‘Hi,’ he said.
She looked up at him, pleasant face for meeting possibly bothersome undeniably male stranger.
‘Mrs. Mucho?’ he said.
The face changed. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My name is Pierce. I’m sure we’ve met.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
‘Your name is . . .’
‘My name is Ryder.’
Good heavens. ‘Oh.’
‘I don’t remember you.’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m new in town, actually. You just look a lot like someone I know.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, her face now definitely closed, as though she had decided a trick was being played on her, or a move made, and she had had enough.
‘Well,’ Pierce said. ‘My mistake.’
‘Uh-huh,’ she said.
He bowed a goodbye and moved away smartly, not to seem a masher. In some ways not really like her at all, or not like the picture of her he retained within, which the months had however no doubt heavily altered. And yet that dark rope of hair down her back, which he had seen her wring the river water from.
Negotiating with the lady at the desk for a card, he glanced once back at her, and caught her looking at him. She returned then, not instantly, to her book, and to whatever the work was that engaged her.
It could be, of course (he thought, climbing up the town home) that the partly jocular ‘Mrs. Mucho’ he had greeted her with didn’t strike her as a bit amusing and she had decided thereupon to cut him dead.
Ryder – was that the name she gave? – might be the maiden name by which she wanted to be called soley by.
Or it might be – it was a thought that had occurred to him before, usually when he had just called one of his loves by the name of one of the others, a thing which he and all men did and which no woman that he knew of ever did – it might be that there was only one woman in the world to whom he was attracted, one woman for him, and she kept showing up in his life in different forms, with different names, disguised as herself.
En ciel un dieu, en terre une déesse, and here she just was again.
Not that it mattered much, of course. His vow was taken, and a year’s long work was before him.
When he arrived at No. 21, an ungainly chocolate-brown van was offloading boxes and boxes of his books, which had been much delayed in transit, and were here at last.
‘You don’t belong here,’ Beau Brachman said to Pierce.
‘No?’
‘No.’ Pierce stood with his neighbor in the sunlight of Beau’s lawn; just for this moment the lawn was tender green, and from every twig-tip of every maple on Maple Street yellow-green baby leaves were extruding themselves. The problem of how these small but perfect jewellike leaves grow into identically shaped but very much larger leaves, a problem Pierce had left off pondering on a day in April some years ago, occurred to him again. In amid the leaves were bunches of those winged seeds that maples bear, which you could (he remembered) wear on your left breast as aviator’s wings, or break carefully open and clip to your nose. Or both, for that matter.
‘Even though you’ve forgotten it,’ Beau said, ‘you’re really from somewhere else. This is not your world, even though it seems to be. This cosmos. You arrive into it, come from a long way away; sort of stunned from the long journey, you forget you were on a journey at all. You started out an astral body, but during your journey you come to be clothed in material reality; in matter, like an overcoat. Inside is still the astral body. But now bound and asleep.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Pierce said. ‘And from where did you start out then? Where did you come from?’
‘Lifetimes ago?’ Beau said.
‘Lifetimes ago. Initially.’
‘Well suppose,’ Beau said, ‘that we, we souls, came from outer space. The stars. Suppose we lost our way; stopped here; adopted a form that would fit with this planet’s like low level of evolution. And suppose we lived so long like that that then we forgot.’
‘Hm.’ These stars, Pierce thought, would be the same stars the kindly aliens came from in Phaeton’s Car, who taught men arts.
‘Back there they remember,’ Beau said, seeming to be improvising. ‘They think of us; they wait for us to remember, and turn homeward. They might even send messages, that can be heard by the astral body.’
‘Which is asleep.’
‘That’s the message,’ Beau said. ‘Wake up.’
A little red sports car had turned the corner at the end of Maple Street and was coming toward Beau’s.
‘But beyond all those stars,’ said Beau, ‘in this story, is God. And no matter how far back we travel, we won’t reach home again till we reach God. From where we started.’
The car at first shot past the lawn where Beau and Pierce sat, and then stopped abruptly. Out from the passenger side came a child of two or three, who ran toward Beau, already holding out to him the doll she carried, and calling his name. Sunlight in her golden hair, clear eyes happy, she struck Pierce as singularly beautiful. After her, struggling from the miniature car’s bucket seat, came a dark and thickish man, who called after the child: ‘Sam!’
‘Hi, Sam. Hi, Mike,’ Beau said mildly, not choosing to rise from the stump in the sun where he sat.
‘H’lo,’ said the dour man, Mike, seeming burdened with thought or care. ‘Her mother will be by for her. Hey, bye, Sam.’ This a trifle reproachfully to the child, who was clambering into Beau’s lap. She clambered down again and dutifully up her father, for a kiss; as she was given it, her father’s doubtful eye fell on Pierce, and he nodded noncommittally.
‘G’bye, Sam. Mommy be here later.’
‘Later,’ Sam echoed. From the red car now had come a tall woman, with thick dark hair; she was pushing back the canvas top of the car. First day of the year warm enough. Her eye – noncommittal also – looked sidewise momentarily behind her at the lawn, the child, Mike, Beau. Pierce.
Her man turned from his child and hurried down to where she struggled with the car, maybe inconvertible after all.
‘His name,’ Pierce ventured, ‘is Mike Mucho.’
‘Yup,’ said Beau.
Mike roughly took charge of the comic top from her, and she resigned it to him. Her eyes again wandered across Pierce, without recognition.
Now damn if she doesn’t look exactly like the woman in the library. Ryder? Ryder. Damn if she does not. His confusion had been understandable, it had been more than that, it had been almost necessary.
‘Her name is Rosie,’ he said to Beau, as with a swing of her dark hair she turned away and inserted herself neatly into the driver’s seat.
‘It’s Rose anyway, I think,’ Beau said.
The toy car, open now, putted away, Mike Mucho’s arm flung proprietarily over the back of his wife’s seat. Still chums apparently.
‘So you don’t belong here,’ Beau said, lifting Sam with a professional fillip to his shoulders. ‘You only seem to. You can never say This is where I belong. The best you can say is This is like it. This day, this place. This is like the place where I belong.’
If that were so (and Pierce did not at all believe it was, he knew what heresy was being spoken here, and knew now what Beau was too) then Pierce would have to say it: This is like, this is a lot like the place where I belong.
‘Come on in,’ Beau said. ‘Have some tea.’
‘Thanks, no,’ Pierce said. ‘Back to the books.’ The child on Beau’s shoulders, carried toward the house, looked back, first leftward and then rightward, at Pierce in frank curiosity. And from where had she got those golden curls?
*
Laid out on Pierce’s bed together, squared up in two ranks of two, the four volumes of Frank Walker Barr’s collected studies of history showed to Pierce the whole painting that had been cut up in four to make their covers. What it pictured, though, was anybody’s guess: here a man pleaded before lictors; there, a mendicant in rags had come to a classical temple;
dark Miltonic beings with bat wings fled away; a flight of angels, or anyway tall and noble ladies, draped, and winged with heavy, pigeon-gray wings, climbed en masse toward an obscurity in the picture’s center, where four corners of the volumes met.
Cockerel Books. ‘His’ publisher. He hoped that his own volume, if it was ever finished, and if really published, would be pondered by the designer who had done these. If if.
He swept them up, Time’s body, and pushed them onto a shelf that ran along the left-hand wall; groaning he bent to another boxful of books, and with his jackknife cut the tape that sealed it. Groaning, because his back and limbs still ached from the unwonted exercise of moving furniture, then carrying these boxes up the stairs, and then the lumber for the shelves that he had put up all along the walls of the central room of his apartment, which would be library, bedroom, and workshop all in one. He had hoped to have Spofford’s help with the shelves, but he had not been able to reach him, and so he’d done it himself, quickly, testily, and not excellently. And it had become evident already that there would not be room enough on them for all these books.
He scooped out two big handfuls, glancing at their spines. His books had gone into their boxes on the basis of size, not content, and these were all little guys, including a paperback cookbook, some old pocket diaries, his childhood Mass book (Our Sunday Missal) and a little Bible, some volumes of the Yale Shakespeare, and the Monas hieroglyphica of John Dee. These handfuls he roughly shoved onto a shelf, extracting only the Dee to go with others of its special kind on the left-hand wall: a small, thin book, bound in red, with the sign, the Monad, stamped on the cover, and appearing again on the title page, reproduced in this cheap edition from the original of 1564:
In his own book he would have to make something of this sign – how it came to be, and Doctor Dee’s high hopes for it, and its subsequent odd reappearances in the history of Ægypt. He would have to take a shot at explaining it, too, and the power such a thing could once have seemed to embody, a geometric conflation or universal puzzle-ring made of a dozen different glyphs, elemental, planetary, mathematical, a seal of silence and a promise of revelation.
To do so, of course, he would have to begin to understand it himself, and feel its power; and in fact he did not. He was not unique in this; the scholar who translated the little book had himself felt compelled to interpolate into Dee’s closed-mouthed and gnomic Latin some guesses as to the sense:
All will be forced to acknowledge it [an] exceedingly rare [event] that (for the everlasting memory of men) this [work] be sealed with my London seal of Hermes, so that in it there may be not even one superfluous dot, and that not one dot may be wanting [in it] to signify those things which we have said (and things far greater yet).
He turned the page. A warning: Some men may lose themselves in the ‘labyrinth’ of Dee’s thought, ‘torture their minds in incredible ways [and] neglect their everyday affairs’; others, ‘imposters and mere spectres of men,’ will rashly deny the truths contained herein. Hm.
What would be nice to have for his own book was a Baroque title page like this one: an engraved portal at once stern and ludicrous, with pillars, lintel, and bases all labeled and emblematic, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, quotes in Latin and Greek on ruffed banners, Mercurius with winged hat and feet, finger to his lips. Above the dedication (to the Emperor Maximilian!) was a motto:
Qui non intellegit, aut taceat aut discat.
Which would actually mean, let’s see,
Let [him] who does not understand [this], either be silent [about it] or learn.
Well and which was his case? It might be, of course, that you could be both: both fool and imposter, knowing nothing, saying much. He shut the Monas hieroglyphica and slipped it in among the others with whom he would be consorting here, his Secondary Sources: with Kraft’s Bruno, with Barr in his four fat volumes, with Thorndike in six fatter volumes; with Earl’s old astronomy textbook, Lewis and Short’s dictionary and a dictionary of angels; with dozens of others the logic of whose association on the left-hand shelf only Pierce for the moment could discern. Let others learn, or be silent.
And did he have a dedicatee? He didn’t, though it struck him just then for the first time what a unique gift such a dedication made: so rich and flattering, so costless to give.
What his book might have (he thought, stepping back and with arms folded regarding the spines of his collection, some of them upside-down) was an author’s note of some kind.
Yes. An Author’s Note: This book, more even than most books, no, More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books. The author wishes to acknowledge. Out of whose great and real scholarship, out of whose daring speculations, out of whose. This fantasia on their themes.
An apology, maybe, in advance, for the uses he intended to put them to, and the company he intended to have them keep.
He turned away, and opened another box. This one was full of big books: a big dictionary and a big picture book on clocks, some volumes of his 1939 Britannica inherited at Sam’s death, a big Shakespeare and a great big Bible.
This last (Douai), heavy in his hands, tempted him to a sortilege.
He put it down on the bed, opened its cover, grasped the thick text, and with his eyes closed riffed the pages. Stopped. With eyes still closed, he put his finger on a text, and warily looked. Isaiah.
For you shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall sing praise before you, and all the trees of the country shall clap their hands.
THREE
Like all of Fellowes Kraft’s books, the little autobiography which Boney gave to Rosie had an epigraph.
It was from Love’s Labor’s Lost:
Welcome the sour cup of prosperity!
Affliction may one day smile again; and until then
Sit down, sorrow.
Which seemed to be a sort of joke when you thought about it; it might be, Rosie thought, that it was the source rather than the quote itself that was significant, because a big theme of the book was Kraft’s search for an Ideal Friend, and the various disappointments, betrayals, forswearings, and lapses the search had entailed, all of them presented so delicately though that Rosie wondered whether he could have been unaware of the shape of his nature, was really innocently in pursuit of just a friend, and it was she who had a dirty mind.
If he was coy about the Ideal Friend, he was frank about royalties and the business of writing. He gave a full accounting of how much he had made on each book, which Rosie found illuminating; enough to live on, apparently, but not enough to live well. There was family money too, though Kraft was a little more secretive about that; and there was the Foundation. Certainly the royalties from books could not have bought the house in Stonykill, or paid for the restless travel Kraft recorded, always hopefully undertaken, always illuminated by art or architecture he found along the way, always leaving an ashen taste: that was because of the Friends, Rosie thought, Nikos and Antonio and the Baron and Cyril and Helmut. There were cloudy photographs of one or two of these men tipped into the book, inside printed frames, with name and place and date; in fact – except for one of a gay and childlike woman a long time ago, in a big hat and summer frock, his mother – those were all the illustrations.
No, one other: Kraft and two other young men, in a sort of truck on a mountain road, with a picture-book castle white and vague far down the valley behind. Kraft and whoever these others were wore rough clothes, leather shorts and sweaters. Underneath, it said: On expedition in the Giant Mountains, 1935, which Rosie thought was remarkable. She hadn’t come upon anything in the text about this expedition, and didn’t know at all where the Giant Mountains were. Fairyland, maybe.
She wasn’t, however, reading the book in any sequential way. It lay on her desk (a card table actually, which she had put up in a corner of the office, where she could work) and she would pick it up now and then when she was bored or didn’t know how to go on; reading it, or looking at it, seeme
d sufficiently related to her job to fill the holes in a workday. She was reading in it on a morning late in May, sitting in Boney’s chair, with her sneakered feet crossed on his desk, though this was not a workday but a Saturday. Boney himself was out on the lawn, bent over a croquet ball, mallet in hand. Deep green lawn, pride of old gardeners, blue-striped ball and mallet. Rosie could see him, when she raised her eyes from the book: practicing.
‘However beautiful we make them, our nests are empty ones,’ she read; and she thought she knew who this we was. ‘We will be solitary, inevitably, like balls struck across a wide lawn, striking others now and then, and being struck by them. We must be glad of that striking; and keep up our courage and our cheer; and not forget the ones we have loved – no, and pray that our remembrance will in turn earn us a place, however little visited, in their hearts.’
Hm. It struck Rosie that nowadays everyone – no, not everyone, but lots of people she knew – lived the way gay men like Kraft had always lived; in brief collisions, restless, among lovers whom there was no way to fix except for as long as you could hold their hands. And then what? And then remember them, and keep in touch: friends. Maybe there was a lesson there, or a hint: how not to end up empty-handed altogether, if that was the way you had to live.
She let the creamy pages fall through her fingers toward the last ones. Out on the lawn, Boney swung his mallet neatly, pendulum fashion, before him, and straightened bent knees. Sam, running delighted across the lawn, intercepted the rolling ball. Boney raised a finger; Sam ball in hand looked up to listen, then decided to carry off the ball anyway, shrieking with glee.
‘There is, in Venice, in the church of San Pantalon, one of the most remarkable works of art I know of. It is a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. His work covers the entire ceiling and its coffers as though it were one enormous easel painting; it must tell the story of the Saint, though what that story is I have never learned. Despite the convincing upward leap of its perspective, it doesn’t have the vanishing lightness of Tiepolo, it has a hallucinatory dark clarity, the figures distinct and solidly modeled, the pillars, flights of stairs, thrones, tripods, and incense-smoke so real that their great size and swift recession from the viewer is vertiginous. Most remarkable of all is that, except for a central flight of angels, there is no obvious religious import to any of it: no Virgin, no Christ, no God or Dove, no cross, no haloes, nothing. Nothing but these huge antique figures, associated in a story more than portraying one; pondering, judging, hoping, seeing, alone. The flight of angels ascends not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky.