AEgypt (45 page)

"I'm going to try to."

"Getting paid for it?"

"Not a lot. Some."

"Hey, good for you. About what?"

Pierce leafed rapidly through the several descriptions he kept within, suitable for different hearers. “It's about magic and history,” he said. “About magic in history, and also about the history of magic, and magicians."

"Wow, interesting. History when?"

"Well, the Renaissance and a little later. Shakespeare's time."

"Magicians back then, huh,” Rosie said. “Like John Dee?"

He looked at her in astonishment. “Well yes,” he said. “Among others. How do you come to know that name?"

"I read about him in a novel. Are you a historian?"

"I taught history,” Pierce said, unwilling to assign the larger word to himself. “What novel was this?"

"A historical novel.” She laughed at the obviousness of this. “Of course. By Fellowes Kraft. He used to live around here, and wrote these books.” A look of understanding had begun to cross Pierce's face, a big understanding, bigger than merely knowing the source of her knowledge of old Dee. Rosie suddenly remembered catching a glimpse of someone who looked like him on her last visit to the library. “Yeah, our local famous author. His house is in Stonykill."

"How do you like that,” Pierce said.

"You've heard of him? He wasn't really so famous."

"I think I've read most of his books. Once upon a time."

Rosie said, “Huh,” looking up at Pierce and experiencing a feeling very much like the feeling of conceiving a painting: the feeling of a number of things melding, turning out to be picturable as one thing. “Is there any chance,” she said, “you might need a job? I mean a part-time temporary kind of thing?"

"I,” Pierce said.

"And you were really a college teacher? Advanced degrees?"

He gave her a brief vita.

"Listen,” she said. “Wait here, will you, just a sec."

He indicated he had no place to hurry to. He watched her go slowly, in thought, across the lawn, and drift almost to a halt, deeper in thought; and then, mind made up, go quickly toward a group of players in white.

He tried a few practice strokes, and then leaned on his mallet, alive in the middle of the day. Now those yellow flowers that had just been coming out when he arrived in the Faraways were gone; a bush of them there by the drive bore green leaves only, and a dusting of fallen petals at its base. The lilacs had come then, white and purple, and were themselves passing; and the rosebuds were heavy. And it was his, all his, the whole unfolding of it, he was
not missing it all
for the first time in years, for the first time since when? Since the tended quadrangles and cloisters of Noate at least.

His county, and Fellowes Kraft's too: and if
that
was some kind of omen, he must suppose it was a good one, though he was yet unused to seeing his life in such terms. The warmth of simple glee was all he felt so far, and astonishment all that he was sure of.

A job. He saw Rosie come back toward him, quick, her face alight.

"Boney thinks it's a
really great
idea,” she said, taking Pierce's arm, “and it will turn out really great for you, I know, so come meet him."

"Boney?"

"Boney Rasmussen. Whose house this is."

"Your father."

"My uncle."

"Aha.” Rich uncles were perhaps common around here, as in an old novel. “And the job?"

"Well listen,” she said. “If you'll first just do me a favor. About Fellowes Kraft. There'll be a job in it, I'm just sure."

"Aha.” He was being led toward a frail and bent and seemingly very aged man who rested on
his
mallet by the lemonade.

"And boy it's a relief to find you,” Rosie said.

"Yes?” The old gent far off raised his hand in greeting, and Pierce raised his too, crossing the velvet lawn and, at the same time, feeling himself step across the threshold of an invisible portal: a portal through which there would be no going back again. He didn't know why or wherefore, but he knew that it was so, for it was a sensation he had felt before.

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The first time Rosie had seen it, in March wind and rain, she had felt warned away; it was like a hermit's or a wizard's house, lonely on a wooded knoll at the end of a long dirt driveway, almost a causeway, that curled through bare and rocky fields. And it was one of those houses too that, to the right eye on the right evening, seemed to have a face: the hooded eyes of a pair of shuttered windows on either side of the nose and mouth of a door and its fanlight, chin of curved steps, mustaches of shaggy balsam. Rosie thought of the phrase from the poem,
Death's dream kingdom
, to which this seemed the gatehouse or keeper's cottage. And beyond it the dark pines gestured, impenetrable, and the hills rose up.

When Pierce first saw it, though, the weather had changed, and it was only a small mock-Tudor cottage, stucco and brick and timber, somehow unconvincing; the eaves were deep, and rounded like thatch, but they were of tarpaper shingle. The rosy-red chimneys and many chimney pots, the mullioned windows and rose trellises, all said 1920 and not 1520. The pines were still dark behind it, though, and the eyes still blind.

He was to go in it, with Rosie, and see what he could see; make a general assessment, sort of, she wasn't quite sure, but she was sure she had neither the competence nor the desire to do it alone. That was the favor. Putting in order the stuff they found, cataloguing it maybe, deciding to sell or not sell the books and stuff if they were worth it—that was the job. If he wanted it.

"While it's still light,” Rosie said. “Just to check it out."

And so at evening (the croquet game having ended, Pierce coming in just barely last and much applauded) they climbed into the Bison with a couple of bottles of beer taken from the party offerings and tore away; Val called ironically after them, Rosie waved, the dogs in the back barked triumphantly.

"I've put it off and put it off so long,” Rosie said, cradling the beer between her thighs. “You really didn't have anything planned?"

"Nothing,” said Pierce. The huge car rolled terrifically down the roadway, as often as not taking more than its allotted half. “Isn't it usual,” he said, “to have a mirror to look out the back with?” He pointed to the gob of stickum on the window where there was no mirror.

"You'll get used to our ways,” Rosie said. She smiled sidewise at him. “So you think you'll stay? Yeah? Settle down here, huh. Maybe get married."

"Ha ha,” he said. “You married?"

"No,” she said, not quite truthfully. She had chosen to make no further reference to Spofford either. Not because she was hurt that he had in the end not come to play croquet, or called to explain. No. She just chose not to. No reason. No plan.

"It was kinda sad, I guess,” she said, as they went through the town of Stonykill. “Boney says he got almost completely deaf toward the end there. And poor. He was a dapper little guy, and he sort of never quite went to pieces, but the show got a little thin. That's how I picture it."

"Hm,” Pierce said, watching Stonykill pass: a mill town nearly depopulated, its mill in ruins—roofless walls pierced with ogee windows, which with the Gothic detail of chimney and clock tower suggested a ruined abbey, also unconvincing.

"He used to walk into town and order his groceries,” Rosie said, pointing to a general store, “and buy a bottle, and the papers. With Scotty."

"Scotty?"

"The dog.” She had turned off the main road, and sharply upward. “The saddest thing was when the dog died. That just about killed him. I think it was the saddest thing that ever happened to him. Oh, maybe when his mother, oh oops oops."

She had slammed on the power brakes, propelling Pierce into the dashboard. Craning her neck to look between the heads of the dogs who had come hurtling forward too, she backed up in a spray of gravel to a broad aluminum gate that, bolted into old stone gateposts, barred the drive. “Shot right past it,” Rosie said, “but here we are."

She had been unable to find the key to the gate's padlock, so they walked to the house along the dusty causeway. Crows making their way toward the pines cawed. The silver-gilt summer evening, daylight savings time, had seemingly ceased to pass away, and might last forever.

"You want to see Scotty's grave?” she asked. “It's around back."

"I thought you hadn't been here before."

"I came once. I looked in the windows. I just didn't dare go in."

They passed around the still and observant house to the back, for it was the kitchen door Rosie had a key to, a round-arched dutch door. “Listen I'm just so grateful for this,” she said, struggling with the stiff lock.

"No trouble,” he said. “It's interesting. And I'm sure I could think of a favor to ask you. In return."

"Anytime,” she said, and the key turned.

"Driving lessons.” Not his type, no. But at least not married; at least not the girlfriend of his only friend in the county.

"Sure,” she said. “You can drive back."

She pushed open the door, and they went into the cold kitchen.

"Okay,” Rosie said when she had closed the door behind them. She felt an urge to take Pierce's hand for safety in the stillness. “Okay."

From being long shut up, the house had the musty smell of a reclusive animal's den, and the small light through the leaded windows made it the more cavelike. A bachelor had lived here, a bachelor once upon a time fussy about his arrangements and his surroundings but who had come to neglect them, growing used over time to the desuetude and no longer actually seeing it. The furniture was good and well chosen but soiled and even a little squalid, a lamp repaired with tape, an upturned umbrella stand to hold an ashtray by the big armchair. The animal denned here had curled up in that chair, it still held his shape; that pale path in the rug that led from chair to Magnavox to liquor cabinet had been worn by his slippered feet. Pierce felt embarrassed by the intimacy of it.

"Books,” Rosie said.

They were everywhere, books in tall cases, books piled in corners, on chairs and beside them, open books laid atop other open books; atlases, encyclopedias, brightly covered novels, broad glossy art books. Pierce took the path of least resistance which Kraft had worked out amid the shoals and islands of them, toward a locked glass cabinet which held still more.

He opened it with a key, which was in the lock.

"We should be systematic, I suppose,” he said. “More systematic."

Several of the items in this case were carefully sealed up in the plastic bags in which rarities are kept; one seemed to contain leaves of a medieval manuscript. The typed label glued to it read PICA TRIX.

Pierce shut the door, suddenly shy. A man's best books.

"So,” Rosie said. Her first apprehension had passed; she was beginning to feel oddly at home here, in this strange man's house, with this stranger. Watching Pierce touch the books in the cabinet had made her think she had introduced two men who could not help but be friends. “You want to poke around down here? I'm going upstairs."

"Okay."

He stood alone for a moment in the sitting room. There were cigarette burns, but why, all along the windowsill by the easy chair. The whole house seemed darkened with smoke, like a Mohawk's lodge. He turned. The path led that way, through the asymmetrical and eccentric layout which the architect had hoped would be picturesque, and into a small, a surprisingly small room at the back of the house whose use was evident and at whose threshold Pierce paused, even more shy than before.

It was as crowded as a cockpit, and as thoughtfully fitted out. There was just enough room for the desk, not a desk even but just a broad surface built in not particularly well under the mullioned windows; and some tall bookcases fitted in beside the windows; and two gray steel filing cabinets labeled in a way Pierce couldn't understand. There was an old electric heater, a stand-up hotel-lobby ashtray, an office lamp on an extensible arm which could be pulled out to shine down on that black Remington.

There he would sit; he would look out those windows at the day. He would put on the glasses he was too vain to wear elsewhere, and light the thirteenth cig of the day, and prop it in the ashtray. He would roll into the typewriter a piece of paper ... a piece of
this
paper: here convenient to hand was a ream box of that coarse yellow copy paper he would have used for initial drafts. Sphinx. Pierce opened it; the lid clung to the box beneath with the vacuum its pulling-off created; the box was nearly full of paper, but the paper wasn't blank.

It was all typed on, pages unnumbered but apparently consecutive, the draft of a novel. With both hands, a cake from the oven or a baby from its pram, Pierce lifted it out, and laid it on the desk before him. Out in the evening, a dog barked: Scotty?

There was no title page, though the top page had what might be an epigraph typed on it.

I learn that I am knight Parsifal.

Parsifal learns that his quest for the Grail is the quest of all men for the Grail.

The Grail is just then coming into being, brought forth by a labor of making in the whole world at once.

With a great groan the world awakes for a moment as from slumber, to pass the Grail like a stone.

It is over; Parsifal forgets what he set out to do, I forget that I am Parsifal, the world turns again and returns to sleep, and I am gone.

This was attributed below (by a quick pencil-dash, as though in an afterthought, or a wild guess) to Novalis. Pierce wondered. He lifted the dry yellow sheet, fragile-seeming, its edges already browning. The second sheet was headed
Prologue in Heaven
, and its first words were these:

There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, they kept pressing in one by one, always room for one more; they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them and looked out at the two mortals who looked in at them. They were all dressed in green, and wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay, and their names all began with A.