AEgypt (49 page)

Boney rose from his desk, and helping himself with his knuckles along its edge, he went to stand looking out the window.

"Sandy knew so much,” he said. “He joked all the time, and you never knew when he meant what he said. He knew so much that you were sure that behind the joke was something he knew. But he wouldn't tell.

"He said. He often used to say. What if once upon a time the world was a different place than it is now. The whole world I mean, everything, well it's hard to express; so that it worked in a way it no longer does."

Pierce held his breath to hear the small old voice.

"And what if,” Boney went on, “there remained somewhere in this new world we have now, somehow, somewhere, some little fragments of that lost world. Some fragments that retain something of the power they used to have, back when things were different. A jewel, say. An elixir."

He turned to look at Pierce, and smiled. The Fabulous Monster. So Rosie had called him. “Wouldn't that be something, he used to say. If that were so. Wouldn't that be something."

"There are such things,” Pierce said. “Unicorns’ horns. Magic jewels. Mummified mermaids."

"Sandy would say:
they
didn't survive the change. But somewhere, somewhere there might be something. Hidden, you see; or not hidden, just overlooked; hidden in plain sight. A stone. A powder. An elixir of life.” Standing had caused him—so it seemed to Pierce—to sink ever so slightly, as though his spine were slowly melting. “He was teasing, I suppose. I'm sure he was. And yet in the Giant Mountains once...."

Nothing more followed. At length Boney left the window, and climbed into his chair again.

"So it's a good book?” he said.

"I've only begun it. The first chapters. Bruno. John Dee at Glastonbury. I think Dee and Bruno are going to meet, eventually. I doubt very much they ever did. But surely they could have."

"Maybe you should finish it,” Boney said. “Finish the writing of it, I mean."

"Ha ha,” said Pierce. “Not my line of work."

Boney pondered. “You could edit it. For possible publication."

"I'd certainly like to read it,” Pierce said. “At least."

"I'm too, it's a little beyond me now,” Boney said. “And I'm not sure I'd recognize it if I saw it there. But you. You."

Through the open door just then there came a bouncing rubber ball, a large one painted with red and white stripes, and white stars on blue. It bounced twice and rolled to a stop, vivid on the rug.

"Does it,” Boney asked, “have a title?"

"It doesn't have a title page,” Pierce said.

He thought he knew, though, what title it might have been intended to have; what title he, as editor, would be tempted to give it. He thought: there is not only more than one history of the world, one for each of us who studies it; there is more than one for each of us, there are as many as we want or need, as many as our heads and wanting hearts can make.

Rosie put her head into the room. “Ready?” she said.

"I won't go in with you just yet,” she told Pierce as they went toward Stonykill.

"No?"

"I've got another house to break into,” Rosie said. “Some errands. I'll drop you off, and come back."

In rain, Stonykill was hangdog, exposed and unhappy-looking. Someone stood by the gas pumps of the little store, under the sagging marquee, wiping the drops from his spectacles. “Anyway,” Rosie said. “You know what you're looking at in there. I don't."

"Maybe yes,” Pierce said, “maybe no."

They coasted to a stop at Kraft's barred drive, and for a moment sat in silence looking out the rain-speckled windows toward the shuttered house and the dark pines. “You know,” Rosie said, “in his autobiography? Kraft said he wanted to write just one last book."

"Yes?"

"He says: a book he could die before finishing."

"And when,” Pierce asked, “was it that he died?"

"Oh six years ago. I think. About 1972."

"Oh. Hm."

"Why?"

"Nothing, really. I was just thinking about this book, coming to be. I suppose it could have been in the works for a while. And then abandoned. I was just wondering."

Rosie extracted the key to Kraft's kitchen from her ring, and gave it to Pierce; he opened the great door of the wagon and put out first his black umbrella, which Rosie had laughed at when she had seen him with it; he in turn had claimed to think it was funny that no one around here had any use for umbrellas, and dashed through the rain bareheaded, a matter of pride it seemed.

"See ya."

"I won't be long,” Rosie said.

The umbrella popped open. “Automatic,” Pierce said.

She watched him step long-legged over the gate and walk the drive, avoiding puddles. His city mac was rumpled and gray.

She could have had him, yesterday, on Fellowes Kraft's satin sheets; only he seemed for some reason too stunned to participate. And Rosie had not pushed it.

She looked behind her, as best she could, and before her, and made a wide and clumsy U-turn. Bye, Pierce.

What had happened was that as she stood with him in the dim bedroom, she had felt herself, all in a moment, forgetting why you did this, seduced people, got into their pants. She just forgot; it vanished from her. And so she gave it up.

She might get him yet, of course. Not a warmth but a weird coldness went through her to think of it, the wrong tap turned on.

The house she had lived in with Mike lay on the other side of the wide township of Stonykill, the newest side: a flight of broad terraces, unwooded and windswept, upon which two-and-a-half-story houses were being built, all alike except that some were mirror images of the others, reversed left to right, and some turned front to back; for variety. It made them look oddly random to Rosie, scattered on the hillside, with their hopeful young birches tethered to the lawns. As though none was aware that others were being built around it. The streets that wind through them are called Spruce and Redbud and Holly, but the whole place has always been called—perhaps after some now-lost village—Labrador.

She approached the house slowly, ready to turn back if there was a car or cars in the driveway. There was none. Rosie had got into a habit, which she reproached herself for, of getting into the house when Mike wasn't there, to find things that she or Sam needed, things she had never recovered, things she didn't want to negotiate with Mike about delivering or replacing. She had at first believed that none of it was important, but now and again over the months had recalled this, or found herself in need of that, and a picture would present itself to her of the thing lying just where it lay in the Stonykill house; and she would come break in to get it.

Only it wasn't really breaking in. She just went up the stairs from the garage; that door was never locked.

She wondered if Mike noticed the pilfering. He never said.

Parked in Redbud Street she pulled her little list from her pocket. There was a hard stone in her breast, the leaden coldness that had been there all day; all spring for that matter.

R. view mirror

Mice/balloons

Pelican

BCPs

She had done without a rear-view mirror for nine months, but it was time to get the wagon inspected, and she wasn't sure it would pass without one. Her Pelikan drawing pen lay (she could see it) on the windowsill of the sun porch, behind the TV; she had been writing letters with it on a summer night last year.

She thrust the list back into her pocket. The book about the family of mice who go traveling in a balloon: it had taken her a while to figure out what Sam meant by the bloon mice, until she remembered the long-overdue, the already-paid-for lost library book. Amazing Sam could remember it, so long ago. It was because of the spring balloon festival up at Skytop tomorrow: and Mike's ridiculous promise to Sam, he'd promise her anything lately. Bloon ride. Anyway she had to have the book. Had to.

The birth control pills, a three-month supply she had got the day before she left this house and Mike, were in the little cabinet beside the toilet, where there was also the extra baby powder, the twelve boxes of tissues Mike had abstracted from The Woods, the potpourri from the bath shop in the Jambs.

They would still be there, she was sure. Mike lived in the house like a squirrel or a caveman, some creature unable to think how he might alter his circumstances to suit himself. Nothing had changed since last summer; last time she had broken in her old nightie still hung on the back of the closet door. The pills would still be there. Rosie had gone off the pill the month after she'd moved out; now she thought she ought to go back on again, and the little pink dots were damn expensive, and she'd need a new prescription if she didn't come get these she'd already paid for: and standing in the damp and concrete-smelling garage she couldn't remember why she wanted them after all.

In the garage were Sam's trike, which sometimes traveled with her and sometimes got left behind; and Mike's ten-speed, not used as much as it had been on the flats of Indiana. The cyclist's body he had once had, heavy-thighed and round-backed, had pleased him more than it had her. The cold stone behind her sternum was heavy. The autumn rake; the summer lawn mower; the winter snow shovel. She had forgotten why it had been important to get away from all this, why she had gone to all the trouble she had gone to to break these connections; she had forgotten, just as she had forgotten why she had once tried hard to make them.

Love's labor's lost.

She had forgotten why: as though the heart inside her had been removed, and with it all knowledge of such things. What makes people love each other? Why do they bother? Why did children love parents, and parents children? Why did husbands love wives, and women love men; what did it mean when they said: he drives me nuts, but still I love him?

She must have known once. Because love had made her do a lot of things, and go to a lot of trouble. She had known once, she almost remembered knowing; she remembered getting along with Mike and Sam, and the getting along was powered by love; love was the necessity for getting along. Once she had known, and now she didn't; and not knowing now made it seem that not she or anyone really knew, they were all faking it, forcing it, even Spofford, even Sam, and why did they bother. A cold loss of knowledge and dark ignorance were where her heart had been, and were all that these commonplace things, innocent tools and toys, called to; her dog Nothing, the name of the stone in her breast.

You couldn't live that way long, of course. You couldn't live in that kind of ignorance. She'd have to remember, sometime. She was sure she would. Because she still had a whole long life to get through, Sam's growing up, Boney's death and her mother's and at last her own: and she couldn't get through it without remembering why you bother.

She would. She was sure of it.
Sure you will
she said to herself, and patted her own bosom:
sure you will
.

At the bottom of the stairs leading up to the kitchen, a flight of open bare wood steps still showing the carpenter's marks, she stopped, unwilling to go up. It seemed certain she would have an accident on the stairs, or that the door at the top would turn out to be locked after all. She stood for a long time looking up, and then went back out into the warm rain.

"So how's it going?” she asked Pierce, at the door of Fellowes Kraft's study, brushing the rain from her cheeks. “How's Bruno?"

"Off to see the Pope,” said Pierce.

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The coach racketed over the bad roads out of Naples, two bright-garbed men riding postilion to clear the way. Carters cursed at them and peasants along the road took off their caps and crossed themselves. The friar in black and white opposite Giordano murmured to him in Roman-accented Latin of what the visit would entail, how long he would be with the Pope—
Sanctissimus
he called him, as though it were a pet name—what Giordano should do and say, whom he should speak to, and whom not.

—
Sanctissimus
will present His ring to you but you must only come near it and not kiss it. Peter's ring would be worn away to nothing if everyone who came to
Sanctissimus
actually pressed his lips to it.
Sanctissimus
will see you in the afternoon, between Nones and Vespers, after He has dined. His dinner is of the simplest. He is as abstemious as He is pious. You must speak clearly and distinctly, as His hearing is not what it was....

The coach stopped at Dominican monasteries in Gaeta and Latina, the horses lathered and weary; Giordano lay long awake in the sultry heat, putting together the journey he had come already, the longest of his life, and attaching the places, roads, shrines, churches, and palaces he had seen to the Neapolitan places of his memory: new spokes of the earthly wheel he had constructed, centered on the church of San Domenico. Before dawn they started out again, to travel in the cool part of the day, and before the brigands—so the friar with him said—were awake.

Giordano's fame had spread to the widest imaginable circle: the widest anyway that the monks of Naples could imagine. When the abbot had come to his cell to tell him that the Pope had heard of the young man with the astonishing memory, and desired to know more, and that the Pope was
sending a coach from Rome to bring him there
, his voice had sunk low in amazement and solemnity.

Giordano's first thought had been, irrelevantly, about Cecco of Ascoli. He had thought: I'll tell Him about Cecco. I'll tell Him: if what Cecco said about the stars is true, if the universe is as he thought it to be, then it can't have been heresy, can it? The truth could never be heresy. A mistake was made, that's all; it's clear that a mistake was somehow made.

The coach sped down the old Appian Way, the friar nodding in his sleep while Giordano's eyes ate up the tombs, ruins, churches along that impossibly straight and metaled road. The coach dove through the Porta San Sebastiano, and past the gigantic ruins of baths and circuses, and into the thronged heart of Rome. At the Tiber bridge the friar pointed out the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which had been built as the Emperor Hadrian's tomb, and was now the keep and dungeons of the Papacy. An angel with a sword stood atop it, mobile in the shimmer of noon.