During those days, the strange clench on Sia’s house often relaxed for long periods, though it never went away altogether. Farrell was amazed at how easily he became accustomed to the change in pressure, although to walk through the front door was like plunging fathoms deep under the sea, and his head hurt constantly when he was there. But in a short time, it became merely another condition of that unlikely house, like the mockingly mobile windows and the room so far above stairs[abovestairs?] where Sia waited for her son to come to her. Always, after a slack period, the grip would return with an abrupt viciousness that made the walls twang and the fireplace bricks whimper against one another, while Briseis only touched down once on her way to the backyard. At such times, the house smelled strongly of dry thunder, more faintly of rotting fruit.
Sia rarely left the room upstairs anymore. Farrell set out several times to hunt for her, but Briseis would never guide him again, and he never got as far as the servants’ stair. When she did come down, she moved in the house like a bear half-roused from hibernation, focusing on no one living, bumping hard into furniture, if not watched carefully. Suzy McManus could not endure to see her so, but burst into tears each time Sia wandered past without taking any notice of her. Eventually she stopped coming to the house, as client or as housekeeper, though she telephoned every day to ask after Sia.
Farrell saw something like recognition in Sia’s face whenever they met, but no acknowledgment of secrets shared, nor of any tender acquaintance. Her eyes were terrifyingly alive, crowded to blindness with the memories of a black stone, and Farrell could not look into them any longer than he had been able to look out through them. In his mind he said to her, over and over, I will not forget, you will forget before I will, and once he thought that she nodded as she climbed away from him again, struggling wearily back up to her one safe place, which did not exist anywhere.
Between them, he and Ben worked out a schedule, making certain that she would never be left alone in the house. Farrell had broached the subject differently[diffidently?] during another silent dinner, but Ben’s reaction was surprisingly swift and precise, and more realistic than his own. “It won’t make a damn bit of difference, you know that, Joe. This is not exactly keeping an eye on Grandma so she doesn’t fall down in the bathroom. We can’t protect her, we can’t do a thing for her. We’re doing this to comfort ourselves and for no other reason. Just so you know that.”
“I know it,” Farrell said, briefly irritable. “I know who’s after her and what they want—I even know why you can’t ever pop your ears in this joint. Have you noticed that it plays hell with the TV reception, by the way? I haven’t been sure what you think about lately.”
“What I think is that it must take one hell of a lot of concentration to keep this up, even for Aiffe. I don’t see how she’ll be able to think about the Whalemas Tourney and Sia at the same time.”
“I don’t suppose that matters very much, either. Nicholas Bonner can.” Getting up to wash the dishes, he said over his shoulder, “You’re feeling a little better, aren’t you? I mean, about Egil.”
Ben was silent for almost as long a time as it took the idiot echoes of that question to fade inside Farrell’s head. He said at last, “I don’t know how I feel about anything, Joe. I mostly know how Egil Eyvindsson feels. He may be dead, but I know him, I am him, he’s still real, and Ben Kassoy is something I have to think about and act out. Right now, sitting here, I’m acting, trying to remember how Ben is supposed to hold his face when he talks, and what he does with his hands.” He laughed suddenly, adding, “Maybe I could get a grant. I had one when I was studying Egil in the first place.” Through the window over the sink Farrell saw two small neighbor children trying to get Briseis to play with them, toddling after her in the smudgy lavender sunset.
Ben said, “Egil was my sanity. The real crazies go to meetings, teach what they love to people who don’t love anything, and stand around at receptions for years with other crazy people who never do give a shit about them. And they don’t know what anything is, just what everybody thinks it’s like. Egil knows—knew, Egil knew what poetry is, and what God is, and what death is. I’d just rather be Egil, but what I’m going to be is the head of the Lit Board next year.” Farrell turned to look at him and saw the same lost hunger in his face that he himself felt for other summer twilights and the tall fathers watching from other windows. Ben said, “I was having a good time, Joe. I’ll never have a good time like that again. Just tenure.”
The schedule was easy and uneventful to maintain, and, as Ben had predicted, completely unnecessary. Aiffe and Nicholas Bonner made no approach to the house, though Ben and Farrell juggled night watches as well as seminars and rehearsals and slept in their clothes like firemen. Sia appeared to notice the new surveillance no more than she noticed anything else human, which made it even more surprising when she insisted that Ben accompany Farrell to the Whalemas Tourney. He tried to make a joke out of his refusal, saying, “You had me dragging after him all through that stupid goddamn war on the island, and he didn’t even have the grace to get killed. Enough, already, he can take care of himself.”
But there was no arguing with her; she said only, “I need to be alone and I am too tired to make up a good lie for you. Watch those two at the tournament, if you like, and if they leave while it is still going on, then you may come back here. Otherwise, you are to stay until everything is over.” She was mumbling from far away, sounding almost apologetic in the face of Ben’s anger and distress, but there was no arguing with her.
From the first, the tourney had always begun at noon on the front lawn of the Waverly Hotel. Farrell went in slashed blue trunk-hose and a jade-green velvet doublet; but Ben, going under protest, wore sneakers, jeans, a felt fishing hat, and a ragged denim jacket over a T-shirt bearing a family portrait of the Borgias. “I don’t dress up anymore. This is the Whalemas Tourney, I can wear any damn thing I feel like.” Looking back at the house as Madame Schumann-Heink grumbled flatulently away down Scotia Street, he said absently, “Like your threads, though. Early Burt Lancaster, very rich period. Very classy.”
“Julie gave them to me,” Farrell said. “Ben, I know she won’t be all right without us, but she’ll be the way she wants to be. We have to honor that, just to comfort ouselves.”
Ben said, “Farrell, when I want California pieties, you’ll be the first I’ll ask.” They drove the rest of the way in silence, until, nearing the Waverly, he asked a very different question rather gently. “How’s she doing, by the way, Julie? You guys talking to each other at all?”
“We call,” Farrell said. “Micah sleeps a lot. Sometimes he has terrible nightmares and then he cries for hours. But he knows who he really is and what century he’s really in. We progress.”
“We certainly do. He’s already overqualified to be President. Will she be coming to the Tourney?”
Farrell shook his head. “She’s like you, it would take Sia to make her go. And she’s got this other person to take care of, and I am being civilized about it. I cannot believe how civilized I am being.”
“Um. Egil didn’t think much of our civilization, the little he saw of it. He thought it was probably all right, for people who really didn’t care a lot about anything.”
There was no parking left at the Waverly, and they were lucky to find curb space two blocks away. The great front lawn was sown with pavilions extending in wildflower clumps and surges across the courtyard, past the triton fountain and around to the rear of the hotel, overflowing the ornamental carriageways into the parking lot. The standards and blazons of the high nobles—the Nine Dukes and three or four others—were displayed in a grand arc facing the lists—an open stretch of greensward, bounded only by the lords’ pavilions and, at the far end, the gilded double throne—half porch swing, half howdah—in which King Bohemond and Queen Leonora would sit. There were merchants’ and craftsmens’ booths and the usual small dais for the musicians. Bright skeins of pennons and ensigns frisked up from many of the tents directly to the awnings and window ledges of the Waverly, so that the Tourney appeared to be a true part of the castle itself—a summer dishevelment, a careless unraveling of austere towers. The banner of the League—a crowned golden Sagittarius on a field of midnight blue—floated from the highest turret of the Waverly.