Ever afterward, when he went down to take from his hoard, he had imagined himself a goat-bearded Levantine, hooknosed and skull-capped, a secret pederast who gave free baklava to the olive boys of the streets. Fussily he would arrange the old trunk and climb on it (lifting the frayed skirts of an imaginary dressing gown) and lift the lid of the wooden crate stenciled with curling letters.
Not much left. Time to reorder soon.
Beneath a thick covering of silvered paper, layer upon layer of lay. The layers were separated by yellow oiled paper. The bars themselves were wrapped tightly too in a third sort of oily paper. He took out two, considered a moment, and put one reluctantly back. It would not, though he had exclaimed so in awe many years ago when he had discovered what it was, last forever. He replaced the layer of oiled paper and then the layer of silvered paper; he drew back on the stout lid, and pushed in place the ancient shapeless nails; he blew across it to resettle the dust. He got down, and studied the bar in the lantern’s light as he had the very first by electric light. He peeled away its paper carefully. It was as black as chocolate, and about the size of a playing card, an eighth of an inch thin. It bore on it a convolute impress: A trademark? Tax stamp? Mystic sign? He had never decided.
He pushed the trunk he had used for a stepladder back into its place in the corner, took up the lantern and started up the stairs. In his cardigan pocket was a piece of hashish something like a hundred years old, and, George Mouse had long ago decided, not reduced in potency by age at all. Improved, perhaps, like vintage port.
News from Home
He was relocking the cellar door when there came a pounding at the street door, so sudden and unexpected that he cried out. He waited a moment, hoping it was some madman’s momentary whim and wouldn’t come again. But it did. He went to the door, listened at it without speaking, and heard frustrated cursing outside. Then, with a growl, the someone grabbed at the bars and began to shake them.
“That’s no use, that’s no use,” George called. The shaking stopped.
“Well, open the door.”
“What?” It was a habit of George’s, when stuck for an answer, to act as though he hadn’t heard the question.
“Open the door!”
“Now, you know I can’t just open the door, man. You know what it’s like.”
“Well, listen. Can you tell me which of these buildings is number two-twenty-two?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Why does everybody in this city answer everything with a question?”
“Huh?”
“Why can’t you open the door and talk to me like a god DAMN human being?”
Silence. The horrid depths of frustration in that outcry touched George’s heart, and he listened at the door to see if there would be more; he tingled secretly at the safety he felt behind the door’s fastness.
“Can you tell me,” the someone began, and George could hear his rage strangled down into politeness, “please, where I can find, or if you know, the Mouse house or George Mouse?”
“Yes,” George said. “I am him.” That was risky, but surely even the most desperate bill-collectors and process-servers weren’t abroad this late. “Who are you?”
“My name is Auberon Barnable. My father…” But already the clankings and scrapings of locks and shootings of bolts drowned him out. George reached into the darkness and pulled the person standing on the threshold into the hall. With quick skill he reslammed and barred and bolted the door, and then raised his lamp to look at his cousin.
“So you’re the baby,” he said, noting with perverse pleasure how ill this remark sat on the tall youth. The moving lantern made his expression changeful, but it wasn’t really a changeful face; it was narrow and tight; in fact the whole of him, slim and neat as a pen in pipe-rack black clothes that fit him well, was somewhat rigid and aloof. Just pissed off, George thought. He laughed, and patted his arm. “Hey, how’s the folks? How’s Elsie, Lacy, and Tilly, whatever their names are? What brings you here?”
“Dad wrote,” Auberon said, as though unwilling to waste effort answering all this if it had already been done.
“Oh yeah? Well, you know how the mail’s been. Look, look. Come on. We don’t have to stand in the hall. Colder than a witch’s tit here. Coffee and something?”
Smoky’s son shrugged shortly. “Be careful on the stairs,” George said, and the lamplight threaded them both back through the tenement and over the little bridge till they stood together on the threadbare rug where Auberon’s parents had first met.
Somewhere along their route, George had picked up an old three-and-a-half-legged kitchen chair. “Did you run away from home? Have a seat,” he said, motioning Auberon to a tattered wingback.
“My father and mother know I left, if that’s what you mean,” Auberon said, a bit haughtily, which was understandable, George thought. Then he shrank back in the chair: George had with a grunt and a wild look raised the broken chair over his head, and, his face twisted with exertion, brought it down on the stone hearth. It fell clattering to pieces. “Did they approve?” George asked, tossing the chair-parts into the fire.
“Of course.” Auberon crossed his legs and plucked at his trouser-knee. “He wrote. I told you. He said to look you up.”
“Oh, yeah. Did you walk?”
“No.” With some contempt.
“And you came to the City to…”
“To seek my fortune.”
“Aha.” George hung a kettle over the fire and took down a precious can of contraband coffee from a bookshelf. “Any glimpse yet what form it might take?”
“No, not exactly. Only…” George mmm-hmmm’d encouragingly as he prepared the coffeepot and set out mismatched cups. “I wanted, I want to write, or be a writer.” George raised his eyebrows. Auberon was twisted around in the wing-back chair as though these admissions were escaping him against his will, and he were trying to hold them in. “I thought television.”
“Wrong coast.”
“What?”
“They do all that television out on the Sunny, the Golden, the West Coast.” Auberon locked his right foot behind his left calf and declined to answer this. George, searching for something in the bookshelves and drawers and beating his many pockets, wondered how that antique desire could have made its way to Edgewood. Odd how the young take to these dying trades so hopefully. When he was young, when the last poets were prattling incommunicado, glowworms gone out in their dells of dew, boys of twenty-one set out to be poets… At length he found what he was looking for: a gift-shop dagger-shaped letter-opener chased with enamel which he had found years ago in an abandoned apartment and sharpened to a fine edge. “Takes a lot of ambition, that television,” he said, “and drive, and the failures are many.” He poured water into the coffeepot.
“How would you know?” his cousin said swiftly, as though he had heard that adult wisdom often before.
“Because,” George said, “I haven’t got those qualities, and I haven’t failed in that field cause I don’t, to wit, QED. Coffee’s running through.” The boy didn’t crack a smile. George put the coffeepot on a trivet that bore a joke in Pennsylvania Dutch argot, and broke out a tin box of cookies, mostly broken. He also took from his cardigan pocket the brown square of hashish. “Like a taste?” he said, not at all grudgingly, he thought, showing Auberon the square. “Best Lebanese. I think.”
“I don’t use drugs.”
“Oh, aha.”
Judging nicely, George cut off a corner with his Florentine instrument, pierced the fragment with its point, and dunked it in his cup. He sat turning the knife in the cup and looking at his cousin, who was blowing on his coffee with single-minded intensity. Ah, it was lovely to be old and gray, and to have learned to ask neither for too much nor too little. “So,” he said. He lifted the knife from his coffee to see that the fragment had nearly dissolved. “Tell us your history.”