Little, Big (30 page)

Very carefully he slipped out from under the high-piled covers, and felt in the darkness for his robe. There was only one cure he knew of for this state, and that was to get up and act awake until it was placated and went away. He stepped carefully over the floor, hoping he wouldn't step into shoes or other impedimenta, there was no reason to inflict this state on Daily Alice, and he gained the door, satisfied he hadn't disturbed her or the night at all. He'd just walk the halls, go downstairs and turn on some lights, that should do it. He closed the door carefully behind him, and at that Daily Alice awoke, not because of any noise he'd made but because the whole peace of her sleep had been subtly broken and invaded by his absence.

There was already a light burning in the kitchen when he opened the back-stairs door. Great-aunt Cloud made a low, shuddering sound of startled horror when she saw the door open, and then "Oh," she said, when only Smoky looked around it. She had a glass of warm milk before her, and her hair was down, long and fine and spreading, white as Hecate's; it had been uncut for years and years.

"You gave me a start," she said.

They discussed sleeplessness in low voices, though there was no one their voices could disturb from here but the mice. Smoky, seeing she too wanted to bustle some to overcome wakefulness, allowed her to warm milk for him; to his he added a stiff measure of brandy.

"Listen to that wind," said Cloud.

Above them, they heard the long gargle and whisper of a flushed toilet. "What's up?" Cloud said. "A sleepless night, and no moon." She shivered. "It feels like the night of a catastrophe, or a night big news comes, everybody awake. Well. Just chance." She said it as another might say God help us—with that same degree of rote unbelief.

Smoky, warmed now, rose and said "Well," in a resigned sort of way. Cloud had begun to leaf through a cookbook there. He hoped she wouldn't have to sit to watch bleak dawn come; he hoped he wouldn't himself.

At the top of the stairs he didn't turn toward his own bed where, he knew, sleep didn't yet await him. He turned toward Sophie's room, with no intention but to look at her a while. Her restfulness calmed him sometimes, as a cat's can, made him restful too. When he opened her door, he saw by the moon-pale night-light that someone sat on the edge of Sophie's bed.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," said Daily Alice.

There was an odd smell in the air, a smell like leaf mold, or Queen Anne's-lace, or perhaps the earth under an upturned stone. "What's up?" he asked softly. He came to sit on the other side of the bed.

"I don't know," she said. "Nothing. I woke up when you left. I felt like something happened to Sophie, so I came to see."

There was no danger that their quiet talk would waken Sophie; people talking near her in her sleep only seemed to comfort her, to make her deep draughts of breath more regular.

"Everything's all right, though," he said.

"Yes."

Wind pressed on the house, beating it in fitful anger; the window boomed. He looked down at Sophie and Lilac. Lilac looked quite dead, but after three children Smoky knew that this scary appearance, especially in the dark, wasn't reason for alarm.

They sat silent on either side of Sophie. The wind spoke suddenly a single word in the chimney's throat. Smoky looked at Alice, who touched his arm and smiled quickly.

What smile did it remind him of?

"Everything's okay," she said.

He remembered Great-aunt Cloud smiling at him as they sat troubled on the lawn of Auberon's summer house the day he was married: a smile meant to be comforting, but which was not. A smile against distance, that only seemed to increase distance. A signal of friendship sent out of infrangible foreignness; a hand waved far off, from across a border.

"Do you smell a funny smell?" he said.

"Yes. No. I did. It's gone now."

It was. The room was full only of night air. The sea of wind outside raised small currents in it which now and again brushed his face; but it didn't seem to him as though this were Brother North-wind moving around them, but as though the many-angled house itself were under sail, making progress through the night, plowing steadily into the future in all directions.

Those who had the entrée

entered the private apartments by

the mirror-door that gave onto

the gallery and was kept shut. It was

only opened when one scratched at it,

and was closed again immediately.

—Saint-Simon

Twenty-five years passed.

On a night late in the autumn, George Mouse stepped out the window of what had been the third-floor library of his townhouse and through a small covered bridge, which connected his window with the window of what had once been a kitchen in a tenement that adjoined his building. The ex-kitchen was dark and cold; George Mouse's breath was manifest in the light of his lantern. As he walked, rats or mice moved away from him and his light, he heard their scratches and rustlings but saw nothing. Without opening a door (there hadn't been a door for years) he went out into the hallway and started carefully down the stairs, carefully because the stairs were rotten and loose where they weren't missing altogether.

On the floor below there were light and laughter; people greeted him as they went in and out of apartments with the makings of a communal dinner; children chased along the halls. But the first floor was dark again, unused now except for storage. George, holding his lantern aloft, peered down along the dark hall to the outer door, and could see its great bar in place, its chains and locks secure. He went around the stairs to the door which led to the basement, taking Out as he went an enormous bunch of keys. One, specially marked, dark as an old penny, unlocked the ancient Segal lock of the basement.

Every time he opened the basement door, George fretted over whether he shouldn't put a nice new padlock on it; this old lock was a toy by now, an elder's grip, anyone could break it. He always decided that a new lock would only make people wonder, and a shoulder against the door would satisfy curiosity, new padlock or no.

Oh, they had all grown very circumspect in this matter of keeping people out.

Down, the stairs, even more carefully, God knew what lived down here amid the rusted pipe and old boilers and fabulous detritus, he had once stepped on something large, soft and dead and nearly broken his neck. At the bottom of the stairs he hung up his lantern, went to a corner, and maneuvered an old trunk so that he could stand on it and reach a high, ratproof shelf.

He had had the gift, predicted long ago by Great-aunt Cloud (left him by a stranger, and not money), for a long time before he learned how he could have come by it. Even before he learned, he was in his Mouse way secretive about it, the result of growing up on the street and youngest in a nosy family. Everyone admired the potent, musky hashish George seemed always to be provided with, and all desired to have some; but he would not (could not) introduce them to his dealer (who was long dead). He kept everyone happy with free bits, and the pipe was always full at his place; but though sometimes, after a few pipes of it, he would look around at his stupefied company and feel guilt for his gloating, and his great, his hilarious, his astonishing secret would burn within him to be spilt, he never told, not a soul.

It was Smoky who, inadvertently, revealed to George the source of his great good fortune. "I read somewhere," Smoky said (his usual entry into conversation), "that oh fifty or sixty years ago, your neighborhood was a Middle Eastern neighborhood. Lots of Lebanese. And the little candy stores and places like that sold hashish, right out in the open. You know, along with the toffee and halvah. For a nickel, you could buy a lot. Big hunks. Like chocolate bars."

And indeed they were very much like chocolate bars. . . . George had felt like a cartoon mouse suddenly struck over the head with the great, well-worn mallet of Revelation.

Ever afterward, when he went down to take from his hoard, he had imagined himself a goat-bearded Levantine, hooknosed and skull-capped, a secret pederast who gave free baklava to the olive boys of the streets. Fussily he would arrange the old trunk and climb on it (lifting the frayed skirts of an imaginary dressing gown) and lift the lid of the wooden crate stenciled with curling letters.

Not much left. Time to reorder soon.

Beneath a thick covering of silvered paper, layer upon layer of lay. The layers were separated by yellow oiled paper. The bars themselves were wrapped tightly too in a third sort of oily paper. He took out two, considered a moment, and put one reluctantly back. It would not, though he had exclaimed so in awe many years ago when he had discovered what it was, last forever. He replaced the layer of oiled paper and then the layer of silvered paper; he drew back on the stout lid, and pushed in place the ancient shapeless nails; he blew across it to resettle the dust. He got down, and studied the bar in the lantern's light as he had the very first by electric light. He peeled away its paper carefully. It was as black as chocolate, and about the size of a playing card, an eighth of an inch thin. It bore on it a convolute impress: A trademark? Tax stamp? Mystic sign? He had never decided.

He pushed the trunk he had used for a stepladder back into its place in the corner, took up the lantern and started up the stairs. In his cardigan pocket was a piece of hashish something like a hundred years old, and, George Mouse had long ago decided, not reduced in potency by age at all. Improved, perhaps, like vintage port.

He was relocking the cellar door when there came a pounding at the street door, so sudden and unexpected that he cried out. He waited a moment, hoping it was some madman's momentary whim and wouldn't come again. But it did. He went to the door, listened at it without speaking, and heard frustrated cursing outside. Then, with a growl, the someone grabbed at the bars and began to shake them.

"That's no use, that's no use," George called. The shaking stopped.

"Well, open the door."

"What?" It was a habit of George's, when stuck for an answer, to act as though he hadn't heard the question.

"
Open
the
door!
"

"Now, you know I can't just open the door, man. You know what it's like."

"Well, listen. Can you tell me which of these buildings is number two-twenty-two?"

"Who wants to know?"

"
Why
does everybody in this city answer everything with a
question?
"

"Huh?"

"
Why can't you open the door and talk to me like a god DAMN human being?
"

Silence. The horrid depths of frustration in that outcry touched George's heart, and he listened at the door to see if there would be more; he tingled secretly at the safety he felt behind the door's fastness.

"Can you tell me," the someone began, and George could hear his rage strangled down into politeness, "please, where I can find, or if you know, the Mouse house or George Mouse?"

"Yes," George said. "I am him." That was risky, but surely even the most desperate bill-collectors and process-servers weren't abroad this late. "Who are you?"

"My name is Auberon Barnable. My father . . ." But already the clankings and scrapings of locks and shootings of bolts drowned him out. George reached into the darkness and pulled the person standing on the threshold into the hall. With quick skill he reslammed and barred and bolted the door, and then raised his lamp to look at his cousin.

"So you're the baby," he said, noting with perverse pleasure how ill this remark sat on the tall youth. The moving lantern made his expression changeful, but it wasn't really a changeful face; it was narrow and tight; in fact the whole of him, slim and neat as a pen in pipe-rack black clothes that fit him well, was somewhat rigid and aloof. Just pissed off, George thought. He laughed, and patted his arm. "Hey, how's the folks? How's Elsie, Lacy, and Tilly, whatever their names are? What brings you here?"

"Dad wrote," Auberon said, as though unwilling to waste effort answering all this if it had already been done.

"Oh yeah? Well, you know how the mail's been. Look, look. Come on. We don't have to stand in the hall. Colder than a witch's tit here. Coffee and something?"

Smoky's son shrugged shortly. "Be careful on the stairs," George said, and the lamplight threaded them both back through the tenement and over the little bridge till they stood together on the threadbare rug where Auberon's parents had first met.

Somewhere along their route, George had picked up an old three-and-a-half-legged kitchen chair. "Did you run away from home? Have a seat," he said, motioning Auberon to a tattered wingback.

"My father and mother know I left, if that's what you mean," Auberon said, a bit haughtily, which was understandable, George thought. Then he shrank back in the chair: George had with a grunt and a wild look raised the broken chair over his head, and, his face twisted with exertion, brought it down on the stone hearth. It fell clattering to pieces. "Did they approve?" George asked, tossing the chair-parts into the fire.

"Of course." Auberon crossed his legs and plucked at his trouser-knee. "He wrote. I told you. He said to look you up."

"Oh, yeah. Did you walk?"

"No." With some contempt.

"And you came to the City to . . ."

"To seek my fortune."

"Aha." George hung a kettle over the fire and took down a precious can of contraband coffee from a bookshelf. "Any glimpse yet what form it might take?"

"No, not exactly. Only. . ." George mmm-hmmm'd encouragingly as he prepared the coffeepot and set out mismatched cups. "I wanted, I want to write, or be a writer." George raised his eyebrows. Auberon was twisted around in the wing-back chair as though these admissions were escaping him against his will, and he were trying to hold them in. "I thought television."

"Wrong coast."

"What?"