Woods and Lakes
Beyond the Summer House they descended a concave lane, quickly swallowed up in a wood tangled and somnolent, moist from the rain. It seemed the kind of wood grown to hide a sleeping princess till her hundred years were up. They hadn’t been long within it when there was a rustle or a whisper beside them, and with a suddenness that startled Smoky, a man stood on the path ahead of them. “Good morning, Rudy,” Cloud said. “Here’s the groom. Smoky, Rudy Flood.” Rudy’s hat looked as though it had been fought with, punched and pummelled; its upturned brim gave his broad bearded face an open look. Out of his open green coat a great belly came, tautening his white shirt. “Where’s Rory?” Cloud asked.
“Down the path.” He grinned at Smoky as though they shared a joke. Rory Flood his tiny wife appeared in a moment as he had, and a big girl in floppy jeans, big baby in her arms punching the air. “Betsy Bird,” Cloud said, “and Robin. And see here are Phil Fox and two cousins of mine, Stones, Irv and Walter. Clouds on their mother’s side.” More came on the path from right and left; the path was narrow, and the wedding guests walked it two by two, dropping back or moving up to handle Smoky and bless him. “Charles Wayne,” Cloud said. “Hannah Noon. Where are the Lakes? And the Woods?”
The path came out into a wide, sloping glade, the marge of a dark lake that still and moatlike surrounded an island where aged trees grew. Leaves floated flat on its surface, and frogs fled from their feet as they came down among its pools. “It’s certainly,” Smoky said remembering the guidebook, “an extensive estate.”
“The further in you go, the bigger it gets,” said Hannah Noon. “Have you met my boy Sonny?”
Across the lake a boat was coming, laying out lacquered ripples. Its carved prow was intended for a swan, but it was gray and eyeless now, like the dark swan on the dark lake of northern legend. It struck the bank with a hollow rattle of oarlocks, and Smoky was pushed forward to board with Cloud, who was still explaining who was who of the laughing wedding-guests. “Hannah’s distantly related,” she said. “Her grandfather was a Bush, and her grandfather’s sister married one of Mrs. Drinkwater’s uncles, a Dale….” She saw that he wasn’t listening, though his head was nodding mechanically. She smiled and put her hand on his. The lake island, shadowed by its trees, seemed made of changeful green glass; myrtle grew on its gentle slopes. At its center was a round gazebo, its pillars slim as arms, softly domed and greenly garlanded. There, a tall girl in white stood among others, holding a ribboned bouquet.
They were greeted and handed out of the leaking swan by many hands. Around the island people were sitting together, opening picnic baskets, placating shouting children; few of them seemed to notice Smoky’s arrival. “Look who we’ve got here, Cloud,” said a slim chinless man who made Smoky think of the poets the guidebook had disliked so much. “We’ve got Dr. Word. Where is he now? Doctor! Got some more champagne?” Doctor Word in a tight black suit had a look of unreasoning terror on his badly shaven face; his golden glassful trembled and bubbles rose. “Nice to see you, Doctor,” Cloud said. “I think we can promise no wonders. Oh, settle down, man!” Dr. Word had tried to speak, choked, spluttered. “Pound his back, someone. He’s not our minister,” Cloud said confidentially to Smoky. “They come from the outside, and tend to get very nervous. A wonder any of us is married or buried at all. Here’s Sarah Pink, and the little Pinks. How do you do. Ready?” She took Smoky’s arm, and as they went up the flagged path toward the gazebo a harmonium began to play, like a tiny weeping voice, music he didn’t know but that seemed to score him with sudden longing. At its sound the wedding-guests gathered, talking in low voices; when Smoky reached the low worn steps of the gazebo, Doctor Word had arrived there too, glancing around, fishing a book from his pocket; Smoky saw Mother, and Doctor Drinkwater, and Sophie with her flowers behind Daily Alice with hers; Daily Alice watched him unsmiling and calm, as though he were someone she didn’t know. They stood him beside her; he began to put his hands in his pockets, stopped, clasped them behind his back, then in front of him. Doctor Word fluttered the pages of his book and began to speak quickly, his words shot through with champagne and tremblings and the harmonium’s unceasing melody; it sounded like “Do you Barble take this Daily Alice to be your awful wedded life for bed or for worse insidious in stealth for which or for poor or to have unto whole until death you do part?” And he looked up inquiringly.
“I do,” Smoky said.
“I do too,” Daily Alice said.
“Wring,” Doctor Word said. “And now you pounce you, man on wife.”
Aaaah, said all the wedding guests, who then began to drift away, talking in low voices.
Touching Noses
There was a game she had played with Sophie in the long hallways of Edgewood, where she and Sophie would stand as far apart as was possible to get and still see each other. Then they would walk slowly together, slowly and deliberately, looking always each at the other’s face. They kept on, at the same pace, not laughing or trying not to, till their noses touched. It was like that with Smoky, though he had started far off, too far to be seen, coming from the City—no farther, out there where she had never been, far away, walking towards her. When the swan boat picked him up, she could easily cover him with her thumbnail if she chose to; then the boat drew closer, Phil Flowers hauling on the oars, and she could see his face, see that it was indeed he. At the water’s edge he was lost for a moment; then there was a murmur of expectation and appreciation around her and he reappeared, led by Cloud, much larger now, the new wrinkles visible at his knees, his strong veined hands she loved. Larger. There were violets in his buttonhole. She saw his throat move, and at that moment came Music. When he had come to the stairs of the pavilion she could no longer take in his feet if she looked resolutely at his face, and she did—for a moment everything around his face darkened and swam, his face orbited towards her like a pale smiling moon. He mounted the steps. He stood beside her. No touching noses. That would come. It might she thought take years; maybe they never would—their marriage was after all a Convenience, though she had never, would never, need not now ever explain that to him because, just as the cards had promised, she knew now she would choose him over anybody else, whether the cards chose him or not, or whether they who had promised someone like him to her thought he was unnecessary now or even wrong. She would defy them to have him. And it was they who had first seen fit to send her out to find him! She wanted with all her being to continue to find him now, to put her arms around him and search; but the stupid minister began to mutter—she felt anger at her parents who had thought him necessary, for Smoky’s sake they said, but she already knew Smoky better than that. She tried to listen to the man, thinking how much better it would be to marry touching noses: to proceed from great distances together till it was as in the old halls when the walls and pictures glided by changefully on the edge of vision but Sophie’s face kept constant, growing, the eyes widening, freckles expanding, a planet, then a moon, then a sun, then nothing at all visible except the onrushing map of it, the great eyes starting to cross at the last moment before their two noses rushed vastly headlong together to collide soundlessly.
Happy Isles
“A little unreal,” he said. There were grass stains on Truman’s suit, and Mother noted them with worry as she repacked a picnic basket. “They won’t come out,” she said. He drank champagne, which seemed to make the unreality acceptable, normal, even necessary; he sat in a haze like the lengthening afternoon’s, pacific and happy. Mother tied up the basket, and then saw a plate staring up at her from the grass; when the job had been all redone, Smoky with a sense of déjà vu pointed out a fork she hadn’t seen. Daily Alice linked her arm with his. They had been all over the island several times, seeing friends and relatives, being made much of. “Thank you,” several of them said when she presented Smoky, and when they gave her gifts. Smoky, after his third glass of champagne, wondered if this saying of things backwards (Cloud was always doing it) needn’
t be looked at case by case, so to speak, but was in the way of a general, well, a general … She leaned her head on his padded shoulder, and the two of them supported each other, hello’d out. “Nice,” he said to no one. “What do they say when something’s outdoors?”
“Al fresco?”
“Is that it?”
“I think so.”
“Are you happy?”
“I think so.”
“I am.”
When Franz Mouse had been married, he and his bride (what was her name?) had gone together to a storefront photo studio. There, as well as the formal nuptial exposure, the photographer had thrown in a few goof pictures taken with props of his own: a papiermâche ball-and-chain for Franz’s leg, a rolling pin he encouraged the bride to brandish over him. Smoky reflected that he knew just about that much of married life, and laughed aloud.
“What,” Alice inquired.
“Do you have a rolling pin?”
“You mean to roll out dough? I guess Mother does.”
“That’s all right, then.” He had the giggles now, the stream of laughter arising from a point in his diaphragm as the bubbles rose from an invisible point in his glass. She caught it from him. Mother, standing above them arms akimbo, shook her head at them. The harmonium or whatever it was began again, stilling them as though it had been a cool hand laid on them or a voice suddenly beginning to speak of some long-past sadness; he had never heard music like it, and it seemed to catch him, or rather he it, as though he were a rough thing drawn across the silk of it. It was a Recessional, he thought, not remembering how he knew the word; but it was a Recessional meant seemingly not for him and his bride, but for the others. Mother sighed a great sigh, having fallen momentarily silent as the whole island had; she picked up her picnic basket, motioned Smoky to sit still who had half-risen with deep reluctance to help her. She kissed them both and turned away smiling. Around the island others were going down to the water; there was laughter, and a far-off shout. At the water’s edge he saw pretty Sarah Pink helped into the swan boat, and others waiting to embark, depart, some holding glasses and one with a guitar over his shoulder; Ruby Flood flourished a green bottle. The music and the late afternoon charged their glad departure with melancholy, as though they left the Happy Isles for somewhere less happy, unable till they left to realize their loss.
Smoky stood his near-empty glass at a drunken angle in the grass, and feeling made of music head to foot, turned to lay his head in Daily Alice’s lap. In doing so, he happened to catch sight of Great-aunt Cloud at the lake’s margin speaking with two people he seemed to know but for a moment couldn’t identify, though he felt great surprise to see them there. Then the man made a fish’s mouth to puff on his pipe, and helped his wife into a rowboat.
Marge and Jeff Juniper.
He looked up into Daily Alice’s placid and certain face, wondering why every deepening of these daily mysteries left him less inclined to probe them. “The things that make us happy,” he said, “make us wise.”
And she smiled, and nodded, as who should say: yes, those old truths are really true.
A Sheltered Life
Sophie parted from her parents as they went arm in arm through the hushing wood, talking quietly to each other of what has been, as parents do whose eldest child has just been married. She took a path of her own, which went away uncertainly, eventually leading back the way they had come. Evening began to fall as she walked, though what it seemed to do was not fall but well up from the ground, beginning with the dense ferns’ velvet undersides turning black. Sophie could see day go from her hands; they became indistinct by degrees, and life then light went from the bunch of flowers she still for some reason carried. But she felt her head to be still above the rising dark, until the path before her grew obscure and she breathed an evening coolness, and was submerged. Evening next reached the birds where they sat, stilling bird by bird their furious battle-of-the-hands and leaving whispering silence in the middle air. Still the sky was as blue as noon, or nearly, though the path was so dark she stumbled, and the first firefly reported for work. She took off her shoes (bending her knee in mid-step and reaching behind her to pull off one by the heel, hopping a step, and taking off the other) and left them on a stone, hoping without giving it much thought that the dew would not spoil their satin.
She wanted not to hurry, though her heart against her will hurried anyway. Brambles implored her lacy dress to stay, and she thought of taking it off too, but did not. The wood, looked through lengthwise the way she went, was a tunnel of soft darkness, a perspective of fireflies; but when she looked out its less dense sides she could see a lapidary blue-gone-green horizon flawed by a pale brush of cloud. She could also see, unexpectedly (it was always unexpected) the top or tops of the house, far off and moving farther off—so it seemed as the air between grew hazier. She went on more slowly into the tunnel into evening, feeling a kind of laughter constrict her throat.
When she came close to the island, she began to feel Somehow accompanied, which was not wholly unexpected, but still it made her flush with sensitivity, as though she had fur and it had been brushed to crackling.
The island wasn’t really an island, or not quite one; it was teardrop-shaped, and the long tail of it reached up into the stream which fed the lake. Coming to it here, where the stream at its narrowest swept around the teardrop’s tail to swell and ripple the lake, she easily found a way to step from rock to rock that the water rushed over making silken water-pillows where it seemed she could lay her heated cheek.
She came onto the island, beneath the gazebo which stood abstracted, looking the other way.
Yes, they were around her in numbers now, their purpose, she couldn’t help but think, like hers: just to know or see or be sure. But their reasons surely must be different. She had no reasons that she could name, and perhaps their reasons had no names that could be spoken either, though she seemed to hear—doubtless only the stream and the blood sounding in her ears—a lot of voices speaking nothing. She went with care and great silence around the gazebo, hearing a voice, a human voice, Alice’s, but not what it said; and a laugh, and she thought she knew what it must be saying. Why had she come? Already she began to feel a horrid blind dark pressure at her heart, a wall of great weight building, but she went on and came to a higher place shielded by glossy bushes and a cold stone bench; there she knelt without a sound.
The last green light of evening went out. The gazebo, as though it had been waiting and watching for it, saw the gibbous moon pull itself above the trees and spill its light over the wrinkled water and through the pillars and onto the couple there.
Daily Alice had hung her white gown on the hands of a bush, and now and again its sleeve or hem would move in the breeze which began when the sun set; seeing it with a corner of his vision Smoky would think there was someone else near the gazebo where they lay. There were these lights then: darkening sky, fireflies, phosphorescent blossoms that seemed to shine not by reflection but by some mild inward light of their own. By them he could sense more than see her long geography beside him on the cushions.
“I’m really very innocent,” he said. “In lots of ways.”
“Innocent!” she said with false surprise (false because of course it was for that innocence that he was here now, and she with him). “You don’t act innocent.” She laughed, and so did he; it was the laugh Sophie heard. “Shameless.”
“Yes, that too. The same thing, I think. Nobody ever told me what to be ashamed of. Afraid of—they don’t have to teach that. But I got over that.” With you, he might have said. “I’ve had a sheltered life.”
“Me too.”
Smoky thought that his life had been not sheltered at all, not when Daily Alice could say the same thing about hers. If hers were sheltered, his was naked—and that’s how it felt to him. “I never had a childhood … not like you had. In a way I never was a child. I mean I was a kid, but not a child….”
“Well,” she said, “you can have
mine then. If you want it.”
“Thank you,” he said; and he did want it, all of it, no second left ungarnered. “Thank you.”
The moon rose, and by its sudden light he saw her rise too, stretch herself as though after labor, and go to lean against a pillar, stroking herself absently and looking across to the massed darkness of the trees across the lake. Her long thews were silvered and insubstantial (though they were not insubstantial; no; he was still trembling slightly from their pressure). Her arm up along the pillar drew up her breast and the blade of her shoulder. She rested her weight on one long leg, locked back tensely; the other bent. The twin fullnesses of her nates were thus set and balanced like a theorem. All this Smoky noted with an intense precision, not as though his senses took it in, but as though they rushed toward it endlessly.
“My earliest memory,” she said, as though in down payment on the gift she had offered him, or maybe thinking of something else entirely (though he took it anyway), “my earliest memory is of a face in my bedroom window. It was night, in summer. The window was open. A yellow face, round and glowing. It had a wide smile and sort of penetrating eyes. It was looking at me with great interest. I laughed, I remember, because it was sinister but it was smiling, and made me want to laugh. Then there were hands on the sill, and it seemed the face, I mean the owner of it, was coming in the window. I still wasn’t scared, I heard laughter and I laughed too. Just then my father came in the room, and I turned away, and when I looked again the face wasn’t there. Later on when I reminded Daddy about it, he said that the face was the moon in the window; and the hands on the sill were the curtains moving in the breeze; and that when I looked back a cloud had covered the moon.”