John Crowley - Little, Big (Fantasy Masterworks 05)

John Crowley

Fantasy Masterworks Volume 5

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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.

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 Cityno 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 didfor 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 wouldtheir 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 muttershe 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.

"A little unreal," he said. There were grass stains on Truman's suit, and Mother noted them with worry as she repacked a picnic basket. "They won't come out," she said. He drank champagne, which seemed to make the unreality acceptable, normal, even necessary; he sat in a haze like the lengthening afternoon's, pacific and happy. Mother tied up the basket, and then saw a plate staring up at her from the grass; when the job had been all redone, Smoky with a sense of dej vu pointed out a fork she hadn't seen. Daily Alice linked her arm with his. They had been all over the island several times, seeing friends and relatives, being made much of. "Thank you," several of them said when she presented Smoky, and when they gave her gifts. Smoky, after his third glass of champagne, wondered if this saying of things backwards (Cloud was always doing it) needn't be looked at case by case, so to speak, but was in the way of a general, well, a general... She leaned her head on his padded shoulder, and the two of them supported each other, hello'd out. "Nice," he said to no one. "What do they say when something's outdoors?"

"Al fresco?"

"Is that it?"

"I think so."

"Are you happy?"

"I think so."

"I am."

When Franz Mouse had been married, he and his bride (what was her name?) had gone together to a storefront photo studio. There, as well as the formal nuptial exposure, the photographer had thrown in a few goof pictures taken with props of his own: a papier-mch ball-and-chain for Franz's leg, a rolling pin he encouraged the bride to brandish over him. Smoky reflected that he knew just about that much of married life, and laughed aloud.

"What," Alice inquired.

"Do you have a rolling pin?"

"You mean to roll out dough? I guess Mother does."

"That's all right, then." He had the giggles now, the stream of laughter arising from a point in his diaphragm as the bubbles rose from an invisible point in his glass. She caught it from him. Mother, standing above them arms akimbo, shook her head at them. The harmonium or whatever it was began again, stilling them as though it had been a cool hand laid on them or a voice suddenly beginning to speak of some long-past sadness; he had never heard music like it, and it seemed to catch him, or rather he it, as though he were a rough thing drawn across the silk of it. It was a Recessional, he thought, not remembering how he knew the word; but it was a Recessional meant seemingly not for him and his bride, but for the others. Mother sighed a great sigh, having fallen momentarily silent as the whole island had; she picked up her picnic basket, motioned Smoky to sit still who had half-risen with deep reluctance to help her. She kissed them both and turned away smiling. Around the island others were going down to the water; there was laughter, and a far-off shout. At the water's edge he saw pretty Sarah Pink helped into the swan boat, and others waiting to embark, depart, some holding glasses and one with a guitar over his shoulder; Ruby Flood flourished a green bottle. The music and the late afternoon charged their glad departure with melancholy, as though they left the Happy Isles for somewhere less happy, unable till they left to realize their loss,