Little, Big

by John Crowley

  And yet it might have been that this summer could not come at all. It was Daily Alice who had brought it, Sophie felt sure; by her bravery had saved it from never occurring, by going first had seen to it that this day was made. It should therefore seem fragile and conditional, and yet it didn’t; it was as real a summer day as Sophie had ever known, it might be the only real summer day she had known since childhood, and it vivified her and made her brave too. She hadn’t felt brave at all for some time: but now she thought she could feel brave, Alice all around, and she must. For today they set out.

  Today they set out. Her heart rose and she clutched more tightly to her the knitted bag that was all the luggage she could think to bring. Planning and thinking and hoping and fearing had taken up most of her days since the meeting held at Edgewood, but only rarely did she feel what she was about; she forgot, so to speak, to feel it. But she felt it now.

  “Smoky?” she called. The name echoed in the tall vestibule of the empty house. Everyone had gathered outdoors, in the walled garden and on the porches and out in the Park; they had been gathering since morning, bringing each whatever they could think of for the journey, and as ready for whatever journey they imagined as they could be. Now afternoon had begun to go, and they had looked to Sophie for some word or some direction, and she had gone to find Smoky, who at times like this was always behind-hand, for picnics and expeditions of every kind.

  Of every kind. If she could go on thinking that it was a picnic or an expedition, a wedding or a funeral or a holiday, or any ordinary outing at all which of course she knew quite well how to manage, and just go on doing what needed to be done just as though she knew what that was, then—well, then she would have done all that she could, and she had to leave the rest to others. “Smoky?” she called again.

  She found him in the library, though when at first she glanced in there she didn’t perceive him; the drapes were drawn, and he sat unmoving in a big armchair, hands clasped before him and a big book open, face down, on the floor by his feet.

  “Smoky?” She came in, apprehensive. “Everybody’s ready, Smoky,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  He looked up at her. “I’m not going,” he said.

  She stood for a moment, unable to understand this. Then she put down her knitted bag—it contained an old album of pictures, and a cracked china figurine of a stork with an old woman and a naked child on its back, and one or two other things; it should have contained the cards, of course, but did not—and came to where he sat. “What, no,” she said. “No.”

  “I’m not going, Sophie,” he said, mildly enough, as though he simply didn’t care to. And looked down at his clasped hands.

  Sophie reached for him, and opened her mouth to expostulate, but then didn’t; she knelt by him and said gently, “What is it?”

  “Oh, well,” Smoky said. He didn’t look at her. “Somebody ought to stay, shouldn’t they? Somebody ought to be here, to sort of take care of things. I mean in case—in case you wanted to come back, if you did, or in case of anything.

  “It is my house,” he said, “after all.”

  “Smoky,” Sophie said. She put her hand over his clasped ones. “Smoky, you have to come, you have to!”

  “Don’t, Sophie.”

  “Yes! You can’t not come, you can’t, what will we do without you?”

  He looked at her, puzzled by her vehemence. It didn’t seem to Smoky to be a remark anyone could fitly make to him, what would they do without him, and he didn’t know how to answer. “Well,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed a long deep sigh. “It’s just, well.” He passed his hand over his brow; he said, “I don’t know—it’s just …”

  Sophie waited through these preambles, which put her in mind of others, long ago, other small words eked out before a hard thing was said; she bit her lip, and said nothing.

  “Well, it’s bad enough,” he said, “bad enough to have Alice go…. See,” he said, stirring in his chair, “see, Sophie, I was never really part of this, you know; I can’t … I mean I have been so lucky, really. I never would have thought, I never really would have thought, back when I was a kid, back when I came to the City, that I could have had so much happiness. I just wasn’t made for it. But you—Alice—you—you took me in. It was like—it was like finding out you’d inherited a million dollars. I didn’t always understand that—or yes, yes I did, I did, sometimes I took it for granted maybe, but underneath I knew. I was grateful. I can’t even tell you.”

  He pressed her hand. “Okay, okay. But now—with Alice gone. Well, I guess I always knew she had a thing like that to do, I knew it all along, but I never expected it. You know? And Sophie, I’m not suited for that, I’m not made for it. I wanted to try, I did. But all I could think was, it’s bad enough to have lost Alice. Now I have to lose all the rest, too. And I can’t, Sophie, I just can’t.”

  Sophie saw that tears had started in his eyes, and overflowed the old pink cups of his lids, a thing she didn’t think she’d ever seen before, no, never, and she wanted with all her heart to tell him No, he wouldn’t lose anything, that he went away from nothing and toward everything, Alice most of all; but she didn’t dare, for however much she knew it was true for her, she couldn’t say it to Smoky, for if it wasn’t true for him, and she had no certainty that it was, then no terrible lie could be crueler; and yet she had promised Alice to bring him, no matter what; and couldn’t imagine leaving without him herself. And still she could say nothing.

  “Anyway,” he said. He wiped his face with his hand. “Anyway.”

  Sophie, at a loss, oppressed by the gloom, rose, unable to think. “But,” she said helplessly, “it’s too nice a day, it’s just such a nice day….” She went to the heavy drapes that made a twilight in the room, and tore them open. Sunlight blinded her, she saw many in the walled garden, around the stone table beneath the beech; some looked up; and a child outside tapped on the window to be let in.

  Sophie undid the window. Smoky looked up from his chair. Lilac stepped over the sill, looked at Smoky arms akimbo, and said, “Now what’s the matter?”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Sophie said, weak with relief. “Oh, thank goodness.”

  “Who’s that?” Smoky said, rising.

  Sophie hesitated a moment, but only a moment. There were lies, and then there were lies. “It’s your daughter,” she said. “Your daughter Lilac.”

  Land Called the Tale

  “All right,” Smoky said, throwing up his hands like a man under arrest, “all right, all right.”

  “Oh good,” Sophie said. “Oh Smoky.” “It’ll be fun,” Lilac said. “You’ll see. You’ll be so surprised.”

  Defeated in his last refusal, as he might have known he would be. He really had no arguments that could stand against them, not when they could bring long-lost daughters before him to plead, to remind him of old promises. He didn’t believe that Lilac needed his fathership, he thought she probably needed nothing and no one at all, but he couldn’t deny he’d promised to give it. “All right,” he said again, avoiding Sophie’s radiantly pleased face. He went around the library, turning on lights.

  “But hurry,” Sophie said. “While it’s still day.”

  “Hurry,” Lilac said, tugging at his arm.

  “Now wait a minute,” Smoky said. “I’ve got to get a few things.”

  “Oh, Smoky!” Sophie said, stamping her foot.

  “Just hold on,” Smoky said. “Hold your horses.”

  He went out into the hall, turning on lamps and wall-sconces, and up the stairs, with Sophie at his heels. Upstairs, he went one by one through the bedrooms, turning on lights, looking around, moving just ahead of Sophie’s impatience. Once he looked out a window, and down on many gathered below; afternoon was waning. Lilac looked up, and waved.

  “Okay, okay,” he muttered. “All right.”

  In his and Alice’s room, when he had lit all the lights, he stood a time, angry and breathing har
d. What the hell do you take? On such a trip?

  “Smoky …” Sophie at the door said.

  “Now, damn it, Sophie,” he said, and pulled open drawers. A clean shirt, anyway; a change of underwear. A poncho, for rain. Matches and a knife. A little onion-skin Ovid, from the bedside table. Metamorphoses. All right.

  Now what to put them in? It occurred to him that it had been so many years since he had gone anywhere from this house that he owned no luggage whatever. Somewhere, in some attic or basement, lay the pack he had first carried to Edgewood, but just where he had no idea. He threw open closet doors, there were half a dozen deep cedar-lined closets around this room that all his and Alice’s clothes had never come close to filling. He tugged at the light-pulls, their phosphorescent tips like fireflies. He glimpsed his yellowed white wedding suit, Truman’s. Below it in a corner—well, maybe this would do, odd how old things pile up in the corners of closets, he hadn’t known this was in here: he pulled it out.

  It was a carpetbag. An old, mouse-chewed Gladstone carpetbag with a cross-bones catch.

  Smoky opened it, and looked with a strange foreboding or hindsight into its dark insides. It was empty. An odor arose from it, musty, the odor of leaf-mould or Queen-Anne’s-lace or the earth under an upturned stone. “This’ll do,” he said softly. “This’ll do, I guess.”

  He put the few things in it. They seemed to disappear in its capacious insides.

  What else should go in?

  He thought, holding open the bag: a twine of creeper or a necklace, a hat heavy as a crown; chalk, and a pen; a shotgun, a flask of rum-tea, a snowflake. A book about houses; a book about stars; a ring. With the greatest vividness, a vividness that stabbed him deeply, he saw the road between Meadowbrook and Highland, and Daily Alice as she had looked on that day, the day of the wedding trip, the day he was lost in the woods; he heard her say Protected.

  He closed the bag.

  “All right,” he said. He took it up by its leather handles, and it was heavy, but an ease entered him with its weight, it seemed a thing he had always carried, a weight without which he would be unbalanced, and unable to walk.

  “Ready?” Sophie said from the door.

  “Ready,” he said. “I guess.”

  They went down together. Smoky paused in the hall to push in the ivory buttons of the lights that lit the vestibule, the porches, the basement. Then they went out.

  Aaaah, said everyone gathered there.

  Lilac had drawn them all after her, from the Park, from the walled garden, from the porches and parterres where they had gathered, to this front of the house, the wooden porch that faced a weedy drive leading to stone gateposts topped with pitted balls like stone oranges.

  “Hi, hi,” said Smoky.

  His daughters came up to him smiling, Tacey, Lily and Lucy, and their children after them. Everyone rose, everyone looked at one another. Only Marge Juniper kept her seat on the porch stairs, unwilling to rise till she knew steps must be taken, for she didn’t have many. Sophie asked Lilac:

  “Will you lead us?”

  “Part way,” Lilac said. She stood in the center of the company, pleased, yet a little awed too, and not sure herself which of these would keep on till the end, and having not enough fingers to count. “Part way.”

  “Is it that way?” Sophie asked, pointing to the stone gateposts. They all turned and looked that way. The first crickets’ voices began. Edgewood’s swifts cut the air, air blue and turning green. Exhalations of the cooling earth made the way beyond those gateposts obscure.

  Had that been the moment, Smoky wondered; had it been that moment, when he had turned in at those stone gateposts for the first time, that the charm had fallen on him, not ever after that to release him? The arm and hand with which he held the carpetbag tingled like a warning bell, but Smoky didn’t hear it.

  “How far, how far?” asked Bud and Blossom hand in hand.

  On that day: the day he had first gone in at Edgewood’s door and then in some sense never again back out.

  Perhaps: or it may have been before that, or after it, but it wasn’t a matter of figuring out when exactly the first charm had invaded his life, or when he had stumbled unwittingly into it, because another had come soon after, and another, they had succeeded one another by a logic of their own, each one occasioned by the last and none removable; even to try to disentangle them would only be the occasion for further charms, and anyway they had never been a causal chain but a series of removes, Chinese boxes one inside the other, the further in you went the bigger it got. And it didn’t end now: he was about to step into a new series, endless, infundibular, utter. Apalled by a prospect of endless variation, he was only glad that some things had remained constant: Alice’s love chief among them. It was toward that that he journeyed, the only thing that could draw him; and yet he felt that he left it behind; and still he carried it with him.

  “A dog to meet us,” Sophie said, taking his hand. “A river to cross.”

  Something began to open in Smoky’s heart as he stepped from the porch: a premonition, or the intimation of a revelation.

  They had all begun to move, taking up their bags and belongings, talking in low voices, down the drive. But Smoky stopped, seeing he could not go out by that gate: could not go out by the gate through which he had come in. Too many charms had intervened. The gate wasn’t the same gate; he wasn’t the same either.

  “A long way,” Lilac said, drawing her mother after her. “A long, long way.”

  They passed him on either side, burdened and holding hands, but he had stopped: still willing, still journeying, only not walking.

  On his wedding day, he and Daily Alice had gone among the guests seated on the grass, and many of them had given gifts, and all of them had said “Thank you.” Thank you: because Smoky was willing, willing to take on this task, to take exception to none of it, to live his life for the convenience of others in whom he had never even quite believed, and spend his substance bringing about the end of a Tale in which he did not figure. And so he had; and he was still willing: but there had never been a reason to thank him. Because whether they knew it or not, he knew that Alice would have stood beside him on that day and wed him whether they had chosen him for her or not, would have defied them to have him. He was sure of it.

  He had fooled them. No matter what happened now, whether he reached the place they set out for or didn’t, whether he journeyed or stayed behind, he had his tale. He had it in his hand. Let it end: let it end: it couldn’t be taken from him. He couldn’t go where all of them were going, but it didn’t matter, for he’d been there all along.

  And where was it, then, that all of them were going?

  “Oh, I see,” he said, though no sound came from his lips. The something that had begun to open in his heart opened further; it let in great draughts of evening air, and swifts, and bees in the hollyhocks; it hurt beyond pain, and wouldn’t close. It admitted Sophie and his daughters, and his son Auberon too, and many dead. He knew how the Tale ended, and who would be there.

  “Face to face,” Marge Juniper said, passing by him. “Face to face.” But Smoky heard nothing now but the wind of Revelation blowing in him; he would not, this time, escape it. He saw, in the blue midst of what entered him, Lilac, turning back and looking at him curiously; and by her face he knew that he was right.

  The Tale was behind them. And it was to there they journeyed. One step would take them there; they were there already.

  “Back there,” he tried to say, unable himself to turn in that direction, back there, he tried to tell them, back to where the house stood lit and waiting, the Park and the porches and the walled garden and the lane into the endless lands, the door into summer. If he could turn now (but he could not, it didn’t matter that he could not but he could not) he would find himself facing summer’s house; and on a balcony there, Daily Alice greeting him, dropping from her shoulders the old brown robe to show him her nakedness amid the shadows of leaves: Daily Alice, his bride, Da
me Kind, goddess of that land behind them, on whose borders they stood, the land called the Tale. If he could reach those stone gateposts (but he never would) he would find himself only turning in at them, Midsummer Day, bees in the hollyhocks, and an old woman on the porch there turning over cards.

  A Wake

  Under an enormous moon full to bursting Sylvie traveled toward the house she had seen, which seemed to be further and further off the closer she came to it. There was a stone fence to climb, and a beech-wood to go through; there was finally a stream to cross, or an enormous river, rushing and gold-foamed in the moonlight. After long thought on its banks, Sylvie made a boat of bark, with a broad leaf for a sail, spider-web lines and an acorn-cup to bail with, and (though nearly swept into the mouth of a dark lake where the river poured underground) she reached the far bank; the flinty house, huge as a cathedral, looked down on her, its dark yews pointing in her direction, its stone-pillared porches warning her away. And Auberon always said it was a cheerful house!

  Just as she was thinking that she never would quite reach it, or if she did would reach it as such an atomy that she would fall between the cracks of its paving-stones, she stopped and listened. Amid the sounds of beetles and nightjars, somewhere there was music, somber yet Somehow full of gladness; it drew Sylvie on, and she followed it. It grew, not louder but more full; she saw the lights of a procession gather around her in the furry darkness of the underwood, or saw anyway the fireflies and night-flowers as though in procession, a procession she was one of. Wondering, her heart filled with the music, she approached the place to which the lights tended; she passed through portals where many looked up to see her enter. She put her feet in the sleeping flowers of a lane, a lane that led to a glade where more were gathered, and more coming: where beneath a flowering tree the white-clothed table stood, many places set, and one in the center for her. Only it was not a banquet, as she had thought, or not only a banquet; it was a wake.