Little, Big Page 2

  Name & Number

  He had a room in a building that had once been the rectory of the very old church that stood revered and vandalized behind it. From his window he could see the churchyard where men with Dutch names turned comfortably in their old beds. In the morning he got up by the clock of sudden traffic—which he could never learn to sleep through as he had the long thunder of Midwestern trains—and went to work.

  He worked in a wide, white room where the little sounds he and the others made would rise to the ceiling and descend again strangely altered; when someone coughed, it was as though the ceiling itself coughed, apologetically, with covered mouth. All day long there Smoky slid a magnifying bar down column after column after column of tiny print, scrutinizing each name and its attendant address and phone number, and marking red symbols next to those that were not the same as the name and address and phone number typed on each card of stack after stack of cards that were piled daily next to him.

  At first the names he read were meaningless to him, as deeply anonymous as their phone numbers. The only distinction a name had was its accidental yet ineluctable place in the alphabetical order, and then whatever idiot errors the computer could dress it in, which Smoky was paid to discover. (That the computer could make as few errors as it did impressed Smoky less than its bizarre witlessness; it couldn’t distinguish, for instance, when the abbreviation “St.” meant “street” and when it meant “saint,” and directed to expand these abbreviations, would without a smile produce the Seventh Saint Bar and Grill and the Church of All Streets.) As the weeks fell away, though, and Smoky filled up his aimless evenings walking block after block of the City (not knowing that most people stayed inside after dark) and began to learn the neighborhoods and their boundaries and classes and bars and stoops, the names that looked up at him through the glass bar began to grow faces, ages, attitudes; the people he saw in buses and trains and candy stores, the people who shouted to each other across tenement shaftways and stood gaping at traffic accidents and argued with waiters and shopgirls, and the waiters and shopgirls too, began to mill through his flimsy pages; the Book began to seem like a great epic of the City’s life, with all its comings and goings, tragedies and farces, changeful and full of drama. He found widowed ladies with ancient Dutch names who lived he knew in high-windowed buildings on great avenues, whose husbands, Estates of, they managed, and whose sons had names like Steele and Eric and were intr dcrtrs and lived in Bohemian neighborhoods; he read of a huge family with wild Greek-sounding names who lived in several buildings on a noisome block he had walked once, a family that grew and discarded members every time he passed them in the alphabet—Gypsies, he decided at last; he knew of men whose wives and teenage daughters had private phones (on which they cooed with their lovers) while their men made calls on the many phones of the financial firms that bore their names; he grew suspicious of men who used their first initials and middle names because he found them all to be bill collectors, or lawyers whose bsns had the same address as their rsdnce, or city marshals who also sold used furniture; he learned that almost everyone named Singleton and everyone named Singletary lived in the northern black city where the men had for first names the names of past presidents and the women had gemlike names, pearl and ruby and opal and jewel, with a proud Mrs. before it—he imagined them large and dark and glowing in small apartments, alone with many clean children. From the proud locksmith who used so many A’s in his tiny shop’s name that he came first to Archimedes Zzzyandottie who came last (an old scholar who lived alone, reading Greek newspapers in a shabby apartment) he knew them all. Beneath his sliding bar a tiny name and number would rise up like flotsam borne up a beach by waves and tell its story; Smoky listened, looked at his card, found them the same, and was turning down the card even as the distorting glass threw up the next tale. The reader next to him sighed tragically. The ceiling coughed. The ceiling laughed, loudly. Everyone looked up.

  A young man who had just been hired had laughed.

  “I’ve just found,” he said, “a listing here for the Noisy Bridge Rod and Gun Club.” He could barely finish it for laughing, and Smoky was amazed that the silence of every other proofreader there didn’t hush him. “Don’t you get it?” The young man appealed to Smoky. “It sure would be a noisy bridge.” Smoky suddenly laughed too, and their laughter rose to the ceiling and shook hands there.

  His name was George Mouse; he wore wide suspenders to his wide pants, and when the day was done, he threw around himself a great woolen cloak whose collar trapped his long black hair, so that he must reach back and flip it out, like a girl. He had a hat like Svengali’s, and eyes like him too—dark-shadowed, compelling, and humorous. It wasn’t a week later that he was fired, to the relief of every pair of bifocals in the white room, but by then he and Smoky had become, as only Smoky in the whole world it seemed could any longer say with all seriousness, fast friends.

  A City Mouse

  With George as his friend, Smoky began a course of mild debauchery, a little drink, a little drugs; George changed his clothes, and his patterns of speech, to a City tattersall, and introduced him to Girls. In not too long a while, Smoky’s anonymity became clothed, like the Invisible Man in his bandages; people stopped bumping into him on the street or sitting on his lap in buses without apology—which he had attributed to his being very vaguely present to most people.

  To the Mouse family—who lived in the last tenanted building of a block of buildings the first City Mouse had built and which they still mostly owned—he was at least present; and more than for his new hat and his new lingo he thanked George for that family of highly distinguishable and loudly loving folk. In the midst of their arguments, jokes, parties, walkings-out-in-bedroom-slippers, attempts at suicide and noisy reconciliations, he sat unnoticed for hours; but then Uncle Ray or Franz or Mom would look up startled and say, “Smoky’s here!” and he would smile.

  “Do you have country cousins?” Smoky asked George once as they waited out a snowstorm over café-royale in George’s favorite old hotel bar. And indeed he did.

  “They’re very religious,” George told him with a wink as he led him away from the giggly girls to introduce him to their parents, Dr. and Mrs. Drinkwater.

  At First Sight

  “Not a practicing doctor,” said the Doctor, a wrinkled man with woolly hair and the unsmiling cheerfulness of a small animal. He was not as tall as his wife, whose generously-fringed and silken shawl trembled as she shook Smoky’s hand and asked him to call her Sophie; she in turn wasn’t as tall as her daughters. “All the Dales were tall,” she said, looking up and inward as though she could see them all somewhere above her. She had given her surname therefore to her two great daughters, Alice Dale and Sophie Dale Drinkwater; but Mother was the only one who ever used the names, except that as a child Alice Dale had been called by some other child Daily Alice and the name had stuck, so now it was Daily Alice and plain Sophie, and there was nothing for it, except that anyone looking at them could certainly see that they were Dale; and they all turned to look at them.

  Whatever religion it was that they practiced didn’t prevent them from sharing a pipe with Franz Mouse, who sat at their feet since they two took up all of a small divan; or from taking the rum-punch Mom offered them; or from laughing behind their hands, more at what they whispered to each other than at anything silly Franz said; or showing, when they crossed their legs, long thighs beneath their spangled dresses.

  Smoky went on looking. Even though George Mouse had taught him to be a City man and not afraid of women, a lifetime’s habit wasn’t so easily overcome, and he went on looking; and only after a decent interval of being paralyzed with uncertainty did he force himself to walk the rug to where they sat. Eager not to be a wet blanket—”Don’t be a wet blanket, for God’s sake,” George was always telling him—he sat down on the floor by them, a fixed smile on his face and a bearing that made him look (and he was, he was stunned to feel as Daily Alice turned to look at him, visible to
her) oddly breakable. He had a habit of twiddling his glass between thumb and forefinger so that the ice trembled rapidly and chilled the drink. He did it now, and the ice rattled in the glass like a bell rung for attention. A silence fell.

  “Do you come here often?” he said.

  “No,” she said evenly. “Not to the City. Only once in a while, when Daddy has business, or … other things.”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “Not really. Not any more. He’s a writer.” She was smiling, and Sophie beside her was giggling again, and Daily Alice went on with the conversation as though the object were to see how long she could keep a straight face. “He writes animal stories, for children.”

  “Oh.”

  “He writes one a day.”

  He looked up into her laughing eyes clear and brown as bottle glass. He had begun to feel very odd. “They must not be very long,” he said, swallowing.

  What was happening? He was in love, of course, at first sight, but he had been in love before and it had always been at first sight and he had never felt like this—as though something were growing, inexorably, within him.

  “He writes under the name of Saunders,” Daily Alice said.

  He pretended to search his memory for this name, but in fact he was searching within for what it was that made him feel so funny. It had extended now outward to his hands; he examined them where they lay in his houndstooth lap, looking very weighty. He interlaced the ponderous fingers.

  “Remarkable,” he said, and the two girls laughed, and Smoky laughed too. The feeling made him want to laugh. It couldn’t be the smoke; that always made him feel weightless and transparent. This was the opposite. The more he looked at her the stronger it grew, the more she looked at him the more he felt … what? In a moment of silence they simply looked at each other, and understanding hummed, thundered within Smoky as he realized what had happened: not only had he fallen in love with her, and at first sight, but she at first sight had fallen in love with him, and the two circumstances had this effect: his anonymity was being cured. Not disguised, as George Mouse had tried to do, but cured, from the inside out. That was the feeling. It was as though she stirred him with cornstarch. He had begun to thicken.

  The Young Santa Claus

  He had gone down the narrow back stairs to the only john in the house that still worked, and stood looking into the wide, black-flecked mirror of that stone place.

  Well. Who would have thought it. From the mirror a face looked out at him, not unfamiliar really, but still as though seen for the first time. A round and open face, a face that looked like the young Santa Claus as we might see him in early photographs: a little grave, dark-moustached, with a round nose and lines by the eyes already where little laughing birds had walked though he wasn’t yet twenty-three. All in all, a face of sunny disposition, with something in the eyes still blank and unresolved, pale and missing, that would, he supposed, never fill in. It was enough. In fact it was miraculous. He nodded, smiling, at his new acquaintance, and glanced at him again over his shoulder as he left.

  As he was going up the back stairs, he met Daily Alice coming down, suddenly, at a turning. Now there was no idiot grin on his face; now she wasn’t giggling. They slowed as they approached each other; when she had squeezed past him she didn’t go on but turned to look back at him; Smoky was a step higher than she, so that their heads were in the relation dictated by movie kisses. His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.

  There was a noise then on the stair above them and they started. It was Sophie, and she stood above them eyes wide, biting her lip. “I have to pee-pee,” she said, and danced by them lightly.

  “You’ll be leaving soon,” Smoky said.

  “Tonight.”

  “When will you come back?” “I don’t know.”

  He held her again; the second embrace was calm and sure. “I was frightened,” she said. “I know,” he said, exulting. God she was big. How was he to handle her when there was no stair to stand on?

  A Sea Island

  As a man well might who had grown up anonymous, Smoky had always thought that women choose or do not choose men by criteria he knew nothing of, by caprice, like monarchs, by taste, like critics; he had always assumed that a woman’s choice of him or of another was foregone, ineluctable and instant. So he waited on them, like a courtier, waited to be noticed. Turns out, he thought, standing late that night on the Mouse stoop, turns out not so; they—she anyway—is flushed with the same heats and doubts, is like me shy and overcome by desire, and her heart raced like mine when the embrace was at hand, I know it did.

  He stood for a long time on the stoop, turning over this jewel of knowledge, and sniffing the wind which had turned, as it infrequently does in the City, and blew in from the ocean. He could smell tide, and shore and sea detritus, sour and salt and bittersweet. And realized that the great City was after all a sea island, and a small one at that.

  A sea island. And you could forget so basic a fact for years at a time if you lived here. But there it was, amazing but true. He stepped off the stoop and down the street, solid as a statue from breast to back, his footsteps ringing on the pavement.

  Correspondence

  Her address was “Edgewood, that’s all,” George Mouse said, and they had no phone; and so because he had no choice, Smoky sat down to make love through the mails with a thoroughness just about vanished from the world. His thick letters were consigned to this Edgewood place, and he waited for reply until he couldn’t wait anymore and wrote another, and so their letters crossed in the mail as all true lovers’ letters do; and she saved them and tied them with a lavender ribbon, and years later her grandchildren found them and read of those old people’s improbable passion.

  “I found a park,” he wrote, in his black, spiky goblin’s hand; “there’s a plaque on the pillar where you enter it that says Mouse Drinkwater Stone 1900. Is that you all? It has a little pavilion of the Seasons, and statues, and all the walks curve so that you can’t walk straight into the middle. You walk and walk and find yourself coming back out. Summer’s very old there (you don’t notice, in the city, except in parks), it’s whiskery and dusty, and the park is little, too; but it all reminded me of you,” as if everything did not. “I found an old pile of newspapers,” said her letter which crossed his (the two truckdrivers waving to each other from their tall blue cabs on the misty morning turnpike). “There were these comic strips about a boy who dreams. The comic strip is all his dream, his Dreamland. Dreamland is beautiful; palaces and processions are always folding up and shrinking away, or growing huge and out of hand, or when you look closely turn out to be something else—you know—just like real dreams, only always pretty. Great-aunt Cloud says she saved them because the man who drew them, his name was Stone, once was an architect in the City, with George’s great-grandfather and mine! They were ‘Beaux-Arts’ architects. Dreamland is very ‘Beaux-Arts’. Stone was a drunkard—that’s the word Cloud uses. The boy in the dreams always looks sleepy and surprised at the same time. He reminds me of you.”

  After beginning thus timidly, their letters eventually became so face-to-face that when at last they met again, in the bar of the old hotel (outside whose leaded windows snow fell) they both wondered if there had been some mistake, if Somehow they had sent all those letters to the wrong person, this person, this unfocused and nervous stranger. That passed in an instant, but for a while they had to take turns speaking at some length, because it was the only way they knew; the snow turned to blizzard, the café-royale turned cold; a phrase of hers fell in with one of his and one of his with one of hers and, as elated as if they were the first to discover the trick of it, they conversed.

  “You don’t get—well—bored up there, all alone
all the time?” Smoky asked, when they had practiced a while.

  “Bored?” She was surprised. It seemed like an idea that hadn’t before occurred to her. “No. And we’re not alone.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean … What sort of people are they?”

  “What people?”

  “The people … you’re not alone with.”

  “Oh. Well. There used to be a lot of farmers. It was Scotch immigrants at first there. MacDonald, MacGregor, Brown. There aren’t so many farms now. But some. A lot of people up there now are our relatives, too, sort of. You know how it is.”

  He didn’t, exactly. A silence fell, and rose as they both started to speak at once, and fell again. Smoky said: “It’s a big house?”

  She smiled. “Enormous.” Her brown eyes were deliquescent in the lamplight. “You’ll like it. Everybody does. Even George, but he says he doesn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s always getting lost there.”

  Smoky smiled to think of George, the pathfinder, the waymaker through sinister night streets, baffled in an ordinary house. He tried to remember if in a letter he’d used the joke about city mice and country mice. She said: “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.” His heart beat fast, with no reason to.

  “I knew you, when we met.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I recognized you.” She lowered her furry red-gold lashes, then stole a quick look at him, then looked around the somnolent bar as though someone might overhear her. “I’d been told about you.”

  “By George.”

  “No, no. A long time ago. When I was a kid.” “About me?”

  “Well not about you exactly. Or about you exactly but I didn’t know that till I met you.” On the plaid tablecloth, she cupped her elbows in her hands, and leaned forward. “I was nine; or ten. It had been raining for a long time. Then there was a morning when I was walking Spark in the Park—”