Little, Big (27 page)

"Getting better every year," Smoky said, and suddenly turned around involuntarily. He was back in Daily Alice's path, collision course, nothing he could do. He wished he'd strapped a pillow to his ass as they do in comic postcards. Alice grew large, and halted abruptly and expertly.

"Do you think Tacey and Lily should go in?" she said.

"I leave that up to you." Mother drew them past again on their sled; their round, fur-circled faces were bright as berries; then they were gone again, and so was Alice. Let the womenfolk consult, he thought. He had to master the simple forward progress; they were making him dizzy, appearing and disappearing like that. "Woops," he said, and would have lost it, but Sophie appearing suddenly behind him bore him up, propelled him forward. "How have you been?" he said nonchalantly; it seemed the thing, to greet each other as they all went around.

"Unfaithful," she said; the cold word made a small cloud on the air.

Smoky's left ankle buckled, and his right runner just then sped away on its own. He spun around and landed hard on the ice, on the rudimentary tail so vulnerable on one so fleshless behind. Sophie was circling him, her laughter almost making her fall too.

Just sit here a while till my tail freezes up, Smoky thought. Sit gripped in ice like the feet of bushes until some thaw comes. . . .

The previous week's snow had not cleaved to earth, it was a night's fall only, the rain returned heavily the next morning and George Mouse went sloshing off in it hollow-eyed and confused, having caught, they all thought, Sophie's bug. The rain continued like unassuageable grief, flooding the low broad lawn where the sphinxes decayed mumchance. Then the temperature tumbled, and Christmas Eve morning the world was all iron-gray and glaring in ice, all the color of the iron-gray sky where the sun made a white smear only behind the clouds. The lawn was hard enough to skate on; the house looked like a miniature house for a model railroad, set beside a pond made from a compact-mirror.

Still Sophie circled him. He said: "What do you mean? Unfaithful?"

She only smiled secretly and helped him up, then turned and with some occult motion he saw but could never copy whispered away effortlessly.

He'd do better if he could figure out how the others got around that unalterable law which said that if one skate slid forward, the other had to slide backward. It seemed he could zip zip back and forth in one place forever and be the only one here in agreement with Newton. Till he fell down. There is no perpetual motion. Yet just at that moment he began Somehow to get it, and, numbbummed, made his way across the ice to the steps of the porch, where Cloud sat in state on a fur rug guarding the boots and the thermos.

"So where's this promised snow?" he said, and Cloud displayed her own brand of secret smile. He wrung the neck of the thermos and decapitated it. He poured lemon tea charged with rum into one of the nested cups the cap contained, and one for Cloud. He drank, the steam melting the cold in his nostrils. He felt bleakly, recklessly dissatisfied. Unfaithful! Was that some kind of joke? The jewel of great price which he had had from Daily Alice long ago, in the midst of their first embrace, darkened as pearls can do and turned to nothing when he tried to hang it on Sophie's throat. He never knew what Sophie felt, but couldn't believe, though he'd learned it to be so of Daily Alice, that Sophie didn't know either: that she was torn, bewildered, and withal half-dreaming as much as he. So he only watched her come and go with seeming purpose, and wondered, imagined, supposed.

She came across the lawn with her hands behind her back, then made a foot-across-foot turn and sailed up to the porch. She turned just where the frozen pond ran out, and engraved the ice with a small shower of crystals when she stopped. She sat beside Smoky and took his cup from him, her breath quick with exertion. In her hair Smoky noticed something, a tiny flower, or a jewel made to look like one; he looked closer and saw it was a snowflake, so whole and perfect he could count its arms and tell its parts. As he was saying "A snowflake," another fell beside it, and another.

Different families have different methods, at Christmas, of communicating their wishes to Santa. Many send letters, mailing them early and addressing them to the North Pole. These never arrive, postmasters having their own whimsical ways of dealing with them, none involving, delivery.

Another method, which the Drinkwaters had always used though no one could remember how they had hit on it, was to bum their missives in the study fireplace, the tiled one whose blue scenes of skaters, windmills, trophies of the hunt seemed most appropriate, and whose chimney was the highest. The smoke then (the children always insisted on running out to see) vanished into the North, or at least into the atmosphere, for Santa to decipher. A complex procedure, but it seemed to work, and was always done on Christmas Eve when wishes were sharpest.

Secrecy was important, at least for the grown-ups' letters; the kids could never resist telling everybody what they wanted and for Lily and Tacey the letters had to be written by others anyway, and they had to be reminded of the many wishes they'd had as Christmas neared but which had grown small in the interim and slipped through the coarse seine of young desire. Don't you want a brother for Teddy (a bear)? Do you still want a shotgun like Grampa's? Ice skates with double blades?

But the grown-ups could presumably decide these things for themselves.

In the expectant, crackling afternoon of that Eve of ice Daily Alice drew her knees up within a huge armchair and used a folded checkerboard resting on her knees for a desk. "Dear Santa," she wrote, "please bring me a new hot-water bottle, any color but that pink that looks like boiled meat, a jade ring like the one my great-aunt Cloud has, for the right middle finger." She thought. She watched the snow fall on the gray world, still just visible as day died. "A quilted robe," she wrote; "one that comes down to my feet. A pair of fuzzy slippers. I would like this baby to be easier than the other two to have. The other stuff is not so important if you could manage that. Ribbon candy is nice, and you can't find it anywhere any more. Thanking you in advance, Alice Barnable (the older sister)." Since childhood she had always added that, to avoid confusion. She hesitated over the tiny blue notepaper nearly filled with these few desires. "P.S.," she wrote. "If you could bring my sister and my husband back from wherever it is they've gone off together I would be more grateful than I could say. ADB."

She folded this absently. Her father's typewriter could be heard in the strange snow-silence. Cloud, cheek in hand, wrote with the stub of a pencil at the drum-table, her eyes moist, perhaps with tears, though her eyes often seemed bedimmed lately; old age only, probably. Alice rested her head back against the chair's soft breast, looking upward.

Above her, Smoky charged with rum-tea sat down in the imaginary study to begin his letter. He spoiled one sheet because the rickety writing-table there rocked beneath his careful pen; he shimmed the leg with a matchbook and began again.

"My dear Santa, First of all it's only right that I explain about last year's wish. I won't excuse myself by saying I was a little drunk, though I was, and I am (it's getting to be a Christmas habit, as everything about Christmas gets to be a habit, but you know all about that). Anyway, ill shocked you or strained your powers by such a request I'm sorry; I meant only to be flip and let off a little steam. I know (I mean I assume) it's not in your power to give one person to another, but the fact is my wish was granted. Maybe only because I wanted it then more than anything, and what you want so much you're just likely to get. So I don't know whether to thank you or not. I mean I don't know whether you're responsible; and I don't know whether I'm grateful."

He chewed the end of his pen for a moment, thinking of last Christmas morning when he had gone into Sophie's room to wake her, so early (Tacey wouldn't wait) that blank nighttime still ruled the windows. He wondered if he should relate the story. He'd never told anyone else, and the deep privacy of this about-to-becremated letter tempted him to confidences. But no.

It was true what Doc had said, that Christmas succeeds Christmas rather than the days it follows. That had become apparent to Smoky in the last few days. Not because of the repeated ritual, the tree sledded home, the antique ornaments lovingly brought out, the Druid greenery hung on the lintels. It was only since last Christmas that all that had become imbued for him with dense emotion, an emotion having nothing to do with Yuletide, a day which for him as a child had had nothing like the fascination of Hallowe'en, when he went masked and recognizable (pirate, clown) in the burnt and smoky night. Yet he saw that it was an emotion that would cover him now, as with snow, each time this season came. She was the cause, not he to whom he wrote.

"Anyway," he began again, "my desires this year are a little clouded. I would like one of those instruments you use to sharpen the blades of an old-fashioned lawn mower. I would like the missing volume of Gibbon (Vol. II) which somebody's apparently taken out to use as a doorstop or something and lost." He thought of listing publisher and date, but a feeling of futility and silence came over him, drifting deep. "Santa," he wrote, "I would like to be one person only, not a whole crowd of them, half of them always trying to turn their backs and run whenever somebody"—Sophie, he meant, Alice, Cloud, Doc, Mother; Alice most of all—"looks at me. I want to be brave and honest and shoulder my burdens. I don't want to leave myself out while a bunch of slyboots figments do my living for me." He stopped, seeing he was growing unintelligible. He hesitated over the complimentary close; he thought of using "Yours as ever," but thought that might sound ironic or sneering, and at last wrote only "Yours &c.," as his father always had, which then seemed ambiguous and cool; what the hell anyway; and he signed it: Evan S. Barnable.

Down in the study they had gathered with eggnog and their letters. Doc had his folded like true correspondence, its backside pimpled with hard-struck punctuation; Mother's was torn from a brown bag, like a shopping list. The fire took them all, though—rejecting only Lily's at first, who tried with a shriek to throw it in the fire's mouth, you can't really throw a piece of paper, she'd learn that as she grew in grace and wisdom—and Tacey insisted they go out to see. Smoky took her by the hand, and lifted Lily onto his shoulders, and they went out into the snowfall made spectral by the house's lights to watch the smoke go away, melting the falling snowflakes as it rose.

When he received these communications, Santa drew the claws of his spectacles from behind his ears and pressed the sore place on the bridge of his nose with thumb and finger. What was it they expected him to do with these? A shotgun, a bear, snowshoes, some pretty things and some useful: well, all right. But for the rest of it . . . He just didn't know what people were thinking anymore. But it was growing late; if they, or anyone else, were disappointed in him tomorrow, it wouldn't be the first time. He took his furred hat from its peg and drew on his gloves. He went out, already unaccountably weary though the journey had not even begun, into the multicolored arctic waste beneath a decillion stars, whose near brilliance seemed to chime, even as the harness of his reindeer chimed when they raised their shaggy heads at his approach, and as the eternal snow chimed too when he trod it with his booted feet.

Soon after that Christmas, Sophie began to feel as though her body were being unwrapped and repacked in a completely different way, a set of sensations that was vertiginous at first when she didn't suspect its cause, and then interesting, awesome even, when she did, and at last (later on, when the process was completed and the new tenant fully installed and making itself at home) comfortable: deeply so at times, like a new kind of sweet sleep; yet expectant too. Expectant! The right word.

There wasn't much her father could say when eventually Sophie's condition was admitted to him, he being just such a one as she carried himself. Being a father, he had to go through motions of solemnity that never quite amounted to censure, and there was never any question of What was to be Done with It—he shuddered to think what would have happened if anyone had thought that kind of thought when he was growing inside Amy Meadows.

"Well, my God, there's room for one more," Mother said, drying a tear. "It's not like it was the first time it ever happened in the world." Like the rest of them, she wondered who the father was, but Sophie wasn't saying, or rather in her smallest voice and with eyes downcast, was saying she wouldn't say. And so the matter had eventually to be dropped.

Though of course Daily Alice had to be told.

It was to Daily Alice that she took her news first, or next to first; her news, and her secret.

"Smoky," she said.

"Oh, Sophie," Alice said. "No."

"Yes," she said, defiant by the door of Alice's room, unwilling to enter further in.

"I can't believe it, that he would."

"Well, you better," Sophie said. "You'd better get used to it, because it's not going away."

Something in Sophie's face-or maybe only the horrid impossibility of what she said—made Alice wonder. "Sophie," she said softly after they had regarded each other in silence for a time, "are you asleep?"

"
No.
" Indignant. But it was early morning; Sophie was in her nightgown; Smoky had only an hour ago stepped down from the tall bed, scratching his head, to go off to school. Sophie had waked Alice: that was so unusual, so reverse of the usual, that for a moment Alice had hoped . . . She lay back against the pillow, and closed her eyes; but she wasn't asleep either.

"Didn't you ever suspect?" Sophie asked. "Didn't you ever think.

"Oh, I guess I did." She covered her eyes with her hand. "Of course I did." The way Sophie said it made it seem she would be disappointed if Alice hadn't known. She sat up, suddenly angry. "But this! I mean the two of you! How could you be so
silly
?"