Novelties & Souvenirs (2 page)

“Sold off? To whom, in God’s name?”

“To a Cheshire agricultural firm. Who proceeded to chop up the lot and resell it. To the local farmers, my dear boy. To use as fertilizer.”

Sir Geoffrey swirled his nearly untouched brandy and stared deeply into it, watching the legs it made on the side of the glass, as
though he read secrets there. “Now the scientific mind may be able to believe,” he said at last, “that three hundred thousand cats, aeons old, wrapped lovingly in winding cloths and put to rest with spices and with spells, may be exhumed from a distant land—and from a distant past as well—and minced into the loam of Cheshire, and it will all have no result but grain. I am not certain. Not certain at all.”

The smoking room of the Travellers’ Club was deserted now, except for the weary, unlaid ghost of Barnett. Above us on the wall the mounted heads of exotic animals were shadowed and nearly unnameable; one felt that they had just then thrust their coal-smoked and glass-eyed heads through the wall, seeking something, and that just the other side of the wall stood their vast and unimaginable bodies. Seeking what? The members, long dead as well, who had slain them and brought them to this?

“You’ve been in Egypt,” Sir Geoffrey said.

“Briefly.”

“I have always thought that Egyptian women were among the world’s most beautiful.”

“Certainly their eyes are stunning. With the veil, of course, one sees little else.”

“I spoke specifically of those circumstances when they are without the veil. In all senses.”

“Yes.”

“Depilated, many of them.” He spoke in a small, dreamy voice, as though he observed long-past scenes. “A thing I have always found—intriguing. To say the least.” He sighed deeply; he tugged down his waistcoat, preparatory to rising; he replaced his eyeglass. He was himself again. “Do you suppose,” he said, “that such a thing as a cab could be found at this hour? Well, let us see.”

“By the way,” I asked when we parted, “whatever came of the wives’ petition for an exorcism?”

“I believe the bishop sent it on to Rome for consideration. The Vatican, you know, does not move hastily on these things. For all I know, it may still be pending.”

W
HEN
P
HILLIPPA
D
ERWENT
at last got through the various switchboards and operators, and a young voice said “Hello?” in a remote, uncertain way, it was as though she had tracked some shy beast to its secret lair, and for a moment she wished she hadn’t embarked on this; she hated to be thought a busybody, and knew that sometimes she could act like one.

“This is Phillippa Derwent,” she said, and paused a moment. When there was no response, she said, “Are you John Knowe? Amy Knowe was my…”

“Yes. Yes, of course. Aunt Phil. I’m sorry. It’s been so long….”

It had indeed been long—over twenty years—years which, Phillippa knew, would have passed far more slowly for her nephew, aged eleven when she had last seen him, than for herself. A certain amount of constrained catching up was thus the next duty. Her nephew’s life, she had always supposed, had been filled with incident and probably not happy; her own, which seemed to her happy, hadn’t been eventful. Her sister Amy had married a man she hadn’t loved, for her son John’s sake, she said: they had
left New England—the last Phillippa had seen of them—and begun a series of removes farther and farther west. Amy’s letters, not pleasant to read, had grown more and more infrequent, now reduced to a Christmas card with a distracted note written on the back. The stepfather had vanished; at any rate, he ceased to be mentioned. When their mother—with whom Phillippa had lived alone for many years—died, Amy hadn’t come to the funeral.

Somewhere down the years Amy had written that John had entered a seminary, and when Phillippa saw mentioned in her local paper that a John Knowe had been appointed to the faculty of a Catholic girls’ school in Westchester, the possibility that this might be her nephew, revolved eastward, grew slowly (for it was hard for her to think of him as other than a shy, large-eyed, and undergrown boy) to a certainty. For many reasons (mostly not the reasons she chose to give herself) she didn’t call him; but when the lawyer’s letter came informing her that Cousin Anne’s will had at last been straightened out, she took it on herself to inform John of it. Foolish, she told herself, living so near and not reopening relations; if he wouldn’t begin, she would.

“She had some property in Vermont,” she told him. “Nothing very grand; but she’s left some of it to you, or rather you’ve come into it by default or something….”

“Not the old farm,” he said, his voice far away.

“Oh no. No, Mother and I sold the farm years ago. No, a parcel of land—not too far north of the farm—and I thought perhaps you might like to see it. I was planning a trip up there in any case—the leaves ought to be just at their peak—and I thought…”

“I don’t drive.”

“Well, I do.” She was growing faintly impatient. “There are
apparently some papers to sign at her lawyer’s up there. It could all be taken care of.”

“Well,” he said, “it’s very kind of you.” There was a pause, and then he said: “I’m sorry about the farm.”

Slight, darkly bearded, not in clerical dress, he stood on the steps of the college with an abstracted yet attentive air that struck her as familiar. Who was she reminded of? Of him, no doubt; him as a boy. For a while she studied him without getting out of the car or hailing him, feeling unaccountably swept into the past.

“John.”

“Aunt Phil.” He was as astonished as she was not. She felt embarrassed; she must appear a ghastly crone in comparison to his mental image. Yet he took her hand warmly, and after a moment’s hesitation, kissed her cheek, tenderly almost. His large eyes were as she remembered them. For a moment a hard thickness started in her throat, and she looked at the sky as an excuse to turn away.

“I should warn you,” she said, “I’m a weather jinx. I can go anywhere and a blue sky will turn black.” And in fact, in the west, hard, white clouds were moving over, preceded by wind-twisted pale mare’s tails—stormbringers, her mother always called them.

Parkways north: already along these most civilized of turnpikes the ivy had turned, burdening the still-green trees with garments of many colors. Since the twenties, when her father had bought the farm for their summers, she had made this journey many times, at first on dirt roads through then-rural Connecticut, later traveling under these arching bridges each one different, and now skating along superhighways that reached—it had once seemed impossible to her that they ever would—deeply into Vermont itself. At this season, she and Amy and their parents would have been traveling
the other way, not toward but away from the farm, where they lived from May to October; going home, they always said, but to Phillippa at least it had always seemed the reverse: leaving the true home for the other, the workaday place, the exile.

“We sold it in 1953,” she said in answer to his question. “The summer after you left this part of the world. It had become just a burden. Dad was dead, and you children weren’t coming up anymore; Mother and I needed money to buy the house in Rye. We got a sudden offer at the end of the summer—a pretty good one—and sold. We were grateful. I guess.”

“What was a pretty good offer then?”

“Five thousand. And another hundred or so for the furnishings; the buyer took most of those too.”

“Five thousand.” He shook his head.

“We paid two, in the twenties. And much of the acreage was gone by then.”

“Nineteen fifty-three,” he said softly, as though the date were something precious and fragile; and then nothing more, looking out the window, absorbed.

She had rather feared this, his remoteness, a probably inevitable constraint. She passed a remark about the weather—the trees were turning up their silvery undersides, as though raising hands in dismay, and the sky was growing increasingly fierce—and then asked about his work. It seemed to be the right question; talking about theology, about the politics of the soul, he became animated and amusing, almost chatty.

Phillippa’s religion, or lack of it, was that of the woman in the Stevens poem, sitting on Sunday morning with her coffee and her cockatoo:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
And that about April…

“Yes,” he said, putting the tips of his fingers together, “heaven is a difficulty. It seems hardly worth all the effort to end up in a white robe singing praises; like an infinity of choir practice. Of course, there’s to be an ineffable, indescribable bliss; but it’s damn hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

“I suppose really religious people sense it,” Phillippa said, feeling odd to be defending heaven.

“I don’t know. I think people who really believe it invest the ordinary things they love with the idea of heaven; so that when they say ‘This is heavenly,’ they really mean it.” Phillippa noticed his shapely hands, mobile now where they had been meekly folded before. They too reminded her of someone; yet how could so changeful a thing as hands, so markable by time, retain a reminder of him as a boy?

“Mother—Amy—always said,” he went on, “that she didn’t care about heaven if she couldn’t have around her all the people and places and times she loved most, in their characters—I mean not abstracted; not in white robes; not on clouds. I think I believe that. Heaven is where you are—or will be, or have been, there being no time in heaven—most happy.”

Where for her, Phillippa wondered; and knew, without assenting to the possibility: the farm, in high summer, years ago. If that
were so…But it wasn’t. If there was one thing Phillippa knew, it was that happiness is something you lose, fast or slow. “I wouldn’t think,” she said, “your church would go along with those ideas.”

He laughed, pleased. “No, well. All that is up in the air, now, you know. I’m something of a heresiarch anyway, really. In fact, I’ve recently worked up a new heresy, or refurbished an old one. Would you like to hear it?”

“If you can promise we won’t be punished for it,” Phillippa said. To the north, a vast, curdled darkness was advancing across their path. “I mean look at that sky.”

“It goes like this,” he said, crossing one sharp-kneed leg over the other. “I’ve decided that not all men have immortal souls. Immortality is what Adam and Eve forfeited in the garden. From then on it was dust to dust. What Jesus promised to those who believed in him was eternal life—the possibility of not dying eternally. So that the believer, if his faith and hope and charity are strong,
creates
his own immortality through Jesus—the first immortal man since Adam: the new Adam.”

“What about the outer darkness, and the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?”

“A metaphor for death. I think it’s easier to explain those few references to fires and so on as metaphors for death than to explain all the many references to death as metaphors for eternal punishment. Jesus said, He who believes in me
shall not die;
that seems clearly to mean that everybody else will.”

“No hell?”

“No. A great problem solved there. Those who don’t care about salvation merely go under the ground, utterly extinguished, having failed to accomplish their immortality.”

“Comforting.”

“Isn’t it. Also clears up the problems of infant damnation and the Good Pagan. More than that, though: it makes the choice harder. The choice for Jesus. When the alternative doesn’t seem so terrible.”

“In fact—I’m sorry—preferable. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me.”

“Well, there you are. Perhaps it isn’t an unalloyed good. Perhaps it’s quite difficult—as difficult as any kind of life.”

“Dear me.”

“Maybe some have no choice. The God-possessed, the saintly.” He had grown more still, more inward. She wondered if he were still joking. “In fact, I would think the population of heaven would be small.”

Phillippa thought of medieval pictures of the court of heaven, the winged saints in rows intended to suggest great numbers but really absurdly few. But that wasn’t the heaven he envisioned, was it? Where ripe fruit never falls. If it were to be a heaven composed of the things one loved most, it would have to include (as far as Phillippa was concerned) change of season, fall of leaves, days like this one, raddled with dark, flying clouds; the flame of swamp maples, going out; April’s green. And yes, for there to be enough of it to go around, perhaps there would need to be only a few to divide it among; the rest of us, mortal, resigning it to them. She thought, suddenly, of an old convertible turning in at the stone gateposts of the long weedy drive leading up to the farm.

Who could that be?
her mother said.
No one we know.

The car, with orange leaves stuck beneath its windshield wipers, nosed into the drive tentatively, uncertainly.

Just turning around, perhaps, lost,
Phillippa said. They sat together on the porch, for it was quite warm in the sun. It was so utterly still and blue that the leaves fell seemingly for no reason, skating with
slow agility to the ground. Their clicking fall among the rest was sometimes audible: it was that still.

The car stopped halfway up the drive and a young man got out. He wore a wide fedora—every man did then—and smoked a long, straight pipe. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks, looking at the house, though not, it seemed, at them. When at last he began to walk toward them, he did so not purposefully, nor did he hail them; he might have been arriving at a deserted house, or a house of his own. When at last he did greet them, it was with a kind of lazy familiarity. He wasn’t a Vermonter, by his voice.

He had been told, he said, in the village, that the ladies were thinking of selling. He was in the market for just such a place; a writer, he needed someplace quiet to work. Were they in fact selling? Might he see the place?

It had been that very week that Phillippa and her mother had come to see that another summer in this house wasn’t possible. The people in the village had, apparently, come to the same conclusion; not surprising, really, but a little forward of them to put it up for sale without asking. Well, her look asked her mother, here he was: why not show him around?

It’s kind of a rambling old place,
she said as they went in through the straining screen door. He stood in the parlor, seeming less to see the place than to inhale its fragrance, of woodstoves and old furniture and cidery autumn air.
Wouldn’t it be too big for you?

Room to spread out,
he said, smiling as though he didn’t really care. She showed him the kitchen, deprecatingly; there was no inside plumbing but a pump; no toilets; no stove but this iron monster. It would need a lot of improvement.

I think I’d leave it as it is,
he said complacently.
It suits me.

But the winter,
Mother said.
What would you do then?

He shrugged happily.
Hibernate, maybe.
He touched the huge old sinks fondly.
Soapstone,
he said.
When I was a kid I thought these sinks were called soapstone because you washed in them.

It was difficult to move him through the house. Whatever room he entered he seemed to want to stay in forever, looking around dreamily. Phillippa found she couldn’t be impatient with him, because he was so obviously taken with what she so much loved. By the end of the tour she found herself rather wanting this stranger to have her house.

And in the end he did have it, over her mother’s objections—she wanted to give it to the local real-estate broker, an old friend—and most of the furniture too, Victorian junk they had collected through twenty summers of auctions.

“Junk,” John Knowe said. “It wouldn’t be that now, would it?”

“No. Antiques. But of course we didn’t know that then.”