Rainy-day Wonder
The stork they rode flew high and fast over swift-unfolding brown and gray November landscapes, but still perhaps Somehow within other borders, for Lilac naked on her back felt neither warm nor cold. She held tight to folds of Mrs. Underhill’s thick clothing, and clutched the stork’s heaving shoulders with her knees, the smooth oiled feathers beneath her thighs soft and slippery. With taps of a stick, here, there, Mrs. Underhill guided the stork up, down, right and left.
“Where do we go first?” Lilac asked.
“Out,” Mrs. Underhill said, and the stork dove and twisted; beneath, far off but coming closer, a large and complex house appeared.
Since babyhood, Lilac had seen this house many times in dreams (how it could be she dreamt but didn’t sleep she never thought about; there was much that Lilac, raised the way she had been, had never thought about, knowing no different way the world and selfhood might be organized, just as Auberon never wondered why three times a day he sat at a table and put food into his face). She didn’t know, though, that when she dreamt she walked the long halls of that house, touching the papered walls hung with pictures and thinking What? What could this be?, that then her mother and her grandmother and her cousins dreamt—not of her, but of someone like her, somewhere else. She laughed when, now, from the stork’s back, she saw the house entire and recognized it instantly: as when the blindfold was lifted from her in a game of blindman’s-bluff and the mysterious features she had been touching, the nameless garments, were revealed to be those of someone well-known, someone smiling.
It grew smaller as they grew closer. It shrank, as though running away. If that goes on, Lilac thought, by the time we’re close enough to look in its windows, one of my eyes only will be able to see in at a time, and won’t they be surprised inside as we go by, darkening the windows like a stormcloud! “Well, yes,” Mrs. Underhill said, “if it were one and the same; but it’s not, and what they’ll see, or rather not see (I should think), is stork, woman and child about a midge’s size or smaller, and never pay it the least never-mind.”
“I can’t,” said the stork beneath them, “quite feature that.”
“Neither can I,” Lilac said laughing.
“Doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Underhill said. “See now as I see, and it’s all one for the purpose.”
Even as she spoke, Lilac’s eyes seemed to cross, then right themselves; the house rushed greatly toward them, rose up housesized to their stork’s size (though she and Mrs. Underhill were smaller—another thing for Lilac not to think to ask about). From on high they sailed down to Edgewood, and its towers round and square bloomed like sudden mushrooms, bowing neatly before them as they flew over, and the walls, weedy drives, porte-cocheres and shingled wings altered smoothly in perspective too, each according to its own geometries.
At a touch of Mrs. Underhill’s stick the stork tipped its wings and fell sharply to starboard like a fighter plane. The house changed faces as they swooped, Queen Anne, French Gothic, American, but Lilac didn’t notice; her breath was snatched away; she saw the house’s trees and angles uptilt and right themselves as the stork pulled out of her dive, saw the eaves rush up, then closed her eyes, clinging tighter. When her maneuver was completed and the stork was steady again, Lilac opened her eyes to see they were in the shadow of the house, circling to perch on a flinty belvedere outcropping on the house’s most Novembery side.
“Look,” Mrs. Underhill said when the stork had folded her wings. Her stick like a knuckly finger indicated a narrow ogive window, casements ajar, kitty-corner to where they stood. “Sophie asleep.”
Lilac could see her mother’s hair, very like her own, displayed on the pillow, and her mother’s nose peeking from under the coverlet. Asleep… Lilac’s bringing-up had trained her to pleasure (and to purpose, though she didn’t know it), not to affection and attachments; rainy days could bring tears to her clear eyes, but wonder, not love, shook her young soul most. So for a long time as she looked within the dim bedroom at her motionless mother, a chain of feelings was knitted within her for which she had no name. Rainyday wonder. Often they had told her, laughing, how her hands had gripped her mother’s hair, and how with scissors they had cut the hair to free her, and she’d laughed too; now she wondered what it would be like to be laid against that person; down within those covers, her cheek on that cheek, her fingers in that hair, asleep. “Can we,” she said, “go closer to her?”
“Hm,” said Mrs. Underhill. “I wonder.”
“If we’re small as you say,” the stork said, “why not?”
“Why not?” Mrs. Underhill said. “We’ll try.”
They fell from the belvedere, the stork laboring under her load to rise, neck straining, feet climbing. The casements ahead grew big as though they came closer, but for a long time they came no closer; then, “Now,” said Mrs. Underhill, and tapped with her stick, and they swooped in a vertiginous arc through the open casement and into Sophie’s bedroom. As they flew between floor and ceiling toward the bed, they would have appeared to an observer (if such a one were possible) to be the size of the bird one makes of two linked hands waving.
“How did that work?” Lilac asked.
“Don’t ask me how,” Mrs. Underhill said. “Anywhere but here it wouldn’t.” She added thoughtfully, as they circled the bedpost: “And that’s the point, about the house, isn’t it?”
Sophie’s flushed cheek was a hill, and her open mouth a cave; her head was forested in golden curls. Her breathing was as slow and low a sound as a whole day makes together. The stork stalled at the bed’s head and turned to coast back toward the arable lands of the patchwork quilt. “What if she woke?” Lilac said.
“You dasn’t!” Mrs. Underhill cried out, but it was too late; Lilac had loosed her grip of Mrs. Underhill’s cloak and as they passed, inspired by an emotion like mischief but fiercer by far, had taken hold of a coiling rope of golden hair and tugged. The jolt nearly upset them; Mrs. Underhill flailed with her stick, the stork squawked and stalled, they circled Sophie’s head again, and still Lilac hadn’t released the hank she held. “Wake up!” she shouted.
“Bad child! Oh horrible!” Mrs. Underhill cried.
“Squawk!” said the stork.
“Wake up!” Lilac called, hand cupped by her cheek.
“Away!” cried Mrs. Underhill, and the stork beat strongly toward the casement, and Lilac, if she weren’t to be pulled from the stork’s back, had to release her mother’s hair. One thick strand as long as a towline came away in her fingers, and laughing, shrieking with fear of falling, and trembling head to foot, she had time to see the bedclothes heave vastly before they reached the casement again. Just outside, like a sheet suddenly shaken open, and with a noise like that, they became again stork-sized to the house, and mounted quickly to the chimney-pots. The hair that Lilac held, three inches long now and so fine she couldn’t hold it, slipped from her fingers and sailed away glittering.
Sophie said “What?” and sat bolt upright. More slowly she lay back again amid the pillows, but her eyes didn’t close. Had she left that casement open? The end of a curtain was waving goodbye madly out of it. It was deathly cold. What had she dreamt? Of her great-grandmother (who died when Sophie was four). A bedroom full of pretty things, silver-backed brushes and tortoise-shell combs, a music-box. A glossy china figurine, a bird with a naked child and an old woman on its back. A big blue glass ball as fine as a soap bubble. Don’t touch it, child: a voice dim as the dead’s from within the ivory-lace bedclothes. Oh do be careful. And all the room, all of life, distorted, made blue, in the ball; made strange, gorgeous, unified because spherical, within the ball. Oh child, oh careful: a weeping voice. And the ball slipping from her grasp, falling as slow as a soap bubble toward the parquet.
She rubbed her cheeks. She put out a foot, wondering, toward her slippers. (Smashing on the floor, without a sound, only her great-grandmother’s voice saying Oh, oh, child, what a loss.) She ran a hand through her hair, impossibly tangled, elf-locks Momdy called them. A blue glass ball smashing; but what had come before that? Already it had fled from her. “Well,” she said, and yawned, and stood upright. Sophie was awake.
That’s the Lot
The stork was fleeing Edgewood when Mrs. Underhill pulled herself together.
