Little, Big (63 page)

"I thought not!" he said, triumphantly. He snatched the spectacles from his face as though he had just remembered they were there. He moved toward an intercom on the phony Louis Quatorze desk.

"Wait," Hawksquill said. "Tell me this. Do you want, after eight hundred years of sleep, to fail in your enterprise?"

He turned slowly to regard her.

"You must remember," Hawksquill went on, "how once you were abased before a certain Pope, and were forced to hold his stirrup, and run beside his horse."

Eigenblick's face was suffused. It grew a bright red different from the red of his beard. He rifled fury at Hawksquill from his eagle eyes. "Who are you?" he said.

"At this moment," Hawksquill said, gesturing toward the farther end of the suite, "men await you who intend to abase you in just such a degree. Only more cleverly. So that you will never notice being clipped. I mean the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club. Or have they presented themselves to you under some other name?"

"Nonsense," Eigenblick said. "I've never heard of this so-called club." But his eyes clouded; perhaps, somewhere, somewhen, he had been warned. . . . "And what
could
you mean about the Pope? A charming gentleman who I've never met." His eyes not meeting hers, he picked up his little coffee and drank it off.

But she had him: she saw that. If he didn't ring to have guards eject her, he would listen. "Have they promised you high position?" she asked.

"The highest," he said after a long pause, gazing out the window.

"It might interest you to know that for some years those gentlemen have employed me on various errands. I think I know them. Was it the Presidency?"

He said nothing. It was.

"The Presidency," Hawksquill said, "is no longer an office. It's a room. A nice one, but only a room. You must refuse it. Politely. And any other blandishments they may offer. I'll explain your next moves later. . . ."

He turned on her. "How is it you know these things?" he said. "How do you know me?"

Hawksquill returned his gunlike look with one of her own, and said, in her best wizard's manner, "There is much that I know."

The intercom buzzed. Eigenblick went to it, looked thoughtfully at the array of bottons on it, finger to his lips, and then punched one. Nothing happened. He pushed another, and a voice made of static spoke: "Everything is ready, sir."

"Ja," Eigenblick said. "Moment." He released the button, realized he hadn't been heard, pressed another, and repeated himself. He turned to Hawksquill. "However it is you've found out these things," he said, "you have obviously not found out all. You see," he went on, a broad smile on his face and his eyes cast upward with the look of one confident of his election, "I'm in the cards. Nothing that can happen to me can deflect a destiny set elsewhere long ago. Protected. All this was meant to be."

"Your Majesty," Hawksquill said, "perhaps I haven't made myself clear. . . ."

"Will you stop calling me that!" he said, furious.

"Sorry. Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. I know very well that you are in the cards—a deck of very pretty ones, with trumps at least obstensibly designed to foretell and encourage the return of your old Empire; designed and drawn, I would guess, some time in the reign of Rudolf II, and printed in Prague. They have been put to other uses since. Without your being, so to speak, any the less in them."

"Where are they?" he said, suddenly coming toward her, avaricious hands like claws held out. "Give them to me. I must have them."

"If I may go on," Hawksquill said.

"They're my property," Eigenblick said.

"Your Empire's," she said. "Once." She stared him into silence, and said: "If I may go on: I know you're in the cards. I know what powers put you there, and—a little—to what end. I know your destiny. What you must believe, if you are to accomplish it, is that I am in it."

"You."

"Come to warn you, and to aid you. I have powers. Great enough to have discovered all this, to have found you out, needle in the haystack of Time. You have need of me. Now. And in time to come."

He considered her. She saw doubt, hope, relief, fear, resolution come and go in his big face. "Why," he said, "was I never told about you?"

"Perhaps," she said, "because they didn't know about me."

"Nothing is hidden from them."

"Much is. You would do well to learn that."

He chewed his cheek for a moment, but the battle was over. "What's in it for you?" he said. The intercom buzzed again.

"We'll discuss my reward later," she said. "Just now, before you answer that, you'd better decide what you will tell your visitors."

"Will you be with me?" he said, suddenly needful.

"They mustn't see me," Hawksquill said. "But I'll be with you." A cheap trick, a cat's bone; and yet (she thought, as Eigenblick punched at the intercom) just the thing to convince the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, if he remembered his youth at all, that indeed she did have the powers she claimed. With his back to her, she disappeared; when he turned to face her, or the place where she had been, she said, "Shall we go meet the Club?"

The day was gray, a certain pale and moist gray, when Auberon descended from the bus at the crossroads. He had had words with the driver about being let off at this particular place; had had difficulty at first in describing it, then in convincing the driver that he actually passed such a spot. The driver shook his head slowly in negative as Auberon described, his eyes not meeting Auberon's, and said "Nope, nope," softly, as though lost in thought; a transparent lie, Auberon knew, the man simply didn't want to make the slightest variation in his routine. Coldly polite, Auberon described the place again, then sat in the first place behind the driver, his eyes peeled; and tapped the driver when the place approached. Got out, triumphant, a sentence forming on his tongue about the hundreds of times the man must have passed this place, if that was the level of observation to be found in the men the public was urged to leave the driving to, etc.; but the door hissed shut and the long gray bus ground its gears like teeth and lurched away.

The fingerboard he stood by pointed as always down the road toward Edgewood; more haggard, leaning at a more senescent angle, the name more time-erased than he remembered or than it had been when he had last seen it, but the same. He started down the looping road, brown as milk-chocolate after the rain, stepping along cautiously and surprised by the loudness of his footfalls. He hadn't understood how much he had been deprived of during his months in the City. The Art of Memory could make a plan of his past where all this had perhaps a place, but it couldn't have restored to him this fullness: these odors, sweet and moist and vivifying, as though the air had a clear liquid texture; the constant low nameless sound filling up the air, whispering loud to his dull ear, pricked out with birdsong; the very sense of volume, of far distances and middle distances made up out of lines and groups of new-leaving trees and the roll and heap of the earth. He was able to survive outside all this well enough—air was air, after all, here or in the City—but, once plunged down within it again, he might have felt returned to a native element, might have uncurled within it, soul expanding like a butterfly sprung from its confining coccoon. In fact he did stretch his arms out, breathe deeply, and quote a few lines of verse. But his soul was a cold stone.

As he went along, he felt himself to be accompanied by someone: someone young, someone not in a lank brown overcoat, someone not hung over, someone who tugged at his sleeve, reminding him that here he'd used to pull his bike over the wall to return by secret ways to the Summer House and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, there he'd fallen out of a tree, there bent down with Doc to hear the mutter of closeted woodchucks. It had all happened once, to someone, to this insistent someone. Not to him . . . The gray stone pillars topped with gray oranges rose up where and when they always would. He reached up to one to touch the pitted surface, clammy and slick with spring. Down at the end of the drive his sisters awaited him on the porch.

Now for God's sake. His homecoming was to be no more secret than his leaving—and as he thought this, he realized for the first time that he had intended it to be secret, had supposed himself able to slip back into the house without anyone's noticing he had been gone for some eighteen months. Foolish! And yet the last thing he wanted was a fuss made over him. Too late, anyway, for as he stood by the gate-posts uncertainly, Lucy had spied him and leapt up waving. She pulled Lily after her to run and greet him; Tacey more regally kept to the peacock chair, dressed in a long skirt and one of his old tweed jackets.

"Hi, hi," he said, casual but suddenly aware of the figure he must cut, unshaven and bloodshot, with his shopping bag and the City dirt beneath his nails and in his hair. So clean and vernal Lucy and Lily seemed, so glad, that he was torn between drawing back from them and kneeling before them to beg their forgiveness; and though they embraced him and took his bag from him, talking both at once, he knew they read him.

"You'll never guess who came here," Lucy said.

"An old woman," Auberon said, glad that once in his life he could be sure he guessed right, "with a gray bun. How's Mom? How's Dad?"

"But
who
she is you'll never guess," Lily said.

"Did she tell you I was coming? I never said it to her."

"No. But we knew. But
guess
."

"She is," Lucy said, "a cousin. In a way. Sophie found out. It was years ago . . ."

"In England," Lily said. "Do you know the Auberon you're named after? Well, he was Violet Bramble Drinkwater's son . . ."

"But not John Drinkwater's! A love child . . ."

"How do you keep all these people straight?" Auberon asked.

"Anyway. Back in England Violet Bramble had an affair. Before she married John. With someone named Oliver Hawksquill."

"A swain," Lily said.

"And got pregnant, and that was Auberon. And
this
lady . . ."

"Hello, Auberon," Tacey said. "How was the City?"

"Gee, just great," Auberon said, feeling a hard lump rise in his throat and water spring to his eyes. "Great."

"Did you walk?" Tacey asked.

"No, the bus, actually." They were silent a moment at that. No help for it. "So listen. How's Mom? How's Dad?"

"Fine. She got your card."

A horror swept him as he thought of the few cards and letters he had sent from the City, evasive and bragging, or uncommunicative, or horribly facetious. The last one, Mom's birthday, he had found, oh God, unsigned in a trash can he was examining, a bouquet of smarmy sentiments; but his silence had been long and he was drunk and he sent it. He saw now that it must have been to her like being stabbed cruelly with a butter knife. He sat down on the steps of the porch, unable just for the moment to go further.

"Well, what do you think, Ma?" Daily Alice asked as she stood looking into the dank darkness of the old icebox.

Momdy was examining the stock inside the cupboards. "Tuna wiggle?" she said doubtfully.

"Oh dear," Alice said. "Smoky will give me a look. You know that look?"

"Oh, I do."

"Well." Beneath her gaze the few damp items on the slatted metal shelves seemed to shrink away. There was a constant drip, as in a cave. Daily Alice thought of the old days, the great white refrigerator chock-full of crisp vegetables and colorful containers, perhaps a varnished turkey or a diamondback ham, and neatly wrapped meats and meals asleep in the icy-breathing freezer. And a cheerful light that winked on to show it all, as on a stage. Nostalgia. She put her hand on a luke-cold milk bottle and said, "Did Rudy come today?"

"No."

"He's really getting too old for that," Alice said. "Lifting big blocks of ice. And he forgets." She sighed, still looking within; Rudy's decline, and the general falling-off in the amenities of life, and the not-so-hot dinner probably awaiting them all, all seemed contained within the zinc-lined icebox.

"Well, don't hold the door open, dear," Momdy said softly. Alice was closing it when the swinging doors of the pantry opened.

"Oh my God," Alice said. "Oh, Auberon."

She came quickly to embrace him, hurrying to him as though he were in deep trouble and she must instantly rescue him. His harrowed look, though, came less from the trouble he was in than from the trip he had just taken through the house, which had assaulted him unmercifully with memories, odors he'd forgotten he knew, scarred furniture and worn rugs and garden-exhibiting windows that filled his eyesight to the brim, as if it had been half a lifetime and not a year and a half he'd been away.

"Hi," he said.

She released him. "Look at you," she said. "What is it?"

"What's what?" he said, attempting a smile, wondering what degradation she read in his features. Daily Alice raised a wondering finger and traced the line of his single eyebrow across his nose. "When did you grow that?"

"Huh?"

Daily Alice touched the place above her own nose where (though faintly, because of her lighter hair) she bore the mark of Violet's descendants.

"Oh." He shrugged. He hadn't actually noticed; he hadn't been studying mirrors much lately. "I dunno." He laughed. "How do you like that?" He stroked it himself. Soft and fine as baby hair, with one or two coarser hairs springing from it. "I must be getting old," he said.

She saw that that was so; that he had crossed in his absence some threshold beyond which life is consumed faster than it increases; she could see the marks of it in his face and the backs of his hands. A hard lump formed in her throat, and she embraced him again so that she wouldn't have to speak. Over her shoulder, to his grandmother, Auberon said, "Hi Momdy, listen, listen, don't get up, don't."

"Well, you're a bad boy, not to have written your mother," Momdy said. "To tell us you were coming. Not a thing for supper."

"Oh, that's okay, that's okay," he said, releasing himself from his mother and coming to kiss Momdy's feathery soft cheek. "How have you been?"