Little, Big

  And yet—strange—no matter how he removed himself from the world, no matter how he poured the rich gains of his working life into such schemes, he flourished; his investments turned over at a great rate, his fortune only increased.

  Protected, Violet said. Taking tea at the stone table he had placed to overlook the Park, John Drinkwater looked up at the sky. He had tried to feel protected. He had tried to repose himself within the protection she was so certain of, and to laugh at the world’s weather from within it. But in his heart he felt unsheltered, bare-headed, abroad.

  In fact, as he grew older, he became more and more concerned with the weather. He collected almanacs scientific and not so, and he studied the daily weather surmise in his paper though it was the divination of priests he didn’t entirely trust—he only hoped, without having reason to, that they were right when they read the omens Fair and wrong when they read them Foul. He watched the summer sky especially, could feel as a burden on his own back any far-off cloud that might obscure the sun, or that might bring others after it. When fluffy harmless cumulus trod the sky like sheep, he was at ease but watchful. They could combine suddenly into thunderheads, they could drive him indoors to listen to the dull fall of rain on his roofs.

  (As they seemed just now to be doing, over in the west, and he powerless to stop them. They drew his eye, and each time he looked they were piled that much higher. The air was dense and palpable. There was then little hope that rain and storm would not begin soon. He was not reconciled.)

  In the winter, he wept often; in the spring he was desperately impatient, rageful when he found heaps of winter still piled in the corners of April. When Violet spoke of spring she meant a time of flowers and baby animals—a notion. A single clear day in April was like what she had in mind, he supposed. Or May, rather, because it had become clear to him that her idea of the qualities of months differed from his: hers were English months, Februaries when the snow melted and Aprils when flowers burst, not the months of this harsher exile place. May, there, was like June here. And no experience of these American months could change her mind: or even reach it, he sometimes thought.

  Perhaps that conspiracy of cloud on the horizon was stationary, a kind of decoration merely, like the high-piled clouds behind country scenes in his children’s picture books. But the air around him belied that: laden and sparkling with change.

  Violet thought (or did she?—he spent hours grappling with her cryptic remarks, with Dr. Bramble’s elaborate explications for a guide, and yet he wasn’t sure) that it was always spring There. But spring is a change only. All seasons, collated into a string of fast-following days like changes of mood. Was that what she meant? Or did she mean the notional spring of young grass and new-unfurled leaves, changeless single equinoctial day? There is no spring. Perhaps it was a joke. There would be precedent for that. He felt sometimes that all she said to his urgent inquiries was a joke. Spring is all seasons and no season. It’s always spring There. There is no There. A humid wave of despair washed over him: a thunder mood, he knew, and yet …

  It wasn’t that he loved her less as they grew older (or rather as he grew older and she grew up); only that he lost that first wild certainty that she would lead him somewhere, a certainty that he had because for sure she had been there herself. He couldn’t, as it happened, follow. After a bitter year he knew that. Better years followed. He would be Purchas to her pilgrims: he would tell her journeys to the world, her traveler’s tall tales of marvels he would never see. She had intimated to him (he thought) that without the house he had built the whole Tale could not be told, that it was the beginning and perhaps the end, in some way, like the house that Jack built, cause of a chain. He didn’t understand, but he was satisfied.

  And there was no time when (even after years, after three children, after who knows how much water under what crumbling bridges) his heart would not swell when she came up to him and put her small hands on him suddenly and whispered in his ear Go to bed, old Goat—Goat she called him for his shameless ceaselessness—and he would mount the stairs and await her.

  And look what he possessed now, all framed against the vertiginous height of cloud forming.

  Here were his daughters Timothea Wilhelmina and Nora Angelica come home from a swim. And his son (her son, his) Auberon stalking across the lawn with his camera as though seeking something to strike with it. And his baby August in a sailor suit, who had never smelled the sea. He had named him for that month when the year stands still and blue day follows blue day, when for a while he stopped looking at the sky. He looked at the sky now. The white clouds were being edged with somber gray, sagging like old men’s sad eyes. Yet still before him his shadow lay amid the shadows of leaves. He shook his newspaper and changed the way his legs were crossed. Enjoy, enjoy.

  Among many other and odder beliefs, his father-in-law was sure that a man can’t think or feel clearly if he can see his own shadow. (He thought also that looking at oneself in the mirror immediately before retiring caused bad, or at least troubling, dreams.) He always sat in the shade or faced into the sun, as he now sat in the wrought-iron love seat by “The Syrinx” with a stick between his knees to rest his hairy hands on, and a gold chain glowing on his stomach as the sun played with it. August sat at his feet listening or perhaps only politely seeming to listen to the old man, whose voice reached Drinkwater as a murmur, one murmur among many, the cicadas, the lawn mower Ottolo pushed in widening circles, the piano in the music room where Nora was practicing now, her chords running together like tears down a cheek.

  Gone, She Said

  She liked mostly the feel of the keys beneath her fingers, liked the thought of them being solid ivory and ebony. “What are they made of?” “Solid ivory.” She stroked them in harmonic sets of six and eight at a time, no longer really practicing, only testing the plangency as her fingertips tested the smoothness. Her mother wouldn’t notice it was no longer Delius she was playing or trying to play, her mother had no ear, she said so herself, though Nora could see the shapely whorl of her mother’s ear where she sat cheek in hand at the drum table, playing her cards or looking at them anyway. For a moment her long earrings were still, till she looked up to take another card from the pile and everything moved, earrings shook, necklaces swung. Nora slid from her polished stool and came to stare at her mother’s work.

  “You should go outside,” Violet said to her without looking up. “You and Timmie Willie should go down to the lake. It’s so hot.”

  Nora didn’t say that she had just returned from there, because she had told her mother that already, and if she hadn’t understood then, there seemed no reason to insist on it. She only looked down at what her mother had laid out.

  “Can you make a house of cards?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Violet said, and went on looking. This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn’t quite enunciate. With his father-in-law’s help, he had filled volumes with his searchings. Her children, though, hardly noticed it. Nora shifted from foot to foot for a moment waiting for the promised structure, and when it didn’t appear forgot it. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed.

  “Oh.” Violet looked up. “They must have had their tea already.” She rubbed her cheeks as though suddenly waking. “Why didn’t you say something? Let’s go see what’s left.”

  She took Nora’s hand and they went to the French doors that led out to the garden. Violet picked up a wide hat that lay on the table there, but stopped when she had it on, and stood looking out into the haze. “What is it in the air?” she said.

  “Electricity,” Nora said, already crossing the patio. “That’s what Auberon says.” She squinted her eyes. “I can see it, all red and blue squiggles, when I do this. It means a storm.”

  Violet nodded, and
started across the lawn slowly, as though making progress through an unfamiliar element, to where her husband waved to her from the stone table. Auberon had just done taking a picture of Grandy and the baby, and now he brought his instrument toward the table, making a motion to gather his mother into his field of focus. He went about his picture-taking solemnly, as though it were duty not pleasure. She felt a sudden pity for him. This air!

  She sat, and John poured her tea. Auberon put his camera before them. The vast cloud defeated the sun, and John looked up at it, resentful.

  “Oh! Look!” Nora said.

  “Look!” Violet said.

  Auberon opened the camera’s eye, and closed it again.

  “Gone,” Nora said.

  “Gone,” Violet said.

  The advancing edge of the occluded front swept invisibly across the lawn, stirring hair and turning lapels and leaves to show their pale undersides. It cut through the broken front of the house, lifting a card on the card-table and riffling the pages of five-finger exercises on the piano. It swung the tassels of scarves hung on sofas, it snapped the edges of drapes. Its cold oncoming wedge rose up through the second floor and the third and then thousands of feet into the air, where the rainmaker minted his first fat drops to throw on them.

  “Gone,” August said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Insnar’d in flowers, I fall on grass.

  —Marvell

  All on a summer morning Smoky dressed himself to wed, in a white suit of yellowed linen or alpaca that his father had always said once belonged to Harry Truman, and there were the initials on the inside pocket, HST; it was only when he came to consider it for a wedding suit (old not new) that he realized the initials could after all stand for somebody else, and that his father had kept up the joke through his life and then perpetuated it beyond without cracking a smile. The sensation wasn’t unknown to Smoky. He had wondered if his education weren’t the same kind of posthumous fun (revenge on his betraying mother?) and though Smoky could take a joke, he did as he shot his cuffs at himself in the bathroom mirror feel a little at a loss and wish his father had given him some man-to-man advice on weddings and marriage. Barnable had hated weddings and funerals and christenings, and whenever one seemed imminent would pack socks, books, dog, and son and move on; Smoky had been to Franz Mouse’s wedding reception and danced with the starry-eyed bride, who made him a surprising suggestion; but that was a Mouse wedding after all and the couple were separated already. He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn’t believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, “Don’t you want it to be a surprise?” The only other thing he was sure of was that he shouldn’t see his bride till she was led up the aisle (what aisle?) by her father. And so he wouldn’t, and didn’t peek in the direction he thought her room lay (he was wrong) when he went to the john. His walking shoes stuck out thick and unfestive from beneath his white cuffs.

  A Suit of Truman’s

  The wedding was to be “on the grounds,” he had been told, and Great-aunt Cloud, as oldest there, would conduct him to the place—a chapel, Smoky surmised, and Cloud with that surprised air said yes, she supposed that’s exactly what it was. It was she Smoky found waiting for him at the top of the stairs when at last he shyly emerged from the bathroom. What a comforting presenee he found her, large and calm in a June dress with a bunch of late violets at her bosom and a walking-stick in her hand. Like him she wore hard shoes with a glum expression. “Very, very good,” she said, as though a hope had proved out for her; she held him at arm’s length and inspected him through blue-tinted glasses for a moment, and then offered him her arm to take.

  The Summer House

  “I think often of the patience of landscape gardeners,” Cloud said as they went through the knee-deep sedge of what she called the Park. “These great trees, some of them, my father planted as infants, only imagining the effect they would have, and knowing he would never live to see the whole. That beech—I could almost join hands around it when I was a girl. You know there are fashions in landscape gardening—immensely long fashions, since the landscapes take so long to grow. Rhododendrons—I called them rum-de-dum-dums when I was a child, helping the Italian men to plant these. The fashion passed. So difficult to keep them cut back. No Italian men to do it for us, so they grow jungly and—ouch!—watch your eyes here.

  “The plan goes, you see. From where the walled garden is now you once looked out this way and there were Vistas—the trees were various, chosen for, oh, picturesqueness, they looked like foreign dignitaries conversing together at an embassy affair—and between them the lawns, kept down you know, and the flower-beds and fountains. It seemed that you would any moment see a hunting party appear, lords and ladies, hawks on their wrists. Look now! Forty years since it’s been properly cared for. You can still see the pattern, what it all was meant to look like, but it’s like reading a letter, a letter from oh a long time ago, that’s been left out in the rain and all the words have run together. I wonder if he grieves at it. He was an orderly man. See? The statue is ‘The Syrinx.’ How long till the vines pull it down, or the moles undermine it? Well He would understand. There are reasons. One doesn’t want to disturb what likes it this way.”

  “Moles and things.”

  “The statue is only marble.”

  “You could—ouch—pull up these thorn-trees, maybe.”

  She looked at him as though, unexpectedly, he had struck her. She cleared her throat, patting her clavicle. “This is Auberon’s lane,” she said. “It leads to the Summer House. It’s not the directest way, but Auberon ought to see you.”

  “Oh yes?”

  The Summer House was two round red brick towers squat as great toes, with a machicolated foot between them. Was it intended to look ruined, or was it really ruined? The windows were out of scale, large and arched and cheerfully curtained. “Once,” Cloud said, “you could see this place from the house. It was thought, on moony nights, to be very romantic…. Auberon is my mother’s son, though not my father’s—my half-brother, then. Some years older than I. He’s been our schoolmaster for many years, though he’s not well now, hasn’t been out of the Summer House much for, oh, a year? It’s a pity…. Auberon!”

  Closer now he could see the place had stretched out habitation’s hands around it, a privy, a neat vegetable garden, a shed from which a lawn mower peeked out ready to roll. There was a screen door, rhombic with age, for the central toothed entrance, and board steps at a slant, and a striped canvas sling-chair in the sun there by the birdbath, and a small old man in the chair who, when he heard his name called, jumped up or at least rose up in agitation—his suspenders seemed to draw him down into a crouch—and made for his house, but he was slow, and Cloud had come near enough to stop him. “Here’s Smoky Barnable, who’s going to marry Daily Alice today. At least come and say hello.” She shook her head for Smoky to see her patience was tried, and led him by the elbow into the yard.

  Auberon, trapped, turned at the door with a welcoming smile, hand extended. “Well, welcome, welcome, hm.” He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs. He took Smoky’s hand and almost before they touched sank again gratefully in his sling-chair, motioning Smoky to a bench. Why was it that within this enclosure Smoky felt a troubling of the sunlight? Cloud sat in a chair by her brother, and Auberon put his white-haired hand over hers. “Well, what’s happened?” she said indulgently.

  “No need to say,” he said undertone, “not before …”

  “Member of the family,” Cloud said. “As of today.”

  Auberon, his throat still making soundless chuckles, looked at Smoky. Unprotected! That’s what Smoky felt. They had stepped into this yard and lost something they had had in the woods; they had stepped out of something. “Easy enough to test,” Auberon said, striking his bony knee and ri
sing. He retreated into the house rubbing his fingers together.

  “It’s not easy,” Cloud said to no one, looking up at the blank sky. She had lost a portion of her ease. She cleared her throat again, contemplated the gray birdbath, which was supported by a number of carved figures, gnomes or elves, with patient bearded faces, who seemed in the act of bearing it away. Cloud sighed. She glanced at a tiny gold watch that was pinned to her bosom. It had little curling wings on either side. Time flies. She looked at Smoky and smiled apologetically.

  “Now, aha, aha,” Auberon said, coming out with a large, long-legged camera veiled with a black cloth. “Oh, Auberon” Cloud said, not impatiently but as though this weren’t necessary and anyway an enthusiasm she didn’t share; but he was already thrusting its spiked toes into the ground by Smoky, adjusting its tibiae to make it stand straight, and bending its mahogany face upon Smoky.

  For years that last photograph of Auberon’s lay on a table in the Summer House, Auberon’s magnifying glass beside it; it showed Smoky, in his suit of Truman’s that glowed in the sunlight, his hair fiery, and half his face sun-struck and blind. There were Cloud’s dimpled elbow and ringed ear. The birdbath. The birdbath: could it be that one of those long soapstone faces had not before been there, that there was an arm too many supporting the garlanded bowl? Auberon didn’t complete the study, come to a decision; and when years later a son of Smoky’s blew the dust from the old image and took up Auberon’s work again it was still inconclusive, proving nothing, a silvered paper blackened by a long-past midsummer sun.