Aegypt

by John Crowley

  He never told his father that he had known the answer.

  The money Axel had by that time won seemed anyway a vast treasure; in retrospect it would appear almost trivial, as so many dollar figures of those days would, but it had been enough then to buy the pretty if shabby building off Park Slope in which Axel lived, and to which Pierce had been born. Axel had thus become a landlord, which he hated, but the building would support him without a lot of labor in the often mismanaged and sometimes dreadful years that lay ahead for him. Even now when its rent-controlled tenantry hardly paid the taxes and the most minimal of maintenance, it was somewhere for Axel to lay his head. That was how he put it to Pierce: ‘At least,’ tears often blooming in his eyes, ‘at least somewhere to lay my head.’

  This Christmas afternoon Pierce found him standing in the entranceway of the building, like a homeless bum taking shelter there (the comparison was Axel’s). ‘The bell’s broken,’ he said, fumbling with the key, ‘and Gravely’s gone to his people on the island. I didn’t want you standing out here ringing, thinking I was gone, though where I’d be I don’t know.’ Gravely was the super, a black man of great kindliness, even sweetness, who had been there since Pierce was a child; Axel revered Gravely, and Gravely called Axel Mr. Moffett; stooped, gracious, slow, and wise, he was one of the almost fictional characters that entered Axel’s life as though from the old movies he loved, and who had passed out of real life everywhere else, if indeed they had ever inhabited it. Pierce feared for Axel when Gravely was dead.

  ‘Where I’d be I don’t know,’ Axel said again as they climbed the stairs. ‘Where I’d be – I don’t know. Oh Pierce. The homeless on a night like this. The homeless man on this night of all nights. This night of all nights in the year.’

  Pierce’s uncle Sam had described Axel once as ‘a little theatrical.’ To ten-year-old Pierce (newly come to live with Sam) this didn’t communicate much, but after pondering it Pierce thought that maybe what Sam referred to was Axel’s habit of repeating, over and over and almost to himself, a phrase that momentarily struck him, like an actor rehearsing it, trying it this way and that way, pressing emotion or levity into it until it made him laugh or cry. Later on, other meanings of Sam’s description seemed more obviously intended, but still it was probably true what Sam also said, that Axel had missed the boat by not going into acting or Holy Orders, one.

  They were greeted as Axel opened his door by a harsh shriek of Latin: ‘De mortuis nil squawk wheep!’ Then: ‘Shut up, shut up.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Pierce said laughing, ‘how many parrots learn to say “shut up.” I wonder why that is.’

  ‘When,’ said Axel with a look of exhausted patience, ‘are you going to take that thing away. Out. Out of my life.’

  ‘Well,’ Pierce said, ‘that’s sort of something I came to announce, in a way.’ He pulled the small bottles from their snow-soggy paper bag. Because of his past history, Axel kept no liquor in the house; he drank only beer and a little wine in taverns. But at birthdays and Christmas he must have a martini, two martinis, to remind him of a more festive time, happier days. He was already at work with pitcher, ice, stirring rod.

  ‘People drink them now on the rocks,’ he said. ‘Horrible, horrible. That’s not a martini. Though I think the little sliver of lemon is a good idea. A twist. A twist of lemon. Really, Pierce, he should be returned to the jungle. It isn’t kind. He looks so shabby. He should be flitting through the jungle, the Amazon. Like a green thought in a green shade. He makes me feel like an old maid, something Victorian and dowdy. Dowdy. When when when are you going to take him away.’ He was laughing now. ‘Liberate me from this enslavement to a bird.’ He stirred. ‘Like a green thought in a green shade. Like a green thought: in a green shade. Libera me domine.’

  Pierce sat on the colorless sofa, contemplating his bird and his old home. It had acquired a patina of Axel that had obliterated almost all that had remained in it of his own life and his mother’s here, even though very little had changed. The walls hadn’t been chocolate brown when he was a boy, but he didn’t think Axel had painted them so; they had just grown so. This sofa had once been a blue one he could remember; the framed etchings of cathedrals and the Cameron photograph of William Morris had once been pictures he had looked long at. There was even a lost pattern on the rug that belonged to his memories. It was all buried here, like an earlier Troy, beneath the tidy dirtiness, the rummage-sale and salvage acquisitions, the old-man smell.

  ‘Libera me domine,’ Axel said again as he brought the pitcher and two glasses. Pierce had to strip the twists from the lemon, Axel’s plump white tapering fingers were no good at such tasks, ‘nerveless’ as he said; and rub the glasses with them, and then pour and present. It was like a hasty tea ceremony. Axel enjoyed it enormously.

  ‘You see the glasses,’ he said. They were tall and etched, with fluted green stems. ‘Venetian. Well not really Venetian, but like Venetian. Victorian copies, I suppose, maybe, possibly.’ They struck Pierce as Woolworth’s, but he knew little about such things. ‘Off the truck, of course. The boys brought them to me. Here, Axel, you kinda like this fancy stuff, why don’t you take these, heck we’d just break ’em. They know, you see. They can’t really appreciate the things themselves, but they know there’s something there, something they don’t grasp. Beauty. Books: they always bring me the books. Hey, Axel, what’s this, I found this. And it was Rabelais in French, a little quarto volume, only one of a set, and I said, Yes, Teddy, this is a great classic’ – kindly, grave, careful of simpler sensibilities – ‘and it’s in French, of a very old-fashioned kind . . . You read that stuff? he said, and I said, Yes, I can make it out, I know the lingo . . . Well, they tease me, they’re just honest hard-handed kids. Merry, merry Christmas, you know your coming here means a lot to me, a lot. Pierce. It means a lot.’ He sighed. ‘Just hard-handed good simple boys. Rowdy. Rowdy.’ He chuckled at a private memory.

  ‘Are you guys making any money?’ Pierce asked. He always felt loutish cutting across his father’s enthusiasms with questions like that, but he couldn’t seem to help it. He mistrusted this salvage business Axel had got involved with, a gang of Brooklynites who after work and on weekends stripped abandoned houses and tenements of copper and lead piping and whatever else of value they could find, under contract to the demolition men. They had a headquarters in an old firehouse they rented from the city, a place to get away from their wives and drink beer prodigiously; they were pledged to one another and to an older man called the Chief, a one-time Navy chief Pierce gathered, who ran the operation – so Axel’s stories suggested – in a manner somewhere between a scout camp and a gang of Villon thieves, though Axel insisted there was nothing illegal about it. Axel kept the books; just how much of the fun he joined in he didn’t quite say.

  ‘Money, well, money,’ he answered. ‘It takes money to make money.’ Suddenly he took umbrage. ‘Money! What are we talking about money for on a day like this! On this day of all days in the year!’

  ‘Squawp wheek!’ said Pierce’s parrot. Pierce had often noticed how a sudden rise in the noise level made a parrot talk. Axel rose heavily, glass in his hand; the bird sidled along its perch toward him, turning its baggy eyes alternately on him. There was a fixed expression on Axel’s face and Pierce wondered if he meant to strangle the bird. But he only stood before it, and after a moment began absently stroking its chin with the back of his forefinger. ‘I got a card from Winnie,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ Pierce said. ‘So did I. She sounds good.’

  Axel sighed hugely. ‘I went to Midnight Mass last night. At Saint Basil’s. You remember we always went. Winnie sang. She sang so purely.’ He leaned against the mantelpiece, head low, shoulders drooping. ‘I mentioned you both, in my intentions. My wife. My son.’

  Pierce too lowered his eyes for a moment, and said, ‘You still go, huh. Pretty crowded still?’

  ‘The Mass of the Angels,’ Axel said. Axel managed to combine a basic atheism with a certain amount
of emotional churchgoing and a special devotion to the Virgin. ‘The music. Gloria in excelsis Deo. Winnie could always just touch the high notes, so, so . . . just touch.’

  ‘Well, she sounds good,’ Pierce said. ‘Rested. Getting a good rest. The card was pretty funny, though. I think it must have been Dora’s choice.’

  ‘I mentioned you both,’ Axel said again. ‘In my intentions. I did. You’re all I have now, Pierce. All I have.’

  Pierce twisted the Venetian glass in his hand. His remark had not deflected the train of reminiscence charged with guilt and loss that came with the finishing of the first martini and the embarking on the second; but he hadn’t expected it to. It was as much a part of Christmas here as a gloomy forecast of declining powers and the deep desire Still to Do Some Good were a part of birthdays, which Axel also took with great seriousness; as he took his marriage vows, and his fatherhood, and his failure at these, or what he took to be his failure. Pierce was never able to reassure him; it was hard, given the depth of Axel’s feelings, to tell him to forget it, it didn’t matter much, or to suggest to him when Axel approached with grave chivalry the memory of his wife that Winnie (Pierce felt pretty sure) rarely thought of the matter one way or the other. It had always been Sam (and Dora now that Sam was dead) who had remembered Axel, remembered to send cards, remembered that Axel had a part in Pierce and a duty toward him too. Winnie had mostly wanted to rest.

  His mother’s capacity for rest had been great – Pierce rarely remembered her except as sitting placidly, sweet face vacant, hands loosely folded in her lap – but it had never been enough. Restlessness, in every sense, was for her like one of those obscure and chronic Victorian maladies that show few symptoms but whose prevention or mitigation is a lifetime’s work. It had only broken out seriously a few times that Pierce knew of: presumably when she had married Axel, perhaps when she had left him to go live with her brother Sam when Sam’s wife died; and after Sam’s death, when it had taken over her badly enough that she’d had to go away, to a rest home, to recover her restfulness.

  She’d met Dora there. Dora had spent years caring for a widowed elder brother (as she supposed Winnie had done too, though it had been as much the other way around), a brother whom she was visiting almost daily in his final senility at the rest home. His death left Dora nothing to do, a condition she feared as much as Winnie longed for rest; and so she had taken up Winnie’s life, with all the fascinating stories and collateral relatives it seemed to contain, including Pierce and Axel, and now she managed it and Winnie from a string of bungalows she had bought in Florida with her own and Winnie’s insurance proceeds. There Winnie seemed truly to have come to rest at last.

  ‘Pisanello,’ Axel said, taking the card he and his son had both got from Florida, and holding it out to Pierce. ‘Quattrocento, yes? I don’t think though that they should imitate the gold leaf by these gold sprinkles. That seems very tasteless to me. Can’t they leave well enough alone? Must they gild the lily?’

  ‘Paint the lily,’ Pierce said.

  ‘Paint the lily, and gild refined gold? Gild refined gold, and paint the lily? Now pour again, Pierce, will you? Please.’

  Before they struck out onto the slushy streets toward the old and famous (and in Pierce’s view now sadly declining) Brooklyn restaurant where long ago the Moffett family had gone for special treats and which now served Axel’s and Pierce’s Christmas dinner, there was an exchange of gifts: for Axel, as every year, a trifle of clothing or decoration ennobled by the famous name of a woodpaneled Madison Avenue shop, or by an English brand name or royal arms; for Pierce, lately, something off the truck. A book, this year.

  ‘You remember it, of course,’ he said, even as Pierce was tearing the wrapper. ‘Oh god I remember how you loved it. You’d ask to see the pictures, the beautiful pictures . . .’ Axel imitated round-eyed child wonder.

  ‘Oh,’ Pierce said. ‘Hm.’

  ‘Not a first edition,’ said Axel.

  ‘No, well,’ said Pierce.

  ‘I read it to you.’

  It was Sidney Lanier’s retelling of the Arthurian legends, in the old deluxe Scribner’s edition with pictures by N. C. Wyeth, all ultramarine skies and white silver armor. He did remember it. He owned a glossy paperback reproduction of it, in fact, but he didn’t remember that he had especially loved it, as he had other books, and opening this musty hardback brought no special pang; pictures and text suggested something remote, untouching and untouched, clear but not his: everything that Pierce thought Axel meant by the word pure, which Axel used in a way all his own, to express something that moved him deeply and Pierce not at all.

  ‘Hey, thanks,’ he said, ‘sure, I remember.’ He didn’t want to meet Axel’s eyes for fear they might be full of tears. He could well imagine that, when he was a child and Axel had read him these stories, Axel had mistaken Pierce’s silence and his amazement before his father’s deep emotion for deep emotion on Pierce’s own part; but what Pierce truly remembered with great vividness of his bedtime stories was not these knights at all, but Axel’s acting out, in minute detail, episodes from the Flash Gordon serial. Ming the Merciless, the Mud Men of Mars, all of it, the best bits of dialogue said over and over, punctuated by Axel’s self-appreciative laughter and Pierce’s delight; his father’s eyes flashing histrionically, his chubby face transmuting from heroic resolve to threatened purity to demonic malice and back again. That’s what Pierce remembered.

  And yet (he turned to the last picture, the effulgent chapel, the mystery within) he did remember a night when this book was the bedtime reading. He remembered it, though it was possible that Axel, who believed that he remembered every detail of Pierce’s life with him, had forgotten it. It was the night before the day when Pierce and Winnie left for Kentucky.

  Pierce in his pajamas, teeth brushed, prayers said, lay with the covers up to his chin, in the corner formed by the two walls against which his little bed was pressed (the more tightly the better, to prevent the midnight egress of whatever might be underneath). Axel, awesomely grave and gentle – as he had been all day, only gripping Pierce’s hand and turning away to sob now and then through the day’s walks and treats (Winnie left alone at home to pack) – took down from the shelf the Boy’s King Arthur.

  ‘This book,’ Axel said. ‘Do you want a story from this book? The book of knights?’

  Pierce nodded, whatever was required of him, only let him get alive through the ritual of these days weird and solemn as a midnight Mass. Yes, that book.

  Axel, rubbing his forehead, smelling a little of drink and Sensen, opened the volume. ‘Well, here’s a story,’ he said, ‘a story of a little boy just like you,’ which issued as a hollow groan. ‘Like you, and he was a good boy like you. His name was Percival.’

  He cleared his throat wetly, and began.

  ‘The father of Sir Percival was that king hight Pellinore who fought so terrible a battle with King Arthur. King Arthur drove him from town to town and from place to place until, at last, he was driven away from the habitations of men and into the forests like a wild beast. And that was a very great hardship for the lady who had been queen; and likewise, it was greatly to the peril of the young child Percival.

  ‘Now Percival was extraordinarily beautiful and his mother loved him above all her other sons. Wherefore she feared lest the young child should die of those hardships.

  ‘So one day King Pellinore said: “Dear love, I am now in no wise prepared for to defend thee and this little one.”’ Axel stopped at these words, swallowing and staring for a moment; Pierce, stilled by strangeness, only waited. At length Axel went on: ‘“Wherefore for a while I shall put ye away from me so that ye may remain in secret hiding until such time as the child shall have grown in years and stature to the estate of manhood and may so defend himself.

  ‘“Now of all my one-time possessions I have only two left me. One of these is a lonely castle in this forest (unto which I am now betaking my way), and the other is a solitary tower, at a grea
t distance from this, and in a very desolate part of the world where there are many mountains. Unto that place I shall send ye.

  ‘“And if this child groweth in that lonely place to manhood, and if he be weak in body or timid in spirit, thou shalt make of him a clerk of holy orders. But if when he groweth, he shall prove to be strong and lusty of frame and high of spirit, and shall desire to undertake deeds of knighthood, thou then shalt not stay him from his desires, but shall let him go forth into the world as he shall have a mind to do.”’

  He stopped reading, and squeezed shut his eyes against the tears. ‘You’ll be a good boy, won’t you,’ he said. ‘You’ll be a good boy, and take care of your mother, like a good knight.’

  Pierce in his corner nodded.

  ‘And so it was,’ Axel said, finding his place with difficulty, ‘and so it was that King Pellinore betook himself to that lonely castle where King Arthur found him and fought with him; and Percival’s mother betook herself to that dwelling-place in the mountains of which King Pellinore had spoken – which was a single tower that reached up into the sky, like unto a finger of stone. There she abided with Percival for sixteen years, and in all that time Percival knew naught of the world nor of what sort it was, but grew altogether wild and was entirely innocent like to a little child.

  ‘Oh my dear son.’ Axel bent toward Pierce as though to bury his head in his son’s lap, but did not; he gripped his own forehead with his hand. ‘You’ll grow up to be strong, won’t you, yes, and manly, and innocent; and if you want to do deeds of knighthood, oh don’t let them stop you, don’t. Oh don’t.’

  He threw up his suffering head. ‘Don’t let them make you hate me,’ he said. ‘Your father. Don’t let them make you hate your father.’ The histrionic abjuring, the careful gravity, had broken; Pierce, awed, saw an adult person in grief like a child. ‘And you’ll come back,’ he sobbed. ‘You’ll come back, won’t you one day, you’ll come back.’ Pierce said nothing. He didn’t know if that house in Kentucky was truly a finger of stone in a solitude of mountains, nor whether he ever would come back to this lonely castle; but he knew that he was not being sent away. He knew that his mother was taking him away, running away with him, and that he was not beautiful at all.