“Anyway,” he said at length. “You are aware that Mr. Rasmussen died intestate. We’ll take up the questions involved with that another time, they’re difficult but not hopeless. What’s relevant here is that he did this year do all the necessary in regard to the Foundation, naming a successor as director, signing the documents.”
Rosie had seen but not studied these, beautifully printed papers with maroon covers. “Successor?” she said.
“The bylaws don’t specify that a member of the family needs to hold the position, but the family’s preferences are very clear. He didn’t have a lot of people to choose from, though he could have gone some ways afield. Of course he didn’t.”
Of course? The certainty came over Rosie, an interpretation of Allan’s face at that moment, that Boney’s death was going to go on issuing surprises, things he had left unsettled and unfinished that rolling Time was going to finish up for him. “Then what…”
“He named you to be the Foundation’s Director, Rosie.” Allan looked at her, smiling, understanding. They were all smiling, as at a genteel surprise party. “I was just informed this morning. A little late, never mind, I imagine they thought Mr. Rasmussen had done this with your full knowledge and assent. No, right?”
“No.” She had been filling up with a feeling that she did not immediately recognize was anger. When she did realize it she was afraid to speak. He had known this for months before he died, and hadn’t told her, or asked her; afraid probably that she might turn him down. He had just left it for her, unrefusable, unacceptable, like his letter about how his remains were to be treated. She thought of that morning, the morning of the Fourth, the last time she had really spoken to him. I’m sorry, he’d said. I hate to leave you with it. He had meant that she should continue his search. Christ.
“Well,” she said at last, all she could manage. She knew her cheeks must be aflame. “Is it legal for me to refuse?”
“Sure,” Allan said. “Of course. But I would have thought.”
“I guess I don’t feel real qualified. For one thing.”
“Boney thought you were qualified,” Allan said, still smiling. She thought: They don’t get it. She looked at them as though she faced a group of good-natured animals, koalas or pandas. They thought Boney was a kind wise mysterious old man who had left a wonderful gift for his great-niece. Not a selfish frightened egotist who wanted her to represent him among the living even when he was gone.
Oh that was too unkind, too hard. Poor foolish man, what the hell had he done.
“Well,” she said again. “I have to think.” She was near tears, and furious with herself because she was, and they had lost their nice smiles at last. “I was just helping out.”
“I don’t think the board needs an answer today,” Allan said, puzzled. “Take some time. There’s compensation to discuss. And there’s the house, too.”
The house. Where they sat. She felt it enclosing her.
The elderly Rasmussen cousin, who had been propped against Boney’s desk, now pushed himself upright.
“Rosie?” he said inquiringly. “Rosie. These gentlemen might not understand. I do. I understand.” He put his hands in his pockets. His dark bow tie had wilted in the heat. He reminded her a lot of Boney, but in what way, beyond a kind of gay gravity, which Boney had lost at the end.
“I don’t know if you know this,” he said, “but there’s a large branch of the Rasmussens who belong to the Mormon church. Yes. Longtime members. Well that interested me, long ago. I went out West, I don’t know why exactly now, to Utah and Salt Lake City, and spent some time with the Mormons. They have some extraordinary beliefs. They believe that the souls of the dead, like those of the living, can be saved. They spend a lot of time at it, learning the names and dates of their dead relatives, going centuries back, so that they can perform these ceremonies, which free those souls. Now it seems to me.”
He paused to assemble his conclusion in his mind, and they all watched him do so. He was her cousin too, Rosie thought.
“It seems to me that it’s something similar you’re being asked to do here. Yes? To spend your days doing the necessary to save the souls of your dead relatives.” He smiled. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I hope you’ll agree. But you’re a young woman. I can see why you might want to refuse. I would in your place. In fact, in your place once, I did.”
He picked up the cane he didn’t really seem to need, strong old guy, all of the Rasmussens were long-lived, she herself too probably. The others rose at this signal. “Don’t let us pressure you,” he said. “You think about it. You might want to tell us no. As the Gospel says. Let the dead bury the dead.”
Afternoon, and the cicadas warned from the oaks; Pierce Moffett, looking fruitlessly for the downstairs bathroom, which he had once been in, right around here somewhere, came on Rosie in the kitchen: she sat on the bottom step of the steep back stairs, her shoes off, a drink in her hand, and an unwonted cigarette.
“You,” Pierce said. “You’re being asked for.”
She knocked ash onto the floor. “Pierce,” she said. “Do you really understand what he was looking for? What it was really?”
“Well,” said Pierce. “I know its name. I know what it was thought to be.”
“It was so confusing,” Rosie said. “He was almost embarrassed to talk about it. He always said you’d understand.”
“Well.” Pierce sat beside her on the stair. “In the mythology of alchemy there’s supposed to be this stuff. It has many names and definitions. Nobody describes it very clearly, partly because it wasn’t a very distinct idea, partly because in those days scientists and researchers—if you can call them that—spent a lot of effort keeping what they knew—what they thought they knew—secret. Big difference from now.”
“But it wasn’t like. Real.”
“Look at it this way,” Pierce said. “Transforming base, so-called base, metals into gold isn’t possible. But there are several really circumstantial accounts of its being done that are hard to poke holes in. Nobody can live for years on nothing but Communion wafers. But there are nuns who were witnessed doing so.”
“So.”
“So.” He laughed softly. “Suppose that once upon a time the world was different. Really different, in its deepest workings. And suppose one sort of something persisted from that time into this. And it happened to be that.”
“That’s what Boney said to me.”
“It’s what Kraft’s book is about,” Pierce said.
“He thought Fellowes Kraft knew it was so.”
“Fellowes Kraft,” Pierce said, “wrote fictions.”
She looked into her glass, silent for a time.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it sounded like a medicine. Sometimes like a metal or a jewel.”
“It was a powder and a liquid too. You could say a lot about it but it seems to me what it comes down to is: it’s the thing missing. The thing you don’t have.”
“So if you ever get it …”
“Then it’s not it. A little parable.”
Rosie felt a familiar painful absence in her breast, one that she had thought was gone. “I thought it was more like this magic medicine,” she said. “To keep you alive forever.”
“That was one description.”
When she had played cowboys and Indians in her old neighborhood, or cops and robbers, they had used Magic Medicine (she could hear herself say it, to say it was to apply it) to revive the countless dead they produced, so that they could be slain again.
“Well you know what I think,” she said. She blinked away the starting tears, the first she had shed that day. “I think it’s the worst thing that a dying person can do. To lay a question on the ones left alive that they can’t answer.” She dropped the half-smoked cigarette into the half-full glass. “It’s like a curse.”
She thought: As though a departing guest were to turn back at the door, after all the farewells and compliments, to ask in sadness and anger why he had been treated
so badly, and then turn away from your outstretched hand and go without another word.
“What question did he leave you with?”
“Well not me really,” she said, thinking it was not even that he put a question but that he was one. “Us. You.”
She climbed back into her tight shoes and took the glass to the sink. There was a sound of loud laughter far away outside, whose.
Pierce knew what the question was, of course, without asking further; it was only Boney’s version of the question he imagined a lot of people put, the question he might himself ask of those unimaginable heirs and relatives who would be standing around his own bed (if he were not to die alone, putting the question to four no more communicative walls): Why must I die? Why now and not some better later time? Why not you instead of me? Why can’t you, you vigorous living ones, why can’t you save me?
He shuddered hugely. God save him from such a death. Which saint was it you prayed to. Nine First Fridays, guarantee of a Good Death. Not for him.
“I never did find it,” he said smiling. “I looked. I did.”
“Well you get to look further,” she said. “Boney wanted to tell you. I was going to tell you. There was a grant set up for you. Well a sort of fellowship. A traveling fellowship he called it.”
“Yes?”
“He was going to tell you how to apply. And then you’d be given it.”
“Well hm,” Pierce said idiotically.
“On this fellowship,” Rosie said, “you were going to go to Europe for a while. Chase this thing down, whatever it is. Find out all about it. Report.” She was laughing now.
“I was?”
“You still are,” she said. “I guess. If you want to. I assume it’s all still set up. Maybe now … well who knows what’ll happen. But.”
“When?”
“When you’re ready. I suppose.” She covered her mouth, stifling another laugh, this game from which Boney had cashed out was going to go on, stranger and stranger. “When you know where to look.”
“Ha ha,” he said, still on his seat on the step. “Okay.”
“Listen I better go, they’ll be wondering. I don’t really know. Everything’s going to be different now. We’ll have to talk.”
She had smoothed her wrinkled skirt as she spoke, and then she slipped out through the kitchen doors, the swinging handleless kind such as restaurants have, which whiffed open again after she had passed through, then closed, then open again, closed.
Pierce had never been to Europe. It was a large, an embarrassing gap in his education, not the only one but one he felt deeply; he had not quite consciously worked out certain locutions to use in conversation which concealed without real prevarication the lame fact.
Now, though.
Europe. The Old World.
He laughed richly in the empty kitchen. To reach at length the land he supposedly already knew in pursuit of a dead man’s wish for eternal life, in order to write a book promoting magic systems he didn’t believe in. He seemed to gaze down on that land from where he sat, saw it as from a plane’s window: the shore of a cold sea, then fields and mountains and crowded rivers, gray cities of flint arising over the earth’s curve, steepled with churches and castles, where people maneuvered cars in courtyards and lanes or walked in the footsteps of their ancestors; the unfolding ribbons of old roads leading east.
Rosie had said goodbye to the last of her guests (hers, she had not thought of them as hers but they certainly weren’t Boney’s, he hadn’t wanted them here at all). Sam was asleep at last, after an awful bedtime battle, overtired, unable to shut off or down.
Asleep now? Yes. Rosie stood at the foot of the stairs and listened: no sound.
Outside in the drive the caterers loaded their last van. Very successful, Allan had said to her.
Successful.
The light was at last beginning to leave the big living room; the groups of chairs and sofas, shabbier and less grand than they had once been, regained their solemn formality as dusk settled on them. The long couch whose leather was webbed with fine cracks, as Boney’s own skin had been; the mahogany sideboard and its bowl of china fruit that Sam longed to handle. The weird commode of inlaid wood, topped with a locked casket.
She worked her bare toes into the carpet. Never, in all her imaginings vague or vivid about where her path would take her from here, what she would have to do and to suffer along it, had she ever thought that it would take her nowhere; that she was here to stay, and it was all decided.
Well it wasn’t.
She crossed the room to the impassive commode, and turned the key in its lock, as once last year Boney had done, passing to her one of the house’s secrets, maybe having already decided what he was going to do. She opened the casket and took out the velvet drawstring bag inside; tugged open the bag, and let fall into her hand a sphere of quartz crystal about the size of Sam’s fist.
A real magician had once owned it, Boney had said (though he hadn’t said how he knew this, or how it had come to him). There were angels in it once, he said, they could be seen and spoken to, and would answer; and all their names began with A.
Heavier than she would have supposed it would be. Empty now though, as far as she could see; or maybe it was she who was empty. A thing, a something left over from the past; the thing you most need. And if you find it, that’s not it.
She tried to imagine inheriting the right to send people out to find the truth, something people needed to know, something that would be a step further on the path, whatever the path was; and whatever it was, it would not remain the same, learning something new would change its course in some small way and there would be no way ever to turn back.
Mike wanted to continue the Foundation’s support for their research. She wondered what they were trying to find out. That weird man.
What could you really learn, she wondered. If you put all of the Foundation’s money to finding out. Not Boney’s nutty quest, she didn’t mean that; something real, a real investigation, real knowledge.
She held the magician’s cold sphere in her hand, the house’s secret, but now her own as well; and it gathered the evening light like an eye.
What do you need? she asked herself. What do you want to know?
TWO
Robbie had been with Pierce for a week. Each morning they rose early and did their exercises together, and sometimes walked in the humid morning, observing the fairy-coin webs on dewy lawns, the blue sky forming as the mists burned away. That case of melancholia too, it burned away every morning, his own heart sky-blue by the time they came back for breakfast.
Surely, Pierce thought, the medieval doctors were more correct about desire than latter-day therapists, who saw desire as a sort of continuous rising pressure, the psyche as a boiler needing “release,” the blowing-off of steam, in danger of unseaming without it. Such a therapist (Mike Mucho? Pierce knew no therapists, and had never been treated by one) would surely say that since in some sense Robbie was occasioned by enforced chastity and sexual tension, then gratifying release with a real other person ought to cause him to evaporate. But he hadn’t. Every morning, it was true, he had to be re-created anew, Pierce working with Pygmalion’s patience on the attenuated phantom until for an instant, a string of instants, he was present, a Real Presence that could be communed with. It grew no easier, but Pierce remained willing, and Robbie didn’t cease coming.
He thought, sometimes, appalled, of that moment in Kraft’s library, when he had felt his powers, powers to wish and to have, awaken again. This time I won’t waste it, he had promised that gift-giver or bearer (himself?). I’m older now, wiser, I won’t waste it, I’ll use it in the context of life. He thought of the two foolish people in the story: granted three wishes, one had wished for a fat sausage; the other, outraged at this foolish waste, wished the sausage would stick to his nose; and there was but one use then they could put the last wish to.
There had not been one, not one wish since childhood that his heart had bee
n poured into, that was not about love. If he were Boney Rasmussen, he would not search for eternal life, eternal life was an empty barrel without love, love with sex bound up in it too he meant, as intimately as dreams are bound up in sleep; he could name other kinds of love, he supposed, but had no idea what it would be like to want them this badly. Christ what a case he was. Maybe when he was Boney’s age.
He thought of Rose Ryder, from whom he had not heard since the night of Boney’s death. They had watched fireworks while he died, odd conjunction, imagine how many others that night. Robbie was still here, but she had vanished into Shadowland. He had even forgotten that place’s name until on a Saturday morning he saw in the Faraway Crier, which he had picked up on his morning constitutional, that the Shadowland Gospel Church was having a Rummage Sale today and a Healing Service tomorrow.
What he had really given thought to was Climacterics. He had mulled over the Mucho system as much as he had the rest of that afternoon’s and night’s events. He had drawn his own chart, insofar as he could remember Mike’s rules, and had found it astonishingly accurate, as accurate as (all it needed to be) astrology or palmistry. He discovered that he was, himself, disconcertingly, just now coming down off a big curve: he had turned thirty-five in December, had seen the wide view from the top (hadn’t he? He had) and his little car would soon be gathering speed on the downward track.
He had sorted through his old inward calendars, not well kept. Finally he needed pencil and paper to work out the math.
The last time he had cycled upward had been in the flush and brilliant months when he had been a cocaine dealer’s consort, when he had gone up literally: gone up in the mirrored elevator of a tower of naked concrete to a wide-windowed apartment commanding the sunset, where he and she had lived and spent.