Meet the Austins (12 page)

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Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: Meet the Austins
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“You mean that old snake I showed you?” John said.
“Yes. Did you take it, John?”
“I didn't do anything with it,” John said. “I left it right on the stone wall where it was when I showed it to you.”
“But I took it,” Suzy said. “I put it in the bottom bureau drawer of the bureau in the guest room—your room. I knew you weren't using that drawer and Maggy made a fuss about having it in our room, and I thought it would be safe there. And now it's gone. I went to see if it was all right but it wasn't there.” Suddenly she turned and glared at Sally. “Did you move my snake?”
“Wild horses wouldn't make me touch a snake,” Sally said. “It was there last night.”
“You mean you saw it?”
“I saw it indeed.”
“Was he all right?” Suzy asked passionately.
Aunt Elena had come in. “We didn't examine him very thoroughly, Suzy darling,” she said. “I was unpacking Sally's clothes and I really didn't think she'd want them on a dead snake, so after dinner I got your father to remove it.”
“Remove it!” Suzy wailed. “But what did Daddy
do
with it?”
Mother came in from the kitchen now, too. “Suzy, what is all this? Why were you keeping a dead snake in the guest room?”
“To hatch!” Suzy cried.
Uncle Douglas was the first of us to realize quite how serious Suzy was. “Suzy,” he said gently, instead of laughing as John and Maggy and I were doing, “how was it going to hatch? What was it going to hatch into?”
Suzy had started to cry. “Into a butterfly. A beautiful, big butterfly. You know, like a caterpillar. I know snakes must do something like that because last summer John showed me where a snake had left its skin on the wall, and I thought if I put it in the drawer where it was safe and quiet and dark it would be like a cocoon for it, and it would hatch into a b-but-butterfly.” She was sobbing so hard now that she couldn't talk, and she ran and flung her arms around Mother.
Mother held her tight and stroked her head and said, “Oh, Suzy, Suzy darling.”
And Suzy sobbed, “It would have been such a big and beautiful butterfly.”
“Darling,” Mother said, “the snake was dead. And snakes aren't like caterpillars. They shed their skins, but they don't weave cocoons or grow into butterflies.”
“But it might have!” Suzy cried. “How do you
know
? It was a scientific speriment. Daddy says you never find out anything except by scientific speriments.” And she began to sob again.
Sally said, “Oh, really!” And even if we'd thought Suzy was silly up to then, we stopped thinking it.
Aunt Elena said, “I know what, let's all sing!”
Mother had lit the two candles in the big silver candlesticks on the piano, and Aunt Elena sat down at the piano and started to play “Oh, Susannah,” especially for Suzy, and Mother started singing,
“Oh, Susannah, don't you cry for me,”
and we all joined in, and then everybody was singing, one song after another—everybody except Sally.
“Why isn't Sally singing?” Rob asked.
“Maybe she doesn't know the songs,” Mother said.
“Get your guitar, Victoria,” Aunt Elena said, and Mother went and got her guitar and played along with Aunt Elena, and Uncle Douglas got the recorder he gave me for Christmas, which I wasn't very good at yet (he wasn't, either, but he had lots of fun with it), and Rob ran to the kitchen and came back with a saucepan for a drum. And Suzy forgot her snake. And we all forgot completely about Sally sitting silently on the sofa and not singing.
 
Daddy called around six to see how we were. The phone was really crackling by then, and I gave it to Mother because I could hardly hear him. She kept saying, “What? What? Shout louder, Wally!” And she was shouting at the top of her lungs herself. She said Daddy was going to stay at the hospital a while longer because some people had been brought in whose car had turned over on the icy road, and as long as Uncle Douglas was with us, he probably wouldn't get home till morning. We had a nice dinner anyhow, and Mother was able to stop listening with one ear for Daddy because she knew he wasn't coming home. “Unless
they have some more emergencies, he'll probably have a better sleep at the hospital anyhow,” she said, “and heaven knows he needs it.”
She'd brought steaks up from the deep freeze and we cooked them over one of the fires, and there were the potatoes she'd baked in foil, and she'd made a big salad, and we ate on paper plates because, of course, there wasn't any water to wash dishes with, and it was all like a picnic and fun. At least, we children had fun, and Mother and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas seemed to be enjoying themselves, too.
But once, when all the grownups, even Sally, were out of the room, Maggy whispered, “I know I've seen her before, that Sally Hough. I know the name, too, but I can't think where.”
“But
think,
” Suzy demanded.
“I've been trying. She must be one of Mummie's friends. And she keeps on looking at me as though she knew me, too. I don't like her.”
None of us did.
We were already in our nightclothes, and Mother said we'd forget about brushing our teeth for one night, and then she had us all go to the bathroom, one after another, and then she took a bucket and filled it with water from the tub and threw it down the toilet, and that made the toilet flush. Rob was fascinated and wanted her to do it again, but she said he'd have to wait till morning.
It was Rob's and my turn to have prayers in our room. Mother left a candle burning on the bureau in the little girls' room (they
don't
like being referred to as the
little
girls but, after all, I'm three years older than Suzy and two years older
than Maggy) and she put a candle on the highboy in Rob's and my room and another candle on the bed table so she could read to us. A room looks very different by candlelight than it does by electric light. Our house is almost two hundred years old, and in winter, even with storm windows, there are drafts that get in at odd places. So the candles would flicker and flare up into long thin orange streamers of flame with a tiny bit of purple smoke curling up beyond, and then the wind would miss its crack and the flames would settle down to fat yellow glowings. By electric light I don't notice shadows very much, except when we play shadow games with our fingers, making rabbits and faces and things on the wall (Daddy and Uncle Douglas are the best at it). But when the candlelight flickered, the shadows moved and changed shapes. Sometimes the shadow of the lamp on the desk would be short and squat and sometimes it would seem to fly up and streak halfway across the ceiling.
Mother read to us, and then we said prayers. Rob asked God to help make the electricity get better and then he did all the family God Blesses and then he said, “And Sally—and Sally—oh, well, God, I s'pose you'd better bless Sally, even if we don't want her for an aunt. And, God, please don't let that moth on the ceiling eat my clothes. And bless me and make me a good boy. Amen.”
Mother brought her guitar and sang to us as a special treat. It had begun to get kind of cold upstairs by this time, since there aren't any fireplaces to help keep it warm. There were all those radiators and not a bit of warmth in any of them, and we never even think of them unless they stop working. Mother heaped extra blankets on all of us and went downstairs.
In the morning, even with all the blankets over me, I could tell that upstairs was really cold. My nose was about the only thing poking out of the covers and it was icy. I looked down at the foot of my bed to Rob's little bed, and I couldn't see him at all, but I knew he was in there because there was a mound of covers sticking up. The east window was completely coated with ice; you couldn't see out at all. But you could hear that the ice was still beating against it, sharp and cold.
When Mother comes up to bed at night she puts out our clothes for morning. She had put out ski clothes for us, warm outdoor clothes, and as I got up and dressed I knew we'd need them. When I was dressed I fished Rob out from under the covers and dressed him quickly, and we ran downstairs.
John and Uncle Douglas were feeding the fires and Mother had managed to make instant cocoa for us in the big fireplace. Aunt Elena had bread on a long fork and was toasting it for Suzy and Maggy, who were already down. Sally had not yet appeared.
When I looked out the south and west windows I could see that the rain had stopped falling. It was ice falling from the trees, from the roof, that I had heard hitting against the windows. There were lots of little branches and quite a few big ones from the elms on the ice-covered lawn. A big branch was split off the oldest and loveliest of the apple trees down in the orchard. And out the kitchen windows I could see that the two birch trees were bent all the way down to the ground in two iced arcs, and the little pines we put in last summer were all bowed down with ice.
We didn't sit around the table for breakfast, but stayed at
the big fireplace in the living room. Aunt Elena said to Mother, “Now, look, Victoria, I couldn't be happier than I am here, ice or no ice, marrow congealed in my bones or no, but as you know, it is imperative that I get back to New York tonight. Wally suggested that I take the early train. What about it?”
Uncle Douglas said, “And since Sally feels that she has accomplished her mission in coming here, we might as well go down on the early train, too.”
Accomplished her mission? What did Uncle Douglas mean by that?
Aunt Elena put her hand on his knee and said, “I'm sorry, Doug. It was really my fault.”
And John said glumly, “No, it was my idea.”
“It was nobody's fault,” Mother said briskly, “and nobody can foretell the final results. As for the early train, the roads aren't bad today. They've been sanded and it isn't raining any more.”
“But if everybody goes at once,” Aunt Elena said, “it'll mean that Victoria has to drive home from the station alone, and I don't think Wallace would like that.”
“I won't be alone,” Mother said. “I'll have five children with me.”
“And if Sally had her way, it'd be four,” John muttered in my ear.
“What on earth is all this—” I started.
John said, “Shush, I'll tell you in a minute,” and then the phone rang, a funny sort of squawk, not a proper ring at all, and Mother got up to answer it. She kept shouting, “I can't hear you! What? What?” and finally she gave up and hung up.
“That was Wallace,” she said. “At least, I think it was. I didn't get a single word, but the voice sounded familiar. And I don't think he heard me at all. Okay, Doug and Elena. If you're going to go I think we'd better get ready. We need to give ourselves twice as much time as usual, though I'm sure the trains will be running late. Elena, you'd better go upstairs and wake Sally. Children, get your beds made, please.”
 
John said, “Vicky, come help me with mine and Uncle Douglas's, and I'll help you with yours and Rob's.” We went into the study and John said, “Now, you must promise not to say anything to the little ones, because Mother doesn't want them upset, but she said I could tell you.”
“Tell me what?” I demanded. “What is all this?”
“I came down early this morning,” John said, “and it was just Mother and me building up the fires, and she told me what happened last night.”
“But
what
happened?”
“Hold on, I'm trying to tell you! Well, you see, Sally isn't Uncle Douglas's girlfriend at all.”
“What a relief! She isn't? Whose girlfriend is she?”
“Nobody's, as far as I can guess. She's Mr. Ten Eyck's niece. She's a cousin of Maggy's.”
“Of Maggy's!”
“Yes. That was why Maggy knew her. She'd met her at her grandfather's.”
“But if she's a cousin of Maggy's, what was she doing here, and with Uncle Douglas?”
“That's just the point. She was inspecting us for Mr. Ten
Eyck, to see if we were fit people for Maggy to stay with. And Sally decided that she could inspect us better if we didn't know who she was or why she'd come.”
“What a dirty trick!”
“Well, sure, but I see her point.”
“We fouled it up all right,” I said, and wondered why I wasn't gladder.
“Yeah. We sure did. Uncle Douglas said he never thought we'd
really
think she was one of his girlfriends. But I guess he doesn't realize that she isn't any more peculiar than lots of the others he's brought up. And, of course, he couldn't have known we'd come down to the station looking like that.”
“But why did he play along with the game?” I demanded. “Why didn't he just stop it right away?”

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