"Welcome to our family,” the dean said.
* * * *
So Pierce and his wife became urban pioneers in that city, which was a real city in a real conurbation and not just a hallucinatory compound of fears and longings, omphalos of a smoky underworld—say it was Holyoke, or Bridgeport, or Albany. It was a city that had got rich very quickly about the middle of the nineteenth century and then slowly got poor again. When it was rich, and the rich didn't mind living near the factories and mills and canals that supported them, the city had built splendid neighborhoods of huge houses, houses that now nobody wanted, for most of those who could afford to live in them wanted to live farther away. Even Roo and Pierce—moved as they were by the big echoey rooms with parquet floors, the curved bay-window glass, the massy radiators and tubs that the desperate salesmen pointed out—in the end couldn't feature managing so much.
But then they found, beyond those proud sad streets and their great trees, in the direction of the (former) farmlands, one of those little suburbs that about 1910 developers were arranging out at the end of the trolley lines, places designed to be the best of town and country. Once surrounded by rose-burdened walls, entered through rough ivy-clad brick gateways (gone when he and she drove through in the Rabbit), it was surrounded now by a shabby nameless precinct of the city, and overlooked by a medical building done in raw concrete (they would see its minatory red cross in their bedroom window in the leafless winter). But it still clustered around its own little rocky sunken parkland and duck pond, and the Tudor red-brick and Queen Anne shingled houses were nearly all still there, some clad in vinyl siding, some with fiberglass carports or chain-link fences. Several of them were for sale.
The one they got, where they still are, was at the end of Peep o’ Morn Way, right on the Glen (as the parkland was called). It was absurdly narrow and tall; two stories faced on the street, and another went down behind as the house fell off a steep ledge into its little garden and backyard down in the Glen. Oh it was cute. Tall trees watched over it and its neighbors; its paneled door sheltered shy behind an arched trellis and a fence; a little gate opened in the fence by the house's side, and a winding wooden stair went down and around the house until it reached the backyard far below. Down there they could glimpse, as they stood by the gate, a wooden bench, and pots and potting tools, and a pair of old gardening gloves.
It was probably the gloves that sold it.
It was large for them, three stories large, though each story was no more than two or three rooms deep or wide; they had no plans to fill it further when they bought it. No firm plans, though looking back Pierce can see himself propelled by an unspoken urgency toward propagation. Roo had always told him she couldn't imagine growing old all alone, and he came to know that what Roo could not imagine she would not allow to befall her: she would instead bring into being what she could imagine.
7
On the fourth anniversary of their marriage, Roo won an office pool at the dealership in Cascadia that the salesmen had put her name into, a sort of memorial to her or to Barney. The prize, to Pierce's horror, was a pair of tickets to Rome and four days-three nights in a chain hotel to which Barney's dealership was somehow connected.
"Uh-uh,” he said to her.
"What?"
"I don't want to go back to the old Old World,” Pierce said. “Besides, I'm not sure it still exists to return to."
"Let's not be silly,” Roo said with something like patient indulgence. “I am not returning anywhere. I've never been, and I think it would be a good and great thing to see what you've seen."
"You don't want to see what I've seen."
"You'd be good to go with. You could explain it all to me. The churches, the pictures. The meaning of it all.” It had surprised Roo that, on the odd occasions (other people's weddings or christenings, chance, curiosity) when they found themselves in a Catholic church, Pierce was able to decode the surreal images in plaster and stained glass, the woman with the toothed wheel, the man in brown with the lily, the man who wasn't Jesus bound to a pillar and pierced with darts, the effulgent bird and crown, the random letters, INRI, XP, JMJ. “Couldn't you?"
"I suppose I could. A lot of it."
"We'd come home different,” she said. “I mean by a different way. Barney used to say—I don't know where he got this—that the Roman legions when they went somewhere to conquer something always came back by a different way. That's how they mapped the world.” She did that herself, in the states of the New World, accumulating knowledge. She liked houses that were planned so that you could go from room to room in a circle to return to where you started, rather than having to retrace your steps. She never wanted to retrace her steps. Pierce seemed to himself to be one who never did anything else.
He was right, though, that the City, however Eternal, was not there to return to. The place to which they arrived, after passing eastward through the night and raising the sun over the Middle Sea, was not the place he had been before, only resembling it in certain sly ways, places with the same names and histories but otherwise different. It was midsummer, and the streets and squares were filled with crowds of people young and old but mostly young, and from all over the world, laughing girls with bare brown midriffs and crowds of boys behind them, passing from place to place, standing six deep to toss coins into the Trevi Fountain, clustered beneath Bernini dolphins and playing guitars and flutes and radios for one another in the transfiguring sun.
But it wasn't just that, the crowds and sun, it was the place itself, which had somehow shrunk or contracted into a small brightly colored place, a toy-town, all its funny old monuments and historic sites open and the people passing in and out. Places it had taken him so long to find, places he had never found, turned out to be mere steps from one another, clustered together like a theme park, no longer containing the past, just a pleasant setting for the present to occur in. Where were the endless dark avenues he had trod in confusion, the puzzles of entwined streets impossible to escape from? Where were the shuttered prisons and palaces he had come upon by chance, so far from one another?
"Oh, hey,” Roo said. “Look at the elephant!"
It was in a little piazza no more than a New York block from the Pantheon; he must have walked around it again and again without ever stepping through this little passage, or that one, or the other one. For a long time he stood before it, watched Roo walk up to pat it. She laughed at the little beast, more Dumbo than Jumbo in size, and the absurd great weight of the figured obelisk it bore on its back.
"What's it say?” Roo said to him, pointing to the tablet beneath the elephant, the writing that explained it all, in a dead language. “What's it mean?"
Pierce opened his mouth, shut it again. As though in a Rose Bowl parade or carnival or mass demonstration, he observed a set of explanations proceeding to the forefront of his mind from the deep old interior: a line of floats and figures great and small, in groups and singly, mounted and afoot, led by the elephant they stood before. Hooded sodalities bore the Crux ansata and papyrus rolls brought from the fall of Constantinople, Colonna and Botticelli the great folio of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, open to the page where the elephant is shown. There came theriomorphic deities of Egypt, made into parables by Baroque symbologists, Hermes with finger to his lips bearing a smaragdine tablet, rendered with hieroglyphics that supposedly said As above, so below but actually didn't. Athanasius Kircher, the Jesuit who studied the Egyptian picture language, including the symbols cut into this very obelisk, and proved they were the unsayable terms of a mystic philosophy. Sir Flinders Petrie and the Invisible College in its winged car, Pope Alexander and Io, queen of Egypt, the crater of Mercurius, the arcana of the Masons carried by apron-wearing men in drip-dry shirts and fezzes. Walking alone, the gloomy Huguenot figure of Isaac Casaubon who showed that Hermes Trismegistus wasn't really Egyptian at all. All moving forward, and then moving past, moving on. The Monas, in Father Kircher's version, that collected a Cobra, a Scarab, the Ptolemaic planetary nest, and more into John Dee's bare bony symbol. The same symbol cut in a ring. His cousins on a ragged hill in Kentucky marked with it. Charis feeding him snowy coke from her poison ring, asking why people think Gypsies can tell fortunes. Julie Rosengarten in a New York slum apartment lifting her hand to him, the nails painted with symbols, Sun, Eye, Rose, Heart, saying, It makes a lot of sense. Rose Ryder moving her finger over a wineglass rim and raising a faint eerie wail.