The pentagon enclosed by the lines of the star he tapped with the pencil, and raised his sandy eyebrows at Smoky. An old map-reader’s trick, Smoky surmised. He discerned the shadow of a road crossing the pentagon, joining the road he walked, which stopped for good here at Meadowbrook. “Hmmm,” he said.
“That’s about all I can tell you,” Jeff said, re-rolling the map.
“You going to walk all night?” Marge asked.
“Well, I’ve got a bedroll.”
Marge pursed her lips at the comfortless blankets strapped to the top of his pack. “And I suppose you haven’t eaten all day.”
“Oh, I’ve got, you know, sandwiches, and an apple…”
The kitchen was papered with baskets of impossibly luscious fruit, blue grapes and russet apples and cleft peaches that protruded like bottoms from the harvest. Marge moved dish after steaming dish from stove to oilcloth, and when it was all consumed, Jeff poured out banana liqueur into tiny ruby glasses. That did it; all his polite remonstrance with their hospitality vanished, and Marge “did up the davenport” and Smoky was put to bed wrapped in an earthbrown Indian blanket.
For a moment after the Junipers had left him, he lay awake looking around the room. It was lit only by a night-light that plugged right into the outlet, a night-light in the shape of a tiny, rosecovered cottage. By its light he saw Jeff’s maple chair, the kind whose orange paddle arms had always looked tasty to him, like glossy hard candy. He saw the ruffled curtains move in the rose-odorous breeze. He listened to the dust-mop dog sigh in his dreams. He found another sampler. This one said, he thought but could not be sure:
He slept.
II.
You may observe that I do not put a hyphen between the two words. I write “country house,” not “country-house.” This is deliberate.
Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:
O great wide beautiful wonderful World With the wonderful waters around you curled And the beautiful grass upon your breast O World you are beautifully dressed.
A Gothic Bathroom
Devotions done, she tilted the tall standing mirror that had been her great-grandmother’s so that she could see her whole length in it, asked the usual question of it and got the right reply this morning; sometimes it was equivocal. She belted around herself a long brown gown, did a turn on her toes so that its frayed edges flew out, and went out wary into the still cold hall. She passed her father’s study and listened briefly to his old Remington click-clacking about the adventures of mice and rabbits. She opened the door to her sister Sophie’s room; Sophie was tangled in her bedclothes, a long golden hair in her parted lips, and her sleeping hands closed like a baby’s. The morning sun was just then looking in at this room, and Sophie stirred, resentful. Most people look odd asleep; foreign, not themselves. Sophie asleep looked most like Sophie, and Sophie liked sleep and could sleep anywhere, even standing up. Daily Alice stayed awhile to watch her, wondering what her adventures were. Well, she would hear later, in detail.
At the end of a whorl of hall was the Gothic bathroom, the only one in the house with a tub long enough for her. Stuck as it was at a turning of the house, the sun hadn’t yet reached it; its stained windows were dim and its cold tile floor made her stand tiptoe. The gargoyle faucet coughed phthisically, and deep within the house the plumbing held conference before allowing her some hot water. The sudden rush had its effect, and she gathered up her brown skirts around her waist and sat on the somewhat episcopal hollow throne, chin in hand, watching the steam rise from the sepulchral tub and feeling suddenly sleepy again.
She pulled the chain, and when the loud clash of contrary waters was done she unbelted and stepped from her gown, shuddered, and climbed carefully into the tub. The Gothic bathroom had filled with steam. Its sort of Gothic was really more woodland than church; the vaulting of it arched above Daily Alice’s head and interlaced like meeting branches, and everywhere carven ivy, leaves, tendrils and vines were in restless biomorphic motion. On the surface of the narrow stained-glass windows, dew formed in drops on cartoon-bright trees, and on the distant hunters and vague fields which the trees framed; and when the sun on its lazy way had lit up all twelve of these, bejewelling the fog that rose from her bath, Daily Alice lay in a pool in a medieval forest. Her great-grandfather had designed the room, but another had made the glass. His middle name was Comfort, and that’s what Daily Alice felt. She even sang.
From Side to Side
While she scrubbed and sang, her bridegroom came on, footsore and surprised at the fierceness of his muscles’ retaliation for yesterday’s walk. While she breakfasted in the long and angular kitchen and made plans with her busy mother, Smoky climbed up a buzzing, sun-shot mountain and down into a valley. When Daily Alice and Sophie were calling to each other through intersecting halls and the Doctor was looking out his window for inspiration, Smoky stood at a crossroads where four elder elms stood like grave old men conversing. A signboard there said EDGEWOOD and pointed its finger along a dirt road that looped down a shadowy tunnel of trees; and as he walked it, looking from side to side and wondering what next, Daily Alice and Sophie were in Daily Alice’s room preparing what Daily Alice next day would wear, while Sophie told her dream.
Sophie’s Dream
“I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor’s office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus—all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised at all when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be
