The Solitudes

by John Crowley

  The same folks as yesterday, or different but similar ones, sat before the little store, and greeted him mildly as he went through the squeaking screen door into the sweet-smelling interior. He dropped Spofford’s letter to his Rosie into the mail slot, and got out a dime and his letter from Peter Ramus College.

  Half an hour later he was outside again, stunned, not knowing whether to rage or laugh aloud. He studied in the sunlight the letter that had brought him here, stranded him here, tempted him this far: it looked real enough, his own name was on it, not seeming slugged into a form; he could feel on its reverse the marks of struck letters, the signature at the bottom was ink—no, now looked at carefully it did seem to be a stamp of some kind. Anyway it was false, generated by some witless computer at academic HQ even while the History Department was making other choices altogether.

  The position he had been invited to apply for was already filled, and had been filled before he left the city; even before he had received this ghost letter.

  This conclusion hadn’t been easy to come to. The computer itself was “down” for the day, and his file, wisps of electromagnetism held in oblivion, unavailable. Departmental secretaries, the dean’s office, were all unwilling to imagine such a dumb possibility, and even when Pierce was forced to posit it, unbelieving himself, they seemed ready to shift the blame to him. Why hadn’t he checked before coming?

  Why hadn’t he checked? Why hadn’t he checked? Pierce wandered out along the highway, letter still in his hand. Had it come to that, we all have to check now to make sure our business is real and not electronic leg-pulling in the dark? His own fault that he had trusted mail. Sirs I have yours of the 15th, may I act on it or is this some kind of joke.

  Maybe he could sue. He did laugh, standing on the narrow bridge over the river, a derisive snort, and shook his head to clear it of that future, which he hadn’t really understood would leave him without one by evaporating. It was too late now in the year to apply for much else.

  Is that really that, then? he thought, looking down into the brown slow river. Was he really now disburdened of history as an occupation?

  Maybe the old bookstore would take him back. He really had a lot longer to live. What was he to do?

  Get into sheep. He laughed again, blank-minded, it just really didn’t bear thinking of, there was only one conclusion thinking could have. He could not go back to Barnabas; he could not humble himself before Earl Sacrobosco. Never.

  He turned to head back to Spofford’s, unseeing, and was nearly struck by a car, a station wagon of the largest kind, full of dogs, children, and baggage, which just then came barreling over the bridge behind him, barely room for it there, and out along the river, leaving a stain of oil smoke on the day.

  SEVEN

  The play was of Cæsar, stabbed in the Capitol; down the white toga draped over his velvets and silk hose coursed the red blood drawn by the conspirators as they stabbed again and again, their knives sinking in to the hilt and the blood gushing awesomely. And as he bled and staggered, there was time for great Cæsar to make a long speech, about envy that would always pull down eagles who would soar—brute envy, he said, and made a complicated pun on Brutus and brutish and brute beasts he had sheltered in his bosom like the Grecian boy and the fox; like that boy he would say no word further, no, though his vitals were gnawed. He said many more words, and some of the audience groaned aloud with pity and wonder, and a few of them laughed that he didn’t die yet; and then he covered his face with the bloody toga and measured his length on the boards: the stage shuddered at his fall.

  That was he too, in fresh gay clothes, in the jig that followed, flinging Brutus’s wife by her arms neatly. And this was he now in Stratford’s common inn, drinking amid the conspirators, a little hoarse, and sweating in the close heat of August. Will, standing on the bench outside and looking in through the open window, watched him turn a coin across the backs of his fingers, and back again, and again.

  —And from that Brutus is named Britain, he said. I have it from a famous learned man, a Doctor Dee, my friend.

  —It is not, then, said Jenkins the new schoolmaster. It is not that Brutus.

  —Did not, said the actor, flipping his coin, did not that Cæsar come here to this isle? And did he not build the Tower of London and win famous victories? Do you deny this, sir?

  It was hard to tell if the actor was angry or amused; his eyes flashed and grew large; his finger pointed like a sword; but ever the coin moved calmly across the knuckles of his other hand, back and forth.

  —And Brutus was Cæsar’s son, adopted by him. Ergo.

  —It was not that Brutus, said Master Jenkins. Jenkins was standing, drinking nothing, hands behind his back as though he were not here in this low room at all. Will watched him; next school term he would be under him, and should learn all he could of the man.

  —It was Brut of Troy, who lived before Rome at all. After Troy fell to the Greeks. Brut came to this isle as Æneas came to found Rome. So we are not British but Bruttish.

  —Bruttish indeed, said Cæsar, and played his death speech.

  How many times, Will thought. How many times has Cæsar died since he died, before how many thousand eyes. He leaned his elbows on the sill, all his senses bent inward, listening. Cæsar made a sudden comic pause, an exaggerated halt, pretending to catch sight of him just then.

  —Who is that imp in the window? Why does he stare at me?

  —John Shakespeare’s boy.

  —What injury have I done him that he should stare at me? He has the Devil’s own red hair. He frightens me.

  The way he drew his hand up by his face, claw-fingers outward, eyebrows and underlids lifted, was Fright. Will laughed with the others, and Cæsar took offense, turning huge and dignified: grave hands splayed on the table, brows turning down.

  —Let us, he said, have a merry song.

  He began a round, lugubriously, but so low and slow it was impossible to join in: he was a sad man now, a sad sad man who wanted to sing. Will shook with laughter and amazement. With a word, a gesture, he could make a person, a whole person one knew but hadn’t known one knew; as though he had them all within him and didn’t know which one would peep out next for a moment.

  —You, lad. In the window. Can you sing this song?

  —I know it, Will said.

  —Well, sing, then. Here’s for your red hair.

  By some snap of fingers he spun the coin toward Will without seeming to fling it; Will let it fall short, and sang. The lark and the nightingale. He had a true high strong treble and he knew it; no harm either to let Master Jenkins hear it; if he liked singing as much as Master Simon Hunt the last schoolmaster did, it would go easy for Will again this term. Prest the rose against his breast, tear stood in his eyen round. They were all silent listening to the boy in the window; and Cæsar, Master James Burbage of the Earl of Leicester’s Men, had drawn all his different persons within him and was paying close attention, a rapt and measuring look on his face, like a draper taking new-fulled woolen cloth in his fingers, or a brewmaster watching clear brown ale drawn from a new cask.

  Rosie closed the book, her fingers at the page; Sam had just then scampered up to her, leaving behind her ball, which followed her for a bounce or two, one of those red and white striped balls with blue and stars on its northern hemisphere. Sam half-hid behind Rosie’s chaise longue, looking toward the veranda door. “He’s coming,” she said.

  Rosie laughed. “Is he?”

  Sam watched fascinated as the door opened and her great granduncle Boney Rasmussen came out with slow steps, watching where he went.

  “Mrs. Pisky made some iced tea,” he said. He propped open the door with a chair and went back inside.

  “See?” said Sam.

  “Yes,” Rosie said. “Iced tea, that’s nice.” She hugged her daughter. Sam found Boney a figure awesome and wonderful, like a large animal, maybe a monster, whose movements had to be monitored with care, between whom and oneself it was bett
er, at the beginning of any interview anyway, to interpose something, her mother preferably.

  “Oh, Boney, that’s so nice of you, but you should have called, I’d have come to get it.”

  He brought out a tray, needing both hands for it, which is why he had propped open the door. He set it down on the big wicker table and offered it with a hand: there was a tall glass and a small one, and sugar and lemon, and a dish of wafers.

  “I bet the small glass is for you,” Rosie said to Sam, pushing her forward. Boney turned away, looking out the wide screens of the veranda, offhand. He had a very clear sense of how he struck Sam, and was careful—it touched Rosie terribly to see it—not to impose himself on her. Sam sidled up to take her glass. “Nice afternoon,” Boney said to no one. “Might rain.”

  He was really quite remarkably ugly. His dark bald head was pied with brown spots and had a polished, greenish patina like old leather, like a lizard’s hide. His hands seemed to be within wrinkled loose gloves of the same material, yellow-nailed, and they ticked restlessly always as though in time to his pulse. Rosie didn’t know exactly how old he was, but he seemed to be as old as it was possible to be and still walk around. In fact he walked around a lot, and even rode an old bicycle around the paths and drives of Arcady. One of those oldsters, Rosie thought, who keep on, though slow; patient with a world that has thickened into something molasses-like and continually difficult. It was probably more painful to watch than to do: Boney bicycling, Boney doing a little gardening, Boney climbing stairs.

  He turned his thick blue-tinted glasses on her. “What’s that you’re reading?”

  Rosie showed him Bitten Apples. “It’s fun,” she said. “Is all this true, though, about Shakespeare running off to be a boy actor?”

  Boney smiled. His false teeth were as old as most people’s real ones; the porcelain was wearing thin in spots, showing a glitter of gold beneath. “I never ask,” he said, “what’s true in those. He did a lot of research.”

  “You knew him, right?”

  “Sandy Kraft? Oh yes. Oh, Sandy and I were good friends, yes.”

  “Sandy?”

  “That’s what he was known as.”

  Rosie turned to the inside back flap of the paper cover. There was a picture of Fellowes Kraft, an ageless, gentle-eyed man in an open shirt, cheek resting on his fist, a shock of light hair falling over his forehead. Thirty years ago? Forty? The book was copyright 1941, but the picture might be older. “Hm,” she said. “He lived in Stonykill.”

  “Near there. That house, you know the one. It’s owned by the Foundation now. Sandy was with the Foundation for a while. Off and on. We have the copyrights too, they still bring in a little, you’d be surprised.” He clasped his shaky hands behind his back and looked out at the day. “He was a nice man, and I miss him.”

  “Does he have any family still here?”

  “Oh no.” Boney grinned again. “Sandy wasn’t the marrying kind, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh?” Rosie said. “Oh.”

  “What we used to call a confirmed bachelor.”

  “But that’s what you are, Boney.”

  “Well.” He cast a sly look at Rosie. “Depending on how you say it, it means different things. Don’t go spreading rumors about me.”

  Rosie laughed. That antique sort of delicacy. Boney, she knew, himself had a long-ago secret, a secret sorrow that was never to be talked of; something that might have been, should have been, an awful scandal, but wasn’t. Nowadays there were no secret scandals. They were all right out there for everybody to ponder, and talk about, and give advice on. She looked out at the broad driveway. Under the maples her station wagon was parked, stuffed to the roof with belongings she was as yet unwilling to unpack. Boney had taken her in instantly, no questions asked, as though she were merely coming for a long visit; and Mrs. Pisky, his housekeeper for the last millennium or so, took her cue from Boney. Well, Mrs. P., Rosie and Sam are going to be staying for a while, what do you think, the west bedroom has a bathroom and there’s the little boudoir too. Oh Mr. Rasmussen they haven’t been aired out or anything, I’ll do a load of wash, isn’t it nice to have young ones around. Whatever griefs, Rosie thought, the old reticences had once caused or hidden, they could be restful too, if you just didn’t have an explanation, if you just wanted to get away and couldn’t say why for a while. Mrs. Pisky might be a hypocrite, for sure she had a quick eye for the things Rosie brought into the house, a mess of a life as yet unpurged, rolling-papers in the jewelry box and Sam confused and not as clean as she might be—food for Mrs. Pisky’s thought, no doubt; but Boney, Rosie felt sure, not only said nothing but as far as was consistent with affection thought nothing either.

  Arcady. What on earth would she have done, she thought humbly, if she hadn’t had Arcady to come to, great dull brown Arcady with its big flagged veranda and its wicker chaise longue where she could lie with a book in the sweet coolness, as she had as a child, a library book into whose pages crept the summer outside and the far hills; what would she have done? How did people bear it, who had no place to go, when something dreadful had to be done and they weren’t ready yet to do it?

  “You notice,” Boney said, seeing her turn back to Bitten Apples, “how he uses little dashes instead of quote marks, when people talk.”

  “Yeah. I think that’s sort of confusing.”

  “Well I think so too. Hard to read. But now do you know why he does that? He explained it to me once. He said he just couldn’t bring himself to claim that all these historical figures really said, quote quote, what he has them say. They never really said these things, he told me; not really. And the little dashes make it not seem so much like people are really talking. Sandy said: It’s more like you’re dreaming of what they must have said, if they did the things they did.” He looked down slowly, unmoving, at Sam, who had approached him just as slowly. “That’s all,” he said gravely. He and Sam looked at each other, her blond head bent up, his lizard’s head bent down. “Hello, Sam.”

  Rosie received the bundle of her daughter in her lap with a grunt, Sam fleeing from Boney’s intimacy. She turned the pages of Bitten Apples, which had fluttered closed, to find her place again.

  Boney, his hand on the screen door to go out, paused. “Rosie,” he said. “May I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think you’ll be needing to talk to a lawyer?”

  “Oh. Oh, Boney …”

  “I only ask because.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so, yet.”

  “Tell me if you do,” Boney said, “and I’ll call Allan Butterman. That’s all.”

  With a small smile, he went out the door, and down the wide shallow steps as though they were steep. Sam, watching him go, got up all of a sudden and went after him, slipping out the door before it could close on its old slow pneumatic closure, and going down the steps that were steep to her too; Boney noticed her following, but took no notice.

  And the wide afternoon still remained; long, long till lawyers, please, please. Young Will went home along Henley Street, past the shambles and the market cross, up to his father’s door, his heart beating hard, with an invitation to be one of the Earl of Leicester’s Boys from Master James Burbage to lay before his father.

  There was no one in the leather-odorous glover’s shop on the first floor. Will mounted to the chamber above, hearing voices speaking in low tones. The room was dim, shutters half-closed, and with the August day still sparkling in his eyes Will could not at first make out who stood there behind his father’s chair.

  His father wiped his eyes with his sleeve; he seemed to have been weeping. Again. In the far doorway his mother stood, hands beneath her apron, her thoughts unguessable but troubled. The man behind his father’s chair, tall, lank-haired, was his teacher of last year, Master Simon Hunt.

  —Will, Will. His father gathered the boy toward him with a two-handed gesture. Will, my own son. We have just now spoken of you.

 
They were all looking at him; in the old smoked darkness all their eyes seemed to him to be alight. Will felt a tremor of apprehension that chilled the sweat on the back of his neck. He did not go to his father.

  —Will, here is Master Hunt. We have prayed long together. For you, for all of us. Will, Master Hunt undertakes a journey tomorrow.

  Will said nothing. Often lately he had found Hunt the schoolmaster here with his father, his father in tears; Hunt and he talked of the old religion in low voices, and of the sad state of the world now, and how nothing ever would go right until true religion came again into this land. Hunt had taken him, Will, aside too, and talked closely and intently to him, and Will in a paralysis of strangeness had listened, and nodded when that seemed required, understanding little enough of what was said to him but feeling Hunt’s intensity almost as a physical touch that he wanted to shake off.

  —I’m going over the sea, Will, said Master Hunt. To see other lands, and to serve God. Is not that a fine thing?

  —Where do you go? Will said.

  —To the Low Countries. To a famous college there, where there are learned and pious men. Brave men too. Knights of God.

  Why were they speaking to him in this way, as though he were a baby, a child to be won over to something? Only his mother had not spoken. She held herself stiffly at the door, half in and half out of the room, in the way she did when her husband reprimanded or beat her children, not daring to intercede for them and yet unwilling to be party to their punishment either. They waited, Hunt waited, for him to speak, but he had nothing to say, except for his own news, which was not now to be said: that he knew.