Little, Big

thumbed deck of Old Maid cards from the same year, just to keep the connection clear) and shut up that room.

Small worlds, she thought, staring out the rain-crazed window of her parlor. To discover small worlds. In no other connection had she ever heard of these cards. The persons and places and things were reminiscent of the Art of Memory, in which a place is established, and a vivid person imagined, holding his emblematic things. And “the return of R. C.”: if that meant the “Brother R. C.” of the Rosicrucians, it would place the cards in the first flush of Rosicrucian enthusiasms; which—she pushed away the tray of tea and toast, and wiped her fingers—might make some sense of the small worlds, too. The arcane thought of those years knew of many.

The athenor of the alchemists, for instance, the Philosopher’s Egg within which the transformation from base to gold took place—was it not a microcosm, a small world? When the black-books said that the Work was to be begun in the sign of Aquarius and completed in Scorpio, they meant not those signs as they occurred in the heavens, but as they occurred in the universe of the world-shaped, world-containing Egg itself. The Work was not other than Genesis; the Red Man and the White Lady, when they appeared, microscopic in the Egg, were the soul of the Philosopher himself, as an object of the Philosopher’s thought, itself a product of his soul, and so on, regressus ad infinitum, and in both directions too. And the Art of Memory: had not the Art introjected into the finite circle of her, Hawksquill’s, skull the mighty circles of the heavens? And did not that cosmic engine within then order her memory, thus her perception, of things sublunar, celestial, and infinite? The immense laughter of Bruno when he understood that Copernicus had inverted the universe—what was it but joy in the confirmation of his knowledge that Mind, in the center of all, contains within it all that it is the center of? If the Earth, the old center, now was seen truly to revolve somewhere halfway between the center and the outside; and the Sun, which before had revolved on a path halfway to the outside, were now the center, then a half-turn like that in a Mbbius strip was thrown into the belt of the stars: and what then became of the old circumference? It was, strictly, unimaginable: the Universe exploded into infinitude, a circle of which Mind, the center, was everywhere and the circumference nowhere. The trick-mirror of finitude was smashed, Bruno laughed, the starry realms were a jewelled bracelet in the hand.

Well, all that was old. Every schoolboy (in the schools that had schooled Hawksquill) knew small worlds were great. If these cards were in her hands, she had no doubt she could quickly learn just what small worlds they were intended to discover: had little doubt that she herself had traveled in them. But were these cards the cards her grandfather had found and lost? And were they as well the cards Russell Eigenblick claimed to be in? A coincidence of that magnitude didn’t seem inherently unlikely to Hawksquill; there was no chance in her universe. But she had no idea how further to search for them, and learn. In fact that alley seemed just at the moment so blind that she decided to walk no further up it. Eigenblick was no Roman Catholic, and the Rosicrucians, as everybody knows, were invisible—and whatever else Russell Eigenblick was, he was very visible. “The hell with it,” she was saying under her breath when the doorbell rang.

She consulted her watch. The Maid of Stone still slept, though the day was already as dark as night. She went to the hall, took a heavy stick from the umbrella-stand, and opened the door.

Overcoated and broad-hatted, windblown and rainswept, the black figure on her doorstep momentarily frightened her.

“Winged Messenger Service,” he said. “Hello, lady.”

“Hello, Fred,” Hawksquill said. “You gave me a start.” For the first time she had understood the pejorative “spook.” “Come in, come in.”

He would come no further than the vestibule, because he dripped; he stood dripping while Hawksquill fetched him a wine-glass of whiskey.

“Dark days,” he said, taking it.

“St. Lucy’s,” Hawksquill said. “Darkest of all.”

He chuckled, knowing very well she knew he meant more than the weather. He drained his glass at a gulp, and drew from his plastic-sheathed carrier a thick envelope for her. It bore no sender’s address. She signed Fred Savage’s book.

“Bad day to be working,” she said.

“Neither rain nor sleet nor snow,” said Fred, “and the owl for all his feathers was a-cold.”

“You won’t stay a moment?” she said. “The fire’s lit.”

“If I stayed a moment,” Fred Savage said, leaning to one side, “I’d stay an hour,” leaning to the other side, rain running from his hat; “and thad be that.” He straightened, and bowed out.

No man more faithful, when he was working, which wasn’t often. Hawksquill shut the door on him (thinking of him as a dark shuttle or bobbin stitching up the rainy City) and returned to her parlor.

The fat envelope contained a deck of new bills in large denominations, and a brief note on the stationery of the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club: “Payment per agreement in the matter of R. E. Have you come to any conclusions?” It was unsigned.

She dropped this note on the open folio of Bruno she had been studying, and was going back to the fire, counting her huge and as yet unearned fee, when a lurking connection was made within her consciousness. She went to the table, turned on a strong light, and looked closely at the marginal note which had originally stoked this long train of thought, a train which had just been shunted by the note from the Club.

The Italic hand is notable for its legibility. Yet now and then the swash capitals, if written quickly, can confuse. And yes: looked at closely there was no doubt that what she had read as “the return of R. C.” should be read “the return of R. E.”.

Where on earth, if on earth at all, were those cards?

A Geography

As she grew older, Nora Cloud seemed to those around her to take on greater mass and solidity. To herself also—though she gained no physical weight—she seemed to grow great. As her age reached toward three digits and she moved slowly through Edgewood on two canes to support her massy years, she bent—so it seemed—less from weakness than to accommodate herself in the narrow corridors of the house.

She came with four-footed deliberateness down from her room toward the drum-table in the many-sided music-room, where beneath a brass and green glass lamp the cards in their bag in their box waited for her—and where Sophie, these several years her student, waited too.

Cloud let herself down into her chair, her sticks rattling and the bones of her knees popping. She lit a brown cigarette and placed it in a saucer beside her, where its smoke rose ribbony and curling like thought. “What’s our question?” she asked.

“Like yesterday,” Sophie said. “Just to continue.”

“No question,” Cloud said. “All right.”

They were silent awhile together. A moment of silent prayer, Cloud had been delighted and surprised to hear Smoky describe this as; a moment for considering the question, or no question, as today.

Sophie with her long soft hand over her eyes thought of no question. She thought of the cards, dark in their bag in their box. She didn’t think of them as units, as individual pieces of paper, could no longer think of them that way even if she chose to. She didn’t think of them either as notions, as persons, places, things. She thought of them as one thing, like a story or an interior, something made of space and time, lengthy and vast but compact; jointed, dimensional, ever-unfolding.

“Well,” Cloud said with gentle finality. Her brownspotted hand hovered over the box. “Shall I lay out a Rose?”

“May I?” Sophie asked. Cloud withdrew her hand before it touched the box, which might spoil Sophie’s control. Attempting Cloud’s wasteless gestures, her calm attention, Sophie laid out a Rose.

Six of cups and four of wands, the Knot, the Sportsman, ace of cups, the Cousin, four of coins and queen of coins. The Rose grew out across the drum-table with an iron yet an organic force. If there was no question, as today, the question always was: what is this Rose the answer to? Sophie laid down the central card.

“The Fool again,” Cloud said.