Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Violetta’s, too.” Dolph looked at her with admiring eyes.

  “I saw a friend of yours before we left home, Henry.” Monty grinned, cracking his hard-boiled egg on Eddie’s head. “She asked to be remembered to you.”

  “Who?” I asked without much interest, wondering which of the vapid little girls my sister and I occasionally played with had sent me a giggling message by the handsome Monty.

  “Ilsa Brandes.”

  I sat up quickly, and Silver nudged me. If we were careful, we might be able to learn something. Monty and Violetta, somehow or other, managed to learn all the spicy gossip that went about town, but they could be like prima donnas about imparting it if they felt biggety.

  “Oh,” I said casually. “How did you happen to bump into her?”

  “We went down to the beach for the day.” Monty rolled over with great elegance and put his head in Silver’s lap. She flushed. After a moment she began diffidently to play with his thick, ruddy hair. “Pa had to go over to July Harbour to see somebody about some fishing boats or something, and it was low tide, so we drove on the beach. Pa let me drive,” he added with pride, looking around to see that we were suitably impressed.

  “Oh, Monty,” Silver sighed, “Papa keeps talking about getting a motorcar, but we never do, and I’m just sick and tired of that old carriage.”

  “Yes, but how did you meet Ilsa?” I persisted.

  “There was a patch of sand that was soft,” Monty said.

  “You mean you drove too near the dunes.” Violetta looked over at Randolph and giggled maliciously.

  “I did not,” Monty said. “There was a bar of soft sand and we got stuck in it. Pa was having forty-seven duck fits, when all of a sudden this girl comes galloping down the beach on a black mare. Lordy, what a horse!”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “That would be Calypso.”

  “Uh huh,” Monty said. “I think she said it had a funny name like that. We yelled at her like mad, and she wheeled around and came back to us. That girl sure enough can sit a horse pretty. Kind of a violent girl, isn’t she, Henry?”

  “Is she?”

  “For a small girl she’s got lots of fire. I’m going to marry her when I’m older.” I sat up angrily at that, but he went on imperturbably. “When we told her the trouble, she tore back up the beach a piece, and then she and a funny old character came back with a couple of boards and a shovel and some rope and dug us out. She said she was sorry her father was off on a—a—”

  “Field trip,” Edwin said. “He plays with plants and bugs and snakes and things in fields.”

  “Uh huh,” Monty said. “So she said she couldn’t offer us any hospitality, because there wasn’t anything in the house but corn liquor, and not much of that. The man said he was on his way to get them some rabbits or some fowl, and Pa said it was against the law, but the man said, not on their own land it wasn’t.”

  “Pa said it was a crime and a scandal to the community,” Violetta announced righteously, “that she should be allowed to live there with that low-down no-’ count piece of white trash, with her father away so much of the time, and her not hardly a child any more.”

  “Mother says her father is a brilliant naturalist.” Dolph joined in for the first time. “She’s read articles he’s written. She said he was the most charming young man she’d ever met.”

  “You mean Cousin Anna knew him!” Silver exclaimed.

  “Well, honey, I guess she couldn’t have said that if she didn’t,” Dolph said. He looked as though he’d like to have put his head down on Violetta’s green-skirted lap, as Monty had done with Silver, but he kept sitting, leaning back up against a huge pine. He didn’t seem particularly interested in Ilsa or her father.

  “Pa says he comes from a po’ white family downstate,” Monty continued. “And this wealthy northern woman sent him up to Baltimore and abroad to study, so he got himself important and thinks he’s right smart and good as other people. But he hasn’t got any kin at all. They’re all dead as doornails.”

  Violetta nodded. “People with the right kind of kinfolk don’t let them all die just like that.”

  Dolph looked bored. “The way you and Monty like to gossip is bad as the Tuesday sewing circle. What difference does it make? We don’t have anything to do with them. You kids make me sick the way you go on.”

  “We do so have something to do with them.” I said. “Ilsa’s my friend. My best friend.”

  “Shoot.” Violetta laughed. “You’re too young, Henry.”

  “Somebody can be your best friend without your being their best friend, can’t they?” I rolled over and dug my nose deep into the fragrant pine needles.

  “Monty,” Silver said softly, ruffling his hair with her curled fingers that were so like Mamma’s. “What happened to her mother?”

  “She died in childbirth.” Monty flaunted the grown-up technical expression.

  “But who was she?”

  “Blessed if I know. Care less.” Monty was through with the subject. He was starting one of his stomach-aches. All three of the Woolfs had weak stomachs. Mamma said they had been fed on Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup to keep them quiet when they were babies, and it ruined their digestions.

  “Come on,” Monty said crossly, sliding on the slippery pine needles as he got up. “Let’s go home.”

  11

  I woke up around midnight that night. The moonlight was pouring through the window onto my bed. Edwin had the sheet over his head and lay with his face buried in the pillow.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got out of bed and went to the window. Although all the lights were out downstairs, and the hotel had quieted down for the night, there was someone walking in the garden, pacing restlessly up and down the paths. I leaned out of the window and peered out into the night, trying to see if it was anybody I knew. After a while I made up my mind it was Cousin Anna, so I slipped into my clothes, tiptoed out of the room, down the creaking corridor and stairs, and out one of the side doors into the garden, without stopping to wonder whether I might be unwelcome.

  When Cousin Anna saw that someone was walking toward her she stopped and waited. She looked relieved when she saw who it was. She didn’t ask me what I was doing, or tell me to go back to bed, but started to walk again, while I fell into step by her side. The night was fragrant and filled with moonlight. It seemed that the fragrance I breathed in with deep cooling breaths came from the moon itself rather than the flowers that, under its strange reflected light, were new flowers, of new color and shape and pattern. In the moonlight, with her scars softened and obscured, Cousin Anna looked very beautiful.

  “I don’t believe in intermarriage,” she said after a while, her voice sounding as luminous and foreign as the night. “It’s one reason why we’re decaying away to a handful of emberless ashes. But it seems there is nothing I can do about it. Perhaps if I had more energy—but I haven’t. I’m perfectly well, you know, strong and healthy; but nothing is worth the effort any more. I simply don’t care. Sometimes I think I would rather be dead than have to go through the insufferable boredom of putting on my clothes in the morning and taking them off at night.” She was silent for a while; then she said, half smiling, “In insane asylums moonlight like this is a troublesome thing. The ones who are violent only part of the time have to be tied down night and day. And the ones who are allowed to eat in the dining room, the ones who really don’t seem crazy most of the time—when the moon is full they are lunatics, too. They have to have their knives and forks taken away, or anything they might be able to use against themselves or each other. They have to be watched twice as carefully.” She paused for a moment. “When the moon is full like this, I’m restless, too. I can’t sleep. I have to get up and walk, or I feel perhaps I might go mad. No one is without a grain of insanity. On nights like this there’s something about to burst inside me, something sobbing and wailing like the doves on the summerhouse, and I have to walk it up and down as though it were a baby, to try and q
uiet it. I have to defy the moon; I have to walk directly under its glare and prove that I’m stronger and more powerful, because I’m still alive and it’s nothing but a poor, dead, burned-out thing, all passion spent.”

  We walked for a time longer in silence. Then Cousin Anna said, “My husband, your Cousin Randolph, is beyond being touched by the moon. He’s lying up there on that hard brass bed, with the moonlight pouring in stripes across him through the blinds and falling into his mouth. Sometimes I wonder what would happen to him if he took a swallow of moonlight by mistake. It might do him a lot of good.”

  We turned down the cinder path and went up the steps to the summerhouse. Cousin Anna sat down on one of the stone benches, gleaming marble-white. She was wearing a blue-gray Paisley shawl which turned silver in the moonlight, and she wrapped it tightly about herself and shivered.

  “Are you cold, Cousin Anna?” I asked.

  “Not outside.”

  “Cousin Anna?”

  “What is it, Henry?”

  “Did you know a man called Dr. John Brandes when you were young?”

  She didn’t appear to have heard my question. She turned to me, and I thought perhaps I shouldn’t have said “when you were young,” because in the moonlight, with her hair loose about her shoulders, she didn’t look much older than Violetta. She was three years older than Mamma, so that would make her thirty-six. Of course I didn’t know that then, because Mamma would have died rather than admit her age.

  “Henry,” Cousin Anna Silverton said, “don’t you grow up to be biggety. You’ve got nothing to be biggety about. Nobody in the whole Porcher-Silverton-Woolf contingent has any right to this overpowering sense of superiority they pour on high and low, the way this moonlight’s pouring down on us. Sometimes I think maybe pride’s as potent as moonlight, or we wouldn’t fool people the way we do. Folks with as much money as we have don’t have any call to be proud, if they remember how they got it. When I was a little girl in Mississippi we would have considered it a disgrace to have money, or even to have had enough to eat three times a day, seven days a week. We lived on soup and rice for months, so that Papa could have his portrait painted. It was a beautiful portrait in his uniform with his saber. It burned up in the first fire. My brother should have had it, but when he took the cloth he gave it to me. I wish now I hadn’t let him give it to me. He didn’t want to. And if he’d kept it, it might still be alive. Though if I know Papa, he’d rather be burned to a frazzle than hang on the wall of a house in New Jersey. That’s where they sent him last winter. New Jersey. I don’t know how he’ll stand the cold.”

  “They sent who to New Jersey?” I asked.

  “My brother William,” Cousin Anna said. “They took away his church and sent him to New Jersey to some town with an Indian name nobody can say, so nobody goes there, and those who do, don’t go to church.”

  “Where was his church they took away?” Excitement rose in me like the tide to the moon.

  “Charleston. Cecilia didn’t tell you about it?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “She wouldn’t, of course. William was so pleased when he was sent to Charleston shortly after Elizabeth died. I wish I’d had a chance to tell him that Cecilia was coming, though even I didn’t think she’d be such a fool as to go to his church. She might have known what would happen. William has always been a gallant idiot, sticking his neck out for what he thinks is right. William is a nice boy, but he never understood Elizabeth for a minute. His wife’s a nice little thing. Mary Huger. He met her in Charleston, and it was the best thing in the world for him. Poor Mary, all this fuss because of William’s dark and gory past must be quite a blow to her, although he wrote me that he was perfectly frank with her about the whole thing.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Shall I tell you something, Henry?” Cousin Anna asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I breathed.

  Cousin Anna looked around her carefully and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I hate your mother.”

  She stood up, flying her Paisley shawl about her, and walked rapidly toward the house. I hurried along behind her. But she didn’t say anything more. She went into the house as though I weren’t there, slamming the screen door in my face. Then she ran up the stairs, her shawl trailing after her, the back of one hand pressed tightly against her mouth.

  12

  Toward the end of the winter, when I was thirteen, Cousin Randolph died of a heart attack. This frightened Mamma, because her own heart had been playing tricks on her a good deal, and she began to read the Bible constantly. After Papa had read us Cousin Anna’s letter announcing Cousin Randolph’s death, a very brief letter, written on paper with only a fine black edge to it, I sat looking at Mamma. Her face had gone very pale; her little lizard’s head, on its slender neck, was proud against her fear of mortality; her stiff body was elegant as a fashion plate; her eyes cold, cold; her nose pinched in as though the world had a smell unpleasant to her fastidious soul; her hands always in the impeccable white kid gloves; and I thought of the things Cousin Anna had said about her and wondered why they were so true. God had certainly given Mamma a good deal, but she had apparently enjoyed none of it.

  Shortly after Cousin Randolph’s death, I read in one of the newspapers in the hotel lounge that the distinguished naturalist, John Brandes, had died of a fever at the beach in his home near July Harbour. It gave a long résumé of his accomplishments and the honors that had been awarded him, and ended up by saying that he was survived by a daughter, Ilsa. This latter part I read without understanding. As soon as I realized that Dr. Brandes was dead, it was as though the world had suddenly become a little darker, and there was no longer as much light for comprehension as there had been.

  I showed the paper to Silver, but she didn’t give it much mind. She had just received a letter from Monty, away at school, with a snapshot of him and a group of other students enclosed. Monty was in the middle, wearing a striped blazer and holding a banjo. He had an idiotic grin on his handsome face, and I turned away from Silver and the picture in anger, trying instead to see Pr. Brandes—the high forehead, and the strong delicate nose, the firm sensuous mouth, and the slight chin with the goatee. I wondered what Ilsa was doing, how she was bearing it. I had a vision of her with her arms around Calypso, comforting her, and trying wordlessly to explain to the mare why her back would be bare forevermore of the form that gave her meaning.… And a vision of Ilsa sitting in the big room at the beach, with one of her father’s books lying open on her lap, while Ira cleaned the big table under the skylight, stripping it bare of jars and specimens.… And a vision of Ilsa pacing up and down on the sand close to the ocean, with the same restless despair as Cousin Anna pacing in the garden of the hotel.

  But I knew that none of these visions was valid, because I still saw Ilsa as the child in the torn blue cotton dress, whereas she must be sixteen now and must have changed as much as I had.

  I said nothing to Papa and Mamma about Dr. Brandes’ death, but they knew. Everyone in the family had written them. Mamma said that it was about time, and she supposed the girl would stay on down at the beach alone with that uncouth assistant of her father’s and sell her soul to the devil forever, and that would be the end of her and good riddance to bad rubbish.

  But Cousin Anna put an end to Mamma’s smugness on the subject. I knew that Papa had received a letter from her, because I recognized the writing and the fine black-edged envelope when the post was brought in. I was curious all during lessons that morning, because Cousin Anna’s letters always seemed to contain gunpowder. This one certainly did.

  At lunch time Papa said, “Well, Cecilia-Jane, young Randolph Silverton is going to marry Violetta Woolf.”

  Mamma nodded approvingly. “A most suitable union. Violetta is a charming young girl, or was when we saw her last, and I’m sure she’ll be a most fitting mate for Randolph. I was afraid he might have absorbed some of Anna’s peculiar ideas. Or that dreadful uncle of his; that fiend out of the bowe
ls of hell. I believe he still writes Anna occasionally from wherever he is—New Jersey. Can you imagine?”

  “After all, Cecilia,” Papa said. “He is Anna’s brother.”

  “That makes it even more inexcusable. I think we made a great mistake to name Anna Silverton after her.” She had a way of moving her small reptilian head as though the neck which supported it were a great deal longer than it was. Now she arched her neck so that one got an impression of snakelike length, and looked with her cold unblinking eyes at Silver, who flushed. Silver and Mamma were no longer as close as they had been. Silver had come to woman’s estate the winter before, and Mamma had felt obliged to tell her that it was a perfectly normal phenomenon and that she was not bleeding to death. Ever since that time there had been a strangled restraint between them. Mamma no longer looked at Silver with mild affection; she looked at her, in fact, as little as possible, and then with a kind of distaste, as though this sudden reminder of the animal facts of life were a deliberate and unforgivable thing on Silver’s part.

  Papa unfolded the two sheets of Cousin Anna’s letter carefully. “‘I suppose it is no use asking you and Cecilia to come home for the wedding, so I shall not do so,’” he read. “‘In any event it will be a very quiet one to be held in the parlor at the Woolfs’. Montgomery thought it would be more proper to wait until a year had gone by after Randolph’s death—only, of course, Montgomery called it “passing” and I am sure you and Cecilia will, too, so forgive my bluntness in speaking of it as what it is. To return to the wedding, if Dolph and Violetta are bound and determined to get married, I suppose they might as well get it over with as soon as possible, no matter how young they are. Dolph will regret it soon enough, but I am not going to try to direct his life for him. I have seen too many unfortunate consequences of that kind of behavior, as I told Montgomery. My son will have to make his own mistakes and abide by them.’” Papa cleared his throat and deliberated whether or not to read the next part, finally deciding against it. Out of the corner of my eye, I read, “No matter what I think of this match, I am not going to run the risk of ruining his life as Cecilia and Montgomery and your pious sister Violetta ruined Elizabeth’s. At any rate I hope Dolph and young Violetta will get some enjoyment out of their marriage before it goes on the rocks. I did, and I can assure you that that compensates for a good deal. Though Cecilia, of course, wouldn’t understand that. Violetta is an appetizing little morsel, which ought to make up to a certain extent for her deficiencies.”