Little, Big

Then one day Joy Flowers, whose granddaughter had lived abroad for a year, gave him a fat brown bag full of envelopes sent her from every part of the world. He could hardly find on the map a place which had nOt stamped its name on one of these pieces of blue flimsy. Some of them came from places so distant they weren’t even in the alphabet he knew. And at a stroke his collection was complete, and his pleasure in it over. No discovery he could make in Meadowbrook’s post office could add to it. He never looked at it again.

It was the same with old Auberon’s photographs, when at last young Auberon discovered them to be more than a record of a large family’s long life. Beginning with the last, of a beardless Smoky in a white suit beside the birdbath made of dwarves which still stood by the Summer House door, he had dipped tentatively, then sorted curiously, and at last hunted greedily through the thousands of pictures big and small, elated with wonder and horror (here! Here was the secret, the hidden ones revealed, each image worth a thousand words) and for a week was almost unable to speak to his family for fear of revealing what he had learned—or rather thought he was about to learn.

For in the end the pictures illuminated nothing, because nothing illuminated them.

“Note thumb,” old Auberon would write on the back of a dim view of gray and black shrubbery. And there was, in the undisentanglable convolvulus, something that looked very much like a thumb. Good. Evidence. Another, though, would annul this evidence entirely, because (with only speechless exclamation marks on its back) here was an entire figure, a ghostly little miss in the leaves, with a trailing skirt of dew-glistening cobweb, pretty as a picture; and in the foreground, out of focus, the excited figure of a blond human child looking at the camera and pointing out the wee stranger. Now who could believe that? And if it was true (it couldn’t be, how it had been faked Auberon had no idea, but it was just too stupidly real not to be fake) then what good was the maybe-a-thumb-in-the- shrubbery and a thousand others just as obscure? When he had sorted a dozen boxes into the few impossible and the many unintelligible, and saw that there were dozens of boxes and portfolios yet to go, he shut them all up (with a mixed sense of relief and loss) and rarely thought about them again.

He never again opened the old five-year diary in which his own notes had been made either, after that. He returned the last edition of the Architecture of Country Houses to its place in the library. His own humble discoveries, or what had seemed like discoveries—the orrery, a few interesting slips of the tongue made by his great-aunt and his grandmother—heart-startling as they had once seemed, had been swamped by the thick flood of torturous pictures and worse notes on them which his namesake had made. He forgot about it all. His secret-agentry was over.

His secret-agentry was over, but he had by this time gone so long in disguise indetectably as a member of his family that by slow stages he had actually become one. (It often happens so with secret agents.) The secret that was not revealed in Auberon’s photographs lay, if it lay anywhere, in the hearts of his relatives; and Auberon had for so long pretended to know what they all knew (so that they would reveal it to him by accident) that he came to suppose he did know it as well as any of them; and like his evidences, and about the same time, he forgot about it. And since, if they had ever really known anything that he didn’t know, they too had all forgotten it or seemed to have forgotten it, then they were all equal and he was one of them. He even felt, just below consciousness, that he was aligned with all the rest of them in a conspiracy that excluded only his father: Smoky didn’t know, and didn’t know they knew he didn’t know. Somehow, rather than separating them from him, this joined them to Smoky all the more, as though they kept from him the secret of a surprise party planned for Smoky himself. And so for a while Auberon’s relations with his father grew a little easier.

But even though he stopped scrutinizing others’ motives and movements, a habit of secrecy about his own persisted in Auberon. He often put false faces over his actions, for no good reason. Certainly it wasn’t to mystify; even as a secret agent he hadn’t wanted to mystify anybody, a secret agent’s task is just the reverse of that. If he had a reason at all, it may have been only a desire to present himself in a milder, clearer light than he might otherwise have appeared in: milder and clearer than the dim-flaring lamps by which he perceived himself.

“Where are you off to in such a tear?” Daily Alice asked him as he wolfed his milk and cookies at the kitchen table after school. He was in this autumn the last Barnable still a scholar in Smoky’s school. Lucy had stopped going the year before.

“Play ball,” he said, his mouth full. “With John Wolf and those guys.”

“Oh.” She half-refilled the glass he held out to her. Good lord he had gotten big lately. “Well, tell John to tell his mother I’ll be over tomorrow with some soup and things, and see what she needs.” Auberon kept his eyes on his cookies. “Is she feeling any better, do you know?” He shrugged. “Tacey said… oh, well.” It seemed unlikely from Auberon’s air that he would go tell John Wolf that Tacey had said his mother was dying. Probably her simple message wouldn’t even be passed. But she couldn’t be sure. “What do you play?”

“Catcher,” he said quickly. “Usually.”

“I was a catcher,” Alice said. “Usually.”

Auberon put down the glass, slowly, thinking. “Do you think,” he said, “that people are happier when they’re alone, or with other people?”

She carried his glass and plate to the sink. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess… Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I just wondered if…” What he wondered was whether it was a fact everyone knew, every grown-up anyway: that everyone is of course happiest alone, or the reverse, whichever it was. “I guess I’m happier with other people,” he said.

“Oh yes?” She smiled; since she faced the sink, he couldn’t see her. “That’s nice,” she said. “An extrovert.”

“I guess.”

“Well,” Alice said softly, “I just hope you don’t creep back in your shell again.”

He was already on his way out, stuffing extra cookies in his pockets, and didn’t stop, but a strange window had suddenly been flung open within him. Shell? Had he been in a shell? And—odder still—had he been seen to be in one, was it common knowledge? He looked through this window and saw himself for a moment, for the first time, as others saw him. Meanwhile his feet had taken him out the broad swinging doors of the kitchen, which grump- grumped behind him in their way, and through the raisin-odorous pantry, and out through the stillness of the long dining room, going toward his imaginary ball-game.

Alice at the sink looked up, and saw an autumn leaf blown by the casement, and called out to Auberon. She could hear his footsteps receding (his feet had grown even faster than the rest of him) and she picked up his jacket from the chair where he had left it, and went after him.

He was gone out of sight on his bike by the time she got out the front door. She called again, going down the porch stairs; and then noticed that she was outdoors, for the first time that day, and that the air was clear and tangy and large, and that she was aimless. She looked around herself. She could just see, extending beyond the corner of the house, a bit of the walled garden around the other side. On the stone ornament at its corner a crow was perched. It looked at her looking around herself—she couldn’t remember ever having seen one so close to the house before, they were fearless but wary—and flopped from its perch, and flapped with heavy wings away over the park. Cras, cras: that’s what Smoky said crows say in Latin. Cras, cras: “tomorrow, tomorrow.”

She walked around the walled garden. Its little arched door stood ajar, inviting her in, but she didn’t go in. She went around to the funny little walk bordered by hydrangeas that had once been in training to be ornamental shrubs, tall and orderly and cabbage-headed, but which had declined over the years into mere hydrangeas, and smothered the walk they were supposed to border, and obscured the view they were supposed to exhibit: two Doric pillars, leading to the path that went up the Hill. Still aimless, Alice walked along that walk (brushing from the last hydrangea blossoms a shower of papery petals like faded confetti) and started up the Hill.

Glory

Auberon circled back along the road that ran around Edgewood’s guardian stone wall, and at a certain point, dismounted. He climbed the wall (a fallen tree there and a weedy hummock on the other side made a stile) and hauled his bike over, wheeled it through the rustling gilded beechwood to the path, mounted again, and, glancing behind him, rode to the Summer House. He concealed the bike in the shed old Auberon had built.