“No need to say,” he said undertone, “not before…”
“Member of the family,” Cloud said. “As of today.”
Auberon, his throat still making soundless chuckles, looked at Smoky. Unprotected! That’s what Smoky felt. They had stepped into this yard and lost something they had had in the woods; they had stepped out of something. “Easy enough to test,” Auberon said, striking his bony knee and rising. He retreated into the house rubbing his fingers together.
“It’s not easy,” Cloud said to no one, looking up at the blank sky. She had lost a portion of her ease. She cleared her throat again, contemplated the gray birdbath, which was supported by a number of carved figures, gnomes or elves, with patient bearded faces, who seemed in the act of bearing it away. Cloud sighed. She glanced at a tiny gold watch that was pinned to her bosom. It had little curling wings on either side. Time flies. She looked at Smoky and smiled apologetically.
“Now, aha, aha,” Auberon said, coming out with a large, long-legged camera veiled with a black cloth. “Oh, Auberon” Cloud said, not impatiently but as though this weren’t necessary and anyway an enthusiasm she didn’t share; but he was already thrusting its spiked toes into the ground by Smoky, adjusting its tibiae to make it stand straight, and bending its mahogany face upon Smoky.
For years that last photograph of Auberon’s lay on a table in the Summer House, Auberon’s magnifying glass beside it; it showed Smoky, in his suit of Truman’s that glowed in the sunlight, his hair fiery, and half his face sun-struck and blind. There were Cloud’s dimpled elbow and ringed ear. The birdbath. The birdbath: could it be that one of those long soapstone faces had not before been there, that there was an arm too many supporting the garlanded bowl? Auberon didn’t complete the study, come to a decision; and when years later a son of Smoky’s blew the dust from the old image and took up Auberon’s work again it was still inconclusive, proving nothing, a silvered paper blackened by a long-past midsummer sun.
Woods and Lakes
Beyond the Summer House they descended a concave lane, quickly swallowed up in a wood tangled and somnolent, moist from the rain. It seemed the kind of wood grown to hide a sleeping princess till her hundred years were up. They hadn’t been long within it when there was a rustle or a whisper beside them, and with a suddenness that startled Smoky, a man stood on the path ahead of them. “Good morning, Rudy,” Cloud said. “Here’s the groom. Smoky, Rudy Flood.” Rudy’s hat looked as though it had been fought with, punched and pummelled; its upturned brim gave his broad bearded face an open look. Out of his open green coat a great belly came, tautening his white shirt. “Where’s Rory?” Cloud asked.
“Down the path.” He grinned at Smoky as though they shared a joke. Rory Flood his tiny wife appeared in a moment as he had, and a big girl in floppy jeans, big baby in her arms punching the air. “Betsy Bird,” Cloud said, “and Robin. And see here are Phil Fox and two cousins of mine, Stones, Irv and Walter. Clouds on their mother’s side.” More came on the path from right and left; the path was narrow, and the wedding guests walked it two by two, dropping back or moving up to handle Smoky and bless him. “Charles Wayne,” Cloud said. “Hannah Noon. Where are the Lakes? And the Woods?”
The path came out into a wide, sloping glade, the marge of a dark lake that still and moatlike surrounded an island where aged trees grew. Leaves floated flat on its surface, and frogs fled from their feet as they came down among its pools. “It’s certainly,” Smoky said remembering the guidebook, “an extensive estate.”
“The further in you go, the bigger it gets,” said Hannah Noon. “Have you met my boy Sonny?”
Across the lake a boat was coming, laying out lacquered ripples. Its carved prow was intended for a swan, but it was gray and eyeless now, like the dark swan on the dark lake of northern legend. It struck the bank with a hollow rattle of oarlocks, and Smoky was pushed forward to board with Cloud, who was still explaining who was who of the laughing wedding-guests. “Hannah’s distantly related,” she said. “Her grandfather was a Bush, and her grandfather’s sister married one of Mrs. Drinkwater’s uncles, a Dale…” She saw that he wasn’t listening, though his head was nodding mechanically. She smiled and put her hand on his. The lake island, shadowed by its trees, seemed made of changeful green glass; myrtle grew on its gentle slopes. At its center was a round gazebo, its pillars slim as arms, softly domed and greenly garlanded. There, a tall girl in white stood among others, holding a ribboned bouquet.
They were greeted and handed out of the leaking swan by many hands. Around the island people were sitting together, opening picnic baskets, placating shouting children; few of them seemed to notice Smoky’s arrival. “Look who we’ve got here, Cloud,” said a slim chinless man who made Smoky think of the poets the guidebook had disliked so much. “We’ve got Dr. Word. Where is he now? Doctor! Got some more champagne?” Doctor Word in a tight black suit had a look of unreasoning terror on his badly shaven face; his golden glassful trembled and bubbles rose. “Nice to see you, Doctor,” Cloud said. “I think we can promise no wonders. Oh, settle down, man!” Dr. Word had tried to speak, choked, spluttered. “Pound his back, someone. He’s not our minister,” Cloud said confidentially to Smoky. “They come from the outside, and tend to get very nervous. A wonder any of us is married or buried at all. Here’s Sarah Pink, and the little Pinks. How do you do. Ready?” She took Smoky’s arm, and as they went up the flagged path toward the gazebo a harmonium began to play, like a tiny weeping voice, music he didn’t know but that seemed to score him with sudden longing. At its sound the wedding-guests gathered, talking in low voices; when Smoky reached the low worn steps of the gazebo, Doctor Word had arrived there too, glancing around, fishing a book from his pocket; Smoky saw Mother, and Doctor Drinkwater, and Sophie with her flowers behind Daily Alice with hers; Daily Alice watched him unsmiling and calm, as though he were someone she didn’t know. They stood him beside her; he began to put his hands in his pockets, stopped, clasped them behind his back, then in front of him. Doctor Word fluttered the pages of his book and began to speak quickly, his words shot through with champagne and tremblings and the harmonium’s unceasing melody; it sounded like “Do you Barble take this Daily Alice to be your awful wedded life for bed or for worse insidious in stealth for which or for poor or to have unto whole until death you do part?” And he looked up inquiringly.
“I do,” Smoky said.
“I do too,” Daily Alice said.
“Wring,” Doctor Word said. “And now you pounce you, man on wife.”
Aaaah, said all the wedding guests, who then began to drift away, talking in low voices.
Touching Noses
There was a game she had played with Sophie in the long hallways of Edgewood, where she and Sophie would stand as far apart as was possible to get and still see each other. Then they would walk slowly together, slowly and deliberately, looking always each at the other’s face. They kept on, at the same pace, not laughing or trying not to, till their noses touched. It was like that with Smoky, though he had started far off, too far to be seen, coming from the City—no farther, out there where she had never been, far away, walking towards her. When the swan boat picked him up, she could easily cover him with her thumbnail if she chose to; then the boat drew closer, Phil Flowers hauling on the oars, and she could see his face, see that it was indeed he. At the water’s edge he was lost for a moment; then there was a murmur of expectation and appreciation around her and he reappeared, led by Cloud, much larger now, the new wrinkles visible at his knees, his strong veined hands she loved. Larger. There were violets in his buttonhole. She saw his throat move, and at that moment came Music. When he had come to the stairs of the pavilion she could no longer take in his feet if she looked resolutely at his face, and she did—for a moment everything around his face darkened and swam, his face orbited towards her like a pale smiling moon. He mounted the steps. He stood beside her. No touching noses. That would come. It might she thought take years; maybe they never would—their marriage was after all a Convenience, though she had never, would never, need not now ever explain that to him because, just as the cards had promised, she knew now she would choose him over anybody else, whether the cards chose him or not, or whether they who had promised someone like him to her thought he was unnecessary now or even wrong. She would defy them to have him. And it was they who had first seen fit to send her out to find him! She wanted with all her being to continue to find him now, to put her arms around him and search; but the stupid minister began to mutter—she felt anger at her parents who had thought him necessary, for Smoky’s sake they said, but she already knew Smoky better than that. She tried to listen to the man, thinking how much better it would be to marry touching noses: to proceed from great distances together till it was as in the old halls when the walls and pictures glided by changefully on the edge of vision but Sophie’s face kept constant, growing, the eyes widening, freckles expanding, a planet, then a moon, then a sun, then nothing at all visible except the onrushing map of it, the great eyes starting to cross at the last moment before their two noses rushed vastly headlong together to collide soundlessly.