Free Endless Things by John Crowley Page B

pillars, then the heads of idols: so, the ground we stand on is not the floor of earth, there are floors beneath us. Look, now it's coming clear as the wind, what a wind, pushes the sand away: it's a door, like a cellar door, a black block, and in its center a ring to grasp and pull it up by. Barr knew that when it was lifted there would be stairs that led down, and those stairs would lead somewhere we can't help but go.
    A little later that day, in Barr's house up on the heights of the Morningside Hills, where many famed scholars and teachers live backyard to backyard, Taffy B. Barr stood before her open refrigerator, one arm akimbo. On the counter by her lay a heap of tomatoes, a brain-shaped cauliflower, a cantaloupe and a clutch of beets with spreading red-veined greens. She had forgotten why she had opened the refrigerator and was pondering or pausing to see if the reason would return to her when the phone rang. She shut the great vault (the light within winking off and plunging the foodstuffs within again into darkness) and answered. It was Frank, calling from his office, with a plan to announce.
    "Frank, let's talk,” she said when he paused.
    "We're talking."
    "At dinner."
    "I need to find my passport,” he said. “I move it from place to place in order to remember where I put it, but it associates logically with nothing else. It's sui generis."
    "Frank. It's a bad idea."
    "It's a good idea. My best in months."
    "Okay. We'll talk."
    "Love you."
    "Love you too."
    Taffy hung up the phone; she looked up at the clock on the wall (a Regulator) and down at the vegetables on her counter, and remembered: aioli.
    She'd tried, his good wife, at dinner that night and at the breakfast and lunch that followed, to talk him out of it, and failed. And so (Frank Barr in Kennedy Airport said to himself) the youth arose, and took a plane. No youth any longer, but still hale; he patted ritually the pocket where his pills were kept.
    He would stop in Athens and be met there by an old—no, better say a former —graduate student of his, a woman dark and sloe-eyed enough to be Greek but in fact a Jewess from Schenectady. Zoe. Zoe mu sas agapo . Thence to Egypt, from where the gods of Greece had come at first, where the Greek wise men used to go to consult with the priests of Isis and Osiris, to sleep in the temples of Asclæpius and there dream a good dream. His colleagues had written that they might leave the conference for a day or two, rent a Land Rover, hire a guide. Make an expedition up the Nile to the temple island of Philæ. Would Frank like to come? He would. And may he (Frank Walker Barr prayed, to no particular god or goddess) dream there a good dream of his own.

 
    6
    Rosie—I am going on the train today to meet Frances Yates, Dame Frances Yates, you've heard me talk about her. If anybody can tell me what I'm supposed to do next, she can. She lives with her sister and her dogs and cats an hour from London, and we're to have tea. I can't explain here how it happened. Excuse the postcard. Pierce
    "Now tell me where you've been,” she said, clasping her hands before her as though in supplication. “And where you mean to go."
    Everyone who's seen her says she looked just like Margaret Rutherford, but in her shabby overcoat buttoned one button wrong (she'd just come in from the potting shed) and her hair coming loose from its great pins, she was the White Queen more exactly.
    "Well,” Pierce said, “I've been to Glastonbury, and..."
    "You've bean to Glostonbrie?” Her mobile eyebrows rose. “Why, you might be in search of the Grail."
    He had gone to Glastonbury, the first of all his memory places, or Kraft's, starred in the guide, and site of more than one scene in Kraft's last novel. The Isle of Avalon. He would enter many churches in the coming months, very many, and of them all it was this ruined one alone that didn't inspire in him an awful trepidation: guilt, threat, pity. Its nave and transept frozen grass, its lead