“Sylvie,” he said.
“Yah.” She looked away down the dark hall, and then back at him, in some kind of hurry, or in some annoyance, or something; what? “I didn’t know anybody was in here. I thought it was empty.”
He so obviously filled the doorway that there was no answer he could make to this.
“Okay,” she said. She allowed one cold hand out from where it hid in her armpit, so it could press her lip against her teeth to be bitten, and glanced away again, as though he were compelling her to stay here and she were impatient to get away.
“Did you leave something here?” She didn’t respond. “How’s your son?” At this the hand that had been pressing her lip covered her mouth altogether, and she seemed to weep, or laugh, or both, still looking away though it was obvious she had no place to go; at last he saw that. “Come in,” he said, and motioned her in, stepping aside so she could enter and nodding encouragement.
“Sometimes I come here,” she said as she came in, “when I want to be, you know, alone.” She looked around her with what Auberon supposed was a justified air of grievance. He was the intruder. He wondered if he should yield it to her, and go sleep in the street. Instead he said: “Would you like some rum?”
She appeared not to hear. “So listen,” she said, and then nothing more. It would be some time before Auberon realized that these words were often as not a mere vocable in City speech, and not intended to roughly command his attention, as they seemed. He listened. She sat on the little velvet chair and said at last, as though to herself, “It’s cozy here.”
“Mm.”
“Nice fire. What are you drinking?”
“Rum. Would you like some?”
“Sure.”
There was, it appeared, only the one cup, so she and he passed it back and forth between them. “He’s not my son,” Sylvie said.
“I’m sorry if I…”
“He’s my brother’s kid. I got a crazy brother. Named Bruno. Like the kid.” She pondered, staring into the fire. “What a kid. So sweet. And smart. And bad?” She smiled. “Just like his papo.” She gripped herself more tightly, drawing her knees up almost to her breasts, and he could see she wept inwardly, and only by this constant pressure against herself kept it from spilling out.
“You and he seemed to get along well,” Auberon said, nodding in what he realized was an absurdly solemn fashion. “I thought you were his mother.”
“Oh, his mother, man,” with a look of pure disdain touched only faintly with pity, “she’s sad. She’s a sad case. Pitiful.” She brooded. “The way they treat him, man. He’s going to turn out just like his father.”
This was apparently not a good thing. Auberon wished he could think of a question that would draw the whole story from her. “Well, sons do turn out like their fathers,” he said, wondering if it would ever seem true of him. “After all, they’re around them a lot.”
She snorted in disgust. “Shit, Bruno hasn’t seen this kid in a year. Now he shows up and says, ‘Hey, my son,’ and all this. Just because he got religion.”
“Hm.”
“Not religion. But this guy he works for. Or follows. Russell—what is it, I don’t know—I go blank. Anyway, he says, love, family, blahblahblah. So here he is on the doorstep.”
“Hm.”
“They’ll kill that lad.” Tears did gather in her eyes, but she blinked them away, none fell. “Damn George Mouse. How could he be so dumb?”
“What did he do?”
“He says he was drunk. Had a knife.”
“Oh.” There being no reflexive in the language Sylvie had to speak here, Auberon was soon lost among the “he”s and had no idea who had a knife or who said whd was drunk. He would have to hear the story twice more in the next days before he sorted out that brother Bruno had come drunk to Old Law Farm and, under the press of his new faith or philosophy, demanded nephew Bruno from George Mouse, who in Sylvie’s absence and after a prolonged debate which had threatened to turn violent, had yielded him up. And that nephew Bruno was now in the hands of bedeviling and loving and deeply stupid female relatives (brother Bruno wouldn’t stay, she was sure of that) who would raise him just as her brother had been raised after his father’s desertion, to vanity, and wildness, a touchy ungovemability and a sweet selfishness no woman could resist, and few men for that matter; and that (even if the child avoided being put in a Home) Sylvie’s plan to rescue him had failed: George had forbidden the Farm to her relatives, he had enough troubles.
“So I can’t live with him any more,” she said—George this time, doubtless.
A strange hope rose in Auberon.
“I mean it’s not his fault,” she said. “Not his fault, really. I just couldn’t any more. I’d always think of it. And anyway.” She pressed her temples, pressing in the thing there. “Shit. If I had the nerve to tell them off. All of them.” Her grief and bedevilment were reaching a climax. “I never want to see them again myself. Never. Never never.” She almost laughed. “And that’s really stupid, ’cause if I leave here I got no place else to go. No place else.”
She wouldn’t weep. She hadn’t, and the moment was past now; now blank despair was in her face as she looked into the fire, both cheeks in her hands.
Auberon clasped his hands behind him, studied an offhand, neighborly tone, and said, “Well of course you can stay here, you’re welcome to,” and realized he was offering her a place which was much more hers than his, and flushed. “I mean of course you can stay here, if you don’t mind my staying too.”
She looked at him, warily he thought, which was proper considering a certain bass obbligato in his feelings just then which he was in fact trying to conceal. “Really?” she said. She smiled. “I wouldn’t take up much room.”
“Well, there’s not much room to take up.” Become host, he looked the place over thoughtfully. “I don’t know how we’d arrange it, but there’s the chair, and, well, there’s my overcoat almost dry, you could use that for a blanket…” He saw that he himself, curled up in a corner, would probably not sleep at all. Now, though, her face had closed somewhat at these cheerless arrangements. He couldn’t think what else to yield up to her.
“I couldn’t,” she said, “have just a corner of the bed? Like down at the foot? I’ll curl up real small.”
“Bed?”
“The bed!” she said, growing impatient.
“What bed?”
Suddenly getting it, she laughed aloud. “Oh wow,” she said, “oh no, you were going to sleep on the flaw—I don’t believe it!” She went to the massy wardrobe or highboy which stood against one wall, and, reaching up along its hidden side, she turned a knob or pulled a lever, and enormously pleased, let down the whole tall front of the thing. Counterweighted (the dummy drawers held lead weights), it swung gently, dreamily down; the mirror reflected floor, and then was gone; brass knobs at each upper corner extruded themselves, slipping out as the front came down, and became legs, locking in place by a gravity-worked mechanism whose ingenuity he would later marvel at. It was a bed. It had a carved headboard; the top of it, as wardrobe, had become the footboard, as bed; it had a mattress, bedclothes, and two plump pillows.
He laughed with her. Displayed, the bed took up most the room. The folding bed room.