Little, Big

by John Crowley

  Violet moved her mouth, as though in answer, but no answer came out. She composed herself. “If he loves her,” she said, “then …”

  “He may,” Mr. Flowers said. “But he says—she says he says—that there’s someone else, someone with, well, a prior claim, someone …”

  “He’s promised to another,” Mrs. Flowers said. “Who’s also, well.”

  “Amy Meadows?” Violet said.

  “No, no. That wasn’t the name. Was that the name?”

  Mr. Flowers coughed. “Happiness wasn’t sure, exactly. There might be … more than one.”

  Violet could only say “Oh dear, oh dear,” feeling deeply their consternation, their brave effort not to censure, and having no idea how to answer them. They looked at her with hope, hope that she would say something that would fit all this too into the drama they perceived. But in the end she could only say, in a tiny voice, with a desperate smile, “Well, I suppose it’s not the first time it ever happened in the world.”

  “Not the first time?”

  “I mean not the first time.”

  Their hearts leapt up. She did know: she knew precedents for this. What could they be? Krishna fluting, seed-scattering, spirit-incarnating—avatars—what? Something they had no inkling of? Yes, brighter and stranger than they could know. “Not the first time,” said Mr. Flowers, his unlined brow raised. “Yes.”

  “Is it,” said Mrs. Flowers, almost whispering, “part of the Tale?”

  “Is what? Oh, yes,” Violet said, lost in thought. What had become of Amy? What on earth was August up to? Where had he found the daring to break girls’ hearts? A dread came over her. “Only I didn’t know this, I never suspected…. Oh, August,” she said, and bowed her head. Was this their doing? How could she know? Could she ask him? Would his answer tell her?

  Seeing her so lost, Mr. Flowers leaned forward. “We never, never meant to burden you,” he said. “It wasn’t—it wasn’t that we didn’t think, that we weren’t sure it wasn’t, or wouldn’t be, all right. Happiness doesn’t blame him, I mean it’s not that.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Flowers, and put her hand gently on Violet’s arm. “We didn’t want anything. It wasn’t that. A new spirit is always a joy. She’ll be ours.”

  “Maybe,” Violet said, “it’ll be clearer later.”

  “I’m sure,” Mrs. Flowers said. “It is, it is part of the Tale.”

  But Violet had seen that it would not be clearer later. The Tale: yes, this was part of the Tale, but she had suddenly seen, as a person alone in a room reading or working at the end of day sees, as she raises her eyes from work that has for some reason grown obscure and difficult, that evening has come, and that’s the reason; and that it would long grow darker before it lightened.

  “Please,” she said, “have tea. We’ll light the lights. Stay awhile.”

  Outside she could hear—they could all hear—a car, chugging steadily toward the house. It slowed as it approached the drive—its voice was distinct and regular, like the crickets’—and changed gears like changing its mind, and chugged onward.

  How long is the Tale? she had asked, and Mrs. Underhill had said: you and your children and your children’s children will all be buried before that Tale’s all told.

  She took hold of the lamp cord, but for a moment didn’t pull it. What had she done? Was this her fault, because she hadn’t believed the Tale could be so long? It was. She would change. She would correct what she could, if there were time. There must be time. She pulled the cord, which made the windows night, and the room a room.

  The Last Day of August

  The enormous moon which August had taken Margaret Juniper out to see rise had risen, though they hadn’t noticed its ascent. The harvest moon, August had insisted this was, and had sung a song about it to Marge as they sped along; but it wasn’t the harvest moon, amber and huge and plenteous as it was, that would be next month’s; this was only the last day of August. Its light was on them. They could look at it now, August was too dazed and replete to do anything else, even to comfort Marge who wept quietly—perhaps, who could tell, even happily—beside him. He couldn’t speak. He wondered if he would ever speak again, except to invite, except to propose. Maybe if he kept his mouth shut … But he knew he wouldn’t.

  Marge raised a moonlit hand, and stroked the moustache he had begun to grow, laughing through her tears. “It’s so handsome,” she said. He twitched his nose like a rabbit under her fingers. Why do they always rub it wrong, turn it uncomfortably underside-over, should he shave it so they can’t? Her mouth was red and the flesh around it flushed from kissing and from weeping. Her skin against his was as soft as he had imagined it would be, but flecked with pinkish freckles he hadn’t expected, not her slim white thighs though, bare on the sweat-slick leather of the seat. Within her opened blouse her breasts were small and new-looking, capped with large changeable nipples, seeming to have just been extruded from a boyish chest. The little hair was blond and stiff and small, like a dot. Oh God the privacies he had seen. He felt the strangeness of unbound flesh strongly. They ought to be kept hidden, these vulnerabilities, these oddities and organs soft as a snail’s body or its tender horns, the exposure of them was monstrous, he wanted to recase hers in the pretty white underthings that hung around the car like festoons, and yet even as he thought this be began to rise again.

  “Oh,” she said. She hadn’t, probably, got much of a gander at his engorgement in the rush of her deflowering, too much else to think about. “Do you do it right away again?”

  He made no answer, it had nothing to do with him. As well ask the trout struggling on the hook if he liked to go on with that activity or cease it. A bargain is a bargain. He did wonder why, though one knows a woman better and she has picked up anyway the rudiments, the second time often seems more difficult, more ill-fitting, more a matter of inconvenient knees and elbows, than the first. None of this prevented his falling, as they coupled, more deeply in love with her, but he hadn’t expected it to. So various they are, bodies, breasts, odors, he hadn’t known about that, that they would be as individual, as charged with character, as faces and voices. He was surfeited with so much character. He knew too much. He groaned aloud with love and knowledge, and clung to her.

  It was late, the moon had shrunk and grown chill and white as it climbed the sky. With how sad steps. Her tears fell again, though she didn’t seem to be exactly weeping, they seemed a natural secretion, drawn forth by the moon perhaps; she was busy putting away her nakedness, though she couldn’t take it back from him any more. She said to him calmly: “I’m glad, August. That we had this one time.”

  “What do you mean?” A hoarse beast’s voice, not his own. “This one time?”

  She brushed the tears from her face with the flat of her hand, she couldn’t see to fasten her garters. “Because I can always remember this now.”

  “No.”

  “At least remember this.” She threw her dress into the air, very agilely causing it to settle over her head; she wiggled, and it descended over her like a curtain, the last act. “August, no.” She shrank against the door, clasping her hands together, drawing up her shoulders. “Because you don’t love me, and that’s all right. No. I know about Sara Stone. Everybody knows. It’s all right.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t you dare.” She looked at him warningly. He wasn’t to spoil this with lies, with coarse denials. “You love her. That’s true and you know it.” He said nothing. It was true. A collision was taking place inside him of such magnitude he could only witness it. The noise of it made it hard to hear her. “I’ll never ever do it with anyone else, ever.” Her bravery exhausted, her lip began to tremble. “I’m going to go off and live with Jeff, and I’ll never love anyone else, and just remember this always.” Jeff was her kindly brother, a rose gardener. She turned her face away. “You can take me home now.”

  He took her home, without another word.

  Being filled with clamor is like being void. Vo
id, he watched her climb down from the car, watched her shatter the moonshadows of leaves and be shattered by them as she went away, not looking back, he would not have seen her if she had looked. Void, he drove away from the shaded, shuddering crossroads. Void, he drove toward home. It didn’t feel like a decision, it felt like void, when he turned off the gray pebble-glittering road, bounced through the ditch, climbed a bank, and steered the Ford (dauntless, unfazed) out into the silvered pond of an uncut pasture, and then further on, the void slowly filling with resolution that felt also like void.

  The car sputtered out of gas. He choked it, prodded it, urged it a little further, but it died. If there was a God damn garage within ten miles of here it would be convenient as hell. He sat for a while in the cooling car, imagining his destination without exactly thinking about it. He did wonder (last lamplit window of common thought, flickering out) if Marge would think he’d done it for her. Well he would have, in a way, in a way, he would have to put stones in his pockets, heavy ones, and just relax. Wash it all away. The thunder of void resolution was like the cold thunder of the falls, he seemed already to hear it, and wondered if he would hear nothing else through eternity; he hoped not.

  He got out of the car, detached the squirrel tail, it ought to be returned, maybe they would Somehow return the payment he had made for it; and, slipping and stumbling in his patent-leather seducer’s shoes, he made for the woods.

  Strange Way to Live

  “Mother?” Nora said, astonished, stopping in the hall with an empty cup and saucer in her hands. “What are you doing up?”

  Violet stood on the stairs, having made no sound coming down that Nora heard; she was dressed, in clothes which Nora hadn’t seen for years, but she had the air of someone asleep, somnambulating. “No word,” she said, as though sure there would not be,

  “about August?”

  “No. No, no word.”

  Two weeks had passed since a neighbor had told them of seeing August’s Ford abandoned in a field, open to the elements. Auberon, after long hesitation, had suggested to Violet that they call the police; but this notion was so far from anything Violet could imagine about what had happened that he doubted she even heard: no fate August was reserved to could possibly be altered, or even discovered, by police.

  “It’s my fault, you know,” she said in a small voice. “Whatever it is that’s happened. Oh, Nora.”

  Nora rushed up the stairs to where Violet had sat down suddenly as though fallen. She took Violet’s arm to help her rise, but Violet only grasped the hand she offered and squeezed it, as though it were Nora who needed comforting. Nora sat beside her on the stair. “I’ve been so wrong,” Violet said, “so stupid and wrong. And now see what’s come of it.”

  “No,” Nora said. “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t see,” Violet said. “I thought … Listen now, Nora. I want to go to the City. I want to see Timmie and Alex, and have a long visit, and see the baby. Will you come?”

  “Of course,” Nora said. “But …”

  “All right. And Nora. Your young man.”

  “What young man?” She looked away.

  “Henry. Harvey. You mightn’t think I know, but I do. I think—I think you and he should—should do what you like. If ever anything I said made you think I didn’t want you to, well, it’s not so. You must do exactly as you like. Marry him, and move away …”

  “But I don’t want to move away.”

  “Poor Auberon, I suppose it’s too late—he’s missed his war now, and …”

  “Mother,” Nora said, “what are you talking about?”

  She was silent a time. Then; “It’s my own fault,” she said. “I didn’t think. It’s very hard though, you know, to know a little, or to guess a little, and not want to—to help, or to see that things come out right; it’s hard not to be afraid, not to think some small thing—oh, the smallest—that you might do would spoil it. But that’s not so, is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t. You see”—she clasped her pale, thin hands together, and closed her eyes—”it is a Tale. Only it’s longer and stranger than we imagine. Longer and stranger than we can imagine. So what you must do—” she opened her eyes “—what you must do, and what I must do, is forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Forget a Tale is being told. Otherwise—oh, don’t you see, if we didn’t know the little that we do, we’d never interfere, never get things wrong; but we do know, only not enough; and so we guess wrong, and get entangled, and have to be put right in ways—in ways so odd, so—oh, dear, poor August, the smelliest, noisiest garage would have been better, I know it would have been ….”

  “But what about a special fate, and all that,” Nora said, alarmed at her mother’s distress, “and being Protected, and all?”

  “Yes,” Violet said. “Perhaps. But it doesn’t matter, because we can’t understand that, or what it means. So we have to forget.”

  “How can we?”

  “We can’t.” She stared straight in front of her. “But we can be silent. And we can be clever against our knowledge. And we can—oh, it’s so strange, such a strange way to live—we can keep secrets. Can’t we? Can you?”

  “I think. I don’t know.”

  “Well, you must learn. So must I. So must we all. Never to tell what you know, or think, because it’s never enough, and it won’t be true anyway for anyone but you, not in the same way; and never hope, or be afraid; and never, never take their side against us, and still, Somehow, I don’t know how, trust them. We must do that from now on.”

  “How long?”

  Before Violet could answer this, if she could, or would, the door of the library, which they could see through the fat banisters, opened a crack, and a wan face looked out, and withdrew.

  “Who’s that?” Violet asked.

  “Amy Meadows,” Nora said, and blushed.

  “What’s she doing in the library?”

  “She came looking for August. She says—” Nora now clasped her hands and shut her eyes “—she says she’s going to have August’s baby. And she wondered where he was.”

  The Seed. She thought of Mrs. Flowers: Is it the Tale? Hopeful, astonished, glad. She nearly laughed, giddily. “Well, so do I,” she said. “So do I.” She leaned out between the banisters and said, “Come out, dear. Don’t be afraid.”

  The door opened, just enough to let Amy pass, and though she shut it behind her softly, it boomed resoundingly as it latched. “Oh,” she said, not having at first recognized the woman on the stair, “Mrs. Drinkwater.”

  “Come up,” Violet said. She patted her lap, as she might to attract a kitten. Amy mounted the stairs to where they sat halfway to the landing. Her dress was homemade, and her stockings were thick, and she was even prettier than Violet remembered. “Now. What is it?”

  Amy sat on the stair below them, a miserable huddle, with a big loose bag in her lap, like a runaway’s. “August’s not here,” she said.

  “No. We … don’t know where he is, exactly. Amy, now everything’s going to be all right. You’re not to worry.”

  “It’s not,” Amy said softly. “It’s not going to ever be all right again.” She looked up at Violet. “Did he run off?”

  “I think he did.” She put her arm around Amy. “But he’ll come back, possibly, probably …” She brushed Amy’s hair aside which had fallen lankly and sadly over her cheek. “You must go home now for a while, you see, and not worry, and everything will turn out for the best, you’ll see.”

  At that Amy’s shoulders began to heave, softly and slowly. “Can’t,” she said, in a small high weeping voice. “Daddy’s put me out. He’s sent me away.” Slowly, as though unable not to, she turned and put her sobbing head in Violet’s lap. “I didn’t come to bother him. I didn’t. I don’t care, he was wonderful and good, he was, I’d do it all again and I wouldn’t bother him, only I got no place to go at all. No place to go.”

  “Well, well,” Violet said
, “well, well.” She exchanged a glance with Nora, whose eyes had filled too. “Of course you have a place. Of course you do. You’ll stay here, that’s all. I’m sure your father will change his mind, the silly old fool, you can stay here as long as you need to. Now don’t cry any more, Amy, don’t. Here.” She took a lace-edged hanky from her sleeve, and made the girl look up and use it, looking levelly into her eyes to stiffen her. “Now. That’s better. As long as you like. Will that be all right?”

  “Yes.” Still a squeak was all she could manage, but her shoulders had stopped heaving. She smiled a little, ashamed. Nora and Violet smiled for her. “Oh,” she said, sniffing, “I almost forgot.” She tried with trembling fingers to undo her bundle, dabbed her face again and gave Violet back her sodden hanky, not much help for storms like Amy’s, and managed to work open the bundle. “A man gave me something to give you. On my way here.” She rooted among her belongings. “He seemed real mad. He said to say, ‘If you people can’t keep your bargains, there’s no use dealing with you at all.’ “ She drew out and placed in Violet’s hands a box that bore on its cover a picture of Queen Victoria and the Crystal Palace, done in different woods.

  “Maybe he was joking,” Amy said. “A funny, birdy man. He winked at me. Is it yours?”

  Violet held the box, whose weight told her that the cards, or something like them, were within.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t know.”

  There were footsteps climbing the stairs of the porch just then, and the three of them fell silent. The footsteps crossed the porch, with a squishy squeak as though sodden. Violet took Amy’s hand, and Nora Violet’s. The screen-door spring sang, and there was a figure against the cloudy oval glass of the door.

  Auberon opened the door. He wore waders, and an old hat of John’s stuck full of flies. He was whistling as he came into the hall, about packing up your troubles in an old kit bag, but stopped when he saw the three women huddled on the stair, inexplicably, halfway to the landing.