Little, Big (41 page)

The athenor of the alchemists, for instance, the Philosopher's Egg within which the transformation from base to gold took place—was it not a microcosm, a small world? When the black-books said that the Work was to be begun in the sign of Aquarius and completed in Scorpio, they meant not those signs as they occurred in the heavens, but as they occurred in the universe of the world-shaped, world-containing Egg itself. The Work was not other than Genesis; the Red Man and the White Lady, when they appeared, microscopic in the Egg, were the soul of the Philosopher himself, as an object of the Philosopher's thought, itself a product of his soul, and so on,
regressus ad infinitum
, and in both directions too. And the Art of Memory: had not the Art introjected into the finite circle of her, Hawksquill's, skull the mighty circles of the heavens? And did not that cosmic engine within then order her memory, thus her perception, of things sublunar, celestial, and infinite? The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe—what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of? If the Earth, the old center, now was seen truly to revolve somewhere halfway between the center and the outside; and the Sun, which before had revolved on a path halfway to the outside, were now the center, then a half-turn like that in a Mbbius strip was thrown into the belt of the stars: and what then became of the old circumference? It was, strictly, unimaginable: the Universe exploded into infinitude, a circle of which Mind, the center, was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The trick-mirror of finitude was smashed, Bruno laughed, the starry realms were a jewelled bracelet in the hand.

Well, all that was old. Every schoolboy (in the schools that had schooled Hawksquill) knew small worlds were great. If these cards were in her hands, she had no doubt she could quickly learn just what small worlds they were intended to discover: had little doubt that she herself had traveled in them. But were these cards the cards her grandfather had found and lost? And were they as well the cards Russell Eigenblick claimed to be in? A coincidence of that magnitude didn't seem inherently unlikely to Hawksquill; there was no chance in her universe. But she had no idea how further to search for them, and learn. In fact that alley seemed just at the moment so blind that she decided to walk no further up it. Eigenblick was no Roman Catholic, and the Rosicrucians, as everybody knows, were invisible—and whatever else Russell Eigenblick was, he was very visible. "The hell with it," she was saying under her breath when the doorbell rang.

She consulted her watch. The Maid of Stone still slept, though the day was already as dark as night. She went to the hall, took a heavy stick from the umbrella-stand, and opened the door.

Overcoated and broad-hatted, windblown and rainswept, the black figure on her doorstep momentarily frightened her.

"Wingéd Messenger Service," he said. "Hello, lady."

"Hello, Fred," Hawksquill said. "You gave me a start." For the first time she had understood the pejorative "spook." "Come in, come in."

He would come no further than the vestibule, because he dripped; he stood dripping while Hawksquill fetched him a wine-glass of whiskey.

"Dark days," he said, taking it.

"St. Lucy's," Hawksquill said. "Darkest of all."

He chuckled, knowing very well she knew he meant more than the weather. He drained his glass at a gulp, and drew from his plastic-sheathed carrier a thick envelope for her. It bore no sender's address. She signed Fred Savage's book.

"Bad day to be working," she said.

"Neither rain nor sleet nor snow," said Fred, "and the owl for all his feathers was a-cold."

"You won't stay a moment?" she said. "The fire's lit."

"If I stayed a
moment
," Fred Savage said, leaning to one side, "I'd stay an
hour
," leaning to the other side, rain running from his hat; "and thad be that." He straightened, and bowed out.

No man more faithful, when he was working, which wasn't often. Hawksquill shut the door on him (thinking of him as a dark shuttle or bobbin stitching up the rainy City) and returned to her parlor.

The fat envelope contained a deck of new bills in large denominations, and a brief note on the stationery of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club: "Payment per agreement in the matter of R. E. Have you come to any conclusions?" It was unsigned.

She dropped this note on the open folio of Bruno she had been studying, and was going back to the fire, counting her huge and as yet unearned fee, when a lurking connection was made within her consciousness. She went to the table, turned on a strong light, and looked closely at the marginal note which had originally stoked this long train of thought, a train which had just been shunted by the note from the Club.

The Italic hand is notable for its legibility. Yet now and then the swash capitals, if written quickly, can confuse. And yes: looked at closely there was no doubt that what she had read as "the return of R. C." should be read "the return of R. E.".

Where on earth, if on earth at all, were those cards?

As she grew older, Nora Cloud seemed to those around her to take on greater mass and solidity. To herself also—though she gained no physical weight—she seemed to grow great. As her age reached toward three digits and she moved slowly through Edgewood on two canes to support her massy years, she bent—so it seemed—less from weakness than to accommodate herself in the narrow corridors of the house.

She came with four-footed deliberateness down from her room toward the drum-table in the many-sided music-room, where beneath a brass and green glass lamp the cards in their bag in their box waited for her—and where Sophie, these several years her student, waited too.

Cloud let herself down into her chair, her sticks rattling and the bones of her knees popping. She lit a brown cigarette and placed it in a saucer beside her, where its smoke rose ribbony and curling like thought. "What's our question?" she asked.

"Like yesterday," Sophie said. "Just to continue."

"No question," Cloud said. "All right."

They were silent awhile together. A moment of silent prayer, Cloud had been delighted and surprised to hear Smoky describe this as; a moment for considering the question, or no question, as today.

Sophie with her long soft hand over her eyes thought of no question. She thought of the cards, dark in their bag in their box. She didn't think of them as units, as individual pieces of paper, could no longer think of them that way even if she chose to. She didn't think of them either as notions, as persons, places, things. She thought of them as one thing, like a story or an interior, something made of space and time, lengthy and vast but compact; jointed, dimensional, ever-unfolding.

"Well," Cloud said with gentle finality. Her brownspotted hand hovered over the box. "Shall I lay out a Rose?"

"May I?" Sophie asked. Cloud withdrew her hand before it touched the box, which might spoil Sophie's control. Attempting Cloud's wasteless gestures, her calm attention, Sophie laid out a Rose.

Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman, ace of cups, the Cousin, four of coins and queen of coins. The Rose grew out across the drum-table with an iron yet an organic force. If there was no question, as today, the question always was: what is this Rose the answer to? Sophie laid down the central card.

"The Fool again," Cloud said.

"Contention with the Cousin," Sophie said.

"Yes," Cloud said. "But whose cousin? His own, or ours?"

The Fool card in the center of the Rose showed a full-bearded man in armor crossing a brook. Like the White Knight he was in the act of pitching head-first and straight-legged from his brawny horse. His expression was mild, and he looked not into the shallow stream he fell toward, but outward at the viewer, as though what he was doing were intentional, a trick, or possibly an example of something: gravity? In one hand he held a scallop-shell; in the other, some links of sausage.

Before interpretation of any fall could be considered, Cloud had taught Sophie, they must decide how the cards themselves must at this moment be construed. "You can think of them as a story, and then you must find the beginning, middle, and end; or a sentence, and you must parse it; or a piece of music, and you must find the tonic and signature; or anything at all that has parts and makes sense."

"It may be," she said, looking down now at this Rose with a Fool in the middle, "that what we have here isn't a story or an interior, but a Geography."

Sophie asked her what she meant by that, and Cloud said she wasn't at all sure. Her cheek was in her hand. Not a map, or a view, but a Geography. Sophie's cheek was in her hand too, and for a long time she gazed down at the Rose she had made and only wondered; she thought, a Geography, and wondered if it might be that here, that this, that—but then she closed her eyes and paused a moment, no, there was no question today, please, and not that question of any one.

Life—her own life anyway, Sophie had come to think, as it grew longer—was like one of those many-storied houses of dreams she had once been able to build, where the dreamer, with a slow or sudden rush of understanding like a wash of cool water, knows himself to have been merely asleep and dreaming, to have merely invented the pointless task, the grim hotel, the flight of stairs; they go away, tattered and unreal; the dreamer awakes relieved in his own bed (though the bed for a reason he can't quite remember is laid in a busy street or afloat in a calm sea), and rises yawning, and has odd adventures, which go on until (with a slow or sudden rush of understanding) he awakes, he had only fallen asleep here in this desert place (Oh I remember) or (Oh I see) in this palace antechamber, and it's time to be up and about life's business; and so on and on: her life had been of that kind.

There had been a dream about Lilac, that she had been real, and Sophie's. Then she had awakened, and Lilac wasn't Lilac at all: she came to see that, came to see that something dreadful had happened, for no reason she could imagine or remember, and Lilac was neither Lilac nor hers, but something else instead. That dream—one of the awful kind, the kind where something terrible and irrevocable has happened, something that oppresses the soul with a special, unrelievable grief—had gone on for nearly two years, and had not truly ended on the night (the night she could still not think about without shudders and involuntary moans, no, not after twenty years) when in desperation, telling no one, she had brought the false thing to George Mouse: and the fireplace: and the blasts, and the phosphorescence, and the rain and the stars and the sirens.

But anyway, awake or not, she had no more Lilac then at all; her dream was another kind then, the Endless Search, that one where some goal recedes forever, or changes when it is approached, leaving you always with further work to do and, though pressing always on your attention, is never nearer to completion. It was then that she had begun to seek for answers from Cloud and her cards: not only
Why
, but also
How
;
Who
, she supposed she knew, but not
Where
; and, most important of all, would she ever see, have, hold her real daughter again, and
When
? Cloud, try as she might, could give no clear answers to these questions, though she held that still the answers must be in the deck and its conjunctions somewhere; and so Sophie began to study their falls herself, feeling that the intensity of her desire might allow her to discover what Cloud could not. But no answer came for her either, and soon she gave it up, and took to her bed again.

But life is wakings-up, all unexpected, all surprising. On a certain November afternoon, twelve years ago, from a certain nap (why that day? Why that nap?) she had awakened from sleeping: from eyes-closed, blankets-up-to-chin, pillow-sleep Sophie awakened, or had been awakened, for good. As though someone (while she slept) had stolen them, her powers of sleeping and escaping into the small dreams within the large had gone away; and Sophie, startled and lost, had had to dream from then on that she was awake, and that the world was around her, and to think what to do with it. It was only then, because her sleepless mind had to have an Interest, any Interest, that (without any hard question, without any question at all) she had taken up the study of the cards, beginning at the beginning humbly as Cloud's tutee.

And yet, though we wake, though there is no end to waking and saying
Oh I see
, not ever (Sophie knew it and was patient), still within the dream in which we find ourselves every other dream is nested, every one we have awakened from. Sophie's hard first question to the cards had not, precisely, gone without an answer, it had been transmuted into questions about the question. It had branched and rooted like a tree, growing questions like buds, and then at some moment all the questions had become one question: what tree is this? And as her study progressed, as she shifted and shuffled and laid out in geometrical figures the greasy, comerless, speaking cards, the question intrigued her further, involved her, at last absorbed her utterly. What tree is this? And yet always at its base, between its roots, beneath its branches, still unfound and growing unfindable, a lost child lay asleep.

Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman. The queen of coins reversed. The Cousin: contention with the Fool in the middle of the deck. A Geography: not a map, or a view, but a Geography. Sophie looked down at the puzzle of it, shifting her consciousness across it, paying attention without quite paying attention, pricking up the ears of her thought and easing them again as hints of speech proceeded from and then retired back into the gabble of the cards' alignments.

Then:

"Oh," Sophie said, and again "Oh," as though suddenly in receipt of bad news. Cloud looked up at her questioningly, and saw Sophie pale and shocked, eyes wide with surprise and pity—pity for her, Cloud. Cloud looked down again at the Geography, and yes, in a twinkling it had contracted, like those optical illusions where a complex urn becomes without your choosing it two faces regarding each other. Cloud was used to these vagaries, and to this message; Sophie evidently was not yet.