AEgypt (31 page)

No more than about waking life did it occur to Rosie to pass critical judgments on what she read. It engaged her or it didn't; when it engaged her she could not have said why. Never, in her intense period of reading mystery stories, did it occur to her to try to figure out what the author was up to, what the solution was; she thought once, looking back, that she hadn't really grasped initially that these stories which she liked were mysteries, that each one would have a solution; if she had read one that didn't, she would not necessarily have felt cheated. What she really liked about them, she thought, was the same thing she liked about biographies: they went only one way.

There was a kind of novel that didn't, and made Rosie feel uneasy: a kind of novel that it seemed you could only go about halfway or two-thirds into before you somehow started coming back out. All the incidents and characters that appeared in the first half of the book, the ones that created the story, would reappear (sometimes even in approximately reverse order) to complete the story, as though the book's second half or last third were a mirror image of the first, with the ending exactly like the beginning except that it was an ending. It wasn't that such books didn't resemble life; Rosie didn't know if they did or didn't; but if they did, then it might be that life too had a mirror half, that its direction all one way was illusory, and Rosie didn't know this to be so only because she hadn't entered on the later, the cursory wrap-up part of her own life.

Once when she had picked up a novel at a tag sale she had found pasted on the fly leaf a yellowed newspaper review of it. The review seemed to like the book but complained of its somewhat mechanical plot. When Rosie read it she found it to be one of those with a mirror final third. So what she had been perceiving all along (she realized with surprise) was
plot
—a thing she might have said novels have and biographies do not, without knowing just what she meant by saying that. And now she knew.

And still she didn't know to what extent lives resembled novels by having plots, by having symmetries, falling into two parts, the long way in, the quicker way back out again. Certainly there was something mechanical about this picture; but there was no way—yet—to know whether life was in fact mechanical and symmetrical, or not. For sure when she sat with a Kraft novel in her lap, waiting in offices to further her divorce from Mike, it didn't seem an academic question; she thought she might very well be just halfway through her own story (if it had a halfway mark) and that so far from ditching her husband she was only establishing the conditions of his later and ineluctable appearances in the story. Which was his story too after all.

Kraft wasn't much help. Despite the forward tumble of history always proceeding in his books, proceeding (with an almost audible roar and mutter) from far past toward nearer past, all one way, the stories themselves which he told often had the mirror-shape of a plot.
Bitten Apples
had such a shape: right in the center of it that magician or scientist drew the diagram of young Will's horoscope, and put his planets in, and told him that he would not, unless he chose to fly in the heavens’ face, make his living as a player upon the stage. And from there, scene by scene, the book walked back out through itself with great neatness. Rosie guessed that it would (saying “Oh no” aloud in comic dismay at breakfast so that Boney raised his bent head to see what she groaned at) as soon as Simon Hunt—Will's old teacher in Stratford, who snuck off to be a priest—appeared again before Will in London.

Now it was Hunt who was at bay, Hunt hunted, a Jesuit, a price on his head. Will, though tempted (only for a shameful second) to turn him in, saves the frightened priest, hiding him at one critical moment in full view of Walsingham's patrol: on stage, playing a farcical monk in an anti-Papist play, dragged down to hell by devils.

Good scene for a movie, Rosie thought.

And at the end Will was on tour of the provinces, and coming once again to Stratford by the Avon; at seventeen feeling old, and worldly-wise, and done with playing. The last long scene with his chastened father—as exactly distant, almost to the number of pages, from the end of the book as the very first interview was from the beginning. Come home, Will. Forgive me: forgive me.

And yet—Rosie wondered how it was done—there was not in this perfect symmetry of scenes the oppression she had felt in other books; it was all somehow encouraging. Maybe it was only her own knowledge, acquired outside these pages, of the further history which none of them who were inside the book could know: not John Shakespeare, not James Burbage (saying goodbye to Will by the property-wagon in a Stratford innyard, brushing away a kindly tear but thinking himself well rid of the tall young man), not Will Shakespeare himself, turning back up the High Street for home.

It was time to settle down; time to take up his father's trade: a clean trade, however unexciting, that could support a man's age.

That could support—Will felt his heart rise, though his big sober feet fell in good order in the High Street—that could support a wife, and sons. A dark-eyed wife of Stratford town.

And if he worked steadily, he might one day erase from the town's long memory his adventure in London, and earn for himself the name of good citizen, credit to the town of Stratford—even, maybe, Gentleman.

Will went up to his father's door, his hand on the butt of an imaginary Gentleman's sword, slung at his side. In the innyard, Burbage's players set up the stage for the old play of CAEsar, stabbed in the Capitol.

Oh, corny, corny,
Rosie thought almost laughing with pleasure, for there at the bottom of the last page, in large capitals, was not “The End” but THE BEGINNING.

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One lamb had died; it lay, a wet lump, near its mother,

who nuzzled it dazedly. Farther down the shed, a ewe had died delivering: beside her, a living lamb attempted to suck. Spofford lifted his lantern, in whose light his breath clouded, and carefully numbered them, so weary he almost could not keep count. The rest were all right. So: one dead lamb, its mother full of milk; and one motherless lamb. But the living ewe wouldn't give suck to the orphan; some instinct, smell, something, prevented it. So the orphan lamb would starve, unless Spofford began now to feed it by hand.

Or he could try an older method, that he had heard of from someone, who, he forgot who; he had in his mind the dim image of an old shepherd who had learned it from an older, and so on back through the years. Well all right.

He opened his knife, and working swiftly and almost automatically as though he had done this many times before, he took the thin wet skin from the dead lamb, pulling and cutting it free. When he had it, he took up the orphaned lamb, and after bundling it in the pitiful rag of its cousin's skin, he laid it by the dead lamb's mother.

The mother examined it, insofar as she could; she nuzzled it, and found it to be her own. At the disguised lamb's insistence, she let it suck: let it live.

How do you like that, Spofford marveled, bloody to the wrists of his sheepskin coat. Now how do you

"like that,” he said aloud, waking.

It wasn't night in February, lambing time, but morning in December. It had snowed in the night, the first snowfall of the year; a white light filled the loft of his cabin, so that he knew without raising his head that it had snowed.

Boy (he thought, stirring), sometimes they can be so convincing. So convincing.

He sat up, and scratched his head with both hands. His sheepskin coat hung, clean, on a peg. He laughed aloud: that was a great trick with the lamb. He wondered if it would work. He hadn't—as far as he remembered—ever heard of it, though as a boy he had once hand-fed an orphaned lamb. For sure the aged shepherd whom, in the dream, he had remembered telling about it (apple-cheeked, with stump of pipe and lamb's-wool hair) was nobody he knew in waking life, a complete fiction.

Over breakfast he decided he would ask one or two sheepmen he knew in the county whether that switcheroo was a possibility. Whether it was a well-known old trick.

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 white frame 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 which 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.