Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

  “You don’t have to go out?” Mother asked.

  “No, not for that. As you’ve probably realized, Sally, I’m Wallace, Doug’s big brother, and Olga is Elena Huxley, one of our very dear friends.”

  I must say, Sally took it very well. She tried to laugh and say how clever we all were.

  “Well, Sally,” Uncle Douglas said, “since my family has confessed all, don’t you think we’d better have a double unveiling?”

  “No,” Sally said, with a warning shake of her head, and we wondered what on earth Uncle Douglas was talking about. I had a horrible idea that maybe he and Sally were going to announce their engagement, and if that was so, the longer they put it off, the better. Maybe Sally shook her head like that because after what had happened she didn’t want to be engaged to Uncle Douglas. I hoped so.

  John and I went up to bed as soon as we’d finished our pie. We walked Rob in his sleep into the bathroom, and then back into his own little bed at the foot of the big bed, and I felt terribly fond of him. Somehow it’s often easier for me to feel terribly fond of Rob when he’s asleep than when he’s awake. I was too wound up to go right to sleep and I lay there listening to the sound of the rain against the windows. It was lashing against them and it sounded cold and icy and I was very comfortable under my pile of blankets and the big goosedown comforter. I heard the office phone ring and then the sound of Daddy’s car going out of the garage, and I knew Mother always worried about him driving at night in bad weather.

  I slept quite late in the morning. Rob’s covers were thrown back and he must have dressed and gone downstairs. He has Saturday-morning farm programs he doesn’t like to miss. He’s apt to be up and downstairs earlier Saturday morning than any other morning in the week. I lay in bed and stretched comfortably with that nice Saturday-morning no-school luxury. It was a white, closed-in day, no mountains and only ghosts of trees. The wind was blowing from the east, and not only the rain was pattering against the window but the wind was blowing the long, brown catalpa pods on the two tall catalpa trees constantly against the east windows and wall, a continual nervous knocking, an insistent but not very interested “Let me in!” It was a lovely morning just to lie there. So I did until I got hungry.

  I went downstairs to get my breakfast, and toward the northwest a whole range of mountains was lost—simply vanished, as though the mountains had never been there. And fog was rolling across the fields with the rain, so that it was a sea of white. Sally had never been here before, of course, and it had been dark the night before, and I thought of all the things she could imagine under the fog instead of our gently sloping pastures and rolling hills: oceans and rivers and prehistoric glaciers, and castles and canyons and chasms—anything might be hidden, to be revealed when the fog rolled away. But I don’t think Sally thought about things like that.

  Everything looked raw and damp, and about the house things were squeaking (shutters, for instance) instead of creaking.

  I was making myself some toast when the kitchen door opened and Daddy came in, looking tired, but kind of relaxed and happy.

  “I heard you go out last night,” I said. “Did you go out and come back again, or have you been out all this time?”

  “All this time,” Daddy said, “but it’s okay now.” I was glad. If things aren’t okay, and, of course, sometimes they aren’t, Daddy doesn’t say anything but he acts quiet, and I can tell he’s depressed and upset. Now he grinned at me and asked, “Any more coffee?”

  “I’ll pour you some,” I said. “I’ve just made toast, too. Raisin bread. Want some?”

  “Hand it over,” Daddy said, and sat down in the red leather chair, shoving Colette off the cushion. She moved over enough to let him sit, then plunked herself down on his lap.

  “Where’s everybody?” Daddy asked.

  “I don’t know. I just got up.”

  “Victoria!” Daddy shouted, and Mother came in from the study.

  “Wally! You’ll wake everybody up.”

  “It’s past ten,” Daddy said. “Who’s asleep?”

  “Elena and Sally in the guest room, and Doug. What about your office hours?”

  “I’m going right on down,” Daddy said. “Just stopped in for a cup of coffee and a bite, which Vicky has very kindly provided. Also, thought you might mention to Elena that this rain is very likely going to turn to ice if the fog lifts, and it mightn’t be a bad idea if she left on the early train tomorrow instead of waiting for the evening one if she really has to get back to New York. I’m not at all sure how good the roads are going to be.” He finished his coffee and toast and stood up. “Well, be back for lunch. I hope.”

  All morning we could hear the rain and the catalpa pods lashing against the house. Mother said, “I think I’ll fill the bathtubs, just in case,” which she did, as well as filling several bottles with water and putting them in the refrigerator and the tea kettle and three saucepans. Sally came in looking sleepy and still as though things smelled horrid, and also looking just a little anxious, as though she didn’t know what to expect next, and asked Mother what she was doing.

  “Well, you see,” Mother said, “the thermometer is reading right around thirty, and that means this rain is very apt to start freezing, and that means an ice storm. And if we have an ice storm, sooner or later the power is apt to go off. And if the power goes off, everything in this house goes off. We’re run entirely by electricity. So we have no heat, we have no water, we have no stove, no refrigerator, no deep freeze, no washing machine, no dryer, no lights, no electric blanket—and really, I think Wallace and I miss that more than almost everything else!”

  Sally blanched.

  “And no television,” Suzy said, coming in with Maggy, “and Mother can’t play her records. And John can’t run his electric trains. And if we had a sewing machine we wouldn’t be able to use it. Mother, may we dress up?”

  “Haven’t you had enough dressing up for one week?” Mother asked.

  “Couldn’t we get the things out of the costume box in the attic?”

  “All right,” Mother said. “But make it your costume box, not mine.”

  Then Maggy, who, after all, was old enough to have known better, went up to Sally and said, “How old are you?”

  “Margaret,” Mother said warningly. “What have we said about personal questions?”

  Maggy dropped that one, but she didn’t take the warning. “Are you going to marry our Uncle Douglas?” she asked. “Because if you are, I want to warn you that his beard is very tickly.”

  “Maggy,” Mother said in her quiet voice, “go up to your room, please, and stay there until you’re ready to remember that you have manners. Suzy, you’d better go back in the study and watch television with Rob or John or do whatever they’re doing until Maggy comes back down.”

  The rain didn’t stop and the fog lifted and the thermometer stayed right around thirty. By lunchtime the black branches of the trees began to get a coating of ice, and the catalpa pods got coated, too, and the noise against the east windows was constant. Mother stayed in the kitchen, “cooking things against the storm.” She made two pies and a big bowl of bread pudding with lots of raisins, and some tapioca, which Suzy and Daddy especially love, and lots of Jell-O for Rob. Daddy came in about one o’clock and said the roads were not good at all, and the road up the long hill from Clovenford, the same one we come up from the station, was beginning to ice badly, and he’d passed several cars that hadn’t been able to make it, and he hadn’t seen the sanding trucks out yet. They’re always prompt in little Thornhill, but down in Clovenford, where the station and the hospital and Daddy’s office are, they’re much slower, partly because we have more ice up here than they do down in the town, I guess.

  Saturday afternoon Daddy doesn’t usually have office hours, but he went right back after lunch to make up some of the appointments he’d missed in the morning. John and I were both feeling sleepy, so we sat in front of the kitchen fire and read. I was rereading The Secret Garden and
John was reading The Sword in the Stone. About five, Mother sent us to have baths, Suzy and Maggy and me upstairs, and John and Rob downstairs, and we were to fill the tubs again as soon as we were through. While we were in the tub the lights flickered and went off and then came on again. Mother came tearing up and told us to get out quickly and let the water right out and fill the tub again. Maggy said she hadn’t washed yet, and Mother said that was just too bad, she’d had plenty of time to wash and she’d just have to stay dirty because those tubs had to be filled before the power went off.

  Our tub was almost filled and we were about half dry when the lights flickered and went down, and then all the way out. And after a few moments the water stopped running.

  Not only darkness comes when the power goes off, but silence, too. The perpetual winter purr of the furnace stops. Most of the time we don’t hear the refrigerator, but when it goes off there’s a strange silence. The deep freeze makes its noise, and whenever we run water the pump thrums away. The television wasn’t on, but Mother was playing records, Schön-berg’s Verklärte Nacht, and that sighed off in the middle of a note. It was somehow a shock when the telephone rang and I remembered that it didn’t depend on the Light and Power Company. It was the house phone and I ran to answer it in Mother and Daddy’s bedroom. The house phone is on Mother’s side of the bed and the office phone on Daddy’s. I lay across the bed and picked up the phone and Daddy said, “Who’s this? Vicky? I can hardly hear you, it’s such a bad connection.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “Tell your mother, tell Uncle Douglas, tell everybody, not to go out in the car. Period. The roads are glare ice. I’m at the hospital now and I’ll be home when I can, and if it’s not by dinnertime I’ll call again, but tell Mother that whatever she’s forgotten at the store, or whatever she’s out of, she’ll just have to stay out of.”

  “Okay, Daddy,” I said. “Our power just went off.”

  Daddy groaned. “Wouldn’t you know. Tell Uncle Douglas and John to help get the fires going in the fireplaces. I’m glad Uncle Douglas is there. Okay, honey, you help Mother with the little ones.”

  I gave Daddy’s messages and Uncle Douglas and John lit the fires and Mother lit candles. The ice was beating against the windows and Rob stayed very close to Mother, holding on to her skirt, until she said, “Rob, darling, I love you very much, but I cannot move with you hanging on to me and there are certain things I have to do. All of you children sit in front of the fire and keep warm while I get the rest of the candles lit.”

  “Let’s watch television,” Maggy said.

  “Let’s play the Peter Pan record,” Rob said.

  “You can’t do either,” John said. “They don’t work without electricity.”

  “Come on,” Uncle Douglas said. “Let’s sit down and feed the fires and I’ll tell you stories.”

  We were in the middle of an exciting story about an Elizabethan pirate when I noticed Suzy wasn’t with us. I looked around by candlelight and counted again. John and Maggy and Rob and I were sitting on cushions around the big living-room fireplace. Aunt Elena and Mother were wrapping potatoes in foil and putting them in the back of the fireplace. Sally was just sitting on one of the sofas. She and Uncle Douglas had been playing cribbage, and she had said she’d put the cribbage set away, but she was just sitting there. Her face flickered in firelight and candlelight, and where Mother and Aunt Elena looked beautiful to me, squatting in front of the fire and poking the potatoes back in the embers, the wavering shadows seemed to make everything long about Sally’s face look longer, especially the nose. As a matter of fact, she looked rather like a witch, and I thought again how awful it would be if she married Uncle Douglas, and I didn’t feel so bad about the trick we’d played on her the night before, especially as she hadn’t even offered to help in any way when the lights went off. I wondered again where Suzy had gone to.

  Suzy doesn’t like to go to sleep unless her room is dark. She and Maggy have had several bad squabbles about whether or not the hall light should be left on till Mother and Daddy come to bed, and Suzy would really prefer not to have the night-light on in the bathroom, but all this is after she’s safely tucked up in bed, and the night-light is on in the bathroom, and all she needs to do if she gets tired of darkness is to reach out and turn on the bedside lamp. Mother had candles in the living room and candles in the kitchen, and she had candles for us to take upstairs at bedtime, but we were never allowed to wander around with candles, and if Suzy wasn’t in the kitchen she must be somewhere in the dark, and I wondered whether or not she was frightened.

  Then I heard someone thudding down the stairs and I knew it must be Suzy and she came panting into the kitchen and I heard her demanding, “Mother, did you take my snake?”

  “What snake, Suzy?” Mother asked. “I don’t know anything about your snake.”

  Suzy stamped into the living room and over to where we were sitting by the fireplace. “Somebody has taken my snake. Who took it?”

  “You mean that old snake I showed you?” John said.

  “Yes. Did you take it, John?”

  “I didn’t do anything with it,” John said. “I left it right on the stone wall where it was when I showed it to you.”

  “But I took it,” Suzy said. “I put it in the bottom bureau drawer of the bureau in the guest room—your room. I knew you weren’t using that drawer and Maggy made a fuss about having it in our room, and I thought it would be safe there. And now it’s gone. I went to see if it was all right but it wasn’t there.” Suddenly she turned and glared at Sally. “Did you move my snake?”

  “Wild horses wouldn’t make me touch a snake,” Sally said. “It was there last night.”

  “You mean you saw it?”

  “I saw it indeed.”

  “Was he all right?” Suzy asked passionately.

  Aunt Elena had come in. “We didn’t examine him very thoroughly, Suzy darling,” she said. “I was unpacking Sally’s clothes and I really didn’t think she’d want them on a dead snake, so after dinner I got your father to remove it.”

  “Remove it!” Suzy wailed. “But what did Daddy do with it?”

  Mother came in from the kitchen now, too. “Suzy, what is all this? Why were you keeping a dead snake in the guest room?”

  “To hatch!” Suzy cried.

  Uncle Douglas was the first of us to realize quite how serious Suzy was. “Suzy,” he said gently, instead of laughing as John and Maggy and I were doing, “how was it going to hatch? What was it going to hatch into?”

  Suzy had started to cry. “Into a butterfly. A beautiful, big butterfly. You know, like a caterpillar. I know snakes must do something like that because last summer John showed me where a snake had left its skin on the wall, and I thought if I put it in the drawer where it was safe and quiet and dark it would be like a cocoon for it, and it would hatch into a b-but-butterfly.” She was sobbing so hard now that she couldn’t talk, and she ran and flung her arms around Mother.

  Mother held her tight and stroked her head and said, “Oh, Suzy, Suzy darling.”

  And Suzy sobbed, “It would have been such a big and beautiful butterfly.”

  “Darling,” Mother said, “the snake was dead. And snakes aren’t like caterpillars. They shed their skins, but they don’t weave cocoons or grow into butterflies.”

  “But it might have!” Suzy cried. “How do you know? It was a scientific speriment. Daddy says you never find out anything except by scientific speriments.” And she began to sob again.

  Sally said, “Oh, really!” And even if we’d thought Suzy was silly up to then, we stopped thinking it.

  Aunt Elena said, “I know what, let’s all sing!”

  Mother had lit the two candles in the big silver candlesticks on the piano, and Aunt Elena sat down at the piano and started to play “Oh, Susannah,” especially for Suzy, and Mother started singing, “Oh, Susannah, don’t you cry for me,” and we all joined in, and then everybody was singing, one song after another—ever
ybody except Sally.

  “Why isn’t Sally singing?” Rob asked.

  “Maybe she doesn’t know the songs,” Mother said.

  “Get your guitar, Victoria,” Aunt Elena said, and Mother went and got her guitar and played along with Aunt Elena, and Uncle Douglas got the recorder he gave me for Christmas, which I wasn’t very good at yet (he wasn’t, either, but he had lots of fun with it), and Rob ran to the kitchen and came back with a saucepan for a drum. And Suzy forgot her snake. And we all forgot completely about Sally sitting silently on the sofa and not singing.

  Daddy called around six to see how we were. The phone was really crackling by then, and I gave it to Mother because I could hardly hear him. She kept saying, “What? What? Shout louder, Wally!” And she was shouting at the top of her lungs herself. She said Daddy was going to stay at the hospital a while longer because some people had been brought in whose car had turned over on the icy road, and as long as Uncle Douglas was with us, he probably wouldn’t get home till morning. We had a nice dinner anyhow, and Mother was able to stop listening with one ear for Daddy because she knew he wasn’t coming home. “Unless they have some more emergencies, he’ll probably have a better sleep at the hospital anyhow,” she said, “and heaven knows he needs it.”

  She’d brought steaks up from the deep freeze and we cooked them over one of the fires, and there were the potatoes she’d baked in foil, and she’d made a big salad, and we ate on paper plates because, of course, there wasn’t any water to wash dishes with, and it was all like a picnic and fun. At least, we children had fun, and Mother and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas seemed to be enjoying themselves, too.

  But once, when all the grownups, even Sally, were out of the room, Maggy whispered, “I know I’ve seen her before, that Sally Hough. I know the name, too, but I can’t think where.”

  “But think,” Suzy demanded.

  “I’ve been trying. She must be one of Mummie’s friends. And she keeps on looking at me as though she knew me, too. I don’t like her.”