To See What He Could See
“We only came out on days that were hot and sunny so we could take off all our clothes—Sophie and me would—and run around and say Look and Look and sometimes Oh it’s gone when you weren’t really sure you’d seen anything anyway…”
“Take off your clothes? How old were you?”
“I don’t remember. Eight. Till I was maybe twelve.”
“Was that necessary? To do the looking?”
She laughed, a low sound for she was lying down, full length, letting whatever breeze that came by have its way with her—naked now too. “It wasn’t necessary,” she said. “Just fun. Didn’t you like to take your clothes off when you were a kid?”
He remembered the feeling, a kind of mad elation, a freedom, some restraint discarded with the garments: not a feeling quite like grown-up sexual feelings, but as intense. “Never around grownups though.”
“Oh, Auberon didn’t count. He wasn’t… well, one of them, I guess. In fact I suppose we were doing it all for him. He got just as crazy.”
“I bet,” Smoky said darkly.
Daily Alice was quiet for a time. Then she said: “He never hurt us. Never, never made us do anything. We suggested things! He wouldn’t. We were all sworn to secrecy—and we swore him to secrecy. He was—like a spirit, like Pan or something. His excitement made us excited. We’d run around and shriek and roll on the ground. Or just stand stock still with a big buzz just filling you up till you thought you’d burst with it. It was magic.”
“And you never told.”
“No! Not that it mattered. Everybody knew anyway, except oh Mom and Dad and Cloud, anyway they never said anything; but I’ve talked to lots of people, later on, and they say Oh you too? Auberon took you to the woods to see what he could see?” She laughed again. “I guess he’d been at it for years. I don’t know anybody who resented it, though. He picked them well, I guess.”
“Psychological scars.”
“Oh, don’t be stupid.”
He stroked his own nakedness, pearly in the moonlight, drying in the licking breeze. “Did he ever see anything? I mean, besides…”
“No. Never.”
“Did you?”
“We thought we did.” She was of course sure they had: on brave luminous mornings walking expectant and watchful, waiting to be led and feeling (at once, at the same moment) the turning they must take that would lead to a place they had never been but which was intensely familiar, a place that took your hand and said We’re here. And you must look away, and so would see them.
And they would hear Auberon behind them somewhere and be unable to answer him or show him, though it was he who had brought them here, he who had spun them like tops, tops that then walked away from him, walked their own way.
Sophie? he would call. Alice?
But There It Is
The Summer House was all blue within except where the lamp glowed, with less authority now. Auberon, dusting his fingers rapidly against his thumbs, went around the little place peering into boxes and corners. He found what he wanted then, a large envelope of marbled paper, last one of many he had had once, in which French platinum printing-papers had long ago been mailed to him.
A fierce pain no worse than longing stitched up his torso, but went away again, more quickly than longing used to when he felt longing. He took the album of buckram and slipped it into the marbled envelope. He undid his ancient Waterman’s (he’d never allowed his students to write with ball points or any of that) and wrote in his schoolmarm hand—shuddery now as though seen under water—For Daily Alice and Sophie. A great pressure seemed to enlarge his heart. He added: And for no one else. He thought of adding an exclamation, but didn’t; only sealed it tightly. The black portfolio he put no name on. It was—all the rest of it was—for no living person anyway.
He went out into his yard. Still the birds for some reason had not begun. He tried to urinate at the lawn’s edge but could not, gave up, went to sit on the canvas chair damp with dew.
He had always imagined, without of course ever believing it, that he would know this moment. He imagined that it would come at their time, unphotographable twilight; and that years after he had surrendered it all, grown hopeless, bitter even, in that twilight one would come to him, stepping through the gloaming without sound and without causing the sleeping flowers to nod. A child, it would seem to be, discarnate flesh glowing as in an antique platinum print, whose silver hair would be as though on fire, lit by the sun which had just set or perhaps hadn’t yet risen. He wouldn’t speak to it, unable to, stone dead already it may be; but it would speak to him. It would say: “Yes, you knew us. Yes, you alone came close to the whole secret. Without you, none of the others could have come near us. Without your blindness, they couldn’t have seen us; without your loneliness, they couldn’t have loved each other, or engendered their young. Without your disbelief, they couldn’t have believed. I know it’s hard for you to think the world could work in this strange way, but there it is.”
In the Woods
By noon next day, clouds had gathered, fitting themselves together resolutely and without haste, seeming when they had put out all the sky to be almost low enough to touch.
The road they walked between Meadowbrook and Highland wound up and down amid an aged forest. The well-grown trees stood close together, their roots it must be all interlaced below; above the road, their branches met and grappled together, so it seemed the oaks grew maple leaves and the hickories oak leaves. They suffered great choking garments of ivy, especially the riddled and fibrous trunks of the dead, propped against their old neighbors, unable to fall.
“Dense,” Smoky said.
“Protected,” Daily Alice said.
“How do you mean?”
She held out a hand, to see whether the rain had begun, and her palm was struck once, then again. “Well, it’s never been logged. Not anyway in a hundred years.”
The rain came on steadily, without haste, as the clouds had; this wasn’t to be some fickle shower, but a well-prepared day’s rain. “Damn,” she said. She pulled a crumpled yellow hat from her pack and put it on, but it was apparent they were in for a wetting.
“How far is it?”
“To the Woods’ house? Not too far. Wait a minute though.” She stopped, and looked back the way they had come, then the way they were going. Smoky’s bare head began to itch from the drops. “There’s a shortcut,” Alice said. “A path you can take, instead of going all the way around by the road. It ought to be right around here, if I can find it.”
They walked back and forth along the apparently impassable margin. “Maybe they’ve stopped keeping it up,” she said as they searched. “They’re kind of strange. Solitary. Just live out here all by themselves and almost never see anybody.” She stopped before an ambiguous hole in the undergrowth and said: “Here it is,” without confidence, Smoky thought. They started in. The rain ticked in the leaves steadily, the sound growing less discontinuous and more a single voice, surprisingly loud, drowning out the sounds their own progress made. It was dark as night beneath the trees beneath the clouds, and not lightened by the silver shimmer of the rain.