Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Mamma looked at Papa, who was skimming to the bottom of the page and turning it over. “Well. Go on,” she commanded.

  “Anna is becoming extremely vulgar,” Papa said.

  Mamma nodded. “Yes. Purely to shock me. If it gives her pleasure to become cheap and bawdy, who am I to stop her? Go on with the letter.”

  But Papa had folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. “She is going to take Ilsa Brandes to live with her,” he said.

  Mamma’s face and neck became crimson. Then the color slowly receded, leaving her deadly white except for a persistent flush in the lobes of the tiny ears that lay close against her head. I felt that only the other families in the dining room, and the fear of making a spectacle of herself in public, kept her from flinging back her chair and removing herself from the sound of such treasonous words, leaving Papa and Silver and me at the round table, while water spilled from her overturned goblet, dripping over the white tablecloth onto the floor.

  But she did nothing so passionate. The color came and fled, and she sat there, her ringed hands under the gloves clenched, her breath coming sharp and quick.

  Satisfied that she wasn’t going to faint, Papa took out the letter again, and read. “‘Although I’m sure she would infinitely prefer to remain at the beach with that odd assistant of her father’s from Georgia, I suppose it would be the topic of much unmerited scandal, and if we don’t look out for her, who will? My sense of duty may differ from Cecilia’s, but it is no less existent. As for me, it will be a great help to have someone with me in this house. Although I am only thirty-six, too many fires seem to have aged me prematurely. I suppose this house will burn, eventually, like the others. Why Randolph insisted on building a third of those neo-Greek, scion-of-the-old-South affairs, is beyond me. Without age and tradition behind them, they are valueless and seem only pretentious and in poor taste.’” Papa had told us that our new house, which was being rented to some people from Alabama who were taking care of the mill while we were away, was also to be as much like the old one as possible.

  “I find it difficult to believe,” Mamma said, “that Anna has the heritage she claims. She is coming to sound more and more like poor white.”

  “Shall I go on with the letter?” Papa asked.

  Mamma nodded.

  Papa read. “‘She is an interesting child, the most alive creature I have ever seen.’” Then he stopped. I managed to read, “The really strange thing is that she reminds me continually of Elizabeth. Perhaps this is a judgment upon Cecilia and Montgomery. I am sure God must find Elizabeth’s death and the manner of her dying hard to forgive. I wonder what would have happened if her child had lived? Perhaps this wild creature, so like her, and so desperately no part of her, might be someone quite different, more like her mother, who—”

  Papa saw my eye on the letter and realized what I was doing. He sent me up to his room to wait for him, and by and by he thrashed me soundly. But the thrashing wasn’t important.

  While I sat in the summerhouse to wait until the pain had subsided, I remembered, unaccountably, as it seemed to me then, something that had happened before we left home, when Silver and I went to school instead of having private lessons. Miss Turnbull had given us a composition. It was one of the first real compositions we had done, and all of them were read in class. One little boy Wrote a fantastic story about mistaken identity during the Civil War, and we all complained because we said it was too coincidental and strange to be true. I remember that Miss Turnbull looked at us very seriously, and told us that the world was so immense, and yet so minute, that the people in it were scrambled about with such diabolical inspiration that nothing that was about human beings, nothing that took place on the face of the earth, was too strange to be true. Afterward, we found out that the little boy’s wild tale was based on actual fact; it was something that had happened to his uncle.

  Often, while Silver and I were having our lessons in one of the small reception rooms in the hotel, I would remember Miss. Myra Turnbull with regret, and think of the many things she had told us that I was too young to understand. We had simply regarded her as another old-maid teacher, although she was quite young at the time, not more than twenty-two or -three. But she was one of those people who change very little between twenty and sixty. Instead of growing and developing into whatever kind of creatures they are, slowly and consistently, they have three periods of their lives, with sharp lines of demarcation between them: they are children, then grownups, then old men and women.

  Suddenly thinking of Miss Myra like that made me miss school dreadfully. The lessons Silver and I were given didn’t amount to much, and I was filled again with the desire to learn that Miss Turnbull had given me.

  Another thing that made me eager to go home was that I felt that now Ilsa had become one of the family, and I couldn’t see that there was any more reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to see her as much as I liked.

  I would get Silver to beg Mamma and Papa to take us back, but finally I came to realize that we would never go home while Mamma was alive. When Mamma had decided she was disgraced, and was going to retire from the world, she meant it. We knew that her heart, like Uncle Randolph’s, was bad, and often I would catch myself looking with guilty hope at the purplish tinge to her fingernails, and the slight swelling that disfigured her elegant ankles when she was tired.

  She lived until I was fifteen. I was the one who found her lying on the floor of the summerhouse, her white dress soiled from her struggle against death, her cold open eyes staring accusingly at me, her mouth bleakly open, while horrible strangling sounds still tore from her throat. On the roof the doves wailed unceasingly.

  I rushed back to the hotel for help. Papa came running, and Silver. Papa looked stern and angry, as he always did when he was upset, and Silver’s face had quickly gone devoid of expression. Her gray eyes under the dark brows were as unfathomable as Mamma’s lifeless ones.

  One of the colored boys carried Mamma back to the house. All the ladies and gentlemen on the cream-colored veranda rose as we came up the steps. The dark green chairs rocked mockingly by themselves. A group of children in the yard took their dripping faces out of their watermelon rinds, and stared at the limp white figure being carried into the house. From somewhere behind the kitchen came the sound of a banjo.

  [PART THREE]

  13

  We went home late in September. I sat in the train staring out the window, trying to drive out of the back of my mind the thought that somehow I had killed Mamma by wanting her to die so that I could go home to Ilsa and Cousin Anna and Miss Myra Turnbull. When I closed my eyes I could see her dreadful ashen face with the open, condemning eyes, and hear the bestial groans coming from her throat. It seemed a strange indignity that Mamma, who had been so fastidious and remote from the physical part of living, should have had to end her life alone in a violent animal struggle against death.

  Papa sat sternly reading the paper. Every once in a while he would pull out his white lawn handkerchief and wipe his mustache as though he had been eating something. Her hands folded delicately in her Jap, Mamma’s diamond and sapphire ring on her little finger, Silver sat looking with cool, uninterested eyes at the other people in the Pullman. I kept turning toward the window, watching the bare rice flats stretching on into the sky, rusty brown and watery, watching a lone tree sticking up, black and burnt-looking, out of place against a sky like a bright ribbon from Violetta’s hair, a sky so bright and blatant that after a moment I had to turn and look with Silver at the other people traveling south with us.

  It was insufferably hot. The large fans creaking and whirring above us seemed only to blow the heat at us with more force. Silver’s face, usually pale and cool in the warmest weather, looked flushed and damp above her black dress. I felt wet to the bone. Papa fanned himself angrily with his paper. I thought we would never get home.

  The train was two hours late.

  We took a cab and drove through the night that, at last, after fi
ve years, had all the familiar odors of childhood, drove down the wide street where the live oaks arched their locked branches overhead. When we turned down our own drive, I reached out and clasped my sister’s hand.

  As the house became visible through the trees it looked so like our old place that I caught my breath in amazement, but later on, after we had been greeted with the old wonderful warmth by Nursie, and been admired and exclaimed over, I realized that it was only a cheap imitation. Five years of living in a place can’t seep into the panels and walls as centuries can. And though the portraits were hung again in heavy gold frames, though most of Papa’s books were back, almost undamaged, in the glassed-in bookcases in the library, there were many things I missed—the rice portieres Great-uncle Henry Randolph had brought from China; Silver’s old rocking horse; the big screen made of oil paintings that Grandfather Montgomery Porcher had collected all over the world, that had stood in the dining room; Mamma’s Chinese sewing table, inlaid with mother-of-pearl; my mahogany spool bed.

  I went into the dining room and stared at the picture of Aunt Elizabeth, grateful that Silver, at seventeen, might have been taken for the original. If Silver looked so much like Aunt Elizabeth, surely she was not going to be like Mamma.

  I had never really, with the eyes of my mind, looked at the picture of Aunt Elizabeth before. Now I stood in front of it, looking up at the steady gray eyes, the dark, determined eyebrows. There was an expression about the mouth that made me feel that she must have laughed a great deal, and at the same time that she was laughing lightly, she would be quite cold-bloodedly getting her own way. And there was something about the way the eyes looked at me, the way the mouth was closed, the way the head was proudly held, that did, indeed, remind me more of Ilsa than my sister. I was determined to go over to Cousin Anna’s the first thing in the morning.

  Silver came in and stood behind me. She, too, looked at the portrait of Aunt Elizabeth.

  “She wouldn’t look so peculiar if it weren’t for those eyebrows. It’s crazy to have black eyebrows, and hair this color. I like that dress. I’d adore to have a red velvet dress. I wonder how long we’ll have to wear mourning for Mamma?”

  “A year, I suppose.” I would have liked to wear the black band for longer because of the feeling of guilt I still had about her. But I didn’t see why Silver should have to wear mourning at all. She had always been gentle and obedient with Mamma, and up until that strange restraint had come between them, I’m sure she never had any but loving thoughts about her. It seemed criminal to me that she should be forced into unbecoming black when she was seventeen and at last coming home to her family and friends. I knew the way the young men who spent the summers at the hotel had looked at her, and how Mamma had seen to it that there was never an opportunity for her to talk to any of them. I hoped that now, at last, she would have her chance, and that she wouldn’t be forced to lose a year because of the forbidding black of mourning.

  She must have read my thoughts, because she said, “Brother—”

  “Yes?”

  “I try to grieve about Mamma, but I can’t seem to.”

  “I know.” We both turned our heads toward the library, where Papa had locked himself. We pictured him sitting at his huge desk, head in hands, studying the miniature of Mamma he always kept with him.

  “Brother—” Silver said again.

  “Yes?”

  “Mamma wasn’t always the way she was.”

  “I don’t ever remember her any different.”

  “Well—she would have felt badly if anything had happened to you.”

  “Only because it was her duty.”

  “But she did love me when we were little, I know she did,” Silver persisted. “I suppose it’s because I’m a girl. She always talked as though she loved me until after I began to grow up. I don’t understand.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t remember—I was only about five, so you’d have been too young—but I remember being waked up one night and brought into the parlor, and there were a lot of ladies and gentlemen, and Mamma had on an ivory satin evening dress and diamond and ruby earrings, and she had on those long white kid gloves you wear in the evening, you know, so they looked all right—and, Henry, she looked so beautiful, and I ran to her and she took me in her arms, and Cousin Anna took you on her lap, and you went right back to sleep in your little white nightgown. But what I mean is, Mamma was so wonderful and beautiful and—and gay then, and she let me taste her champagne. I don’t understand. What was it that Mamma wanted? Where did she belong?”

  “She didn’t belong to be a mother.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silver sat down in Mamma’s old armchair at the end of the table and looked at the shining polished tea and coffee sets on the dark mahogany sideboard. She sighed. “Oh, well. I’m glad these things got saved, aren’t you, Henry?”

  I nodded.

  “Papa says you’re to have our old playroom for your room and I’m to have the bedroom. I suppose our things must be about unpacked by now. I’m tired. Let’s go up.”

  “All right, Sister.”

  “It seems funny to be home. And I keep missing things,” she said. “I used to love those rice portieres and the way you could see such beautiful flowers on them when you stood in the place where the light hit them just right. I suppose the Woolfs still have theirs. Papa says we’ll call on them tomorrow evening, and Cousin Anna afterward. And he says you aren’t to go over to Cousin Anna’s before.”

  “Oh, he does, does he!” I answered. “Well, he’ll have to tell me himself, then.”

  “Oh, please, Brother.” Silver put her hand on my shoulder. “He’ll just yell at us both. And Papa feels real bad about Mamma, even if we don’t.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said crossly. “Come on up.”

  At the landing there was a window seat cushioned in brown plush. On either side were glassed-in bookcases of poetry and Victorian novels. From the window you could see down the drive to the wrought-iron gates. We turned to each other, then sat down on the window seat, pressing our faces against the panes and staring out into the dark. The magnolia tree was still there, its leaves smooth and shiny-black. Silver opened the door to one of the glassed-in bookcases and pulled out a small leather-bound volume of Byron’s poetry.

  “I think I’ll stay here and read awhile. You go on up, Henry.”

  I nodded and left her.

  It seemed strange to go into our playroom, and find it quite a different room. Our little chairs and table were gone, and our toy chest. A low mahogany bed was where Silver’s rocking horse had been. There were white dotted-swiss curtains at the windows; the wallpaper was white with blue and silver stripes. My night clothes were laid out on the bed, three of my books on the bed table, the rest neatly stacked on the flat-topped desk and on the floor. I would have to ask Papa to give me a bookcase for the books I had managed to collect during the five years we lived at the hotel. Most of them I had sent away for with my pocket money. Cousin Anna always gave me a book at Christmas and on my birthday. These were some of my favorites: Stalky and Co.; Browning’s poems; an anthology of Elizabethan plays.

  At the window the white curtains stirred slightly with the breeze from the river. The fire had left enough live oaks, hung with summer-dried and dusty Spanish moss, so that the river was partly obscured and showed only as a cool glimmer here and there through the trees. I sat down on the bed and pulled off my shoes and socks. My hot, swollen feet were grateful for the cool of the floor under them. I sat still on the edge of the bed with my feet stealing the cool of the floor, and tried to sense the room. It still belonged to whomever had slept in it for the past few years, but I had a feeling that I could make it mine as a hotel room can never be one’s own.

  14

  Early the next evening we went over to the Woolfs. I had forgotten how the atmosphere of that house oppressed me. As we went into the entrance hall I remembered t
hat it was here that Aunt Elizabeth had been living when whatever it was that made Mamma and Aunt Violetta and Uncle Montgomery hate her so had happened. The house always seemed full of hate, and I was only just beginning to realize what a horribly destructive thing hate is, how it destroys inwards as well as outwards. I remembered something that Miss Myra Turnbull had taught us: that nothing in the chemical world vanishes. Everything that is in the world remains in some form or other. Decaying matter turns into mould and gases and is regenerated and becomes living matter again. I had come home from school and realized that that was what must happen to the human body after death. Even if the soul went to heaven, the body would become part of the earth again, of sand and wind and trees and sea.

  Standing in Uncle Montgomery’s ill-lighted front hall, while the houseboy went to announce us, I thought that it must be the same way with thoughts and emotions. All the powers of evil and good we let loose are freed into the world forever. Every will to hurt, to cause pain—every time we are shaken by anger—that fury, that cruelty, remains forever. I felt that an untold deal of evil thinking had gone on in this dark sunless house, buried in the decadent green of too many trees.

  Silver and I nudged each other as we pushed through the rice portieres that still hung between the living room and the hall and that clung tenuously to our hot bodies as we went in. Uncle Montgomery and Edwin were alone. We sat down, and Uncle Montgomery got out the port. He had gone very gray; I hadn’t noticed this at the funeral. Silver kept looking around and I knew that she was wondering where Monty was. After a while she asked about Violetta.