Little, Big (37 page)

Besides cats, there was the dog Spark. He was descended from a long line of dogs who all looked (so Smoky said) like natural sons of Buster Keaton: light patches above Spark's eyes gave him the same faintly reproachful, enormously alert, long-nosed face. Spark when fabulously aged impregnated a visiting cousin and fathered three anonymous dogs and another Spark; his lineage assured, he curled up in Doc's favorite chair before the fire for the rest of his life.

It wasn't only the animals (and Doc expressed himself clearly enough without ever speaking about his dislike for pets) that pushed Doc and Mom aside. Itwas as though, while losing no dignity or place, they were being silently sailed into the past on a quick and heaping tide of toys, cookie crumbs, birds' nests, diapers, Band-aids and bunk beds. Mom, since her daughter was a mom too, became Mom Drinkwater, then Mom D., then Momdy, which she couldn't help feeling was an uncomfortable kind of kicking-upstairs for one who had always served hard and well below. And Somehow over the years the many clocks in the house began to chime unsynchronized, though Doc, usually with one or two children around his knees, used to set them and wind them and peer at their mechanisms often.

The house itself aged, gracefully on the whole and still sound at heart, but sagging here and loosening there; its maintenance was a huge job and never done. At its perimeters, rooms had to be closed off: a tower, an extravagance, a glass orangery whose barley-sugar panes lay scattered amid the flower-pots, fallen square by diamond out of the icing of white wrought iron into which John Drinkwater had puttied them. Of the many gardens and flowerbeds around the place, the kitchen-garden's was the slowest downfall and the longest decadence. Though whitewash flaked from the pretty cutout porch and the grape-leaves strangled up the ogee arches, though the steps sagged and the flagstone path disappeared under dock and dandelion muscling up through its crevices, still for as long as she was able Great-aunt Cloud tended the flowerbeds and they brought forth blossoms. Three crabapple trees had grown up at the garden's end, grown old and hale and gnarled; every autumn they scattered their hard fruit on the ground to inebriate the wasps as it rotted. Momdy made jelly of a fraction of it. Later on, when he became a collector of words, the word "crabbed" would bring to Auberon's mind those puckered orange apples withering in their useless sourness amid the weeds.

Auberon grew up in the kitchen-garden. When at last the spring came when Cloud decided that trying to keep up the garden, her back and legs being as they were, and failing would be more painful than letting it go altogether, then Auberon liked it better: now the flower beds weren't forbidden him. And as it was abandoned, the garden and its buildings took on some of the attractions of a ruin: the tools in the earth-smelling potting shed were dusty and remote, and spiders spun webs across the openings of watering cans, giving them the fabulous antiquity of casques in a buried hoard. The pump house had always had for him this quality of the remote, the barbaric, with its useless tiny windows and peaked roof and miniature eaves and cornices. It was a heathen shrine, and the iron pump was the long-crested, great-tongued idol. He would stand on tiptoe to raise the pump-handle, raise it and lower it with all his strength while the idol choked hoarsely, until there came a catch in its throat as the handle met some mysterious resistance, and he must pull himself almost off his feet to draw it down, and again, and then with a magical sudden ease and release the water would sluice down the pump's broad tongue and splash in a continuous smooth clear sheet onto the worn stones.

The garden was huge then to him. Seen from the vast, slightly undulating deck of the porch it went on great as a seascape to the crabapples and then broke in a high surf of overgrown flowers and indomitable weed against the stone wall and the X-gate forever shut in it which led into the Park. It was a sea and a jungle. He alone knew what had become of the flagstone path, because he could go on all fours beneath the overarching leaves where it ran secretly, its stones as cool and gray and smooth as water.

At evening there were fireflies. He was always surprised by them, how one moment there seemed to be none, and then, when evening turned blue and he looked up from some absorbing thing— the making inch by inch of a molehill maybe—they would be alight in the velvet darkness. There was an evening when he decided to sit on the porch as day turned to night, sit and watch only and nothing else, and catch the first one to light itself, and the next and the next: for the sake of some completeness he hankered after—would always hanker after.

The porch steps were that summer just throne height to him, and so he sat, sneakered feet planted firmly, not so rigidly attentive that he didn't look up at the phoebe's nest modeled neatly in the porch rafters, or at the silver pen-stroke of an unseen jet's smoke; he even sang, without a tune, the words a meaningless onomatopoeia of the fading twilight. All the while he kept watch; yet in the end it was Lilac who saw the first firefly.

"There," she said, in her little gravelly voice; and off amid the jungle of the ferns the light did go on, as though created by her pointing finger. When the next lit, she pointed with a toe.

Lilac wore no shoes, she never did, not even in winter, only a pale blue dress without sleeves or a belt that came midway down her satiny thighs. When he told his mother so, she asked didn't Lilac ever get cold, and he couldn't answer; apparently not, she never shivered, it was as though with the blue dress on she was complete, whole, needed no further protection; her dress, unlike his flannel shirts, was part of her, and not put on to cover or disguise.

The whole nation of the fireflies was coming into being. Whenever Lilac pointed and said "there" another one, or many, lit their pale candles, whitey-green like the phosphorescent tip of the light pull in his mother's closet. When they were all present, the only clarity in a garden grown vague and colorless and massy, Lilac circled her finger in the air and the fireflies began to gather, slowly, by jumps, as though reluctant, in the middle of the air whore Lilac pointed; and when they had gathered they began to wheel there, at the direction of Lilac's finger, a twinkling circle, a solemn pavane. He could almost hear the music.

"Lilac made the fireflies dance," he told his mother when at length he came in from the garden. He circled his finger in the air as Lilac had and made a hum.

"Dance?" His mother said. "Don't you think it's time for you to go to bed?"

"Lilac stays up," he said, not comparing himself to her— there were no rules for her—but only associating himself with her: even though he had to go to bed, wrongly, when blue light still suffused the sky and not all the birds were yet asleep, still he knew someone who did not; who would sit up in the garden deep into the night as he lay dreaming, or walk in the Park and see the bats, and never sleep at all if she so chose.

"Ask Sophie to turn on your bath," his mother said. "Tell her I'll be up in a minute."

He stood looking up at her a moment, considering whether to protest. Bathing was another thing Lilac never did, though often she sat on the edge of the tub, studying him, aloof and immaculate. His father rattled his paper and made a noise in his 'throat, and Auberon went out of the kitchen, a good little soldier.

Smoky put down his paper. Daily Alice had fallen silent at the sink, the dishclout in her hand, her eyes elsewhere.

"A lot of kids have imaginary friends," Smoky said. "Or brothers or sisters."

"Lilac," Alice said. She sighed and picked up a cup; she looked at the tea leaves in it as though to divine from them.

Sophie allowed him a duck. It was often easier to earn such favors from her, not because she was necessarily more kindly but because she was less alert than his mother, and seemed not always to be paying much attention. When he was neck-deep in the Gothic bathtub (large enough almost for him to swim in) she unwrapped a duck from its tissue. He could see that there were five still left in the compartmented box.

The ducks were made of Castile soap, Cloud said who had bought them for him, and that's why they float. Castile soap, she said, is very pure, and doesn't sting your eyes. The ducks were neatly carved, of a pale lemon yellow which did seem very pure to him, and of a smoothness that inspired a nameless emotion in him, something between reverence and deep sensual pleasure.

"Time to start washing," Sophie said. He set the duck afloat, brooding on an unrealizable dream: to set all the pale yellow ducks afloat at once, without regard, flotilla of supernal smooth carven purity. "Lilac made the fireflies dance," he said.

"Oh? Wash behind your ears."

Why, he wondered or rather did not quite wonder, was he always told to
do
something or other whenever he mentioned Lilac? Once his mother had suggested to him that it might be better not to say too much about Lilac to Sophie, because it might make her feel bad; but he thought it enough if he was careful to make the distinction: "Not
your
Lilac."

"No."

"
Your
Lilac is gone."

"Yes."

"Before I was born."

"That's right."

Lilac, sitting on the episcopal toilet seat, only looked from one to the other, seemingly unmoved, as though none of this concerned her. There was a host of questions Auberon had about the two Lilacs—or was it three?—and every time Sophie's came to his mind a new question budded on the complex bush. But he knew there were secrets he would not be told: only as he grew older would he come to resent that.

"Betsy Bird's getting married," he said. "Again."

"How do you know that?"

"Tacey said so. Lily said she's going to marry Jerry Thome. Lucy said she's going to have a baby.
Already
." He mimicked the intrigued, faintly censorious tone his sisters took.

"Well. First I've heard of it," Sophie said. "Out you come."

With reluctance he abandoned the duck. Already its sharply-incised features had begun to soften; in future baths it would grow eyeless, then featureless; its broad beak would dwindle to a sparrow's, then gone; then headless (he would be careful not to break its increasingly skinny neck, not wanting to interfere in its dissolution); at last shapeless, not a duck any more, a duck's heart only, still pure, still floating.

She toweled him roughly, yawning. Her bedtime was often as not before his. Unlikehis mother, she usually left wet spots, on the backs of his arms, his ankles. "Why don't you ever get married?" he asked. This would solve one of the difficulties about one of the Lilacs.

"Nobody ever asked me."

This wasn't true. "Rudy Flood asked you. When his wife died."

"I wasn't in love with Rudy. Where did you hear that, anyway?"

"Tacey told me. Were you ever in love?"

"Once."

"With who?"

"That's a secret."

It wasn't until Auberon was past seven years old that his Lilac went away, though long before that he stopped mentioning her existence to anyone. When he was grown up he would sometimes wonder if most children who have imaginary friends have them for longer than they admit. After a child has stopped insisting that a place be set for his friend at dinner, that people not sit in chairs his friend is sitting in, does he usually go on having some intercourse with him? And does the usual imaginary friend fade only slowly, lingering on more and more spectrally as the real world becomes realer, or is it usually the case that on one specific day he disappears, never to be seen again—as Lilac did? The people he questioned said they remembered nothing about it at all. But Auberon thought they might still be harboring the old small ghosts, perhaps ashamed. Why after all should he alone remember so vividly?

That one specific day was a June day, as clear as water, summer fully clothed, the day of the picnic: the day Auberon grew up.

The morning he spent in the library, stretched out along the chesterfield, the leather cool against the backs of his legs. He was reading: or anyway holding a heavy book on his chest and looking at lines of dense print one by one. There had never been a time when Auberon hadn't loved reading; the passion had begun long before he could actually read, when he would sit with his father or his sister Tacey by the fire, feet up, turning when they turned the incomprehensible pages of a big picture-poor volume and feeling inexpressibly cozy and at peace. Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump. He liked them big; he liked them old; he liked them best in many volumes, like the thirteen on a low shelf, golden-brown, obscure, of Gregorovius's Medieval Rome. Those— the big ones, the old ones—held secrets by their very nature; because of his years, though the paragraphs and chapters passed each under his scrutiny (he was no skimmer), he couldn't quite get at those secrets, prove the book to be (as most books after all are) dull, dated, stupid. They kept their magic, mostly. And there were always more on the burdened shelves, the occult volumes John Drinkwater collected no less compelling to his great-great-grandson than the multivolume stuff he had bought by the yard to fill up the shelves. The one he held at the moment was the last edition of John Drinkwater's
Architecture of Country Houses
. Lilac, bored, flitted from corner to corner of the library, taking poses, as though playing Statue Tag with herself.

"Hey," Smoky said through the open double doors. "What are you doing frowsting in here?" The word was Cloud's. "Have you been outside? What a day." He got no response but a slowly turned page. From where he stood Smoky saw only the back of his son's cropped head (Smoky's own haircutting) with two pronounced tendons, a vulnerable hollow between them; and the top of the book; and two crossed big-sneakered feet. He didn't have to look to know Auberon wore a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists—he never wore any other kind, or unbuttoned the wrists, no matter how hot the weather. He felt a kind of impatient pity for the boy. "Hey," he said again.