A Green and Ancient Light (25 page)

Grandmother heated soup and brought out cheese and meat and bread. We sat around the kitchen table while crickets fiddled steadily in the night, and the world to me seemed as right as it ever gets. When Mr. Girandole had eaten his fill, Grandmother
poured glasses of wine—mine a smallish one—and we retired to the sitting room.

“Oh, I forgot!” I said. “R —— asked for cigarettes and wine or beer or whiskey.”

“Ha!” said Grandmother. “Then he'd better just check himself into the hotel.”

Moving closer to the lamp, Mr. Girandole asked if he might see the poem in my notebook; R ——'s poem. “These lines haunted me while I was away,” he said as he re-read them. “I made some connections that had not at first occurred to me. I've been away for so long that I wasn't thinking of the poetry of Faery.”

“What do you mean?” Grandmother asked.

“The Elder Folk have special names for nearly everything, used often in songs—‘sisters dancing' refers to leaves—the leaves of trees.”

“So, we're looking for
leaves
?” I asked with a frown.

“No, there's more to it. In Faery, it's difficult for us to comprehend the idea of death, though we know it's something that happens to mortals before they come to us. There's a song I knew once, though I'd all but forgotten it—a fairy song that describes death as ‘sisters dancing in the water and the sky'—yes, the very line used in R ——'s poem. The image, you see, is of leaves that fall from the branches to the water . . . leaves that are plucked from the boughs and borne away by the wind. The water and the sky are not where the leaves began, but they dance there—do you see? That's how we try to understand the mortal journey.”

Grandmother put her elbows on her knees. “So, the poem tells us to look for fourteen, or twice seven, and it tells us to look for death.”

Mr. Girandole sipped his wine. “I'm not sure
what
the poem tells us, but mortality seems to be a part of the garden.”

For a short while, we listened to a soft orchestral piece on the radio. When it finished, Grandmother turned it off.

I pulled my knees up, rested my head on the arm of the couch, and must have drifted off. But at some point, I was awake again, warm and comfortable and listening to the two of them talk. I felt a pang of guilt—it was a personal conversation. And yet it seemed that were I to stir and alert them to my wakefulness, I would be doing a greater disservice, shattering a fragile thing. So, I lay without moving, and listened.

“A confession, Girandole?”

“Yes, of sorts. You recall the day I spoke to you of my first love, the woman I left my people for?”

“How could I forget?” said Grandmother dryly. “It was the day you told me in no uncertain terms that I should leave the garden without looking back and marry some good man of the village. The day you broke my heart.” Grandmother spoke gently, not with bitterness.

“Yours and mine,” he answered. “But what I said then was not entirely true. I abandoned my people indeed for a woman—but not for one I'd already met.”

“What do you mean, Girandole?”

“I've never explained to you about the broken statue—the one of which only the feet remain. Tell me what you know of that image, M ——.”

I nearly opened my eyes.

Grandmother spoke softly. “You said once that you had never seen it, that it was already gone when the fauns came to the sacred
woods. I told you, you'll remember, what I read about in the capital, that it was very likely an image of G ——, the duke's beloved wife. The woman he built the garden for.
Behold in me,
the inscription reads. The duke must have ‘beheld' in her
everything
: the reason the moon climbs the sky; the purpose of the dawn and the rain; the meaning in his breath itself. Listen to me!” She laughed at herself.

“Go on,” said Mr. Girandole. “Everything you know about it.”

“Well, she died,” continued Grandmother, “and he could not bear to look at the perfect image of her when the woman herself was gone. In his grief, he had the statue destroyed. The garden, like his life, would never again be complete. He left the feet and the pede­stal, according to the legend, to express the brokenness, the hole left in the world.” Grandmother seemed to think for a moment. “And then he went through the fairy door, didn't he?—to be with her again. That's why he disappeared from this world. Mortality is a part of the garden, as you said. Its paths go round and round on life's journey, but then, at the end, one path leaves the garden and ascends.”

“Up to the temple, yes.” I heard Mr. Girandole set down his glass. “Well, I told you what I told you because I knew it was the only way you would leave me and have the life you were meant to have—a life among your kind, where time passes. You left me when I'd convinced you that I'd loved before and might love again—that you were the second love of my life. If I'd told you the truth, you wouldn't have gone.”

Grandmother seemed at a loss for words. “But . . . you left your people. What could make you do that, if not—”

“I saw only the feet that remained. Only the pedestal where she'd
stood, and those words in the stone. I didn't know about G —— and the duke yet, but I understood—perhaps with the intuition of a faun, for we are creatures of the heart, even as our satyr cousins are creatures of the flesh. And once I understood, the music and the dancing could no longer fill the emptiness in me.

“I knew that humans have a gift that is not granted to us in Faery: this gift of giving the heart in devotion to one other soul, and walking together through days of a limited number. This love of which your people are capable . . . It's warmer than the warmest hearth in winter. It's like a meteor, lighting the sky before it passes beyond.

“If I couldn't have that with you, M ——, I wanted it
for
you. With your young human heart, I thought, you could forget me, and find your love where you were meant to.”

Grandmother was weeping now. “Oh, Girandole. You dear, foolish man.”

“The truth, M ——, is that there was no ‘first' woman. There were only the feet, G ——'s feet, and what they represented. I knew I would find her, somewhere in this world. I wanted to touch and hold such a gift in my own arms, even if I couldn't keep her. One single moment of that would be better than an eternity without. And I
did
find her—only once. I regret nothing. I've been blessed to watch her son grow up, to know her grandson, and I've been close to her for longer than I expected.”

“Girandole,” Grandmother said huskily. “Do you think for a moment that you'll ever lose me?”

The couch moved then, and I knew Grandmother was getting up to go and sit beside him. I took the opportunity to roll over with my face to the cushioned back, so they wouldn't see my tears.

*  *  *  *

I awoke in my bed, with bright sunlight streaming through the curtains. I was wearing my pajamas, so I must have made my way in there at some point, but I had no recollection of it. From the way my mouth felt, I could tell I hadn't cleaned my teeth. No one occupied the sitting room, front room, or kitchen. I saw by the kitchen clock that it was past nine o'clock. As I grabbed my toothbrush and the powder, I heard Grandmother chatting with someone in the garden. At first, I wondered if it might be Mr. Girandole, though I doubted he'd remain here in the daytime, but then I heard another lady's voice. Peeping out through a window, I saw that it was a friend of Grandmother's I'd never met.

I cleaned my teeth, got dressed, and discovered the rucksack from yesterday packed and waiting for me on the kitchen table. A note beside it said, “Milk in the ice box.” In the top section, next to the dwindling chunk of ice, I found the same milk bottle, not quite full; Grandmother was sending the last of it with me. By force of habit, I dropped to all fours for a look into the pan beneath the ice box. It was in no danger of overflowing before evening. I slid the bottle into the bag, went back to my room for my notebook, and took one more look at the key in the drawer.

Passing toward the back door, I glanced into the sitting room, thinking happily of the time we'd spent last night. I saw the mythology book lying open on Grandmother's footstool. I crouched beside it and found the entry about the Pleiades. Reading through it again, I noticed something that I had glossed over before: of the Seven Sisters, only six were said to be visible in Taurus. One of them, named Merope, was the “lost Pleiad.” The book explained
that she was ashamed to show her face because she married a mortal.

I stood and stretched. After a while, I ventured out to the garden and was introduced to Mrs. J ——, who, like so many others, said I looked like my papa.

“I'll mail our letter, and I have to go to the store,” Grandmother told me. I offered to help, but she said she only needed to get a few things, and she'd rather I went and gathered some wood for the stove. “Did you see the lunch for you to take?”

I nodded and thanked her.

“He's such a good boy!” exclaimed Mrs. J ——.

*  *  *  *

I had reached an impasse with the grove of monsters. Though Grandmother and Mr. Girandole helped me, the mystery seemed to recede before us like heat waves shimmering on far fields. The more we probed, the more the answer crumbled beneath our fingers like the wood of a rotten log.

Grandmother wrote down the identity of each statue and spent hours poring over books from her shelf; she read about centaurs and Heracles, Neptune and mermaids. Mostly in the evenings, I joined her in this reading. We stacked the kitchen table high with books and pushed them back and forth, showing each other passages we wondered about.

I got into the habit of carrying a book or two to the garden each day, comparing illustrations of fantastic creatures to the statues there.

R —— confronted us at last with the question I'd been dreading: “What you do?” He pointed at my notebook. “All this, all time . . . what for? Why you hard think?”

I bit my lip, wondering how much to say.

Fortunately, Grandmother was there. She sighed and explained in a low voice that we thought the garden's statues and words and numbers were all part of a riddle that concealed a door into Faery, and we were trying to solve it. R —— gave a joyous whoop, but Grandmother shushed him. “If we're caught,” she said, “you're going with the soldiers, not the fairies.”

For a while, I grew obsessed with maps, supposing at first that the grove might be laid out in imitation of the classical city of Rome on its seven hills, each statue corresponding to a famous building of antiquity—but in the end, I couldn't make the theory stick. I wondered for a time if the grove's central thicket were shaped like the sea, and the statues around it the seaports and capi­tals of the ancient world. In desperation, I added all the ­garden's trees to my map, postulating that the duke had woven nature into his enigma—but Mr. Girandole gently pointed out that most of the present trees were much younger than the garden, and there had likely been different ones standing in the duke's era. So much for my idea that the seven major trees of Heracles's thicket might be the Pleiades.

We reviewed from the Gospels and Revelation and Genesis every account we could find of angels. Contemplating the elephant, we read about Hannibal and the Punic Wars. Grandmother even opened a heavy bestiary and studied tortoises, boars, and bears. I wasn't sure what research might be done on the four unclothed women with water jars, but I kept my eyes open for similar images.

Recalling what Mr. Girandole had said about the fairy poem—that “sisters dancing in the water and the sky” was a metaphor for death—we revisited every place in the garden that suggested
mortality. The sleeping woman, I conceded, might well be dead. The soldier in the elephant's trunk appeared lifeless. Grandmother pointed out that the screaming mouth resembled a tomb. The hilltop temple (
I am a gate
) clearly led visitors Heavenward and anticipated the afterlife. But our searches yielded nothing new. Mr. Girandole also spent a long time reexamining the base of the missing statue and the interior of the leaning house.
Reason departs,
he mused to us, implied insanity. Did it refer to the duke's state of mind after his wife's death? Could it also be a direct reference to G ——, since her death meant the departure of the duke's
reason
for existence?

Grandmother took to falling asleep in her easy chair with a book in her lap; I would nudge her awake so she could go to bed. She, in turn, would poke me in the early hours so I could begin my hike up the mountain. Having made her neighborly rounds of all her friends' flower gardens, she came with me more and more as the days drew nearer to the end of my visit. Mr. Girandole tapped more often at our back door after supper, and we talked and read, laughed and speculated on those hot late-summer nights, with moths beating against the screens and moonlight blazing down on the trees and hedges.

Our days in the sacred grove were both timeless and fleeting. In the morning, when the shadows were vibrant and blue, when the light was pink on the stone, I would sigh happily at the prospect of an entire day in this place, with these people. In the late afternoon, with the sunlight heavy, thick, and deepening from gold to red, I would wonder where that long day had gone while my back was turned.

Mr. Girandole brought a clear glass jar from his cave. It was huge,
like the jars from which drugstores sold candy. He filled it with water, added certain dry leaves and herbs, and left it on the open hilltop, by the Greek temple. The sun shone down and brewed a rich tea scented of mint, which we drank with our meals in the grove.

I made the rounds of the monsters, scrutinizing them from every angle, tapping and poking and searching for any numbers hidden among their carved features. Mr. Girandole engaged in his own explorations, focusing more on those impassable tangles of vegetation where more secrets might still lie hidden. He wriggled into hedges and came out covered with burrs and spores and spider webs. Grandmother methodically dug up the weeds and soil from all seven urns on the terrace rail, sifting through the muck and examining each urn inside and out. (It was ideal work for her, since she could take sitting breaks or naps on the benches.) But there was nothing to be found. With our help as haulers, she refilled the urns with fresh earth, and we scattered the old snailly mulch in the bushes. In time, the forest would replant the urns with the seeds of its choosing.