“We came to say goodbye,” Lily said. Lucy shifted the front twin and added, “And give you some things.”
“Yeah? Well.” Tacey turned her bike neatly at the porch stairs and dismounted. “Hi, hi,” Auberon said again. “Did you bring along the whole county?” But of course they hadn’t brought anyone else; no one else’s presence was necessary, as theirs was.
Perhaps because their names were so similar, or because so often in the community they appeared and acted together, but people around Edgewood always found it hard to distinguish among Tacey, Lily, and Lucy. In fact they were very different. Tacey and Lily were descendants of their mother and her mother, long, bigboned and coltish, though Lily had inherited from somewhere a head of fine straight blond hair, straw spun into gold as the princess in the story spun it, where Tacey’s was curly reddish-gold like Alice’s. Lucy, though, was all Smoky’s; shorter than her sisters, with Smoky’s dark curls and Smoky’s cheerful bemused face and even something of Smoky’s congenital anonymity in her round eyes. But in another sense it was Lucy and Lily who were a pair: the sort of sisters who can finish one another’s sentences, and feel even at a distance one another’s pains. For years the two of them kept up a running series of seemingly pointless jokes; one would ask, in a serious tone, a silly question, and the other would just as seriously give an even sillier answer, and then they would (never cracking a smile) give the joke a number. The numbers ran into the hundreds. Tacey, perhaps because she was the oldest, was remote from their games; she was a naturally regal and private person who cultivated intensely a number of passions, for the alto recorder, for raising rabbits, for fast bikes. On the other hand, in all complots, plans, and ceremonies that dealt with grownups and their affairs, it had always been Tacey who was priestess, and the younger two her acolytes.
(In one thing all three were alike: they each had only one eyebrow, running over their noses from outer eye-corner to outer eye-corner without a break. Of Smoky and Alice’s children, only Auberon was without it.)
Auberon’s memories of his sisters would always be of their playing at the mysteries, birth, marriage, love, and death. He had been their Baby when he was very young, chivvied around from imaginary bath to imaginary hospital endlessly, a living doll. Later he was compelled to be Bridegroom, and finally Departed when he was old enough to be pleased simply to lie there while they ministered to him. And it was not only play; as they grew older, all three seemed to develop an instinctive grasp of the scenes and acts of quotidian life, of the curtains rising and rung down in the lives around them. No one remembered telling them (they were aged four, six, and eight then) that the youngest of the Bird girls was to be married to Jim Jay over in Plainfield, but they appeared at the church in jeans with bunches of wildflowers in their hands and knelt decorously on the church steps while inside the bride and groom took their vows. (The wedding photographer, waiting outside for the couple to appear, took a whimsical picture of the three darlings which later won a prize in a photo contest. It looked posed. In a sense, it was.)
From an early age, they had all three learned needlework, becoming more skilled and taking up in turn more difficult and esoteric branches of it as they got older, tatting, silk embroidery, crewel-work; what Tacey learned first from Great-aunt Cloud and her grandmother she taught to Lily, and Lily to Lucy; and as they sat together expertly doing and undoing with thread (often in the many-sided music room where the sun came in at all seasons) they kept up among themselves a constant calendar of the passings, pledges, partings, parturitions expected (announced or not) among the people they knew. They made knots, they snipped threads, they knew all; it came to pass that no sad or glad occasion was unknown to them, and few went forward without the three of them present. Those that did seemed incomplete, unsanctioned. Their only brother’s departure for his appointment with destiny and lawyers was not to be one of those.
“Here,” said Tacey, plucking from her bike’s basket a small package done up in ice-blue paper, “take this, and open it when you get to the City.” She kissed him lightly.
“Take this,” Lily said, giving him one wrapped in mintygreen, “and open it when you think of it.”
“Take this,” Lucy said. Hers was wrapped in white. “Open it when you want to come home again.”
He gathered these together, nodding, embarrassed, and put them in his duffle. The girls said nothing more about them, only sat for a while with him and Smoky on the porch, across which dead leaves blew unswept, gathering up under the seats of wicker chairs (whith ought to go in the basement, Smoky thought; an old chore of Auberon’s; he felt a chill of foreboding, or loss, but thought it to be the somber November gloaming only). Auberon, who was young and solitary enough to think that he might have escaped his house without anyone being the wiser, that no one paid much attention to his movements, sat constrainedly with them watching dawn grow; then he slapped his knees, rose, shook his father’s hand, kissed his sisters, promised to write, and at last stepped off southward into the sounding sea of leaves, striking for the crossroads where a bus could be hailed; he didn’t look back at the four who watched him go.
“Well,” Smoky said, remembering his own journey to the City at an age near Auberon’s, “he’ll have adventures.”
“Lots,” Tacey said.
“It’ll be fun,” Smoky said, “probably, possibly. I remember…”
“Fun for a while,” Lily said.
“Not much fun,” Lucy said. “Fun first, though, at least.”
“Dad,” said Tacey, seeing him trembling, “you shouldn’t sit out here in your ’jammies, for God’s sake.”
He rose, pulling his bathrobe around him. This afternoon he would have to get in the porch furniture, before snow piled absurdly in its summery seats.
A Friend of the Doctor’s
Shifting focus, George Mouse watched from a niche in the Old Stone Fence as Auberon came across the Old Pasture, short-cutting his way toward Meadowbrook. The Meadow Mouse in that niche, grass blade between his teeth and gloomy thoughts in his mind, watched the human come toward him, crunching great twigs and dead leaves by the hundreds beneath his boots. Ah, the great and clumsy feet of them! The shod feet, larger and harder even than the Brown Bear’s of ancient memory! Only the fact that they had only two each, and came around rarely and singly near his home, allowed the Meadow Mouse to feel somewhat more kindly toward them than toward the house-wrecking Cow, his personal behemoth. As Auberon came closer, passing indeed very close to the niche where he huddled, the Meadow Mouse had a surprise. This was the boy—grown huge—who had once come with the Doctor who was the Meadow Mouse’s great-great-grandfather’s friend; the very same boy that the Meadow Mouse as a tiny mousling had once observed, hands on his bare and scabby knees peering intently into the familial home as the Doctor took down Great-great-grandfather’s memoirs, which were so famous now not only among generations of Meadow Mice but throughout the Great World as well! His natural timidity overcome by a rush of family feeling, the Meadow Mouse put his nose out of the niche in the wall and attempted a greeting: “My great-great-grandfather knew the Doctor,” he called out. But the fellow went right on.