by John Crowley
“Oh I don’t know,” Winnie said. “I would have said rich in fathers.” But then she lowered her eyes and said: “I know.”
He, fatherless; and Bobby too. Axel Moffett, childless. Sam’s children, motherless; Sam, wifeless. He remembered the storm of tears, wholly unexpected, that had occurred in him when Winnie called to tell him Sam was dead, tears because he knew suddenly that Sam had suffered a loss that had never been, and could not now ever be, made up to him: a flood of awful fellow-feeling, the first in his life, with those who die.
A few days after that eleventh birthday, when he came in from the schoolroom for lunch, Winnie (a little shamefaced, a little amused) said “Guess what?” and gave Pierce a package that had come for him in the mail, from Brooklyn.
A rectangular block of unmistakable heft, wrapped in brown paper pieced out from a grocery bag, tied with grubby twine and addressed in a schoolmarmishly correct yet uncertain Palmer Method script which Pierce recognized instantly (it looked a lot like his own).
“Well open it,” Winnie said. Sam looked up from his sandwich. “Go ahead.”
A book, of course, a hardback book with a paper jacket, one of that special class of books that had paper jackets but no library plastic covers. A novel, obviously, because of the paper jacket, and because the jacket showed a painting, a painting of an imaginary moment, chosen from the story within.
“Huh,” he said, turning the book in his hands, upside down, back to front, as though he had never handled such an object before. “Wow.”
Gingerly he opened it. On the empty flyleaf, an inscription in pencil had been crossed out in pen: For Rex, who will never read it. Love, Sandy. The same pen that had crossed this out had written another in another corner: My dear Son, and below that Love, Axel, as though a long message were missing that should have come between. “Well,” he said.
On the next page the title again, and beneath it in small italics one of those little quotations that Pierce had noticed many old books had, like a magician’s distracting patter before his trick, more mysterious usually than the book that followed. He read it.
One met the Duke ’bout midnight, in a lane behind St. Mark’s Church, with the leg of a man over his shoulder; and he howled fearfully; said he was a Wolf, only the difference was, a Wolf’s skin is hairy on the outside, his on the inside; bade them take their swords, rip up his flesh, and try.
He read it again, conscious that time’s passing had slowed for him and the light had brightened, and of his mother and Sam watching him in this moment which was his; feeling spoken to, softly and intimately, not quite yet intelligibly, by all the great wide world at once.
“Gee,” he said. He closed the book and looked again at the cover picture. Darkness in a city, a high-walled, narrow-laned Old World city; a black tower and a yellow moon; the only other lights a single window in the tower, and the torches of a pursuing crowd far down the twisted street: and the eyes of the one they pursued, yellow crayon-dashes, the lanterns of his eyes.
He showed it to Winnie. “Oh yes,” she said.
“Have you read it?” Pierce asked in wonder.
“No,” she said. “He liked them. There’s lots more, I think. If you like that one we can send away for more.”
“Huh,” Pierce said, still holding the book in both hands before him, still standing in the same spot, as though rooted to it by a transmission of energy, a summoning beam coming from far away, from the future, passing through the transformer of the book into his being and out through his feet, pinning him like the poor guy who grabs the hot wire.
For a long time afterward, he didn’t read the book. He kept it on top of his bookcase, with those other select books which held apart the hemispheres of cloudy Earth. He would look at its spine, there among the others (it had a little leaping wolfhound imprint at the base), and imagine what was in it—not the events so much as the paragraphs, full of print, full of meaning. He looked on it as a book which his larger self must read, the self he felt struggling to extrude itself from the strangling husk of his childhood. When at last he did open it, on a night of rainy wind, it was with a reverence and an expectation that would have surprised and abashed its author.
The Werewolf of Prague by Fellowes Kraft.
Like the rest of his lares and penates (Rockaway seashells, Bear Mountain sheath knife, the books of Enosh), he took the book with him on his later journeys—to school, to college, to the city—and somewhere along the way it had got lost. He supposed he had grieved for it, but there was a lot that got lost and trampled and left behind in those days. Anyway he did not think of it again until, in the musty library of a shuttered house in another state, he pulled it out from a row of similar ones, the author’s own copies of his works, and opened it again.
“Yes,” Winnie in Florida said to him. “Quite a story.”
“Yes.” The story that had all along lain ahead of him for him to fall into; the story that (he had come to see) every event had led him toward, beginning with the arrival of that book from Brooklyn, or beginning before that, as far back as anything can begin.
“To end up in the very same town he lived in,” Winnie marveled, not for the first time. “Coming upon it, just like that, when you’d read all his books.”
“Yes. You remember?”
“Well I don’t actually remember you reading them. You read such a lot. But didn’t you? You’ve told me you did.”
“I did.” He read them all, or all he could get from the State Library; read them one after the other, lived within each for a week or two weeks, and forgot it when the next arrived: each with its little wolfhound imprint at the base of the spine, each with its watercolor painting for a cover, gratifying and unrememberable as dreams.
“I guess that’s always been a very nice area,” Winnie said. “Where he lived.”
“Yes. Nice.” Pierce’s heart and throat were filled with longing for it, as though he had not seen it in years, when in fact he had only left there yesterday: longing for the summer country he had first come to settle in, which seemed now alienated from him, maybe forever, blasted, and by more than winter.
What had he done to himself, what hurt had he done his heart, that he should think so?
“This woman, I suppose,” Winnie said, as though he had spoken aloud, as perhaps he had.
“Yes.”
She put her hand on his; but she shook her head too, and made a face, wry or ironic, that he knew.
A day and a half before, Pierce had awakened in darkness after a few hours’ purgatorial sleep; had awakened from a dream that, though singularly dreadful, he right away recognized as cognate to a dozen others memory could lay hands on.
He spoke aloud a charm to keep him safe: “Hypnerotomachia,” he said. But this time it did no good; he doubted it really ever had, or ever would, for it was a charm of knowledge, and not of comfort, and knowledge was no longer any use to him, knowledge was what had hurt him. Well by God no matter what he would not lie wide-eyed in the dark, as he had the last night and the night before that, listening to his own heart-taps and wishing. No!
So he got up, and dressed in the dark, and went out, and took the path that leads to the road that rises up the mountain; and his new demons collected to go along with him, fastened on him like Peter Pain. Everyman I will go with thee.
Up on the mountainside, he had been told, there was a place you could stand and look into three other states, north, south, and east. He would climb to it, he decided. Supposedly a monument stood there too, to a man who in the last century had had a vision at that spot, a vision of—no one had been able to tell him exactly of what: peace, he thought; the unity of all religions; hope.
Salt fluid burned his eyes. He could see the monument vividly with his mind’s eye, an obelisk, a cube, a sphere, a tablet to which ivy clings, neglected amid winter foliage. And a foraging deer, who looks up wide-eyed to see him approach.
He studied the earth as he went up, as though searching a loved face for some sign
of help: the frosted briars, and the brown milkweed loosing its seed; the lamplit windows of a farm, the lichened stone of its fence. In the driveway a truck, waiting for its driver, breathed white smoke and rumbled patiently. All there, all the same, wasn’t it? He acknowledged that it was, and still beautiful, still the same. Only he could not touch it, it was no longer for him.
A long, actually an endless, hour later, he had come no closer to the path up to the monument, if there was a path, or a monument; he had mostly stood stock still, breathing whitely, while awful crimes of omission and commission were charged to him, which he could neither quite remember nor convincingly deny.
He had done that which he should not have done; that which he should have done he had not done; and he was here again where he had been.
As though he had come around a conical mountain on a rising road, and reached the place where he had been before, only one turn higher; and looking down could see his young self below, also struggling upward, also stock still.
Then, as now, he had failed to rescue someone he had been sent to rescue (oh what had her name been, a nursery rhyme, a fairy tale, he had not thought of her in years, where was she now? What had become of her?).
And when he came around to this place again on the path above, in the new age, he would doubtless fail again, forever, until he died, if he had not already done so.
But then the sun rose, and in a new sign. Like the escaping tooth of a great clock-gear, the mountain slipped to its next notch, and rested there.
Oh you dope, Pierce thought. What are you thinking?
The hot light flooded him indoors and out. He looked down to see that he was wearing shoes from two different pairs, he had pulled them on in the dark unseeing, unfeeling too. He clutched his brow. If he was not yet mad, he would soon be thought so by his neighbors; anyway if he went on walking the roads in the pre-dawn, arguing with unseen opponents, and wearing a brown left and a black right shoe.
He laughed aloud.
Turn back, he told himself; go home, pack a bag, get out of here. He couldn’t do what he had been summoned to do, not this time any more than last time; but he could cut and run.
He could go see his mom.
He turned to go back. His demons, who had risen away from him momentarily like crows startled from their roadside carrion, settled once more upon him.
“You don’t really have to tell me the whole story,” Winnie said to him, and touched his hand with hers. “Don’t feel you have to. Really.”
But he had come here just in order to tell it, the whole story, and so to cease telling it; to get from her the beginning of it, which would be the reason for the end.
And would it have all been different, Pierce cried in his heart, if he had never been taken away from Brooklyn, if he had grown up instead with Axel; would he have understood it all differently, and not laid the trap for himself which he had laid, if he had not grown up with his cousins—grown up as one of them, an Oliphant, acerb, arrogant, shy—but as a different person, as the son of his father, as himself? Was it enough, that old separation, enough to account for him, for the way he was: for the sins of avoidance and denial he had committed for twenty years, sins he had not until now even recognized as sins; for his irreparable sense that where he really belonged was always somewhere else, for a life of guilty and continual wishing? Was it enough?
A brown pelican, coasting over the cove, just then fell, as though slain, toward the water below. Belly-flopped in, and arose with a fish. Rose off the water, sailed on, shedding streams.
“Huh,” Winnie said. “Did you feel that?”
“What?” His senses all pricked up, afraid.
“That.”
“When?”
“Just now.”
Winnie snapped her fingers, having remembered all of a sudden the thing she wanted to tell her son, the thing he needed to know, about the path not taken, and how we always choose the way we most want. Almost as suddenly she forgot again, as though her own finger-snap had been a hypnotist’s, to wake her; and in the same moment Pierce discovered, in the name of his wild Kentucky girl, the name of his lost son.
The wide ripples rising on the cove dispersed. As it had now been doing for some time, the world continued to turn (at the rate of one second per second) from what it had been and into what it was to be.
“That old man is dead,” Winnie said. “Is that right?”
“Boney Rasmussen,” Pierce said. “This last summer.”
“And of course the writer. Fellowes Kraft. What a name.”
“Yes. A few years before I got there.”
“Well, son.” She looked at her watch, and at the evening. “I think—don’t you?—that at least it’s time for a drink.”
FOURTEEN
In the former time, when the world was not as it has since become, wonders and unlikelihoods were more common; Coincidence, restless, constant Coincidence, was a greater engine then, though few minds or hearts perceived all that it brought about, any more than the present age is aware of its own true springs. You can’t tell, when you’re asleep and dreaming, that you sleep; only when you’re awake can you tell the difference.
There was a highland then, the Faraway Hills, that lay a hundred miles or so away from the Cumberland counties and about as far to the west of New York City. A good-sized river (the Blackbury) ran through these folded hills, and there were towns and villages along the river and above the river’s valley. One by the river was called Fair Prospect; a road wound from Fair Prospect up into a cleft of the Faraways, to lead eventually in one direction over a hump of wooded hills to the town of Blackbury Jambs, and in another direction to the smaller town of Stonykill. Before it reached that fork, the road passed a drive closed by a rusty chain, and down that drive, alone on a knoll like a toy castle, stood an oddly suburban little villa, red-brick Tudor style, which had been the home of Fellowes Kraft, author of Bitten Apples and A Passage at Arms and The Werewolf of Prague and the others Pierce read as a boy; and behind the house a garden. On a day in June, late in that age of the world, a young woman sat cross-legged on the warm earth of the garden; in the cradle of her legs was an open book, her finger on a passage, this:
Divine love, Giordano Bruno believed, is expressed in the endless unstinting production of things; love in man is expressed in an endless, insatiable hunger for the productions of infinity.
The book was by Fellowes Kraft, his very first, though she had saved it for last to read; she had read all the others. Her name was Rosalind Rasmussen.
Giordano Bruno was the first man in Western history to conceive of the physical universe as literally infinite and unbounded, actually filled with stars that were suns around which planets like ours circled, out to infinity; and unlike Pascal in the next century the infinity never frightened or appalled him or made him feel small. He wrote in The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast: “The gods take pleasure in the multiform representation of multiform things, in the multiform fruits of all talents; for they have as great pleasure in all the things that are, and in all representations made of them, as in taking care that they be, and giving order and permission that they be made.” As pleased as though he were one of them himself, Bruno rejoiced in the Gods’ fecundity, and thought himself large enough to contain or at least to represent all that they so generously made.
Abashed and troubled, Rosie lifted her eyes from the page. Abashed, because she wasn’t sure she understood, nor whether the sense she made of it was what Kraft had meant; troubled, because it seemed so carelessly, cheerfully voracious, and it made her feel thin and renunciatory, who could take the things of this world only one by one or a few at a time before a sort of surfeit came over her, and she had to withdraw.
“Mommy!” said her daughter Sam, blond and four years old, who had been having her own way with the endless production of things, in this garden anyway. “Yets pick flowers.”
Were they hers to pick? No one else would pick them; Fellowes Kraft was dead, and he had
no heirs except a Foundation, the Rasmussen Foundation, whose employee she herself was.
“Come on yets.”
“Wait hon. Let me get scissors.”
It would make a great painting, she thought (Rosie was a painter, or had been or tried to be one, and would or imaginably could be one again in another time): it would show the riot of tall flowers in the June sun, realistically rendered, looking on helpless and aghast as the strong blond kid strains to break or uproot one of their number, tougher than it looks. Jaw set and bare feet firmly planted, but her hair more delicate than petals.
In Rosie’s heart, or in the space within her where her heart ought to be, she felt stir into being that painful hard thing that had mysteriously come to replace it: to replace not the plain muscle itself, but the other, the heart’s heart.
She looked up. From where she sat, she could see the window of the little room where Kraft had used to write his books; but because of the sun on its glass casements and the black vacuity of the screen, she couldn’t see inside, where Pierce Moffett was reading the pages of a book of Kraft’s, his very last book, as the one Rosie read was the first.
The novelist Fellowes Kraft, though he is now known chiefly for the shelf of historical fictions that Pierce read one after the other and one after the other largely forgot, had taken a kind of pride in being good at several different kinds of literary jobbery. Amid the K’s in a few dozen libraries, largely unread now for many years but still bearing unremovably their Dewey Decimal numbers, were a couple of biographies too (Bruno’s Journey, 1931, the one Rosie Rasmussen sat reading; The Winter King, 1940). There was a popular history (Elizabethan People, 1953); there were also a children’s story (Astray, 1959), a book of ghost stories, a couple of travel books, a hardboiled detective novel (Scream Bloody Murder, 1939), and even a piece of pornography (Skin Deep, n.d., Herm Press).
But though he thought of himself as a quick brown fox living by his wits in “the hilly country on the borderlands of literature” (where one reviewer located his works), he was actually a slow and fussy writer, who spent more time on his pages and worried more over their fate than he ever admitted. His historicals as a result were too short to truly engross fans of their genre, and his entire ouevre too small to support him. As he grew older, he found himself less and less able to build up the likenesses (or “likelinesses” as he used to call them) of historical personages, or to give imaginative force to their supposed actions; he wrote less and less more and more slowly, as though slipping into successively lower gears. When a small family foundation awarded him a stipend to help him continue, he seemed to stop altogether.