It was still snowing in the Capital. The snow whitened the night, obscuring the far monuments that could be seen through the President’s mullioned windows, piling up at the feet of heroes, choking the entrances to underground garages. Somewhere a stuck car was crying rhythmically and helplessly to escape a drift.
Barbarossa wept.
Just About Over
“What do you mean,” Smoky asked, “just about over?”
“I mean I think it’s just about over,” Alice said. “Not over, not yet; but just about.”
They had gone to bed early—they did that often nowadays, since their big bed with its high-piled quilts and comforters was the only place in the house they could be truly warm. Smoky wore a nightcap: draughts were draughts, and no one could see how foolish he looked. And they talked. A lot of old knots were untangled in those long nights: or at least shown to be for sure unentanglable, which Smoky supposed was more or less the same thing.
“But how can you say that?” Smoky said, rolling over toward her, lifting as on a big wave the cats who sailed the foot of the bed.
“Well, good heavens,” Alice said, “it’s been long enough, hasn’t it?”
He looked at her, her pale face and nearly white hair just distinguishable in the dark against the white pillowcase. How did she always come up with these un-answers, these remarks struck off with such an air of logical consequence, that meant nothing, or as good as nothing? It never ceased to amaze him. “That’s not what I meant, exactly. I guess I meant how do you know it’s just about over? Whatever it is.”
“I’m not sure,” she said, after a long pause. “Except that after all it’s happening to me, partly anyway; and I feel about over, some ways; and…”
“Don’t say that,” he said. “Don’t even joke about it.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t mean dying. Is that what you thought I meant?”
He had; he saw now that he didn’t understand at all, and rolled over again. “Well, hell,” he said. “It never really had anything to do with me anyway.”
“Aw,” she said, and moved closer to him, putting an arm around him. “Aw, Smoky, don’t be that way.” She placed her knees up behind his, so that they lay together like a double S.
“What way.”
She said nothing for a long time. Then: “It’s a Tale, is all,” she said; “and tales have beginnings and middles and ends. I don’t know when the beginning was, but I know the middle…”
“What was the middle?”
“You were in it! What was it? It was you!”
He drew her familiar hand around him closer. “What about the end?” he said.
“Well that’s what I mean,” she said. “The end.”
Quick, before a looming something he saw darkly huge in her words could steal over him, he said, “No no no no. Things don’t have ends like that, Alice. Any more than they have beginnings. Things are all middles in life. Like Auheron’s show. Like history. One damn thing after another, that’s all.”
“Tales have ends.”
“Well, so you say, so you say, but…”
“And the house,” she said.
“What about the house?”
“Couldn’t it have an end? It seems like it will, not long from now; if it did…”
“No. It’ll just get older.”
“Fall apart…”
He thought of its cracked walls, its vacant rooms, the seep of water in its basements; its paintless clapboards growing warped, masonry rotting; termites. “Well, it’s not its fault,” he said.
“No, sure.”
“It’s supposed to have electricity. Lots of it. That’s how it was made. Pumps. Hot water in the pipes, hot water in the heaters. Lights. Ventilators. Things freeze and crack, because there’s no heat, because there’s no electricity.”
“I know.”
“But that’s not its fault. Not our fault either. Things have gotten so bad. Russell Eigenblick. How can you get things fixed when there’s a war on? His domestic policy. Crazy. And so things run out, and there’s no electricity, and so…”
“And whose fault,” she said, “do you think Russell Eigenblick is?”
For a moment, just for a moment, Smoky allowed himself to feel the Tale closing around him, and around all of them; around everything that was. “Oh, come on,” he said, a charm to banish the idea, but it persisted. A Tale: a monstrous joke was more like it: the Tyrant installed, after God knows how many years’ preparation, amid bloodshed and division and vast suffering, just so that one old house could be deprived of what it needed to live on, so that the end of some convoluted history, which coincided with the house’s end, could be brought about, or maybe only hastened; and he inheriting that house, maybe lured there in the first place by love only so that eventually he could inherit it, and inheriting it only so that (though he struggled against it, tools were never far from his hapless hands, all to no good) he could preside over—maybe even, through some clumsiness or inadequacy he could easily imagine himself capable of, insure—its dissolution; and that dissolution in turn bringing about… “Well, what then?” he asked. “If we couldn’t live here any more.”
She didn’t answer, but her hand sought his and held it.
Diaspora. He could read it in her hand’s touch.
No! Maybe the rest of them could imagine such a thing (though how, when it had always been more their house than his?), maybe Alice could, or Sophie, or the girls; imagine some impossible imaginary destination, some place so far… But he could not. He remembered a cold night long ago, and a promise: the night they had first been in the same bed, he and Alice, bedclothes drawn up, lying together like a double S, when he saw that in order to go where she would go, and not be left behind, he would have to find within himself a child’s will to believe that had never been much exercised in him and was even then long in disuse; and he found himself no more ready to follow now than he had ever been. “Would you leave?” he asked.
“I think,” she said.
“When.”
“When I know where it is I’m supposed to go.” She drew even closer to him, as though in apology. “Whenever that is.” Silence. He felt her breath tickle his neck. “Not soon, maybe.” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “And maybe not leave; I mean leave-leave; maybe not ever.”
But that was just to placate him, he knew. He had after all never been more than a minor character in that destiny, he had always expected to be left in some sense behind: but that fate had been for so long in abeyance, causing him no grief, that (without ever quite forgetting it) he had chosen to ignore it; had even sometimes allowed himself to believe that he had made it, by his goodness and acquiescence and fidelity, go away. But he had not. Here it was: and, as gently as she could consonant with there being no mistake about it, Alice was telling him so.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.” That was a code-word between them, meaning I don’t understand but I have come to the limit of my strength to try to understand, and I trust you to this point anyway, and let’s talk of something else. But—.
“Okay,” he said again, and this time meant a different thing by it: because he saw just then that there was one way, an impossible unfollowable way but the only way there was, for him to fight this—yes! Fight!—and that Somehow he would have to find it.