Little, Big

pillows like an Oriental queen, and smoking a brown cigarette of Cloud’s as she now and then did when feeling grand. “Well,” she said, grandly. “Some fix.”

Strangled with embarrassment (and deeply confused, he had thought he had been so careful, they say it’s always possible, but how?) Smoky walked around the room picking up small objects and studying them, and putting them down again. “I never expected this,” he said.

“No. Well, I guess it’s always unexpected.” She watched Smoky go back and forth to the window to peep through the curtains at the moon on the snow, as though he were a renegade looking out of his hideout. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

He turned from the window, his shoulders bent with the weight of it. For so long he had dreaded this exposure, the crowd of ill-dressed characters he had been impersonating caught out, made to stand forth in all their inadequacy. “It was all my fault, first of all,” he said. “You shouldn’t hate Sophie.”

“Oh?”

“I… I forced myself on her, really. I mean I plotted it, I… like a, like a, well.”

“Mmm.”

All right, ragamuffins, show yourselves, Smoky thought; it’s all up with you. With me. He cleared his throat; he plucked his beard; he told all, or nearly all.

Alice listened, fooling with her cigarette. She tried to blow out with the smoke the lump of sweet generosity she tasted in her throat. She knew she mustn’t smile while Smoky told his story, but she felt so kindly toward him, wanted so much to take him in her arms and kiss the soul she saw clearly rising to his lips and eyes, so brave and honest he was being, that at last she said, “You don’t have to keep stalking around like that. Come sit down.”

He sat, using as little of the bed he had’ betrayed as he could. “It was only once or twice, in the end,” he said. “I don’t mean…”

“Three times,” she said. “And a half.” He blushed fiercely. She hoped that soon he would be able to look at her, and see that she would smile for him. “Well, you know, it’s probably not the first time it ever happened in the world,” she said. He still looked down. He thought it probably was. The shameful self sat on his knees like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He had it say:

“I promised I’d take care of it, and all. And be responsible. I had to.”

“Of course. That’s only right.”

“And it’s over now. I swear it, Alice, it is.”

“Don’t say that,” she said. “You never know.”

“No!”

“Well,” she said, “there’s always room for one more.”

“Oh don’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I deserve it.”

Shyly, not wanting to intrude on his guilt and repentance, she slipped an arm through his and interlaced her fingers with his. After a tormented pause, he did turn to look at her. She smiled. “Dummy,” she said. In her eyes brown as bottle-glass he could see himself reflected. One self. What was happening? Under her gaze something wholly unexpected was taking place: a fusing, a knittingtogether of parts that had never been able to stand alone but which all together made up him, “You dummy,” she said, and another foetal and incompetent self retreated back within him.

“Alice, listen,” he said, and she raised a hand to cover his mouth, almost as if to prevent the escape of what she had put back. “No more,” she said. It was astonishing. Once again she had done it to him: as she had first in George Mouse’s library so long ago, she had invented him: only this time not out of nothing, as then, but out of falsehoods and figments. He felt a cold flash of horror: what if, in his foolishness, he had gone so far as to lose her? What if he had? What on earth would he have done then? In a rush, before her no-shaking head could stop him, he offered her the rod of correction, offered it without reservation; but she had only asked him for it so that she could, as she then did, give it back to him unused with all her heart.

“Smoky,” she said. “Smoky, don’t. Listen. About this kid.”

“Yes.”

“Do you hope it’s a boy or a girl?”

“Alice… !”

She had always hoped, and almost always believed, that there was a gift they had to give, and that in time—their own time—they would give it. She had even thought that when at last it came, she would recognize it: and she had.

Old World Bird

Like a centrifuge, with infinite slowness accelerating, spring flung them all outward in advancing circles as it advanced, seeming (though how it was possible they couldn’t tell) to untangle the tangled skein of them and lay their lives out properly around Edgewood like the coils of a golden necklace: more golden as it grew warmer. Doe, after a long walk one thawing day, described how he had seen the beavers break out of their winter home, two, four, six of them, who had spent months trapped beneath the ice in a room hardly larger than themselves, imagine; and Mother and the rest nodded and groaned as though they knew the feeling well.

On a day when Daily Alice and Sophie were digging happily in the dirt around the back front, as much for the feel of the cool, reborn earth under their nails and in their fingers as for any improvements they might make in the flower beds, they saw a large white bird descend lazily out of the sky, looking at first like a page of wind-borne newspaper or a runaway white umbrella. The bird, which carried a stick in its long red beak, settled on the roof, on a spoked iron mechanism like a cartwheel which was part of the machinery (rusted and forever stopped) of the old orrery. The bird stepped around this place on long red legs. It laid its stick there, cocked its head at it and changed its place; then it looked around itself and began clacking its long red bill together and opening its wings like a fan.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it building a nest there?”

“Starting to.”

“You know what it looks like?”

“Yes.”

“A stork.”

“It couldn’t be a stork,” Doc said when they told him. “Storks are European, or Old World, birds. Never cross the big water.” He hurried out with them, and Sophie pointed with her trowel to where there were now two white birds and two more neststicks. The birds were clacking at each other and entwining their necks, like newlyweds unable to stop necking long enough to do housework.

Dr. Drinkwater, after disbelieving his eyes for a long time and making certain with binoculars and reference-works that he wasn’t mistaken, that this wasn’t a heron of some kind but a true European stork, Ciconia alba, went with great excitement to his study and typed out in triplicate a report of this amazing, this unprecedented sighting to send to the various bird-watching societies he more or less belonged to. He was searching for stamps for these, saying “amazing” under his breath, when he stopped and grew thoughtful. He looked at the memos on his desk. He dropped his search for stamps and sat down slowly, looking upward at the ceiling as though he could see the white birds above him.

Lucy, then Lilac

The stork had indeed come a great distance and from another country, but remembered crossing no big water. The situation here suited her very well, she thought; from the high housetop she could see a great distance,