Wild above rule or art, enormous bliss.
What Smoky liked about his girls’ growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distaste or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives: when they were kids, their lives and concerns—Tacey’s rabbits and music, Lily’s bird’s-nests and boy-friends, Lucy’s bewilderments—could all fit within the compass of his life, which was then replete; and then as they grew up and out, they no longer fit, they needed room, their concerns multiplied, lovers and then children had to be fitted in, he could no longer contain them unless he expanded too, and so he did, and so his own life got larger as theirs did, and he felt them to be no further from him than ever, and he liked that. What he didn’t like about their growing up was the same thing: that it forced him to grow, to enlarge, sometimes beyond what he felt the character he had come over the years to be encased in could stand.
Tossing and Turning
There had been one great advantage in having grown up anonymous when he had come to have children: for they could make out of him what they wanted, could think him kindly or strict, evasive or frank, jolly or glum, as their own tempers required. That was great, great to be Universal Father, nothing withheld from him, he bet (though he had no way to prove it) that his daughters had told him more of their secrets, grave, shameful, or hilarious, than most men’s did. But there were limits even to his flexibility, he couldn’t as time went on stretch as much as he had once done, he found himself less and less able to ignore it when his character, growing ever more lobsterlike and unsheddable, disapproved of or could not understand the Young.
Perhaps it was chiefly that which had come between him and his youngest child, his son Auberon. Certainly the commonest emotions Smoky remembered feeling about the boy were a sort of baffled irritation, and a sadness over the mysterious gulf that seemed fixed between them. Whenever he got up the nerve to try to learn what was with his son, Auberon had produced a complex and wellpracticed secretiveness that Smoky was helpless and even bored before; when Auberon had come to him, on the other hand, Smoky had seemed unable not to retreat into a bluff, know-nothing, standard-issue parent costume, and Auberon would too quickly retire. And it had grown not better but worse as the years went by, until at last Smoky, with outward head-shaking and reluctance, and inward relief, had seen him off on his strange quest to the City.
Maybe if they’d played ball more. Just gone out, son and dad, and tossed the old pill around on a summer afternoon. Auberon had always liked to play ball, Smoky knew, though he himself had never been either good at it or happy doing it.
He laughed at the insufficiency of this reverie. Just the sort of thing his character might suggest, in the face of his children’s inexplicability. Maybe, though, it had occurred to him because he sensed that some common touch, some ordinary gesture, might have crossed over what lay between him and his son; if there were something as wide that lay between him and his daughters, he had never noticed it, but of course it might well be there, disguised in the daily strangenesses of growing up today with a father who had grown up yesterday, or even the day before that.
None of his daughters had married, or seemed likely to, though he had now two grandchildren, Lily’s twins, and Tacey seemed ready to bear a child by Tony Buck. Smoky held no particular brief for marriage, though he couldn’t imagine life without his own, odd as it had proved to be; and as for fidelity, he had no right to speak at all. But he did find it distressing to think that his offspring would be more or less nameless, and that if this kept up might one day be describable only as race-horses are, by so-and-so out of soand-so. And he couldn’t help thinking that there was something embarrassingly obvious in the couplings of his daughters with their lovers, a shamelessness that marriage would have decently hid. Or rather his character thought so. Smoky himself mostly cheered their daring, their bravery, and wasn’t ashamed to admire their sexuality as he had always admired their beauty. Big girls now, after all. But still… well, he hoped they could ignore it when his character made noises, or caused him, for instance, to decline to visit Tacey and what’s-his-name when they were living together in a cave. A cave! His children seemed bent on recapitulating in their own lives the whole history of the race. Lucy gathered herbs for simples and Lucy read the stars and hung coral around her babies’ necks to ward off evil; Auberon with a knapsack set out to seek his fortune. And in her cave Tacey discovered fire. Just when the supply of electricity in the world seemed to be running out for good, too. Thinking of which, he listened to the clock chime the quarter hour, and wondered if he should go down and shut down the generator.
He yawned. The single lamp lit in the library made a pool of light he was reluctant to leave. There was a pile of books by his chair from which he had been choosing for school; the old ones had grown repulsive to the hand and eye from years of use, and boring beyond expression. Another clock chimed, one o’clock, but Smoky didn’t trust it. Outside in the corridor, a candle in her hand, a familiar wraith of nighttime passed: Sophie, still awake.
She went away—Smoky watched the changeful light on walls and furniture flash and dim—and then came back again.
“You still up?” she said, and at the same moment he asked the same of her.
“It’s awful,” she said, coming in. She wore a long white nightgown which gave her even more the air of an unlaid ghost. “Tossing and turning. Do you know that feeling? As though your mind’s asleep but your body’s awake—and won’t give in—and has to keep jumping from one position to another…”
“Just barely waking you up every time…”
“Yes, so your head can’t—can’t dive down, sort of, and really sleep, but it won’t give up either and wake up, and just keeps repeating the same dream, or the beginnings of one, and not getting anywhere…”
“Sorting over and over the same handful of nonsense, yup; until you have to give in, and get up…”
“Yes, yes! And you feel like you’ve been lying there for hours, struggling, and not sleeping at all. Isn’t that awful?”
“Awful.” He felt, but would never admit to, a sense of fitness that Sophie, long the champion sleeper, had come in recent years to be a fair insomniac, and knew now even better than Smoky, a chancy sleeper at the best of times, the pursuit of fleeing oblivion. “Cocoa,” he said. “Warm milk. With a little brandy. And say your prayers.” He’d given her all this advice before.
She knelt by his chair, covering her hare feet with the nightgown, and rested her head on his thigh. “I thought,” she said, “when I sort of snapped out of it, you know, the tossing and turning? I thought: she must be cold.”
“She?” he said. And then: “Oh.”
“Isn’t that dumb? If she’s alive, she’s not cold, probably; and if she’s—well, not alive…”
“Mm.” There was, there was Lilac, of course: he had been thinking with such self-satisfaction of how well he knew his daughters, and how well they liked him, his son Auberon the only grain of grit in his oyster: but there was his other daughter, his life was odder than it often appeared to him, Lilac was a dimension of mystery and grief he sometimes forgot. Sophie never forgot.
“You know what’s funny?” Sophie said. “Years ago, I used to think of her growing up. I knew she got older. I could feel it. I knew just what she looked like, how she’d look as she got older. But then it stopped. She got to be about… nine, or ten, I guess; and then I couldn’t imagine her getting any older.”
Smoky answered nothing, only stroked Sophie’s head softly.
“She’d be twenty-two now. Think of that.”
He thought of it. He had (twenty-two years ago) sworn before his wife that her sister’s child would be his, all the responsibility his. Her disappearance hadn’t altered that, but it had left him with no duties. He couldn’t imagine how to search for the real Lilac lost, when he had at length been told that she
