Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

  After dinner Uncle Douglas took Suzy and Rob into the study and played with them, and John and I helped Mother and Daddy put the dishes in the dishwasher and clean up, and before we’d finished Daddy got a call and had to go down to the hospital. He put his arms around Mother again and said, “I don’t think I’ll be very long. I’ll be home as soon as I can and I’ll phone you if I’m longer than I expect.” Then he kissed us all good night and slung Rob over his shoulders like a sack of flour and took him upstairs and dumped him down on his bed.

  Mother came up to read to us and put us to bed. We were in the middle of The Jungle Book then. We always try to pick things everybody will like for the read-aloud books, and even Rob enjoyed Mowgli and Rikki-tikki-tavi. But Mother only read us a couple of pages. We were in Suzy’s and my room. We take turns: one night Suzy’s and my room, the next night John and Rob’s. There are twin beds in Suzy’s and my room, and John sat on the foot of Suzy’s bed, and Rob got in with me and messed all the bedclothes up, and Mother sat on the floor between the beds. Colette curled up cozily in Mother’s lap and yawned all through the reading. Mr. Rochester very seldom comes upstairs; Mother and Daddy don’t encourage it, he’s so big. But that night he didn’t seem to want to stay downstairs; he must have sensed that something was wrong, so we heard him lumbering up. Poor Rochester, he’s very heavy on his feet, and clumsy, too, and he’s always getting scolded for bumping into things and knocking them over. It’s very sad for him, because Colette’s so delicate and graceful. Now Mr. Rochester sniffed around both beds and finally sat down with a thud by Mother and Colette.

  When Mother closed the book, we turned out the light and said prayers. We have a couple of family prayers and Our Father and then we each say our own God Bless. Rob is very personal about his God Bless. He puts in anything he feels like, and Mother and Daddy had to scold Suzy to stop her from teasing him about it. Last Christmas, for instance, in the middle of his God Bless, he said, “Oh, and God bless Santa Claus, and bless you, too, God.” So I guess that night we were all waiting for him to say something about Uncle Hal. I was afraid maybe he wouldn’t, and I wanted him to, badly.

  “God bless Mother and Daddy and John and Vicky and Suzy,” he said, “and Mr. Rochester and Colette and Grandfather and all the cats and Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and Uncle Hal and …” and then he stopped and said, “and all the cats and Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena and Uncle Hal,” and then he stopped again and said, “and especially Uncle Hal, God, and make his plane have taken him to another planet to live so he’s all right because you can do that, God, John says you can, and we all want him to be all right, because we love him, and God bless me and make me a good boy. Amen.”

  Mother didn’t sing to us that night. She usually sings to us, but she said, “I’m going downstairs now, children. Please be good and try to go to sleep right away. Run along into your own room, John and Rob. I’ll come tuck you in as soon as I tuck in the girls.”

  Rob slowly got out of my bed. He stood up on the foot of it and said to Mother, “Do you ever cry?”

  “Of course, Rob,” Mother said. “I cry just like anybody else.”

  “But I never see you cry,” Rob said.

  “Mothers have to try not to cry,” Mother said. “At least, not too often. Now, run along to your own room.”

  She tucked Suzy and me in, and kissed us, and then we heard her go in to Rob and John.

  I couldn’t go to sleep. I lay there and my bed was all rumpled up from Rob, and I got up and straightened it out and tucked it in again and lay there on my back and I couldn’t sleep. I whispered, “Suzy,” but she didn’t answer. She only sighed heavily and turned over and I knew that she was asleep. I was cold, and Mother hadn’t put on our winter blankets yet, and I pulled up the bedspread and lay there with the covers under my chin, and it wasn’t only because autumn was coming that I was cold.

  Suzy’s and my room is over the study, and I could hear Mother and Uncle Douglas talking, just the rumble of their voices, Uncle Douglas’s deep and rich, Mother’s lighter. Then the phone rang and then there was silence for a long time, and then their voices again, and then another phone call. Suzy’s little blue clock seemed to tick louder and louder, and finally I put on the light to see what time it was, and it was after eleven.

  I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up. I went to the bathroom, and then I looked into John and Rob’s room, but they were both asleep. I’d been hoping John would be awake, too, because I knew that he felt worse about Uncle Hal than any of the rest of us.

  I went and sat for a moment at the top of the back stairs, because the light and warmth from the kitchen came up to me and gave me a feeling of safety. Then I heard Mother on the telephone: “Yes, of course, Douglas will drive right down; wait a minute, Elena, I’ll put him on.”

  I knew that I mustn’t eavesdrop, but I couldn’t go back upstairs and to bed, so I went on down. Uncle Douglas must have been right by Mother, because he was holding the phone to his ear, and Mother saw me and said, “Vicky,” and then, “Go wait in the study.” In a moment she came and joined me, saying, “What’s the matter, Vic?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  She nodded. “I know. How about the others?”

  “I think they’re all asleep.”

  “John?”

  “He’s asleep. Mother,” I started. “Why? Why did Uncle Hal have to be—”

  But then Uncle Douglas came in. “Vic,” he started to say to Mother; then he saw me. “Oh, hello, Vicky, what are you doing?”

  “She was just wakeful,” Mother said quickly for me. “So now what, Doug? Are you going?”

  “Yes,” Uncle Douglas said. “Right away.”

  “Where’s Uncle Douglas going?” I asked. I was all tangled up in my mind, because it didn’t seem fair for Uncle Douglas to be dashing off again just after he had come. We all loved him so terribly much, and I hadn’t had a chance to see him at all, really, since he’d arrived the night before, and yet I didn’t understand how I could be disappointed about a thing like that at a time like this.

  He came over to me and put his hand under my chin so that he could look down into my eyes. I looked up at him, hoping that he could straighten me out, because, though Uncle Douglas is always making jokes and people call him a bohemian because he’s an artist and maybe because of his beard, too, he also seems able to straighten things out. He says it’s because he’s not around all the time, so he has perspective on us.

  Now he said, “Aunt Elena needs me, little one. I’m going to see if I can be of any help to her. She’s very much alone now. And Uncle Hal’s copilot was killed, too, you see, and he had a little girl. She doesn’t have any mother, so your Aunt Elena’s in charge of her for the moment. So that’s another complication, too.”

  “Oh,” I said, and it all seemed more frightening and terrible than ever.

  “Go upstairs now, Vicky,” Mother said. “Try to go to sleep or you’ll never be up in time for Sunday school tomorrow. I’ll come up to you later and see if you’re still awake.”

  Uncle Douglas kissed me goodbye, his beard tickling me softly, and I trailed on upstairs. I climbed into bed and the night-light from the bathroom came in gently, and by and by a rectangle of light came in through the window and wheeled across the ceiling, and it was Uncle Douglas getting his car out and driving off.

  Because I knew that Mother would come in to me, I was able to relax a little as I lay there, instead of just bouncing around the way I’d been doing before. I didn’t want to sleep. All I wanted to do was to talk, to talk to people who were alive and who could help make me less frightened and confused. I don’t know exactly why I was so frightened and confused; maybe if I’d known why, I wouldn’t have been.

  I heard Daddy come home, and then he and Mother came upstairs. I heard Daddy take Rob to the bathroom, and then Mother came in to me and sat down on the side of my bed, and the light from her bedside lamp shone across the hall and onto my bed and her face.


  “Mother, how old is the little girl?” I asked.

  She must have been thinking very hard about something else, because she said, “What little girl?”

  “The one whose father was Uncle Hal’s copilot.”

  “Ten.”

  A year older than Suzy; two years younger than I am. And she didn’t have a mother or a father. “Mother, I don’t understand life and death.”

  Mother laughed softly, a little sadly, and ran her hand over my forehead. “My darling, if you did you’d know more than anybody in the world. We mustn’t talk any more now. We’ll wake Suzy.”

  And Daddy came and stood in the doorway, saying quietly, “Vicky, John is asleep and you must try to go to sleep, too.”

  He and Mother went into their room and turned off their light, and the soft sound of their voices talking quietly together must have acted like a lullaby on me, because I turned over and went to sleep.

  Sometime during the night the phone rang again; I woke up just enough to realize it. And it rang again in the morning—the house phone both times, not the office ring; but once I had finally gone to sleep I was so sleepy that the sound of the phone hardly got through to me, and it was only as I was waking up, with the sun shining full across my bed, and heard the office phone ringing that I remembered the phone had rung during the night.

  We have lots more time on Sundays than we do on schooldays, but there always seems to be more of a rush to get to Sunday school on time than there is to catch the school bus, so we don’t make our beds till we get home from Sunday school and church. As soon as we got home from church Mother told us to get out of our good clothes and into play clothes (I don’t know why we’d never do it if she didn’t tell us, but there’s always so much to do that we just don’t think about it) and then she told me to strip my bed and make it up with clean sheets. “And check the guest room, Vicky,” she said. “Make sure there are clean sheets on the guest-room beds.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I tell you to,” she said, as though I were Rob, and that was all.

  I was almost through when she came up and said, “Vicky, would you mind sleeping in Rob’s room for a while?”

  “Me? Why?” I asked in surprise.

  “You must have realized that Aunt Elena called several times last night. I talked with her again this morning, and Uncle Douglas is driving her up here with Maggy.”

  “Maggy?”

  “Margaret Hamilton, the little girl whose father was Uncle Hal’s copilot.”

  I hadn’t quite finished making the bed, but I sat down on the edge of it. “When are they coming?”

  “They’re on their way now,” Mother said. “They ought to be here this afternoon. I thought that since Maggy and Suzy are so close in age, I’d put Maggy in your bed.”

  “What about John?”

  “He’ll sleep in the study tonight while Aunt Elena’s here. When she goes, he can have the guest room. I know you have a lot of homework this year, Vicky, but John has even more, and I think he must be the one to have the room to himself. It won’t be all gravy, you know; he’ll have to move out whenever we have company.”

  I thought this over for a moment. Then I said, “How long is the little girl … Maggy … staying?”

  “I don’t know,” Mother said. “We’ll just have to see.”

  “And Mother … why is she coming to us?”

  “It’s too complicated to go into now,” Mother said briskly. “Come along, Vic, let’s get the beds done.”

  Mother usually gives us nice, full explanations for things, but on the rare occasions when she doesn’t (I think being cryptic is what I mean), there’s no point asking any more questions, so we just finished up with the beds.

  After lunch John had to work on his science project, so he went off to the barn, with Daddy warning him to do his project and not his space suit. I biked over to the center of Thornhill to check my math homework with Nanny Jenkins, my best friend. Nanny’s parents run the store in the village and Mr. Jenkins plays the cello, too. Math is not my best subject and I find that if I don’t check my problems I’m apt to make silly mistakes in adding or subtracting that make the whole problem wrong even if I’ve been doing it the right way. We finished about five o’clock and it was time for me to get along home, anyhow. Mother doesn’t like us to ride our bikes after dark unless there’s a very good reason. It’s a nice ride home from the village, up the one real street in Thornhill, a nice wide street with white houses set back on sloping lawns and lots of elms and maples (it’s just a typical New England village—at least, that’s what Uncle Douglas says), and then off onto the back road. The back road is a dirt road, and it’s windy and hilly and roundabout and so bumpy that cars don’t drive on it very often. Our house is at the other end of it, just about a mile and a half. In the autumn it’s especially beautiful, with the leaves turned and the ground slowly being carpeted with them. Where the trees are the heaviest and the road cuts through a little wood, the leaves are the last to turn, so that as I pedaled along, the evening sun was shining through green, and up ahead of me, where the trees thinned out, everything was red and orange and yellow.

  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.