Little, Big

Sophie allowed him a duck. It was often easier to earn such favors from her, not because she was necessarily more kindly but because she was less alert than his mother, and seemed not always to be paying much attention. When he was neck-deep in the Gothic bathtub (large enough almost for him to swim in) she unwrapped a duck from its tissue. He could see that there were five still left in the compartmented box.

The ducks were made of Castile soap, Cloud said who had bought them for him, and that’s why they float. Castile soap, she said, is very pure, and doesn’t sting your eyes. The ducks were neatly carved, of a pale lemon yellow which did seem very pure to him, and of a smoothness that inspired a nameless emotion in him, something between reverence and deep sensual pleasure.

“Time to start washing,” Sophie said. He set the duck afloat, brooding on an unrealizable dream: to set all the pale yellow ducks afloat at once, without regard, flotilla of supernal smooth carven purity. “Lilac made the fireflies dance,” he said.

“Oh? Wash behind your ears.”

Why, he wondered or rather did not quite wonder, was he always told to do something or other whenever he mentioned Lilac? Once his mother had suggested to him that it might be better not to say too much about Lilac to Sophie, because it might make her feel bad; but he thought it enough if he was careful to make the distinction: “Not your Lilac.”

“No.”

“Your Lilac is gone.”

“Yes.”

“Before I was born.”

“That’s right.”

Lilac, sitting on the episcopal toilet seat, only looked from one to the other, seemingly unmoved, as though none of this concerned her. There was a host of questions Auberon had about the two Lilacs—or was it three?—and every time Sophie’s came to his mind a new question budded on the complex bush. But he knew there were secrets he would not be told: only as he grew older would he come to resent that.

“Betsy Bird’s getting married,” he said. “Again.”

“How do you know that?”

“Tacey said so. Lily said she’s going to marry Jerry Thome. Lucy said she’s going to have a baby. Already.” He mimicked the intrigued, faintly censorious tone his sisters took.

“Well. First I’ve heard of it,” Sophie said. “Out you come.”

With reluctance he abandoned the duck. Already its sharply-incised features had begun to soften; in future baths it would grow eyeless, then featureless; its broad beak would dwindle to a sparrow’s, then gone; then headless (he would be careful not to break its increasingly skinny neck, not wanting to interfere in its dissolution); at last shapeless, not a duck any more, a duck’s heart only, still pure, still floating.

She toweled him roughly, yawning. Her bedtime was often as not before his. Unlikehis mother, she usually left wet spots, on the backs of his arms, his ankles. “Why don’t you ever get married?” he asked. This would solve one of the difficulties about one of the Lilacs.

“Nobody ever asked me.”

This wasn’t true. “Rudy Flood asked you. When his wife died.”

“I wasn’t in love with Rudy. Where did you hear that, anyway?”

“Tacey told me. Were you ever in love?”

“Once.”

“With who?”

“That’s a secret.”

Books and a Battle

It wasn’t until Auberon was past seven years old that his Lilac went away, though long before that he stopped mentioning her existence to anyone. When he was grown up he would sometimes wonder if most children who have imaginary friends have them for longer than they admit. After a child has stopped insisting that a place be set for his friend at dinner, that people not sit in chairs his friend is sitting in, does he usually go on having some intercourse with him? And does the usual imaginary friend fade only slowly, lingering on more and more spectrally as the real world becomes realer, or is it usually the case that on one specific day he disappears, never to be seen again—as Lilac did? The people he questioned said they remembered nothing about it at all. But Auberon thought they might still be harboring the old small ghosts, perhaps ashamed. Why after all should he alone remember so vividly?

That one specific day was a June day, as clear as water, summer fully clothed, the day of the picnic: the day Auberon grew up.

The morning he spent in the library, stretched out along the chesterfield, the leather cool against the backs of his legs. He was reading: or anyway holding a heavy book on his chest and looking at lines of dense print one by one. There had never been a time when Auberon hadn’t loved reading; the passion had begun long before he could actually read, when he would sit with his father or his sister Tacey by the fire, feet up, turning when they turned the incomprehensible pages of a big picture-poor volume and feeling inexpressibly cozy and at peace. Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump. He liked them big; he liked them old; he liked them best in many volumes, like the thirteen on a low shelf, golden-brown, obscure, of Gregorovius’s Medieval Rome. Those— the big ones, the old ones—held secrets by their very nature; because of his years, though the paragraphs and chapters passed each under his scrutiny (he was no skimmer), he couldn’t quite get at those secrets, prove the book to be (as most books after all are) dull, dated, stupid. They kept their magic, mostly. And there were always more on the burdened shelves, the occult volumes John Drinkwater collected no less compelling to his great-great-grandson than the multivolume stuff he had bought by the yard to fill up the shelves. The one he held at the moment was the last edition of John Drinkwater’s Architecture of Country Houses. Lilac, bored, flitted from corner to corner of the library, taking poses, as though playing Statue Tag with herself.

“Hey,” Smoky said through the open double doors. “What are you doing frowsting in here?” The word was Cloud’s. “Have you been outside? What a day.” He got no response but a slowly turned page. From where he stood Smoky saw only the back of his son’s cropped head (Smoky’s own haircutting) with two pronounced tendons, a vulnerable hollow between them; and the top of the book; and two crossed big-sneakered feet. He didn’t have to look to know Auberon wore a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists—he never wore any other kind, or unbuttoned the wrists, no matter how hot the weather. He felt a kind of impatient pity for the boy. “Hey,” he said again.

“Dad,” Auberon said, “is this book true?”

“What book is that?”

Auberon held it up, waggling it to show the covers. Smoky felt a dense rush of feeling: it had been a day like this one— perhaps this very day of the year, yes—on which long ago he had opened that book. He hadn’t looked at it since. But he knew its contents very much better now. “Well, ‘true’,” he said, “ ‘true’, I don’t know exactly what you mean by ‘true’.” Each time he said it the invisible doubt-quotes around the word became clearer. “Your great- great-grandfather wrote it, you know,” he said, coming to sit on the end of the sofa. “With some help from your great-great-grandmother—and your great-great-great grandfather.”

“Hm.” This didn’t intrigue Auberon. He read: “ ‘There, is a realm by definition precisely as large as. this one, which should not be—’ ” he stumbled “ ‘—reducible by any expansion, or enlargeable by any contraction, of this one, Here; and yet it must be that inroads have been made on that kingdome of late, that what are called by us Progress, and the growth of Commerce, and the enlargement of the bounds of Reason, have caused a flight further within their borders of that people; so that (though they have—by the nature of things must have—infinite room in which to retreat) their ancient holdings have been reduced by much. Are they angry at this? We cannot tell. Do they plan revenge? Or are they, like the Red Indian, like the African savage, now so debilitated, made so spiritless, so reduced in number, that they will at last be—’ ” another hard one “ ‘—extirpated entirely; not because they have nowhere left to flee, but because the losses, both of place and sovereignity, which our rapacity