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
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 and 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.
Since all this was happening as Auberon was coming into consciousness, it only seemed to him that his grandfather’s powers were growing surer, his ear more keen. When, on one of their long walks together through the woods, Doc at last stopped pretending that what he heard the animals say was made up, and admitted that he was passing on conversations he heard, they both felt a lot better. Auberon never much liked let’s-pretend, and Doc had hated lying to the child. The science of it escaped him, he said; maybe it was only a result of his long devotion; anyway, it was only certain animals he could understand, small ones, the ones he knew best. Bears, moose, the scarce and fabulous cats, the solitary, long-winged predators he knew nothing of. They disdained him, or couldn’t discourse, or had no use for small talk—he couldn’t tell.
“And insects and bugs?” Auberon asked him.
“Some, but not all,” Doc answered.
“Ants?”
“Oh, yes, ants,” Doc said, “sure.”
And taking his grandson’s hands where they knelt together beside a new yellow hill, he gratefully translated for him the mindless shoptalk of the ants within.
George Mouse Goes on Overhearing
Auberon was asleep now, on the bursting loveseat, curled beneath a blanket, as who would not be who had risen as early and come as far in as many ways as he had today; but George Mouse, subject to tics and exulting on the giddy chutes and ladders of High Thought, kept watch over the boy and continued to overhear his adventures.
When, oatmeal untasted but coffee finished, he went out the great front door, Smoky’s hand paternally on his shoulder though it was higher than his own, Auberon saw that he wasn’t to make his getaway without goodbyes. His sisters, all three, had come to see him off; Lily and Lucy were walking up the drive arm-in-arm, Lily bearing her twins fore-and-aft in canvas carriers, and Tacey was just turning in at the end of the drive on her bike.
He might have known, but hadn’t wished this sendoff, wished it less than anything because of the formal finality his sisters’ presence always lent to whatever partings or arrivals or conjunctions they attended. How the hell anyway had they known this was to be the morning? He had only told Smoky late last night, and sworn him to secrecy. A certain familiar rage rose in him whose name he didn’t know was rage. “Hi, hi,” he said.
“We came to say goodbye,” Lily said. Lucy shifted the front twin and added, “And give you some things.”
“Yeah? Well.” Tacey turned her bike neatly at the porch stairs and dismounted. “Hi, hi,” Auberon said again. “Did you bring along the whole county?” But of course they hadn’t brought anyone else; no one else’s presence was necessary, as theirs was.
Perhaps because their names were so similar, or because so often in the community they appeared and acted together, but people around Edgewood always found it hard to distinguish among Tacey, Lily, and Lucy. In fact they were very different. Tacey and Lily were descendants of their mother and her mother, long, bigboned and coltish, though Lily had inherited from somewhere a head of fine straight blond hair, straw spun into gold as the princess in the story spun it, where Tacey’s was curly reddish-gold like Alice’s. Lucy, though, was all Smoky’s; shorter than her sisters, with Smoky’s dark curls and Smoky’s cheerful bemused face and even something of Smoky’s congenital anonymity in her round eyes. But in another sense it was Lucy and Lily who were a pair: the sort of sisters who can finish one another’s sentences, and feel even at a distance one another’s pains. For years the two of them kept up a running series of seemingly pointless jokes; one would ask, in a serious tone, a silly question, and the other would just as seriously give an even sillier answer, and then they would (never cracking a smile) give the joke a number. The numbers ran into the hundreds. Tacey, perhaps because she was the oldest, was remote from their games; she was a naturally regal and private person who cultivated intensely a number of passions, for the alto recorder, for raising rabbits, for fast bikes. On the other hand, in all complots, plans, and ceremonies that dealt with grownups and their affairs, it had always been Tacey who was priestess, and the younger two her
