They faced the square stone place that Hawksquill supposed to he a tool shed or other facility, disguised as a pavilion or miniature pleasure-dome. “I don’t know exactly,” she said, “but the reliefs on it represent the Four Seasons, I think. One to a side.”
The one before them was Spring, a Greek maiden doing some potting, with an ancient tool very like a trowel and a tender shoot in her other hand. A baby lamb nestled near her and like her looked hopeful, expectant, new. It was all quite well done; by varying the depth of his cutting, the artist had given an impression of distant fields newly turned and returning birds. Daily life in the ancient world. It resembled no spring that had ever come to the City, but it was nonetheless Spring. Hawksquill had more than once employed it as such. She had for a time wondered why the little house had been placed off-center on its plot of ground, not square with the streets around the park; and after a little thought saw that it faced the compass points, Winter facing north and Summer to the south, Spring east, and Autumn west. It was easy to forget, in the City, that north was only very approximately uptown—though not easy for Hawksquill, and apparently this designer had thought a true orientation important too. She liked him for it. She even smiled at the young man next to her, a supposed descendant, though he looked like a City creature who didn’t know solstice from equinox.
“What good is it?” he said, quietly but truculently.
“It’s handy,” said Hawksquill. “For remembering things.”
“What?”
“Well,” she said. “Suppose you wanted to remember a certain year, and the order in which events happened then. You could memorize these four panels, and use the things pictured in them as symbols for the events you want to remember. If you wanted to remember that a certain person was buried in the spring, well, there’s the trowel.”
“Trowel?”
“Well, that digging tool.”
He looked at her askance. “Isn’t that a little morbid?”
“It was an example.”
He regarded the maiden suspiciously, as if she were in fact about to remind him of something, something unpleasant. “The little plant,” he said at length, “could be something you began in the spring. A job. Some hope.”
“That’s the idea,” she said.
“Then it withers.”
“Or bears fruit.”
He was thoughtful a long time; he drew out his bottle and repeated his ritual exactly, though with less grimace. “Why is it,” he said then, his voice faint from the gin that had washed it, “that people want to remember everything? Life is here and now. The past is dead.”
She said nothing to this.
“Memories, Systems. Everybody poring over old albums and decks of cards. If they’re not remembering, they’re predicting. What good is it?”
An old cowbell rang within Hawksquill’s halls. “Cards?” she said.
“Brooding on the past,” he said, regarding Spring. “Will that bring it back?”
“Only order it.” She knew that, reasonable as they might seem, people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses. They have a reason for being where they are, expressed in a peculiar apprehension of things, a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled, She knew she must not press questions on him, pursue a subject, for like the paths in this place that would only lead her away. Yet she wanted very much now not to lose contact. “Memory can be an art,” she said schoolmarmishly. “Like architecture. I think your ancestor would have understood that.”
He lifted eyebrows and shoulders as though to say Who knows, or cares.
“Architecture, in fact,” she said, “is frozen memory. A great man said that.”
“Hm.”
“Many great thinkers of the past”—how she had caught this teachery tone she didn’t know, but she couldn’t seem to relinquish it, and it seemed to hold her hearer—“believed that the mind is a house, where memories are stored; and that the easiest way to remember things is to imagine an architecture, and then cast symbols of what you wish to remember on the various places defined by the architect.” Well, that surely must have lost him, she thought, but after some thought he said:
“Like the guy buried with the trowel.”
“Exactly.”
“Dumb,” he said.
“I can give you a better example.”
“Hm.”
She gave him Quintillian’s highly-colored example of a law-case, freely substituting modern for ancient symbols, and spreading them around the parts of the little park. His head swiveled from side to side as she placed this and that here and there, though she had no need to look. “In the third place,” she said, “we put a broken toy car, to remind us of the driver’s license that expired. In the fourth place—that arch sort of thing behind you to the left—we hang a man, say a Negro all dressed in white, with pointed shoes hanging down, and a sign on him: INRI.”
“What on earth.”
“Vivid. Concrete. The judge has said: unless you have documentary proof, you will lose the case. The Negro in white means having it on paper.”
“In black and white.”
“Yes. The fact that he’s hanged means we have captured this black-and-white proof, and the sign, that it is this that will save us.”
“Good God.”
“It sounds terribly complicated, I know. And I suppose it’s really not any better than a notebook.”
“Then why all that guff? I don’t get it.”
“Because,” she said carefully, sensing that despite his outward truculence he understood her, “it can happen—if you practice this art—that the symbols you put next to one another will modify themselves without your choosing it, and that when next you call them forth, they may say something new and revelatory to you, something you didn’t know you knew. Out of the proper arrangement of what you do know, what you don’t know may arise spontaneously. That’s the advantage of a system. Memory is fluid and vague. Systems are precise and articulated. Reason apprehends them better. No doubt that’s the case with those cards you spoke of.”
“Cards?”
Too soon? “You spoke of brooding over a deck of cards.”
“My aunt. Not my aunt really,” as though disclaiming her. “My grandfather’s aunt. She had these cards. Lay them out, think about them. Brood on the past. Predict things.”
“Tarot?”
“Hm?”
“Were they the Tarot deck? You know, the hanged man, the female pope, the tower…”
“I don’t know… How would I know? Nobody ever explained anything to me.” He brooded. “I don’t remember those pictures, though.”
“Where did they come from?”
“I dunno. England, I guess. Since they were Violet’s.”
She started, but he was lost in thought and didn’t see. “And there were some cards with pictures? Besides the court cards?”
“Oh yeah. A whole slew of ’em. People, places, things, notions.”
She leaned back, interlacing her fingers slowly. It had happened before that a place which she had put to multiple memory uses, like this park, came to be haunted by figments, hortatory or merely weird, called into being simply by the overlap of old juxtapositions, speaking, sometimes, of a meaning she would not otherwise have seen. If it were not for the sour smell of this one’s overcoat, the undeniable this-worldness of the striped pajamas beneath it, she might have thought him to be one of them. It didn’t matter. There is no chance. “Tell me,” she said. “These cards.”