She sat, and John poured her tea. Auberon put his camera before them. The vast cloud defeated the sun, and John looked up at it, resentful.
“Oh! Look!” Nora said.
“Look!” Violet said.
Auberon opened the camera’s eye, and closed it again.
“Gone,” Nora said.
“Gone,” Violet said.
The advancing edge of the occluded front swept invisibly across the lawn, stirring hair and turning lapels and leaves to show their pale undersides. It cut through the broken front of the house, lifting a card on the card-table and riffling the pages of five-finger exercises on the piano. It swung the tassels of scarves hung on sofas, it snapped the edges of drapes. Its cold oncoming wedge rose up through the second floor and the third and then thousands of feet into the air, where the rainmaker minted his first fat drops to throw on them.
“Gone,” August said.
IV.
Insnar’d in flowers, I fall on grass.
All on a summer morning Smoky dressed himself to wed, in a white suit of yellowed linen or alpaca that his father had always said once belonged to Harry Truman, and there were the initials on the inside pocket, HST; it was only when he came to consider it for a wedding suit (old not new) that he realized the initials could after all stand for somebody else, and that his father had kept up the joke through his life and then perpetuated it beyond without cracking a smile. The sensation wasn’t unknown to Smoky. He had wondered if his education weren’t the same kind of posthumous fun (revenge on his betraying mother?) and though Smoky could take a joke, he did as he shot his cuffs at himself in the bathroom mirror feel a little at a loss and wish his father had given him some man-to-man advice on weddings and marriage. Barnable had hated weddings and funerals and christenings, and whenever one seemed imminent would pack socks, books, dog, and son and move on; Smoky had been to Franz Mouse’s wedding reception and danced with the starry-eyed bride, who made him a surprising suggestion; but that was a Mouse wedding after all and the couple were separated already. He knew there must be a Ring, and he patted his pocket where he had it; he thought there should be a Best Man, though when he wrote so to Daily Alice she wrote that they didn’t believe in that; and as for Rehearsals, she said when he mentioned them, “Don’t you want it to be a surprise?” The only other thing he was sure of was that he shouldn’t see his bride till she was led up the aisle (what aisle?) by her father. And so he wouldn’t, and didn’t peek in the direction he thought her room lay (he was wrong) when he went to the john. His walking shoes stuck out thick and unfestive from beneath his white cuffs.
A Suit of Truman’s
The wedding was to be “on the grounds,” he had been told, and Great-aunt Cloud, as oldest there, would conduct him to the place—a chapel, Smoky surmised, and Cloud with that surprised air said yes, she supposed that’s exactly what it was. It was she Smoky found waiting for him at the top of the stairs when at last he shyly emerged from the bathroom. What a comforting presence he found her, large and calm in a June dress with a bunch of late violets at her bosom and a walking-stick in her hand. Like him she wore hard shoes with a glum expression. “Very, very good,” she said, as though a hope had proved out for her; she held him at arm’s length and inspected him through blue-tinted glasses for a moment, and then offered him her arm to take.
The Summer House
“I think often of the patience of landscape gardeners,” Cloud said as they went through the knee-deep sedge of what she called the Park. “These great trees, some of them, my father planted as infants, only imagining the effect they would have, and knowing he would never live to see the whole. That beech—I could almost join hands around it when I was a girl. You know there are fashions in landscape gardening—immensely long fashions, since the landscapes take so long to grow. Rhododendrons—I called them rum-de-dum-dums when I was a child, helping the Italian men to plant these. The fashion passed. So difficult to keep them cut back. No Italian men to do it for us, so they grow jungly and—ouch!— watch your eyes here.
“The plan goes, you see. From where the walled garden is now you once looked out this way and there were Vistas—the trees were various, chosen for, oh, picturesqueness, they looked like foreign dignitaries conversing together at an embassy affair—and between them the lawns, kept down you know, and the flower-beds and fountains. It seemed that you would any moment see a hunting party appear, lords and ladies, hawks on their wrists. Look now! Forty years since it’s been properly cared for. You can still see the pattern, what it all was meant to look like, but it’s like reading a letter, a letter from oh a long time ago, that’s been left out in the rain and all the words have run together. I wonder if he grieves at it. He was an orderly man. See? The statue is ‘The Syrinx.’ How long till the vines pull it down, or the moles undermine it? Well. He would understand. There are reasons. One doesn’t want to disturb what likes it this way.”
“Moles and things.”
“The statue is only marble.”
“You could—ouch—pull up these thorn-trees, maybe.”
She looked at him as though, unexpectedly, he had struck her. She cleared her throat, patting her clavicle. “This is Auberon’s lane,” she said. “It leads to the Summer House. It’s not the directest way, but Auberon ought to see you.”
“Oh yes?”
The Summer House was two round red brick towers squat as great toes, with a machicolated foot between them. Was it intended to look ruined, or was it really ruined? The windows were out of scale, large and arched and cheerfully curtained. “Once,” Cloud said, “you could see this place from the house. It was thought, on moony nights, to be very romantic… Auberon is my mother’s son, though not my father’s—my half-brother, then. Some years older than I. He’s been our schoolmaster for many years, though he’s not well now, hasn’t been out of the Summer House much for, oh, a year? It’s a pity… Auberon!”
Closer now he could see the place had stretched out habitation’s hands around it, a privy, a neat vegetable garden, a shed from which a lawn mower peeked out ready to roll. There was a screen door, rhombic with age, for the central toothed entrance, and board steps at a slant, and a striped canvas sling-chair in the sun there by the birdbath, and a small old man in the chair who, when he heard his name called, jumped up or at least rose up in agitation—his suspenders seemed to draw him down into a crouch—and made for his house, but he was slow, and Cloud had come near enough to stop him. “Here’s Smoky Barnable, who’s going to marry Daily Alice today. At least come and say hello.” She shook her head for Smoky to see her patience was tried, and led him by the elbow into the yard.
Auberon, trapped, turned at the door with a welcoming smile, hand extended. “Well, welcome, welcome, hm.” He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs. He took Smoky’s hand and almost before they touched sank again gratefully in his sling-chair, motioning Smoky to a bench. Why was it that within this enclosure Smoky felt a troubling of the sunlight? Cloud sat in a chair by her brother, and Auberon put his white-haired hand over hers. “Well, what’s happened?” she said indulgently.