Little, Big

the spark simple and convenient. The operation is performed in this way…” And August drew these knowledges on, reasonable and close-fitting, over the mad muddle of his childhood, as one draws on a duster over a suit of clothes, and buttoned them up to the neck.

A Swell Idea

“What you need,” he told his mother that afternoon, “is some fresh air. Let me take you out for a drive. Come on.” He came to take her hands, to lift her from the chaise, and though she gave him her hands they both knew, for they had enacted all this several times the same way, that she wouldn’t rise and certainly wouldn’t ride. But she kept his hands in hers. “You can bundle up, and anyway with the roads around here you can’t go more than fifteen miles an hour…”

“Oh, August.”

“Don’t ‘oh, August’ me,” he said, allowing himself to be drawn down to sit by her, but turning his face away from her lips. “There’s nothing wrong with you, you know, I mean nothing really wrong. You’re just brooding.” That it should be he, the baby, who was compelled to speak sternly to his mother as to a mopey child, when there were older children who ought to be doing it, annoyed him, though it didn’t her.

“Tell me about sawing wood,” she said. “Was little Amy there?”

“She’s not so little.”

“No, no. She’s not. So pretty.”

He supposed he blushed, and he supposed she saw it. He found it embarrassing, almost indecent, that his mother should see that he regarded any girl with other than amused indifference. In fact toward few girls did he feel amused indifference, if the truth were known, and it was known: even his sisters plucked lint from his lapels and brushed back his hair, thick and unruly as his mother’s, with knowing smiles when he mentioned ever so casually that during the course of an evening he might drop in at the Meadows’ or the Flowers’. “Listen, Ma,” he said, faintly peremptory, “now really listen. Before, you know, Papa died, we talked about the garage, and the agency and all that. He didn’t like it so well, but that was four years ago, I was very young. Can we talk about it again? Auberon thinks it’s a swell idea.”

“He does?”

He hadn’t put up any objections; but then he had been behind the darkroom door, in his dim red-lit hermit’s cell, when August had discussed it with him. “Sure. You know, everybody’s going to have an automobile soon. Everybody.”

“Oh, dear.”

“You can’t hide from the future.”

“No, no, that’s true.” She gazed out the windows at the sleeping afternoon. “That’s true.” She had taken a meaning, but not his: he drew out his watch and consulted it, to draw her back.

“So, well,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking into his face not as though to read it, or to communicate with it, but as though it were a mirror: that frankly, that dreamily. “I don’t know, dear. I think if John didn’t think it was a good idea .

“That was four years ago, Ma.”

“Was it, was it four…” She made an effort, and took his hand again. “You were his favorite, August, did you know that? I mean he loved all of you, but… Well, don’t you think he knew best? He must have thought it all out, he thought everything all out. Oh, no, dear, if he was sure, I don’t think I could do better, really.”

He stood up suddenly and thrust his hands into his pockets. “All right, all right. But don’t blame him, that’s all. You don’t like the idea, you’re afraid of a simple thing like a car, and you never wanted me to have anything at all anyway.”

“Oh, August,” she began to say, but clapped her hand over her mouth.

“All right,” he said. “I guess I’ll tell you, then. I think I’ll go away.” A lump rose to his throat, unexpectedly; he had expected to feel only defiance and triumph. “Maybe to the City. I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” In a tiny voice, like a child just beginning to understand a huge and terrible thing. “What do you mean?

“Well really,” he said, rounding on her, “I’m a grown man. What do you think? That I’ll just hang around this house for the rest of my life? Well, I won’t.”

The look in her face, of shocked helpless anguish, when all he’d said was what any twenty-year-old might say, when all he felt was the dissatisfaction any ordinary person might feel, made confusion and frustrated common sense boil up in him like a lava. He rushed to her chair and knelt before her. “Ma, Ma,” he said, “what is it? What on earth is it?” He kissed her hand, a kiss like a furious bite.

“I’m afraid, that’s all…”

“No, no, just tell me what’s so terrible. What’s so terrible about wanting to advance yourself, and be, and be normal. What was so wrong”—it was spilling out now, that lava, he neither desired to stop it now nor could if he chose—“about Timmie Willie going to the City? It’s where her husband lives, and she loves him. Is this such a swell house that nobody should ever think of living anyplace else? Even married?”

“There was so much room. And the City’s so far…”

“Well, and what was so wrong when Aub wanted to join the Army? There was a war. Everybody went. Do you want us all to be your babies forever?”

Violet said nothing, though her big pearly tears, like a child’s, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn’t understand them really, he would receive reverently; and out of him would come then the advice, warnings, notions, the clever decisions she could never have made. She ran her hand through August’s matted, elf-locked hair, no comb could conquer it, and said, “But you know, dear, you know. You remember, don’t you? You do, don’t you?”

He laid his cheek in her lap with a groan, and she continued to stroke his hair. “And autos, August—what would they think? The noise, and the smell. The—the boldness. What must they think? What if you drove them away?”

“No, Ma, don’t.”

“They’re brave, August, you remember the time, when you were a little boy, the time with the wasp, you remember how brave the little one was. You saw. What if—what if it angered them, wouldn’t they plan something, oh something so horrid… They could, you know they could.”

“I was just a little kid.”

“Do you all forget?” she said, not as though to him, but as though questioning herself, questioning a strange perception she had just then had. “Do you all really forget? Is that it? Did Timmie? Do you all?” She raised his face in her hands to study it. “August? Do you forget, or… You mustn’t, you mustn’t forget; if you do…”

“What if they didn’t mind?” August said, defeated. “What if they didn’t care at all? How can you be so sure they’d mind? They’ve got a whole world to themselves, don’t they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Grandy said…”

“Oh, dear, August, I don’t know.”

“Well,” he said, extracting himself from her, “then I’ll go ask. I’ll go ask their permission.” He rose. “If I ask their permission, and they say it’s all right, then…”

“I don’t see how they could.”

“Well, if they do?”

“How could you be sure? Oh, don’t, August, they might lie. No, promise me you won’t. Where are you going?”

“I’m going fishing.”

“August?”