And if it was?
Washing up, he made a further decision. This seemed a day charged with significance: that dream, this snow-light, certain deeps seeming just for today to be open and plumbable within him. So when his chores were done he would go over to the Lodge to visit Val, a thing he had been intending to do for a long time. While he picked his teeth with a trout’s bone he kept just for that purpose, he outlined in his mind what questions he would ask: what advice it was he was after, and on what matters.
Val’s Faraway Lodge, in Shadowland, was closed for the winter season. Val always described this closing as though it were she herself who was being shut up for three months: “I’m closing on Thanksgiving,” she would say. “I’ll be closed till Easter.” And in a sense Val too was closed. As soon as snow of any consequence began to fall, she stopped driving; her Beetle (into which big Val fit neatly, like a big clown into a tiny car in the circus) became a shapeless white hummock in her driveway, and only when it had lost its snowman suit in spring did she start it up again. Meanwhile she (and her old mother, who lived at the Lodge as well) depended on the phone, on the thoughtfulness of those passing her way, and on a certain talent for hibernation, a trick of living on the summer’s pleasures, occupations, gossip, and news as on a store of accumulated fat. Even her store of physical fat seemed somewhat to shrink as the days grew longer toward the equinox.
The Lodge is a low two-story building on the Shadow River, almost unfindable down two dirt roads, its sign and its furnishings pretty well unchanged for thirty years. What Spofford often wondered, what he had never thought of a tactful way of finding out, was how long it was since the Lodge had ceased to be a whorehouse. That it had been one in living memory he had deduced from several hints dropped by local folk, from the general layout of the place (the bar and restaurant in front, connecting to the sitting room of the apartment behind, and several small rooms now unrented upstairs and in a wing shadowed by pines), and also from the character of Val’s mother, Nanna, whom, now in retirement and functioning chiefly (according to Val) as Val’s cross to bear, Spofford could easily imagine as a country madam: even though he had never known (not in this country) a country madam. She was nowadays given over to special communications with God and telling whoppers about her past that caused Val to snort and speak rudely to her. The two of them had never lived apart.
“It’ll melt by tomorrow,” Spofford said. “But I brought this stuff anyway. Put it in the larder.” There were staples and delicacies and the carton of Kents she had asked for and a string bag of oranges.
“Was anything plowed?” Val said. She had only a vague idea of the realities of winter, but she liked to talk about it. “No? And you came out here with this stuff? Oh God you big brave brute!”
Spofford laughed. “It’s not enough snow to fill the tire treads, Val.”
She grinned at him, seeing through this piece of modesty, and showed the stuff to her mother. “Look, Ma. What do you think.”
“He’s a good boy,” said her mother, beside her on the bed. “God will give him something special.”
“Get God to do that,” Val said. “Get God to fix a ticket for him.”
“Don’t you mock.”
The two of them were sharing Val’s bed before the big TV, which was on, showing a soap Val followed; she and her mother, wrapped in a quilt against the cold, pillows propped behind them and a coffeepot nearby, weren’t exactly still in bed, or exactly up either; they were late and long risers. On the bed, with the TV Guide and the Faraway Crier and some gossip magazines, was a tray of dog’s breakfast, and a dog, a little Pekingese with exactly the hair and the winning expression of the cartoon kid for whom he was named. He yapped and panted at Spofford.
“So anyway,” Val said, and laughed her low infectious laugh; she had a way of laughing that way, at nothing, periodically, as though a party were always going on around her. “Your chart, right? You came for your chart.”
“Kind of,” Spofford said.
“It’s not done.”
“Well.”
“It’s almost done. You want to see? Dennis! Get your foot out of the food. Oh God look what he’s done.” She gathered up the dustmop dog, and pulled her big chenille gown around her; she rose, cocking up the cigarette in the corner of her mouth and squinting her eye against the rising smoke. “Come see.”
There was a card table set up in the corner of the sitting room, with a lamp beside it, where Val worked. In between two fat Chinese sages of soapstone were her ephemerides, tables, and guides. A mug of colored pencils, red plastic ruler, compass, and protractor gave an impression of schoolchild’s homework, but Val wasn’t playing. She was respected in the Faraways; she made a good part of her living from the casting of horoscopes; there were those who wouldn’t make a move without her encouragement. She bet that as many sought help here as in any minister’s study in the county, and confessed to her their fears, and even wept in her big lap.
She put down Dennis, who shook himself carefully head to stump of tail; she drew out Spofford’s chart from under a calculator and some sheets of typing paper scribbled over with figures. “The math kills me,” she said. “It just kills me.” She sat to study what she had done, motioning Spofford to sit too, in that chintz-covered maple chair, and drew an ashtray to her side.
Val well knew that there were a thousand ways to do what she had done, and endless further computations that could be made, if you had the patience and the skill to make them; but they were not useful to her. She worked her numbers only until she began to grasp a natal chart in the inward way or with the inward sense that was what made her good at this. And when that engagement happened her math began to be fruitful, the planets in their houses began to make sense, began to turn their faces on or away from each other, exalted, dignified, dejected, or confused; the little paper universe began to tick and tock, and Val could begin to work.
That was called “rectification of the chart.” The reason for such rectification was obvious to Val: if all the babies who were born in a single hour in all the hospitals of a single city, all therefore under identical astral influences, would have fates and fortunes subtly or radically different from one another (and surely they would), then each soul on earth was subtly or radically different from every other, and that difference could not be apprehended in the mere accurate placement of planetary symbols in a scheme of houses. And in any case, as far as Val could tell there was no end to how accurate you could be, and with every advance in accuracy everything could change, a person’s planets could slip from one sign or house into another, oppositions could be negated, squares turn into meaningless rhomboids.
No, what mattered always more than accuracy, more than math, was apprehension: the growing conviction that you had it right, that it made sense. Oh look here, Mercury is inconjunct with Saturn in the seventh house, of course; and your mother must have had her moon in Gemini, of course she did. When the twelve houses became to Val’s mind’s eye not wedges of an abstract pie but houses—and not anyone’s houses but this soul’s houses, houses that, ramshackle or sleekly marbled or grim and machicolated, could be no one else’s—then, and only then, did she begin to speak.
“Houses,” she said to Spofford. “There are twelve houses in a horoscope, and dwelling in them are planets. Twelve compartments of life, twelve different kinds of things life has in it, that’s the houses; and seven kinds of pressures or forces or influences on those things, that’s the planets. See? Now, depending on when and where you were born, and just what stars were coming up over the horizon just then, we arrange these houses one to twelve, counterclockwise from here, where you get born.”
“Hm,” Spofford said.
“The trick is,” Val said, “that this chart is made of time, and so are these houses; and we have to turn them into places to be in.
“The first three houses, from here to here, are the first quaternary: the first fourth, see, because there are four sets of three in twelve, right? The fi
rst quaternary is dawn. And spring. And birth. Okay?” She fingered another cigarette from within her crumpled pack, and lit it. “Okay. The first house is called Vita: that’s Latin, you shmoe, you wouldn’t know it. Vita: Life. The House of Life. Little Spofford gets born, and begins his journey.”
She went on, pointing out to Spofford where his planets lay, in which houses, and whether they were comfortable there, or even exalted, or quite the reverse, and what it all might portend for Spofford’s fate, and for his happiness, and for his Growth. He listened happily, intrigued and satisfied to hear himself articulated into parts in this way, his inchoate self set up in neat geometries, and the general dun color of his soul (as he perceived it usually) broken by the prism of his chart into a spectrum of clear hues, some broad bands, some narrow ones.
“What’s this?” he asked; a line from Saturn in his own house, the twelfth—Carcer, the Prison—connected to Venus, just opposite in the sixth house.
“Opposition,” Val said. “Challenge. Saturn in the twelfth house can mean isolation. Self-discipline. Aloneness, gloomy hermit stuff. Uh-uh. Opposed to Venus in Valetudo, the sixth house, which is the house of service sort of; there, she means bringing harmony to other people’s lives. Sometimes by intervention, getting your two cents in and helping out. Okay?”
Spofford looked down at this tussle. “So who wins?”
“Who knows? That’s the challenge.” She dispersed smoke with a wave of her hand from before her. “But. There’s more. See: here’s Mars right next door in the seventh house, that’s Uxor, the Wife; and old Mars is trine with Saturn over here, and when two planets in opposition have a third planet that’s sextile to one and trine to the other, that’s called an Easy Opposition. Easy because no matter how hard the opposition, it’s balanced by the big weight of the third planet.
“Mars in Uxor! Means maybe a romance started on an impulse, that you just never get out of. One of those with a lot of yelling, you know? Or it could make for real strong partners in a marriage, buddies to the end.
“That’s up to you.”
Done with what she knew so far, Val crossed her hands on the table before her.
“Well,” said Spofford.
“Well.”
“Basically,” he said, tugging down his cap, “what I hoped to find out about was the future.”
“Yeah?”
“About a certain woman. My chances. How it looks from here.”
“What certain woman? Hey, take it easy. I don’t want to know her name. But astrally. What’s her sign?”
“I can never remember. I think Pisces.”
“Pisces and Aries aren’t all that great, first off,” Val said. “But there’s so many factors.”
“Not all that great?”
“Fire and water,” Val said. “Remember. And Aries is the youngest sign. Pisces is the oldest.”
Spofford regarded the chart that Val had turned toward him. He seemed to be able to discern in it anyway all that he needed for the moment to know. Saturn, the pull of melancholy, his small house; a gray sad stone, like the gray sad stone he seemed to feel so often in his own breast. Solitude.
But Venus, Saturn’s soft-smiling opposite number … An old soul, Rosie had said to him once, a jolly old soul, in an old old water sign. He’d already intervened: he would fight for her too, if fighting could help. And Mars, fiery, his own planet, inhabited the house of taking wives (Spofford’s scarred forefinger touched the sign, ♂); and had not he, Spofford, been a warrior? Maybe he could get some help here, if it came to it. Like the GI Bill.
Shine on, then, he thought; shine on. “It don’t look bad,” he said, rising. “It looks all right.”
When he was gone, Val sat for a time with her hands folded before her, and then with her chin resting in the cup of one hand, and then with both hands laced behind her head.
Rosie Mucho had better be careful, she thought. That guy has set his cap for her. He’s got a moon in Taurus, too, a whim of iron. Rosie had better be ready for that.
She turned in her chair. Behind her on the bookshelves were several old-fashioned letter files, the kind with orange backs and black-and-white spatterdash spines, little brass clips to close them with, and leather tabs on their sides to draw them out by. She chose one of these, opened it, and after a little search amid its contents drew out a twelve-part pie chart like the unfinished one she had been explicating for Spofford, only all different, different domiciles housing different guests differently disposed. She placed it next to Spofford’s, and cradling her brow with one hand and drumming with the fingers of the other, she studied both together.
Pisces: Love and Death. That’s how Val thought of the sign. Chopin was a Pisces. Only here was a commonsense ascendant, Taurus with Venus in the House of Life.
Well, she was a good girl, and probably a survivor, but a little crazy; more crazy than she probably knew. Moon in Scorpio: Scorpio is Sex and Death.
She had better be careful.
The snow continued, growing heavier, through that day and the night; the big plows came out toward morning, sailing ghostlike behind their bright lights, their blades casting aside long wakes of snow. Next day when the sun shone at last the world had been neatly packed up in it; Spofford’s sheep were not so round, or so white, or so soft, as the hills and woods seen from the kitchen windows of Arcady where Rosie stood waiting.
“Pst,” said the tall radiator.
“Pst,” said Sam, half in and half out of her snowsuit but ready enough to go that Rosie needed only to encase her upper half and put her out the door. The snowsuit’s arms and hood hung down like a pelt Sam was shedding.
“Psst,” said the radiator.
“Pssst,” said Sam, and laughed.
“There he is,” said Rosie, gratefully, “right on time.”
“I wanna see.”
Rosie lifted her up to see a little red car turn in at the gate, fishtailing somewhat in the heedless snowplow’s leavings piled there in the driveway.
“I hope they’re careful,” Rosie said to Sam, pulling up the Siamese twin of her snowsuit and tucking Sam into it.
“It’s slipry.”
“Yep.”
“Daddy can drive.”
“He can?”
“You could come too.”
“Not this morning. I’ll see you later.”
Rosie hurried Sam through the house to the vestibule and swung open the heavy front door. In the drive the little red car idled, trembling as though with cold, and breathing whitely from its tailpipe. Mike made his way toward the house carefully, holding out gloved hands for balance.
“Hi.”
“Hi. Okay? Hi, hi Sam. Hey.” He gathered up the wrapped bundle of his daughter and squeezed her; Rosie, embracing herself, cold in the open doorway, waited for their colloquy. Sam had news. Mike listened.
“So what’s up today?” Rosie said at last. “What’s the schedule?”
“I don’t know,” Mike said, looking not at Rosie but at Sam, whose fingers were in his mustache. “Maybe build a snowman, huh? Or a snow fort.”
“Okay!” Sam said, wriggling to get down. “Or a snow car! Or a snow hops pittal.”
“Hey, but not here,” Mike said. He put her down. “We’ll go home and make one.”
“Hey,” Rosie said to him, warningly.
“Okay.”
She gave Mike a zippered case. “Blankie. Bottle for later. Don’t give her milk in it while she naps; dentist says. Book. Stuff.”
“Okay,” Mike said. “Ready?”
Sam, standing between them, looked from one to the other, still new at this choice.
“Bye, Sam. See you later.”
“Come on, Sam. Mommie’s cold in the doorway. Let’s let her go inside.”
Sam still would make no voluntary move to go, so Mike at last with a cheerful Whee! picked her up again and carried her off like a pirate, almost taking a header on the snowy path. The little car harrumphed. Mike climbed into the driver’s side, pus
hing Sam in before him, must be a little crowded in there Rosie thought, but she knew Sam liked that car.
Rosie waved. Bye-bye. She smiled. She waved again, a grownup’s wave, for the car, no hard feelings. She went inside and shut the door. The last segment of caught winter air went off down the hall.
Boney stood at the hall’s end, hands behind his back.
“It’s sort of okay,” Rosie said. “Sort of like having a good babysitter. Free.” She hadn’t uncrossed her arms, they still hugged her. “He never spent this much time with her before. Never tried this hard to please her.”
Boney nodded, slowly, as though considering this. He wore an old old turtleneck sweater, its stretched neck-opening far too wide for his own skinny turtle’s neck that protruded from it. “Did you have anything planned for this morning?” he said.
“No.”
“Well,” he said, pondering. “I’d like to have your advice about something. Talk something over.”
“Sure, sure.”
“What say?”
“I said sure,” Rosie said, releasing herself and coming to Boney’s side, no need to make him shout. “Sure. What kind of something?”
“If you’re sure you’ve got nothing else to occupy you,” Boney said, watching her closely.
“I haven’t got anything else,” Rosie said smiling, taking the arm he offered her and squeezing it gently. “You know I don’t.”
“Well,” he said, “this might be a good opportunity then. We’ll just go down along to my office there.”
Every time, every time Mike went off with Sam, Rosie felt it, this cloud of guilt and loss that was absurd and unusable, a cloud she refused to stand under and yet couldn’t get rid of—it was like that dream she had used repeatedly to have in the first months of Sam’s life, that somebody with a right to judge had decided that Sam wasn’t hers, or that Rosie wasn’t competent to raise her and would have to give her up: the same sense of guilt and loss, the awful shriving off of her adulthood, and at the same time that feeling of being once again free and alone, like a child—a sneaky sense of freedom and solitary possibility that was no substitute for Sam, but was there anyway. Now either this cloud came from that dream, or both this cloud and that dream came from the same place, and what was that? Guilt, guilt over not wanting to grow up, could that be it; not wanting in your own secret kid’s heart to be double or triple but only and forever single—and then loss, too, loss of everything dear to you, everything earned in growing up.