Little, Big (40 page)

But it was George Mouse who stood on the threshold. (Auberon would soon learn not to mistake anyone else at the door for Sylvie, because Sylvie instead of knocking always scratched or drummed at the door with her nails; it was the sound of a small animal wanting admission.) George had an old fur coat over his arm, an antique lady's peau-de-soi black hat on his head, and two shopping bags in his hands. "Sylvie not here?" he said.

"No, not just now." With all the practiced skills of a secretive nature Auberon had managed to avoid George Mouse for a week in his own farm, coming and going with a mouse's forethought and haste. But now here he was. Never had Auberon experienced such embarrassment, such a terrible caught-out feeling, such an awful sense that no common remark he could make would not carry a load of hurt and rejection for another, and that no pose, solemn, facetious, offhand, could mitigate that. And his host! His cousin! Old enough to be his father! Usually not at all intensely aware of the reality of others or of others' feelings, Auberon just then felt what his cousin must feel as though he inhabited him. "She went out. I don't know where."

"Yeah? Well, this stuff is hers." He put down the shopping bags and plucked the hat from his head. It left his gray hair standing upright. "There's some more. She can come get it. Well, a load off my mind." He tossed the fur coat over the velvet chair. "Hey. Take it easy. Don't hit me, man. Nothing to do with me."

Auberon realized he had taken a rigid stance in a corner of the room, face set, unable to find an expression to suit the circumstance. What he wanted to do was to tell George he was sorry; but he had just enough wit to see that nothing could be more insulting. And besides, he wasn't sorry, not really.

"Well, she's quite a girl," George said, looking around (Sylvie's panties were draped over the kitchen chair, her unguents and toothbrush were at the sink). "Quite a girl. I hope yiz are very happy." He punched Auberon's shoulder, and pinched his cheek, unpleasantly hard. "You son of a bitch." He was smiling, but there was a mad light in his eye.

"She thinks you're terrific," Auberon said.

"Izzat a fact."

"She said she doesn't know what she would have done without you. Without your letting her stay here."

"Yeah. She said that to me too."

"She thinks of you like a father. Only better."

"Like a father, huh?" George burned him with his coaly eyes, and without looking away began to laugh. "Like a father." He laughed louder, a wild staccato laugh.

"Why are you laughing?" Auberon asked, not certain he was meant to join, or whether it was he who was being laughed at.

"Why?" George laughed all the harder. "Why? What the hell do you want me to do? Cry?" He threw back his head, showing white teeth, and roared. Auberon couldn't help joining in then, though tentatively, and when George saw that, his own laugh diminished. It went on in chuckles, like small waves following a breaker. "Like a father, huh. That's rich." He went to the window and stared out at the iron day. A last chuckle escaped him; he clasped his hands behind his back and sighed. "Well, she's a hell of a girl. Too much for an old fart like me to keep up with." He glanced over his shoulder at Auberon. "You know she's got a Destiny?"

"That's what she said."

"Yeah." His hands opened and closed behind him. "Well, it looks like I ain't in it. Okay by me. Cause there's a brother in it, too, with a knife, and a grandmother and a crazy mother . . . And some babies." He was silent awhile. Auberon almost wept for him. "Old George," George said. "Always left with the babies. Here, George, do something with this. Blow it up, give it away." He laughed again. "And do I get credit? Damn right I do. You son of a bitch, George, you blew up my baby."

What was he talking about? Had he slipped into madness under the pressure of grief? Would losing Sylvie be like that, would it be so awful? A week ago he wouldn't have thought so. With a sudden chill he remembered that the last time Great-aunt Cloud had read the cards for him, she had predicted a dark girl for him; a dark girl, who would love him for no virtue he had, and leave him through no fault of his own. He had dismissed it then, as he was in the process of dismissing all of Edgewood and its prophecies and secrets. He dismissed it now again, with horror.

"Well, you know how it is," George said. He pulled a tiny spiral notebook from his pocket and peered in it. "You're on for the milking this week. Right?"

"Right."

"Right." He put away the book. "Hey listen. You want some advice?"

He didn't, any more than he wanted prophecy. He stood to receive it. George looked at him closely, and then around the room. "Fix the place up," he said. He winked at Auberon. "She likes it nice. You know? Nice." He began to be caught by a fit of laughing again, which burbled at the back of his throat as he took a handful of jewelry from one pocket and gave it to Auberon, and a handful of change from another and gave him that too. "And keep clean," he said. "She thinks us white people are a little on the foul side most of the time." He headed for the door. "A word to the wise," he said, and chuckling, left. Auberon stood with jewels in one hand and money in the other, hearing, down the hall, Sylvie pass George on her way up; he heard them greet each other in a volley of wisecracks and kisses.

It often happens that a man cannot

recall at the moment, but can search

for what he wants and find it. . . .

For this reason some use places for the

purposes of recollecting. The reason

for this is that men pass rapidly from

one step to the next: for instance

from milk to white, from white to air,

from air to damp; after which one

recollects autumn, supposing that one

is trying to recollect that season.

—Aristotle
, De anima

Ariel Hawksquill, greatest mage of this age of the world (and a match, she was not too modest to think, of many great ones of the so-called past, with whom she now and then discoursed), possessed no crystal ball; judicial astrology she knew to be a fraud, though she had uses for the old pictured heavens; she disdained spells and geomancies of all kinds, except at great need, and the sleeping dead and their secrets she let sleep. Her one Great Art, and it was all she needed, was the highest Art of all, and required no vulgar tools, no Book, no Wand, no Word. It could be practiced (as, on a certain rainy afternoon of the winter in which Auberon came to Old Law Farm, she was practicing it) before the fire, with feet up, and tea and toast at hand. It required nothing but the interior of her skull: that and a concentration and an acceptance of impossibility which saints would have found admirable and chess masters difficult.

The Art of Memory, as it is described by ancient writers, is a method by which the Natural Memory we are born with can be improved tremendously, beyond recognition in fact. The ancients agreed that vivid pictures in a strict order were the most easily remembered. Therefore, in order to construct an Artificial Memory of great power, the first step (Quintillian and other authorities agree on this, though they diverge at other points) is to choose a Place: a temple, for instance, or a city street of shops and doorways, or the interior of a house—any place that has parts which occur in a regular order. This Place is committed to memory carefully and well, so well that the rememberer can scurry around it backwards, forwards, any which way at will. The next step is to create vivid symbols or images for the things one wishes to remember—the more shocking and highly-colored the better, according to the experts: a ravished nun, say, for the idea of Sacrilege, or a cloaked figure with a bomb for Revolution. These symbols are then cast onto the various parts of the memory Place, its doors, niches, forecourts, windows, closets, and other spaces; and then the rememberer has simply to go around his memory Place, in any order he wishes, and take from each spot the Thing which symbolizes the Notion which he wishes to remember. The more one wishes to remember, of course, the larger the house of memory must be; it usually ceases to be an actual place, as actual places tend to be too plain and incommodious, and becomes an imaginary place, as large and varied as the rememberer can make it. Wings can be added at will (and with practice); architectural styles can vary with the subject-matter they are meant to contain. There were even refinements of the system whereby not Notions but actual words were to be remembered by complex symbols, and finally individual letters: so that a collection of sickle, millstone, and hacksaw instantly brings the word God to mind when gathered from the appropriate mental nook. The whole process was immensely complicated and tedious and was for the most part rendered obsolete by the invention of the filing-cabinet.

But the greatest practitioners of the old art discovered some odd things about their memory houses the longer they lived in them, and modern practitioners (or practitioner, really, there being only one of any skill, and she keeps it to herself) have improved on and even further complicated the system for reasons of their own.

It was discovered, for instance, that the symbolic figures with vivid expressions, once installed in their proper places, are subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth. That ravished nun who meant Sacrilege might, when one passes her again, have acquired a depraved air about the mouth and eyes one hadn't thought he had bestowed on her, and something wanton about her
deshabille
that looks Somehow purposeful rather than forced: and Sacrilege changes to Hypocrisy, or at least borrows some of its aspects, and thus the memory she symbolizes alters perhaps in instructive ways. Also: as a memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can't conceive of beforehand. When out of necessity he throws up a new wing, it must abut the original place in some way; so a door in the original house that previously opened on a weedy garden might suddenly blow open in a draught and show its astonished owner his grand new gallery full of just-installed memories from the backside, so to speak, at a left-hand turning, facing in the wrong direction—also instructive; and that new gallery might also turn out to be a shortcut to the ice-house where he had put a distant winter once and then forgot.

Yes, forgot: because another thing about a memory house is that its builder and occupier can lose things in it just as you can in any house—the ball of string which you were certain you kept either with the stamps and the tape in the desk-drawer or in the hall closet with the tackhammer and the picture-wire, but which isn't in either place when you go to look for it. In the ordinary or Natural Memory such things can simply vanish; you don't even remember you forgot them. The advantage of a memory house is that you know it's in there somewhere.

So it was that Ariel Hawksquill was rooting around in one of the oldest attics of her memory mansions, looking for something she had forgotten but knew was there.

She had been re-reading an
ars memorativa
of Giordano Bruno's called
De umbris idearum
, a huge treatise on symbols and seals and signs to be used in the highest forms of the art. Her first-edition copy had marginal notes in a neat Italic hand, often illuminating but more often puzzling. On a page where Bruno treats of the various orders of symbols one might use for various purposes, the commentator had noted: "As in ye cartes of ye returne of R.C. are iiiij Personnes, Places, Thynges &c., which emblemes or cartes are for remembering or foretelling, and discoverie of smalle worldes." Now this "R.C." could stand for "Roman Church", or—just possibly— "Rosicrucian." But it was the persons and places and things that had rung a distant bell: a bell here, she thought, where she had stored her distant childhood long ago.

She moved carefully but with increasing impatience through the miscellany there, her dog Spark, a trip to Rockaway, her first kiss; she became intrigued with the contents of chests and went off down useless corridors of reminiscence. In one place she had put a battered cowbell, why she at first had no idea. Then she rang it tentatively. It was the bell she had heard, and instantly she remembered her grandfather (whom the cowbell was—of course !—to represent, since he had been a farm laborer in England till he emigrated to this vast and cowless city). She saw him distinctly now, where she had put him, below the mantel with the Toby jugs on it which resembled him, in a battered armchair; he turned the cowbell in his hands as he had used to turn his pipe.

"Did you," she questioned him, "tell me once about cards, with persons and places and things?"

"I might have."

"In what connection?"

Silence. "Well, small worlds then."

It grew clearer in that attic, lit with a past sun, and she sat at Grandpa's feet in the old apartment. "It was the only thing I ever found had any value, like," he said, "and I threw it away on a silly girl. Would've brought twenty bob in any dealer's, I can tell you that, they were that old and fine. I found them in an old cottage that the squire wanted pulled down. And she was a girl who said she saw fairies and pixies and such, and her father was another like her. Violet her name was. And I said, 'Tell my fortune then with these if you can.' And she like riffled through them—there were pictures on them of persons and places and things—and she laughed and said I'd die a lonely old man on a fourth storey. And wouldn't give me back the cards I'd found."

There it was then. She put the cowbell back in its place in the order of her childhood (put it next to a well-thumbed deck of Old Maid cards from the same year, just to keep the connection clear) and shut up that room.

Small worlds, she thought, staring out the rain-crazed window of her parlor. To discover small worlds. In no other connection had she ever heard of these cards. The persons and places and things were reminiscent of the Art of Memory, in which a place is established, and a vivid person imagined, holding his emblematic things. And "the return of R. C.": if that meant the "Brother R. C." of the Rosicrucians, it would place the cards in the first flush of Rosicrucian enthusiasms; which—she pushed away the tray of tea and toast, and wiped her fingers—might make some sense of the small worlds, too. The arcane thought of those years knew of many.