Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Has she ever let you do it before?”

  “She’s never said I couldn’t. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “It’s on your own head,” John said. “Go ahead, if you think you’re so smart.” And he pushed his face into the pillow and burrowed under the covers again.

  Maybe I should explain about the radiators. We have hot-water heat. The hot water circulates through the radiators, and when air gets in with the hot water it keeps the hot water from circulating properly, and the radiators don’t give off as much heat, and they make noises. We keep the upstairs thermostat lower than the downstairs one because we like to sleep in cool rooms and it saves oil, so the upstairs radiators seem to get air in them more often than the downstairs ones, where the water is constantly circulating most of the winter. Each radiator has a sort of little valve, and you take a key that looks like a very small roller-skate key and turn the valve, and hold a glass under the outlet. The air hisses out and you hold the glass there until a little stream of water flows into it, and then you know the air is out of the radiator. Mother keeps the upstairs key on her dressing table so it won’t get lost, and I went and got it.

  First I let the air out of the radiators in John’s room, to annoy him. Then I did Mother’s and Daddy’s room, and then Suzy and Maggy’s, and then Rob’s and mine. I was doing the radiator by the north window and all of a sudden I felt the radiator key just turning and turning and I couldn’t get it to shut off the valve at all. I took it out and a tiny sort of screw came out, and water came pouring out of the valve place and the outlet place, shooting out at the wall and the ceiling. There was absolutely nothing to do to stem the wild stream except put my fingers over the two places and hold. I was afraid the water might scald me, but I guess the little holes were so tiny that it didn’t, because it didn’t seem particularly hot, only very uncomfortable. I felt exactly like the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

  “John!” I yelled. “John!”

  “I’m trying to sleep,” he yelled back. “Leave me alone.”

  “But a screw came out of the radiator!”

  “I told you you’d make a mess of it. Go tell Mother.”

  “I can’t! If I take my fingers away from the two little holes the water shoots all over the place.”

  “Serves you right,” John said.

  “Please call her for me,” I begged.

  “Call her yourself,” he said. “I’m sick.”

  “But I can’t! I can’t move!”

  Downstairs in the study the little ones had TV on, louder than Mother likes us to have it. I yelled and yelled and stamped and stamped for about five minutes before I could attract their attention. Finally Suzy came up to see what the matter was, and I told her, and told her to go tell Mother, quickly.

  Well, she went back downstairs, and she says she meant to tell Mother right away, but she stopped off for a moment to look at TV and she got caught up in an exciting part of the story and just stayed there. And Mother didn’t come and didn’t come and finally I realized that Suzy couldn’t have told her. So I began stamping and yelling again. It was the most awful feeling, being stuck to the radiator and not able to move. And I kept feeling more and more like the boy at the dike. I yelled at John again but he just laughed nastily.

  Finally Mother came, and I was furious with John and furious with Suzy, and furious with Maggy and Rob, too, because they’d had the TV on so loud and been making so much noise, and I was furious with Mother for not having heard me and come sooner. I took my fingers away and the water came spouting out and Mother said, “Hold it again, Vic, while I phone Mr. Calahan,” and she hurried off to her room and I heard her talking to Mr. Calahan, the plumber. Then she came back and said, “All right, Vic. Mr. Calahan will be over as soon as he can get here. Rescue us for a few minutes more, will you? Mr. Calahan says that if I get a potato and ram it up against the two little points where the water’s coming out, it’ll be a lot easier to hold the potato than the radiator itself. I’ll go get a potato and then take over for you.”

  “John’s a beast,” I said. “He knew what was happening and he wouldn’t call you for me.”

  “John’s sick in bed,” Mother said, “and I told him not to get out.”

  “He did get out. He went to the bathroom and threw up.”

  Mother looked at me quizzically. “Did you think I wanted him to throw up all over the bed? Now, hold it, Vic, and I’ll be right back.”

  “And Suzy’s a beast, too!” I shouted after her. “I told her to tell you right away and she didn’t. Everybody just left me here to stew in … in radiator juice.”

  Mother laughed. “Just keep calm, honey,” she said, and disappeared.

  It didn’t take her long to come back with the potato. I left her holding it on to the radiator and I went to the door of John’s room and hissed, “Beast.”

  The phone rang, the house phone, and Mother called, “Answer it, please, Vicky.”

  It was for me, anyhow, Nanny, to ask me something about the Social Studies homework. She couldn’t seem to understand what I was telling her about the assignment, so I said, “I’ll get my bike and come over and show you.”

  “Is that okay?” Nanny asked.

  “Why not? It won’t take me long.”

  “But it’s almost dark.”

  “I have a light on my bike and I’ll go by the back road.”

  I knew perfectly well that it wasn’t all right. John is sometimes allowed to ride on the main road, but none of the rest of us is. We can ride on the back road, but there’re usually two of us, and it’s never been after dark. But I didn’t push thinking about whether or not Mother’d say yes if I asked her if I could ride over to Nanny’s alone on the back road after the sun had gone down.

  I went out to the garage, leaving all the warmth and comfort of the house behind me. As I shut the door I shut out not only the light and the sounds of the little ones watching television but my anger, too. Only now it was too late to turn back. I put on my jacket and pulled the hood over my head. It had turned very cold; I was sure it was below zero, and even with knee socks and my strong school shoes the cement floor of the garage seemed cold, and I knew the frozen ruts of the back road would be colder still, so I pushed my feet into my boots, though I’ve never liked riding a bike in boots.

  You go downhill most of the way to Nanny’s, then up a hill so steep that you have to get off and push your bike. I went in the back way, instead of going through the store. I wasn’t quite sure why I didn’t want her mother and father to see me, but I didn’t. Nanny was on the lookout for me, and we slipped up their back stairs to her room. It only took me a couple of minutes to show her about the homework, so I said, “Well, I better be going. See you tomorrow in school,” and I scuttled off.

  I’d thought there might still be some daylight left, but in those couple of minutes it was all gone. It was really dark on the road now, and even with my strong bike light I didn’t like it one bit, and I knew I’d been a fool to go tearing off to Nanny’s in a rage like that. The sky was clouding over, deep masses of snow clouds, so there weren’t even any stars. There are only a few houses on the back road between Nanny’s house and ours, and great stretches of darkness in between. The back road isn’t paved, and the dirt and ruts were frozen hard as iron, so that it was bumpy and uncomfortable to ride on. The shadows seemed enormous, and the distances between one house and another, between friendly lights spilling out of the windows onto frozen rusty lawns and the road, seemed much longer than I remembered. Finally I passed the last house and then there was about half a mile of pitch-black darkness before the end of the back road where it turns into the old Boston Post Road. Our house is on the corner. I pedaled as fast as I could. I forgot that I was mad at John, mad at Suzy, mad at anyone. All I wanted was to be home.

  I’ll never know exactly how it happened. Maybe I struck a rut or a pebble. Or maybe the hem of my skirt, which I’d torn that day at recess, caught in one of the pedals. Or maybe it was bicy
cling in boots. But whatever caused it, all of a sudden I was tumbling over the handlebars and onto a pile of rocks at the side of the road.

  I didn’t know at first whether I was hurt or not. I think maybe I was knocked out for a moment. I picked myself up and tried to get back on my bike to get home as soon as possible, but I couldn’t ride it. My right arm hurt in a way that nothing had ever hurt before, and even if it hadn’t, I couldn’t have ridden the bike home because the handlebars were all bent around and the wheel was crooked. My face hurt, too, and when I put my left hand up to it, something felt horribly warm and sticky, and I knew I was bleeding. There was only one thing on my mind, and that was to get home as fast as I possibly could, and I started running up the dark road, and each step jolted the pain in my arm, and I felt the sticky warmth from my face trickling down my neck. For a long while I was too frightened to cry, and then, as I saw the lights from our house streaming across the lawn and I knew that everybody in there was warm and comfortable and noisy, I began to shriek. I didn’t really know that I was shrieking; it just happened.

  It was John who heard me, John who’d just had to get up to go to the bathroom and throw up again. He said he yelled out, “That’s Vic! Something’s wrong with Vicky!” And he flung himself into his slippers and bathrobe and dashed outdoors to the sound of my screaming.

  When he got to me I must have looked just as awful as I felt. My face was all covered with blood, and it had dripped down all over my jacket. All John could say was, “Oh, Vicky, oh, Vicky,” and then Rochester came bounding out, and he seemed to know that he mustn’t jump on me, but he began to whimper and try to lick my fingers in comfort.

  Maggy came rushing to the open door and took one look at me and ran back in again, screaming at the top of her lungs, “Aunt Victoria! Vicky’s all bloody! Come quick!”

  Then Mother came running out without stopping to put on a coat or anything. She took one look at me and said—and her voice sounded so calm I felt better at once—“John, you shouldn’t be out of bed. Please get upstairs at once and take the little ones with you and keep them there till I tell you. Suzy and Rob and Maggy, go with John at once.” They hesitated, and Mother said, “Now. At once. Before I count: one, two, three …”

  They ran.

  Then Mother put her arm around me and the protecting pressure of her arm came against my hurt arm and I screamed, “Mother, it’s my arm! Mother, I’ve hurt my arm.”

  “All right, darling,” Mother said. “Let’s get indoors to the bathroom, where we can clean you up.”

  We moved slowly across the rectangle of light in which we had been standing and into the house. I couldn’t move quickly. I had run all the way home, but I knew now that I couldn’t run another step no matter what was after me. We went into the bathroom, and from the study the TV was blasting.

  “Turn it off,” I said. “Please turn it off.”

  Mother turned it off, then came back and turned on the water in the basin. Then she took a washcloth and began gently cleaning my face. “I think Daddy’ll have to take a stitch or two in your chin,” she said. “I’ll call him in just a moment.”

  I turned so that I could see myself in the mirror, and then I screamed, “My teeth! Mother, my teeth!” My bottom teeth were all pushed in and bloody.

  Mother said, very quietly, “All right, Vicky, don’t be frightened. They can be fixed, don’t worry. I’m going to try to get hold of Daddy now.”

  She helped me into the kitchen and I sat down at the table because I didn’t think I could stand up any longer and now I was too frightened even to yell. I couldn’t even breathe without a funny scared kind of sob coming up from my sides and choking me. Mother phoned the office number and got the answering service. She turned to me.

  “Good. Daddy’s at the hospital. I’ll get him there.”

  Then she dialed the hospital number and asked for Daddy, and then it seemed to me she waited forever. Finally she said, “This is Dr. Austin’s wife. One of our little girls is hurt.” And then there was another long wait. She said, “Vicky, how did it happen?”

  “I fell off my bike.”

  Then she said, “Oh, Wally. Wally, Vicky fell off her bike and I think she’s broken her arm and her face is pretty battered … All right. Right away.” And she hung up. “Come on, honey,” she said. “We’ll go down to the hospital and meet Daddy there. Let me just run upstairs and ask John to keep an eye on the little ones.”

  I was so stiff and wobbly that she had to help me into the car, and I sat very close to her, leaning against her. I could lean up close because my left arm was all right. What I really wanted was to be small enough so that I could sit in her lap and have her hold me, while someone else drove.

  “Can you tell me more about it, Vicky?” Mother asked. “What were you doing out on your bike after dark?”

  “I went to help Nanny with her Social Studies homework,” I said. Then I added, very low, “I was mad at John.”

  Mother didn’t say anything and we drove on in silence. She was driving quickly, more quickly than she usually drives, and as each minute passed, each thing about me that hurt began to hurt worse. My arm and my jaw particularly, but also it seemed that every bone in my body felt jostled and jounced.

  Daddy was waiting on the steps of the hospital as Mother drove up. He helped me out and Mother went to park the car and Daddy took me down a long corridor. A nurse asked him if he wanted a wheelchair or a stretcher, but he said, “Thanks, we won’t wait.” He took me into a white room that was blindingly light, and helped me up onto a table sort of like the examination table in his office, but there was an enormous light over it. I began to feel all fuzzy and wuzzy, and Daddy said, “I’ll have to sew up your chin, Vicky, but I think we’d better get some X-rays first.”

  All the rest of it I don’t remember very well, and I’m just as glad. Daddy did get a stretcher and then I went up in an elevator, and then there were the X-rays, and the X-ray technician leaving me under the big X-ray machine and going into a little room and saying, “Don’t breathe,” and the buzz of the X-ray machine, and then, “Now breathe.” And then I was in the elevator again and there was another doctor, Dr. Olsen, who’s an orthopedic surgeon—that means bones and things—and Dr. Harlow, our dentist, and nurses and things, and Daddy said they were going to give me some anesthesia.

  When I woke up I was in a room with one other bed in it, and I felt awful. My arm was in a plaster cast and I couldn’t move my head at all and I couldn’t speak. Daddy was there and I made some grunting sort of noises, and he told me to be quiet and lie still, and then he said that I’d broken my right arm and they’d set it, and he’d taken six stitches in my chin, and Dr. Harlow had put the teeth back in place, and to hold them properly he’d put a tongue depressor between my teeth, and then my whole head was bound up so I couldn’t move my jaws at all. I felt thirsty and horrible and Daddy must have known this, because he took a spoon and dribbled some ice water into my mouth and I don’t think anything has ever felt or tasted so wonderful.

  Then Daddy said that he was going home, that John was sick, too, and he had to see to him, but that he’d come back down to the hospital later on to check on me, and that meanwhile I was to be good and not give the nurses any trouble. And he left.

  I lay there and looked around the room. The other bed was empty and clean and white. The door to the room was partly open and light came in from it, but I couldn’t move to look at my watch and they must have taken it off, anyhow. I didn’t have any idea how late it might be. It was around five when I started home from Nanny’s, and I didn’t know how much time had passed since I fell off my bike.

  Every once in a while a nurse or a doctor walked by, but no one came in. I wanted to cry out or to press the little buzzer pinned to my sheet, but I remembered Daddy’s voice when he told me to be good and not give the nurses any trouble. My arm ached. My face ached. Tears started to come out of my eyes and roll down my cheeks but I couldn’t sob aloud, not only because of wh
at Daddy had said but because it would hurt too much.

  And I knew it was all my fault.

  This one I couldn’t blame in any way on Maggy.

  Only it seemed to me, as I lay there miserably, that before Maggy came to stay I’d never been as stupid and horrid and disobedient as I’d been that afternoon. Of course, that wasn’t fair of me; I’ve been just awful lots of times when there wasn’t any Maggy in our house. It just seemed that way. And I remembered a few weeks before hearing Daddy saying to Mother that Maggy was managing to disrupt the entire household, and Mother answering that if our household atmosphere was so precarious that a ten-year-old child could ruin it, it was a good thing to find it out. And Daddy said he wished Mr. Ten Eyck would make up his mind and just take Maggy back to New York. And Mother said that he was just as apt to decide to let her stay right where she was, with us; and if he did we couldn’t refuse the responsibility; we had to give the child her chance.

  I knew I couldn’t blame Maggy for any of the things that I’d done that day. If I hadn’t been mad at John, if I hadn’t gone off on my bike in a huff, I might have been at home right that minute, maybe upstairs with Mother being read to or saying prayers. But I wasn’t home; I was in the hospital, and maybe I’d made John worse, because he’d come running outdoors into the icy night air after me in only his pajamas and bathrobe. I wondered what Rob would say in his God Bless that night, if he’d ask God to help John get better, and to help me get better, too, and if he’d been scared when he saw me all bloody like that. Rob never seems to get scared at anything, but I think sometimes he feels things more than we know.

  The longer I lay there, the worse I felt. And then a man’s shadow stood near the door and then turned and came in. But it wasn’t Daddy, it was Dr. Harlow. He came in and turned on the little lamp by my bed.

  “Well, Vicky,” he said, “how goes it?”