Little, Big (24 page)

"Bless the master of this house

The mistress bless also

And all the little children

That round the table go."

Which that year included his own grandson Robin, and Sonny Noon's new twins, and Smoky's daughter Tacey.

Mother said, glass aloft:

"I wish you shelter from the storm

A fireplace, to keep you warm

But most of all, when snowflakes fall

I wish you love."

Smoky began one in Latin, but Daily Alice and Sophie groaned, so he stopped, and began again:

"A goose, tobacco and cologne:

Three-winged and gold-shod prophecies of Heaven

The lavish heart shall always have, to leaven,

To spread with bells and voices, and atone

The abating shadows of our conscript dust."

"'Abating shadows' is good," said Doc. "And 'conscript dust'."

"Didn't know you were a smoker though," Rudy said.

"And
I
didn't know, Rudy," Smoky said expansively, inhaling Rudy's Old Spice, "you were a lavish heart." He helped himself to the decanter.

"I'll say one I learned as a kid," said Hannah Noon, "and then let's get down to it:

"Father Son and Holy Ghost

You eat the fastest, you get the most."

After dinner, Rudy sorted through some piles of ancient records as heavy as dishes that had lain long disused and circled with arcs of dust in the buffet. He found treasures, greeting old friends with glad cries. They stacked them on the record player and danced.

Daily Alice, unable after the first round to dance any more, rested her hands on the great prie-dieu of stomach she had grown and watched the others. Great Rudy flung his little wife around like a jointed doll, and Alice supposed he'd learned over the years how to live with her and not break her; she imagined his great weight on her—no, probably she would climb up on him, like climbing a mountain.

Dunkin' donuts, yubba yubba

Dunkin' donuts, yubba yubba

Dunkin' donuts—splash! in the coffee!

Smoky, bright-eyed and loose-limbed, made her laugh with his cheerfulness, like a sun; a sunny disposition, is that what was meant by that? And how did he come to know the words to these :razy songs, who seemed never to know anything that everybody else knew? He danced with Sophie, just tall enough to take her properly, footing it gallantly and inexpertly.

The pale moon was rising above the green mountains

The sun was declining beneath the blue sea

Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smoky, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her. Huge: that's what she felt herself to be becoming. Her perimeters expanded, she felt that eventually she would be contiguous almost with the walls of Edgewood itself: as large, as old, as comfortably splayed on its feet and as capacious. And as she grew huge—this suddenly struck her—the ones she loved diminished in size as surely as if they walked away from her, and left her behind.

"Ain't misbehavin'," Smoky sang in a dreamy, effete falsetto, "savin' all my love for you."

Mysteries seemed to accumulate around her. She rose heavily, saying No, no, you stay, to Smoky who had come to her, and went laboriously up the stairs, as though she carried a great, fragile egg before her, which she did, almost hatched. She thought perhaps she had better get advice, before winter came and it was no longer possible.

But when she sat on the edge of her bed, still faintly hearing the high accents of the music below, which seemed to be endlessly repeating
tin-cup, top-hat
, she saw that she knew what advice she would get if she went to get it: it would only be made clear to her again what she already knew, what only grew dim or clouded now and again by daily life, by useless hopes and by despairs equally useless—that if this were indeed a Tale, and she in it, then no gesture she or any of them could make was not a part of it, no rising up to dance or sitting down to eat and drink, no blessing or curse, no joy, no longing, no error; if they fled the Tale or struggled against it, well, that too was part of the Tale. They had chosen Smoky for her and then she had chosen him for herself; or, she had chosen him and then they had chosen him for her; either way it was the Tale. And if in some subtle way he moved on or away and she lost him now, by inches, by small daily motions she only now and then even perceived for certain, then his loss to her, and the degree of that loss, and each one of the myriad motions, looks, lookings-away, absences, angers, placations and desires that made up Loss, sealing him from her as layers of lacquer seal the painted bird on a japanned tray or as layers of rain freeze deeper the fallen leaf within the winter pond, all of it was the Tale. And if there were to come some new turning, some debouchment of this shaded lane they seemed just now to be walking, if it opened up quite suddenly into broad, flower-starred fields, or even if it only brought them to crossroads where fingerboards stated cautiously the possibilities of such fields, then all that too would be the Tale; and those whom Daily Alice thought wise, whom she supposed to be endlessly relating this tale. Somehow at the same pace as Drinkwater and Barnable lives fell away day by day, hour by hour—those tellers couldn't be blamed for anything told of in it, because in fact they neither spun nor told it really, but only knew how it would unfold in some way she never would; and that should satisfy her.

"No," she said aloud. "I don't believe it. They have powers. It's just that sometimes we don't understand how they'll protect us. And if
you
know, you won't say."

"That's right," Grandfather Trout seemed gloomily to reply. "Contradict your elders, think you know better."

She lay back on her bed, supporting her child with interlaced fingers, thinking she did not know better, hut that advice would anyway be lost on her. "I'll hope," she said. "I'll be happy. There's something I don't know, some gift they have to give. At the right time it'll be there. At the last moment. That's how Tales are," and she wouldn't listen to the sardonic answer she knew the fish would give to this; and yet when Smoky opened the door and came in whistling, his odor a meld of the wine he had drunk and Sophie's perfume he had absorbed, something which had been growing within her, a wave, crested, and she began to weep.

The tears of those who never cry, the calm, the levelheaded ones, are terrible to see. She seemed to be split or torn by the force of the tears, which she squeezed her eyes shut against, which she forced back with her fist against her lips. Smoky, afraid and awed, came immediately to her as he might to rescue his child from a fire, without thought and without knowing quite what he would do. When he tried to take her hand, speak softly to her, she only trembled more violently, the red cross branded on her face grew uglier; so he enveloped her, smother the flames. Disregarding her resistance, as well as he could he covered her, having a vague idea that he could by tenderness invade her and then rout her grief, whatever it was, by main strength. He wasn't sure he wasn't himself the cause of it, wasn't sure if she would cling to him for comfort or break him in rage, but he had no choice anyway, savior or sacrifice, it didn't matter so long as she could cease suffering.

She yielded, not at first willing to, and took handfuls of his shirt as though she meant to rend his garments, and "Tell me," he said, "tell me," as though that could make it right; but he could no more keep her from suffering this than he would be able to keep her from sweating and crying aloud when the child within her made its way out. And there was no way anyway for her to tell him that what made her weep was a picture in her mind of the black pool in the forest, starred with golden leaves falling continuously, each hovering momentarily above the surface of the water before it alighted, as though choosing carefully its drowning place, and the great damned fish within too cold to speak or think: that fish seized by the Tale, even as she was herself.

Come, let me see thee sink into a dream

Of quiet thoughts, protracted till thine eye

Be calm as water when the winds are gone

And no one can tell whither.

—Wordsworth

It's George Mouse," Smoky said. Lily clinging to his pants-leg looked out the front way where her father pointed. Above the fist stuck in her face, her longlashed eyes made no judgment on George coming up through the mist, his boots spraying puddles. He wore his great black cloak, his Svengali's hat limp with rain; he waved a hand at them as he came up. "Hey," he said, squishily mounting the stairs. "Heeeeeey." He embraced Smoky; beneath his hat-brim his teeth shone and his dark-rimmed eyes were coals. "This is what's-her-name, Tacey?"

"Lily," Smoky said. Lily retreated behind the curtain of her father's pants. "Tacey's a big girl now. Six years old."

"Oh my God."

"Yes."

"Time flies."

"Well, come in. What's up? You should have written."

"Didn't decide till this morning."

"Any reason?"

"Wild hair up my ass." He chose not to tell Smoky of the five hundred milligrams of Pellucidar he had taken and which were now coldly ventilating his nervous system like the first day of winter, which this was, seventh winter solstice of Smoky's married life. The great capsule of Pellucidar had put him on the gad; he had got out the Mercedes, one of the last tangibles of the old Mouse affluence, and driven north till all the gas stations he passed were bankrupt ones; he parked it then in the garage of a deserted house, and, breathing deeply of the dense and moldy air, set off on foot.

The front door closed behind them with a solid sound of brass fittings and a rattle of the oval glass. George Mouse decaped grandly, a gesture that made Lily laugh and that halted Tacey in her headlong rush down the hail to see who had come. Behind her came Daily Alice in a long cardigan, her fists making bulges in the pockets. She ran to kiss George, and he pressing her felt a dizzying and inappropriate rush of chemical lust that made him laugh.

They all turned toward the parlor where yellow lamplight already shone, and saw themselves in the tall hall pier-glass. George stopped them by it, holding a shoulder of each, and studied the images: himself, his cousin, Smoky—and Lily who just then appeared between her mother's legs. Changed? Well, Smoky had regrown the beard he had started and then amputated when George first knew him. His face looked gaunter, more what George could only call (since the word was just then rushed to him by importunate messenger) more
spiritual
. SPIRITUAL. Watch out. He got a grip on himself. Alice: a mother twice over, amazing! It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story. And himself? He could see the grizzle in his moustache, the lean stoop of his stringbean torso, but that was nothing; it was the same face that had always looked out from mirrors at him since he had first looked in.

"Time flies," he said.

In the parlor, they were all preparing a long shopping list. "Peanut butter," Mother said, "stamps, iodine, soda-water—lots of it, soap pads, raisins, tooth powder; chutney, chewing gum, candles, George!" She embraced him; Doctor Drinkwater looked up from the list he was making.

"Hello, George," said Cloud from her corner by the fire. "Don't forget cigarettes."

"Paper diapers, the cheap ones," Daily Alice said. "Matches—Tampax—3-in-One Oil."

"Oatmeal," Mother said. "How are your people, George?"

"No oatmeal!" Tacey said.

"Good, good. Mom's, you know, hanging on." Mother shook her head. "I haven't seen Franz for, oh, a year?" He put bills on the drum-table where Doc wrote. "A bottle of gin," he said.

Doc wrote "gin," but pushed aside the bills. "Aspirin," he remembered. "Camphorated oil. Antihistamine."

"Somebody sick?" George asked.

"Sophie's got this strange fever," Daily Alice said. "It comes and goes."

"Last call," Doc said, looking up at his wife. She stroked her chin and clucked in an agony of doubt, and at last decided she would have to go too. In the hall, pursued by all of their last-minute needs, he tugged a cap over his head (his hair had gone almost white, like dirty cotton-wool) and put on a pair of pink-framed glasses his license said he had to wear. He picked up a brown envelope of papers he must deal with, announced himself ready, and they all went out onto the porch to see them off.

"I hope they'll be careful," Cloud said. "It's very wet."

From within the coach-house, they heard a hesitant grinding. Then an expectant silence, followed by a firmer start, and the station wagon backed warily out into the drive, making two soft and delible marks in the wet leaves. George Mouse marveled. Here they all were intently watching nothing more than an old guy very gingerly handling a car. The gears ground and an awed silence fell. George knew of course that it wasn't every day they got the car out, that it was an occasion, that doubtless Doc had spent the morning wiping cobwebs from the old wood sides and chasing chipmunks away who were thinking of nesting under the apparently immobile seats, and that he now put on the old machine like a suit of armor to go out and do battle in the Great World. Had to hand it to his country cousins. Everybody he knew in the City hitched endlessly about the Car and its depredations; his cousins had never handled this twenty-year-old woodie anyhow but infrequently and with the greatest respect. He laughed, waving goodbye with the rest, imagining Doc out on the road, nervous at first, shushing his wife, changing gears with care; then turning onto the great highway, beginning to enjoy the smooth slipping-by of brown landscape and the sureness of his control, until some monster truck roars by and nearly blows him off the road. The guy's a definite hazard.