Part 9 (1/2)

”What.”

”I think of Auberon,” she said quietly, wiping her face on her pillow. He took her up then, and she hid her face in the hollow of his shoulder and sniffed. He stroked her hair, running his fingers soothingly through it, which she loved as much as a cat does, until she slept. And when she was asleep, he found himself staring into the sparkling phantasmal ceiling, surprised by sleeplessness, not having heard of the rule whereby one spouse can trade a restlessness for the other's sleepa”a rule spelled out in no marriage contract.

Well, what about it then?

He had been taken in here, adopted, it seemed not an issue that he would ever leave. Since nothing had before been said about their future together, he hadn't thought about it himself: he was unaccustomed to having a future is what it was, since his present had always been so ill-defined.

But now, anonymous no more, he must make a decision. He put his hands behind his head, carefully so as not to disturb her still-fresh sleep. What sort of a person was he, if he was now a sort of person? Anonymous, he had been as well everything as nothing; now he would grow qualities, a character, likes and dislikes. And did he like or dislike the idea of living in this house, teaching at their school, beinga”well, religious he supposed was how they would put it? Did it suit his character?

He looked at the dim range of snowy mountains which Daily Alice made beside him. If he was a character, she had made him one. And if he was a character, he was probably a minor one: a minor character in someone else's story, this tall story he had got himself into. He would have his entrances and exits, contribute a line of dialogue now and then. Whether the character would be crabby schoolmaster or something else didn't seem to matter much, and would be decided along the way. Well then.

He examined himself carefully for feelings of resentment at this. He did feel a certain nostalgia for his vanished anonymity, for the infinity of possibilities it contained; but he also felt her breathing next to him, and the house's breathing around him, and in rhythm with them he fell asleep, nothing decided.

While the moon smoothly s.h.i.+fted the shadows from one side of Edgewood to the other, Daily Alice dreamed that she stood in a flower-starred field where on a hill there grew an oak tree and a thorn in deep embrace, their branches intertwined like fingers. Far down the hall, Sophie dreamed that there was a tiny door in her elbow, open a crack, through which the wind blew, blowing on her heart. Doctor Drinkwater dreamed he sat before his typewriter and wrote this: ”There is an aged, aged insect who lives in a hole in the ground. One June he puts on his summer straw, and takes his pipe and his staff and his lamp in half his hands, and follows the worm and the root to the stair that leads up to the door into blue summer.” This seemed immensely significant to him, but when he awoke he wouldn't be able to remember a word of it, try as he might. Mother beside him dreamed her husband wasn't in his study at all, but with her in the kitchen, where she drew tin cookie-sheets endlessly out of the oven; the baked things on them were brown and round, and when he asked her what they were, she said ”Years.”

The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him to be a native of the rocks.

a”Johnson After John Drinkwater's death in 1920, Violet, unable to bear or even believe in the thirty years and more of life without him promised her by her cards, retreated for a long time to an upstairs room. Her thick dark hair, turned prematurely white, and her elfin thinness, grown more p.r.o.nounced because of a sudden distaste she took in that year to most food, gave her the appearance of great and fragile age, though she didn't seem aged; her skin remained unlined for many more years, and her dark, liquid eyes never lost the infant, feral innocence which John Drinkwater had first seen in them in the last century.

Retreats and Operations It was a nice room, facing in several directions at once, In one corner, half the interior of a dome (all the interior it had, though its exterior was whole) made a windowed retreat, and she had a big b.u.t.toned chaise there. Elsewhere, her bed, hung with the gauzy curtains and covered with the eiderdowns and ivory-colored laces with which the mother she had never known had clothed her own sad marriage bed; a broad oxblood-colored mahogany table, piled up with John Drinkwater's papers, which she had at first thought to put in some order, and maybe publish, he had loved to publish, but which in the end she only left piled there under the gooseneck bra.s.s lamp; the humpbacked cracked leather trunk from which they had come and into which, years later, they would go again; a couple of splayed velvet armchairs, napless and cozy, by the fire; and those small thingsa”her silver and tortoisesh.e.l.l combs and brushes, a painted music-box, her strange cardsa”which her children and grandchildren and visitors would later remember as being the chief furnis.h.i.+ngs of the room.

Her children, except August, didn't resent this abdication of Violet's. She had not often been wholly present anyway, and this seemed only the natural continuation of her daily abstraction. They all, except August, loved her deeply and uncritically, and would contest with each other over who would bring up her frugal and as often as not uneaten meals, make up her fire, read her her mail, or be the first to bring her news.

”August found a new use for his Ford,” Auberon told her as they looked together through some pictures he had taken. ”He took a wheel off, and hitched it with a belt to Ezra Meadows' saw. Then the engine will turn the saw, and cut wood.”

”I hope they don't go far,” Violet said.

”What? Oh, no,” he said, laughing at the image she must have, of a tooth-wheeled Model T tearing through the woods, felling trees as it went. ”No. The car is put up on logs, so the wheels just go around but don't go anywhere. It's just to saw with, not to drive around.”

”Oh.” Her slim hands touched the teapot, to see if it were still warm. ”He's very clever,” she said, as though she meant something else.

It was a clever idea, though not August's; he had read of it in an ill.u.s.trated mechanics magazine, and persuaded Ezra Meadows to try it out. It proved to be a little more laborious than the magazine described it, what with leaping in and out of the driver's seat to alter the blade's speed, cranking each time the engine stalled out on a knot in the wood, and shouting What? What? back and forth with Ezra over the racket it made; and August had little interest in the production of sawn wood anyway. But he loved his Ford, and anything it could be made to do, from bouncing obliviously down railroad tracks to skimming and whirling like a four-wheeled Nijinsky over a frozen lake, he made it do. Ezra, suspicious at first, at least didn't have the airy contempt for Henry Ford's masterpiece which his family or people like the Flowers had; and making such a to-do in Ezra's yard brought out from her ch.o.r.es more than once his daughter Amy. Once with a dishclout in her hand, abstractedly wiping a white-speckled black tin frying pan as she stared; again with her hands and ap.r.o.n floured. The belt of the saw broke, and went flapping wildly. August cut the engine.

”There now, Ezra, look at that. Look at that stack.” The fresh yellow wood, rough-cut and burned in brown arcs here and there by the blade's insistence, gave out its sweet odor, resin and pastry. ”That would have taken you a week by hand. What do you think of that?”

”It's all right.”

”What do you think, Amy? Pretty nice?” She smiled, and looked shy, as though it were she he was praising.

”It's all all right,” said Ezra. ”Gwan, git.” This to Amy, whose expression changed to a hurt hauteur as sweet to August as her smile; she tossed her head and went, slowly, so as not to appear dismissed.

Ezra helped him bolt back the wheel of the Ford in silence; an ungrateful silence, August thought, though maybe the farmer was afraid that if he opened his mouth the subject of payment might come up. He was in no danger; for August, unlike the youngest son in all the old tales, knew he couldn't demand, in return for the accomplishment of an impossible task (the sawing of a couple hundred board feet in a single afternoon), the hand of his beautiful daughter.

Rolling home along the familiar roads, raising the familiar dust, August felt sharply the congruence (which everyone else saw as a contradiction) of his car and this deep summer. He made a small, unnecessary adjustment to the throttle, and tossed his straw hat on the seat next to him; he thought that if the evening were fine he might drive to some spots he knew of, and do some fis.h.i.+ng. He was conscious of a bliss that stole over him not infrequently now, had first stolen over him when he had first acquired his car, first bent up its bat-wing hood and seen the engine and drive-train, humble and useful like his own internal organs. It was a sense that at last what he knew of the world was sufficient to his being alive in it: that the world and what he knew of it were one. He called this feeling ”growing up,” and it did feel *like growing, though in moments of mad elation he would wonder if what he was growing into weren't a Ford, or perhaps Ford: there was no other instrument, and no other man, so serenely purposeful and complete, August thought, so sufficient to the world and so self-sufficient: it would have been a destiny he could welcome.

Everyone else seemed bent on thwarting it. When he told Pop (he called his father Pop to himself and to Amy, though he had never said it to John's face) that what was needed in this area was a garage, which could dispense gas and make repairs, and sell Fords, and had laid out the literature he'd got from the Ford company about what it would cost to set up such an agency (he hadn't proposed himself as agent, he knew he was too young at sixteen for that, but he would be happy just pumping the gas and making repairs, very happy), his father had smiled and not considered it even for five minutes, had sat nodding while August explained it to him only because he loved his son, and loved to indulge him. And then he said: ”Would you like a car of your own?”

Well, yes; but August knew he had been treated like a boy, though he had made his proposal as carefully as any man; and his father, whose concerns were so weirdly childish, had smiled at it as though it were a child's mad desire, and bought him the car only to allay it.

But it was not allayed. Pop didn't understand. Before the war, things were different. n.o.body knew anything. You could go walking in the woods and make up stories and see things if you wanted. But there was no excuse now. Now knowledge was there to be had, real knowledge, knowledge of how the world operates and what must be done to operate it. Operate. ”The operator of a Ford Model T will find setting the spark simple and convenient. The operation is performed in this waya .” And August drew these knowledges on, reasonable and close-fitting, over the mad muddle of his childhood, as one draws on a duster over a suit of clothes, and b.u.t.toned them up to the neck.

A Swell Idea ”What you need,” he told his mother that afternoon, ”is some fresh air. Let me take you out for a drive. Come on.” He came to take her hands, to lift her from the chaise, and though she gave him her hands they both knew, for they had enacted all this several times the same way, that she wouldn't rise and certainly wouldn't ride. But she kept his hands in hers. ”You can bundle up, and anyway with the roads around here you can't go more than fifteen miles an houra .”

”Oh, August.”

”Don't *oh, August' me,” he said, allowing himself to be drawn down to sit by her, but turning his face away from her lips. ”There's nothing wrong with you, you know, I mean nothing really wrong. You're just brooding.” That it should be he, the baby, who was compelled to speak sternly to his mother as to a mopey child, when there were older children who ought to be doing it, annoyed him, though it didn't her.

”Tell me about sawing wood,” she said. ”Was little Amy there?”

”She's not so little.”

”No, no. She's not. So pretty.”

He supposed he blushed, and he supposed she saw it. He found it embarra.s.sing, almost indecent, that his mother should see that he regarded any girl with other than amused indifference. In fact toward few girls did he feel amused indifference, if the truth were known, and it was known: even his sisters plucked lint from his lapels and brushed back his hair, thick and unruly as his mother's, with knowing smiles when he mentioned ever so casually that during the course of an evening he might drop in at the Meadows' or the Flowers'. ”Listen, Ma,” he said, faintly peremptory, ”now really listen. Before, you know, Papa died, we talked about the garage, and the agency and all that. He didn't like it so well, but that was four years ago, I was very young. Can we talk about it again? Auberon thinks it's a swell idea.”

”He does?”

He hadn't put up any objections; but then he had been behind the darkroom door, in his dim red-lit hermit's cell, when August had discussed it with him. ”Sure. You know, everybody's going to have an automobile soon. Everybody.”

”Oh, dear.”

”You can't hide from the future.”

”No, no, that's true.” She gazed out the windows at the sleeping afternoon. ”That's true.” She had taken a meaning, but not his: he drew out his watch and consulted it, to draw her back.

”So, well,” he said.

”I don't know,” she said, looking into his face not as though to read it, or to communicate with it, but as though it were a mirror: that frankly, that dreamily. ”I don't know, dear. I think if John didn't think it was a good idea .

”That was four years ago, Ma.”

”Was it, was it foura .” She made an effort, and took his hand again. ”You were his favorite, August, did you know that? I mean he loved all of you, but a Well, don't you think he knew best? He must have thought it all out, he thought everything all out. Oh, no, dear, if he was sure, I don't think I could do better, really.”

He stood up suddenly and thrust his hands into his pockets. ”All right, all right. But don't blame him, that's all. You don't like the idea, you're afraid of a simple thing like a car, and you never wanted me to have anything at all anyway.”