In Frenchman’s Bend the old frame houses stood as Simon remembered them. Whether it was the same paint covering them now or not, it looked no older than the paint of fifteen years ago. The two parked cars were unfamiliar, though; even here some things had to change.
With Margie following him silently, Simon turned his back on the houses for a moment and walked to the place where the road cut through the bluff. He stood there looking down. On the gravel shingle just below was an abandoned pile of clamshells, left over from the decades before plastic buttons, when the freshwater shells had had some commercial value. Simon remembered the shell pile as soon as he saw it again, as with the giant elm.
No one around here built a permanent boat-dock; the spring ice-jams and floods tended to be too fierce, tearing away anything weaker than a bridge abutment. But there was an old rowboat, too lacking in distinction for Simon’s memory to feel sure about it, tied by padlocked chain to the trunk of a stubby, familiar willow. And, on the narrow strip of sand that at the water’s very edge blended into rich mud, an aluminum canoe, unlocked, had been inverted, with a wooden paddle partially visible underneath it. If this was the same canoe that he remembered—
Motion and whiteness, along the wooded shore of an island a hundred yards out in the stream, caught Simon’s eye. He looked up sharply.
Margie, who had been gazing out across the water in a different direction, turned toward him. “What is it?”
“I thought I saw… someone out on the island.” The impression, momentary but convincing, had been of pale flesh, completely unclothed, and dark curly hair. Of course what was much more likely was that he had seen someone wearing some light-colored summer garment.
At the distance, he reflected as he watched the island, it would be hard for even the steadiest gaze to perceive curliness.
An insect droned from across the water. “Looks like a real jungle over there,” said Margie without much interest.
Was his imagination continuing to add details, or had he really seen the figure, in that one doubtful moment, as beckoning to him with one arm. He closed his eyes. An inner voice said that, even if he couldn’t remember it, there was good reason why he hadn’t come back here for fifteen years.
Simon opened his eyes again before Margie could take notice. Now on a sudden impulse he climbed a few steps, from the road to the lip of the bluff. From here he stared downstream, between islands, along the longest visible reach of the river. He knew where the castle stood, half a mile downstream, atop the high bluff opposite. Simon knew the exact direction in which to look, or thought he did, because he had seen it often enough from this very spot in winter, its gray stone angles standing out starkly amid a tracery of black branches, against gray winter sky…
A crow, cawing sharply as if disturbed by someone nearby, came up from amid the trees of the nearest island, the one where Simon thought that he had seen the figure. Well then, there was someone on the island, and what of it? But he felt relieved.
“I’ve never been in a canoe,” said Margie, looking down toward the shingle. “Is that how we’re going to get across?”
“We’ll see,” Simon told her. “Look, we’ll just check it out as far as we can go, the secret passage and the rest. When we hit a snag that could stop us we’ll give up the idea and come back here and drive back to Blackhawk and around and drive up to the castle by the front door like they’re expecting us to do, and put on our alternate act. But the secret passage just makes too beautiful an opportunity to resist, if it’s still there and we can use it. Right?”
Margie had been doubtful all along. “The people who own the place now don’t know this passageway is there?”
“I tell you I don’t think they do. And it can’t hurt anything to try.” Simon resolutely turned his back on the water.
There were two houses on this side of the highway, along with a couple of outbuildings. In front of the bigger house a wooden sign said BOATS. The ANTIQUES sign Simon also remembered had disappeared sometime in the last decade and a half; he thought he could make out from here the slightly discolored spot on a tree trunk where it had been nailed.
“Canoes are all right,” he said to Margie now. “You can tip them if you try, or if you jump around wildly in one, but you’re all right if you just sit still. I can do the paddling.” As he spoke he had started walking toward the larger house, with Margie keeping at his side. Now he could see that the name on the rural mailbox a few yards from the house still said Colline. And when he squinted through the heat-shimmer of the concrete to the far side of the highway, it seemed to Simon that he could still make out faded letters on one of the mailboxes over there: Wedderburn. That house on the far side stood next to a building that had once been a farm equipment store, though even in Simon’s earliest childhood memories it had been generations out of date and closed. If Gregory should appear in one of those doorways or windows now, would Simon, seen once more in a familiar context, be recognized?
But no one at all appeared. Simon led Margie on, toward the house-antique shop. Their feet made a sound that evoked memories for him, crunching lightly on an ancient detritus of broken clamshells, waste from the clam-fishing decades, pulverized by time and by now almost turned to soil.
A few steps from the closed front door of the house, he halted Margie for a moment. “My aunt and uncle used to run this place as an antique shop. For all I know they still do. I don’t know whether they’ll recognize me or not. If they don’t, I’d just as soon leave it at that.”
Margie frowned at him—she liked to think sometimes that she was softhearted on family relationships—then shrugged, pretty shoulders moving in the light, longsleeved shirt. “Whatever you say. It’s your town and your family, and you’re the boss on the job.”
Simon felt like kissing her, and knew she would resent it at this moment. Without giving himself time to think about it any more, he turned to the old familiar door and pulled it open. A moment later they were both stepping into the half-familiar semigloom of what had been—no, apparently still was—the antique shop’s main room. The place was crowded with dusty shapes that on a second glance turned out to be not junk for sale but only cases and mountings for displays. There was less actual merchandise on view than he remembered, but there was still some. Business appeared to be languishing even more now than it had been then, which he supposed was hardly surprising given the current absence of a sign out front.
The antique bell that he remembered had tinkled when they came in. Now Simon watched the curtained doorway that led to the living quarters in back. He was bracing himself for the sight of his aunt or uncle. The curtain stirred as he watched it, and in the fraction of a second before it was whipped aside he knew that if his relatives didn’t recognize him he wasn’t going to tell them who he was, either before or after the performance.
Except, of course, just possibly—Vivian. Had Miss Littlewood recognized Simon the Great when she saw him in performance, and had she sent Gregory with an invitation for that reason? Since the night in the chapel at TMU, Simon had tried a thousand times to picture what Vivian must be like now, at thirty. He had tried to analyze what he thought about her now, what his feelings were at the prospect of shortly seeing her again. The analysis had proved impossible. The thoughts and feelings would not fall into any ordinary category, except the inadequate one of curiosity.