“Listen, Dad, listen.”
“No, it’s all right,” Smoky said. If he were going to face front then he would by God face front. “Only… Well, it always seemed to me that you—just you, not the others—could have explained it. That you wanted to explain it, but couldn’t. No, it’s all right.” He held up his hand to forestall whatever evasion or equivocation his son was about to make. “They, I mean Alice, and Sophie, and Aunt Cloud—even the girls—they said everything they could, I think, only nothing they could say was ever an explanation, not an explanation, even though maybe they thought it was, maybe they thought they’d explained it over and over and I was just too dumb to grasp it; maybe I was. But I used to think that you—I don’t know why—that I could maybe understand you, and that you were always just about to spill the beans…”
“Dad…”
“And that we got off on the wrong foot, way back, because you had to hide it, and so you sort of had to hide from me…”
“No! No no no…”
“And I’m sorry, really, if you felt I was always spying on you and intruding and all, but…”
“Dad, Dad, will you please just listen a second?”
“But well, as long as we’re asking simple questions, I’d like to know what it was that you…”
“I didn’t know anything!” His shout seemed to awaken Smoky, who looked up to see his son twisted up in an attitude of recrimination or confession, and a mad light in his eye.
“What?”
“I didn’t know anything!” Auberon knelt suddenly before his father, his whole childhood giddily inverted; it made him want to laugh insanely. “Nothing!”
“Cut it out,” Smoky said, puzzled. “I thought we were getting down to brass tacks here.”
“Nothing!”
“Then how come you were always hiding it?”
“Hiding what?”
“What you knew. A secret diary. And all those weird hints.
“Dad. Dad. If I knew anything you didn’t know—if I did—would I have thought that old orrery was going around and nobody was admitting to it? And what about the Architecture of Country Houses, that you wouldn’t explain to me…”
“I wouldn’t explain! It was you who thought you knew what it was…”
“Well, and what about Lilac?”
“What about her?”
“Well, what happened to her? Sophie’s, I mean. Why didn’t anybody tell me?” He gripped his father’s hands. “What happened to her? Where did she go?”
“Well?” Smoky said, frustrated beyond endurance. “Where did she?”
They stared at each other wildly, all questions, no answers; and at the same moment saw that. Smoky clapped his hand to his brow. “But how could you have thought I… that I… I mean wasn’t it obvious I didn’t know…”
“Well, I wondered,” Auberon said. “I thought maybe you were pretending. But I couldn’t be sure. How could I be sure? I couldn’t take a chance.”
“Then why didn’t you…”
“Don’t say it,” Auberon said. “Don’t say, Why didn’t you ask. Just don’t.”
“Oh, God,” Smoky said, laughing. “Oh, dear.”
Auberon sat back on the floor, shaking his head. “All that work,” he said. “All that effort.”
“I think,” Smoky said, “I think I’ll have another taste of that brandy, if you can reach the bottle.” He hunted up his empty snifter, which had rolled away into the darkness. Auberon poured for him, and for himself, and for a long time they sat in silence, glancing now and again at each other, laughing a little, shaking their heads. “Well, isn’t that something,” Smoky said.
“And wouldn’t it really be something,” he added after a while, “if none of us knew what was what. If we, if you and I, marched up now to your mother’s room…” He laughed at the idea. “And said, Hey…”
“I don’t know,” Auberon said. “I bet…”
“Yes,” Smoky said. “Yes, I’m sure. Well.” He remembered Doc, years ago, on a hunting expedition Smoky and he had made one October afternoon: Doc, who was himself Violet’s grandson, but who had advised Smoky that day that it was best not to inquire into some things too deeply. Into what’s given; what can’t be changed. And who could tell now just what Doc himself had known, after all, what he had carried with him to the grave. On the very first day he had come to Edgewood, Great-aunt Cloud had said: The women feel it more deeply, hut the men perhaps suffer from it more… He had come to spend his life with a race of expert secret-keepers, and he had learned much; it was no wonder really that he’d fooled Auberon, he’d learned from masters how to keep secrets, even if he had none to keep. Yet he did have secrets, he suddenly thought, he did: though he couldn’t tell Auberon what had happened to Lilac, there was more than one fact about her and about the Barnable family that he still kept to himself, and had no intention of ever telling his son; and he felt guilty about that. Face to face: well. And was it suspicion of some such thing which made Auberon rub his brow, staring again into his glass?
No; Auberon was thinking of Sylvie, and of what his mother had instructed him to do tomorrow in the woods above the lake island, the outlandish thing; and how she had pressed her finger to her lips, and then to his, enjoining silence on him when his father came into the room. He raised his forefinger and stroked the new hair that had recently and unaccountably joined his two eyebrows into one.
“In a way, you know,” Smoky said, “I’m sorry you made it back.”
“Hm?”
“No, of course I don’t mean I’m sorry, only… Well, I had a plan; if you didn’t write or show up soon, I was going to set out to find you.”
“You were?”
“Yup.” He laughed. “Oh it would have been quite an expedition. I was already thinking of what to pack, and all.”
“You should have,” Auberon said, grinning with relief that he had in fact not.
“It might have been fun. Seeing the City again.” He was lost a moment in old visions. “Well. I probably would have got lost myself.”
“Yes.” He smiled at his father. “Probably. But thanks, Dad.”
“Well,” Smoky said. “Well. Gosh, look at the time.”
Embracing Himself
He followed his father up the wide front staircase.
The stairs creaked where and when they always had. The nighttime house was as familiar to him as the day-house, as full of details he had forgotten he knew.
They parted at a turning of the corridor.
“Well, sleep well,” Smoky said, and they stood together in the pool of light from the candle Smoky held. Perhaps if Auberon hadn’t been encumbered with his squalid bags and Smoky with the candle, they would have embraced; perhaps not. “You can find your room?”
“Sure.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
He took the fifteen and a half steps—bumping his flank against the absurd commode he always forgot was there—and put out his hand, and it touched his faceted glass knob. He lit no light once inside, though he knew that a candle and matches were there on the night-table, knew how to find them, knew the scarred underside of the table where he could strike the match. The odor (his own, cold, faint, but familiar, with an admixture of child’s smell, Lily’s twins who had camped there) spoke in a constant old murmur to him of past things. He stood unmoving for a moment, seeing by smell the armchair where much of his childhood’s happiness had been had, the armchair just large enough and unsprung enough for him to curl in with a book or a pad of paper, and the calm lamp beside it, and the table where cookies and milk or tea and toast could glow warmly in the lamplight; and the wardrobe from out whose door, when left ajar, ghosts and hostile figures used to steal to frighten him (what had become of those figures, once so familiar? Dead, dead of loneliness, with no one to spook); and the narrow bed and its fat quilt and its two pillows. From an early age he’d insisted on having two pillows, though he’d only rested his head on one. He liked the rich luxury of them: inviting. All there. The weight of the odors was heavy on his soul, like chains, like old burdens reassumed.