Little, Big

  Tossing and Turning

  There had been one great advantage in having grown up anonymous when he had come to have children: for they could make out of him what they wanted, could think him kindly or strict, evasive or frank, jolly or glum, as their own tempers required. That was great, great to be Universal Father, nothing withheld from him, he bet (though he had no way to prove it) that his daughters had told him more of their secrets, grave, shameful, or hilarious, than most men’s did. But there were limits even to his flexibility, he couldn’t as time went on stretch as much as he had once done, he found himself less and less able to ignore it when his character, growing ever more lobsterlike and unsheddable, disapproved of or could not understand the Young.

  Perhaps it was chiefly that which had come between him and his youngest child, his son Auberon. Certainly the commonest emotions Smoky remembered feeling about the boy were a sort of baffled irritation, and a sadness over the mysterious gulf that seemed fixed between them. Whenever he got up the nerve to try to learn what was with his son, Auberon had produced a complex and well-practiced secretiveness that Smoky was helpless and even bored before; when Auberon had come to him, on the other hand, Smoky had seemed unable not to retreat into a bluff, know-nothing, standard-issue parent costume, and Auberon would too quickly retire. And it had grown not better but worse as the years went by, until at last Smoky, with outward head-shaking and reluctance, and inward relief, had seen him off on his strange quest to the City.

  Maybe if they’d played ball more. Just gone out, son and dad, and tossed the old pill around on a summer afternoon. Auberon had always liked to play ball, Smoky knew, though he himself had never been either good at it or happy doing it.

  He laughed at the insufficiency of this reverie. Just the sort of thing his character might suggest, in the face of his children’s inexplicability. Maybe, though, it had occurred to him because he sensed that some common touch, some ordinary gesture, might have crossed over what lay between him and his son; if there were something as wide that lay between him and his daughters, he had never noticed it, but of course it might well be there, disguised in the daily strangenesses of growing up today with a father who had grown up yesterday, or even the day before that.

  None of his daughters had married, or seemed likely to, though he had now two grandchildren, Lily’s twins, and Tacey seemed ready to bear a child by Tony Buck. Smoky held no particular brief for marriage, though he couldn’t imagine life without his own, odd as it had proved to be; and as for fidelity, he had no right to speak at all. But he did find it distressing to think that his offspring would be more or less nameless, and that if this kept up might one day be describable only as race-horses are, by so-and-so out of so-and-so. And he couldn’t help thinking that there was something embarrassingly obvious in the couplings of his daughters with their lovers, a shamelessness that marriage would have decently hid. Or rather his character thought so. Smoky himself mostly cheered their daring, their bravery, and wasn’t ashamed to admire their sexuality as he had always admired their beauty. Big girls now, after all. But still … well, he hoped they could ignore it when his character made noises, or caused him, for instance, to decline to visit Tacey and what’s-his-name when they were living together in a cave. A cave! His children seemed bent on recapitulating in their own lives the whole history of the race. Lucy gathered herbs for simples and Lucy read the stars and hung coral around her babies’ necks to ward off evil; Auberon with a knapsack set out to seek his fortune. And in her cave Tacey discovered fire. Just when the supply of electricity in the world seemed to be running out for good, too. Thinking of which, he listened to the clock chime the quarter hour, and wondered if he should go down and shut down the generator.

  He yawned. The single lamp lit in the library made a pool of light he was reluctant to leave. There was a pile of books by his chair from which he had been choosing for school; the old ones had grown repulsive to the hand and eye from years of use, and boring beyond expression. Another clock chimed, one o’clock, but Smoky didn’t trust it. Outside in the corridor, a candle in her hand, a familiar wraith of nighttime passed: Sophie, still awake.

  She went away—Smoky watched the changeful light on walls and furniture flash and dim—and then came back again.

  “You still up?” she said, and at the same moment he asked the same of her.

  “It’s awful,” she said, coming in. She wore a long white nightgown which gave her even more the air of an unlaid ghost. “Tossing and turning. Do you know that feeling? As though your mind’s asleep but your body’s awake—and won’t give in—and has to keep jumping from one position to another….”

  “Just barely waking you up every time …”

  “Yes, so your head can’t—can’t dive down, sort of, and really sleep, but it won’t give up either and wake up, and just keeps repeating the same dream, or the beginnings of one, and not getting anywhere….”

  “Sorting over and over the same handful of nonsense, yup; until you have to give in, and get up….”

  “Yes, yes! And you feel like you’ve been lying there for hours, struggling, and not sleeping at all. Isn’t that awful?”

  “Awful.” He felt, but would never admit to, a sense of fitness that Sophie, long the champion sleeper, had come in recent years to be a fair insomniac, and knew now even better than Smoky, a chancy sleeper at the best of times, the pursuit of fleeing oblivion. “Cocoa,” he said. “Warm milk. With a little brandy. And say your prayers.” He’d given her all this advice before.

  She knelt by his chair, covering her bare feet with the nightgown, and rested her head on his thigh. “I thought,” she said, “when I sort of snapped out of it, you know, the tossing and turning? I thought: she must be cold.”

  “She?” he said. And then: “Oh.”

  “Isn’t that dumb? If she’s alive, she’s not cold, probably; and if she’s—well, not alive …”

  “Mm.” There was, there was Lilac, of course: he had been thinking with such self-satisfaction of how well he knew his daughters, and how well they liked him, his son Auberon the only grain of grit in his oyster: but there was his other daughter, his life was odder than it often appeared to him, Lilac was a dimension of mystery and grief he sometimes forgot. Sophie never forgot.

  “You know what’s funny?” Sophie said. “Years ago, I used to think of her growing up. I knew she got older. I could feel it. I knew just what she looked like, how she’d look as she got older. But then it stopped. She got to be about … nine, or ten, I guess; and then I couldn’t imagine her getting any older.”

  Smoky answered nothing, only stroked Sophie’s head softly.

  “She’d be twenty-two now. Think of that.”

  He thought of it. He had (twenty-two years ago) sworn before his wife that her sister’s child would be his, all the responsibility his. Her disappearance hadn’t altered that, but it had left him with no duties. He couldn’t imagine how to search for the real Lilac lost, when he had at length been told that she was lost, and Sophie had hid her awful ordeal with the false Lilac from him, and from all of them. He still didn’t know how it had ended: Sophie was gone for a day, and when she returned there was no more Lilac, false or true; she took to her bed, a cloud was lifted from the house, and a sadness entered it. That’s all. He was not to ask.

  So much not to ask. It was a great art, that one. He had learned to deploy it as skillfully as a surgeon his art, or a poet his. To listen; to nod; to act on what he was told as though he understood it; not to offer criticism or advice, except of the mildest kind, just to show his interest and concern; to puzzle out. To stroke Sophie’s hair, and not try to deflect her sadness; to wonder how she had gone on with such a life, with such a sorrow at its heart, and never ask.

  Well, if it came to that, though, his other three daughters were as great a mystery to him, really, as his fourth, only not a mystery it grieved him to contemplate. Queens of air and darkness, how had he come to engender them? And his wife: only he had so lo
ng ceased (since his honeymoon, since his wedding day) to question her that she was now no more a mystery (and no less) than clouds and stones and roses. If it came to that, the only one he could begin to understand (and criticize, and intrude on, and study) was his only son.

  “Why do you suppose that is?” Sophie asked. “Why what is?”

  “That I can’t imagine her getting any older.”

  “Well, hm,” Smoky said. “I don’t really know.”

  She sighed, and Smoky stroked her head, running his fingers through her curls, sorting them out. They would never exactly go gray; though the gold faded from them, they still seemed like golden curls. Sophie was not one of those maiden aunts whose unused beauty comes to seem dried and pressed, like a flower—for one thing she was no maiden—but it did seem that her youth couldn’t be outgrown, that she had never and would never become a person of mature years. Daily Alice looked now, at almost fifty (fifty, good Lord) just as she ought, as though she had shed the successive skins of childhood and youth and come forth thus, whole. Sophie looked sixteen: only burdened with a lot of unnecessary years, almost unfairly, it seemed. Smoky wondered which, over the years, he had oftenest thought the more beautiful. “Maybe you need another Interest,” he said.

  “I don’t need another Interest,” she said. “I need to sleep.”

  It had been Smoky who, when Sophie had discovered with surprise and disgust how many hours there are in the day when it isn’t half-filled with sleep, had said that most people fill those hours with Interests of some kind, and had suggested Sophie take some up. Out of desperation she’d done so; the cards, of course, first, and when she wasn’t working with them she gardened, and paid visits, canned, read books by the dozen, made repairs around the house, always resenting that these Interests should be forced on her in the absence of her lost (why? why lost?) sweet sleep. She turned her head restlessly on Smoky’s thigh as though it were her unquiet pillow. Then she looked up at him. “Will you sleep with me?” she said. “I mean sleep.”

  “Let’s make cocoa,” he said.

  She got up. “It seems so unfair,” she said, casting her eyes upward at the ceiling. “All of them up there fast asleep and I have to haunt the place.”

  But in fact—besides Smoky leading the way by candlelight to the kitchen—Momdy had just awakened with arthritic pains, and was thinking whether it would hurt more to get up and get aspirin or lie there and ignore them; and Tacey and Lucy had never gone to bed at all, but sat up by candlelight in quiet talk about their lovers and friends and family, about the fate of their brother and the shortcomings and virtues of the sister not present, Lily. Lily’s twins had just awakened, one because he’d wet the bed, and the other because she felt the wetness, and their wakefulness was about to wake Lily. The only one asleep then in the house was Daily Alice, who lay on her stomach with her head deep in two feather pillows, dreaming of a hill where there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace.

  La Negra

  On a winter day, Sylvie paid a visit to her old neighborhood, where she had not lived since her mother had gone back to the Island and farmed Sylvie out to aunts. In a furnished room down that street, with her mother, her brother, a child of her mother’s, her grandmother and the odd visitor, Sylvie had grown, and grown Somehow the Destiny that she had today brought back with her to these littered streets.

  Though only a few subway stops away from Old Law Farm, it seemed a great distance, across a border, another country altogether; so dense was the City that it could contain many such foreign countries cheek by jowl; there were several which Sylvie had never visited at all, their old Dutch or quaintly rural names suggestive and remote to her. But these blocks she knew. Hands in the pockets of her old black fur, double socks on her feet, she went down streets she walked often in her dreams, and they weren’t much different than she dreamed them to be, they were preserved as though in memory: the landmarks by which she had mapped them as a child were mostly still there, the candy store, the evangelical church where women with moustaches and powdered faces sang hymns, the squalid credit grocer, the notária scary and dark. She found, by following these markers, the building where the woman called La Negra lived; and though it was smaller, dirtier, with darker and more urinous hallways than it had been or than she remembered it, it was the same, and her heart beat fast with apprehension as she tried to remember what door was hers. From out an apartment, as she climbed up, a family argument accompanied by jíbaro music suddenly burst, husband, wife, crying children, mother-in-law. He was drunk, and going out to get drunker; the wife railed at him, the mother-in-law railed at the wife, the music sang of love. Sylvie asked where La Negra’s house was. They all fell silent, all but the radio, and pointed upward, studying Sylvie. “Thanks,” she said, and went up; behind her the sextet (well and long rehearsed) resumed.

  From behind her door studded with locks La Negra questioned Sylvie, unable, apparently, despite her powers, to place her. Then Sylvie remembered that La Negra had known her only by a childhood diminutive, and she gave that. There was a shocked silence (Sylvie could sense it) and the locks were opened.

  “I thought you were gone,” the black woman said, eyes wide, mouth corners drawn down in fearful surprise.

  “Well, I am,” Sylvie said. “Years ago.”

  “I mean far,” La Negra said. “Far, far.”

  “No,” Sylvie said. “Not so far.”

  She herself was a shock to Sylvie, for she had grown a lot smaller, and a lot less fearsome as she was smaller. Her hair had grown gray as steel wool. But the apartment, when La Negra at last stood aside and let Sylvie enter, was the same: mostly a smell, or many smells together, that brought back, as though she inhaled them with the odors, the fear and wonder she had felt here.

  “Titi,” she said, touching the old woman’s arm (for La Negra still stared at her in something like surprise and didn’t speak), “Tití, I need some help.”

  “Yes,” La Negra said. “Anything.”

  But Sylvie, looking around the small, small apartment, was less sure than she had been an hour ago about what help she wanted. “Gee, the same,” she said. There was the bureau, done up as a composite altar, with the chipped statues of black Santa Barbara and black Martin de Porres, the red candles lit before them, the plastic lace tablecloth beneath; there was the picture of Our Lady pouring blessings that turned to roses into the gas-flame-colored sea. On another wall was the Guardian Angel picture which also hung, oddly, on George Mouse’s kitchen wall: the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely. “Who’s that?” Sylvie asked. Between the saints, before the talismanic hand, was a picture shrouded in black silk, a candle before it also, burning low.

  “Come sit, come sit,” La Negra said quickly. “She’s not being punished, even if it looks like it. I never meant that.”

  Sylvie decided not to question this. “Oh, hey, I brought some stuff.” She offered the bag, some fruit, some dulces, some coffee she had begged from George, who got it when no one else could, for she had remembered her aunt drinking it with relish, hot white and sweet.

  La Negra, blessing her profusely, grew easier. When she had, as a precaution, taken the glass of water she kept on the bureau to catch evil spirits in and flushed it down the noisy toilet and replaced it, they made the coffee and talked about old things, Sylvie in her nervousness rattling on a little.

  “So I heard from your mother,” La Negra said. “She called long-distance. Not me. But I heard. And your father.”

  “He’s not my father,” Sylvie said, dismissively. “Well …”

  “Just somebody my mother married.” She smiled at her aunt. “I got no father.”

  “Ay, bendita.”

  “A virgin birth,” Sylvie said, “just ask my mother,” and then, though laughing, clapped her hand over her mouth at the blasphemy.

  Coffee made, they drank it and ate the dulces, and Sylvie told her aunt why she had come: to get the Destiny that on
ce upon a time La Negra had seen in the cards and in her child’s palm removed from her: to have it pulled, like a tooth.

  “See, I met this man,” she said, looking down, suddenly shy to feel the warmth that bloomed in her heart. “And I love him, and …”

  “Is he rich?” La Negra asked. “I don’t know, I think his family is, sort of.” “Then,” her aunt said, “maybe he’s the Destiny.” “Ay, tití,” Sylvie said. “He’s not that rich.” “Well …”

  “But I love him,” Sylvie said. “And I don’t want some big Destiny coming along and snatching me away from him.”

  “Ay, no,” La Negra said, “but where would it go? If it left you.”

  “I don’t know,” Sylvie said. “Couldn’t we just throw it away?”

  La Negra slowly shook her head, her eyes growing round. Sylvie felt suddenly both afraid and foolish. Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply cease believing that any destiny was hers; or to believe that love was as high a destiny as anyone could want or have, and which she did have? What if messing in it with spells and potions didn’t ward it off at all, but only turned it bitter, and sour, and cost her love as well…. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is that I love him, and that’s enough; I want to be with him, and be good to him, and make him rice and beans and have his babies and … and just go on and on.”