Little, Big

by John Crowley

  They sat silent on either side of Sophie. The wind spoke suddenly a single word in the chimney’s throat. Smoky looked at Alice, who touched his arm and smiled quickly.

  What smile did it remind him of?

  “Everything’s okay,” she said.

  He remembered Great-aunt Cloud smiling at him as they sat troubled on the lawn of Auberon’s summer house the day he was married: a smile meant to be comforting, but which was not. A smile against distance, that only seemed to increase distance. A signal of friendship sent out of infrangible foreignness; a hand waved far off, from across a border.

  “Do you smell a funny smell?” he said.

  “Yes. No. I did. It’s gone now.”

  It was. The room was full only of night air. The sea of wind outside raised small currents in it which now and again brushed his face; but it didn’t seem to him as though this were Brother North-wind moving around them, but as though the many-angled house itself were under sail, making progress through the night, plowing steadily into the future in all directions.

  BOOK THREE: OLD LAW FARM

  CHAPTER ONE

  Those who had the entrée

  entered the private apartments by

  the mirror-door that gave onto

  the gallery and was kept shut. It was

  only opened when one scratched at it,

  and was closed again immediately.

  —Saint-Simon

  Twenty-five years passed. On a night late in the autumn, George Mouse stepped out the window of what had been the third-floor library of his townhouse and through a small covered bridge, which connected his window with the window of what had once been a kitchen in a tenement that adjoined his building. The ex-kitchen was dark and cold; George Mouse’s breath was manifest in the light of his lantern. As he walked, rats or mice moved away from him and his light, he heard their scratches and rustlings but saw nothing. Without opening a door (there hadn’t been a door for years) he went out into the hallway and started carefully down the stairs, carefully because the stairs were rotten and loose where they weren’t missing altogether.

  Keeping People Out

  On the floor below there were light and laughter; people greeted him as they went in and out of apartments with the makings of a communal dinner; children chased along the halls. But the first floor was dark again, unused now except for storage. George, holding his lantern aloft, peered down along the dark hall to the outer door, and could see its great bar in place, its chains and locks secure. He went around the stairs to the door which led to the basement, taking out as he went an enormous bunch of keys. One, specially marked, dark as an old penny, unlocked the ancient Segal lock of the basement.

  Every time he opened the basement door, George fretted over whether he shouldn’t put a nice new padlock on it; this old lock was a toy by now, an elder’s grip, anyone could break it. He always decided that a new lock would only make people wonder, and a shoulder against the door would satisfy curiosity, new padlock or no.

  Oh, they had all grown very circumspect in this matter of keeping people out.

  Down the stairs, even more carefully, God knew what lived down here amid the rusted pipe and old boilers and fabulous detritus, he had once stepped on something large, soft and dead and nearly broken his neck. At the bottom of the stairs he hung up his lantern, went to a corner, and maneuvered an old trunk so that he could stand on it and reach a high, ratproof shelf.

  He had had the gift, predicted long ago by Great-aunt Cloud (left him by a stranger, and not money), for a long time before he learned how he could have come by it. Even before he learned, he was in his Mouse way secretive about it, the result of growing up on the street and youngest in a nosy family. Everyone admired the potent, musky hashish George seemed always to be provided with, and all desired to have some; but he would not (could not) introduce them to his dealer (who was long dead). He kept everyone happy with free bits, and the pipe was always full at his place; but though sometimes, after a few pipes of it, he would look around at his stupefied company and feel guilt for his gloating, and his great, his hilarious, his astonishing secret would burn within him to be spilt, he never told, not a soul.

  It was Smoky who, inadvertently, revealed to George the source of his great good fortune. “I read somewhere,” Smoky said (his usual entry into conversation), “that oh fifty or sixty years ago, your neighborhood was a Middle Eastern neighborhood. Lots of Lebanese. And the little candy stores and places like that sold hashish, right out in the open. You know, along with the toffee and halvah. For a nickel, you could buy a lot. Big hunks. Like chocolate bars.”

  And indeed they were very much like chocolate bars…. George had felt like a cartoon mouse suddenly struck over the head with the great, well-worn mallet of Revelation.

  Ever afterward, when he went down to take from his hoard, he had imagined himself a goat-bearded Levantine, hook-nosed and skull-capped, a secret pederast who gave free baklava to the olive boys of the streets. Fussily he would arrange the old trunk and climb on it (lifting the frayed skirts of an imaginary dressing gown) and lift the lid of the wooden crate stenciled with curling letters.

  Not much left. Time to reorder soon.

  Beneath a thick covering of silvered paper, layer upon layer of lay. The layers were separated by yellow oiled paper. The bars themselves were wrapped tightly too in a third sort of oily paper. He took out two, considered a moment, and put one reluctantly back. It would not, though he had exclaimed so in awe many years ago when he had discovered what it was, last forever. He replaced the layer of oiled paper and then the layer of silvered paper; he drew back on the stout lid, and pushed in place the ancient shapeless nails; he blew across it to resettle the dust. He got down, and studied the bar in the lantern’s light as he had the very first by electric light. He peeled away its paper carefully. It was as black as chocolate, and about the size of a playing card, an eighth of an inch thin. It bore on it a convolute impress: A trademark? Tax stamp? Mystic sign? He had never decided.

  He pushed the trunk he had used for a stepladder back into its place in the corner, took up the lantern and started up the stairs. In his cardigan pocket was a piece of hashish something like a hundred years old, and, George Mouse had long ago decided, not reduced in potency by age at all. Improved, perhaps, like vintage port.

  News from Home

  He was relocking the cellar door when there came a pounding at the street door, so sudden and unexpected that he cried out. He waited a moment, hoping it was some madman’s momentary whim and wouldn’t come again. But it did. He went to the door, listened at it without speaking, and heard frustrated cursing outside. Then, with a growl, the someone grabbed at the bars and began to shake them.

  “That’s no use, that’s no use,” George called. The shaking stopped.

  “Well, open the door.”

  “What?” It was a habit of George’s, when stuck for an answer, to act as though he hadn’t heard the question. “Open the door!”

  “Now, you know I can’t just open the door, man. You know what it’s like.”

  “Well, listen. Can you tell me which of these buildings is number two-twenty-two?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Why does everybody in this city answer everything with a question?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why can’t you open the door and talk to me like a god DAMN human being?”

  Silence. The horrid depths of frustration in that outcry touched George’s heart, and he listened at the door to see if there would be more; he tingled secretly at the safety he felt behind the door’s fastness.

  “Can you tell me,” the someone began, and George could hear his rage strangled down into politeness, “please, where I can find, or if you know, the Mouse house or George Mouse?”

  “Yes,” George said. “I am him.” That was risky, but surely even the most desperate bill-collectors and process-servers weren’t abroad this late. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Aubero
n Barnable. My father …” But already the clankings and scrapings of locks and shootings of bolts drowned him out. George reached into the darkness and pulled the person standing on the threshold into the hall. With quick skill he reslammed and barred and bolted the door, and then raised his lamp to look at his cousin.

  “So you’re the baby,” he said, noting with perverse pleasure how ill this remark sat on the tall youth. The moving lantern made his expression changeful, but it wasn’t really a changeful face; it was narrow and tight; in fact the whole of him, slim and neat as a pen in pipe-rack black clothes that fit him well, was somewhat rigid and aloof. Just pissed off, George thought. He laughed, and patted his arm. “Hey, how’s the folks? How’s Elsie, Lacy, and Tilly, whatever their names are? What brings you here?”

  “Dad wrote,” Auberon said, as though unwilling to waste effort answering all this if it had already been done.

  “Oh yeah? Well, you know how the mail’s been. Look, look. Come on. We don’t have to stand in the hall. Colder than a witch’s tit here. Coffee and something?”

  Smoky’s son shrugged shortly. “Be careful on the stairs,” George said, and the lamplight threaded them both back through the tenement and over the little bridge till they stood together on the threadbare rug where Auberon’s parents had first met.

  Somewhere along their route, George had picked up an old three-and-a-half-legged kitchen chair. “Did you run away from home? Have a seat,” he said, motioning Auberon to a tattered wingback.

  “My father and mother know I left, if that’s what you mean,” Auberon said, a bit haughtily, which was understandable, George thought. Then he shrank back in the chair; George had with a grunt and a wild look raised the broken chair over his head, and, his face twisted with exertion, brought it down on the stone hearth. It fell clattering to pieces. “Did they approve?” George asked, tossing the chair-parts into the fire.

  “Of course,” Auberon crossed his legs and plucked at his trouser-knee. “He wrote. I told you. He said to look you up.”

  “Oh, yeah. Did you walk?”

  “No.” With some contempt.

  “And you came to the City to …”

  “To seek my fortune.”

  “Aha.” George hung a kettle over the fire and took down a precious can of contraband coffee from a bookshelf. “Any glimpse yet what form it might take?”

  “No, not exactly. Only …” George mmm-hmmm’d encouragingly as he prepared the coffeepot and set out mismatched cups. “I wanted, I want to write, or be a writer.” George raised his eyebrows. Auberon was twisted around in the wing-back chair as though these admissions were escaping him against his will, and he were trying to hold them in. “I thought television.”

  “Wrong coast.”

  “What?”

  “They do all that television out on the Sunny, the Golden, the West Coast.” Auberon locked his right foot behind his left calf and declined to answer this. George, searching for something in the bookshelves and drawers and beating his many pockets, wondered how that antique desire could have made its way to Edgewood. Odd how the young take to these dying trades so hopefully. When he was young, when the last poets were prattling incommunicado, glowworms gone out in their dells of dew, boys of twenty-one set out to be poets…. At length he found what he was looking for: a gift-shop dagger-shaped letter-opener chased with enamel which he had found years ago in an abandoned apartment and sharpened to a fine edge. “Takes a lot of ambition, that television,” he said, “and drive, and the failures are many.” He poured water into the coffeepot.

  “How would you know?” his cousin said swiftly, as though he had heard that adult wisdom often before.

  “Because,” George said, “I haven’t got those qualities, and I haven’t failed in that field cause I don’t, to wit, QED. Coffee’s running through.” The boy didn’t crack a smile. George put the coffeepot on a trivet that bore a joke in Pennsylvania Dutch argot, and broke out a tin box of cookies, mostly broken. He also took from his cardigan pocket the brown square of hashish. “Like a taste?” he said, not at all grudgingly, he thought, showing Auberon the square. “Best Lebanese. I think.”

  “I don’t use drugs.”

  “Oh, aha.”

  Judging nicely, George cut off a corner with his Florentine instrument, pierced the fragment with its point, and dunked it in his cup. He sat turning the knife in the cup and looking at his cousin, who was blowing on his coffee with single-minded intensity. Ah, it was lovely to be old and gray, and to have learned to ask neither for too much nor too little. “So,” he said. He lifted the knife from his coffee to see that the fragment had nearly dissolved. “Tell us your history.”

  Auberon was mum.

  “Come on, let’s have it.” He slurped the fragrant brew eagerly. “News from home.”

  It took a deal of questioning, but as the night wore down, Auberon did speak phrases, yield anecdotes. It was enough for George; his laced coffee finished, he heard a whole life in Auberon’s sentences, complete with amusing detail and odd conjunctions; pathos, even magic, even. He found himself looking into his cousin’s closed heart as into the halved shell of a coiled and chambered nautilus.

  What George Mouse Heard

  He’d left Edgewood early, awakening just before dawn, as he’d intended to—it was an ability he shared with his mother, that he could wake when he chose. He lit a lamp; it would be another hour or two before Smoky shuffled down to the basement to start up the generator. There was a trembling tightness around his diaphragm, as though something struggled for release or escape there. He knew the phrase “butterflies in your stomach,” but is one of those people to whom phrases like that communicate nothing. He has had butterflies in his stomach as he’d had the willies, and the jitters; more than once he has been beside himself; but has always thought these experiences were his alone, and never knew they were so common as to have names. His ignorance allowed him to compose poetry about the weird feelings he felt, a handful of typewritten pages which as soon as he was dressed in the neat black suit he put carefully into the green canvas knapsack along with his other clothes, his toothbrush, what else? An antique Gillette, four bars of soap, a copy of Brother North-wind’s Secret, and the testamentary stuff for the lawyers.

  He walked through the sleeping house for what he solemnly imagined was the last time, on his way to an unknown destiny. The house seemed in fact to be quite restless, tossing and turning in an unquiet half-dream, opening its eyes, startled, as he passed. A watery, wintery light lay along the corridors; the imaginary rooms and halls were real in the gloom.

  “You look as though you hadn’t shaved,” Smoky said uncertainly when Auberon came into the kitchen. “You want some oatmeal?”

  “I didn’t want to wake up everybody, running the water and everything. I don’t think I can eat.”

  Smoky went on fussing with the old wood stove anyway. It always amazed Auberon as a child to see his father go to bed at night in this house and then appear at his desk in the schoolhouse next morning as though translated, or as though there were two of him. The first time he got up early enough to catch his father with frowzy hair and a plaid robe, on his way between sleep and school, it was as though he had caught out a conjurer; but in fact Smoky always made his own breakfast, and though for years the glossy white electric range has stood cold and useless in the corner, like a proud old housekeeper unwillingly retired, and Smoky was as unhandy with fires as he was about most things, he went on doing it; it only meant he had to get up earlier to begin.

  Auberon, growing impatient with his father’s patience, bent down before the stove and got it angrily flaming in a moment; Smoky stood behind him, hands in his robe pockets, admiring; and in a while they sat opposite each other with bowls of oatmeal, and coffee too, a gift from George Mouse in the City.

  They sat for a moment, hands in laps, looking not into each other’s eyes but into the brown Brazilian eyes of the two coffee cups together; and then Smoky, with an apologetic cough, got up a
nd got the brandy bottle from a high shelf. “It’s a long walk,” he said, and spiked the coffee.

  Smoky?

  Yes; George could see that there could well have grown in him in the last years a sort of constriction of feeling sometimes that a nip can untangle. No problem really; just a nip, so he can begin to ask Auberon if he’s sure he has enough money, if he’s got Grandpa’s agents’ address and George Mouse’s address and all the legal instruments and so on about the inheritance and so on. And yes he does.

  Even after Doc died, his stories continued to be published in the City’s evening paper—George read them even before he read the funnies. Besides these posthumous stories squirreled away like winter nuts, Doc left a mess of affairs as thick and entangling as any briar patch; lawyers and agents pursued his intentions there, and might for years. Auberon had a special interest in these thorny matters because Doc had specified a bequest to him, enough to live for a year or so and write unhampered. Doc had hoped, actually—though he was too shy to say so—that his grandson and the best friend of his last years might take up the little adventures, though Auberon was at a disadvantage there—he would have to make them up, unlike Doc, who for years had been getting them firsthand.

  There’s a certain embarrassment, George could easily imagine, in learning that you can talk to animals. No one knew how long Doc’s conviction was in growing, though some of the grown-ups could remember his first claiming it was so, shyly, tentatively, as a joke they supposed, a lame sort of joke, but then Doc’s jokes weren’t ever very funny except to millions of children. It took later the form of a metaphor or puzzle: he recounted his conversations with salamanders and chickadees with a cryptic smile, as though inviting his family to guess why he spoke so. In the end, he ceased trying to hide it: what he heard from his correspondents was just too interesting not to recount.