Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  To Mariana.

  Only to Mariana. Their eyes met, and then Mariana turned away as though to speak to the child.

  Standing against the wall, Sister Joaquina watched. As Mariana turned from Peregrina and looked after the two soldiers, Joaquina pushed up to her and plucked at her sleeve. “What’s the matter, Sister?”

  Mariana, only half hearing, half feeling, did not turn to see who was pulling at her attention. “Matter? Nothing. How could anything be the matter?”

  “You look so strange.”

  Mariana turned to see who was speaking, and answered impatiently, “Look at the soldiers. Don’t look at me.”

  Joaquina frowned, still holding the sleeve of Mariana’s habit. “But I’m not sure it’s right, all this excitement. I don’t think it’s what her Grace meant—”

  Sister Beatriz, the young nun of whom Peregrina had said, “We’re afraid of her but we respect her,” turned her cool gaze to Joaquina. “Sister, what are you talking about?”

  “All this wild behavior, when this is a convent of the Reform—”

  Beatriz said quietly, “Her Grace would be the last to deny us a moment of joy for our men who have fought and suffered for us. This is no time for long faces.”

  Mariana turned away and watched the procession until the last moment when the consciously colorful figures on the black and white chargers rounded a corner and could no longer be seen from the balcony.

  … It was on (or would one call it in?) a balcony that Charlotte had first seen Patrick Napier. She had been taken to the opera by a young cousin of her father’s. (Why was Jane referred to as Charlotte’s father’s cousin, rather than Charlotte’s, since surely she was both?) Jane was older than Charlotte, married to a medical student, and Patrick was one of their friends. Charlotte was then seventeen and for two years had been living in New York with her father and going to the inevitable convent school, though at last as a day student. For her to sit next to a medical student was to partake, even if for a few hours, of the real world, for neither the world of school nor the world of her father’s house had much, she felt, to do with reality. Patrick seemed to know a great deal about music but he did not foist his knowledge on her. When Jane asked him questions, perhaps showing him off, he answered, but briefly, almost unwillingly.

  After the opera they had gone to Jane’s apartment where Pete, her husband, was studying for an exam; this was how Charlotte had happened to be given his ticket. Jane had cooked them a superb supper, and then asked Charlotte down for a party the following week. Patrick was at the party, and then, extraordinary joy, had asked to see her again, had made a date. It was perhaps less extraordinary that it was Charlotte’s first date.

  If Mariana was unprepared for Noël, so was Charlotte for Patrick, though differently, for Charlotte, leaving her father’s house, had determined quite consciously that it was the moment for her to enter fully the adult world, to participate at last in reality, no matter what that involved.

  (“You’re so square, Charlotte,” Ursula, her best friend, told her with heavy patience. “Don’t you know the world is different now? You have to break away from the Establishment. It’s passé. You’ve got to find things out for yourself. What do you think we’ve learned from the little talks Reverend Ma’s had Sister Mary Michael give us? What can a nun tell us about sex? You seem to think everything Mary Michael tells us comes from a direct line to God. Well let me tell you, it doesn’t.”)

  Properly primed by Ursula, Charlotte had been quite determined to find out for herself.

  It was the martinis with the red cherries bobbing in them that saved her virtue. It wasn’t just that they tasted vile (Patrick used far too much vermouth); it was that he didn’t know about martinis. If he could be wrong about such a basic thing as a martini, then she had misjudged him utterly, no matter how much he knew about music. Or medicine.

  She took several large gulps, however, because it was the only way to get it down, like castor oil. And she couldn’t leave at once; that would be rude. And then, gulping again, she wondered—Maybe Patrick’s testing me to see if I’m just a dumb kid instead of sophisticated, the way I thought he thought I was. Maybe he’s doing it deliberately.

  She shuddered and tried not to make a face.

  “What’s the matter, Cotty?” Patrick asked.

  “Nothing. I just felt cold for a minute. And please don’t call me Cotty.” She tried to make her voice cool and aloof. If Patrick didn’t know about martinis she couldn’t tell him how awful his were, and she was disappointed, in spite of his asking her for dinner, in spite of his looks, in spite of his being a medical student with his own apartment in the village …

  At least his looks were all right. His looks were more than all right. But she wasn’t going to let him know that. She glowered over at him as he sat across from her in an orange canvas sling chair, the sort of chair, Charlotte thought, that used to be smart but that had become almost old-fashioned. But he looked splendid in it, hunched over, wearing tight levis on his long, thin legs, and a black turtle-neck sweater, and above it his thin white face and the lovely mop of thick, silky black hair. And his eyes: his eyes were a startling blue with long, shadowy curtains of lashes. Oh, Patrick was beautiful all right.

  Hamlet, exquisite and thin as moonbeams in an inky cape.

  Who wrote that? Elinor Wylie? Would Patrick like it if she quoted it to him? No. Yes. Maybe he’d like it too much. She’d save it.

  “If you’re cold I’ll close the window.” Patrick leaped to do it, moving with feral grace. “And you told me the other night at Jane and Pete’s party that your best friends call you Cotty.”

  She looked down at the cherry, repulsively red in the pale liquid, and decided that it wasn’t a test. “I don’t know you well enough to be on best-friend terms yet.”

  “Things seem to have changed from the way they were when we made this date, Charlotte,” Patrick said, sitting down in the orange chair again so that his thin knees in the faded levis stuck up forlornly.

  “You can call me Lottie,” she said graciously.

  “Nope. If it’s not to be Cotty it’s Charlotte. Okay, relax for a minute, will you? These chairs aren’t for sitting like ramrods in.” He slung around in his and draped his long legs over the side.

  She didn’t lean back against the canvas—hers was scarlet and clashed with the orange—but she took another gulp of martini and looked around Patrick’s room. It was his whole apartment, the one room, and it wasn’t a particularly large room. There was a pink marble fireplace that didn’t go at all with the orange and scarlet chairs; they were as clashing a combination as the cherries in the martinis. But there was a fire of cannel coal burning in the grate, and a dented copper coal scuttle. In one corner of the room was a round electric heater, and she wondered if the fire and the heater were the only things Patrick had to keep his apartment warm. As a matter of fact, it really wasn’t very warm. She was glad she’d worn her new cashmere sweater.

  She took another sip of martini and looked over at the studio couch, probably his bed, undoubtedly his bed, with a printed Indian throw over it; on the wall above there was an enormous nonobjective painting with angry splashings of blood reds and storm blacks. It was a violent sort of painting and she couldn’t decide whether she liked it or not, or whether it was good art or not. There were a lot of paperbound books in unpainted shelves that looked rather rickety; perhaps Patrick had built them.

  “A small place, but all mine own,” he said, waving one arm constricted by the metal wings of the chair. He finished his drink and sat holding the cherry by the stem, twirling it. “I dote on these things,” he said, and popped it into his mouth. “Can’t afford ’em very often. Has to be a special occasion. I live a frugal life.”

  Carefully she removed the cherry from her glass and handed it over to him. “Here. Eat mine.”

  Patrick raised the dark, silky lines of his eyebrows, and took the cherry. “My budget doesn’t include restaurants right now, so
I’ve cooked us a meal. Hope that’s all right with you.”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “It needs another few minutes, so let’s have another drink.”

  “Why not?” she asked, very casually. “And why don’t you let me make it this time?”

  Patrick’s eyebrows went up again. “If it would give you pleasure. The kitchen’s behind that screen. The refrigerator is under the stove. The liquor’s on the shelf with the Worcestershire sauce and the catsup. Things are in kind of a mess. You look too pretty to go splashing about in the kitchen. Do you know you have hair the color of a lemon?”

  She went behind the screen. The stove was two gas burners and on one something was bubbling. A basket of greens was hanging over a cracked bowl to dry; there didn’t seem to be any sink.

  “What did you make the martinis in?” she asked.

  “You’ll probably see a dented saucepan with a few dregs of ice. I broke my only pitcher a week ago.”

  If there was one thing Charlotte felt she knew how to do, it was to make a martini. She was perfectly willing to admit that she was not in the habit of drinking martinis. But she knew how to make them. If she had learned nothing else from her father she had learned how to make a martini. Since she had been living at home with him they had developed an evening ritual. She would go into the library at seven-thirty and make him two martinis. Two. Strictly two. This was why Charlotte made them. If her father made them himself he cheated. So Charlotte made them. And sat with him while he drank them. It was their one real time together. So she knew about martinis. The drink she brought to Patrick was chill and pale and perfect.

  “Didn’t you see the cherries?” Patrick asked.

  She was silent. Patrick was cooking her dinner and he didn’t even have a pitcher to mix his martinis in, and she couldn’t just out and say, “Patrick, one does not put cherries in martinis. I could put in a touch of lemon peel if you want it.” She said with studied casualness, “Just for fun see how you like it without the cherry.”

  “Whatever you say,” Patrick said, and sipped. She couldn’t tell whether or not he thought her martini an improvement over his. He reached out and caught her hand. “I don’t go in much for entertaining, Cotty—sorry, Charlotte—and I’m not much in the habit of drinking. My mother, who, as you might say, abandoned me in my infancy and only now that I’m on my own and she’s sure I’m not going to demand anything of her is beginning to take a maternal interest in me, is continental in her taste in drinking. I know something about wines but nothing about so-called mixed drinks. However, I am aware that a martini’s the proper thing before dinner in New York, and I imagine you’re used to everything being fairly elegant.”

  There was something romantic, which was all right, but something pathetic, which was not, in this speech. Charlotte had not come to dinner with Patrick because he was pathetic. Pathetic was the last thing Charlotte wanted Patrick to be. But her father cared even more about courtesy than about martinis, so she said, “I just love your apartment, Patrick. It’s—it’s unique. But Patrick, Patrick, why did you get an orange chair and a red chair to go with a pink fireplace?” That question was anything but courteous, but it slipped out before she realized it.

  “Some people like the combination,” he said with an unexpected grin. “As a matter of fact, I bought the chairs for a quarter each. Couldn’t afford to be choosy at that price.” He looked at her in a speculative sort of way as she sat there in his scarlet chair in her pink dress and sweater. “You know, I have a feeling that this evening isn’t going to be quite what I expected, but maybe it will be good for you to see how the other half lives.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean maybe it’s good for you to go slumming once in a while. The thing I liked about you the other night at Jane and Pete’s was that you were different. You stood out like a sore thumb—sorry, that’s not a very complimentary metaphor, is it?—The first thing—or maybe it wasn’t the first thing—anyhow, it was the way you ate asparagus. You ate it as though it was the first asparagus you’d ever tasted in your life and it was the most wonderful thing in the world. You picked it up on your fingers like the rest of us and dipped it in the lemon butter, and when you’d finished with a stalk you licked your fingers, delicately, elegantly, like a little cat. There wasn’t anything messy about it. But what struck me was that you really enjoyed it. You were eating asparagus and you were completely alive while you were doing it. And Cotty” (this time he didn’t stop to correct himself, and she didn’t say anything, either), “have you realized that most people are fully alive only part of the time, if that?”

  “Yes,” she said, and suddenly she was furious, though she didn’t know why. Yes. Yes. She did know. But she didn’t want to think about it.

  “What’s the matter?” Patrick asked her.

  “Nothing. Nothing you said, anyhow. I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  “You’re a funny girl,” Patrick said. “How old are you, anyhow?”

  “Seventeen.”

  There was naked shock in Patrick’s face. Then he recovered and swooned in the orange chair. “Oh, gawd. What on earth were you doing there, then?”

  “Where?”

  “At Jane and Pete’s?”

  “Jane’s my father’s young cousin. At least I suppose she’s my cousin, too, but—and she knows what I—what I want to do with my life.”

  “You mean what you want to do with your life is go to beer parties in cold-water flats and help chip plaster from the walls?”

  Charlotte stood up with dignity. “Some day I am going to have a cold-water flat of my own, and I am going to invite people in and have a party and knock off all the plaster down to that beautiful pink brick the way Jane and Pete did, only I won’t serve beer, I’ll serve champagne.”

  Patrick groaned. “I know you’re a minor and I should be shot for letting you have a martini, but have you any idea of the comparative cost of beer and champagne?”

  Charlotte could feel herself turning pink with anger and humiliation at her own stupidity.

  “Don’t take on,” Patrick said, gently. “It was blind of me not to realize how much younger you were than the rest of us. We’re rather an elderly crowd as medical students go. Most of us have done our time in the army, and most of us are having to pay our own way with odd jobs and time out. Finish your drink. You might as well now that you’ve started it.”

  Before she could stop herself she flashed out, “I make a darned sight better martini than you do, Patrick Napier.”

  “Okay, okay,” Patrick said. “Bottoms up, and we’ll have a nice hot bowl of stew. Gourmet stew. Where, O Charlotte, do you live?”

  “With my father.”

  “No mother?”

  “No.”

  “Divorced?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Cotty,” he said gently.

  She did not want Patrick to be sorry for her. “Oh, I didn’t like her very much. Anyhow it was a long time ago.”

  “So you live with your father. Where?”

  She looked around Patrick’s apartment. It was an old brownstone on Bleeker Street and the building had smelled of fish and onions when she came in and climbed the three long flights to Patrick’s room. “Well, it’s an old brownstone,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “East Seventy-fourth.”

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s—he’s a writer.”

  “What does he write?”

  “Books,” she said.

  “Come on, Cotty. What kind of books?”

  “You’re calling me Cotty,” she said sharply. “You’d probably think his books were kind of peculiar.”

  “Why?”

  She looked down at her feet. “You just probably would.”

  “What name does your father write under?”

  “His own name. James Clement. You probably wouldn’t have heard of him.”

  “But m
y God,” Patrick exclaimed, “I didn’t know he was still alive—I mean—I’m sorry, Cotty.”

  “You mean you know who he is?”

  “Do I know who he is? I did a paper in college on his books.”

  “On Father’s books?”

  “Sure. My mother’s crazy about him. The brilliant apocalyptical novels of James Clement. She likes to discover geniuses nobody else knows about. James Clement’s one of her particular pets. She introduced me to him. But why hasn’t he written anything lately?”

  “He has,” Charlotte said. “He writes all the time.”

  “Then why hasn’t he published anything?” Patrick asked.

  God, how she hated Patrick. She got up and walked over to his window and looked out into the dark courtyard. She pressed her forehead against the windowpane and cupped her hands about her eyes so that she could cut out the light of the room. She saw a winter-bare tree, and a long laundry line running from one building to another with one lonely pair of long men’s underdrawers still hanging out and kicking listlessly in the wind. She swung around and faced Patrick. “You can probably tell me why publishers don’t publish books as well as I can.”

  “Oh,” he said softly. “I see.”

  “I doubt very much if you do,” she said acidly. “And what does your father do?”

  “Fair exchange, eh?” Patrick asked. “He’s a missionary doctor in South America. If I’m lucky I’ll see him once in five years. Don’t think you’re the only person in the world with parent troubles.”

  “Did I say that?” she asked.

  “Sorry. No, you didn’t, Charlotte. You didn’t at all. So there’s your father writing brilliant apocalyptical books that practically nobody understands, and there’s my father in the middle of the jungle struggling with the bodies and souls of a tribe of people who are still savage and could quite easily turn and kill him for dinner.”

  “And what about your mother?” she asked, still angry. “The one who abandoned you.”

  He laughed. “She’s the only one. She’s a harpsichordist. As a matter of fact she’s rather well known. Violet Napier.”