Little, Big

all. He was not to ask.

So much not to ask. It was a great art, that one. He had learned to deploy it as skillfully as a surgeon his art, or a poet his. To listen; to nod; to act on what he was told as though he understood it; not to offer criticism or advice, except of the mildest kind, just to show his interest and concern; to puzzle out. To stroke Sophie’s hair, and not try to deflect her sadness; to wonder how she had gone on with such a life, with such a sorrow at its heart, and never ask.

Well, if it came to that, though, his other three daughters were as great a mystery to him, really, as his fourth, only not a mystery it grieved him to contemplate. Queens of air and darkness, how had he come to engender them? And his wife: only he had so long ceased (since his honeymoon, since his wedding day) to question her that she was now no more a mystery (and no less) than clouds and stones and roses. If it came to that, the only one he could begin to understand (and criticize, and intrude on, and study) was his only son.

“Why do you suppose that is?” Sophie asked.

“Why what is?”

“That I can’t imagine her getting any older.”

“Well, hm,” Smoky said. “I don’t really know.”

She sighed, and Smoky stroked her head, running his fingers through her curls, sorting them out. They would never exactly go gray; though the gold faded from them, they still seemed like golden curls. Sophie was not one of those maiden aunts whose unused beauty comes to seem dried and pressed, like a flower—for one thing she was no maiden—but it did seem that her youth couldn’t be outgrown, that she had never and would never become a person of mature years. Daily Alice looked now, at almost fifty (fifty, good Lord) just as she ought, as though she had shed the successive skins of childhood and youth and come forth thus, whole. Sophie looked sixteen: only burdened with a lot of unnecessary years, almost unfairly, it seemed. Smoky wondered which, over the years, he had oftenest thought the more beautiful. “Maybe you need another Interest,” he said.

“I don’t need another Interest,” she said. “I need to sleep.”

It had been Smoky who, when Sophie had discovered with surprise and disgust how many hours there are in the day when it isn’t half-filled with sleep, had said that most people fill those hours with Interests of some kind, and had suggested Sophie take some up. Out of desperation she’d done so; the cards, of course, first, and when she wasn’t working with them she gardened, and paid visits, canned, read books by the dozen, made repairs around the house, always resenting that these Interests should be forced on her in the absence of her lost (why? why lost?) sweet sleep. She turned her head restlessly on Smoky’s thigh as though it were her unquiet pillow. Then she looked up at him. “Will you sleep with me?” she said. “I mean sleep.”

“Let’s make cocoa,” he said.

She got up. “It seems so unfair,” she said, casting her eyes upward at the ceiling. “All of them up there fast asleep and I have to haunt the place.”

But in fact—besides Smoky leading the way by candlelight to the kitchen—Momdy had just awakened with arthritic pains, and was thinking whether it would hurt more to get up and get aspirin or lie there and ignore them; and Tacey and Lucy had never gone to bed at all, but sat up by candlelight in quiet talk about their lovers and friends and family, about the fate of their brother and the shortcomings and virtues of the sister not present, Lily. Lily’s twins had just awakened, one because he’d wet the bed, and the other because she felt the wetness, and their wakefulness was about to wake Lily. The only one asleep then in the house was Daily Alice, who lay on her stomach with her head deep in two feather pillows, dreaming of a hill where there stood an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace.

La Negra

On a winter day, Sylvie paid a visit to her old neighborhood, where she had not lived since her mother had gone back to the Island and farmed Sylvie out to aunts. In a furnished room down that street, with her mother, her brother, a child of her mother’s, her grandmother and the odd visitor, Sylvie had grown, and grown Somehow the Destiny that she had today brought back with her to these littered streets.

Though only a few subway stops away from Old Law Farm, it seemed a great distance, across a border, another country altogether; so dense was the City that it could contain many such foreign countries cheek by jowl; there were several which Sylvie had never visited at all, their old Dutch or quaintly rural names suggestive and remote to her. But these blocks she knew. Hands in the pockets of her old black fur, double socks on her feet, she went down streets she walked often in her dreams, and they weren’t much different than she dreamed them to be, they were preserved as though in memory: the landmarks by which she had mapped them as a child were mostly still there, the candy store, the evangelical church where women with moustaches and powdered faces sang hymns, the squalid credit grocer, the notaria scary and dark. She found, by following these markers, the building where the woman called La Negra lived; and though it was smaller, dirtier, with darker and more urinous hallways than it had been or than she remembered it, it was the same, and her heart beat fast with apprehension as she tried to remember what door was hers. From out an apartment, as she climbed up, a family argument accompanied by jibaro music suddenly burst, husband, wife, crying children, mother-in-law. He was drunk, and going out to get drunker; the wife railed at him, the mother-inlaw railed at the wife, the music sang of love. Sylvie asked where La Negra’s house was. They all fell silent, all but the radio, and pointed upward, studying Sylvie. “Thanks,” she said, and went up; behind her the sextet (well and long rehearsed) resumed.

From behind her door studded with locks La Negra questioned Sylvie, unable, apparently, despite her powers, to place her. Then Sylvie remembered that La Negra had known her only by a childhood diminutive, and she gave that. There was a shocked silence (Sylvie could sense it) and the locks were opened.

“I thought you were gone,” the black woman said, eyes wide, mouth corners drawn down in fearful surprise.

“Well, I am,” Sylvie said. “Years ago.”

“I mean far,” La Negra said. “Far, far.”

“No,” Sylvie said. “Not so far.”

She herself was a shock to Sylvie, for she had grown a lot smaller, and a lot less fearsome as she was smaller. Her hair had grown gray as steel wool. But the apartment, when La Negra at last stood aside and let Sylvie enter, was the same: mostly a smell, or many smells together, that brought back, as though she inhaled them with the odors, the fear and wonder she had felt here.

“Titi,” she said, touching the old woman’s arm (for La Negra still stared at her in something like surprise and didn’t speak), “Titi, I need some help.”

“Yes,” La Negra said. “Anything.”

But Sylvie, looking around the small, small apartment, was less sure than she had been an hour ago about what help she wanted. “Gee, the same,” she said. There was the bureau, done up as a composite altar, with the chipped statues of black Santa Barbara and black Martin de Porres, the red candles lit before them, the plastic lace tablecloth beneath; there was the picture of Our Lady pouring blessings that turned to roses into the gas-flame- colored sea. On another wall was the Guardian Angel picture which also hung, oddly, on George Mouse’s kitchen wall: the dangerous bridge, the two children, the potent angel watching to see that they crossed safely. “Who’s that?” Sylvie asked. Between the saints, before the talismanic hand, was a picture shrouded in black silk, a candle before it also, burning low.

“Come sit, come sit,” La Negra said quickly. “She’s not being punished, even if it looks like it. I never meant that.”

Sylvie decided not to question this. “Oh, hey, I brought some stuff.” She offered the bag, some fruit, some dulces, some coffee she had begged from George, who got it when no one else could, for she had remembered her aunt drinking it with relish, hot white and sweet.

La Negra, blessing her profusely, grew easier. When she had, as a precaution, taken the glass of water she kept on the bureau to catch evil spirits in and flushed it down the noisy toilet and replaced it, they made the coffee and talked about old things, Sylvie in her nervousness rattling on a little.

“So I heard from your mother,” La Negra said. “She called long-distance. Not me. But I heard. And your