‘Just before he finished this huge work, Fumiani apparently fell from his scaffolding and was killed. Imagine.
‘I first saw the ceiling of San Pantalon (Saint Pantaloon, the old fool’s church?) in 1930, when I was in Europe writing my very first book, Bruno’s Journey. I have gone back to Venice often since then, and Fumiani’s ceiling has been among the things that drew me back. If I could – if I didn’t feel this old Waterman’s I hold to be already running on empty – I would attempt one more book, a book like that ceiling; a book composed of groups ambiguous but clear, great solitudes that look on and look away from each other; a book solemn and darkly bright and joyous in its achievement, as that ceiling is joyous in the immense trick of its perspective; a book empty and infinite at its center. A book that would close the circle of my life as Bruno opened it; a book that I could die before finishing.’
The hair rose on Rosie’s neck. Actually, though, she knew these enormous thoughts were a little premature, he’d written at least one more whole book after this memoir, was it Under Saturn? Or Darkling Plain? She’d read it, and it didn’t seem very different from the others; just one more. The memoir, she thought, might have been written more at the onset of old age than in the shadow of death.
Apparently, though, he never did come up with the Ideal Friend. So love’s labor was lost.
She put down the book, and took her feet from the desk. It was not a workday, but there were lots of things to be done: for this was the first day of the summer’s floating croquet tournament, and the season opener, a premier social occasion, was to be played here at Arcady, on the lawn beyond the office.
Not all of the top-seeded players would be coming; some were summer people who hadn’t opened their houses yet, some were setting out their tomatoes. She thought Beau and them would come. Allan Butterman had been invited. She hoped Spofford, whom she hadn’t officially seen for some time, would be there; he had (he had said) a scheme to talk to her and Boney about.
A scheme. She tightened her sneakers’ laces, and, though sure it wasn’t really proper to do so, opened the tall casement and stepped out over the sill onto the lawn, calling her daughter for lunch.
Neither had Pierce been seeing much of Spofford since he had arrived, Spofford being busy on his land this time of year and having little reason to come into the Jambs. Pierce was making his own way, though, already aware that as a newcomer he was an object of some interest.
He had got on good terms with Beau and the women of his house, and at Beau’s he had met Val among others; indeed it seemed likely that he would soon have a wider circle of acquaintance in this small town than he had had in the great city, in which he had come to be something of a recluse finally, and from which anyway most of the people he cared about had, one by one, escaped, as he had at last himself.
As he had himself. On a Saturday he sat in a deep armchair by his open window, able to smell lilacs (a vast old bush of them burdened the stick-and-wire fence that separated the yard of his building from the neighbors’) and hear birds. He was waiting for Val to call up the stairs: for he was going with her and Beau to play croquet of all things. And he was writing in his record book.
‘Persistence of magical thinking in this neighborhood is remarkable,’ he wrote. ‘My neighbor Beau explaining to me yesterday all about the various planetary characters people can have, mercurial, jovial, saturnine, martial, etc. And how good planetary influences can be attracted to counteract the bad ones. Talismans. Seals. He is not getting this from any kind of scholarly endeavor, from any old book; it’s just available to him. Yet it’s the same prescriptions Marsilio Ficino worked out for himself 500 yrs. ago. How?’
He put his pencil between his teeth like a pirate’s dirk, and struggled to rise; he went to the left-hand shelf, sought among the books there, found one, and sought through it as he returned to fall again into the armchair.
‘Val,’ he wrote, ‘is our astrologer, and apparently an extremely important character around here, just as the astrological doctor or cunning woman would have been in any Elizabethan village. She was explaining the other day at the Donut Hole the qualities or contents of the twelve houses of the horoscope. I asked her how she had come by the descriptions she has; she didn’t really have an answer; she’s studied, she says, but what she’s studied seems to be magazines mostly; and she’s thought, and felt – experience, she says, more than anything; but look how her descriptions match the ones Robert Fludd gives in his astrology, in about 1620:’
He propped open the book on the arm of the chair, to copy from it.
‘Val says Vita is Life, psychological and physical character. Fludd says: life, personality, appearance, and childhood. Lucrum is possessions, money, jobs, Val says; Fludd says property, riches, and house (but Val says it’s also beginnings; first steps; what you do with what you get in Vita ). Fratres, Val says, isn’t just brothers and sisters, it’s about family relations and communication of all kinds; more than that, it’s friendship too: your circle in effect. Fludd says’ – he had lost the place, and had to search – ‘brothers and sisters, friendship, faith and religion, and journeys.’
Well maybe not so exactly identical as he had imagined. How did journeys come in under Fratres?
Farther down the list, Pietas, the ninth house, had ‘travel’ in Fludd’s description. Was there a difference between ‘journeys’ and ‘travel’? Mors, the eighth house, Val had said, isn’t just death, it’s coming to see the larger perspective on life, the cosmic perspective. Fludd’s description was, ‘Death, work, sadness, inherited diseases, final years.’ In general Val’s descriptions were, well, nicer than the seventeenth-century mage’s, more meliorative, always conceiving difficulty and obstacle as growth and struggle on a higher plane.
But why after all did the houses have the characters they had, and not others? And why in the order they came in? Val could explain them as a series, a cumulative expansion out of childhood and personal concerns through socialization and family toward cosmic consciousness, a story in twelve chapters: but that wasn’t really what Pierce was asking. Any twelve notions in a row could probably be satisfactorily interpreted, especially in that esoteric, anagogical way; but that didn’t explain them. He had put it to Val in the Donut Hole: Why did Death come in the eighth place and not in the last? Why eighth and not seventh or ninth? Did Lucrum really deserve its place immediately after Vita? And why did the twelve end, not with the grandest expansion or the darkest finality, but with Carcer, the Prison?
Beau Brachman had sat listening to their discussion with a faint smile of amusement, as though knowing better, keeping quiet, while Pierce asked questions and Val put forth notions, laughing at her own unhandiness with logical intellection. ‘Carcer,’ Val said, ‘sorrow, okay? And fear and restriction; but see it’s the individual fate, and coming to see that.’
‘See what?’
‘That your individual fate, this time around, is something you have to drop, and get out of, in death, and rejoin the universe. It’s understanding that.’ She looked to Beau. ‘Right?’ But Beau said nothing, only smiled, Pierce had begun to think his smile simply stood in the shape of his mouth, the curve of his neat satyr’s lips, and not in his eye or mind at all.
Now what did Fludd have for the last house of all? ‘Hidden enemies, deceivers, jealous persons, evil thoughts, large animals.’
Large animals?
Pierce had a sudden inspiration. It popped open in his mind like a bud, and immediately began putting forth petals, unfolding like a time-lapse flower in a nature film, even as Pierce groped for the pencil he had put down.
‘Organize the book according to the twelve houses,’ he wrote, ‘each house a chapter or segment. Somewhere tell story of how 12 houses came to be, how changed meaning over time, but save this till late; let reader ponder, Vita? Lucrum? What’s up, etc.’
He heard the door below, his front door, open.
‘In Vita, tell how you came to do this investigation. Barr. Childhood.
Etc.’
‘Hey, handsome.’ Val’s raucous voice from the bottom of the stairs.
‘Okay. Coming.’ His pencil hovered over the page. Lucrum, hm. But Fratres the company of thinkers, historians, mages then and now. And Bruno’s journey.
He got up, putting aside the journal but still writing.
Mors three-quarters through would be where Bruno burns. But then his legacy – Ægypt, infinity – expanding through Pietas, Regnum, Benefacta.
Carcer at the end. Carcer. Bruno’s nine years in a cell the size of Pierce’s bathroom. Nine years to recant, and he never did.
Why are we left at the end in prison?
He clattered down a few stairs, back up to snatch up his tobacco, matches, the sunglasses he had bought last summer in Fair Prospect. And out and down again to where Val arms akimbo awaited him with mock impatience. He didn’t lock his door behind him, he hadn’t locked his door since he had come to this small town; he had somehow instantly broken ten years of city habits as though he had not lived there at all, and was never to take them up again.
Some of the games of the summer’s croquet tournament, played on the backyard courts of farmhouses up north, rocky and full of stumps and lost toys, had developed a unique character, and rules of their own; a sort of Obstacle Croquet that some players had got very good at, Spofford among them. But on the billiard-table ground at Arcady croquet was played according to stricter geometries; the crowd tended to be older, and the younger players to be a little abashed by the whites that Boney’s set wore and Mrs. Pisky’s pitcher of lemonade and silver tray of cookies. Pierce, climbing from Val’s Beetle and seeing a warm-up round in progress beyond the rose bushes, expected almost to be handed a flamingo, to roll hedgehogs beneath hoops of playing cards.
Rosie Rasmussen saw him coming across the lawn with Beau and Val, a big ugly man in a knit shirt holding with odd delicacy a tiny cigarette stub. She knew who he was, for he had been described to her by Spofford and by Val, but she hadn’t yet met him, the new man in the county.
And Pierce saw her, striking a pose with her mallet and with her hand displaying to him, and to Beau and Val, the lawn around her, the flowers and the day; a rangy, cheerful person, carrot-topped with curly hair, the kind of clear-cut almost horsey features that would keep her long looking pretty good. Not his type though. She shouldered her mallet and came across the lawn to meet him. A sudden burst of chagrined groans and laughter came from the white-clothed players near the post; Val cried out her party laugh; Rosie and Pierce took hands.
‘Hi, I’m Rosie Rasmussen.’
‘Pierce Moffett.’
‘Right,’ she said, as though he had guessed correctly. ‘Welcome to the Faraways.’
Val called out a hello to people she knew, and began rapidly muttering their histories to Beau beside her.
Rosie pointed to the croquet ground. ‘You play this game?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t,’ Pierce said. ‘Oh once or twice. I’m not even sure of the rules.’
‘I’ll show you,’ Rosie said. ‘Couldn’t be simpler.’ They walked that way. Pierce looked up at the gray heights of Arcady, its gingerbread and deep eaves, and into the broad veranda where wicker furniture consorted. There were, he was aware, many old houses of this size and age tucked into the hills and glens of the Faraways, turn-of-the-century summer places, modest back then, fabulous now. Spofford, on one drive last summer, had somewhere pointed out the road that led to a big place he said his Rosie’s uncle owned. Somewhere. Eventually, Pierce supposed, the local geography would come to lie right in his mind, its hoops and posts and the paths that led among them.
‘So Spofford got you to come here, right?’ Rosie asked.
‘Sort of,’ Pierce said. ‘Mostly. And luck. You know Spofford?’
‘Real well,’ she said, smiling and lowering her eyes to the ball she was tapping into place. ‘How do you like it here?’
Pierce, soft May airs in his hair and shirt, and the chartreuse hills and changeful clouds in view, thought how to answer. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘If I had three wishes, any wishes, I would think that one had been delivered already, just getting me here, getting me out of the city.’
Rosie laughed at the silly extravagance of this. ‘Well and you still got two more.’
‘Those,’ Pierce said, ‘I know how to treat.’
‘You sure?’
‘Oh yes.’ He outlined for her, briefly, his theories and conclusions in the matter of wishing, the preparations he had made, the traps he had foreseen.
‘Boy you got all this figured out,’ Rosie said.
‘You betcha,’ Pierce said. ‘Be Prepared.’
‘And what makes you think you’ve got to get ready? I mean what are you going to do to get these wishes?’
‘I’m not sure you have to do anything,’ Pierce said. ‘Not to deserve them. They just are offered. Your number comes up. You buy an old lamp at a stall in a bazaar. Your fishing line pulls in the magic fish.’
‘Oh?’
‘Sure. I mean the chances are slim, I admit, but still, why not take the trouble to be ready? The same way you always send in those magazine sweepstake things, even though it’s millions to one.’
‘I never do,’ Rosie said.
‘Well in fact,’ Pierce said, ‘neither do I.’ His face creased several ways in an asymmetrical grin. Rosie laughed, puzzled by his funny fantastical gravity. How old would he be, thirty or forty? Big hands, she noted; big feet. ‘Okay you start at the stake,’ she said, pointing it out to him. ‘What color do you want to be?’
‘A matter of indifference.’
‘Spofford said you were writing a book?’
‘I’m going to try to.’
‘Getting paid for it?’
‘Not a lot. Some.’
‘Hey, good for you. About what?’
Pierce leafed rapidly through the several descriptions he kept within, suitable for different hearers. ‘It’s about magic and history,’ he said. ‘About magic in history, and also about the history of magic, and magicians.’
‘Wow, interesting. History when?’
‘Well, the Renaissance and a little later. Shakespeare’s time.’
‘Magicians back then, huh,’ Rosie said. ‘Like John Dee?’
He looked at her in astonishment. ‘Well yes,’ he said. ‘Among others. How do you come to know that name?’
‘I read about him in a novel. Are you a historian?’
‘I taught history,’ Pierce said, unwilling to assign the larger word to himself. ‘What novel was this?’
‘A historical novel.’ She laughed at the obviousness of this. ‘Of course. By Fellowes Kraft. He used to live around here, and wrote these books.’ A look of understanding had begun to cross Pierce’s face, a big understanding, bigger than merely knowing the source of her knowledge of old Dee. Rosie suddenly remembered catching a glimpse of someone who looked like him on her last visit to the library. ‘Yeah, our local famous author. His house is in Stonykill.’
‘How do you like that,’ Pierce said.
‘You’ve heard of him? He wasn’t really so famous.’
‘I think I’ve read most of his books. Once upon a time.’
Rosie said, ‘Huh,’ looking up at Pierce and experiencing a feeling very much like the feeling of conceiving a painting: the feeling of a number of things melding, turning out to be picturable as one thing.
‘Is there any chance,’ she said, ‘you might need a job? I mean a part-time temporary kind of thing?’
‘I,’ Pierce said.
‘And you were really a college teacher? Advanced degrees?’
He gave her a brief vita.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Wait here, will you, just a sec.’
He indicated he had no place to hurry to. He watched her go slowly, in thought, across the lawn, and drift almost to a halt, deeper in thought; and then, mind made up, go quickly toward a group of players in white.
He tried a few pract
ice strokes, and then leaned on his mallet, alive in the middle of the day. Now those yellow flowers that had just been coming out when he arrived in the Faraways were gone; a bush of them there by the drive bore green leaves only, and a dusting of fallen petals at its base. The lilacs had come then, white and purple, and were themselves passing; and the rosebuds were heavy. And it was his, all his, the whole unfolding of it, he was not missing it all for the first time in years, for the first time since when? Since the tended quadrangles and cloisters of Noate at least.
His county, and Fellowes Kraft’s too: and if that was some kind of omen, he must suppose it was a good one, though he was yet unused to seeing his life in such terms. The warmth of simple glee was all he felt so far, and astonishment all that he was sure of.
A job. He saw Rosie come back toward him, quick, her face alight.
‘Boney thinks it’s a really great idea,’ she said, taking Pierce’s arm, ‘and it will turn out really great for you, I know, so come meet him.’
‘Boney?’
‘Boney Rasmussen. Whose house this is.’
‘Your father.’
‘My uncle.’
‘Aha.’ Rich uncles were perhaps common around here, as in an old novel. ‘And the job?’
‘Well listen,’ she said. ‘If you’ll first just do me a favor. About Fellowes Kraft. There’ll be a job in it, I’m just sure.’