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Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: Meet the Austins
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“That's what Mother and Aunt Elena asked him. But he said the damage had already been done, with us arriving at the station looking like that, and it was the only way he could see to make the weekend any fun at all, and he hoped all along that maybe Sally would turn out to have a sense of humor after all.”
“But she didn't,” I said, yanking John's top sheet straight.
“No. I think it was Suzy's snake that finished her. I guess she was pretty awful to Mother and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas last night. She wanted to take Maggy right back to New York with her today. She said that if Mr. Ten Eyck couldn't take her, then she'd offer her a home herself.”
“So I guess Maggy won't be with us much longer,” I said.
John pulled up the blankets and pounded at them sort of absentmindedly. “Looks that way. Are you glad?”
“Not as glad as I thought I'd be,” I said.
“Neither am I. I think she's sort of changed in the last few weeks. I mean, she's more like just any other little girl instead of being so—so ubiquitous.”
“Ubiquitous” is one of John's pet long words and it's a good one for Maggy. It means being everywhere, or sort of seeming to be all over the place at the same time. And that's how Maggy did seem. There always seemed to be more of her in the house than the four of us put together.
“I guess I'm really sorry for her now,” I said. “I wasn't at first. But I am now.” And it was true. Now I could empathize with her.
“It's like sending her to the lions,” John said. “Can you imagine what it would be like to live with Sally? Jeepers, Vicky, we
should
have known right from the start she couldn't have been one of Uncle Douglas's girlfriends! Uncle Douglas's really goofed on some of them, but Sally just isn't his kind of goof.”
“But even Mother and Daddy didn't guess about her,” I said. “Oh,
poor
Maggy! I mean, we aren't perfect, but it's always pretty nice around our house.”
“I'll feel kind of awful if it's all because of my idea she gets sent away,” John said.
“I don't think Sally would have approved of us anyhow,” I tried to comfort him. “There'd have been the snake, and the power going off.”
“We couldn't help the ice storm!” John was indignant.
“I'm sure Sally thinks we could. And we're always noisy. And she didn't like it when we all sang.”
“Well …” John said. And then, “Uncle Douglas says that he feels that certain things are meant, and what's to be will be about Maggy, no matter what Sally says to Mr. Ten Eyck.”
“I wish Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena could get married,” I said. “Then Maggy could live with them. That's what Maggy's father wanted, anyhow, for her to be with Aunt Elena.”
We finished the beds and then went into the kitchen. Uncle Douglas was saying to Mother, “Victoria, you are undoubtedly the worst mother in the world, but I love you anyhow.”
And Mother got kind of indignant and said, “Come, now, I don't think I'm all that bad.”
And Uncle Douglas gave her a big hug and said, “You can be the mother of my children if you like.”
Mother laughed and said, “That would hardly be proper,” and then Aunt Elena and Sally came into the kitchen, dressed to go, and Aunt Elena said, “Go see what's looking coyly in the bathroom window.”
 
None of us had been in the upstairs bathroom that morning, since it was so cold upstairs, so we all ran up like a small herd of elephants, and there, stuck right through the frozen screen, peered the television aerial!
Just before it was time to leave for the station I went into the hall toy closet to find something for Rob, and Sally drew Maggy away from the others and into the study. I could see them and hear them from where I was in the hall, and I have to admit right here and now that I just stayed and listened. I didn't actually eavesdrop, I just happened to be where I could hear. Or, let's face it, I guess it
was
eavesdropping, and I guess it was wrong, but I'm glad I didn't go away as I ought to have done, because it made me feel lots closer to Maggy.
“Margaret, dear,” Sally said, “don't you recognize me?”
“I think I know you,” Maggy said cautiously, “but I'm not sure who you are. Are you one of Mummie's friends?”
“I'm your mother's first cousin. I'm your Cousin Sally.”
“Oh,” Maggy said flatly.
“Aren't you glad to see me?”
“I don't know you very well,” Maggy said. “And if you're my cousin, why didn't you tell me before?”
“I wanted to see how you were getting on, and if you were happy. Margaret, dear, wouldn't you like to come live with me?”
“No,” Maggy said, and she didn't add “thank you.”
“But you know, dear, I'm your closest relative now, after your grandfather.”
“I don't know you nearly as well as I do Aunt Victoria and Uncle Wallace, or Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas.”
“They aren't your real aunts and uncles,” Sally said. I thought that was awful of her.
“They feel lots realer than you do,” Maggy said.
“Time to leave now,” Mother called just then.
We all piled into the station wagon and Mother drove us down to the station. Sally sat in front between Mother and Aunt Elena and hardly said a word. When we got to the station we found out that the train was going to be quite late, but the station was open and warm, and the electricity hadn't gone off down in Clovenford, so we left them sitting there to wait.
In the car on the way back up the hill Mother said, “Well, children, that will teach us to play practical jokes. They're almost always like boomerangs; they come back and hit you in the face.”
“But we didn't like Sally, any of us,” Maggy said. “It would be awful if she married Uncle Douglas.” I could see, then, why
Mother hadn't wanted the little ones to know who Sally was. Luckily, I don't think Maggy realized that Sally might be deciding her fate. I think she thought Sally really was Uncle Douglas's girlfriend; and just because she'd told Sally she didn't want to live with her, that would be the end of that. But I was afraid for her.
So we drove home. The roads were sanded and the car got covered with sand and the windshield splashed with mud so that the windshield wipers didn't do much good. The trees down in Clovenford weren't all iced, but just before we got back to Thornhill they started to be sheathed again, and we could see wires down all along the roadside and the Light and Power trucks working on them. Mother slowed down and asked one of the men when he thought the power would be back on, and he said, “Don't ask me, lady, but don't look for it before tomorrow.”
During the afternoon the wind shifted, swinging around from the southeast to the northwest, and the thermometer dropped down to a shivering ten degrees. Even when the furnace is working full time the house is coldest when the wind is blowing hard from the northwest. Mother stationed us in front of the fireplaces and we kept putting logs on and as long as we stayed right close we weren't too cold. Mother began to worry about the pipes, and she and John went upstairs and draped blankets over the radiators to try to keep them from freezing. The office phone rang once, but when we went to answer it, it was completely dead.
Have you ever noticed how things
look
different when it's terribly cold? I don't think it's imagination to say that things
look harder—the grasses and small trees especially. And things don't have as much color, they fade. Uncle Douglas says that this is observant of me, and absolutely true. And then there's the feel, the cold against your face as though your skin had been turned to polished metal. And I always feel, for some reason, terribly clean when it's specially cold. And all kinds of wood, trees, and the wood of the house creak and crack in protest.
About six o'clock Daddy walked in, and we all rushed at him and tried to climb up on him, until Mother shouted, “Children! Daddy's tired! Leave him alone!” And she sent us all to sit in front of the fireplace in the kitchen while she got dinner at the fireplace in the living room, and John and I knew she was telling Daddy about who Sally really was and everything that had happened.
We all went to bed early because in an ice storm that's the coziest, warmest thing to do.
 
I don't know how long we'd been asleep when I felt someone shaking me, and I opened my eyes and it was Mother, holding a flashlight. “Put something warm on, Vicky,” she said, “and come downstairs and see fairyland.”
I put on my bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and wrapped a blanket around myself and ran downstairs, and so did everybody else. Daddy had Rob rolled up in a blanket and was carrying him, which pleased Rob very much. We looked outdoors and the moon was high and full and it streamed through the trees and every single tiny twig was cased in ice and shimmered like diamonds. And the ground shimmered, too, because it was covered with spangles of ice. The two birches were twin shining
arcs of ice that seemed to be spraying off rays of light. As the wind shook the trees tiny bits of ice would break off and catch the moonlight as they fell to the ground. Little clouds scudded across the moon, and it made the moon look as though it were flying across the sky; and then the trees made long delicate shadows that came and went along the icy ground. It was so beautiful we couldn't speak, any of us. We just stood there and looked and looked. And suddenly I was so happy I felt as though my happiness were flying all about me, like sparkles of moonlight off the ice. And I wanted to hug everybody, and tell how much I loved everybody and how happy I was, but it seemed as though I were under a spell, as though I couldn't move or speak, and I just stood there, with joy streaming out of me, until Mother and Daddy sent us up to bed.
And I lay there in the dark and I was absolutely positive that God would not allow Maggy to be thrown to the lions.
 
The next morning the house was bone-cold, and not being able to run water and having to cook over the fireplace had lost its glamour. Rob was kind of whiny, and all of us felt a little cross. Mother said something to Daddy about sending us all somewhere where there was a coal furnace and we could warm up, but Daddy said that the power just had to come back on soon.
After breakfast we burned the paper plates and napkins and things, but even so the sink was full of the pots and pans Mother had had to use and hadn't been able to wash, and the whole house looked cold and kind of grimy. Daddy and John brought in loads of wood and stacked it by the fireplace.
Then, suddenly, all over the house, lights clapped back on,
and there was a sudden whirring and buzzing of noise as all the motors started, and we could feel the furnace throbbing in the cellar! Oh, what joy, what joy! We ran all over the house turning lights off, and then turning them on again, just to make sure they really did work. The water in the upstairs bathtub began to run as soon as the pump filled up the tank, and I turned the tap off and then just stood there and listened to the lovely banging of the pump and the thrum-thrum of the furnace and the rattle of the deep freeze. In the kitchen in short order Mother was doing dishes, doing one load of wash and drying another, and then she went to the vacuum cleaner, flying through the house putting it in order again, with the phonograph on full volume, loud cheerful music, Handel's
The Cuckoo and the Nightingale.
Gradually the house began to warm up and we started shedding sweaters and jackets. The office phone began to ring, so we knew the phone men were out working, too, and things were back to normal. Then the house phone rang, and it was Uncle Douglas, and he said, “Be of good cheer, little Vic. When Sally told her horrendous story to Mr. Ten Eyck he roared with laughter, so I think our little Maggy's safe for a while longer, at any rate. Now let me speak to your mother.”
I gave Mother the phone, and then I rounded up all the kids to play a game of hide-and-seek, because I was so happy I had to take it out in some kind of romp. And even two days before, if anyone had told me I'd be wild with delight because Maggy wasn't going to leave us, I don't think I'd have believed it!
E
very once in a while something happens to make you realize you don't know someone you thought you knew inside out. My brother John, for instance. John's always been my big brother, and I've admired him and loved him and hated him and fought with him and never thought much about him, simply because he's just John.
And our father. Daddy's a country doctor, and he's familiar and safe, and it's hard for us to realize that lots of people are afraid of him.
And Mother. She's just Mother to us, and that's enough.
So of course the John we see isn't the John anybody else sees, and that's a big thing to realize.
It started out with measles. All in one week John and Maggy and Suzy and Rob came down with measles, in chronological order.
I didn't, heaven knows why. So I helped Mother take care
of the others because she said there wasn't any point in trying to isolate me; I was already thoroughly exposed and I might as well make myself useful. This mostly meant taking care of Rob.
Everybody was miserable, everybody had a high fever, but Rob was the most miserable of all. His head ached and his eyes hurt and every part of him was uncomfortable, and any time Rob is hurt or sick he believes in letting everybody know about it. So this time he thought he was much sicker than the others, and Daddy said he was, a little, but not nearly as much as he thought he was.
John lay in the guest room with Rochester by his bed, when Rochester could be called away from Rob. Mother put up the dart board on the wall across from John's bed and he threw darts. And then he played records. He played Mother's records, and his album of country-and-western, and Mother said if she heard
The Gambler
one more time she'd break the record over his head, measles or no. He wanted to watch television, but the TV is downstairs and Daddy said it wasn't good for his eyes, which are a bit weak, anyhow. We seem to watch a lot less television than most of our friends, partly because our parents limit our watching, but largely because there's so much else to do.
Daddy brought home two small dolls for Maggy and Suzy and they lay in bed and played with the dolls and slept and complained. Suzy pretended both the dolls had smallpox and she was a famous doctor taking care of them during an outbreak of smallpox because, she said, people got careless about vaccinations, and it was a new strain. And she had Maggy's doll die of smallpox, and then Maggy shrieked and yelled and screamed
herself to a pulp, and Mother said Suzy would have to invent a new serum to resurrect Maggy's doll, and Suzy felt mean because she was sick, and she said the doll was dead and she was going to perform an autopsy, and Maggy leaped out of bed and grabbed Suzy's doll and pulled off one of its arms and they started to have a free-for-all, and Mother had to send Suzy into her and Daddy's bed to wait until Daddy came home.
And Rob just felt miserable. Mother was so busy with the others that I stayed with Rob. I drew the curtains at the windows and got my big soft quilt and rocked him and sang to him and told him stories, and Colette cuddled with us, too, and I discovered again how terribly much I love my bratty little brother.
So everybody got over measles and went back to school. The incubation period went by, and Daddy said, “Well, Vicky, it looks as though you have a natural immunity to measles.”
But the next day in school my head began to ache, and my eyeballs began to throb, and if you've never had measles you haven't any idea how awful you feel. So about eleven o'clock my teacher called Mother, and she and Rob got in the station wagon and came over and brought me home. Mother said, “Well, Vicky, it looks as though you weren't immune to measles after all, but you certainly waited till beyond the last minute to get them.”
I undressed and Mother turned down my bed and when I got in the sheets felt cool, and the pillow soft and good to my head. Rob brought me up a glass of ginger ale, and that tasted just perfect, and I felt quite cozy and contented. But then my head began throbbing and my eyeballs hurting and the pillow
was hot and the bed had lumps and the sheets instead of feeling smooth were suddenly scratchy, and I realized how good Rob had been while he was so miserable. And I was lucky because I was the only one who was sick, so Mother could pay more attention to me. She sat by the bed and stroked my head with cool fingers, and Rochester flopped down by the bed as much as to say he'd take care of me, too. When the others got back from school they came in and said they were sorry, because they knew how miserable I felt, and Suzy fixed my bed, straightened the sheets and turned the pillow so it felt cool again. When John got home from the Regional High School he said I could have the dart board; he'd put it up for me, but I didn't feel like throwing darts. I didn't feel like watching television. I didn't even feel like listening to Mother's records, so I knew I was really sick.
Rob went into the guest room with John that night so I wouldn't disturb him with my tossing and turning and my feverish bouncings, and so he wouldn't disturb me if he snored. But I was used to having Rob's small bed at the foot of my big pine bedstead. I didn't want him to go. I cried and that made my eyes worse. John came in to say good night and to bring me aspirin, and said, “I guess I was just lucky and didn't have it as bad as you, Vic. Even with my myopic eyes my head didn't ache much after the first day. Maybe you'll feel like playing darts or something tomorrow. I don't suppose you'd like me to set up my electric train in here where you can see it?”
John's electric train used to belong to Uncle Douglas, and it's got all kinds of cars and bridges and tunnels and bells and whistles and the thought of all the noise made me shudder, but
I tried to be nice about it because he meant it kindly. I hoped he wouldn't offer to reconstruct his space station for me.
I felt very sorry for myself. I thought it would have been much more fun to have had measles with everybody else, and if I'd had it then I wouldn't have been so sick; and Daddy wasn't home that evening and I wanted Daddy, and I resented Mother spending time with the others at bedtime. It was really rather nice while everybody else was sick and I was taking care of Rob, but it was awful with me being sick all by myself and everybody else feeling fine.
I tried to go to sleep but I kept bouncing around and the sheets got all messed up again and I needed Suzy to fix them, and the aspirin didn't seem to have helped at all. The hall light was on and a shadow moved across it, and then John was standing in the doorway. “It's me again,” he whispered. “Are you still awake?”
“How could I sleep when I feel so awful?” I asked. Maybe I was good when I was in the hospital after my bike accident, but I wasn't good about having measles.
“Mother wants to know if you want some more ginger ale.”
“I guess so.”
He was back in a moment with a cool, amber glass, and I rose up on one elbow and sipped at it and began to feel a little better. The light coming in from the hall was just enough light not to hurt my eyes, and John was standing there by the bed looking sorry for me, and that helped, too. John has a way of making people feel that he cares what happens to them; that's one of the nicest things about him, because it's true. He really does care.
“I've been out walking around the orchard,” John said.
“It's late.”
“Not that late. Just about eight-thirty, and it isn't even quite dark around the edges. It'll be summer before we know it. The apple blossoms are just about to burst open. I'll pick you a bunch of violets tomorrow to put on your bookcase. I stood there and watched the stars come out. If you hadn't been measly I'd have come and got you, they were so beautiful.”
“I've seen stars before,” I said shortly.
“It's a funny thing about problems and being sick and everything,” John said. “When you're in the middle of it, it seems so enormous, it seems the only thing in the world. But when you think of the relativity of size it doesn't seem to matter, after all.”
“Having measles matters to me even if it doesn't seem to matter to anyone else,” I said stuffily. “Anyhow, what do you mean by the relativity of size?”
John went to the east window and pushed aside the curtains. Our house is a hundred miles outside the city, so there are few lights to dim the stars. “Look at that star up there. Bright and beautiful, but it's only a pinprick in the sky. If it has planets we can't see them. And then look at our own solar system.”
“You look at it,” I said, irritated.
John continued, undaunted. “We're on part of it right now. The earth. Just a small sphere, one of—how many planets is it? I forget.”
We'd had it in school the year before, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, planetoids, Saturn, oh—what comes next,
is it Pluto? I stuck my face in the pillow and mumbled, “I couldn't care less.”
“Just one of maybe a dozen planets of assorted size circling about a larger ball that's our sun,” John said. “And then think of the atoms that go to make everything up. That go to make
us
up.”
“You think—” I started.
But John said quickly, “Shut up, Vicky, and listen. Do you realize that your body is made up of millions of atoms, and each one is a tiny solar system? And maybe some of these solar systems are like the larger one we live on. Maybe some of them have inhabited planets with flourishing civilizations. It's all a question of the relativity of size. We really don't know anything about size except that we don't understand it at all.”
I shivered. I was hot with fever but I shivered anyhow. “Shut up. You make me feel as though I'm mostly thin air, when I think about being made out of atoms. And now to be made of inhabited planets—of all the idiotic notions, John Austin. What does that make me, a galaxy? Galaxy Austin, that's me.”
“Well,” John said, “Mother said I was just to give you the ginger ale and see if I could help make you more comfortable for the night. She or Daddy'll look in on you later. Here, I'll straighten out your bed, you've got it all messed up.” He pulled the bottom sheet from both sides till it was taut under me—my bed's an odd size that doesn't take fitted sheets—and turned over my pillow, and it felt better. Then he said good night and left me, not a bit cross at me because of my bad temper, as I'd been at him the night he had flu.
But that's what I mean about John. Things like that. Like
talking to me about stars and the relativity of size and stuff. The other kids, the ones we go to school with, don't talk like that. It's not that John does it often, but he does it. It's partly, I suppose, because Mother and Daddy discuss things at the dinner table. And then Daddy belongs to a group of doctors that get together once a month to discuss things, not medicine, but philosophy and economics and stuff like that, and Daddy has been letting John sit and listen in when the meetings are at our house. But what I mean is, we're used to John. Until you get to really know John he can be difficult, but he's handsome and bright and infuriating and peculiar and our brother and we take him for granted.
But he isn't like anybody else's brother, and the other kids don't see him the way we do. One thing that has been a big help to him is having Dave Ulrich for a friend. Dave is a head shorter than John, but he's built like a bull; he's nearly two years older than John, but they're in the same grade, and it sort of makes John seem more okay to be seen with Dave. He and Dave don't discuss things; Dave's not a talker. They
do
things together. When they were little they started to dig a hole that would go all the way down to China. They dug in Dave's back yard and they got down ten feet before Mr. Ulrich decided it was dangerous and ordered them to quit.
Then they built the tree house in our big maple, and they took a couple of old bikes and two old lawn mowers they bought for ten dollars and made a car that would run. Dave isn't very smart at school. I don't mean he's dumb or anything; his I.Q.'s probably fine. He just doesn't care about books unless he's looking something up about how to build one of his
machines. This means he's okay in anything that's mathematical, but he'd probably flunk everything else if John didn't push him through. Dave's father has a big lumber business, and Dave's going to go in with him as soon as he gets out of high school, though I know Mrs. Ulrich wishes he'd study enough to go to college.
Schoolwork's always been easy for John. Lots of kids hide their report cards because they aren't very good, but John doesn't want people to see his because they're too good. He says it's bad enough being so nearsighted he can't see the blackboard without his glasses, so he's already pegged as being an egghead.
Suzy and I get good report cards, too, but not as good as John's. I'm good at English and spoken reports and history, but I have a terrible struggle with math. Suzy's memory will pull her through almost anything, and she says she has to get in the habit of getting reasonable report cards if she wants to get into medical school—and she does. Suzy and John have always known what they want to do when they're grown up; John wants to go into space in some way or other, and he's already reading a lot of astrophysics. And Suzy's wanted to be a doctor ever since she could talk. As for me—what? I wish I knew.

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