“Russell Eigenblick?”
“The man with the red beard. The Lecturer. The Geography.”
He lay back again, his rocky couch groaning beneath him. “No King of a new age,” he said. “An upstart. An invader.” “Invader?”
“He is their champion. That’s why they waked him.” His milky-gray eye was drifting closed. “Asleep for a thousand years, lucky man. And now awakened for the conflict.”
“Conflict? Champion?”
“Daughter,” he said. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
War … There had been, all along, one word she had sought for, one word under which all the disorderly facts, all the oddities she had gathered up concerning Russell Eigenblick and the random disturbances he seemed to cause in the world might be subsumed. She had that word now: it blew through her consciousness like a wind, uprooting structures and harrying birds, tearing leaves from trees and laundry from lines, but at least, at last, blowing from one direction only. War: universal, millennial, unconditional War. For God’s sake, she thought, he’d said as much himself in every recent Lecture; she’d always thought it was merely a metaphor. Merely! “I didn’t know, Father,” she said, “until this moment.”
“Nothing to do with me,” said the Ancientest One, his words muffled in a yawn. “They applied to me once for his sleep, and I granted it. A thousand years ago, give or take a century … They are after all children of my children, related by marriage…. I do them a favor once and again. No harm in that. Little enough to do here anyway.”
“Who are they, Father?”
“Mm.” His enormous vacant eye was shut.
“Who are they whose champion he is?”
But the vast head was bent backward on its bouldered pillow, the vast throat swallowed a snore. The hoary-headed eagles who had risen shrieking when he woke settled again on their crags. The windless forest soughed. Hawksquill, reluctantly, turned her steps toward the shore again. Her steed (sleepy himself, even he) raised his head at her approach. Well! No help for it. Thought must conquer this, Thought could! “No rest for the weary,” she said, and leapt smartly onto his broad back. “On! And quickly! Don’t you know there’s a war on?”
She thought as they ascended, or descended: who slept for a thousand years? What children of the children of Time would make war on men, to what end, with what hope of success?
And who (by the way) was that golden-haired child she had glimpsed curled up asleep in the lap of Father Time?
The Child Turned
The child turned, dreaming; dreaming of what had come of all she had seen on her last day awake, dreaming it all and altering it in her dreaming even as, elsewhere, it came to pass; plucking apart her bright and dark dream-tapestry and knitting it up again with the same threads in a way she liked better. She dreamt of her mother awaking and saying “What?”, of one of her fathers on a path at Edgewood; she dreamt of Auberon, in love somewhere with a dream-Lilac of his own invention; she dreamt of armies made of cloud, led by a red-bearded man who startled her nearly awake. She dreamt, turning, lips parted, heart beating slowly, that at the end of her tour she came riding down from the air, came coursing with vertiginous speed along an iron-gray and oily river.
The ghastly red round sun was sinking vaporously amid the elaborate smokes and scorings of jets that had made the false armies in the west. Lilac could only hold her tongue: the brutal esplanades, the stained blocks of buildings, the clamor brought to her ears, silenced her. The stork turned inward; Mrs. Underhill’s stick seemed uncertain in the rectangular valleys; they went east, then south. A thousand people seen from above are not as one or two: a heaving queasy sea of hair and hats, the odd bright muffler blown back. Hell-holes in the street shot up steam; crowds were swallowed up in clouds of it, and (so it seemed to Lilac) didn’t emerge, but there were countless others to replace them.
“Remember these markers, child,” Mrs. Underhill shouted back at Lilac over the keening sirens and the turmoil. “That burned church. Those railings, like arrows. That fine house. You’ll pass this way again, alone.” A caped figure just then detached itself from the crowd and made to enter the fine house, which didn’t seem fine to Lilac. The stork, at Mrs. Underhill’s direction, topped the house, cupped her wings to stop, and with a grunt of relief put her red feet down amid the weather-obscured detritus of the rooftop. The three of them looked down into the middle of the block just as the caped figure came out the back door.
“Now mark him, dear,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Who do you suppose he is?”
With arms akimbo beneath the cloak, and a wide hat on his head, he was a dark lump to Lilac. Then he took off the hat, and shook out long black hair. He turned clockwise in a circle, nodding, and looked around at the rooftops, a white grin on his dark face. “Another cousin,” Lilac said.
“Well, yes, and who else?”
He put his finger thoughtfully to his lips, and scuffed the dirt of the untidy garden. “I give up,” Lilac said. “Why, your other father!” “Oh.”
“The one who engendered you. Who’ll need your help, as much as the other.” “Oh.”
“Planning improvements,” Mrs. Underhill said with satisfaction, “just now.”
George paced out his garden. He went and chinned himself on the board fence which separated his yard from the next building’s, and looked over like Kilroy into the even less well-kept garden there. He said aloud, “God damn! All right!” He let himself down, and rubbed his hands together.
Lilac laughed as the stork stepped to the roof’s ledge to take off. Like the stork’s white wings opening, George’s black cape flew outward and then closed more tightly around him as he laughed too. This, Lilac decided, delighted by something about him which she couldn’t name, was the father which, of the two of them, she would have chosen to have: and with the instant certainty of a solitary child about who is and who is not on its side, she chose him now.
“There’s no choosing, though,” said Mrs. Underhill as they ascended. “Only Duty.”
“A present for him!” she cried to Mrs. Underhill. “A present!”
Mrs. Underhill said nothing—the child had been indulged quite enough—but as they coursed down the shabby street, in their wake there sprang up from the sidewalk at even intervals a row of skinny and winter-naked saplings, one by one. This street is ours, anyway, thought Mrs. Underhill, or as good as; and what’s a farm without a row of guardian trees along the road that passes it?
“Now for the door!” she said, and the cold city tumbled beneath them as they fled uptown. “It’s long past your bedtime—there!” She pointed ahead to an aged building that must once have been tall, overweening even, but no more. It had been built of white stone, white no longer, carved into a myriad of faces, caryatids, birds and beasts, all coal-miners now and weeping filthily. The central part of it was set back from the street; wings on either side framed a dark dank courtyard into which taxis and people disappeared. The wings were linked, high up at the top, by an archlike course of masonry, an arch for a giant to pass under: and they three did pass under it, the stork ceasing to beat its wings, coasting, wing-tipping slightly to arrow accurately into the darkness of the courtyard. Mrs. Underhill cried “ ‘Ware heads! Duck, duck!” and Lilac, feeling a whoosh of stale air rush up at her from the interior, ducked. She closed her eyes. She heard Mrs. Underhill say, “Nearly done now, old girl, nearly done; you know the door,” and the darkness behind her lids grew brighter, and the noise of the City vanished, and they were elsewhere again.
So she dreamed; so it came to have been; so the saplings grew, dirty-faced urchins, tough, neglected and sharp. They grew, fattening in the trunk, buckling the sidewalk that ran beneath them. They wore broken kites and candy-wrappers, burst balloons and sparrows’ nests in their hair, unmindful; they shouldered each other for a glimpse of sun, they shook their sooty snow winter after winter on passersby. They grew, penknife-scarred, snaggle-branched, dog-manured, unkillable. On a mild night in a certain March,
Sylvie, returning to Old Law Farm at dawn, looked up at their branches outlined against a raw pale sky and saw that every twig-tip bore a heavy bud.
She said goodnight to the one who had seen her home, though he was importunate, and sought the four keys she needed to get herself into Old Law Farm and the Folding Bedroom. He’ll never believe this crazy story, she thought laughing, never believe the crazy but essentially innocent, nearly innocent, chain of events that had had her up till dawn. Not that he would grill her; he’d only be glad she was safe, she wished he wouldn’t worry. She got whirled away, sometimes, is all; everybody put a claim in on her, and most of them seemed to her good. It was a big city, and its revels ran till late when the moon was full in March, and hey, one thing just led to another…. She unlocked the door into the Farm, and made her way up through the sleeping warren of it; at the hall that led to the Folding Bedroom she slipped off the high-heeled shoes from her dancing feet and tiptoed to the door. She unlocked the locks quietly as a burglar, and peeked in. Auberon lay in a heap on the bed, obscure in the dawn light and (for some reason she was sure) only feigning untroubled sleep.
An Imaginary Study
The Folding Bedroom and its little kitchen were so small that Auberon, in order to have some quiet and isolation in which to work, had to create out of it an imaginary study.
“A what?” Sylvie asked.
“An imaginary study,” he said. “Okay. Look. This chair.” He had found somewhere in the ruined habitations of Old Law Farm an old schoolhouse chair with one broad paddle arm for a student to use as a desk. Underneath the seat was a compartment for the student’s books and papers. “Now,” he said. He positioned the chair carefully. “Let’s pretend I have a study in this bedroom. This chair is in it. Now really all we have is this chair, but …”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well will you please just listen a minute?” Auberon said, blazing up. “It’s very simple. There were lots of imaginary rooms at Edgewood where I grew up.”
“I bet.” She stood arms akimbo, a wooden spoon in one hand, head bound in a bright hussy kerchief beneath which her earrings trembled amid escaping curls of raven hair.
“The idea is,” Auberon said, “that when I say ‘I’m going into my study, babe,’ and then sit down in this chair, then it’s as though I’ve gone into a separate room. I shut the door. Then I’m alone in there. You can’t see me or hear me, because the door is closed. And I can’t see or hear you. Get it?”
“Well, okay. But how come?”
“Because the imaginary door is closed, and …”
“No, I mean how come you need this imaginary study? Why don’t you just sit there?”
“I’d rather be in private. You see, we have to make a deal, that whatever I do in my imaginary study is invisible to you; you can’t comment on it or dwell on it or …”
“Gee. What are you going to do?” A smile, and she made a rude gesture with the spoon. “Hey.” But what he intended to do, though no less private and self-indulgent, was mostly to daydream, though he wouldn’t have put it that way; to court, on long woolgathering rambles, Psyche his soul; put two and two together, and perhaps write down the sum, for he would have sharpened pencils in the pencil-well of the desk and a clean pad before him. But mostly, he knew, he would only sit, twist a lock of hair between his fingers, suck his teeth, scratch himself, try to catch the flying speckles that swam in his vision, mutter the same half-line of someone else’s verse over and over and generally behave like the quieter sort of nut. He might also read the papers.
“Thinkin’ and readin’ and writin’, huh,” Sylvie said with great affection.
“Yes. You see, I have to be alone sometimes ….”
She was stroking his cheek. “For thinkin’ and readin’ and writin’. Yes, baby. Okay.” She backed away, watching him with interest.
“I’m going into my study now,” Auberon said, feeling foolish.
“Okay. ‘Bye.”
“I’m shutting the door.”
She waved the spoon. She began to say something further, but he cast his eyes upward, and she returned to the kitchen.
In his study, Auberon rested his cheek in the cup of his hand and stared at the old grainy surface of his desk. Someone had scratched an obscenity there, and someone else had priggishly altered it into BOOK in block letters. Probably all done with the point of a compass. Compass and protractor. When he started in at his father’s little school his grandfather gave him his old pencil-case, leather with a snap closure and weird Mexican designs cut in it—a naked woman was one, you could run your finger over her stylized breast and feel the leather button of her nipple. There were pencils with dowdy pink hats for erasers, which pulled off to reveal the naked pencil end; there was another rhomboid dialectical gray eraser, half for pencil and a grittier half for ink, which macerated the paper it was used on. Pens black and cork-tipped like Aunt Cloud’s cigarettes, and a steel box of points. And a compass and protractor. Bisect an angle. But never trisect it. With his fingers he moved an imaginary compass above the desk-top. When the little yellow pencil wore down, the compass leaned at a useless angle. He could write a story about those long afternoons in school, in May, say the last day, hollyhocks growing outside and vines clambering in at the open windows; the smell of the outhouse. The pencil box. Mother West-wind and the Little Breezes. Those protracted afternoons … He could call the story Protractor. “Protractor,” he said aloud, and then shot a glance at Sylvie to see if she had overheard him. He caught her just having shot him a glance, and now looking back at her task unconcernedly.
Protractor, protractor … He drummed his fingers on the oak. What was she up to in there anyway? Making coffee? She had heated a big kettle of water, and now dumped heedlessly into it several big shakes of coffee, right from the bag, and threw in this morning’s used grounds as well. A rich, boiling-coffee smell filled the air.
“You know what you ought to do?” she said, stirring the pot. “You ought to try to get a job writing on ‘A World Elsewhere.’ It’s really degenerating.”
“I …” he began to say, but then studiously turned away.
“Oops, oops,” she said, stifling a laugh.
George had said that all that TV was written on the other coast. But how would he know anyway? The real difficulty was that he had come to see, through Sylvie’s elaborate retellings of the events of “A World Elsewhere,” that he could never have thought up the myriad and (to him) incongruous passions that seemed to fill it. Yet for all he knew the terrible griefs, great sufferings, accidents and windfalls it told of were all true to life—what did he know about life, about people? Maybe most people were as wilful, as overmastered by ambition, blood, lust, money, passion as the TV showed them. People and life weren’t his strengths as a writer anyway. His strengths as a writer were …
“Knock-knock,” Sylvie said, standing before him.
“Yes?”
“Can I come in?” “Yes.”
“Do you know where my white outfit is?” “In the closet?”
She opened the door of the toilet. They had screwed into the door of this little chamber a collapsing clothes-rack, which held most of their clothes. “Look inside my overcoat,” he said.
There it was, a two-piece white cotton outfit, jacket and skirt, an old nurse’s uniform in fact with an identifying patch on the shoulder. Sylvie had ingeniously altered it into something at once stylish and improvised: her taste was sure, her skills didn’t match it quite, he wished not for the first time that he could give her thousands to lavish on herself, it would be a joy to watch.
She looked over the outfit critically.
“Your coffee’s going to boil away,” he said.
“Huh?” With a pair of tiny scissors in the shape of a long-beaked bird she was removing the identifying shoulder patch. “Oh, yike!” She hurried to turn it down. Then she returned to her outfit. Auberon returned to his study.
His strengths as a writer were …
“I wish I could write,” Sylvie said.
“Maybe you can,” Auberon said. “I bet you’d be good at it. No, really”—she had snorted in contempt at this notion—”I bet you would.” He knew with love’s certainty that there was little she couldn’t do, and that little wasn’t worth doing. “What would you write?”
“I bet I could think up better stuff than they think up on ‘A World Elsewhere.’ “ She carried the steaming kettle of coffee to the tub (as in all old-law tenements this sat squat and unembarrassed in the middle of the kitchen) and began straining the liquid through a cloth into an even bigger cauldron set in the tub. “It’s not touching, y’know? It doesn’t touch your heart.” She started to undress.
“Do you mind,” Auberon said, abandoning as hopeless the imaginary walls and door that separated him from Sylvie, “if I ask you what the hell you’re doing?”
“I’m dying,” she said calmly. Shirtless now, the globes of her breasts swinging gently with their pendular momentum as she moved, she picked up the two parts of the white outfit, looked them over a final time, and thrust them into the cauldron of coffee. Auberon got it, and laughed delightedly.
“Sort of a beige,” Sylvie said, pronouncing the “g” as though it were in “badge”. She plucked from the dish-drainer by the sink the little sock-like cotton strainer—el colador, a boy—which she used to make strong Spanish coffee, and showed it to him. It had turned a rich tan color he had himself often admired. She began stirring the cauldron slowly with a long-handled spoon. “Two shades lighter than me,” she said, “is what I want. Café-con-leche.”
“Pretty,” he said. Coffee spattered her brown skin. She wiped it off and licked her fingers. With the spoon in both hands she lifted the garment up, her breasts tautening, and looked at it; it was already deep brown, browner than she, but rinsings (he could see her think it) would lighten it. She dropped it back in, with a quick finger tucked a lock of hair that had got away back under her snood, and stirred again. Auberon wouldn’t ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn’t write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute. But he had no real desire to write of anything else. He was standing now in the door of the little kitchen.