Little, Big (86 page)

"I should have known," he said laughing. "I should have known."

"Yes," she said. "Just beginning. You'll see."

Not one story, no, not one story with one ending but a thousand stories, and so far from over as hardly to have begun. She was swept away from him then by laughing dancers, and he watched her go, there were many hands importuning her, many creatures at her quick feet, and her smile was frank for all of them. He drank, inflamed, his feet itching to learn the antic-hay. And could she, he thought watching her, still cause him pain, too? He touched the gift which in their revels she had placed on his brow, two handsome, broad, ridged and exquisitely recurving horns, heavy and brave as a crown, and thought about them. Love wasn't kind, not always; a corrosive thing, it burned away kindness as it burned away grief. They were infants now in power, he and she, but they would grow; their quarrels would darken the moon and scatter the frightened wild things like autumn gales, would do so, had long done so, it didn't matter.

Doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Her aunt was a witch, but his sisters were queens of air and darkness; their gifts had once aided him, and would again. He was heir to his father's bafflements, but he could touch his mother for strength. . . . As though turning the pages of an endless compendium of romances, all read long ago, he saw the thousands of her children, generations of them, most of them his, he would lose track of them, meet them as strangers, love them, lie with them, fight them, forget them. Yes! They would blunt the pens of a dozen chroniclers with their story and the stories their story generated, tedious, hilarious, or sad; their feasts, their balls, their masques and quarrels, the old curse laid on him and her kiss that mitigated it, their long partings, her vanishings and disguises (crone, castle, bird, he foresaw or remembered many but not all), their reunions and couplings tender or lewd: it would be a spectacle for all, an endless and-then. He laughed a huge laugh, seeing that it would be so: for he had a gift for that, after all; a real gift.

"Y'see?" said the black locust-tree that overhung the feast-table, the locust from which the flowers that decked Auberon's horned head had been taken. "Y'see? Jes' oney the brave deserve the fair.

The dance whirled around the prince and princess, marking a wide circle in the dewy grass; the fireflies, toward dawn, turned in a great circle in obedience to the turning of Lilac's finger, wheeling in the opulent darkness.
Aaaah
, said all the guests.

"Just the beginning," Lilac said to her mother. "You see? Just like I told you."

"Yes, but Lilac," Sophie said. "You lied to me, you know. About the peace treaty. About meeting them face to face."

Lilac, elbow on the littered table, rested her cheek in the cup of her hand, and smiled at her mother. "Did I?" she said, as though she couldn't remember that.

"Face to face," Sophie said, looking along the broad table. How many were the guests? She'd count them, but they moved around so, and diminished uncountably into the sparkling darkness; some were crashers, she thought, that fox, maybe that gloomy stork, certainly this clumsy stag-beetle that staggered amid the spilled cups flourishing its black antlers; anyway she didn't need to count in order to know how many were here. Only—"Where's Alice, though?" she said. "Alice should be here."

She's here, she's near
, said her Little Breezes, moving among the guests. Sophie trembled for Alice's grief; the music altered once again, and a sadness and a stillness came over the company.

"Call for the robin-redbreast an' the wren," said the locust-tree, dropping white petals like tears on the feast-table. "Keep m'man Duke far hence that's foe to man."

The breezes rose to dawn winds, blowing away the music. "Our revels now are ended," sighed the locust-tree. Alice's white hand blotted out the grieving moon like clouds, and the sky grew blue. The stag-beetle fell off the edge of the table, the ladybug flew away home, the fireflies turned down their torches; the cups and dishes scattered like leaves before the coming day.

Come from his burial, none knew where but she, Daily Alice came among them like daybreak, her tears like day-odorous dew. They swallowed tears and wonder before her presence, and made to leave; but no one would say later that she hadn't smiled for them, and made them glad with her blessing, as they parted. They sighed, some yawned, they took hands; they took themselves by twos and threes away to where she sent them, to rocks, fields, streams and woods, to the four corners of the earth, their kingdom new-made.

Then Alice walked alone there, by where the moist ground was marked with the dark circle of their dance, her skirts trailing damp in the sparkling grasses. She thought that if she could she might take away this summer day, this one day, for him; but he wouldn't have liked her to do that and she could not do it anyway. So instead she would make it, which she could do, this her anniversary day, a day of such perfect brilliance, a morning so new, an afternoon so endless, that the whole world would remember it ever after.

The lights of Edgewood which Smoky had left burning paled to nothing on that day; in the night that followed they shone again, and on every night thereafter. Rain and wind came in through the open windows, though, which they had forgotten to close; summer storms stained the drapes and the rugs, scattering papers, blowing shut the closet doors. Moths and bugs found holes in the screens, and died happily in union with the burning bulbs, or did not die but generated young in the rugs and tapestries. Autumn came, though it seemed impossible, a myth, a rumor not to be believed; fallen leaves piled up on the porches, blew in through the screen-door left unlatched, which beat helplessly against the wind and at last died on its hinges, no barrier any more. Mice discovered the kitchen; the cats had all left for more seemly circumstances, and the pantry was theirs, and the squirrels' who came after and nested in the musty beds. Still the orrery turned, mindlessly, cheerfully whirling, and still the house was lit up like a beacon or the entrance to a ballroom. In winter it shone its lights on snow, an ice palace; snow drifted in its rooms, snow capped its cold chimneys. The light over the porch went out.

That there was such a house in the world, lit and open and empty, became a story in those days; there were other stories, people were in motion, stories were all they cared to hear, stories were all they believed in, life had got that hard. The story of the house all lit, the house of four floors, seven chimneys, three hundred and sixtyfive stairs, fifty-two doors, traveled far; they were all travelers then. It met another story, a story about a world elsewhere, and a family whose names many knew, whose house had been large and popuious with griefs and happinesses that had once seemed endless, but had ended, or had stopped; and to those many who still dreamed of that family as often as of their own, the two stories seemed one. The house could be found. In spring the basement lights went out, and one in the music-room.

People in motion; stories starting in a dream, and spoken by unwise actors into wanting ears, then ceasing; the story turning back to dream, and then haunting the day, told and retold. People knew there was a house made of time, and many set out to find it.

It could be found. There it was: at the end of a neglected drive, in a soft rain, not what had been expected at all and however long-sought always come upon unexpectedly, for all its lights; sagging porch steps to go up, and a door to go in by. Small animals who thought the place theirs, long in possession, sharing only with the wind and the weather. On the floor of the library, by a certain chair, face down at a certain page, a heavy book spine-broken and warped by dampness. And many other rooms, their windows filled with the rainy gardens, the Park, the aged trees indifferent and only growing older. And then many doors to choose from, a juncture of corridors, each one leading away, each ending in a door that could be gone out by; evening falling early, and a forgetfulness with it, which way was the way in, which now the way out?

Choose a door, take a step. Mushrooms have come out in the wetness, the walled garden is full of them. There are further lights, there in the twilit bottom of the garden; the door in the wall is open, and the silvery rain sifts over the Park that can just be seen through it. Whose dog is that?

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn't as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

JOHN CROWLEY came to New York City from the Midwest in 1964, and earned his living there in films and television. In 1977 he moved to the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, where he has lived in one small town or another writing novels. LITTLE, BIG, his fourth, was begun in New York in 1969 and finished in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1978. He is 38.