And yet she thought she could soon count out the few remaining.
She assembled her deck, and spread it all in a fan before her; then she drew out court cards one by one to represent the ones she already knew of, laying them in groups with low cards for their courts or children or agents, insofar as she could guess at them.
One for sleep, and four for seasons; three to tell fates, two to be Prince and Princess; one to go messages, no, two to go messages, one to go and one to come back again… It was a matter of discriminating between functions, and learning which were whose, and how many were needed for it. One to bring gifts; three to bear gifts away. Queen of Swords and King of Swords and Knight of Swords; Queen of Coins and King of Coins and ten low cards for their children…
Fifty-two?
Or was it only that at that number (with only the Least Trumps, the plot which they acted out, left uncounted) her deck ran out?
There was a sudden clanging noise above her head, and Sophie ducked; it sounded as though a full and heavy set of fire-irons had tumbled over in the attic. Smoky, at work in the orrery. She glanced up. The crack in the ceiling seemed to have lengthened, but she doubted that it really had.
Three for labor, two to make music, one to dream dreams…
She thrust her hands into her sleeves. Few, anyway; not hosts. The taut plastic over the window was a drumskin, tapped on by wind. It seemed—it was hard to tell—that it had begun to snow again. Sophie, abandoning the count (she still didn’t know enough; it was wrong, and more than wrong on an afternoon like this, to speculate when you knew so little) gathered up the cards and put them away in their bag in their box.
She sat for a while, listening to the taps of Smoky’s hammer, hesitant at first, then more insistent, then ringing as though he struck a gong. Then they fell silent, and the afternoon returned.
Carrying a Torch
“Summer,” Mrs. MacReynolds said, lifting her head slightly from the pillow, “is a myth.”
The nieces and nephews and children around her looked at each other in thoughtful doubt or doubtful thought.
“In winter,” the dying old woman went on, “summer is a myth; a report, a rumor, not to be believed…”
The others drew closer to her, watching her fine face, her fluttering blue lids. Her head lay so lightly on its pillow that her blue-rinsed coiffure was unmussed, but this was for sure her last gasp; her contract had run out, and would not be renewed.
“Never,” she said, and then paused a long time in limbo while Auberon thought further: never forget me? Never break faith, never say die, never never never? “Never long,” she said. “Only wait; only have patience. Longing is fatal. It will come.” They had begun to weep around her, though they hid it, for the old lady would have been impatient with tears. “Be happy,” she said, even more faintly. “For the things…” Yes. There she goes. Bye, Mrs. MacR. “The things, children—the things that make us happy—make us wise,”
One last look around. Lock glances with Frankie MacR., the black sheep: he won’t forget this, a new leaf turns for him. Music up. And dead. Auberon skipped two spaces and made three memorial asterisks across the page, and drew it out.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?” said Fred Savage. “Done?”
“Done,” Auberon said. He shuffled the twenty or so pages together, his hands clumsy in gloves from which the ends of the fingers had been cut off, and jammed them in an envelope. “G’ahead.”
Fred took the envelope, thrust it smartly beneath his arm, and with a mocking suggestion of salute, made to leave the Folding Bedroom. “ ’M I spose to wait?” he asked, hand on the door. “While they reads over this?”
“Ah, don’t bother,” Auberon said. “It’s too late now. They’ll have to just do it.”
“Oookay,” Fred said. “Later, m’man.”
Auberon built up the fire, pleased with himself. Mrs. MacReynolds was among the last of the characters whom he had inherited from the creators of “A World Elsewhere.” A young divorcée thirty years ago, she had tenaciously and cleverly held on to her part, through alcoholism, remarriage, religious conversion, grief, age and illness. Done now though. Contract terminated. Frankie was about to go off on a long trip, too; he would return—his contract had years to run, and he was the producer’s boyfriend as well—but he would return a changed man.
A missionary? well, yes, in a sense; perhaps a missionary…
More ought to happen, Sylvie had said once on a certain day to Fred Savage; and in the long interpenetration of Auberon’s vision of “A World Elsewhere” and the show as he had found it, a lot had. He couldn’t believe it at first to be so, but it seemed that the turgid, long-drawn-out pointlessness of its plot had been due simply to a lack of inventiveness on the writers’ parts. Auberon, in the beginning anyway, suffered from no such lack, and besides, there were all those tedious and unlikable people who had to be disposed of, whose passions and jealousies Auberon had a hard time understanding. The death rate had therefore been high for a while; the shriek of tires on rainy roads, the horrid crunch of steel on steel, the shout of sirens had been nearly continuous. One young woman, a drug-addicted Lesbian with an idiot child, he could not contractually eliminate; so he magicked her away in favor of her identical twin sister, long-lost and a very different character. That had taken a few weeks to accomplish.
The producers blanched at the speed with which crises came and passed in those days; the audience, they said, couldn’t bear such storms, they were used to tedium. But the audience seemed to disagree, and while eventually it came to he a somewhat different audience, it was no smaller, or not measurably so, and more fiercely devoted than ever. Besides, there were few enough writers who could produce the amounts of work Auberon could, at the new and sharply reduced salaries being offered, and so the producers, struggling for the first time in their profession with tight budgets, flirting with bankruptcy, counting assets and debits late into the night, gave Auberon his head.
So the actors spoke the lines which Fred Savage carried to them from Old Law Farm every day, meekly trying to infuse some reality and humanity into the strange hopes, intimations of high events, and secret expectancy (calm, sad, impatient, or resolved) which had come to infect characters they had played for years. There were not the many secure berths for actors that there had been in the days of the old affluence, and for every character released from the box of Auberon’s foreknowledge there were scores of applicants, even at fees that would have been scoffed at in the now-lost Golden Age. They were grateful to be embodying these peculiar lives, working toward or away from whatever huge thing it was which seemed always in preparation, yet never revealed, and which had kept their audience on gentle tenterhooks now for years.
Auberon laughed, staring into the fire and already fcrmulating new gins and defeats, embroglios and breakthroughs. What a form! Why hadn’t anyone before caught the secret of it? A simple plot was required, a single enterprise which concerned all the characters deeply, and which had a grand sweet simple single resolution: a resolution, however, that would never be reached. Always approached, keeping hopes high, making disappointments bitter, shaping lives and loves by its inexorable slow progress toward the present: but never, never reached.
In the good old days, when polls were as common as house-to-house searches were now, pollsters asked viewers why they liked the bizarre torments of the soap operas, what kept them watching. The commonest answer was that they liked soap operas because soap operas were like life.