John Crowley: Little, Big

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.

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 unflcused 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 cafe-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—”

“What?”

“Spark was a dog we had. The Park is, you know, the grounds around. There was a breeze blowing, and it felt like the rain was going to end. We were all wet. Then I looked west: there was a rainbow. I remembered what my mother said: morning rainbow in the west, then the weather will be best.”

He imagined her very vividly, in a yellow slicker and high widemouthed boots, and her hair finer even and curlier than now; and wondered how she knew which way west was, a problem he still sometimes stumbled over.

“It was a rainbow, but bright, and it looked like it came down just—there, you know, not far; I could see the grass, all sparkling and stained every color there. The sky had got big, you know, the way it does when it clears at last after a long rainy time, and everything looked near; the place the rainbow came down was near; and I wanted more than anything to go stand in it—and look up—and be covered with colors.”

Smoky laughed. “That’s hard,” he said.

She laughed too, dipping her head and raising the back of her hand to her mouth in a way that already seemed heartstirringly familiar to him. “It sure is,” she said. “It seemed to take forever .”

“You mean you—”

“Every time you thought you were coming close, it would be just as far off, in a different place; and if you came to that place, it would be in the place you came from; and my throat was sore with running, and not getting any closer. But you know what you do then—”

“Walk away from it,” he said, surprised at his own voice but Somehow sure this was the answer.

“Sure. That isn’t as easy as it sounds, but—”

“No, I don’t suppose.” He had stopped laughing.

“—but if you do it right—”

“No, wait,” he said.

“—just right, then…”

“They don’t really come down, now,” Smoky said. “They don’t, not really.”

“They don’t here ,” she said. “Now listen. I followed Spark; I let him choose, because he didn’t care, and I did. It took just one step, and turn around, and guess what.”

“I can’t guess. You were covered in colors.”

“No. It’s not like that. Outside, you see colors inside it; so, inside it—”

“You see colors outside it.”

“Yes. The whole world colored, as though it were made of candy—no, like it was made of a rainbow. A whole colored world as soft as light all around as far as you can see. You want to run and explore it. But you don’t dare take a step, because it might be the wrong step—so you only look, and look. And you think: Here I am at last.” She had fallen into thought. “At last,” she said again softly.