A Circle of Quiet

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I feel very tired, and somehow as though somebody had kicked me.

  2

  My Mother does not come to Crosswicks in isolated chronology; she comes to a house which, like a river, continuously flows with living. The summer of the great-grandmother began several weeks before her arrival, early in June, while she was still in the South, and her great-granddaughters were still living in England, where their parents, Alan and Josephine, were preparing to break up their home in Lincoln and return to New York. Our younger daughter, Maria, and Peter, with impatience and impetuousness similar to Hugh’s and mine a quarter of a century ago, couldn’t wait for them. So on the fifth of June Crosswicks was filled with the joy and laughter of a tiny wedding.

  The apple blossoms were barely over, the lawn still white from petal-fall. There were a few lingering daffodils in cold and shady corners which keep small drifts of snow long after the rest of the grass has started to turn green. The lilac, purple and white, was in full bloom (the white lilac tree outside Mother’s window was a birthday present to her twenty-odd years ago); early daisies and ubiquitous dandelions brightened the big field. Hugh mowed the lawn, trimmed around rocks and trees. Our son, Bion, just graduated from high school, made countless trips to the dump, fifteen miles away—there’s nothing like a wedding to insure a proper housecleaning. And I cooked as though we expected to feed an army instead of a small wedding party.

  Maria and I had long, quiet talks. Like her sister Josephine before her, she was apprehensive as the moment approached. I assured her that I had been too. We grew closer in sharing experience.

  Peter and I talked, too. He said, “Maria is worried that you don’t love me as much as you love Alan.” I assured him, “I love you just as much for being Peter as I love Alan for being Alan.”

  Alan is English, an Anglican priest and theologian. Peter is Jewish, and a theoretical chemist, and that’s a superb pair of sons-in-law. A few days ago Peter showed me his most recent published paper and paid me the honor of expecting me to understand his strings of equations, Greek letters, and an occasional English word. He leaves pads of yellow paper lying around on which he has been scrawling a long equation he is trying to think through. Occasionally I will glimpse, off in the corner of my mind, something of what he is driving at, and this happens just often enough to encourage me.

  On the day of the wedding, our friend and family godfather, Canon Tom Tallis, drove up to Cross-wicks from St. John’s Cathedral in New York to perform the wedding ceremony.

  In the same large, L-shaped living room where Peter and Maria stood to become man and wife, Hugh and I, newly married, had put on wallpaper, yellow and grey colonial wallpaper which is still on the walls, still beautiful (we are very good wallpaperers). Hugh had spent hours pulling the old bark from the ceiling beams, scrubbing them down; these were the first important acts of making Crosswicks our home. Several years later I rocked Bion in an ancient wooden cradle in front of the fireplace in the long end of the L. The Christmas tree was always in the corner of the L, in front of the heavy door, the “funeral door” which blew in during the blizzard of ’88. One Christmas Eve, when our children were small, we all set off for church, leaving the wrapped presents under the tree, and a puppy in the kitchen. When we got home the puppy had got loose and had joyfully unwrapped every single package. Thank-you letters that year ran something like, “Thank you for the lovely present …” because nobody had any idea who had sent what.

  I have wept in this room; made love in this room, in front of the fire on a cold winter’s night; I have waited anxiously for my husband to make a long drive home the length of New England during a terrible wind and snow storm. The house has absorbed and contained much of my married life, of my “grownup” years. The fullness of life in this room filled my heart as we waited for Tallis to begin.

  The family wedding party stood in a semicircle—Hugh and me; Peter’s mother and two sisters; Bion; plus the cats and dogs, interested in the whole event and ever ready to participate. Tyrrell, Josephine and Alan’s dog, half shepherd, half golden retriever, who has been with us for the three years they have been in England, retired under the sofa. The two Irish setter puppies, Faba, who belongs to Tallis, and her sister, Dulcie, who is ours, are less well behaved and I had to order them, firmly, “Sit.” Then the words of the wedding ceremony took over and I found that I was close to tears in the presence of these aweful vows my daughter and Peter were taking, the same vows which Hugh and I took, the vows which have held us together through many rough patches.

  When I hugged and kissed Maria after the final words were said, I whispered to her, “Now that there has been a wedding here, the house is truly blessed.”

  That night when everybody had left, except for Hugh and Bion and me, and Hugh and I were ensconced wearily in our four-poster bed, reading, the phone rang. It was Maria and Peter, calling from the International Motel at JFK airport, bubbling with happiness, thanking us—and everybody—for their day; sharing their joy. Josephine and Alan had called from the same place on their wedding night; our travel agent had kept reassuring us that the rooms were soundproof, and it took us a long time to realize that he was referring to the sound of planes.

  Laughing, we turned off the lights.

  3

  And so the summer began with something quite ordinary, two young people getting married. We put the house back into its usual disorder, and I began to concentrate on Mother’s arrival. When we went South for the ninetieth-birthday party, we all realized that if Mother was to spend the summer months in Crosswicks as usual, she would have to have a great deal more care than ever before. So we began putting together a bouquet of young girls to tend her, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. These girls, friends of our children, are of high school and college age, and this is their summer job. I talked with them informally, trying to tell them what we expected of them, and somehow sensing intuitively that the job was going to be more exacting than any of us anticipated.

  The week before Mother’s arrival I was to spend teaching at a writers’ conference in the Midwest, and I set off, feeling that everything was under control, as much as is humanly possible. How to take care of my mother’s summer was my single-minded concern, and I thought I had the summer pretty well organized.

  Then, as so often happens when I think that everything is under control, the unexpected struck. My second night at the conference, Hugh phoned and during the conversation told me, trying to make light of it, that he had been feeling some numbness in his feet. He had gone to our doctor, who had made an appointment for him with a neurologist; this could not be arranged for until a week after Mother’s arrival.

  I hung up, hoping I had kept my voice steady. Only a short while ago a cousin had died of a brain tumor; the first symptom was numbness in the feet. I could not guess whether or not Hugh remembered this. I knew, from the timbre of his voice when we talked again the next night, that he was more concerned than he wanted me to know.

  So we moved into the same kind of cold waiting we had known once before, when three-year-old Josephine, during Christmastime, showed all the symptoms of leukemia. The pediatrician, examining her, had talked in obscure medical terminology, and I finally cut him short by saying, “What you mean is that you suspect leukemia—don’t you?” “It is a possibility, yes.” Once the words were out, he was much more gentle, much more human with us than he had been while he was pussyfooting.

  Hugh and I shared our fear mostly in silence. We will never forget the merry little girl’s lethargy and pallor, or her quiet stoicism in the hospital lab. Nor will we ever forget the world opening out again when the tests indicated an infection which was already beginning to clear up.

  While I was at the writers’ conference our sharing had to be on that silent level which precludes words. This was certainly no time to voice my fears to Hugh, or his to me. The only way I could be a wife to him was to affirm silently a courage and endurance I was very uncertain I had.

  One of t
he problems of being a storyteller is the cultivated ability to extrapolate; in every situation all the what if’s come to me. Often my fears are foolish: if Hugh is ten minutes late in getting home from the theatre he has not necessarily been pushed under a subway train or been stabbed. This time I knew the fear was not the child of my overvivid imagination; it was quite possible that I might have to face my husband’s death even before my mother’s. My powers of extrapolation were kind enough to slam the door on themselves, at least momentarily.

  Still shaken, I went to give a lecture. I talked, as I had originally planned to do, about the precariousness of all life. And I told about walking in midtown New York and having a stone from a nearby half-built skyscraper crash to the sidewalk just behind me. Had I been a fraction of a second slower I would have been killed. And I said that the artist’s response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, not to impose restrictive rules but to rejoice in pattern and meaning, for there is something in all artists which rejects coincidence and accident. And I went on to say that we must meet the precariousness of the universe without self-pity, and with dignity and courage. It was what I had prepared, several weeks before, to talk about, tying it all in with writing, and our responsibility not to make vain promises of “everything will be all right” to our children. But that day the words were swords which turned to me, to teach me. To challenge me to accept my own words.

  Listening to the lecture was one old and close friend who knew of my fears about Hugh, and I was sustained by the necessity not to let her down. What I cannot do for myself, I can sometimes do for somebody else.

  That evening in my hotel room where nobody would overhear, I called Pat in Florida. Pat is a doctor, and we have been friends ever since we were in high school. I knew that she would not fob me off with easy answers, and she did not. She did, however, explain calmly and rationally all the things other than a brain tumor which could cause the symptoms. When I hung up I was still fearful, but I knew that there were alternatives.

  In any case, one cannot sustain the heights of anguish for too long; this appears to be one of the built-in safety mechanisms of the psyche, and it is a saving grace. My fears for Hugh continued to give me an occasional kick in the pit of the stomach, but mostly they stayed decently in the background, and I was able to get on with the business of daily chores; complete the series of lectures and seminars; return to Crosswicks; prepare for Mother’s arrival.

  At the moment it is all a chill business because I am living in the cold place of the absence of meaning. And yet I know that if there is anything radically wrong with Hugh I cannot survive it myself, or be a wife and strength and help to him, or be a daughter to my mother, or be a person for my family and friends, unless there is a promise of meaning.

  My frail hope is that I was able to lecture while I was impaled on the point of anguish, and that I lectured well—no need for false humility here—and I certainly could not have done it if I truly felt that the universe has no meaning, that there is no point to Hugh’s life; or my mother’s; or mine.

  Buy The Summer of the Great-Grandmother Now!

  A Biography of Madeleine L’Engle

  Madeleine L’Engle was the award-winning author of more than sixty books encompassing children’s and adult fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, and books on prayer. Her best-known work is the classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal for distinguished children’s literature and has sold fourteen million copies worldwide. The Washington Post called the science fantasy tale of an adolescent girl and her telepathic brother’s journey through space and time “one of the most enigmatic works of fiction ever created.”

  L’Engle was born on November 29, 1918, in New York City, where both of her parents were artists—her mother a pianist and her father a novelist, journalist, and music and drama critic for the New York Sun. Although she wrote her first story at the age of five and devoted her time to her journals, short stories, and poetry, L’Engle struggled in school and often felt disliked by her teachers and peers. She recalled one of her elementary school teachers calling her stupid and another accusing her of plagiarism when she won a writing contest.

  At twelve, L’Engle and her family moved to France for her father’s health (he had been a soldier during World War I and suffered lung damage), and she was sent to boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Two of her novels, A Winter’s Love and The Small Rain, drew on her experiences in Europe. She returned to the United States three years later to attend another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. L’Engle flourished during these years and went on to graduate from Smith College with honors in English.

  After college, she moved back to New York City and started work as a stage actress while devoting her free time to writing. During this time, she published her first two novels, The Small Rain and Ilsa, and wrote many plays that were produced in regional theaters. While touring in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as an understudy, she met actor Hugh Franklin, and they married in 1946. After the birth of their daughter Josephine the following year, they bought an old farmhouse, which they called Crosswicks, in Goshen, a small town in rural Connecticut, planning on weekends in the country. When she became pregnant with their second child, Bion, they moved to Crosswicks permanently and ran the local general store. Their family grew with an adopted daughter, Maria. After nearly a decade in Connecticut, they moved back to New York so her husband, who would go on to star in All My Children, could focus on his acting career. She was happy to return and hoped that she would find success as an author again. Indeed, A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962.

  The family often returned to Crosswicks over the years and these visits inspired L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, including Two-Part Invention, which tells the story of her marriage, and A Circle of Quiet, in which she explores her role as a woman, mother, wife, and writer.

  Back in Manhattan, L’Engle worked as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a position she held for more than three decades. Her lifelong fascination with theology and philosophy, and her personal faith, largely influenced her work. A Wrinkle in Time hints at many Christian themes, yet religious conservative groups have spoken out against the book, accusing L’Engle of misrepresenting God in a dangerous world of witchcraft, myth, and fantasy. It has been one of the most banned books in the United States. Apart from her religious influences, she said that Einstein’s theory of relativity and other theories in physics also served as inspiration. The novel’s combined use of both science fiction and philosophy established it as a sophisticated work of fiction, proving L’Engle’s belief that children’s literature deserves a place in the literary canon.

  However, L’Engle initially struggled to achieve success and recognition for her work, and she almost quit writing at forty. She finally broke out onto the literary scene in 1960 with Meet the Austins, the first in her popular young adult series about the Austin family, which includes Newbery Honor Book A Ring of Endless Light. Even A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Although it was an instant commercial and critical sensation and has never gone out of print, the book’s strong female protagonist and intellectual themes were unusual in children’s fiction at the time.

  L’Engle’s long literary career expanded far beyond the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. Among her many books are adult novels dealing with relationships, faith, and identity, including Certain Women, A Live Coal in the Sea, and A Severed Wasp; several books of poetry; and more overtly religious works like her Genesis Trilogy of biblical reflections. She won countless accolades, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the National Religious Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal. L’Engle lived out her final years in Litchfield, Connecticut, and passed away at the age of eighty-
eight on September 6, 2007.

  A portrait of L’Engle in her first years of life.*

  L’Engle ice-skating in Brittany, France, circa 1926.*

  L’Engle with her dog, Sputzi, circa 1934.*

  From July to September 1943, the Repertory Players at Straight Wharf Theatre produced two of L’Engle’s plays, The Christmas Tree and Phelia. She acted in both plays, among others.

  L’Engle with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, in 1946.*

  L’Engle and her husband renovated and ran a general store in the late 1940s.

  L’Engle always illustrated her family’s Christmas cards, including this one from 1952.

  L’Engle with her granddaughters Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Lena Roy at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Cathedral Library, circa 1975.

  L’Engle in the library of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1977.

  L’Engle at a Manhattanville College commencement ceremony, where she received an honorary degree in 1989.*

  L’Engle with her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis the night before the young woman’s wedding on August 30, 1996.

  L’Engle speaking at a church in 1997.

  L’Engle at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1997.*

  *Photograph courtesy of the Madeleine L’Engle Papers (SC-3), Special Collections, Buswell Library, Wheaton, Illinois.