Aegypt

by John Crowley

  ‘And how was this one?’ Phoebe asked her while she hunted up nickels for the fine. This was the same Phoebe to whom Rosie had once paid fines for The Secret Garden and The Borrowers Abroad, herself, too, grown a lot smaller.

  ‘Good,’ said Rosie. ‘A good one.’

  ‘I’ve never read him,’ Phoebe said. ‘I suppose I should. Our local famous author.’

  ‘Oh, it’s good,’ Rosie said. ‘You’d like it.’

  ‘They were very popular once.’ She turned Darkling Plain in her hands, regarding through the bottoms of her bifocals the edgeworn cover, a dim painting of armored men struggling together. ‘There’s lots more.’

  ‘More where that came from, huh,’ Rosie said. She paid her fine and wandered into the stacks. Maybe she would try another. She was intending to save them for winter, when, if things turned out as she thought they would, she would be in need of long and easeful distractions, a place to go. But Darkling Plain had not satisfied, somehow; involving and colorful as it had been, it had seemed not a complete story; she wanted more. She ran her hand across the backs of them, unable to think how she might make a choice among them; she knew only the rudiments, if that, of the true histories they were based on (in fact she was hoping to learn a lot from them in the history line), and they all seemed more or less the same thing, each with its old-fashioned watercolor painting for a cover, overlaid with black script title, and each bearing at the bottom of the spine a little leaping wolfhound imprint. She drew one out: Under Saturn, a Novel of Wallenstein. More battles. Who was Wallenstein again? Another: this one’s cover had a crowded Elizabethan scene, an inn-yard theater, orange-sellers, swells with swords, an apprentice or somebody who turned away from the scene and called out to the viewer, hand by his mouth, pointing to the players: Lots of fun here, let’s go. Well, all right, this looked cheerful. It was called Bitten Apples.

  She checked it out, and with its solid, deckle-edged weight under her arm felt oddly safe. Only one or two things left on the list before Mike’s lunch. Mike’s lunch was the last. She wrestled the great wagon out of its parking place, craning her neck to see whom she might run over; the power steering cried out, oil smoke farted from the tailpipe, the dogs barked. Rosie went west across the bridge and out of town, thinking: the last.

  From Blackbury Jambs to Cascadia, the river takes on briefly a broad, quick lordliness; there are paper mills and furniture mills and a few tall brick chimneys along this stretch, and the river is walled and channeled here and there. Most of this work from the Iron Age is derelict now, the mills mostly stand windowless and the riparian works are crumbling; visitors to the Faraways in the last century complained bitterly about dark satanic mills and the intrusion of the Great God Dollar into sylvan loveliness, but the rosy brick and calm desuetude of the old factories seem harmless enough today, even romantic in certain weathers. One small ivy-clad block, once a chair factory, is a kind of monastery now; there are open services on weekends, and ecstatic dancing. The crowd there even makes and sells herbal remedies and cordials, but there are old cars in the yard, and crumb-crushing equipment, they aren’t celibate who live there. Others of the old places are still marginally alive, doing a little warehousing or renting space to small businesses.

  Rosie turned in at one of these, a corner of which housed Bluto’s Automotive. Its sign showed a grinning, black-bearded cartoon brute in full stride, crushing a muffler in one paw and holding a wrench in the other; the resident mechanic, though, was a chinless, weedy guy with a thin fair beard and a prominent Adam’s apple, scholarly-looking in rimless glasses. He looked at the rearview mirror Rosie handed him as though he’d never seen anything resembling it before, but if given time for study would figure out its purpose.

  ‘It glues on,’ Rosie said.

  He put its chrome foot to the spot on the window where it had come from. It didn’t cling there.

  ‘I can’t see behind me,’ Rosie said. ‘Can’t see where I’ve been.’

  ‘Epoxy,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Give me a minute.’

  He went off with the mirror into his shop. Rosie let the patient dogs out of the car – they flowed smoothly out as soon as they understood it was permitted, and went racing after each other around the littered yard; they might, Rosie thought, melt like Sambo’s tigers in this heat, churn themselves into buttermilk. She wandered to the brick embankment, iced with broken concrete, which ended the yard at the river’s edge, and leaned her elbows there. Bending forward and stretching she could see, far downstream, the towers of Butterman’s lifting themselves out of the river and the midday haze like a fairy castle.

  Even along this deep and almost lakelike part of the Blackbury there are islands large and small that put out their heads; and on one of them someone named Butterman once built a castle. A real castle, with turrets and outworks and machicolations; across one red stone face he had his name carved in tall Gothic letters, BUTTERMAN’S, and inside there was a beer garden and a variety theater. The commonalty on excursion to the Faraways a hundred years ago needed to go no farther than here. A steamer then plied the river all summer long, starting from a special steel pier at Cascadia (Gateway to the Faraways) and calling at Butterman’s on its way to Blackbury Jambs, and then again on its return to Cascadia. Butterman’s is a ruin now, and the dock at Blackbury Jambs is gone, though the water-stairs remain; Rosie’s uncle Boney could remember the steamer, and she often used to imagine it, holiday-makers in white clothes, the tooting steam whistle and the striped awnings. And though she had never been inside the ruin of Butterman’s, she always meant to organize an expedition there, when she was grown up and needed no permission, because Butterman’s, at least partly, was hers.

  The Rasmussen holdings in the Faraways are not now as extensive as they once were; the big place in Cascadia was sold for a boys’ school twenty years ago, and while Rosie was growing up in the Midwest with her father and mother, the whole tissue of properties somewhat unraveled. ‘Arcady,’ the summer place above Fair Prospect, with its fields and woods, is still theirs, though strictly speaking it belongs not to Boney Rasmussen, who lives there, but to the Rasmussen Foundation. As a child, Rosie hadn’t perceived the decline, if it was one, of the Rasmussens; she had a Grandfather and a Grandmother Rasmussen in addition to Boney, a father too, and cousins, and her Sunday visits were always to one Rasmussen satrapy or another; but even in those days a kind of abstraction was setting in, was in fact well advanced, her own father’s flight first to the West and then increasingly into his own fast-darkening soul (he died of an overdose of morphine when Rosie was fourteen) was only the extremest example of it. When Mike got the job here at The Woods (partly through Boney’s influence, the Rasmussen Foundation still contributed to the place’s existence) and Rosie returned to the Faraways, she felt a little like a princess who had awakened after being asleep for a hundred years: grandparents were dead, known houses sold to strangers, cousins departed, new blacktop highways and plastic shopping centers laid over Rasmussen pastures and horse barns. Only Boney, her grandfather’s older brother, oldest of them all, old even when Rosie was a child, still survived, outliving them all. And Butterman’s, her castle, to the best anyway of Boney’s remembrance, was still hers or his: her castle, that she had told stories of, to herself and others, during her long life elsewhere. Between her and Mike especially the castle had been a funny bond, Rosie’s castle in the Faraways, her dowry, they would take possession when they moved back there together.

  A trickle of sweat ran down her side beneath her T-shirt.

  Spofford’s party is tomorrow night, she thought; Full Moon party on the river. Her heart rose, or sank. Below her, in the glassy curls of the backwater, several ducks floated, turning idly in the current, dabbling, climbing onto rocks and shaking themselves head to tail always with the same small motion.

  A swim. A long dive into dark water. Always that moment, as you leaped, when the desired water made you afraid, a moment in the middle of the air when you half-changed your
mind, decided not to dive after all, a thrill of oh-no that was swept off by the cloven water’s cold solidity and the bliss of being in it.

  ‘Okay, hey,’ Gene the mechanic called to her.

  She turned back to her car. Gene was stretched out in the front seat, looking at his work from different angles while the dogs sniffed his pants leg. In the western sky a huge pile of dense cloud had arisen: thunderheads. Rosie shuddered in the heat. A storm coming soon.

  She drove back toward Blackbury Jambs, but instead of crossing the bridge into town she took the leftward way and went north along the Shadow River road. Now at high noon the river wasn’t shadowy but spangled and glittering with sundrops, with shafts of sun reaching through silvery aspens and dark firs down into its deep bed. It ran gurgling happily over its waterfalls and around the tall boots of a fisherman who stood in it casting for trout.

  The Shadow is a recreational river, or at least so billed, and has been for a long time. Down near the Jambs the vacation houses built amid the firs are stark geometries of glass and naked wood, with jutting decks and roofs sloping at surprising angles; they are ‘year-round’ houses and several are lived in year-round by psychiatrists and administrators who work at The Woods, professionals on permanent vacation. Farther along the style changes to the passé chalet and A-frame types built ten and twenty years ago, interspersed with log cabins and even some trailers lugged laboriously into place and then fitted out with woodsheds, porches, carports, becoming immobile homes over time; but farther on than that, on the steps of Mount Merrow and Mount Whirligig, are the oldest settlements, clusters of bungalows and cabins, summer camps and boardinghouses dating from the Depression and before, beloved places cheerfully cheek-by-jowl around the shores of aging lakelets or strung along the river’s banks wherever it widens momentarily; places that have names on boards over their doors, and whitewashed rocks bordering their brief front walks, flamingos and windmills and jungle gyms and seesaws arrayed around them.

  Rosie called the general style of these encampments Tacky Tuckaway; their smallness had intrigued her as a child, their smallness and the neighborliness of their tiny lots, the noise their children and dogs and picnicking made. Her own child-life was lived on a larger scale, more widely spaced, less loud: these places had seemed child-sized to her. And her affection remained. She drove slowly through them on her way to The Woods or to Val’s Faraway Lodge, never failing to notice something new and astonishing. Someone had bordered his pat of pine-needle-strewn ground with a cement wall, a turret at each corner, all stuck full of bits of colored glass, bottle bottoms, shiny scraps of this and that. The working-class people who came to vacation here, heavy-bellied men from Conurbana, couldn’t rest, it seemed, they had to work; they built cement walls and stuck glass in them, they made carports and barbecue pits and trimmed their minute porches with fretwork. Or they had once anyway. More and more Rosie noticed empty cabins, camps for sale. Where did they go now instead, she wondered. Daze-Aweigh, what could that mean. Daze-Aweigh was 4 Sale. Oh: ‘days away.’ She drove past the Here You Are grocery store and the bait store, spelled Bate – Don’t you know how to spell ‘bait,’ mister, Sure I do but I always get a lot of folks come in to the store just to tell me how; these two stores and a squat cement-block church were all there was to Shadowland, a failed township that had once been laid out around these glens, centering on this crossroads.

  Rosie paused at the crossroads. On ahead and down to the river was Val’s; Rosie had wanted to go see Val, she had brought her chart with her for Val to look at and give advice, and she might have liked a quick drink too. She glanced at her watch. No. She turned left, and in a short time passed through a gateway, huge wooden posts roughly hewn, and onto a private road that led up the side of Mount Whirligig. The road was bordered with heavy wooden fencing; now and again trails and small roads led away, marked with finger boards directing walkers to the Grotto, the Falls, the Serpentine. At the end of the road, amid tended plantings, was a large wooden sign, rough handiwork but varnished and authoritative, that said THE WOODS CENTER FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY. A circular drive swept around this sign leading to the Center itself.

  The Woods is a long, many-angled, four-story frame place, painted white, with fieldstone chimneys and deep verandas. It was built after World War I as a resort, the sort of place middle-class families would come to for a summer holiday in the mountains, to breathe healthful piny air and eat huge communal meals at long tables, chicken every Sunday, and sit on wicker chairs along the verandas or play bridge in the wide lounges; fireworks on the Fourth, and a hayride at season’s end. It was never fancy; there were lace curtains in the rooms, but iron bedsteads and no rugs, and the toilet was down the hall. In the twenties a three-hole golf course was made, and some tennis courts put in. Evening entertainment was an upright piano with rolls. Despite a loyal though aging clientele, The Woods started to seem not much fun by the next war, and declined; Rosie remembered the dining room in the fifties, shabby and prisonlike, the waitresses ancient. She thought it must have been among the last resorts anywhere to serve canned peas. It closed in 1958, and didn’t reopen as a private psychiatric institution until 1965, when Rosie was living in the Midwest.

  Wisely, the directors decided to leave the place as much as possible as they found it, beyond sprucing it up, replacing kitchens and bathrooms, and fitting in staff quarters and offices and infirmary. The Maxfield Parrish prints disappeared into the directors’ offices or houses, and a moose head was removed from over the fieldstone fireplace, being thought perhaps unsettling; but the wicker furniture and the pine dining tables, the cool smell of the long wood-clad halls, the lace curtains, all remain. The Woods as a psychiatric center was to have the same tranquilizing properties it had as a resort, and the principles it is run on are communal in some of the same ways, not excepting group sings around the fire and even hayrides. As stronger tranquilizers were developed over the next decade, The Woods began to decline again; even the profoundly troubled who cannot live in the world can stay at home now and still float on quiet seas far away. The people who come to The Woods these days are for the most part not in desperate trouble, though their unhappiness may lead them to think so; they are people who, as the staff say to local people, ‘need a rest’; and The Woods is as restful as it always was, though quite a lot more expensive to stay in.

  Rosie parked her panting wagon, which shuddered and heaved for some time after the ignition was switched off (it didn’t like these mountain climbs), and apologized profoundly to the dogs. ‘Just a little while, guys,’ she promised, and got out, only to return for Mike’s Saran-wrapped lunch, which lay on the front seat. It was soggy with the heat, and, Rosie thought, probably more inedible even than before. Who cares, who cares. Mike had recently decided to change his diet, adopting a new and fairly severe one consisting mostly of whole grains in certain combinations; Rosie cooked the required cakes and compotes but refused to eat them. Beige food.

  The Woods is divided into two wings by a broad portal running through its center, through which the porches and lawns on the back side can be seen; from certain angles this portal makes the whole place seem two-dimensional or fake, a cutout front merely, or a standing screen, as though you could fold up its angled length and put it away. Rosie’s clogs echoed on the flags of this passage; she avoided the eyes of one or two aimless people who loitered there before the notice board – you could be hours here if you caught the wrong person’s attention – and went into the east wing through big old screen doors that clacked behind her satisfyingly. She liked this place, basically. Too bad. She asked for Dr. Mucho at the desk, noticing by its clock that she was only minutes late.

  ‘There it is,’ she said when he came. She gave him the food. ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’

  The woman at the desk looked up slyly, interested. Mike, cake in hand, glanced at her and at Rosie. He nodded thoughtfully, entertaining the idea. Then he said, ‘Okay. Let’s go to Woodpecker.’

  The vario
us suites, rooms, crafts shops, and lounges at The Woods have the names of local birds. On the doors are polished wooden plaques in the shape of Kingfisher, Woodpecker, Robin. Woodpecker is the staff lounge, almost deserted at lunchtime except for one or two other dieters. Mike sat at a table and picked at the wrapping of his lunch, stuck to the bolus within. Rosie, feeling the underarms of her shirt growing stained as a workman’s, crossed her arms before her, watching.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘The last lunch.’

  ‘Rosie,’ Mike said, not looking up, ‘don’t be cryptic.’

  He should never have grown that mustache, Rosie thought. Its drooping ends only emphasized the pout of his mouth and the chub of his cheeks. She began to pace in a small circle, two steps, turn, two steps.

  ‘I’m going to Boney’s this afternoon. I’m packing my stuff. I’m not coming back.’

  Still not looking at her, a mask of professional calm on his face, Mike stood and got himself a plastic fork from a jar of them on the next table. He sat again, poised the fork for use, but didn’t use it. ‘We agreed,’ he said, ‘that just now, just now and for a while, there wasn’t going to be any of this.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You agreed.’

  A quick dart of Mike’s eyes to the others in the room. ‘If you want,’ he said carefully, ‘we can go somewhere, outside . . .’

  ‘I’m taking the calculator,’ she said. ‘If that’s okay. I know you use it all the time but I did pay for it and I can’t do anything without it.’

  ‘Rosie. You’re acting out.’ He looked up at her at last, levelly, candor and control projected from his narrow eyes. ‘You know, I really feel like you’re breaking a bond. Like a little kid. As though you can’t see me, see me as a person. We agreed that with my work and my research and my, that we would put off any discussions.’ His voice had sunk to a low murmur. ‘Until a turnaround time.’