The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Do I have a right to make this decision? Perhaps not, but I make it because it is the decision I would want my children to make if I were in my mother’s place. There is no dignity to this kind of death at best; but forcing food down her when she is not hungry is simply an added indignity.

  The babies and the animals affirm the great-grandmother’s reality in a way that I cannot, because they are able to take her for granted exactly as she is. This morning I watched Léna sitting in her small rocking chair at her great-grandmother’s feet, sitting with a book of nursery rhymes held upside down, rocking and singing to her great-grandmother. Titus, the yellow kitten, curled up in the old woman’s lap, yawned with luxurious contentment. For a brief moment I too could accept, and my heart was warm and freed from the numbness which has enclosed it most of the time during these weeks.

  I read somewhere that the subconscious mind cannot understand or accept its own extinction. But I don’t think that the conscious mind gets very close to understanding or acceptance either. It is a fact that all men must die; but because my underwater, subconscious mind, the largest part of me, does not believe it, my intellectual acceptance doesn’t mean very much.

  First of all, I don’t know what death means:

  Death first intruded upon me when I was three years old, and my paternal grandmother came to visit us in New York and died of pneumonia, in my bed, in my room. My memory of this death is two small fragments; I remember sitting on the floor beside the bed, playing with a pack of cards; it must have been before anybody realized that she was gravely ill. And I remember driving at night to her home, near Princeton, New Jersey; we passed road construction, and I remember the red lanterns hanging from the barriers blocking our way and the unknown dark ahead. After this, memory betrays me chronologically. Although I know we were driving to New Jersey for the funeral, my tricky memory projects me into the comfortable living room of my grandmother’s house, and I am sitting in her ample lap, being rocked by her, and we are flooded with golden light from a Tiffany lampshade.

  I was in early adolescence when my other grandmother, my maternal grandmother, died at the beach cottage in North Florida.

  We had to drive from the beach up to town, and I remember my sense of shock as we drove through the hot and crowded streets; the familiar city was new to me; it was as though I had never passed through these streets before. The entire world was different, and nobody we passed knew it; nobody knew that my grandmother had died; and this seemed to me outrageous.

  It was more than a selfish, childish, reaction. Perhaps we are supposed to walk more often through the streets of that different world, where all our awareness is more acute, not our awareness of ourselves but an awareness that we are part of each other, that we are all as intricately and irrevocably connected as the strands of a fugue.

  This is the world I walk in this summer.

  This world is crystal-clear, and yet it is not bathed in the white light of intellectual certainty. It has more to do with the underwater world, the world in which I meet the characters and people of my stories, the world in which I understand the language of the C minor Fugue.

  I first came across this fugue while I was in college during a time of confusion and unhappiness. I still had not come to terms with my father’s death, which occurred during my last year in boarding school. It was a premature death, caused by mustard gas during the First World War; Father would not take his men anywhere he would not go himself, and his action saved most of his men from gassing. If my memory of Mother begins with smell and sound, so does my memory of Father: smell of clean linen, after-shave lotion, whiskey; sound of coughing.

  And I was afraid of death, all death, afraid for my mother, for myself. The C minor Fugue spoke to me in a language even more positive than that of John Donne’s beautiful sonnet, “Death be not proud.”

  What do I believe, this summer, about death and the human being? I’m not sure. But I know that it is in the language of the fugue, not the language of intellectual certainty. And I know that I could not survive this summer if I could not hope for meaning, meaning to my mother’s life, to Hugh’s and mine, to our children’s, to all the larger family, to everybody, to all things, including the rock at the brook and the small frog. What that ultimate meaning may be I do not know, because I am finite, and the meaning I hope for is not. But God, if he is God, if he is worth believing in, is a loving God who will not abandon or forget the smallest atom of his creation. And that includes my mother. And everybody, everybody without exception.

  I cannot believe in meaning by myself, alone, but it is often the small things which sustain me. Someone will say, after a particularly difficult, tiring day, “Madeleine, dinner tonight was just great.” Or I will sit, in the twilight, in the old rocker with one of the babies and sing, and take strength from the small and perfect body drooping into sleep in my arms. At least once a week Alan, or Tallis, will celebrate Communion, and from this I receive the same kind of strength which, in a different way, comes to me in the C minor Fugue, and I am able to return to the routine of these difficult days with a lighter touch.

  Would I be able to go on, one day at a time, this way, if we lived in a small pre-fab house in Levittown, or a cramped apartment in the City? It would take a great deal more strength and courage than is being called from me here in Crosswicks, and there are days even here, even with the help of the household and the quiet minutes at the brook, when I am so exhausted by nighttime that I barely have the strength to climb the stairs to the Tower and fall into bed.

  Somehow, despite the fact that I feel that my mother’s slow dying and birth are opposites, I still turn to the analogy of birth. When I walk down the lane at night and pray for Mother’s death, I must know what I am praying for, and I am praying not just for her release from the prison her body has been turned into, but for birth. Alan was with Josephine during Charlotte’s birth, and was amazed not only by the violence with which the mother works to expel the baby but by the violence with which the baby struggles to be born. Charlotte—typically—did not need to be spanked into life; she emerged shouting. Only a few hours earlier she had been safely inside her mother’s womb, swimming comfortably in the amniotic fluid. Everything was done for her; she was sustained and nourished in the dark warmth. And suddenly the calm waters started churning, and she was shoved through a dark tunnel into blinding light, air knifed into her unused lungs, and she greeted the trauma of birth with a bellow of rage.

  It’s a good analogy for me, birth, and certainly has nothing to do with pie in the sky by and by. Perhaps the great-grandmother is as much afraid of the violence of a new birth as she is of the act of dying.

  Do I believe all this? Not with my intellect. But my intuition keeps insisting that there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than your philosophies can tell.

  I’ll leave it there for now. The only thing to do is to get up in the morning and move through the day, trying to do what has to be done, as it comes. When Mother’s face crumples pitifully and she says, “I’m scared, I’m scared,” I put my arms around her and say, “It’s all right, Mother,” and I do this well aware of the enormity of the promise. There is a chill and empty feeling within me; nevertheless, there is something which impels me to put my arms around the Madeleine who is ninety and the Madeleine who has just turned three, and say, “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right.”

  II

  The Mother I Knew

  1

  I was a much longed-for baby. It wasn’t for want of trying that my parents were childless for so long. But Mother could not hold a baby past three months. “All I needed to get pregnant,” she once remarked, “was for your father to hang his pajamas over the bedpost.” She had miscarriages all over the world—Paris, Berlin, Cairo, and—I think—one in China. Sometime toward the end of “the war,” my parents’ war, World War I, Father came home on leave from Plattsburg, and I was conceived. Because Father was sent immediately overseas, Mother was able to spend most of the
nine months in bed. Even so, I am a witness to her determination. The first doctor she went to told her that she could not possibly carry a baby to term, and that if she did not have a therapeutic abortion, both she and the baby would die. Then she went to a Roman Catholic doctor: that was in 1918. So I am here to tell the story.

  My Southern grandmother, Dearma, came north to take care of her daughter. Mother carried me the full nine months, and started labor late on a blizzardy Thanksgiving night. Dearma went out onto Park Avenue to try to call a taxi to take Mother to the hospital, but the storm was so fierce that no taxis came by. There the elderly lady stood in the snow, wind blowing her clothes about her, whipping her white hair free of its pins, and finally two young men in a long touring car stopped and asked if she needed help. So my mother was driven to the hospital by two friendly strangers.

  Father didn’t see me until I was several months old, because he was kept overseas after the Armistice. I wish that we had not wiped out Armistice Day in favor of Veterans Day. It strikes me as part of our reluctance to accept the horrid reality of death. We are afraid of that dark silence when for a minute everybody in the nation was supposed to pause and think of the dead. And I remember the ancient verses,

  The gude Sir Hew of Eglintoun,

  And eik Heriot, and Wintoun,

  He has tane out of this cuntre;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  And I add,

  Remember Charles of Crosswicks town

  And those beside him who went down.

  The flesche is brukle, the Fiend is sle;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  I share in the primordial terror.

  Otherwise I could not sit by my mother at night and hold her dry and burning hand in my still quick one. Her hand is as dry and fragile as a leaf in November.

  She told me that once she and Father had had their long-awaited baby, I became a bone of contention between them. They disagreed completely on how I ought to be brought up. Father wanted a strict English childhood for me, and this is more or less what I got—nanny, governesses, supper on a tray in the nursery, dancing lessons, music lessons, skating lessons, art lessons …

  Mother had the idea that she wanted me trained by a circus performer, that it would give me grace and coordination and self-assurance, but Father was horrified. I wish Mother had had her way. However, I did have Mrs. O.

  Mrs. O. Nanny: odd, obsolete, un-American idea. But Mrs. O is worth a book in herself, as are so many of the other people in this tale. She’s English, a Liverpudlian, and her family for generations had belonged to the highest order of English servants—and there is nothing more rigid or more snobbish than the English-servant class system. It started to break down during World War I, and vanished during World War II. There are a few nannies left, but not many. Mine is ninety-one this summer, still completely compos mentis, and passionately concerned with all the doings of my family. She has clucked with me many times about Mother’s decline, and somehow she always manages to phone me on a day when things have been particularly difficult, and by the end of the conversation we are both laughing.

  She was born Mary McKenna and came to the New World when she was fifteen, to spend a summer on Prince Edward Island taking care of four small children. At summer’s end she went to visit one of her aunts, who was housekeeper for a wealthy family on Park Avenue; the enormous house is still in existence, now a club. There were four in the family, and forty on the staff, which included gardeners, coachmen, and outdoor laborers. The staff ate dinner at noon, around a long table below stairs, having a “joint” each day, bowls of potatoes, vegetables, salad. They were well fed, if hard-worked. The family dined at night. One of the daughters of the family, Miss Amy, fourteen, was blind as a result of scarlet fever. She was spoiled and demanding. Young Mary McKenna’s aunt suggested that Mary take Miss Amy for a walk. When Miss Amy began to be difficult, not wanting to walk, whining, wanting to go home, Mary said, “My aunt said that you are supposed to walk for an hour, doctor’s orders.”

  Miss Amy said, “I won’t.”

  Mary said, “You will.”

  Miss Amy said, “I’ll lie down in the street.”

  Mary said, “Go ahead, for all the good it will do you.” It was the first time anybody had crossed Miss Amy since her blindness.

  They walked for a full hour, and when they got home Miss Amy said to her mother, “I want Mary.”

  So Mary McKenna, barely older than blind Miss Amy, became a lady’s maid. The next day the family left for a trip abroad, and Mary sat at the captain’s table with Miss Amy, to help her. When the family went to Paris they arrived earlier than expected, and the floor of the hotel which was usually reserved for their use had not yet been emptied, so the servants were sent, just for one night, up to the top of the hotel, under the eaves.

  Mary McKenna announced to one of the others, “I’ve never slept in a place like this before, and I’m not going to begin now.” So she went looking for some way to summon help and express her displeasure. At one end of the attic she saw a series of brass bells, took a broomstick and began whacking away at them, making a considerable din. It was not until firemen came rushing upstairs with hoses and hatchets that she knew which bells she had rung.

  However, she had made her point. She did not sleep in the attic.

  With Miss Amy she traveled all over Europe, went to formal dinner parties, to the opera, to the theatre; because of Miss Amy’s blindness she saw far more of the above-stairs world than would most lady’s maids.

  Then she met and married John O’Connell, whose brother is still remembered in Ireland as one of the great fighters of the Irish revolution. They had three daughters, and then the O’Connell family fell on hard times, and in order to help feed and clothe the children she went back to work, and the only work she could get was as a charwoman—the lowest rung of the English-servant caste system. It was a humiliation to her that few could understand.

  She worked on Wall Street cleaning offices at night. My godfather often worked late and got to talking with this rather unusual cleaning woman, and once when his wife was having a large party and needed extra help, he asked Mrs. O’Connell if she could come to their house and help out. My parents were at that party, and later Mother phoned to find out who the splendid extra helper had been, and if she would come help at a party Mother and Father were giving.

  When she arrived at our apartment, Mother smiled and said, “I don’t even know your name.”

  “My name is Mrs. O’Connell, but I expect you will want to call me Mary.”

  “I’d be delighted to call you Mrs. O’Connell,” Mother said, and that was the beginning of a friendship between the two women, and my nanny’s entrance into my life. I was only a baby, and when I began to talk I called her “O,” and a little later Mrs. O, and Mrs. O she has remained, and there are many people who don’t know her by any other name. Wherever she is, she brings laughter, and a sense of fun, although her life, after she left Miss Amy, was full of pain and tragedy.

  Until arthritis prevented travel, she spent several weeks with us three or four times a year, and I treasure a small snapshot of Mother and Mrs. O sitting on the sofa, side by side, nattering away. They share many of the same memories—of operas all over Europe, of singers; Mrs. O refers casually to Madam Melba, Jean de Reszke, Chaliapin. If Mother knew the people above-stairs, so did Mrs. O, and from the point of view of below-stairs, so she was able to tell Mother all kinds of little titbits she’d never have heard otherwise. She also enjoyed telling stories on herself, such as the time she was sent out to buy pâté de foie gras; when she reached the grocer she couldn’t remember the French words, “but it sounds like Paddy Fogarty.” The closest she has ever come to being vulgar is when she says, “Ah, well, I must go and shed a tear for Ireland,” and heads for the bathroom.

  She thought my father a prince, and treated him accordingly. She loves to tell of one summer when Mother and I were out of the city and Father was preparing to sai
l to Europe on an assignment. He couldn’t find some things he needed, and knew that Mrs. O would know where they were. She didn’t have a phone, so he sent her a telegram: COME AT ONCE.

  She came, and there he was, she said, sitting alone at the dining table, eating scrambled eggs by candlelight.

  She also liked to tell of the times she met him on the street, when he would stand leaning on his cane and passing the time of day, “as though he didn’t have anything better to do.”

  She was deeply religious, in a quiet way, and sometimes when she had a special concern on her mind, she would take me to church with her. She also thought—quite rightly—that I was overprotected, and took me on my first subway rides. She didn’t like the fact that Mother would allow no sugar in my breakfast oatmeal; Mother always tasted the oatmeal to make sure no softhearted member of the household had sugared it; Mrs. O got around that by putting the sugar in the bottom of the porringer, and the oatmeal on top of it, and stirring it in after the porridge had been tasted, and Mother never knew, until we told her a few years ago, why I would always eat my oatmeal for Mrs. O. For I never told of the subway rides, or the visits to church, or the sugar in the cereal, or the little packets of butterscotch in the park; all I knew then and all I know now is that Mrs. O never taught me anything but good.

  I used to say to her, “Will you help me take care of my children when I grow up?” And she would remind me of this on her visits to us.

  When A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic, was on television, she sat and watched and rocked and clucked; she knew most of the guests from Miss Amy’s family; the captain had been to the house many a time for dinner, and the young Mary would go to the ship bearing the invitation; some of the crew she knew this way, and some from family and acquaintances in Liverpool; the movie seemed to have been filmed especially for her, and all of us watching it with her were far more moved by it than if we had not been seeing it through her eyes.