“But you had to believe it.”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth put her hands back in her lap. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was too late. Taxi’s world was insecure enough. Camilla and Mac were his parents. The fewer people who knew, the better—even you, dearest Liz.”
“Oh, God,” Raffi moaned.
Elizabeth asked, “How did Luisa Rowan get this picture?”
Andrew said, “I referred a patient to her and she came to my office to meet the girl yesterday. She stood looking at all the pictures. Took this one down from the wall. When she was ready to leave, she asked—asked—”
“She asked to borrow this picture?”
He nodded.
“Did she tell you why?”
“No.”
Raffi exclaimed, “She must have guessed. About you and my dad. And me. You already knew when I broke my arm, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“You knew you were my grandfather.”
“Yes, Raffi. I knew.”
“So I was special to you—” Raffi’s arms were around him. She was hugging him, crying, calling aloud, “I’m so glad! So glad!”
He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her off so that he could look at her, a dazzled joy in his eyes. She pressed her face against his starched white coat. “You’re my grandfather! I haven’t had a grandfather, ever! You’re Taxi’s father! You’re my dad’s father! Oh, don’t you see? He hated his father, the one he thought was his father. Don’t you see what a difference this can make to him?”
“So you expected miracles?” Dr. Rowan demanded.
Raffi’s voice was hoarse from crying. “He was angry with me! He screamed at me! He said I was an interfering little bitch!” Again she sobbed.
“Wait,” Dr. Rowan said. “I was the interfering bitch. Wait, Raffi, let him absorb what you told him.”
“I thought it would make him so happy.”
Luisa looked across the desk at her. “Has your father ever been predictable?”
“I hate him!”
“Do you?”
“Dr. Rowan, I want Andrew Grange to be my grandfather.”
“He is.”
“And I want my dad to be glad.”
“Wait, Raffi.”
“That’s what Mom said.”
Camilla was in bed asleep when the phone rang. “Mom. It’s Taxi. Did I wake you?”
She leaned up on one elbow in alarm. “What’s wrong?”
“Mom. I don’t think anything’s wrong. I think—oh, Mom, I think maybe I can be who I am.”
She said, softly, “You’re my son, Taxi.”
“I will always be that. It’ll be easier, now, now that I know who my father is.”
He told her, told her what Raffi had told him with such joy. “I slapped her down, Mom, I don’t know why. But we’ve made up. She understands. She’s a terrific girl. She’s on her way back to college now. She’ll need you.”
“I’ll be here.”
“I’m going to meet with Andrew in the morning. Meet with my father. Mom, you don’t know what this has done for me, what a weight’s gone from my shoulders. It changes everything. I know who I am. Finally I know who I am. It’ll be all right, Mom. You’ll see.”
Would it be all right? Terrible damage had been done. But Andrew’s revelation was a mercy, a live coal that did not need to be dropped into the sea, but could flame quietly, and by which they could warm themselves. She hoped it was a mercy for Andrew, too.
It was midnight when Raffi rang the doorbell. Camilla put on a warm robe and went down to let her in, holding out her arms in greeting.
“Grandmother,” Raffi said. “Here I am.”
A Biography of Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle was the award-winning author of more than sixty books encompassing children’s and adult fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, and books on prayer. Her best-known work is the classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal for distinguished children’s literature and has sold fourteen million copies worldwide. The Washington Post called the science fantasy tale of an adolescent girl and her telepathic brother’s journey through space and time “one of the most enigmatic works of fiction ever created.”
L’Engle was born on November 29, 1918, in New York City, where both of her parents were artists—her mother a pianist and her father a novelist, journalist, and music and drama critic for the New York Sun. Although she wrote her first story at the age of five and devoted her time to her journals, short stories, and poetry, L’Engle struggled in school and often felt disliked by her teachers and peers. She recalled one of her elementary school teachers calling her stupid and another accusing her of plagiarism when she won a writing contest.
At twelve, L’Engle and her family moved to France for her father’s health (he had been a soldier during World War I and suffered lung damage), and she was sent to boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Two of her novels, A Winter’s Love and The Small Rain, drew on her experiences in Europe. She returned to the United States three years later to attend another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. L’Engle flourished during these years and went on to graduate from Smith College with honors in English.
After college, she moved back to New York City and started work as a stage actress while devoting her free time to writing. During this time, she published her first two novels, The Small Rain and Ilsa, and wrote many plays that were produced in regional theaters. While touring in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as an understudy, she met actor Hugh Franklin, and they married in 1946. After the birth of their daughter Josephine the following year, they bought an old farmhouse, which they called Crosswicks, in Goshen, a small town in rural Connecticut, planning on weekends in the country. When she became pregnant with their second child, Bion, they moved to Crosswicks permanently and ran the local general store. Their family grew with an adopted daughter, Maria. After nearly a decade in Connecticut, they moved back to New York so her husband, who would go on to star in All My Children, could focus on his acting career. She was happy to return and hoped that she would find success as an author again. Indeed, A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962.
The family often returned to Crosswicks over the years and these visits inspired L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, including Two-Part Invention, which tells the story of her marriage, and A Circle of Quiet, in which she explores her role as a woman, mother, wife, and writer.
Back in Manhattan, L’Engle worked as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a position she held for more than three decades. Her lifelong fascination with theology and philosophy, and her personal faith, largely influenced her work. A Wrinkle in Time hints at many Christian themes, yet religious conservative groups have spoken out against the book, accusing L’Engle of misrepresenting God in a dangerous world of witchcraft, myth, and fantasy. It has been one of the most banned books in the United States. Apart from her religious influences, she said that Einstein’s theory of relativity and other theories in physics also served as inspiration. The novel’s combined use of both science fiction and philosophy established it as a sophisticated work of fiction, proving L’Engle’s belief that children’s literature deserves a place in the literary canon.
However, L’Engle initially struggled to achieve success and recognition for her work, and she almost quit writing at forty. She finally broke out onto the literary scene in 1960 with Meet the Austins, the first in her popular young adult series about the Austin family, which includes Newbery Honor Book A Ring of Endless Light. Even A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Although it was an instant commercial and critical sensation and has never gone out of print, the book’s strong female protagonist and intellectual themes were unusual in children’s fiction at the time.
L’Engle’s long literary career expanded far beyond the publication of A Wrinkle in Time
. Among her many books are adult novels dealing with relationships, faith, and identity, including Certain Women, A Live Coal in the Sea, and A Severed Wasp; several books of poetry; and more overtly religious works like her Genesis Trilogy of biblical reflections. She won countless accolades, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the National Religious Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal. L’Engle lived out her final years in Litchfield, Connecticut, and passed away at the age of eighty-eight on September 6, 2007.
A portrait of L’Engle in her first years of life.*
L’Engle ice-skating in Brittany, France, circa 1926.*
L’Engle with her dog, Sputzi, circa 1934.*
From July to September 1943, the Repertory Players at Straight Wharf Theatre produced two of L’Engle’s plays, The Christmas Tree and Phelia. She acted in both plays, among others.
L’Engle with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, in 1946.*
L’Engle and her husband renovated and ran a general store in the late 1940s.
L’Engle always illustrated her family’s Christmas cards, including this one from 1952.
L’Engle with her granddaughters Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Lena Roy at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Cathedral Library, circa 1975.
L’Engle in the library of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1977.
L’Engle at a Manhattanville College commencement ceremony, where she received an honorary degree in 1989.*
L’Engle with her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis the night before the young woman’s wedding on August 30, 1996.
L’Engle speaking at a church in 1997.
L’Engle at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1997.*
*Photograph courtesy of the Madeleine L’Engle Papers (SC-3), Special Collections, Buswell Library, Wheaton, Illinois.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1996 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4156-0
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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MADELEINE L’ENGLE
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