THE WAD OF paper arched neatly, bounced off the rim of the wastepaper basket and fell to the floor. It was very strange, since he’d been writing poetry all his life, that now when something really important had happened—the kind of thing that had inspired poets down through the ages—he suddenly seemed to have lost his touch. Of course, most of his poetry in the past had been humorous and satirical and in a style that wasn’t particularly suitable for what he had in mind at the moment. The trouble seemed to be that while what he was trying to express was incredibly exciting and original and significant at what you might call the gut level, it kept coming out at the verbal level sounding surprisingly ordinary and trite. He’d tried sonnets, triolets, ballad form, blank verse and anapestic pentameter, all with about the same results—another opportunity to practice basket shooting.
He sighed, and pulling Jenkin’s A Man for All Ages across the desk, he opened it to page thirty-two, which was as far as he had gotten in a whole month at New Moon Lake. He might as well get some work done on the da Vinci thing. There probably wasn’t any new way to say what he had in mind anyway. After all, where could you go after “How do I love thee” and “My luv is like a red, red rose”?
There was a knock, and Charlotte opened the door. When she saw James at his desk, she paused in the doorway. In the Fielding family one didn’t interrupt intellectual exercise unless it was absolutely necessary. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt your train of thought.”
“Don’t worry,” James said. “It’s already derailed.”
Charlotte glanced at the wads of paper in and around the wastepaper basket. “Having trouble with Leonardo?” she asked.
“Well, not exactly.”
“Well, what I came in to say is that we’re thinking about driving in to New Moon. Would you like to come along?”
“No, I guess not, thanks. Now that I’ve finally gotten started on this thing, I guess I’d better keep at it awhile.”
As Charlotte was leaving, James suddenly said, “Mom.” Charlotte had always been easy to talk to on almost any subject. At least comparatively easy, judging by what he’d heard about other people’s mothers. But when she stopped and came back, he changed his mind. There just didn’t seem to be any way to put his feelings about Diane into words without somehow trivializing them. “Oh, never mind,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“I’m in no particular hurry, if there’s something you’d like to talk about.”
“No. It can wait. Right now I’d better stick with Leonardo.”
He didn’t, however, stick with Leonardo for very long. When he heard the Volvo’s motor starting up, he went to the window. William was just getting into the passenger side of the front seat. Charlotte was driving as usual. It wasn’t that William was a bad driver. It was just that on longer trips he tended to start concentrating on some important issue and forgot to notice such minor details as stop signs or oncoming traffic. So Charlotte encouraged William to concentrate on his important issues and let her handle unimportant routines, particularly the ones that were potentially lethal. As James watched from his window, she deftly backed and turned the old Volvo and set off briskly down the narrow dirt road.
James went back to his desk, poked at the da Vinci notes, wandered out the door and down the stairs. It wasn’t until he was in the front yard that he realized where he was heading. The week that the Jarretts were to have been in Sacramento wasn’t quite over yet, but it was possible that they might have decided to come back a little early. And even if they hadn’t, a game of tennis might be just what he needed to work off some tension and restlessness. In fact, right at the moment, a game of tennis would probably help the da Vinci more than anything else he could do. Relax his nerves and do great things for his powers of concentration. Halfway down the drive he stopped suddenly and went back to the cabin for his tennis racket.
He’d played one set with a middle-aged lady and was sitting on the sidelines waiting for another partner possibility to present itself when he heard the sound of running feet on the path outside the courts. He turned around in time to see Laurel Jarrett dash through the gate, skid to a stop and then stand still, staring delightedly in his direction. He smiled, and she started toward him, balancing on the tips of her toes. In Laurel’s case, tiptoeing seemed to have more to do with the state of her emotions, than with any desire to move quietly. When she was directly in front of him, she came down off her toes and said, “Hi!” Then, glancing around and lowering her voice she said, “Prince Pwah-son.”
“Hi, yourself,” James said, and then with a sudden surge of excitement, “Hey, are you back from Sacramento already?”
“Oh, I didn’t go.”
“But your mother and father went, didn’t they. Diane said your father was one of the judges.”
She nodded. “They went. But they left me here with Susie. She’s my baby-sitter. They never take me when they go to swimming things because I’m the only one in the family who sinks.”
“You—sink?”
“Yes,” she said tragically. “It’s awful. I have the wrong kind of bones or something. Jacky doesn’t even sink as fast as I do, and he’s only two.”
It was a real disappointment. For a moment he’d been sure that all the Jarretts must have returned. But Laurel was still standing in front of him doing her tragic heroine bit. “That’s too bad,” he said. “About the sinking.” He moved over to make room on the bench, and she scooted herself up beside him. She was wearing denim slacks and a flowered blouse. Her feet, in very small blue sneakers, swung back and forth about six inches from the blacktop. It really was too bad that they all went off and left her just because she couldn’t swim as well as the rest of them. She obviously felt very bad about it. “I’m sorry you didn’t get to go,” he said.
“Oh, that’s all right. I didn’t want to. Besides, Griffin says it’s probably just an enchantment. The sinking. She says as soon as she figures out the right spells, she’s going to disenchant me and then I’ll probably be able to swim better than anybody.”
“Oh, that’s great. Where’s Griffin today? I mean, how come you’re not working on some enchantment or other this morning?”
Laurel sighed. Tragedy had returned. “She can’t. Woody has tonsillitis, and she has to take care of him.”
“Where are their parents? Did they go to the swimming meet, too?”
“No. I think they just went to a party. They usually go to parties. Is it nice not being a fish anymore? Or do you miss it sometimes? The secret pool and everything. Griffin says it’s not so bad being a fish as long as you’re smart enough not to get hooked. Griffin says she was a fish once, and it wasn’t too bad.”
“Oh, well yes. I guess I’d say that Griffin was right. It wasn’t too bad, most of the time.” He grinned. “I did get tired of those mosquitoes though.”
Laurel grinned back, her excited, lopsided smile. Slipping down off the bench, she picked up James’ tennis ball and ran in a circle bouncing it. James went back to watching the other tennis players and wondering if anyone else was going to need a partner any time soon. It didn’t look as if anyone was. When Laurel came back and scooted back up on to the bench, he said, “I guess I’m going to be leaving now. Say hello to Griffin and Woody for me when you see them.”
“Okay.” Laurel jumped down, and when James started off she ran along behind him, skipping and jumping and making a funny singsong noise. It was actually a little bit embarrassing, but every time he stopped and looked back at her she smiled at him lopsidedly, wrinkling her long, delicate nose and looking so pleased with herself that he couldn’t bring himself to chase her away. But when he came to the beginning of Anzio, he said, “I’m going up Anzio now to the west gate. Where are you going?”
“I am, too. I’m going to Griffin’s house. Griffin’s house is number nineteen.”
James remembered number nineteen. It was on the west side of Anzio, not far from where the trail began that led through the grove of pines to the west gate. So they went on together until they came to the driveway. The house, an immense A-frame set on a massive stone foundation, loomed over them at the end of a short, steep drive.
“Come on up and see Griffin,” Laurel said, tugging at his hand. “Griffin hasn’t seen anybody but Woody and me for two whole days.” The tugging, along with a certain amount of curiosity, won. James allowed himself to be led up the drive and a flight of stone steps. Pushing open a sliding door, Laurel went in without knocking, and James followed. The living room towered, an enormous triangle of glass on one end, a stone fireplace wall on the other, and on each side huge sloping surfaces of rough-hewn wood. There was nothing in the room that actually looked like a piece of furniture. Vases and ash trays sat on white plastic mushrooms or clear glass cubes, books lined up along racks of chrome and glass, and in front of the fireplace was an enormous conversation pit, terraced in squashy velvet. On the walls and dangling overhead were several works of art that looked as if they’d been stolen from the opening sequences of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. At the moment the room also was decorated with an assortment of toys, newspapers, articles of clothing and dirty dishes. Griffin, dressed in a Mexican-looking smock with faded embroidery around the top, was lying on her stomach on the lower level of the conversation pit. She was reading a book, and all around her were dozens of other books. When Laurel said, “Hi, Griffin, look who I brought to see you,” she sat up quickly, looking startled.
“Hi,” James said, “Laurel insisted that I come in. Hope it’s okay.”
A wide smile replaced the startled expression. “Of course, it’s okay. Enter Prince Poisson and welcome. You honor our humble castle with your royal presence. You’ll have to excuse the mess, though. My folks are away and our live-in left, and I’m a lousy housekeeper.”
“Where’s Woody?” Laurel asked.
“He’s in his room. He still has a fever.” Then, as Laurel started to run on tiptoe toward a doorway, she added, “Don’t get too close to him. He might be catching.”
James made his way down to the lowest level of the conversation pit, which was completely awash with what seemed to be very old books. Books were everywhere—stacked, tumbled, piled and scattered.
“What’s been going on here?” he asked. “You been hijacking bookmobiles?”
“No. They’re mine. I bought them. Aren’t they great?” She slid down among the books and started gathering them into stacks, handling them as carefully as if they were valuable heirlooms. “They had a sale at the library in New Moon. Books people donated and all the old ones they didn’t want any more. I bought them all. There were too many for me to carry, so yesterday Mr. Grant, he’s the librarian’s husband, delivered them for me. I’m going to read them all.”
James picked up a couple that were lying near his feet. Kiss Me Deadly by Mickey Spillane looked as if it had been left out in the rain and Jane Austen’s Emma had obviously been attacked by a dog. “Well, it looks like an interesting assortment,” he said.
“Yes, I know. I just finished that one.” She was pointing at Emma.
“Did you like it?” Charlotte had all of Jane Austen’s books, and James had read a couple with rather mild interest.
“I loved it. I love all her stories.”
“Oh. What do you like about them?”
“Oh, I don’t know. They’re just so perfect—and small.”
“Small?” He examined the width of the book.
“I don’t mean short. I mean small things happen. But it makes you understand how they didn’t seem small to the people in the story.”
Charlotte had said something not too different when they’d argued about Austen. He was trying to remember just what it was, when something ran up his right leg. For an awful moment he thought it was a rat, a book carton stowaway from someone’s attic. But it turned out to be a chipmunk. When it got to his lap, it grabbed the top of a pocket and tugged with tiny long-fingered paws.
“His name is Tad,” Griffin said. “He just wants to see if you brought him anything. I usually keep sunflower seeds in my pockets.”
The chipmunk sniffed in James’ pocket, made a scolding noise and skittered across books to run up Griffin’s braid as if it were a rope ladder. Perched on her shoulder, chattering impudently, flicking his striped tail, he seemed to be running on sixteen cylinders-bursting with too much life and energy for such a small chassis.
He’s incredible,” James said. “How did you get him to be so tame. I’ve tried to tame chipmunks and I’ve gotten a couple of them to come to within a few feet of me, but that’s as far as it goes.”
“I got him when he was just a tiny baby,” Griffin said. “I’d been watching his mother, and I was pretty sure she had babies in a hole in a log. And then one day, right while I was watching, a hawk got her. It was terrible. There wasn’t anything I could do except to get the babies out and see if I could help them, but they were pretty young, and two of them died. Tad was the only one that made it. He thinks I’m his mother.” She reached into the pocket of her smock, took out some sunflower seeds and held her arm straight out in front of her. The chipmunk ran around the back of her neck to her other shoulder and then out her arm. When he got to her hand, he began stuffing seeds into his cheeks with both hands. With his cheeks bulging like a bad case of mumps, he ran back to her shoulder, down her braid and away across the room. “He’s probably headed for my closet,” Griffin said. “He’s been storing up for winter in the toe of one of my shoes.”
“Griffin. Can I get up now? I’m feeling a lot better.” Woody came into the room followed by Laurel. He was wearing striped pajamas and his tousled hair had that faintly green tone that blond hair gets when it needs to be shampooed. “I want to talk to the prince, too.”
“Woodrow Everett Westmoreland. You go right back to bed. You still have a fever.” Griffin got up quickly, put her hand on Woody’s forehead and then started leading him back down the hall. “Come on,” she said. “Laurel can stay in your room and talk to you for a while if she doesn’t get too close.”
“Can the prince come talk to me, too? I want the prince to come talk to me.” Twisting around so that he was walking backwards as Griffin tugged him along, Woody stared at James, his slate-blue eyes glittering with fever and self-pity. “I’ve been sick, Prince,” he said. “And I’m awful bored. Being sick is awful boring.”
So they all wound up sitting around in beanbag chairs and on a canopied wicker couch that hung from the ceiling in Woody’s bedroom. The room, like the rest of the house, was fantastic. The bed hung from the ceiling, too, and it could be raised up during the day to make more play space. One set of controls was in the head of the bed so you could even make it go up and down while you were lying in it. Around the walls were built-in desks, bookcases, toy shelves and an enormous model train table. Very expensive looking toys were scattered everywhere. At first glance, you might wonder how a kid could be bored in a place like that, but after a while you began to understand. The place was boring. There was something deadening about all that slick, shiny, automated junk, most of which did all kinds of complicated things if you pushed a button or pulled a switch. The toys did it all. They rolled, walked, crashed, fought, beeped and talked. There was nothing left for a kid to do but lie there and watch. No wonder Woody was anxious to talk to somebody.
At first they talked about something that had been going on just before Woody got sick, something Woody called “helping the warfs.” Sitting in the center of his tousled bed with his hair standing on end and his cheeks glowing feverishly, Woody went on at great length about some poor losers, mysteriously known as warfs. The warfs, it seemed, lived in some caves along the river bank and they’d been having a lot of trouble with a gang of goblins. The goblins had stolen the warfs’ food supplies, and the warfs were about to starve when Grif found out about it. So she and Woody and Laurel had started helping by providing the warfs with food and anti-goblin magic and other necessities.
James caught Griffin’s eye and grinned, but her answering smile was wide-eyed and earnest, without the slightest admission that she’d been putting anything over on the kids, and without any indication that she was asking him to back up her story. But he decided to, anyway.
“That’s the way it goes everytime—with warfs and goblins,” he told Woody. “I’ve never known it to fail. You know—goblins ninety-nine, warfs zero.”
“Not warfs,” Laurel said. “Dwarfs. Woody just calls them warfs since his top teeth came out. But what they are are dwarfs like in Snow White.” Laurel said dwarfs very distinctly, by pushing out her lower lip and curling the upper one up on one side.
“Sure,” James said. “That’s what I said—dwarfs. I never met a bunch of dwarfs yet who knew how to get the best of goblins. The thing with dwarfs is, they just aren’t organized. What you ought to do is start a dwarfs’ union. Start an organized protest. Picket lines, sit-down strikes, that sort of thing. That would take care of those goblins. I mean, what are they going to do when the goblin parking lot is full of limp dwarfs.”
Griffin didn’t smile, at least not with her mouth. Laurel and Woody gazed at James with undisguised admiration. When they looked at Griffin, she nodded solemnly. “I’ll tell them,” she said. “I’ll tell the dwarfs what the prince said. It might help.”
After that the conversation got really far out, all about enchantments and curses and talking animals and haunted forests. It wasn’t too long before Woody began to run down. His eyes drooped, and he seemed about to keel over. When Griffin suggested he lie down and rest, he didn’t argue. On their way back to the living room James asked, “How come he’s Woody Westmoreland? Isn’t he your brother?”
There was a difference in the tone of Griffin’s voice as she answered. “He’s my half-brother. We had different fathers. Our mother is Alexandra Griffith. That is, she was until she married my father.” They’d reached the living room, and Griffin stopped to pick up a pair of blue jeans. She wadded them into a ball, clutched them against her chest and looked down at them instead of at James as she asked, “Have you heard of Alexandra Griffith?”
The definite difference in her face aroused his curiosity. “No,” he said, watching her closely. “I don’t think so. Why? Should I have?”
She shrugged. “I just thought you might.”
Still wondering about the tight look around her eyes and mouth, he probed further. “But your name is Donahue?”
“Yes. My father was Kevin Donahue. He got killed in an accident, and after that my mother married Woodrow Everett Westmoreland the Second. Woody is the third.”
“I’m sorry. About your father.”
She shrugged again. “It was a long time ago. I can barely remember him. She was still looking down; and without being able to see her eyes, it was impossible to tell whether the tension in her face and voice was sorrow or anger or something else.
“Where are your parents now?” he asked, hoping to make her look up.
“In Reno. They go to Reno a lot when we’re staying at The Camp. They have some friends there, and Wes, that’s my stepfather, likes to gamble.”
“Does he work there? In Reno?”
“No. He doesn’t work anywhere, really. At least not very much. He has to go to San Francisco sometimes to see about money. His lawyer and stockbroker and people like that. But he doesn’t really work.”
“Do they know about Woody?”
At last she looked up. “What about Woody?” she said sharply.
“Do they know he’s sick? It seems to me they’d like to be here until he gets to feeling better.”
She turned away. “Oh that. That’s all right. They knew he was sick. He gets tonsillitis all the time, and he always gets better after a few days. Usually we have a live-in who takes care of us when they go away, but the last one left and they couldn’t get anyone new in time. But it’s all right. Woody hates most of them. He’d rather just have me take care of him.”
She walked to the glass wall and stood staring out, still clutching the wadded-up blue jeans, like a kid with a security blanket. James followed her, still trying to think of something to say that might change her mood. But the difference was still there, and it felt defensive now, suspicious, as if she were holding back, shutting him out as a person not to be trusted. Her surprisingly immediate acceptance of him as friend and fellow pipe dreamer was just as suddenly gone, and the more he tried to get it back by showing that he was interested and sympathetic, the more distant she seemed to become.
Suddenly, without more than a moment’s consideration of the consequences, he found himself saying, “Hey. Would you like to see something really amazing? I found this secret valley…” He’d barely gotten started when he was sorry, when he knew it might be an awful mistake; but by then it was too late to stop. She was looking at him again, and her odd, oblong eyes were back to their normal high voltage.
“There’s a deer,” he said. “Not an ordinary deer—”
But just then Laurel came running down the hall. James shook his head. “Later,” he said, but the die was cast, and before he left he’d told her all about the deer and promised to take her to see him.
That night, while he was helping Charlotte clean up the kitchen, he was thinking about it, about what he had done and about Griffin, herself—and the strange way she reacted to any mention of her parents.
“Have you ever heard of anybody named Alexandra Griffith?” he asked.
“Griffith?” Charlotte said. “Alexandra? Oh yes, of course. The Griffith heiress. I haven’t heard much about her lately but back ten or fifteen years ago she was constantly in the public eye—newspapers, magazines, television.”
“Why? What did she do?”
Charlotte, who could be very critical of people whose foibles she didn’t approve of, curled her lip. “Nothing,” she said. “As far as I can remember, not a damn thing. Except to have been born rich and beautiful, and extraordinarily uninhibited. She was just a debutante who went around doing shocking things and making scandalous statements to the press—mostly to get attention, no doubt. Then she got married. Ran off and married some playboy daredevil—raced cars and airplanes—something like that. For a while after that they were both in the news, but then there was an accident. If I remember correctly, the husband was killed and she just barely lived through it.”
“Was his name Donahue?”
“I think it was, now that you mention it. How did you happen to hear about them? It all happened years ago.”
“Well, Alexandra Griffith lives at The Camp. Only she’s married to someone else. Her name is Westmoreland now.”
“Really?” Charlotte seemed to be quite impressed. “Did you hear that, William? That Griffith girl, well, woman now, is living—”
William, who was reading a book at the kitchen table, put a finger on his place and looked up, but you could tell by his unfocused eyes that he wasn’t really hearing. “Never mind, darling,” Charlotte said, “I’ll tell you later.”
She went back to the dishpan then, and James finished drying the pots and pans. But later, when he was on his way to his room, he made a sudden detour into the sunporch that William was using for a study and flipped open the dogeared Webster’s Unabridged. Back in his own room he made a notation on a three-by-five card from his da Vinci file. “Griffin,” he wrote, “also Griffon or Gryphon. A fabulous creature half-lion and half-eagle.” After a moment he added, “Half daring debutante and half dead daredevil. Given to telling fantastic lies with great sincerity and the truth as if it were a dangerous secret.” Then he filed the card under G.