I will try to share one of these occurrences which I call intimations. I cannot call upon them to come; I have no control of them whatsoever; they usually happen during Emerson’s vulnerable moments between sleeping and waking, or when I am so tired that my conscious mind lets down its barriers.
This past spring, after Mother’s ninetieth-birthday party, I flew back to England with Josephine and Alan and the babies, to spend a week with them in Lincoln, and a few days in London seeing friends. The flight from New York to London seemed unusually long. We were served lunch immediately after departure, and then nothing else at all, not even tea, though we did manage to get some milk for the little ones.
Because of the time gap it was eleven o’clock at night when we arrived in London, and it took us over an hour to pick up the car in which we were to make the five-hour drive to Lincoln. We were very hungry, but all restaurants and coffee shops were closed. Alan said we would try to find an all-night truckers’ café on the way.
I sat in the back of the small car, suitcases piled up beside me, Charlotte on my lap. I was very tired, not because of the trip but because the birthday festivities had been exhausting, emotionally and spiritually even more than physically. Josephine and I began to sing to the little girls, trying to lull them into sleep, taking turns in singing the old nursery and folk songs, many of which had come to us from my mother.
Then, suddenly, the world unfolded, and I moved into an indescribable place of many dimensions where colors were more brilliant and more varied than those of the everyday world. The unfolding continued; everything deepened and opened, and I glimpsed relationships in which the truth of love was fully revealed.
It was ineffably glorious, and then it became frightening because I knew that unless I returned to the self which was still singing to the sleeping baby it would be—at the least—madness, and for Josephine and Alan’s sake I had to come back from the radiance.
Alan pulled the car into the parking lot of an open café. I was able to get out and carry Charlotte in, to sit down at the table, to nod assent as Alan ordered bacon and eggs and tea, but I was still not back. I talked through cold lips in what must have been a normal fashion, because neither Josephine nor Alan asked if anything was wrong, and I drank cup after cup of strong English tea until gradually the vastness of the deeper world faded away, and I was back within myself again, talking to my children and eating bacon and eggs.
Was this no more than hallucination caused by fatigue and hunger? That may have been part of it, but only part. I offer no explanation for this vision of something far more beautiful and strange than any of the great beauties I have seen on earth. I only know that it happened to me, and I am grateful.
But I do not need frequent visions to be fortified by the truth of love, my mother’s love for me, a love which I cannot conceive of as having any end, no matter how much it is trapped within her this summer.
Her concern is something I have automatically assumed, as a matter of fact. It was nearly impossible for me to hide anything from her. When I phoned her when I wasn’t feeling well, or was unhappy about something and chatted, perfectly naturally (I thought), she would say, “What’s the matter? Something’s wrong.” Cool, undemonstrative, reserved, yes, but tender. Gentle and soft but with a core of steel.
Now, during my adult years, if I wake up in the night and am frightened, as occasionally happens, I control my terror by myself. Hugh needs his sleep; I am grown up now and I do not wake him to hold and comfort me—although simply his presence, the rhythmic sound of his breathing, helps push me through the fear.
But when I was a child and we were living on Eighty-second Street I could call for my mother when I woke up and was frightened, and she would come to me and sit on the side of my bed and stroke my forehead until I was quiet and ready to go back to sleep. When I was a little older I would slip out of bed and across the hall and into her room and get in bed with her, knowing she would never reject me. She would put her arms around me and hold me close and say, “It’s all right,” and then I could go to sleep.
I sleep this summer because I am too tired to stay awake. If I wake up during the night my ears strain to hear Mother, although out in the Tower I cannot hear her. Sometimes in the afternoon I go out to the hammock, which is strung between two ancient apple trees halfway to the brook, and out of earshot of the house. Sometimes there, swaying gently, and surrounded by green leaf patterns shifting against the sky, I can relax into peace.
III
The Mother I Did Not Know
1
“Tell me a story, Mother,” I used to demand in the very early morning in the days on Eighty-second Street when I climbed into bed with her before breakfast.
Often she would reply,
“I’ll tell you a story
About Jack a Minory,
And now my story’s begun:
I’ll tell you another
About Jack and his brother,
And now my story’s done.”
“No, no, Mother! A real story!”
“What kind of a story?”
“A story about you when you were a little girl.”
She was born in 1881, my mother, just after the end of the Civil War, with the memory of it still fresh, and she said, “with the memory bitter indeed.” Carpetbaggers had arrived in full force, and the old Southern families, most of whom had lost fathers and brothers and homes and money, resented what she termed the “Northern interlopers.”
She called her paternal grandparents Amma and Ampa. “They came from the West, and although they came from real Southern stock, they were Western in their speech and mannerisms.” She loved them dearly, particularly Ampa, with whom she often used to spend the night, sleeping with him in a great four-poster bed.
All this talk of being in bed with parents and grandparents: it reminds me that while I was in college I wrote a story about a very small girl who woke up on the morning of her birthday and ran joyfully into her parents’ room to climb into bed with them and open her presents there in the warmth and safety of their presence. The professor announced to me that the reason the child wanted to get into bed with her mother and father was that she wanted to sleep with them sexually, a sort of combination Oedipus-Electra complex. I dropped the course without credit. But the remark has obviously left its mark in that I think of it each time I write about getting into bed with Mother, or Mother sleeping with Ampa. Such a thing could—and should—be spontaneous and completely innocent of Freudian connotation, and it is a sad commentary on today’s climate that I hesitate in the telling.
Amma and Ampa came to the South from Kansas not long after the war, because Amma’s migraine headaches were relieved in the more temperate climate. In Kansas they “had lived the life of pioneers and had no time for social graces. But when they came South, the fact that they were of Southern ancestry was in their favor with the Southerners.” And my grandfather, Mother’s Papa, was an attractive young man, and a skilled athlete. “He met a good many of the young men around town and was soon taken into their crowd.”
Because I grew up in another time and another world, all that she told me was as strange as a fairy tale, and I never tired hearing about it. In an apartment in the city of New York, Mother showed me the vast plains of Kansas. On a hot summer city night she told me of the far greater heat of the Kansas plains at a time when few trees had been planted. “Amma used to take a big watering can on hot summer nights and go about the house sprinkling the sheets until the beds were cool enough to lie down on.” Suddenly New York seemed cooler.
“Papa grew up on horseback,” Mother told me. “He was given a Kickapoo pony when he was a very little boy.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s an Indian pony, and it has the tribal mark of the Kickapoos—each ear split about two inches. His next pony was a Texas cow pony which was his constant companion. Papa went out with him every evening to bring the cows home. Every household kept one or two cows, and they were all t
urned out together in the morning to feed on the rich prairie grass. Sometimes Papa would find them two or three miles away, and he said that all he had to do was to get his pony to ‘start cutting our cows,’ and then he could put his reins down and the pony would do the rest.” He was a crack shot and provided much of the food for the table.
Grandfather was living in Scotland during our years on Eighty-second Street, but he came to America once a year, and before one visit Mother told me a story about something that happened to him in Kansas when he was nine years old. While he was whittling, his knife slipped and stabbed him in the right leg. At each beat of his heart, blood spurted from the wound. He called for his father, who checked the bleeding temporarily by pressure. The only available doctor did not know the difference between a vein and an artery, and simply bandaged the leg. As the blood continued to ooze through the bandage, he stopped it by putting a piece of wood on the bandage immediately over the puncture.
Grandfather was left in this condition for nearly two weeks, by which time his entire leg below the bandage was swollen and had turned black. Then a Civil War surgeon happened through the little township of Hiawatha, saw the injured boy, and told his father that the only chance to save his life was to amputate the leg next to the body. Ampa asked if there was no possible way by which the leg could be saved. The surgeon said there was one chance in a hundred that if he ligatured the artery it would hold, but he thought the leg was so diseased that he could not advise it. Ampa said, “I will take the chance.”
The operation was performed on the kitchen table, and was successful. It was a long time before Grandfather could walk again, but that did not hold him down; he went everywhere on horseback with his closest friend, the son of the chief of the Sauks and Foxes. When he learned to walk again, it was like an Indian, lithe and silent, one foot directly in front of the other, and he walked that way all his life. This rigorous training made him both an athlete and a beautiful dancer. He overcame his lameness so completely that when he went to the University of Kansas he won the track meet.
Years later he was persuaded to return to Kansas for his sixtieth college reunion. He was at that time an active and virile man who would have been taken for someone in his late fifties. When he stepped off the train, one of his boyhood friends was there to meet him, and hobbled along the platform, leaning on a cane. In an old, squeaky voice he quavered, “Hello, Bion.”
Grandfather took one look at this old man, bounded back up the steps of the train, and never turned back.
He had come a long way from the Kansas plains of his boyhood; he was a highly sophisticated and cultivated man; going back was in all ways an impossibility.
I could never write a biographical book about Grandfather. He was a self-made man and a great man, and like all such he had the weaknesses which were the other side of his strength. He hurt people, and the telling of his story would hurt more people. Perhaps he will come to me sometime as a character in a novel, as my parents have already done, more than once. In a fiction the events of his life would have to be toned down, because they are too incredible. In a story, who would believe in a character who not only survived the ligaturing of an artery in a gangrenous leg but who fell off a hay wagon in a freshly plowed field and had the heavy wooden wheel of the wagon roll over his head? If the field had not just been plowed, his skull would undoubtedly have been crushed. As it was, he had a bad headache for a few days.
Who would believe that, not long after the move to Florida, Grandfather stood on the beach, looking out over the ocean, with colleagues on either side of him, and remained standing when a bolt of lightning from a sudden tropical storm felled and killed the other two men?
When Grandfather neared middle age, he got Bright’s disease. He knew that it was fatal, and that his life expectancy was limited. His eyes suffered the kind of massive deterioration which is the result of badly diseased kidneys. But Grandfather was by no means prepared to die. He had a pitcher of water by his side at all times, and he drank countless glasses of water—Florida sulphur water. Not only did he recover from Bright’s disease, but he went down in medical annals as the first person whose eyes had deteriorated from kidney disease who recovered his full vision. I remember him sitting, when he was in his nineties, in the library after dinner reading The Wall Street Journal. His red chair is now in the Tower, and perhaps it has brought with it a measure of his courage—and stubbornness.
In his early sixties, when he was living in Scotland, he was told that his heart was in very bad shape and would not last a year. Grandfather’s response was to go mountain climbing. He would climb until he fainted. When he came to, he would pick himself up and climb until he fainted again—a rather unorthodox way of curing a heart condition.
He had passage on the Lusitania (“But not the Titanic, too,” Mother would say, lest I get carried away) and canceled it at the last minute to have dinner with an old friend.
Who would believe Grandfather?
When he first went South he still had the West in his speech and manners, and he met Caroline L’Engle, my Dearma, through her two older brothers. She was as immediately attracted to his Western virility as he to her subtle Southern charm. They were married when she was twenty and he was twenty-two.
It was not a happy marriage. Mother said that between the South and the West there was always the barrier of the manner of living, and this must have been exacerbated because the old manner of living in the South had been taken away by the war; all that the old Southerners had left was who they were, and they held on to social amenities, the small and gentle graces. They wore elegant gowns and suits which were completely impractical for the new, impoverished way of life, but which were all they had. Dearma was married in a made-over ball gown of her mother’s; the children’s clothes were cut out of the salvageable material of their parents’ wardrobes.
Social life was topsy-turvy. “Nobody who had money was anybody,” said Mother, and the suspicion of “new money” remained with her always. During the day the young men who were most desirable as escorts to the St. Cecilia Ball or the Patriarch Dances might be selling groceries or working in a pharmacy. “A young man in an apron might sell you a slab of bacon, and present himself at your door in rusty dinner clothes in the evening.”
Many things worked against my grandparents’ marriage from the start. Add to the differences between South and West, and the general poverty and hardship (all the children were undernourished, many of them rickety, and many not strong enough to survive the normal childhood ailments), that both of them were strong-willed and dominant. No wonder there was conflict in Mother’s childhood home.
2
Mother’s maternal grandmother, the Madeleine L’Engle after whom I am named, was probably the strongest influence in her life, and had led a completely different kind of life from the Kansas grandparents’; they might have been from different planets. I know her as Mado, a French nickname for Madeleine; and I think of her generation and my further forebears by the names Mother used. A Southern family is usually impossible to sort out; after the immediate uncles and aunts and first cousins, little distinction is made between second, third, and far more distant cousins; they are kin, and that is all that matters.
For me, my mother’s Papa is Grandfather, and her Mama is Dearma; and if Mother told me fewer stories about Dearma than about her grandparents and great-grandparents, it is partly because I knew Dearma for myself. I did not need stories to make her come alive for me. And it may also have been because Mother often fled the tensions at home to stay with Mado, with Amma and Ampa, with favorite cousins, and she preferred to limit her reminiscences to happy ones.
There might not have been so much storytelling had I not been an only child, and had we not traveled so much. Mother whiled away the time on trains, in hotels in strange cities, in restaurants, by the remembrance of things past. The stories were a foundation of security which helped her, I’m sure, as much as they helped me during the insecurity of our nomadic lif
e. The precariousness of both my parents’ health; the uncertainty of Father’s ability to pay bills—for his work was not going well; the confusion of living in a world so caught in the grip of a great Depression that only a terrible war could bring a semblance of prosperity: all this must have been far more difficult for my mother than I could begin to guess. Her stories helped us both.
I do not know Mother’s physical genetic pattern, who left the strongest imprint on her DNA; but Amma and Ampa, Mado, and Greatie are the ones who left indelible imprints on her psychic genetic pattern.
Mother’s name, like mine, came from her maternal great-grandmother, and I learned that Mother spoke most often of Mado when she was depressed, because Mado, even in recollection, brought the gift of laughter. She was born Madeleine Saunders, in Charleston, South Carolina, and when she was a young girl her father was ambassador to the court of Spain. Mado was his hostess, because her mother was in poor health. Countess Eugénie Montijo, later to become the wife of Napoleon III and Empress of France, was Mado’s closest friend. They had clothes made to match (Dearma’s wedding dress came from the Spanish court days), rode together, hunted together, daydreamed together. It was a life of countless balls and great dinner parties. Some years ago, Mother gave me the huge silver tray on which after-dinner coffee was served in the Embassy; it is heavy to lift with nothing on it, and after-dinner coffee in Spain included not only coffee but a large silver pitcher full of hot milk.
The golden world of those dinner parties is something out of a fairy tale to me. It was a world in which the rules of etiquette were fixed and unmovable. One of the table services was of gold (it’s long gone, but I would love to have had a glance at it), and one evening Mado almost disgraced herself when a golden spoon fell to the floor and she started to bend down to pick it up, then caught the formidable eye of her ambassador father. She sat through the rest of the meal in misery while the beautiful spoon was trampled beyond repair, because it was not etiquette for any of the servants to pick it up, or acknowledge that it had fallen.
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother Page 12