Little, Big

she went from wood to stone) and through the puzzle of the imaginary drawing-room where a tapestry on the wall moved in a draft with spooky life. Then the stairs upward.

There were three hundred and sixty-five stairs within Edgewood, her father told her. The left-hand stick, the right-hand foot, right-hand stick, left-hand stick, left-hand foot. There were as well seven chimneys, fifty-two doors, four floors, and twelve—twelve what? There must be twelve of something, he wouldn’t have left that out. Right- hand stick, left-hand foot, and a landing where a lancet window poured a pearly stain of winter light on the dark wood. Smoky had seen an ad in a magazine for a sort of chair-elevator to move old folks up and down stairs; it even tilted up to deposit the aged body at its chosen floor. Smoky pointed this out to Cloud, but she had said nothing. An object of perhaps some abstract interest, but why was he showing it to her? That’s what her silence said.

Upward again, the minute risers—nine inches exactly— growing ever more cliffy no matter how big she was herself, no matter that the banisters shouldered her and the coffered ceiling pressed on her bent neck. It was wrong in her, she thought as she toiled, not to have warned Sophie of what she, Cloud, had for a long time known about, what had become a kind of recurrent obbligato in her recent readings of the cards, a memento mori that could show up in any fall cast for any person; but it was so constant lately that Cloud had really ceased to notice it. She didn’t anyway need, at her huge age, any reminders in her cards of what was obvious to anyone, and most of all to her. It was no secret. She was packed and ready.

Those of her treasures which had not already been distributed were all labeled for the ones they were meant for, the jewelry, Violet’s things, stuff she had never really considered hers anyway. And the cards would of course be Sophie’s; that was a relief. She had made over the house and grounds and rents to Smoky, an unwilling Smoky; he would be caretaker, good conscientious man! Not that the house couldn’t in the main take care of itself. It couldn’t come apart, not anyway until the Tale was all told, if then—but there was no thinking about that, that was no excuse not to execute legal instruments, make wills and make repairs. Alone of them all, Great-aunt Cloud still remembered Violet’s instructions: forget. She had acted so well on those instructions that she supposed that her nieces and nephews and grand- and great-grand-nieces and nephews really had forgotten, or never quite learned, what they must forget or needn’t learn. Perhaps, like Daily Alice, they thought it had all Somehow slipped out of their reach, each generation slipping further from it as the inexorable slow fall of time was consumed to embers, the embers to ashes, the ashes to cold clinkers, each generation losing something of the last’s close connection, or easy access, or quick understanding, the times when Auberon could photograph them or Violet wander in their realms and return with news now the dim fabulous past: and yet (Cloud knew it to be so) each generation in fact grew closer to it, and only ceased to search or bother themselves about it because they felt fewer and fewer distinctions between themselves and it. And, upon a time, there would be no searching at all for a way in. Because there they would be.

The Tale, she thought, would end with them: with Tacey, and Lily, and Lucy; with lost Lilac, wherever she was; with Auberon. Or with their children at the latest. This conviction grew, as she grew older, rather than fading; and that was the clue in these matters that she knew to trust. And it was a shame, a damn shame, she thought, that she had lived nearly to a hundred (at the cost of great effort, and not only on her part) and yet wouldn’t live to see the end.

Last stair. She put her stick on it, one foot, the other stick, the other foot. She stood stock still while the clamor of effort subsided in her body.

A Fool, and a Cousin; a geography, and a death. She had been right, that every fall of the cards was related to every other. If she read a fall for George Mouse and saw a vista of corridors, or for Auberon and saw the dark girl he would love and lose, that was not different from searching for lost Lilac, or glimpsing the dim lineaments of the Tale, or reading the fate of the Great World itself. How that could be, how each secret revealed could encode another, or all others, why behind a fall that showed a grand Geography—empires, frontiers, a final battle—there should appear one old woman’s death, she couldn’t tell; perhaps, probably, it couldn’t be told. Her dismay at this was mitigated by her old resolution, her promise to Violet: that even if she could tell, she wouldn’t.

She looked down the mountain of stairs she had just barely, had almost not conquered; and, weakened and slowed more by sad understanding than by any arthritis, she turned toward her room, certain now she would not ever go down them again.

The next morning Tacey came, packed for a long visit, bringing needlework to pass the time. Lily and the twins were already there. Lucy came at evening, not surprised to find her sisters there, and settled in with them, with her needlework, to help and watch and wait.

Princess

Before anyone else could have perceived morning in the somber air above Old Law Farm, the cock crew and woke Sylvie. Auberon beside her stirred. She was pressed against his long, unconscious warmth, and felt a mystery in being awake next to his sleep. She eontemplated it, rooting gently in the warmth, thinking that it was odd that she knew she was awake and he asleep, and that he knew neither; and in thinking so, she slept again. But the cock called her name.

She rolled over carefully, so as not to enter the colder frontier of the bed’s edge, and put her head out. She should wake him. It was his turn to milk, his last day. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. How would it be if she did it for him, a gift. She imagined his gratitude, and weighed it against the cold dawn and the stairs downward, the wet farmyard and the labor. The gratitude seemed to win, she could feel it the more intensely, could feel it almost as a gratitude of hers toward him. “Aw,” she said, grateful for her own kindness, and slipped out of bed.

Swearing terribly and softly she took the stool in the closet, not quite putting her flesh against its iciness, and then in a quick, Chinese-stepping crouch, blowing through her chattering teeth, hunted up her clothes and put them on. Her hands shook with cold and hurry as she did up buttons.

A hard life, she thought with pleasure as she breathed the foggy air out on the fire escape, pulling on brown gardener’s gloves; a hard life, this farm-laborer’s life. She went down. Outside the door of George’s kitchen hallway was a bag of selected garbage for the goats, to be mixed with their meal. She shouldered this, and slopped across the yard to the goats’ apartment, hearing them stirring.

“Hi, guys,” she said. The goats—Punchita and Nuni, Blanca and Negrita, Guapo and La Grani and the unnamed ones (George had never named any of them, and Sylvie’s inspiration hadn’t yet reached two or three, of course they must all have names but the right names)—looked up, clattered on the linoleum, shat, and gave voice. The smell of their garden apartment was vivid. Sylvie wondered if she remembered it from childhood, it seemed to suit her nostrils so well.

She fed them, measuring grain and garbage into the bathtub with a nice eye and mixing it carefully as though it were a child’s formula; she talked to them, criticizing faults and praising virtues even-handedly but reserving special affection for the black kid and for the oldest, La Grani, a granny indeed, all backbone and shin, “like a bicycle,” Sylvie said. Arms crossed, leaning on the jamb of the bathroom door, she watched them chew with a sidewise motion and raise their heads in rotation to look at her and then down again to their breakfast.

Morning light had begun to enter the apartment. The flowers on the wallpaper awoke, and those on the linoleum, neglected beds and growing indiscernible year by year under dirt, even with all of Brownie’s sweeping and mopping in the night. She yawned widely. Why do animals get up so early? “Up and at ’em, huh,” she said. “Late for work. Dummies.”

She thought, as she prepared for milking: look what love makes me do. And she stopped for a moment, feeling warmth suddenly poured into her heart and loins, for she hadn’t before used the word about her feelings for Auberon. Love, she said again to herself; and yes, there was the feeling, the word was like a swallow of rum. For George Mouse, her buddy for life, no matter what, who had taken her in when she had no place else, she felt deep gratitude and a complex of other feelings, mostly good; but not this heat, like a flame with a jewel held at its heart. The jewel was a word: love. She laughed. Love. Nice to be in love. Love disguised her in a peacoat and brown gloves, love sent her to the goats and warmed her hands in her armpits for the goats’ udders. “Okay, okay, take it easy,” she said, gently, to them and to the love disguised in labor. “Take it easy, we’re coming.”

She stroked Punchita’s udders. “Hey, big tits. Ay mami. Where’d you get them big tits. You find them under a bush?” She worked, thinking of Auberon asleep in his bed, and George asleep in his; she