“I’m not going, Sophie,” he said, mildly enough, as though he simply didn’t care to. And looked down at his clasped hands.
Sophie reached for him, and opened her mouth to expostulate, but then didn’t; she knelt by him and said gently, “What is it?”
“Oh, well,” Smoky said. He didn’t look at her. “Somebody ought to stay, shouldn’t they? Somebody ought to be here, to sort of take care of things. I mean in case—in case you wanted to come back, if you did, or in case of anything.
“It is my house,” he said, “after all.”
“Smoky,” Sophie said. She put her hand over his clasped ones. “Smoky, you have to come, you have to!”
“Don’t, Sophie.”
“Yes! You can’t not come, you can’t, what will we do without you?”
He looked at her, puzzled by her vehemence. It didn’t seem to Smoky to be a remark anyone could fitly make to him, what would they do without him, and he didn’t know how to answer. “Well,” he said. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
He sighed a long deep sigh. “It’s just, well.” He passed his hand over his brow; he said, “I don’t know—it’s just…”
Sophie waited through these preambles, which put her in mind of others, long ago, other small words eked out before a hard thing was said; she bit her lip, and said nothing.
“Well, it’s bad enough,” he said, “bad enough to have Alice go… See,” he said, stirring in his chair, “see, Sophie, I was never really part of this, you know; I can’t… I mean I have been so lucky, really. I never would have thought, I never really would have thought, back when I was a kid, back when I came to the City, that I could have had so much happiness. I just wasn’t made for it. But you—Alice—you—you took me in. It was like—it was like finding out you’d inherited a million dollars. I didn’t always understand that—or yes, yes I did, I did, sometimes I took it for granted maybe, but underneath I knew. I was grateful. I can’t even tell you.”
He pressed her hand. “Okay, okay. But now—with Alice gone. Well, I guess I always knew she had a thing like that to do, I knew it all along, but I never expected it. You know? And Sophie, I’m not suited for that, I’m not made for it. I wanted to try, I did. But all I could think was, it’s bad enough to have lost Alice. Now I have to lose all the rest, too. And I can’t, Sophie, I just can’t.”
Sophie saw that tears had started in his eyes, and overflowed the old pink cups of his lids, a thing she didn’t think she’d ever seen before, no, never, and she wanted with all her heart to tell him No, he wouldn’t lose anything, that he went away from nothing and toward everything, Alice most of all; but she didn’t dare, for however much she knew it was true for her, she couldn’t say it to Smoky, for if it wasn’t true for him, and she had no certainty that it was, then no terrible lie could be crueler; and yet she had promised Alice to bring him, no matter what; and couldn’t imagine leaving without him herself. And still she could say nothing.
“Anyway,” he said. He wiped his face with his hand. “Anyway.”
Sophie, at a loss, oppressed by the gloom, rose, unable to think. “But,” she said helplessly, “it’s too nice a day, it’s just such a nice day…” She went to the heavy drapes that made a twilight in the room, and tore them open. Sunlight blinded her, she saw many in the walled garden, around the stone table beneath the beech; some looked up; and a child outside tapped on the window to be let in.
Sophie undid the window. Smoky looked up from his chair. Lilac stepped over the sill, looked at Smoky arms akimbo, and said, “Now what’s the matter?”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Sophie said, weak with relief. “Oh, thank goodness.”
“Who’s that?” Smoky said, rising.
Sophie hesitated a moment, but only a moment. There were lies, and then there were lies. “It’s your daughter,” she said. “Your daughter Lilac.”
Land Called the Tale
“All right,” Smoky said, throwing up his hands like a man under arrest, “all right, all right.”
“Oh good,” Sophie said. “Oh Smoky.”
“It’ll be fun,” Lilac said. “You’ll see. You’ll be so surprised.”
Defeated in his last refusal, as he might have known he would be. He really had no arguments that could stand against them, not when they could bring long-lost daughters before him to plead, to remind him of old promises. He didn’t believe that Lilac needed his fathership, he thought she probably needed nothing and no one at all, but he couldn’t deny he’d promised to give it. “All right,” he said again, avoiding Sophie’s radiantly pleased face. He went around the library, turning on lights.
“But hurry,” Sophie said. “While it’s still day.”
“Hurry,” Lilac said, tugging at his arm.
“Now wait a minute,” Smoky said. “I’ve got to get a few things.”
“Oh, Smoky!” Sophie said, stamping her foot.
“Just hold on,” Smoky said. “Hold your horses.”
He went out into the hall, turning on lamps and wallsconces, and up the stairs, with Sophie at his heels. Upstairs, he went one by one through the bedrooms, turning on lights, looking around, moving just ahead of Sophie’s impatience. Once he looked out a window, and down on many gathered below; afternoon was waning. Lilac looked up, and waved.
“Okay, okay,” he muttered. “All right.”
In his and Alice’s room, when he had lit all the lights, he stood a time, angry and breathing hard. What the hell do you take? On such a trip?
“Smoky…” Sophie at the door said.
“Now, damn it, Sophie,” he said, and pulled open drawers. A clean shirt, anyway; a change of underwear. A poncho, for rain. Matches and a knife. A little onion-skin Ovid, from the bedside table. Metamorphoses. All right.
Now what to put them in? It occurred to him that it had been so many years since he had gone anywhere from this house that he owned no luggage whatever. Somewhere, in some attic or basement, lay the pack he had first carried to Edgewood, but just where he had no idea. He threw open closet doors, there were half a dozen deep cedar-lined closets around this room that all his and Alice’s clothes had never come close to filling. He tugged at the light-pulls, their phosphorescent tips like fireflies. He glimpsed his yellowed white wedding suit, Truman’s. Below it in a corner—well, maybe this would do, odd how old things pile up in the corners of closets, he hadn’t known this was in here: he pulled it out.
It was a carpetbag. An old, mouse-chewed Gladstone carpetbag with a cross-bones catch.
Smoky opened it, and looked with a strange foreboding or hindsight into its dark insides. It was empty. An odor arose from it, musty, the odor of leaf-mould or Queen-Anne’s-lace or the earth under an upturned stone. “This’ll do,” he said softly. “This’ll do, I guess.”
He put the few things in it. They seemed to disappear in its capacious insides.
What else should go in?
He thought, holding open the bag: a twine of creeper or a necklace, a hat heavy as a crown; chalk, and a pen; a shotgun, a flask of rum-tea, a snowflake. A book about houses; a book about stars; a ring. With the greatest vividness, a vividness that stabbed him deeply, he saw the road between Meadowbrook and Highland, and Daily Alice as she had looked on that day, the day of the wedding trip, the day he was lost in the woods; he heard her say Protected.