“At a thousand, with one page left, she still refuses. In the fire. But before it goes, the mother shouts Wait I’ll pay! Sybil snatches it out. Half a burnt page left.” Val grinned wickedly. “And she pays.”
“Is this a warning? To your customers?”
“Customers?” Val said, offended. “And so what about you?” She pointed to Rosie’s old jeans and sweater. “You’re just you. No?”
“I know. I’ve got to think of something.”
“Rosie! It’s about two hours from now!”
“Right. Well let’s see.”
She looked around herself at the living room and hall of Arcady where they stood, as though a ball gown or fairy wings might be hanging on the hall tree or the back of the closet door.
“I’ve been so crazy,” she said. “Sam. Mike. I mean you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
She went to the basement door beneath the stairs, opened it a crack, thought of the clothes turning in the washing machine down there, thought of Sam, thought of Pierce, thought of Boney’s old housekeeper Mrs. Pisky. Shut the door again.
“Okay,” she said.
She went to the stairs up, and Val followed her, who had never been taken up the stairs here before, would not have asked to be, would have sneered at the offer of a tour. What broad dark stairs upward. The light in Rosie’s eye was alarming, as though she were seeing something unseeable except to her, and just ahead.
“This is his room?” Val said at the door of the room Rosie went into.
“Yep.”
The old-man smell not quite dispersed from it, the dent in the big bed’s middle where it had borne him. Val entered cautiously.
“He really was a son of a bitch,” Rosie said. “But he was kind to me.”
She opened the mirrored folding doors of the closet and the room they reflected was shattered and flung about. Rosie had stood here six months before, choosing a suit for Boney’s dead body to wear.
“Okay you’ll have to help me with this,” Rosie said. “Here.” She took out and handed to Val a vested suit of Harris tweed.
“Oh no,” said Val.
“I like this room,” Rosie said. Like a train that has pulled away from the station and is at last getting its long load rolling, she was aglow and picking up speed. “I like these big windows, and the closets. My closet is.” She made a quick gesture meaning zilch, nothing, insignificant. She pulled open Boney’s drawers, and took out a white shirt from among those still folded there, Mrs. Pisky’s work; she snapped it open like a flag. “Think I should make this room mine?”
“Well hell,” said Val.
Rosie doffed her sweater, and slipped Boney’s rag-soft shirt on.
“You’ve got it on wrong,” Val said.
“Help me here,” said Rosie.
Val stepped to where Rosie stood with Boney’s shirt on back to front. Boney had liked his shirts generous at neck and breast, and this one could be buttoned easily up Rosie’s back. “Oh my God,” Val said.
“French cuffs,” Rosie said, holding out her arms. “We’ll need cuff links.”
A big tie next; Val chose a wine-dark one with an obscure pattern, looped it like a hangman’s noose around Rosie’s neck and pondered how to tie it. Rosie made suggestions, facing the other way and describing loops in the air with her hands. “Over and around and back up and down through.”
Good enough if not Boney’s own Windsor knot. The vest then, woolly side to the back, silky side to the front, Rosie cinched its little belt as Val buttoned.
“I think I will take it,” Rosie said. “This room. I think I will. It’s got to be painted though. White.”
“Off-white,” said Val.
“All this stuff can go,” Rosie said. The blackish etchings, she meant, Old World churches or monuments; the slipper chair and the somber drapes. She might sleep in his bed, though. She might.
The pants were difficult, more carefully engineered than Rosie would have thought and unwilling to be reversed, besides being a good deal too long. Laughing now giddily like bad girls, they got scissors and cut away at the fine fabric. “But what about,” Val said, turning Rosie’s wrong-way head in her hands, as though it might swivel, like a doll’s.
“Ah!” said Rosie. She waddled from the room, Val shrieking with laughter to see her go; she had an idea. Downstairs somewhere, in some crowded never-sorted drawer of this and that—she could see the drawer and almost examine its contents but could not place it in space.
Down here too she’d make changes, she thought. Pull down those ivory-lace curtains, like mummy’s cerements, and their heavy drapes; change the wallpaper. Okay. All right. The leather couches would go too, that one on which Sam had had her first seizure.
“Here,” Rosie said, heading for the old commode or chest in the living room, the one atop which the little casket of wood held the glass ball in its bag, knowing before she reached it that she was right. The doors she opened revealed closed drawers behind them, why so secret. She pulled open the lower one (when had she done this before, so that she knew where to look? Anyway here she was again) and rooted through the stuff there, postcards and old journals and a big pocket watch and a calendar. She picked up and for a moment studied a little photograph: a tintype, she guessed, only a few inches square, a boy in an autumn garden dressed in Elizabethan costume. Who and where? Toss it back. And here, what she wanted: a white mask. A white sad delicate human face, its broad upper lip like a jawless skull’s but its fine nose and brow somehow beautiful.
“Here,” she said.
A label pasted on the inside said La Zanze Venexiana Maschere espressive. Neutrie larve.
She lifted it and by its ribbons hung it on the back of her head, so that its white nose pointed back, toward where we’ve been, and its long Venetian lip hung just above the tie-knot. Rosie heard Val behind her utter a low shuddery gasp. She walked backwards toward Val, reaching at her with wrong-way hands. Even spookier though was when she walked forward, like a movie running in reverse, the old-man puppet she had become bent all wrong.
“There,” Rosie said. “All done.”
Almost all done. Boney Rasmussen himself, within whose hearing they stood, waited with what would have been tears in his eyes if he had had eyes that could weep, tears of rage and longing, rage at himself and his powerlessness, longing which he tried to turn upon them like a lamp or flare so that they could see his need. He could see nothing but the door he stood before, which had seemed to come ajar.
“Or should I sell it?” Rosie asked, the question and its answer just then blooming within her. “Sell it and just get an office somewhere. What do you think?”
“Oh my God,” cried Val, aghast; she who had had her own place up for sale for years. And she thought: Sell, yes sell, why not. A cold wind of possibility blew through her breast, and she remembered—as we do sometimes in the course of the day, our waking brains or souls jogged by something we happen to see or taste—that last night (wasn’t it last night?) she dreamed a dream. She dreamed she had gone out under the stars, down by the river, and looked up; and for the first time she knew them all, the Zodiac and all the others, their faces as familiar to her as their names: she had known them all her life. Pointing to them one after the other she had said their common names aloud: there was the Pot and Pan, the Wedding Dress, the twins Cosmo and Otto, the Boy Barber, Harold the Great, the Red Man, Omphalos, Wednesday Mensday Womensday, the Big Bug. And the bright planets round as marbles rolled among them. She had awakened still knowing every stupid name, though she couldn’t think of them all now; and as she remembered this, she thought a thought she had not thought before: that maybe Mama was wrong.
Maybe Mama was wrong. It could be that what gratified Mama so much to believe, and that had caused Val such pain to know, was just not so. There was actually too little in the story, when you thought about it, to make it so for certain; you could, if you wanted, decide it wasn’t so.
And so she would. Her father? Knowledge not wor
th paying for: let it burn.
Now Rosie in the hall put on over her curls the tweed cap Boney had never gone outdoors without between October and May, backwards, of course, and standing backwards tried to glimpse herself in the pier glass. Val, who had started to laugh at her own abnegation or refusal, laughed louder to see Rosie, a lot louder. Rosie saw the impossibility within the glass: for the first and only time, she and the one in there were facing the same way.
And at that, at Val’s laughter and Rosie’s, the door before Boney opened (though the front door of Arcady stayed firmly shut) and like a thin curtain drawn out an open window by a sudden outpouring gust or breath, he escaped.
Oh thank you child. Oh thank God or time. Freed from Una Knox, great Archon of oblivion: he would not after all (as he had so much feared) dissolve in her embrace forever.
Which didn’t mean that he had no others to contend with. Boney Rasmussen had done nothing to ready himself for this journey, nothing but yearn; all the spheres remained before him to be crossed, and he could be stopped before he climbed even to the moon’s. On the path upward there are as many dangerous beings to meet as on the dark path downward, and almost everyone who sets out is stopped and turned back, not once but many times; they won’t give up the things they’ve brought along, or their throats are dry as gravedust and they’re happy to drink there at the silver river, and drift with the multitudes forgetful toward the Gate in Cancer to be returned. If, in the sphere of Fire, for instance, Boney had no good answer to the hard questions that would be put to him, he could be stuck there with the many souls who inhabit that sphere, the ones we can see squirm and dart when we stare up into a bright sky, stuck raging until they entirely consume themselves and are returned to earth as sparks to animate slugs and snails and oysters.
He knew nothing of all this yet. He only set out, taking long quick steps, going (he thought) along the road toward Fellowes Kraft’s house not far away, toward which he had been setting out that night in July when. There was something there he wanted to see or collect; but then, no, he was not headed there, not onward but upward, climbing a stair in the air.
Val had not meant to accomplish any of this, nor had Rosie, though they each felt a sudden chill at his passage, and looked around to see if the door to the basement or something had been left open. No; Rosie had meant only to get herself going right-way at last, to come or go as she wasn’t, or hadn’t been. For she was under the same obligation as everyone she had invited, in fact it had been she who had laid the obligation on them all, come as you aren’t, and she couldn’t exempt herself: nor would she have wanted to.
“I gotta start all over,” she said.
“What!”
“Well I need some long johns or something on under this,” Rosie said. “I’ll freeze my buns.”
“Who are you?” Pierce Moffett asked the figure who stood at his open door in the lamplight.
“Night,” she said.
“No stars?”
She drew some out from within her sable wrappings, and showed them to him in her black-gloved hand: rhinestones all a-glitter, chokers and bracelets.
“No moon?” he asked.
“I’m Night, not light,” she answered. “Who are you?”
“Night too,” he said, “or Knight rather; at least that’s what I started out to be; but something went wrong.”
He took her hand—she was a little unsteady in her heels and gown of black, high-collared opera cape, hat and muff of gleaming fur—and helped her up his steps and into his house. He had lit every lamp. His head, all done, stood on the table.
“Oh yeah I see,” she said, and turned to smile on him. “Uh-huh. It’s cute.”
“It is cute,” he said. “But not a Knight.”
“No, maybe not.”
“I knew a young girl in Madras,” Pierce quoted. “Who allowed me to fondle her ass …”
Rose laughed, getting it.
“It was not round and pink,” Pierce said, “or cleft as you’d think …” “It was gray,” Rose guessed.
“Had long ears, and ate grass.” He wore evening clothes, a set chosen from the rack at The Persistence, the only coat and trousers large enough, and mismatched; in the night and the darkness no one would know. To the great head he had affixed a paper bat-wing collar and a grosgrain ribbon for a tie. He lifted it, and placed it over his head. Rose made a small cry, startled or touched, universal and ancient response to a mask, upon which all visits from the gods and the dead had once depended. LARVA, a mask; also, a GHOST (q.v.) or SPECTER. Man made god, or the reverse; possessor and possessed in one.
It is said that he who rides an Ass to Hell will not be subject to the power of the DEVIL (q.v.), but just how this is to be done is nowhere made apparent.
“Where’s this one from?” he asked when they went out into the moonlight, and he saw her car. “Another loaner?”
“A friend,” Rose said, and patted it. “A Tomcat.”
“The car, not the friend,” Pierce guessed.
“Mine really can’t be driven. The window. I told you.”
“Yes.”
She seemed to pause a moment, as though herself remembering something, or changing her mind about being here where she had perhaps just now found herself.
“I have to leave early,” she said. “Don’t let me, you know. Stay up late. You know?”
“I won’t,” said the Ass. “I promise.”
10
Everyone said they had never seen Butterman’s look like this, bright banners hanging and flags flying from the towers, all alight. Some remembered when they were kids swimming or rowing out to the island, to drink beer or make out or plink at rats with a .22. Only the oldest remembered it when it was open, and the docks were busy and band music could be heard from the riverbanks.
The marina had an excursion boat that Rosie had hired, a flat-bottomed paddle-wheel craft like a little bus, and all that night it plied the waters between the castle and the shore. Groups of guests gathered at the dock, breathing frost in the dock’s light and greeting one another as they waited to board, then laughing as the boat departed, pulling for the island. Allan Butterman had worked out the guest list with Rosie: those who had to be invited, and if those were, which others also had to be. Many of the dignitaries were people whose family names Rosie remembered from childhood, from that old big world that resembled this smaller one in so many respects, that was caught or contained inside it; some were the very kids that Rosie had known, others she knew from Boney’s funeral in July; they were lawyers and business-people who sat on the school committees and the town council, sold real estate or did plumbing and heating, and they were bluff or shy or both at once—glad to meet her at last and to study her, fabulous being just emerged from a hole or den they’d been watching with interest for some time, and deeply grateful (they said) for what she had done: this is quite a place, quite a place.
Allan in a borrowed judge’s robe and curly white wig introduced her to those he knew as Rosie walked among them, hearing laughter behind her wherever she went and wondering if people guessed it was a suit of Boney’s that she wore, his tie and cap. She felt now a little foolish and impertinent and wished somewhat she had adopted the strategy so many of the women had—just dress to the teeth in gown and jewels, long gloves and décolletage. Come as you aren’t, a queen or movie star or Marie Antoinette. Their men tended to be clowns or bums or big babies with suckers, why. Like these two now entering, she gorgeous and sinister in black taffeta and sequined cat’s-eye mask and a sable wrap, he as a donkey following her.
“You’ve got my book,” Val said to Pierce, the first of the mummers to approach him. “I need it. Bring it back.”
Pierce stared at her, not knowing if these words belonged to the character she was dressed as, or were spoken to the character he was dressed as, or were a real communication. “Book?”
“The Dictionary.”
“Oh yes.” He felt stupid, and stubborn too. “Hey, it’s not you
rs.”
“Not yours either, ass.” Val turned to look Rose over, and winked conspiratorially at her, suddenly in her rouge and golden curls looking like a gross and dissolute bawd.
“I took it out,” Pierce said.
“Well nobody’d taken it out for years before me. Since Kraft.”
“Kraft?”
“Fellowes Kraft. Yes. Didn’t you notice his name on the card? Just above mine? About six times?”
Pierce could see it now, but he hadn’t seen it then: the ancient ticket and its purple stamped dates, and on it Val’s pencil scrawl, and yes Kraft’s blue-black fountain-pen ink, neat and antique, his earliest signatures from years ago already fading.
“Oh yes,” he said.
“Oh yes,” Val said. She tossed her goldilocks. “Oh yes.”
Oh yes. Pierce thought of the unlikelihood of that old bad book showing up here in this town to which he had come; thought too of Kraft’s great pile of paper on his own desk in Littleville, and of the coincidence, as he had supposed it to be, of its tales with those he had himself known and journeyed in when he was a kid. He and Kraft turning over those big pages of the Dictionary, perhaps at the same time, on the same day. No it was not coincidence at all but causation and consequence, only reversed, running from this moment backwards, to, well to the starting point wherever that was or is. He had been fooled, deeply and profoundly fooled, the extent of it was not even yet evident to him but he knew that too at least. He saw how it might be possible, if you were blinded or in deep darkness, to take what seemed like a very long journey in a very small place; you might by chance return not once but many times to the same suite of rooms, the same walled garden or forest glade, and (for a good while anyway) think you were always farther on.
“I have,” he said, “a great desire to a bottle of hay.”
“Cash bar,” said Val. “All proceeds to the rehab.”
From inside the ass’s head it was somewhat hard to see; Pierce caught only glimpses of the other guests in the throng around them. There was JOVE or maybe JEHOVAH in great beard and robe, paper lightning bolts in his hand, who laughed with Rhea Rasmussen swathed in red satin as a Cardinal or INQUISITOR; there was APOLLO with his bays and lyre, PANDORA the robot temptress whom the GODS manufactured to degrade us, with her box of evils and her CROW of hopeless hope (this was actually just a SORCERESS, Pierce had overinterpreted her); a SANTA, a WOLF-MAN and a MUMMY wrapped in unravelling cerements, more than one ANGEL, the FOUR BEASTS of the Gospels: Bull, Eagle, Lion and Man, who was apparently a woman; a CRONE or WITCH or ILL-FAVORED LADY, who was certainly a man, and the DEVIL too, who waved familiarly to Pierce and waggled his long tongue at Rose. Somebody she knew from before, probably.