The Joys of Love (18 page)

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Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: The Joys of Love
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Bibi had left, though her bed was still unmade and she had clothes strewn all over her chair and Sophie's bed.
Elizabeth went over to her bureau, picked up her glasses which she had left there when she went to wash her hair, put them on, took down the double frame picture, and handed it to Ben.
“Here it is,” she said. “I don't know when it was taken.”
Ben studied it gravely. “Yes. That's Anna Larsen all right. And you certainly look like her, Liz.”
“Was Mother hard to handle, Ben?” Elizabeth asked.
“She had a reputation that way,” Ben said, “but I know Mother never had any trouble with her. And she certainly never spoke a cross or impatient word to me. And I've never been able to forget her.”
“You said you never forget anybody.”
“I don't. But I remember your mother more like yesterday than a lot of people right here in the company this summer. Did you ever think about singing, Liz?”
“No.” Elizabeth rubbed her head violently with the towel. “I love music, but not that way—just to listen to, not to do. I guess it's a good thing. If I sang it would be even worse for Aunt Harriet than acting, though I don't think she thinks there's much difference between the two.”
“Want me to scram while you get dressed?” Ben asked.
“I guess you'd better. It's almost time for lunch.”
“I'll wait for you downstairs,” Ben said.
 
After lunch Elizabeth helped Jane clear the tables. Then she went out onto the porch, where most of the company was sitting. Jane joined John Peter and they started off down the walk, Jane hovering solicitously over John Peter, who had had his tooth pulled and was looking very pale and dramatic. Ben and Ditta were sitting on the steps going over a scene from
Oedipus
.
“Anybody want to rehearse
Seagull
this afternoon?” Elizabeth asked.
“John Peter says he doesn't feel well enough,” Ditta said. “He and Jane are going down to sit on the beach. But we could work on something else. How about
Twelfth Night
? You said you wanted to try Viola and I'd love to butcher Olivia.”
“What about me?” Ben asked. “I don't see myself as Orsino.”
“Feste, of course,” Elizabeth told him. “You'd make a wonderful Elizabethan clown. If Kurt's around maybe he'll read Orsino for us. Shall we go in and start?”
Ben flung up his arms. “Such energy! Let's relax for a few minutes.”
“Anyhow, we wouldn't have any privacy till the professional company goes over to the theatre for dress rehearsal at three,” Ditta said.
“Don't you have to be there, Ben?” Elizabeth asked.
“No, Joe doesn't want me until five.”
“Hey, listen,” Ditta said. “I have an idea. Why don't we rehearse on the beach?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “We tried that before, remember, and didn't get anything done.”
Ditta stood up, shut her book, and stretched. “I think I'll go down to the beach till three, then. Coming?”
“I got too much sun this morning,” Ben said. “I think I'll take a nap. You can wake me at three, Liz. Throw some pebbles up.”
“Okay, and if you don't wake I'll start throwing rocks,” Elizabeth warned.
“You coming, Liz?” Ditta asked hopefully.
Ben climbed down from the stone railing. “You oughtn't go back on the beach today, Liz. Your nose is bright red from this morning.”
Elizabeth felt her nose. “Yes, I guess it is. I don't get out often enough and my nose peels all over again every week. Poor thing, I'd better stay inside and put some of Jane's sunburn stuff on it.”
Ditta stretched again. “In that case, I think I'll follow Ben's example and take a nap, too. That shindig at Irving's last night was too much for an old schoolmarm like me. You can wake me, too, Liz.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Okay. You're making me feel sleepy, too.”
“Going up to take a nap?” Ben asked her.
She shook her head. “No. I don't like to sleep in the afternoon. I can't wake up the rest of the day.”
“Oh, well, I won't sleep either then,” Ben said. “Come on
over to the theatre. It's nice and cool over there and we can play some records.”
“Good.” Elizabeth followed him off the porch. The sun beat down on their heads as they walked through the hot streets to the theatre. The back of Ben's shirt was stained with perspiration.
They bumped into Joe McGill sitting on the rickety back steps that led to the back stage. He was smoking an evilsmelling cigar and mopping his brow with a damp handkerchief. “Hi, kids,” he greeted them.
“Hi, Joe. Mind if we go backstage and play a few records before dress rehearsal starts? It's cooler there than anywhere else.”
“Go ahead. Listen, Ben, I don't really need you today after all, see. There isn't anything I can't handle myself, and you've been working like a dog all summer so if you want time off, I figure it's coming to you, see. But it's up to you.”
“Thanks an awful lot, Joe,” Ben said. “But I really enjoy watching Andersen in action, so I'll be there at five.”
“That's fine, then,” Joe said.
Ben and Elizabeth climbed the wooden steps and went into the narrow corridor backstage that led to the dressing rooms.
Elizabeth put her arm lightly about Ben's shoulders. “He's a nice guy, isn't he?”
Ben nodded. “Best stage manager I've ever met.”
It had always struck Elizabeth as interesting the way the different members of the company kept their dressing rooms. All the doors were locked during the day when the dressing rooms were not in use, but each one had a neat typewritten
card bearing the name of the occupant. Dottie and Marian Hatfield shared a dressing room, and below the card someone had drawn a crude star in lipstick. Dottie's side of the dressing room always looked as though a hurricane had hit it. Opened lipsticks and tubes of greasepaint and lining sticks lay in disorder on the table with broken eyebrow pencils, false eyelashes, a soiled powder puff and a jar of cold cream discolored by greasepaint. Everything was covered with a heavy film of dark powder. Marian's half of the dressing room was always immaculate, her makeup neatly arranged on a tray covered by a yellow linen towel. Her can of Albolene was covered and a bottle of witch hazel stood in line beside it. Her telegrams were stuck neatly with Scotch tape on the wall around her mirror, and her costumes, instead of being thrown on the hangers any old which way, were neatly hung up and covered with a dust sheet.
Ben went out onstage and snapped on the work light, a naked bulb with a wire cage around it that hung down from the grid. The curtain was raised and row after row of chairs stretched out into the dusty reaches of the auditorium. Elizabeth went to the big box where Joe kept the records that were played during intermission or occasionally during a performance and began looking through the albums while Ben switched on the turntable that was attached to the loudspeaker in the auditorium. Elizabeth handed him the
Rosenkavalier
waltzes.
“Your mother used to sing Octavian in
Der Rosenkavalier
,” Ben said.
Elizabeth nodded. “Yes. I thought she probably would have.”
Ben put the record on and the music filled the theatre. He turned the volume down. “Liz—”
“What, Ben?”
“You say you went to your mother's funeral. Where was she when she died?”
“A boardinghouse in Georgia.”
“What was the matter with her?”
“Her heart. She went south to get away from a northern winter. I don't know just what it was—her heart gave out or something. She was there about six months before she died.”
“Well, how did you happen to go to the funeral, your Aunt Harriet feeling the way she does?” Ben was fiddling with the controls on the loudspeaker, but his face was very still and listening, the dark peaked brows drawn together in an intent frown.
“I told Aunt Harriet I was going, and she let me. She gave me my train fare. Maybe she approved of Mother's going south to die. Sort of an indirect compliment because of Father's being a Southerner. Or maybe she just approved of Mother's dying.” Elizabeth's voice was light, but she found she could not look at Ben as she talked. She had to concentrate her gaze on the grey canvas floor covering. If she was going to share something as personal as seeing her mother, looking into Ben's intent eyes would bring too much emotion out into the open and above all she did not want Ben to see her cry.
When Elizabeth had announced to her Aunt Harriet that she was going to her mother's funeral if she had to hitchhike, she was extremely surprised at her aunt's lack of resistance.
But dying was the most considerate thing Anna Larsen had ever done as far as Harriet Jerrold was concerned. And since Anna had had the added courtesy to die during Elizabeth's spring vacation from college, Aunt Harriet gave Elizabeth both the permission and the funds to attend her mother's funeral.
Elizabeth remembered with strange clarity the afternoon the telegram came. Even though spring was late that year and there was still snow on the ground, she was sitting out on the porch wrapped in her winter coat and reading a book she was due to give a report on when she returned to college. Inside the house the telephone began to ring. For a moment the shrill insistence of the bell did not pierce Elizabeth's concentration, and when she went into the house to answer it Aunt Harriet was there before her, and handed the receiver to her.
“It's for you, Elizabeth,” she said. “It's a telegram.”
The telephone table was in a hallway beside one of the registers and Elizabeth remembered standing over the grill and feeling the hot air blow up her legs. “Yes, this is Elizabeth Jerrold,” she said.
“I have a telegram for you,” the operator said in a voice that was impersonal but that nevertheless prepared Elizabeth for bad news. “Your mother died this morning … The funeral will be Thursday …” It was signed Ilsa Woolf and gave the address.
Elizabeth had not known that her mother was ill, nor that she was in Georgia. Somehow she had never imagined that her mother would die. A living Anna was much more potent a ghost in Elizabeth's life than a dead one. Elizabeth stood holding the telephone in her cold fingers, shivering inside her heavy
winter coat, while the hot air from the register was like an icy blast on her legs. She knew she should say something, but she couldn't imagine what.
Then the operator asked, “Would you like the telegram mailed to you, miss?”
“Yes. Please.” Automatically Elizabeth replaced the receiver. Then she said to her aunt, “Mother is dead.”
For a long moment Aunt Harriet did not reply. Then, to Elizabeth's intense surprise, she started to cry, turned away, and went up the stairs.
Elizabeth had ridden south in the day coach. All through Virginia and North Carolina, the rain dashed itself against the dirty windows of the train. Night fell and the windows showed only the distorted reflections of the passengers, and Elizabeth sat stiff in her seat, too frightened at the ordeal ahead of her to be able to relax or try to sleep. She sat staring out the window, still shocked into a state of complete numbness, saying over and over to herself in rhythm with the wheels, I am going to see my mother … I am going to see my mother …
She had grown up with the knowledge that she was never going to see her mother, and now to see her mother even this way, dead, was a shock so great that it seemed to split her life in two.
In Georgia it was also raining, a steady monotonous downpour. She stood on the narrow station platform and looked about her at the rusty cracked branches of the station palms, the dripping masses of Spanish moss on the oaks, an orange peel in the gutter, stained damp newspapers flapping in the
wind. Mrs. Woolf, the owner of the boardinghouse, had sent a man to meet her. He greeted her kindly, and drove her through the oak-lined streets of the town until they came to a large, shabby, white-pillared house on a river.
“Mrs. Woolf 's expecting you,” he said as he took her bag into the hall. “She's in the drawing room.”
He led her into a large, dark room with long French windows leading out onto a terrace. A woman with tawny hair streaked with grey was seated at a square Victorian piano playing Bach.
“The young lady's here, Mrs. Woolf,” the man said, and the woman rose from the piano and came toward Elizabeth, hand outstretched in greeting. Her grip was firm and cool and somehow comforting to Elizabeth, who was beginning to shiver with nervous fatigue.
“Your hand is like ice, child; you must be exhausted.” Mrs. Woolf's voice was deep, rather dark in quality, but clear-cut and clean. “Would you like to go up to your room?”

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