by John Crowley
He got down a dusty whiskey bottle.
“No ice,” said Alice. “Rudy didn’t come.”
“He still cuts ice?”
“Oh yes. But he’s been sick lately. And Robin, you know, his grandson—well, you know Robin; he isn’t much help. Poor old man.”
Absurdly, this was the last straw. Poor old Rudy … “Too bad, too bad,” he said, his voice shaky. “Too bad.” He sat, his glassful of whiskey the saddest thing he had ever seen. His vision was clouded and sparkling. Alice rose slowly, alarmed. “I made a real mess of it, Ma,” he said. “A real awful mess.” He put his face in his hands, the awful mess a harsh, gathering thing in his throat and breast. Alice, unsure, came and put her arm tentatively around his shoulder, and Auberon, though he hadn’t done so in years, never even for Sylvie, not once, knew he was about to sob like a child. The awful mess gathered weight and force and, pressing its way out, opened his mouth and shook his frame violently, causing sounds he had not known he could make. There there, he said to himself, there there: but it wouldn’t stop, release made it grow, there were vast volumes of it to be expelled, he put his head down on the kitchen table and bawled.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said when he could speak again. “Sorry, sorry.”
“No,” Alice said, her arm around his resistant overcoat; “no, sorry for what?” He raised his head suddenly, throwing off her arm, and, after another gasping sob, ceased, his chest heaving. “Was it,” Alice said softly, warily, “the dark girl?”
“Oh,” Auberon said, “partly, partly.”
“And that stupid bequest.”
“Partly.”
She saw peeking from his pocket a hanky, and pulled it out for him. “Here,” she said, shocked to see in his streaming face not her baby boy in tears, but a grownup she hardly knew transformed by grief. She looked at the hanky she offered him. “What a pretty thing,” she said. “It looks like …”
“Yes,” Auberon said, taking it from her and mopping his face. “Lucy made it.” He blew his nose. “It was a present. When I left. Open it when you come home, she said.” He laughed, or cried again, or, both, and swallowed. “Pretty, huh.” He stuffed it back in his pocket and sat, back bent, staring. “Oh God,” he said. “Well, that’s embarrassing.”
“No,” she said, “no.” She put her hand over his. She was in a quandary; he needed advice, and she couldn’t give it to him; she knew where advice could be got, but not whether it could be given to him there, or whether it was right for her to send him. “It’s all right, you know,” she said, “it really is, because,” and then bethought herself “Because it’s all right; it’ll be all right.”
“Oh sure,” he said, sighing a great, shuddering sigh. “All over now.”
“No,” Alice said, and took his hand more firmly. “No, it’s not all over, but … Well, whatever happens, it’ll all be part of, well part of what’s to be, won’t it? I mean there’s nothing that couldn’t be, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know,” Auberon said. “What do I know.”
She held his hand, but oh, he was too big now for her to gather him to her, hug him, cover him up with herself and tell him all, tell him the long, long tale of it, so long and strange that he would fall asleep long before it was over, soothed by her voice and her warmth and the beat of her heart and the calm certainty of her telling: and then, and then, and then: and more wonderful than that: and strange to say: and the way it all turns out: the story she hadn’t known how to tell when he was young enough to tell it to, the story she knew now only when he was too big to gather up and whisper it to, too big to believe it, though it would all happen, and to him. But she couldn’t bear to see him in this darkness, and say nothing. “Well,” she said, not releasing his hand; she cleared her throat of the huskiness that had gathered there (was she glad, or the reverse, that all her own storms of tears had been wept, years ago?) and said, “Well, will you do something for me, anyway?” “Yes, sure.”
“Tonight, no, tomorrow morning—do you know where the old gazebo is? That little island? Well, if you follow that stream up, you come to a pool—with a waterfall?”
“Sure, yes.”
“Okay,” she said. She took a deep breath, said “Well” again, and gave him instructions, and pledged him to follow them exactly, and told him something of the reasons why he must, but not all; and he agreed, in a cloud, but having wept out before her any reservations he might have had to such a scheme, and such reasons.
The door to the kitchen-garden opened, and Smoky came in through it; before he came around the corner of the summer kitchen, though, Alice had patted Auberon’s hand, smiled, and pressed her forefinger to her lips, and then to his.
“Rabbit tonight?” Smoky was saying as he came into the kitchen. “What’s all the excitement?” He did an extravagant double-take when he saw Auberon, and books slipped from beneath his arm to the floor.
“Hi, hi,” said Auberon, glad at least to have taken one of them by surprise.
Slowly I Turn
Sophie had also known that Auberon was on his way home, though the bus had thrown off her calculations by a day. She was full of advice, and had many questions to ask; but Auberon wanted no advice, and she saw that her questions would get no answers either, so she didn’t ask them: what information he chose to offer was all she would get for the moment, scantily though it clothed his City months.
At dinner she said: “Well. It’s nice to have everybody back. For one night.”
Auberon, devouring victuals like a man who’s lived for months on hot dogs and day-old Danish, looked up at her, but she had looked away, not conscious apparently of having said anything odd; and Tacey began a story about Cherry Lake’s divorce after only a year of marriage.
“This is delicious, Ma,” Auberon said, and helped himself again, wondering.
Later, in the library, he and Smoky compared cities: Smoky’s, from years ago, and Auberon’s.
“The best thing,” Smoky said, “or the exciting thing, was the feeling you always had of being at the head of the parade. I mean even if all you did was sit in your room, you felt it, you knew that outside in the streets and in the buildings it was going forward, boom boom boom, and you were part of it, and everybody everywhere else was just stumbling along behind. Do you know what I mean?”
“I guess,” Auberon said. “I guess things have changed.” Hamletish in a black sweater and pants he’d found among his old clothes, he sat somewhat folded up in a tall buttoned leather chair. One light lit shone on the brandy bottle Smoky had opened. Alice had suggested he and Auberon have a long talk; but they were having difficulty finding subjects. “It always felt to me like everybody everywhere else had forgotten all about us.” He held out his glass, and Smoky put an inch of brandy in it.
“Well, but the crowds,” Smoky said. “The bustle, and all the well-dressed people; everybody hurrying to appointments …”
“Hm,” Auberon said.
“I think it’s …”
“Well I mean I think I know what you say you thought, I mean that you think it was …”
“I think I thought …”
“I guess it’s changed,” Auberon said.
A silence fell. Each stared into his glass. “So,” Smoky said. “Anyway. How did you meet her?”
“Who?” Auberon stiffened. There were subjects he had no intention of discussing with Smoky. That with their cards and their second sight they could probe his heart and learn his business was bad enough.
“The lady who came,” Smoky said. “That Miss Hawksquill. Cousin Ariel, as Sophie says.”
“Oh. In a park. We fell into conversation…. A little park that said it was built by, you know, old John and his company, back when.”
“A little park,” Smoky said, surprised, “with funny curving paths, that …”
“Yeah,” Auberon said.
“That lead in, only they don’t, and …”
“Yeah.”
“Fountains, statues, a littl
e bridge …”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“I used to go there,” Smoky said. “How do you like that.”
Auberon didn’t, really. He said nothing.
“It always reminded me,” Smoky said, “for some reason, of Alice.” Suddenly flung back into the past, Smoky with great vividness remembered the small summery park, and felt—tasted, almost, with the mind’s tongue—the season of his first love for his wife. When he was Auberon’s age. “How do you like that,” he said again, dreamily, tasting a cordial in which a whole summer’s fruits were long ago distilled. He looked at Auberon. He was staring into his glass gloomily. Smoky sensed that he was approaching a sore spot or subject. How odd, though, the same park … “Well,” he said, and cleared his throat. “She seems like quite a woman.”
Auberon ran his hand over his brow.
“I mean this Hawksquill person.”
“Oh. Oh, yes.” Auberon cleared his throat, and drank. “Crazy, I thought, maybe.”
“Oh? Oh, I don’t think so. No more than … She certainly had a lot of energy. Wanted to see the house from top to bottom. She had some interesting things to say. We even crawled up into the old orrery. She said she had one, in her house in the City, different, but built on the same principles, maybe by the same person.” He had grown animated, hopeful. “You know what? She thought we could get it working again. I showed her it was all rusted, because, you know, the main wheel for some reason sticks out into the air, but she said, well, she thought the basic works are still okay. I don’t see how she could tell that, but wouldn’t that be fun? After all these years. I thought I’d have a shot at it. Clean it up, and see …”
Auberon looked at his father. He began to laugh. That broad, sweet, simple face. How could he have ever thought … “You know something?” he said. “I used to think, when I was a kid, that it did move.”
“What?”
“Sure. I thought it did move. I thought I could prove that it moved.”
“You mean by itself? How?”
“I didn’t know how,” Auberon said. “But I thought it did, and that you all knew it did, and didn’t want me to know.”
Smoky laughed too. “Well, why?” he said. “I mean why would we keep it a secret? And anyhow, how could it? What would be the power?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” Auberon said, laughing more, though the laughter seemed likely to deliquesce into tears. “By itself. I don’t know.” He rose, unfolding himself from the buttoned chair. “I thought,” he said, “oh, hell, I can’t recreate it, why I thought it was important, I mean why that was important, but I thought I was going to get the goods on you….”
“What? What?” Smoky said. “Well why didn’t you ask? I mean a simple question …”
“Dad,” Auberon said, “do you think there’s ever been a simple question around here you could ask?”
“Well,” Smoky said.
“Okay,” Auberon said. “Okay, I’ll ask you a simple question, okay?”
Smoky sat upright in his chair. Auberon wasn’t laughing any more. “Okay,” he said.
“Do you believe in fairies?” Auberon asked.
Smoky looked up at his tall son. Through the whole of their lives together, it had been as though he and Auberon had been back to back, fixed that way and unable to turn. They had had to communicate by indirection, through others, or by craning their necks and talking out the sides of their mouths; they had had to guess at each other’s faces and actions. Now and then one or the other would try a quick spin around to catch the other unawares, but it never worked, quite, the other was still behind and facing away, as in the old vaudeville act. And the effort of communication in that posture, the effort of making oneself clear, had often grown too much for them, and they’d given it up, mostly. But now—maybe because of what had happened to him in the City, whatever that was, or maybe only increase of time wearing away the bond that had both held them and held them apart, Auberon had turned around. Slowly I turn. And all that was left then was for Smoky himself to turn and face him. “Well,” he said, “ ‘believe’, I don’t know; ‘believe’, that’s a word …”
“Uh uh,” said Auberon. “No quotes.”
Auberon stood over him now, looking down, waiting.
“Okay,” Smoky said. “The answer is no.”
“Okay!” Auberon said, grimly triumphant.
“I never did.”
“Okay.”
“Of course,” Smoky said, “it wouldn’t have been right to say so, you know, or really ask right out what was what here; I never wanted to spoil anything by not—not joining in. So I never said anything. Never asked questions, never. Especially not simple ones. I just hope you noticed that, because it wasn’t always easy.”
“I know,” Auberon said.
Smoky looked down. “I’m sorry about that,” he said; “about deceiving you—if I did, I suppose I didn’t; and sort of spying on you all the time, trying to figure it out—when all the time I was supposed to know about it all, the same as you.” He sighed. “It’s not so easy,” he said. “Living a lie.”
“Wait a sec,” Auberon said. “Dad.”
“None of you seemed to mind, really. Except you, I think. Well. And it didn’t seem that they minded, that I didn’t believe in them, the Tale went on and all, just the same—didn’t it? Only I did, I admit, feel a little jealous; anyway I used to. Jealous of you. Who knew.”
“Listen, Dad, listen.”
“No, it’s all right,” Smoky said. If he were going to face front then he would by God face front. “Only … Well, it always seemed to me that you—just you, not the others—could have explained it. That you wanted to explain it, but couldn’t. No, it’s all right.” He held up his hand to forestall whatever evasion or equivocation his son was about to make. “They, I mean Alice, and Sophie, and Aunt Cloud—even the girls—they said everything they could, I think, only nothing they could say was ever an explanation, not an explanation, even though maybe they thought it was, maybe they thought they’d explained it over and over and I was just too dumb to grasp it; maybe I was. But I used to think that you—I don’t know why—that I could maybe understand you, and that you were always just about to spill the beans….”
“Dad …”
“And that we got off on the wrong foot, way back, because you had to hide it, and so you sort of had to hide from me….”
“No! No nono …”
“And I’m sorry, really, if you felt I was always spying on you and intruding and all, but …”
“Dad, Dad, will you please just listen a second?”
“But well, as long as we’re asking simple questions, I’d like to know what it was that you …”
“I didn’t know anything!” His shout seemed to awaken Smoky, who looked up to see his son twisted up in an attitude of recrimination or confession, and a mad light in his eye.
“What?”
“I didn’t know anything!” Auberon knelt suddenly before his father, his whole childhood giddily inverted; it made him want to laugh insanely. “Nothing!”
“Cut it out,” Smoky said, puzzled. “I thought we were getting down to brass tacks here.”
“Nothing!”
“Then how come you were always hiding it?” “Hiding what?”
“What you knew. A secret diary. And all those weird hints …”
“Dad. Dad. If I knew anything you didn’t know—if I did—would I have thought that old orrery was going around and nobody was admitting to it? And what about the Architecture of Country Houses, that you wouldn’t explain to me …”
“I wouldn’t explain! It was you who thought you knew what it was….”
“Well, and what about Lilac?”
“What about her?”
“Well, what happened to her? Sophie’s, I mean. Why didn’t anybody tell me?” He gripped his father’s hands. “What happened to her? Where did she go?”
“Well?” Smoky said, frustrated beyond endurance. “Where did she?”
>
They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. “But how could you have thought I … that I … I mean wasn’t it obvious I didn’t know….”
“Well, I wondered,” Auberon said. “I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn’t take a chance.”
“Then why didn’t you …”
“Don’t say it,” Auberon said. “Don’t say, Why didn’t you ask. Just don’t.”
“Oh, God,” Smoky said, laughing. “Oh, dear.”
Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. “All that work,” he said. “All that effort.”
“I think,” Smoky said, “I think I’ll have another taste of that brandy, if you can reach the bottle.” He hunted up his empty snifter, which had rolled away into the darkness. Auberon poured for him, and for himself, and for a long time they sat in silence, glancing now and again at each other, laughing a little, shaking their heads. “Well, isn’t that something,” Smoky said.
“And wouldn’t it really be something,” he added after a while, “if none of us knew what was what. If we, if you and I, marched up now to your mother’s room …” He laughed at the idea. “And said, Hey …”
“I don’t know,” Auberon said. “I bet …”
“Yes,” Smoky said. “Yes, I’m sure. Well.” He remembered Doc, years ago, on a hunting expedition Smoky and he had made one October afternoon: Doc, who was himself Violet’s grandson, but who had advised Smoky that day that it was best not to inquire into some things too deeply. Into what’s given; what can’t be changed. And who could tell now just what Doc himself had known, after all, what he had carried with him to the grave. On the very first day he had come to Edgewood, Great-aunt Cloud had said: The women feel it more deeply, but the men perhaps suffer from it more…. He had come to spend his life with a race of expert secret-keepers, and he had learned much; it was no wonder really that he’d fooled Auberon, he’d learned from masters how to keep secrets, even if he had none to keep. Yet he did have secrets, he suddenly thought, he did: though he couldn’t tell Auberon what had happened to Lilac, there was more than one fact about her and about the Barnable family that he still kept to himself, and had no intention of ever telling his son; and he felt guilty about that. Face to face: well. And was it suspicion of some such thing which made Auberon rub his brow, staring again into his glass?
