This would be hard, very hard, Auberon thought, following reluctantly; far harder to yield to than to the blank passages and discomfitures of his old drunkenness. And yet the skills he had learned in that long binge—how to yield up control, how to ignore shame and make a spectacle of himself, how not to question circumstances or at least not be surprised when no answers to questions could be found—those skills were all he had now, all the gear he could bring to this expedition. Even with them he doubted he would get to the end; without them, he thought, he would not have been able to start off.
“Okay, wait,” he said, turning after the others into deeper places. “Hold on.”
And what if he had been put through that awful time, basic training, only so that now (snow-blind, sun-struck) he could live through this storm of difference, make his way through this dark wood?
No. It was Sylvie who had set him on that path; or rather Sylvie’s absence.
Sylvie’s absence. And what if Sylvie’s absence, what if her presence in his life in the first place, God what if her very love and beauty had been plotted from the beginning, to make him a drunk, to teach him those skills, to train him in pathfinding, to immure him at Old Law Farm for years to wait for news without knowing he waited, to wait for Lilac to come with promises or lies to stir his heart’s ashes into flame again, and all for some purpose of their own, which had nothing to do with him, or with Sylvie either?
All right: supposing there was to be this Parliament, supposing that that wasn’t just lies as well and that he would come Somehow face to face with them, he had some questions to ask, and some good answers to get. Come to that, let him only find Sylvie, and he had some tough questions he could put to her about her part in all this, some damn tough questions; only let him find her. Only, only let him find her.
Even as he thought this he saw, leaping from the last stair of a rachitic escalator, down there, a blond girl in a blue dress, bright in the brown darkness.
She looked back once and (seeing that they saw her) turned around a stanchion where a notice was posted: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS.
“I think this is the way,” George called. A train roared through just at that moment, as they were gathering to run downward; the wind of its passage snatched at their hats, but their hands were quicker. “Right?” George said, hand on his hat, shouting over the trains enfilade.
“Yup,” Fred said, holding his. “I was about to say.”
They went down. Auberon followed. Promises or lies, he had no choice, and for sure they had known that all along too, for had it not been they who had at first thus cursed him? He sensed with a terrible clarity all the circumstances of his life, not excepting this foul underground now and these stairs down, take hands in a chain one after another, not one left out; they linked up, they unmasked, they seized him by the throat, they shook him, shook him, shook him till he woke up.
Fred Savage was returning from the woods with a bundle of sticks to feed the fire.
“Mess o’ folks out there,” he said with satisfaction as he stuck sticks into the embers. “Mess o’ folks.”
“Oh yeah?” George said with some alarm. “Wild animals?”
“Could be,” Fred said. His white teeth shone. In watch cap and poncho he looked ancient, a shapeless hump, like a wise old stumpwater toad. George and Auheron hunched a little closer to the feeble flames, and pricked up their ears, and looked around them into the complex darkness.
A Family Thing
They had not come very far into this wood from the river’s edge, where the ferry had let them off, before darkness overtook them and Fred Savage called a halt. Even as the ancient, gray, knocking, creaking boat had slid downstream along its line they watched the red sun sinking behind the still-leafless great trees, bitten into crimson bits by undergrowth, and then swallowed. It had all looked fearsome and strange, yet George said:
“I think I’ve been here. Before.”
“Oh yeah?” Auberon said. They stood together in the bow. Fred, sitting astern, legs crossed, made remarks to the aged aged ferryman, who said nothing in response.
“Well, not been here,” George said. “But sort of.” Whose adventures here, in this boat, in those woods, had he known about, and how had he come to know about them? God, his memory had turned to a dry sponge lately. “I dunno,” he said, and looked curiously at Auberon. “I dunno. Only—” He looked back at the shore they had come from, and at the one they slid toward, holding his hat against the river breezes. “Only it seems—aren’t we going the wrong way?”
“I can’t imagine that,” Auberon said.
“No,” George said, “can’t be…” Yet the feeling persisted, that they travelled back-toward and not away-from. It must be, he thought, that same disorientation he sometimes experienced emerging from the subway into an unfamiliar neighborhood, where he got uptown and downtown reversed, and could not make the island turn around in his mind and lie right, not the street-signs nor even the sun’s position could dissuade him, as though he were caught in a mirror. “Well,” he said, and shrugged.
But he had jogged Auberon’s memory. He knew this ferry too: or at any rate he had heard of it. They were approaching the bank, and the ferryman laid up his long pole and came forward to tie up. Auberon looked down on his bald head and gray beard, but the ferryman didn’t look up. “Did you,” Auberon said, “did you once,” now how was he to put this, “was there a girl, a dark girl once, who, a time some time ago, well worked for you?”
The ferryman with long, strong arms hauled on the ferry’s line. He looked up at Auberon with eyes as blue and opaque as sky.
“Named Sylvie?” Auberon asked.
“Sylvie?” said the ferryman.
The boat, groaning against its stub of dock, came to rest. The ferryman held out his hand, and George put into it the shiny coin he had brought to pay him with.
“Sylvie,” George said by the fire. His arms were around his drawn-up knees. “Did you think,” he went on, “I mean I sort of thought, didn’t you, that this was sort of a family thing?”
“Family thing?”
“All this, I mean,” George said vaguely. “I thought it might only be the family that got into this, you know, from Violet.”
“I did think that,” Auberon said. “But then, Sylvie.”
“Yeah,” George said. “That’s what I mean.”
“But,” Auberon said, “it still might, I mean all that about Sylvie might be a lie. They’ll say anything. Anything.”
George stared into the fire a time, and then said: “Mm. Well, I think I have a confession to make. Sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sylvie,” George said. “Maybe it is family.”
“I mean,” he went on, “that maybe she’s family. I’m not sure, but… Well, way back when, twenty-five years ago, oh more, there was this woman I knew. Puerto Rican. A real charmer. Bats, completely. But beautiful.” He laughed. “A spitfire, in fact. The only word. She was renting at the place, this was before the Farm, she was renting this little apartment. Well, to tell the truth she was renting the Folding Bedroom.”
“Oh. Oh,” Auberon said.
“Man, she was something. I came up once and she was doing the dishes, in a pair of high heels. Doing the dishes in red high heels. I dunno, something clicked.”
“Hm,” Auberon said.
“And, well.” George sighed. “She had a couple of kids somewhere. I got the idea that whenever she got pregnant she’d go nuts. In a quiet way, you know. So, hey, I was careful. But.”