Little, Big

IV.

Insnar'd in flowers, I fall on grass.

—Marvell

All on a summer morning Smoky dressed himself to wed, in a white suit of yellowed linen or alpaca that his father had always said once belonged to Harry Truman, and there were the initials on the inside pocket, HST; it was only when he came to consider it for a wedding suit (old not new) that he realized the initials could after all stand for somebody else, and that his father had kept up the joke through his life and then perpetuated it beyond without cracking a smile. The sensation wasn't unknown to Smoky. He had wondered if his education weren't the same kind of posthumous fun (revenge on his betraying mother?) and though Smoky could take a joke, he did as he shot his cuffs at himself in the bathroom mirror feel a little at a loss and wish his father had given him some man-to-man advice on weddings and marriage. Barnable had hated weddings and funerals and christenings, and whenever one seemed imminent would pack socks, books, dog, and son and move on; Smoky had been to Franz Mouse's wedding reception and danced with the starry-eyed bride, who made him a surprising suggestion; but that was a Mouse wedding after all and the couple were separated already. He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn't believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, "Don't you want it to be a surprise?" The only other thing he was sure of was that he shouldn't see his bride till she was led up the aisle (what aisle?) by her father. And so he wouldn't, and didn't peek in the direction he thought her room lay (he was wrong) when he went to the john. His walking shoes stuck out thick and unfestive from beneath his white cuffs.


A Suit of Truman's

The wedding was to be "on the grounds," he had been told, and Great-aunt Cloud, as oldest there, would conduct him to the place—a chapel, Smoky surmised, and Cloud with that surprised air said yes, she supposed that's exactly what it was. It was she Smoky found waiting for him at the top of the stairs when at last he shyly emerged from the bathroom. What a comforting presence he found her, large and calm in a June dress with a bunch of late violets at her bosom and a walking-stick in her hand. Like him she wore hard shoes with a glum expression. "Very, very good," she said, as though a hope had proved out for her; she held him at arm's length and inspected him through blue-tinted glasses for a moment, and then offered him her arm to take.


The Summer House

"I think often of the patience of landscape gardeners," Cloud said as they went through the knee-deep sedge of what she called the Park. "These great trees, some of them, my father planted as infants, only imagining the effect they would have, and knowing he would never live to see the whole. That beech—I could almost join hands around it when I was a girl. You know there are fashions in landscape gardening—immensely long fashions, since the landscapes take so long to grow. Rhododendrons—I called them rum-de-dum-dums when I was a child, helping the Italian men to plant these. The fashion passed. So difficult to keep them cut back. No Italian men to do it for us, so they grow jungly and—ouch!— watch your eyes here.

"The plan goes, you see. From where the walled garden is now you once looked out this way and there were Vistas—the trees were various, chosen for, oh, picturesqueness, they looked like foreign dignitaries conversing together at an embassy affair—and between them the lawns, kept down you know, and the flower-beds and fountains. It seemed that you would any moment see a hunting party appear, lords and ladies, hawks on their wrists. Look now! Forty years since it's been properly cared for. You can still see the pattern, what it all was meant to look like, but it's like reading a letter, a letter from oh a long time ago, that's been left out in the rain and all the words have run together. I wonder if he grieves at it. He was an orderly man. See? The statue is 'The Syrinx.' How long till the vines pull it down, or the moles undermine it? Well. He would understand. There are reasons. One doesn't want to disturb what likes it this way."

"Moles and things."

"The statue is only marble."

"You could—ouch—pull up these thorn-trees, maybe."

She looked at him as though, unexpectedly, he had struck her. She cleared her throat, patting her clavicle. "This is Auberon's lane," she said. "It leads to the Summer House. It's not the directest way, but Auberon ought to see you."

"Oh yes?"

The Summer House was two round red brick towers squat as great toes, with a machicolated foot between them. Was it intended to look ruined, or was it really ruined? The windows were out of scale, large and arched and cheerfully curtained. "Once," Cloud said, "you could see this place from the house. It was thought, on moony nights, to be very romantic. . . . Auberon is my mother's son, though not my father's—my half-brother, then. Some years older than I. He's been our schoolmaster for many years, though he's not well now, hasn't been out of the Summer House much for, oh, a year? It's a pity. . . . Auberon!"

Closer now he could see the place had stretched out habitation's hands around it, a privy, a neat vegetable garden, a shed from which a lawn mower peeked out ready to roll. There was a screen door, rhombic with age, for the central toothed entrance, and board steps at a slant, and a striped canvas sling-chair in the sun there by the birdbath, and a small old man in the chair who, when he heard his name called, jumped up or at least rose up in agitation—his suspenders seemed to draw him down into a crouch—and made for his house, but he was slow, and Cloud had come near enough to stop him. "Here's Smoky Barnable, who's going to marry Daily Alice today. At least come and say hello." She shook her head for Smoky to see her patience was tried, and led him by the elbow into the yard.

Auberon, trapped, turned at the door with a welcoming smile, hand extended. "Well, welcome, welcome, hm." He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs. He took Smoky's hand and almost before they touched sank again gratefully in his sling-chair, motioning Smoky to a bench. Why was it that within this enclosure Smoky felt a troubling of the sunlight? Cloud sat in a chair by her brother, and Auberon put his white-haired hand over hers. "Well, what's happened?" she said indulgently.

"No need to say," he said undertone, "not before . . ."

"Member of the family," Cloud said. "As of today."

Auberon, his throat still making soundless chuckles, looked at Smoky. Unprotected! That's what Smoky felt. They had stepped into this yard and lost something they had had in the woods; they had stepped out of something. "Easy enough to test," Auberon said, striking his bony knee and rising. He retreated into the house rubbing his fingers together.

"It's not easy," Cloud said to no one, looking up at the blank sky. She had lost a portion of her ease. She cleared her throat again, contemplated the gray birdbath, which was supported by a number of carved figures, gnomes or elves, with patient bearded faces, who seemed in the act of bearing it away. Cloud sighed. She glanced at a tiny gold watch that was pinned to her bosom. It had little curling wings on either side. Time flies. She looked at Smoky and smiled apologetically.

"Now, aha, aha," Auberon said, coming out with a large, long-legged camera veiled with a black cloth. "Oh, Auberon" Cloud said, not impatiently but as though this weren't necessary and anyway an enthusiasm she didn't share; but he was already thrusting its spiked toes into the ground by Smoky, adjusting its tibiae to make it stand straight, and bending its mahogany face upon Smoky.

For years that last photograph of Auberon's lay on a table in the Summer House, Auberon's magnifying glass beside it; it showed Smoky, in his suit of Truman's that glowed in the sunlight, his hair fiery, and half his face sun-struck and blind. There were Cloud's dimpled elbow and ringed ear. The birdbath. The birdbath: could it be that one of those long soapstone faces had not before been there, that there was an arm too many supporting the garlanded bowl? Auberon didn't complete the study, come to a decision; and when years later a son of Smoky's blew the dust from the old image and took up Auberon's work again it was still inconclusive, proving nothing, a silvered paper blackened by a long-past midsummer sun.


Woods and Lakes

Beyond the Summer House they descended a concave lane, quickly swallowed up in a wood tangled and somnolent, moist from the rain. It seemed the kind of wood grown to hide a sleeping princess till her hundred years were up. They hadn't been long within it when there was a rustle or a whisper beside them, and with a suddenness that startled Smoky, a man stood on the path ahead of them. "Good morning, Rudy," Cloud said. "Here's the groom. Smoky, Rudy Flood." Rudy's hat looked as though it had been fought with, punched and pummelled; its upturned brim gave his broad bearded face an open look. Out of his open green coat a great belly came, tautening his white shirt. "Where's Rory?" Cloud asked.

"Down the path." He grinned at Smoky as though they shared a joke. Rory Flood his tiny wife appeared in a moment as he had, and a big girl in floppy jeans, big baby in her arms punching the air. "Betsy Bird," Cloud said, "and Robin. And see here are Phil Fox and two cousins of mine, Stones, Irv and Walter. Clouds on their mother's side." More came on the path from right and left; the path was narrow, and the wedding guests walked it two by two, dropping back or moving up to handle Smoky and bless him. "Charles Wayne," Cloud said. "Hannah Noon. Where are the Lakes? And the Woods?"

The path came out into a wide, sloping glade, the marge of a dark lake that still and moatlike surrounded an island where aged trees grew. Leaves floated flat on its surface, and frogs fled from their feet as they came down among its pools. "It's certainly," Smoky said remembering the guidebook, "an extensive estate."

"The further in you go, the bigger it gets," said Hannah Noon. "Have you met my boy Sonny?"

Across the lake a boat was coming, laying out lacquered ripples. Its carved prow was intended for a swan, but it was gray and eyeless now, like the dark swan on the dark lake of northern legend. It struck the bank with a hollow rattle of oarlocks, and Smoky was pushed forward to board with Cloud, who was still explaining who was who of the laughing wedding-guests. "Hannah's distantly related," she said. "Her grandfather was a Bush, and her grandfather's sister married one of Mrs. Drinkwater's uncles, a Dale. . . ." She saw that he wasn't listening, though his head was nodding mechanically. She smiled and put her hand on his. The lake island, shadowed by its trees, seemed made of changeful green glass; myrtle grew on its gentle slopes. At its center was a round gazebo, its pillars slim as arms, softly domed and greenly garlanded. There, a tall girl in white stood among others, holding a ribboned bouquet.


They were greeted and handed out of the leaking swan by many hands. Around the island people were sitting together, opening picnic baskets, placating shouting children; few of them seemed to notice Smoky's arrival. "Look who we've got here, Cloud," said a slim chinless man who made Smoky think of the poets the guidebook had disliked so much. "We've got Dr. Word. Where is he now? Doctor! Got some more champagne?" Doctor Word in a tight black suit had a look of unreasoning terror on his badly shaven face; his golden glassful trembled and bubbles rose. "Nice to see you, Doctor," Cloud said. "I think we can promise no wonders. Oh, settle down, man!" Dr. Word had tried to speak, choked, spluttered. "Pound his back, someone. He's not our minister," Cloud said confidentially to Smoky. "They come from the outside, and tend to get very nervous. A wonder any of us is married or buried at all. Here's Sarah Pink, and the little Pinks. How do you do. Ready?" She took Smoky's arm, and as they went up the flagged path toward the gazebo a harmonium began to play, like a tiny weeping voice, music he didn't know but that seemed to score him with sudden longing. At its sound the wedding-guests gathered, talking in low voices; when Smoky reached the low worn steps of the gazebo, Doctor Word had arrived there too, glancing around, fishing a book from his pocket; Smoky saw Mother, and Doctor Drinkwater, and Sophie with her flowers behind Daily Alice with hers; Daily Alice watched him unsmiling and calm, as though he were someone she didn't know. They stood him beside her; he began to put his hands in his pockets, stopped, clasped them behind his back, then in front of him. Doctor Word fluttered the pages of his book and began to speak quickly, his words shot through with champagne and tremblings and the harmonium's unceasing melody; it sounded like "Do you Barble take this Daily Alice to be your awful wedded life for bed or for worse insidious in stealth for which or for poor or to have unto whole until death you do part?" And he looked up inquiringly.

"I do," Smoky said.

"I do too," Daily Alice said.

"Wring," Doctor Word said. "And now you pounce you, man on wife."

Aaaah, said all the wedding guests, who then began to drift away, talking in low voices.



Touching Noses

There was a game she had played with Sophie in the long hallways of Edgewood, where she and Sophie would stand as far apart as was possible to get and still see each other. Then they would walk slowly together, slowly and deliberately, looking always each at the other's face. They kept on, at the same pace, not laughing or trying not to, till their noses touched. It was like that with Smoky, though he had started far off, too far to be seen, coming from the City—no farther, out there where she had never been, far away, walking towards her. When the swan boat picked him up, she could easily cover him with her thumbnail if she chose to; then the boat drew closer, Phil Flowers hauling on the oars, and she could see his face, see that it was indeed he. At the water's edge he was lost for a moment; then there was a murmur of expectation and appreciation around her and he reappeared, led by Cloud, much larger now, the new wrinkles visible at his knees, his strong veined hands she loved. Larger. There were violets in his buttonhole. She saw his throat move, and at that moment came Music. When he had come to the stairs of the pavilion she could no longer take in his feet if she looked resolutely at his face, and she did—for a moment everything around his face darkened and swam, his face orbited towards her like a pale smiling moon. He mounted the steps. He stood beside her. No touching noses. That would come. It might she thought take years; maybe they never would—their marriage was after all a Convenience, though she had never, would never, need not now ever explain that to him because, just as the cards had promised, she knew now she would choose him over anybody else, whether the cards chose him or not, or whether they who had promised someone like him to her thought he was unnecessary now or even wrong. She would defy them to have him. And it was they who had first seen fit to send her out to find him! She wanted with all her being to continue to find him now, to put her arms around him and search; but the stupid minister began to mutter—she felt anger at her parents who had thought him necessary, for Smoky's sake they said, but she already knew Smoky better than that. She tried to listen to the man, thinking how much better it would be to marry touching noses: to proceed from great distances together till it was as in the old halls when the walls and pictures glided by changefully on the edge of vision but Sophie's face kept constant, growing, the eyes widening, freckles expanding, a planet, then a moon, then a sun, then nothing at all visible except the onrushing map of it, the great eyes starting to cross at the last moment before their two noses rushed vastly headlong together to collide soundlessly.


Happy Isles

"A little unreal," he said. There were grass stains on Truman's suit, and Mother noted them with worry as she repacked a picnic basket. "They won't come out," she said. He drank champagne, which seemed to make the unreality acceptable, normal, even necessary; he sat in a haze like the lengthening afternoon's, pacific and happy. Mother tied up the basket, and then saw a plate staring up at her from the grass; when the job had been all redone, Smoky with a sense of dejà vu pointed out a fork she hadn't seen. Daily Alice linked her arm with his. They had been all over the island several times, seeing friends and relatives, being made much of. "Thank you," several of them said when she presented Smoky, and when they gave her gifts. Smoky, after his third glass of champagne, wondered if this saying of things backwards (Cloud was always doing it) needn't be looked at case by case, so to speak, but was in the way of a general, well, a general . . . She leaned her head on his padded shoulder, and the two of them supported each other, hello'd out. "Nice," he said to no one. "What do they say when something's outdoors?"

"Al fresco?"

"Is that it?"

"I think so."

"Are you happy?"

"I think so."

"I am."

When Franz Mouse had been married, he and his bride (what was her name?) had gone together to a storefront photo studio. There, as well as the formal nuptial exposure, the photographer had thrown in a few goof pictures taken with props of his own: a papier-mâché ball-and-chain for Franz's leg, a rolling pin he encouraged the bride to brandish over him. Smoky reflected that he knew just about that much of married life, and laughed aloud.

"What," Alice inquired.

"Do you have a rolling pin?"

"You mean to roll out dough? I guess Mother does."

"That's all right, then." He had the giggles now, the stream of laughter arising from a point in his diaphragm as the bubbles rose from an invisible point in his glass. She caught it from him. Mother, standing above them arms akimbo, shook her head at them. The harmonium or whatever it was began again, stilling them as though it had been a cool hand laid on them or a voice suddenly beginning to speak of some long-past sadness; he had never heard music like it, and it seemed to catch him, or rather he it, as though he were a rough thing drawn across the silk of it. It was a Recessional, he thought, not remembering how he knew the word; but it was a Recessional meant seemingly not for him and his bride, but for the others. Mother sighed a great sigh, having fallen momentarily silent as the whole island had; she picked up her picnic basket, motioned Smoky to sit still who had half-risen with deep reluctance to help her. She kissed them both and turned away smiling. Around the island others were going down to the water; there was laughter, and a far-off shout. At the water's edge he saw pretty Sarah Pink helped into the swan boat, and others waiting to embark, depart, some holding glasses and one with a guitar over his shoulder; Ruby Flood flourished a green bottle. The music and the late afternoon charged their glad departure with melancholy, as though they left the Happy Isles for somewhere less happy, unable till they left to realize their loss,

Smoky stood his near-empty glass at a drunken angle in the grass, and feeling made of music head to foot, turned to lay his head in Daily Alice's lap. In doing so, he happened to catch sight of Great-aunt Cloud at the lake's margin speaking with two people he seemed to know but for a moment couldn't identify, though he felt great surprise to see them there. Then the man made a fish's mouth to puff on his pipe, and helped his wife into a rowboat.

Marge and Jeff Juniper.

He looked up into Daily Alice's placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. "The things that make us happy," he said, "make us wise."

And she smiled, and nodded, as who should say: yes, those old truths are really true.


A Sheltered Life

Sophie parted from her parents as they went arm in arm through the hushing wood, talking quietly to each other of what has been, as parents do whose eldest child has just been married. She took a path of her own, which went away uncertainly, eventually leading back the way they had come. Evening began to fall as she walked, though what it seemed to do was not fall but well up from the ground, beginning with the dense ferns' velvet undersides turning black. Sophie could see day go from her hands; they became indistinct by degrees, and life then light went from the bunch of flowers she still for some reason carried. But she felt her head to be still above the rising dark, until the path before her grew obscure and she breathed an evening coolness, and was submerged. Evening next reached the birds where they sat, stilling bird by bird their furious battle-of-the-hands and leaving whispering silence in the middle air. Still the sky was as blue as noon, or nearly, though the path was so dark she stumbled, and the first firefly reported for work. She took off her shoes (bending her knee in mid-step and reaching behind her to pull off one by the heel, hopping a step, and taking off the other) and left them on a stone, hoping without giving it much thought that the dew would not spoil their satin.

She wanted not to hurry, though her heart against her will hurried anyway. Brambles implored her lacy dress to stay, and she thought of taking it off too, but did not. The wood, looked through lengthwise the way she went, was a tunnel of soft darkness, a perspective of fireflies; but when she looked out its less dense sides she could see a lapidary blue-gone-green horizon flawed by a pale brush of cloud. She could also see, unexpectedly (it was always unexpected) the top or tops of the house, far off and moving farther off—so it seemed as the air between grew hazier. She went on more slowly into the tunnel into evening, feeling a kind of laughter constrict her throat.

When she came close to the island, she began to feel Somehow accompanied, which was not wholly unexpected, but still it made her flush with sensitivity, as though she had fur and it had been brushed to crackling.

The island wasn't really an island, or not quite one; it was teardrop-shaped, and the long tail of it reached up into the stream which fed the lake. Coming to it here, where the stream at its narrowest swept around the teardrop's tail to swell and ripple the lake, she easily found a way to step from rock to rock that the water rushed over making silken water-pillows where it seemed she could lay her heated cheek.

She came onto the island, beneath the gazebo which stood abstracted, looking the other way.

Yes, they were around her in numbers now, their purpose, she couldn't help but think, like hers: just to know or see or be sure. But their reasons surely must be different. She had no reasons that she could name, and perhaps their reasons had no names that could be spoken either, though she seemed to hear—doubtless only the stream and the blood sounding in her ears—a lot of voices speaking nothing. She went with care and great silence around the gazebo, hearing a voice, a human voice, Alice's, but not what it said; and a laugh, and she thought she knew what it must be saying. Why had she come? Already she began to feel a horrid blind dark pressure at her heart, a wall of great weight building, but she went on and came to a higher place shielded by glossy bushes and a cold stone bench; there she knelt without a sound.

The last green light of evening went out. The gazebo, as though it had been waiting and watching for it, saw the gibbous moon pull itself above the trees and spill its light over the wrinkled water and through the pillars and onto the couple there.

Daily Alice had hung her white gown on the hands of a bush, and now and again its sleeve or hem would move in the breeze which began when the sun set; seeing it with a corner of his vision Smoky would think there was someone else near the gazebo where they lay. There were these lights then: darkening sky, fireflies, phosphorescent blossoms that seemed to shine not by reflection but by some mild inward light of their own. By them he could sense more than see her long geography beside him on the cushions.

"I'm really very innocent," he said. "In lots of ways."

"Innocent!" she said with false surprise (false because of course it was for that innocence that he was here now, and she with him). "You don't act innocent." She laughed, and so did he; it was the laugh Sophie heard. "Shameless."

"Yes, that too. The same thing, I think. Nobody ever told me what to be ashamed of. Afraid of—they don't have to teach that. But I got over that." With you, he might have said. "I've had a sheltered life."

"Me too,"

Smoky thought that his life had been not sheltered at all, not when Daily Alice could say the same thing about hers. If hers were sheltered, his was naked—and that's how it felt to him. "I never had a childhood . . . not like you had. In a way I never was a child. I mean I was a kid, but not a child. . . ."

"Well," she said, "you can have mine then. If you want it."

"Thank you," he said; and he did want it, all of it, no second left ungarnered. "Thank you."

The moon rose, and by its sudden light he saw her rise too, stretch herself as though after labor, and go to lean against a pillar, stroking herself absently and looking across to the massed darkness of the trees across the lake. Her long thews were silvered and insubstantial (though they were not insubstantial; no; he was still trembling slightly from their pressure). Her arm up along the pillar drew up her breast and the blade of her shoulder. She rested her weight on one long leg, locked back tensely; the other bent. The twin fullnesses of her nates were thus set and balanced like a theorem. All this Smoky noted with an intense precision, not as though his senses took it in, but as though they rushed toward it endlessly.

"My earliest memory," she said, as though in down payment on the gift she had offered him, or maybe thinking of something else entirely (though he took it anyway), "my earliest memory is of a face in my bedroom window. It was night, in summer. The window was open. A yellow face, round and glowing. It had a wide smile and sort of penetrating eyes. It was looking at me with great interest. I laughed, I remember, because it was sinister but it was smiling, and made me want to laugh. Then there were hands on the sill, and it seemed the face, I mean the owner of it, was coming in the window. I still wasn't scared, I heard laughter and I laughed too. Just then my father came in the room, and I turned away, and when I looked again the face wasn't there. Later on when I reminded Daddy about it, he said that the face was the moon in the window; and the hands on the sill were the curtains moving in the breeze; and that when I looked back a cloud had covered the moon."

"Probably."

"It's what he saw."

"I mean probably . . ."

"Whose childhood," she said turning to him, her hair afire with moonlight and her face matte and blue and for a moment frighteningly not hers, "is it that you want to have?"

"I want to have yours. Now."

"Now?"

"Come here."

She laughed, and came to kneel with him on the cushions, her flesh cooled now by moonlight but no less wholly her flesh for that.


As Quietly As She Had Come

Sophie saw them coupling. She felt with intense certainty what moods Smoky made come and go in her sister, though they were not the moods she had known Daily Alice to feel before. She saw clearly what it was to make her sister's brown eyes grow dense and inward, or leap to light: saw it all. It was as though Daily Alice were made of some dark glass which had always been partly opaque, but now, held up before the bright lamp of Smoky's love, became wholly transparent, so that no detail of Alice could be hidden from her as she watched them. She heard them speak—a few words only, directions, triumphs—and each word rang like a crystal bell. She breathed her sister's breath, and at each quickening of it Alice was fired further with distinctness. Strange way to possess her, and Sophie couldn't tell if the breath-robbing heat she felt at it were pain, or daring, or shame, or what. She knew that no force could make her look away; and that if she did she would still see, and just as clearly.

And yet all this time Sophie was asleep.

It was the sort of sleep (she knew every kind, but had no name for any one) in which it seems your eyelids have grown transparent, and you look through them at the scene you saw befcre they closed. The same scene, but not the same. She had, before her eyes closed, known or felt anyway that there were others around come also to spy on this marriage. Now in her dream they were quite concrete; they looked over her shoulders and her head, they crept with cunning to be near the gazebo, they lifted atomies of children above the myrtle leaves to see the wonder of it. They hung in the air on panting wings, wings panting in the same exaltation as that which they witnessed. Their murmuring didn't disturb Sophie, for their interest, as intense as hers, was in nothing else like it; while she felt herself braving deeps, not certain she would not drown in contrary tides of wonder, passion, shame, suffocating love, she knew that those around her were urging those two—no, cheering them on— to one thing only, and that thing was Generation.

A clumsy beetle rattled past her ear, and Sophie woke.

The living things around her were dim analogs of those in her dream: murmuring gnats and glinting glowworms, a distant nightjar, hunting bats on rubber wings.

Far off, the gazebo was white and secret in the moonlight. She thought she could see, at moments, what might be the movements of their limbs. But no sound; no actions that could be named, or even guessed at. A stillness utterly private.

Why did it cut her more deeply than what she dreamed she had witnessed?

Exclusion. But she felt immolated between them as surely now when she could not see them as when she dreamed she could; was as uncertain she would survive it.

Jealousy: a waking jealousy. No, not that either. She had never been conscious of owning so much as a pin, and you can be jealous only when what is yours is taken. Nor betrayal either: she had known all from the start (and knew more now than they would ever know she knew); and you can only be betrayed by the false, by liars.

Envy. But of Alice, or Smoky, or both?

She couldn't tell. She only felt that she glowed with pain and love at once, as though she had eaten live coals for sustenance.

As quietly as she had come she went, and numbers of others presumably after her even more quietly.


Suppose One Were a Fish

The stream that fed the lake fell down a long stony distance like a flight of stairs from a broad pool carved by a tall waterfall high up within the woods.

Spears of moonlight struck the silken surface of that pool, and were bent and shattered in the depths. Stars lay on it, rising and falling with the continual arc of ripples which proceeded from the foamy falls. So it would appear to anyone at the pool's edge. To a fish, a great white trout almost asleep within, it seemed very different.

Asleep? Yes, fish sleep, though they don't cry; their fiercest emotion is panic, the saddest a kind of bitter regret. They sleep wide-eyed, their cold dreams projected on the black and green interior of the water. To Grandfather Trout it seemed that the living water and its familiar geography were being shuttered and revealed to him as sleep came and went; when the pool was shuttered, he saw inward interiors. Fish-dreams are usually about the same water they see when they're awake, but Grandfather Trout's were not. So utterly other than trout-stream were his dreams, yet so constant were the reminders of his watery home before his lidless eyes, that his whole existence became a matter of supposition. Sleepy suppositions supplanted one another with every pant of his gills.

Suppose one were a fish. No finer place to live than this. Falls continually drowning air within the pool so that it was a pleasure simply to breathe. Like (supposing one were not a waterbreather) the high, fresh, wind-renewed air of an alpine meadow. Wonderful, and thoughtful of them so to provide for him, supposing that they thought of his or anyone's happiness or comfort. And here were no predators, and few competitors, because (though a fish couldn't be supposed to know it) the stream above was shallow and stony and so was the stream below, so that nothing approaching him in size came into the pool to contest with him for the constant fall of bugs from the dense and various woods which overhung. Really, they had thought of everything, supposing they thought of anything.

Yet (supposing that it was not his choice at all to be a swimmer here) how condign and terrible a punishment, bitter an exile. Mounted in liquid glass, unable to breathe, was he to make back-and-forth forever, biting at mosquitoes? He supposed that to a fish that taste was the toothsome matter of his happiest dreams. But if one were not a fish, what a memory, the endless multiplication of those tiny drops of bitter blood.

Suppose on the other hand (supposing one had hands) that it was all a Tale. That however truly a satisfied fish he might appear to be, or however reluctantly accustomed to it he had become, that once-on-a-time a fair form would appear looking down into the rainbow depths, and speak words she had wrested from malign secret-keepers at great cost to herself, and with a strangulating rush of waters he would leap—legs flailing and royal robes drenched—to stand before her panting, restored, the curse lifted, the wicked fairy weeping with frustration. At the thought a sudden picture, a colored engraving, was projected before him on the water: a bewigged fish in a high-collared coat, a huge letter under his arm, his mouth gaping open. In air. At this nightmare image (from where?) his gills gasped and he awoke momentarily; the shutters shot back. All a dream. For a while he gratefully supposed nothing but sane and moonshot water.

Of course (the shutters began to drift closed again) it was possible to imagine he was one of them, himself a secret-keeper, curse-maker, malign manipulator; an eternal wizard intelligence housed for its own subtle purposes in a common fish. Eternal: suppose it to be so: cetainly he has lived forever or nearly, has survived into this present time (supposing (drifting deeper) this to be the present time); he has not expired at a fish's age, or even at a prince's. It seems to him that he extends backwards (or is it forwards?) without beginning (or is it end?) and he can't just now remember whether the great tales and plots which he supposes he knows and forever broods on lie in the to-come or lie dead in the has-been. But then suppose that's how secrets are kept, and age-long tales remembered, and unbreakable curses made too. . . .

No. They know. They don't suppose. He thinks of their certainty, the calm, inexpressive beauty of their truth-telling faces and task-assigning hands, as unrefuseable as a hook deep in the throat. He is as ignorant as a fingerling; knows nothing; he wouldn't care to know—wouldn't care to ask them, even supposing (another inward window slides open silently) they would answer, whether on a certain night in August a certain young man. Standing on these rocks which lift their dry brows into the perishing air. A young man struck by metamorphosis as this pool was once struck by lightning. For presumably some affront, you have your reasons, don't get me wrong, it's nothing to do with me. Only suppose this man imagines remembering, imagines his only and final memory to be (the rest, all the rest, is supposition) the awful strangulated gasping in deadly waterlessness, the sudden fusing of arms and legs, the twisting in air (air!) and then the horrible relief of the plunge into cold, sweet water where he ought to be—must now be forever.

And suppose he cannot now remember why it happened: only supposes, dreaming, that it did.

What was it he did to hurt you so?

Was it only that the Tale required some go-between, some maquereau, and he came close enough to be seized?

Why can't I remember my sin?

But Grandfather Trout is deep asleep now, for he could not suppose any of this if he were not. All shutters are shut before his open eyes, the water is all around and far away. Grandfather Trout dreams that he's gone fishing.