The Solitudes

  Everything, everything dear to you but yourself.

  “Here we are,” Boney said, opening narrow double doors and showing her in.

  Rosie had never been in what was called the office, though Boney had often been spoken of, when she was a child, as being there, occupied there, not to be disturbed there; she had used to picture him denned and brooding like a dark mage, but supposed now, hearing again in memory those injunctions, that Boney had probably been taking a nap.

  And in fact in the corner there was a buttoned leather chaise longue with an afghan thrown over it that looked pretty cozy.

  “The office,” Boney said.

  It had once been and was still mostly a library; handsome bookcases of some light wood reached up to a coffered ceiling all around the room, even in between the deep tall windows that looked out to the garden; and they were all full, though not entirely with books, there were letter files and what seemed to be shoe boxes, and piles of old newspapers and magazines on the shelves as well.

  “Mike comes every week, does he?” Boney asked, moving a pile of mail from the seat of a leather swivel chair.

  “Yup.” She glimpsed what he might be driving at. “I mean just temporarily. Really, really, you know, I don’t intend to hang on here the rest of your life. It’s just until …”

  Until what?

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Boney said, having laboriously cleared himself a seat, and taken it. “You’re more than welcome. I was only wondering—if you are pretty sure you’re not taking up again with Mike—how you’re fixed for money.”

  Rosie sat down on the chaise longue.

  “The little school,” Boney said. “That wasn’t really steady.”

  “No.”

  “What I was going to suggest—well, let’s start from the beginning.” He leaned back in the chair, it creaked stiffly, seeming as old and in need of oiling as Boney. “You understand about the Rasmussen Foundation.”

  “Well, I know there is such a thing. I mean I don’t really know how it works.”

  “It’s just the family money, what’s left of it, that was put into a nonprofit corporation, and used for funding worthwhile sorts of things. Things my brother or I were interested in or that the community needed.” He grinned his ivory-toothed grin, and gestured toward a trio of steel filing cabinets that stood incongruously against the wood paneling. “That’s our business nowadays, you see,” he said. “Giving away money, instead of making it.”

  “Who do you give it to?” Rosie asked, wondering for a moment if he intended to offer her a grant, and how he would justify that.

  “Oh, people apply,” Boney said. “You’d be surprised, the requests we get. Most of it goes to the same people every year, continuing grants: the Blackbury Jambs Library, the wildlife sanctuary, the Parr Home. The Woods.”

  He glanced up at her, the wrinkles rising along his spotted pate.

  “There’s a board of directors,” he went on. “They meet once a year, and approve the grants. But it’s me who sends them the proposals. They pretty much approve what I send them. If they’re all in the proper form, and all.”

  “You’re not going to give me one, are you,” Rosie said laughing. “For being a good guy and a help to the community?”

  “Well, no,” Boney said. “I hadn’t thought of that, exactly. What I was coming to was that in the last couple of years the proposals just haven’t been getting to the board.” He slowly laced his hands together. “And there’s other business that’s not getting done, that ought to be done.”

  “You need help? If you need help …”

  “I was going to offer you a job.”

  Boney at his big desk, hands folded in his lap, head almost lower than his shoulders, was dark against the tall windows and the snow. It struck Rosie for the first time with clarity that Boney was certainly, and not long from now, going to die.

  “I should help out,” she said. “Just for room and board. I would. I’d be happy to.” A lump had begun to form in her throat.

  “No, no,” Boney said. “There’s too much work. A full-time job. Think it over.”

  Rosie thrust her cold hands in between her knees. There was, of course, nothing to think over.

  “I hope,” Boney said softly, “you’re not insulted. Working for wages for the family. I do it, Rosie. It’s sort of all that’s left.”

  Now tears gathered swiftly in her eyes. “Sure I’m insulted,” she said. “Sure. Say, listen, isn’t it really freezing in here? Do you ever start up that fireplace?”

  It was clad in green serpentine, and a brass screen in the shape of a peacock stood before it. There was a brass basket of kindling and logs, and a set of brass tools, and a box of long matches. “I never do,” Boney said, rising effortfully and going to look at the fireplace as though it had just then opened up in the wall. “Mrs. Pisky doesn’t like to see them lit. Sparks on the rug. Smoke in the drapes.”

  Rosie had knelt before it and moved aside the peacock. She pulled open the flue. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Okay,” Boney said doubtfully. “If you’ll take the blame.”

  “I will,” Rosie said. “How about some paper?”

  Boney turned back to his desk, and after sorting briefly through the mail, brought her most of it. “One thing, when you’re thinking it over,” he said, “that I thought might interest you. You remember I told you that Sandy Kraft once worked for the Foundation.”

  “I think you said so. What did he do?”

  “Oh, research. Various things. In the old days.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rosie said.

  “Anyway. Now his copyrights are owned by the Foundation. And every now and then we get some interest in them. The reprint rights. And I thought, since you seemed so interested in them yourself.”

  “Uh-huh.” She set fire to the mail and kindling and wood with one of the long matches. The chimney drew nicely. “I see.”

  “And more,” Boney said. “More than that.” He stroked his bald head. “His house. It belongs now to the Foundation, and nobody has been in it since he died. To see what’s there.” Rosie couldn’t see his eyes behind the fire reflected in his blue glasses. “I can’t do it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So. Think it over, why don’t you, and if you think …”

  “Boney,” she said. “I’m on.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, we’ll have to talk about hours, and salary and all. …”

  “Yeah, sure,” Rosie said. “I mean yes, of course we will, sure. But I’m on.” She smiled at him reassuringly.

  “Hmp,” said Boney, looking down at her where she knelt on the hearth, pleased or a little disconcerted by her swift decisiveness. “Well. Okay.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Good.”

  He turned away to the bookshelves behind her. Rosie began to notice things in the room she hadn’t noticed before. The steel filing cabinets seemed somewhat to be bulging, just able to contain their contents. There were several cardboard boxes in the corners, which seemed to be full of waste paper, or maybe unanswered mail, neglected proposals.

  The Woods, huh. Mike had hinted that The Woods was in some financial difficulties. She warmed slightly to think she might have some power over them. If only an expediting power. Or a delaying one.

  “This,” Boney said, returning with a book he had taken from the shelf. “You might be interested in this.”

  It was called Sit Down, Sorrow, and it was by Fellowes Kraft.

  “A limited edition,” Boney said. “A memoir. Just a couple hundred copies printed by a small press. You might learn something there.”

  “Well,” Rosie said. “Wow.” There were a few photographs tipped in. The deckle edges of the fat paper it was printed on were crumbling in tiny splinters. Rosie opened it and glanced at a page.

  I am sometimes asked how one can keep at his fingertips all the details not only of historical event but of dress and food and custom and architecture and commerce that are needed to make a
historical novel convincing. Well, I suppose enough notebooks and aides-memoire of various kinds can be used, but in my case, even though I don’t have a particularly capacious brain, I carry all that I need within, for I have these many years practiced a system of mnemonics that has proved capable of retaining an almost limitless number of facts in an ordered way, and which works in what strikes many people as a very curious manner indeed.

  “It’s too cold now,” Boney said, and it took Rosie a moment to understand that he was still talking about Fellowes Kraft’s house. “It’s too cold now, with the heat off and the electricity. But in the spring.”

  “Sure,” Rosie said. What was that expression in Bitten Apples, that they used for the old Queen? In her crazy white makeup and red wig and jewels and rings … A fabulous monster. That’s what Boney is, she thought, watching him warm his old claws at the fire she had made. A fabulous monster.

  “In the spring,” he said, seeming to have fallen partly asleep. “In the spring. You’ll go in, and see.”

  “Each of the twelve signs,” Val said to Beau Brachman, squatting uncomfortably on Beau’s floor and dying for a smoke, “each of the twelve can be sort of summed up or reduced to a single word.”

  “One word?” said Beau, cheek in hand and smiling.

  “Well, one verb, I mean, with I. Like ‘I do’ or ‘I can.’ Every sign has one, that sort of sums up that sign.”

  “Uh-huh,” Beau said. “Like …”

  “Like I’m about to tell you,” Val said.

  She had been brought into the Jambs on this sloppy January day by Rosie Mucho, who had left Val to make her visits while Rosie did business with Allan Butterman, her own and Boney’s; later she and Val were to go together to the Volcano in Cascadia and consume plates of South Seas tidbits and drink Mai Tais in the bead-curtained lounge, while Rosie caught Val up on her troubles and triumphs.

  “Aries,” she said. “The first sign. Aries says I am. The first sign, right, the youngest of all. Then Taurus, Taurus says I want. Material desires, see, very big with Taurus. Get the idea? Gemini, Gemini says …” She suddenly looked at Beau sideways and raised an admonishing finger. “You’re not listening,” she sang out warningly.

  “I hear you, Val,” Beau said. “I hear you.”

  “I know you think this stuff is bullshit.”

  “No, I just think …”

  “You think the whole thing is a big prison. That’s what you told Mama.”

  “I know it’s a big prison. Destinies. Stars. Signs. Houses. Little words and verbs. All that you’re saying, Val, with all of that stuff, is This is the way you’re stuck. But you’re not stuck. There’s a word for all of this stuff you work with: Heimarmene. A Greek word. It means fate or destiny, but it means prison too. And the thing is not only to understand where you’re at—what your sign is and your destiny right now—but to break through it too, break through the spheres that bind you in.” He had gotten excited enough to rise from his crosslegged ease. “I have all those twelve signs in me, Val. I have all those verbs. All those seven planets, or eight or nine. They’re all mine. If I want to be a Taurus, I will be. Or a Leo or a Scorpio. I don’t have to work through all twelve in endless lifetimes. That’s what they want.” He gestured upward. “But it’s not so.”

  “They?” Val asked.

  Still smiling, Beau slowly put his forefinger to his lips. Silence.

  “You nut,” Val said, marveling. She laughed aloud. “You crazy nut.”

  “Oh listen,” Beau said, struck by a sudden thought. “Are you by any chance going to the bank today? The one on Bridges Street, is that yours? Because can you make a deposit for us? We’re holding all these January checks we just got. …”

  “Capricorn,” Val said, aiming a gunlike finger at him. “I have.”

  There were heavy footsteps just then on the stairs outside, and someone tried the door. Beau and Val listened curiously as the someone tried to insert a key, and failed; swore; peered in through the tiny and winter-fogged window in the door, shading it with his hand.

  “Come in,” Beau at length called out. “It’s not locked.”

  Some further fumbling, and a large man in a long salt-and-pepper overcoat stood on the welcome mat, wet and distracted, looking from one to the other of them. There was something about him (Val thought) of an unfinished Gary Merrill type. Not bad. A Sagittarius, she almost instantly concluded. A Sagittarius, definitely.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I thought it was empty. I was told it was empty.”

  “Nope,” said Beau.

  “Is this the one for rent?”

  “The apartment? No.” He showed it with a hand. “It’s mine.” “Is this Twenty-one Maple?”

  “No. This is the even side. This is Eighteen. Twenty-one is right opposite.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Very sorry.”

  Beau and he looked quizzically at each other for a time, each trying to remember where and when he had met the other, and failing. Then Pierce Moffett turned and left.

  “A Sadge,” Val said, reaching by instinct for her Kents, and putting them back again in her bag, no smoking at Beau’s. “I bet a dollar.”

  “And what’s his verb?” Beau said, still trying to place the intruder.

  “His verb? Lemme think. Sagittarius. Scorpio is I desire, and then Sagittarius … Sagittarius is I see. That’s it. I see.” She drew the bowstring of an imaginary bow, and aimed along the arrow. “Get it? I see.”

  * * *

  The upstairs apartment at Number 21 across the street was empty, as promised, and the key that Pierce had been given by the lady at the real estate office did open the door. He stood dripping onto the linoleum of the kitchen, which the key had let him into, and looked down the length of the place, which was disposed in railroad fashion, like his old slum apartment had been. Beyond the bleak but large kitchen was a minute sitting room, with a nice tall arched window. Beyond that was the largest room by far, wainscoted strangely in painted wood and with a ceiling of stamped tin: it would, he supposed, have to function as bedroom and study in one.

  Peculiar. Inconvenient. But possible.

  Beyond the windows of the large room, through a glass door, was a sun porch, running the width of the apartment: a narrow sun porch with casement windows. And beyond that the Blackberry River and the Faraways, for the apartment faced outward that way.

  Here in the kitchen he would make and eat his meals; there, he would sit to read. Beyond, in there, he would sleep and work; and once a month, at a desk there, he would write a check for the absurdly small sum they were asking for this place.

  And beyond, out there, he would sail the porch. Just as he had once used to sail a narrow second-story porch of the Oliphant house in Kentucky long ago. Vigilant; calm; his hand on his wheel; sailing at treetop level a sun porch windowed like a dirigible’s gondola, or the bridge of a steamship headed east.

  SEVEN

  The reasons why Pierce in the end really did leave Barnabas College and the city and go to live in Blackbury Jambs in the Faraway Hills were the same reasons for leaving he had once given to Spofford: love and money.

  Love and money, both striking at once, on the same day, like Danaë’s golden shower: so that though it took him some months to actually accomplish the move, it would always be clear to him on what day he had begun to move, or to be moved.

  It was an oddity of Pierce’s love life that he had never courted any woman he had ever been deeply attached to: had never first noticed, and then considered, and then flirted with, considered further, wooed, made slow progress toward, and won. His big affairs—he could count them on one hand and have fingers left over—had each begun with a sudden collision, a single night or day in which the whole of the succeeding affair was contained in small, all its liberties, sympathies, pains only needing to be unfolded from then out. It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, for usually the initial collision was followed by a period of suspension, even indifference, with Pierce enjoying his conquest or his go
od luck and checking off another course in the banquet of life, more where that came from. But the collision had deflected him; he ran parallel to her then, and she (axiomatically) to him. They were in for a penny that first night, but Pierce at any rate was in for a pound as well.

  Pierce, awake too early on an ashen December morning and reviewing his history with the torpid clarity of hangover, could not think of an important exception. It had happened so with every one.

  It had happened so (Pierce shifted beneath the covers of his messy bed, which he could not seem to leave) with Penny Pound, the girl with the smoky eyes and the thin scars on her wrists with whom he had fled to sunny California just at the beginning of his sixth semester at Noate. She’d had to be back in her dorm at eleven that first night, and he had headed dutifully that way with her after a postmovie coffee shared in the communal kitchen of his rooming house in town; and on a street corner halfway between his place and the dorm they had stopped to kiss; and as though turning through a revolving door without going out (though ending in a new place nonetheless) had almost wordlessly turned back. Pierce next day had not felt noticeably different than he had the day before; he got her back into her dorm and saw nothing of her for a week. And then when they met again it was all as it would be; they were inseparable, her huge and unresolvable griefs were his, her young body and her old hands; if some wise elder (his own elder self, except that his own elder self had never learned it) had advised caution and circumspection, he wouldn’t have understood the advice. True, the first time she said she loved him (at Sam’s house, he had taken her there for a long weekend, they lay en deshabille in the old schoolroom while two doors away his mother placidly pasted trading stamps into a book) he had been unable to respond—but only because he was awed by the words, which it was his assumption could only ever truly be said once, and for good. Once they were said, running off with her was mere practical necessity; in those days of universities standing in loco parentis (nowadays they didn’t even know that lingo) the two of them were barred from cohabiting, from coitus too if they could be caught at it, and she was the first woman he had both loved and lain with, so there was nothing for it but to cash in their just-paid-for class-admittance cards like chips—his had been paid for with a scholarship, no matter, by an oversight he was allowed to liquidate them anyway—and use the money to flee; and though when he staggered from the bus at a rest stop into the unreal sunshine of Albuquerque he did for an awful moment think What have I done, he didn’t ever, then or later, certainly not on the long bus ride back east alone, back into winter and the string of lies he had left behind him, ever really think he had much choice in the matter.