Little, Big

“Yes.”

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

“No,” said Grandfather Trout, though whether in agreement or denial was hard to tell when the word issued from a fish’s mouth. “Now let me sleep.”

“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course a Consort! What have I been thinking of? Yes!” At every word her voice grew greater. Grandfather Trout sank quickly in fear, and the very ice melted away by inches from beneath Mrs. Underhill’s feet as she cried “Yes!” in a voice of thunder.

“Love!” she said to the others. “Not in the Was, not in the Will Be, but Now!”

“Love!” they all cried. Mrs. Underhill threw open a humpbacked trunk bound in black iron and began rummaging in it. She found what she wanted, wrapped it featly in white paper, bound it with red-and-white twine, neatly waxed the ends of the twine to keep them from raveling, took pen and ink, and on Mr. Woods’s bent back addressed a label: all in less time than it took to think of it. “Let him follow love,” she said when the package was made. “And so he’ll come. Willy.” She dotted a final i. “Nilly.”

“Aaaah,” they all said, and began to drift away, talking in low voices.

“You’ll never believe this,” Sylvie said to Auberon, bursting through the door into the Folding Bedroom, “but I got a job.” She’d been out all day. Her cheeks were red with March wind, her eyes bright.

“Hey.” He laughed, astonished, pleased. “Your Destiny?”

“Fuck destiny,” she said. She tore from its hanger the coffee-dyed outfit and flung it trashcanwards. “No more excuses,” she said. She pulled out work shoes, sweatshirt, muffler. She banged the shoes on the floor. “Have to dress warm,” she said. “I start tomorrow. No more excuses.”

“That’s a good day,” he said. “April Fool’s.”

“Just my day,” she said. “My lucky day.”

He laughed, raising her. April had come. And she in his embrace felt a thing that was at once relief at a danger avoided and a foreboding of that same danger, and her eyes filled at the safety she felt, within his arms, and at its fragility too. “Papo,” she said. “You’re the greatest, you know that? You really really are.”

“But tell me, tell me,” he said. “What’s this job?”

She grinned, hugging him. “You’ll never believe it,” she said.

IV.

Me thinks there be not impossibilities
enough in Religion for an active faith.

—Sir Thomas Browne

In the tiny offices of Winged Messenger Service were: a counter or partition, behind which the dispatcher sat, chewing always an unlit cigar and plugging and unplugging the cords of the oldest PBX in the world and bellowing “Winged” into his headset; a line of gray metal folding chairs on which those messengers not at the moment carrying messages sat, some as still and lifeless as unplugged machines, some (like Fred Savage and Sylvie) engaged in conversation; a huge and ancient television on a chain-flown platform out of reach, forever on (Sylvie, if she wasn’t running, caught episodes of “A World Elsewhere”); some urns full of sand and cigarette butts; a crackle-finish brown time clock; a back office, containing a boss, his secretary, and at odd hours a hearty but ill- looking salesman; a metal door with a bar; no windows.

More Would Happen

It wasn’t a place Sylvie liked to stay in much. In its bare, fluorescent, hard-finish shabbiness she recognized too many places where she had spent too much of her childhood: the waiting rooms of public hospitals and asylums, welfare offices, police stations, places where a congress of faces and bodies in poor clothes gathered, dispersed, were replaced always by others. She didn’t, fortunately, have to spend much time there: Winged Messenger Service was as busy as it had ever been, and out on the cold spring streets, bound in work-boots and hooded sweatshirt (looking, she told Auberon, like a teenage dyke, but cute), she made time, glorying in the crowds, the posh offices, and the oddly-assorted secretaries (snooty, harsh, and mannered; slovenly; kind) whom she gave to and took away from. “Winged Messenger!” she shouted at them, no time to waste. “Sign here please.” And away, in elevators crowded with soft-voiced, fine-suited men on their way to lunch, or loud-voiced back- slappers returning. Though she never learned midtown as Fred Savage knew it—every underground access, every passageway, every building which, facing on one avenue, evacuated onto another, saving half a block for a walker —she did grasp the general, and find shortcuts; and she made her lefts and rights, ups and downs, with an accuracy she was proud of.

On a day early in May that had begun rainy (Fred Savage beside her wore a vast fedora swaddled in plastic) she sat restless on the edge of her chair, crossing her legs right over left and then left over right, watching “A World Elsewhere” and waiting for her name to be called.

“That guy,” she explained to Fred, “was the one who pretended to be the father of the kid whose real father was the other guy, who divorced the wife who fell for the girl who crashed the car that crippled the kid that lived in the house that this guy built.”

“Mm,” Fred said. Sylvie’s eyes hadn’t left the screen nor her ear the story, but Fred looked only at Sylvie.

“That’s him,” she said as the scene changed to a smoothhaired man sipping coffee and studying, silently, for a very long time, a letter addressed to someone else, trying apparently to decide whether he dared open it. He had been, Sylvie told Fred, wrestling with this temptation since April ended.

“If I was writing it,” she said, “more would happen.”

“I just bet it would,” Fred said, and the dispatcher said Sylvie.

She leapt up, though her eyes didn’t leave the screen; she took the dispatcher’s slip and started out.

“See ya,” she said to Fred and to an unresponsive overcoat and hat at the end of the row of chairs.

“More would happen, mm-mm,” said Fred, who still looked only at Sylvie. “I bet now it would at that.”

Something Going

The pickup was from a suite in a tall hotel of glass and steel, chill, sinister even, despite the factitious gaiety of its tropical lounges and English chophouse and hustle and bustle. She rode upward alone in a silent, thickly carpeted elevator in which nameless music played. At the thirteenth floor, the doors slid open, and Sylvie said “A! A!”, startled, because facing her was a vast blowup in color of Russell Eigenblick’s face, bushy eyebrows over limpid eyes, red red beard sprouting from his cheeks almost up to his eyes, mouth knowing, stem and kindly. The nameless elevator music became a radio, loud: a merengue.

She looked down the long plush corridor of the suite. Instead of a secretary of any sort, four or five young guys, black and P.R., made dance steps and drank Cokes around a vast rosewood desk. Those not in a sort of