Meet the Austins (3 page)

Read Meet the Austins Online

Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: Meet the Austins
7.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
A little green snake wriggled across the road in front of me, and I thought how thrilled Rob would be if he were along. Almost every day all summer he would go up the lane hunting for a turtle to bring home as a pet. We never found a turtle, but we've seen lots of deer, and a woodchuck that lives in the old stone wall by the brook, and any number of rabbits; and once we saw a red fox.
When I got home, Uncle Douglas's red car was parked outside the garage behind our station wagon, so I knew they were there.
And suddenly I felt very funny about going in, and took twice as long as I needed to put my bike in the shed. I hung my jacket up in the back-hall closet and picked up Suzy's and Rob's jackets, which they'd evidently hung on the floor, and put them on hangers—anything to put off opening the back door and going into the kitchen.
Why was I so shy about seeing Aunt Elena and meeting Maggy, or even saying hello to Uncle Douglas again when I'd been talking with him only the night before?
Finally there was nothing to do except open the door and go in, so I did. And instead of finding the kitchen full of everybody as it usually is at that time of day, I saw Aunt Elena standing in front of the stove alone. She turned to greet me and she said immediately and briskly, “Ah, Vicky, you've saved me. I am not ten feet tall like your mother and I cannot reach the coffee.”
So I didn't have to say anything. I didn't even have to kiss her, which would have been the easiest thing in the world to do up to the time the telephone rang the day before and which now seemed to take more courage than I possessed. I pulled a stool over to the stove and climbed up on it and got the can of coffee.
“No, the other one,” Aunt Elena said. “I promised your mother I'd make some café espresso for after dinner.”
And all I could say was, “Oh.” I stood there, watching her. She didn't look any different; she looked just the same way she had a few weeks before, when she and Uncle Hal were up for the weekend; and yet she wasn't the same person at all. She stood there in her black dress measuring coffee, wearing black
not because of Uncle Hal but because she is a city person and she looks beautiful in black and wears it a great deal. Her hair is black, too, and in one portrait Uncle Douglas painted of her he used great enormous globs of blue and green in the hair, and, funnily enough, when it was done it was exactly right. We have a lovely portrait of Mother Uncle Douglas painted, and he's painted quite a few others of her, too, and one is in a museum. Uncle Douglas says he paints only beautiful women. But, he says, beautiful is not pretty. I don't really know whether Mother is beautiful or not. To me she looks exactly the way a mother should look, but only in the portrait where she's holding Rob just a few weeks after he was born does Uncle Douglas see her the way I do.
Aunt Elena doesn't look like a mother at all—and, of course, she isn't. Her black hair falls loose to her shoulders and she always looks to us as though she were dressed to go to a party. When she plays with us we always have a wonderful time, but it's as though we were brand new to her each time, not as though she were used to being around children at all. Uncle Hal, with his big booming laugh and the way he could roughhouse with us all, was quite different. I thought of Uncle Hal and remembered that I would never see him again, and I looked at Aunt Elena, and it was as though it were terribly cold and my sorrow was freezing inside me so that I couldn't speak.
 
John came in just then, bursting in through the kitchen door with his jacket still on and his face so pink from the cold that the lenses of his glasses began to steam up from the warmth of the kitchen.
John and I fight a lot, but I have to admit that John is the nicest one of us all. He seems to know what to do and say to people without having to think about it, and whenever there are elections and things John always gets elected president. So now he was able to do what I wanted to do and knew I ought to do and simply couldn't do. He went right up to Aunt Elena and put his arms around her and hugged her hard and kissed her. He didn't say anything about Uncle Hal, but it was perfectly obvious exactly what he was saying. For a moment Aunt Elena sort of clung to him, and then, just as I thought maybe she was going to start to cry, John took his arms away and said, “Aunt Elena, you're the only person around here who can untie knots, and my shoelace is all fouled up. Could you untie it for me?” And he yanked off his shoe and handed it to her.
Now, I am very good at untying knots and I always untie John's knots for him and I started to say so, indignantly, but then I realized what John was doing and I shut my mouth, just in time. Aunt Elena bent over John's shoe, and the tears that had been starting in her eyes went back, and when she handed John the shoe she smiled and looked like herself.
“Where's everybody?” John demanded.
“Your mother's out picking carrots,” Aunt Elena said.
“Oh, no, not carrots again.” John groaned. “I wish Rob had never planted those carrots. Where're the kids?”
“Your Uncle Douglas took them for a walk.”
“What's for dinner—other than carrots? Carrot sticks this time, I hope. We had 'em cooked last night.” He went over to the stove, lifted the lid off a big saucepan, and sniffed. “Um, spaghetti. Garlic bread?”
“But of course,” Aunt Elena said as Mother came in, her arms full of carrots.
I was helping Mother scrape the carrots when there came the sounds of shouting and talking and then in they came, seeming like a whole horde of children instead of just three and Uncle Douglas.
And a dark-haired little girl came dancing in, screaming shrilly, “You can't catch me! You can't catch me!” and went dancing around the table, Suzy and Rob after her, and, of course, Rochester came dashing in to see what was going on and knocked over a chair, and the little girl knocked over another chair, not because she was clumsy, like Rochester and me, but because she wanted to hear the crash.
“All right,” Mother said, far more pleasantly than she would have if it had been just us or one of our friends from around here, “this furniture has to last us for quite a long while. Let's keep the rougher kind of roughhousing for outdoors, shall we?”
And the little girl paid absolutely no attention. “C'mon, Suzy, chase me!” she shrieked, and knocked over another chair.
Mother's voice was still pleasant but considerably firmer. “Maggy, I said not in here, please. Suzy and Rob, pick up the chairs. Maggy, you haven't met John and Vicky yet. John and Vic, this is Margaret Hamilton.”
John shook hands with her and said, “We're glad you've come to stay with us for a while, Maggy.”
Maggy looked him up and down and said, “Well, I don't know if I'll like living way out in the country,” in a sort of a disapproving way.
I shook hands with her and she looked me up and down in
the same way she had John and said, “You're not as pretty as Suzy.”
Now, this is true, but it wasn't very tactful. Suzy is pretty and fluffy and she has curly blond hair, and I'm tall and skinny and my hair is sort of mousy and doesn't have any curl at all and I cut off my braids when I went back to school this autumn and I wish I hadn't. I know all this about myself, but I still got kind of red and unhappy when Maggy said that about Suzy and me.
Uncle Douglas said quickly, “Remember the story of the ugly duckling, Maggy? Vicky's going to be the swan of you all. Someday I'm going to paint her.”
I could see that Maggy didn't like that very much, because she flounced over to Suzy, saying, “C'mon, let's go up to our room and play.” Even when she flounced she was graceful, sort of like a butterfly, and if you hadn't known she wasn't Aunt Elena's daughter or any relation at all you would have thought Aunt Elena was her mother, because Maggy has the same shiny soft black hair and enormous dark eyes. Well, I guess that's really all that's alike, because under the flesh the bones are shaped differently. Aunt Elena's features are strong and definite, and her nose has a high bridge. And Maggy's face is soft and wistful, and her eyes are just a tiny bit almond-shaped.
She and Suzy started to dash upstairs and Mother called Suzy back down and told her to set the table first, and that from now on Maggy could help her.
“I don't know how,” Maggy said flatly.
“Suzy will show you.”
“Sure,” Suzy said. “Come on, Maggy. How many tonight?”
“Count,” Mother said automatically.
“Six of us,” Suzy said, “and Maggy and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas is … is …”
“Seventeen,” Rob said.
“Nine,” Suzy said. “So we'll have to put the leaves in the table.”
John went to get the leaves, because they're quite heavy, and there was a frantic scratching and a shrill barking, and Rochester bounded to the door, and we realized that Colette had been left out.
“I'll let her in,” I said. “I'll be back in just a minute.” Usually, just before dinner is the nicest time of day, but this evening I suddenly wanted to be alone for a few minutes. Was it just because Maggy had reminded me that I am plain? Mother says that I'm getting very broody, and part of it is my age, and most of it is just me.
I walked slowly around the house, with Colette prancing about me. It was nearly dark and lights were on in almost all the windows of the house and rectangles of light poured out onto the lawn. There were still a few leftover summer noises—a frog or an insect—and the air was clear and cold, and finally I had to run to keep warm and Colette began yipping and nipping at my heels in excitement, thinking I was playing a game just especially for her.
Then there came the sound of the piano, coming clear and beautiful out into the night, and I knew that Aunt Elena must be in the living room, playing. When she's with us she often sits at the piano and plays and plays and plays, but somehow I hadn't expected her to this time, and it made me feel more the crying kind of unhappy than I'd felt since the phone call. It wasn't that
she was playing anything sad or anything—mostly it was Bach, I think—but just having her sit there at the piano, playing, and knowing that Uncle Hal would never hear her again made me want to go find Mother and put my head against her and howl.
 
I stayed out, listening for a moment, and when I went back in the house things had calmed down considerably. Aunt Elena was still at the piano; Suzy and Maggy must have gone upstairs; Rob and Uncle Douglas were watching television in the study; and John and Mother were talking while Mother made the salad.
“Vicky,” Mother said, “tell Rob he hasn't put the napkins on the table yet and to come do it as soon as there's an ad on.” Putting on the napkins and the table mats, when we don't use a tablecloth, is Rob's part of setting the table. Suzy does the silver and I do the china and glasses.
I went in to tell Rob, and when he'd gone into the kitchen to do his job I sat down on the arm of Uncle Douglas's chair.
“Turn that thing down, Vicky,” he said. “It's blasting my ears off.”
I turned down the volume and then went and sat by Uncle Douglas again. “What's on your mind, young lady?” he asked me.
I did have something on my mind; I did want to talk to him; how did he always know? “Uncle Douglas,” I said, “why is it that John can show Aunt Elena he's sorry about Uncle Hal and I can't, and I'm so terribly, terribly sorry?”
Uncle Douglas put his arm around me and his beard rubbed gently against my cheek. “Aunt Elena knows you're sorry, dear.”
“But why does John know what to say, and how to say it, and all I can do is act stupid, as though it didn't matter?”
“Just because it matters too much. Have you ever heard of
empathy
?”
I shook my head.
“John can show Aunt Elena how sorry he is because he has a scientific mind and he can see what has happened from the outside. All good scientists have to know how to be observers. He can be deeply upset about Uncle Hal and deeply sorry for Aunt Elena, but he can be objective about it. You can't.”
“Why?”
“Because you have an artistic temperament, Vicky, and I've never seen you be objective about anything yet. When you think about Aunt Elena and how she must be feeling right now, it is for the moment as though you
were
Aunt Elena; you get right inside her suffering, and it becomes your suffering, too. That's empathy, and it's something all artists are afflicted with.”
“Are you?”
“Sure. But I'm older than you are and I can cope with it better.”
“But, Uncle Douglas, I'm not artistic. I haven't any talent for anything.”
Uncle Douglas patted me again. “Don't worry, duckling. That will come, too.”
Uncle Douglas can always make me feel more than I am, as though I were really somebody. It's one of the very nicest things about him.
Rob came in just then and turned the volume up on the TV
again, so I kissed Uncle Douglas and went back out to the kitchen because I didn't feel like watching cartoons.

Other books

Off the Rails by Isabelle Drake
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
Their Little Girl by L.J. Anderson
Wintercraft: Legacy by Burtenshaw, Jenna