A Winter's Love

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Beanie smiled at Virginia and it was the kind of smile, eager and cruel and also a little ashamed, that she had seen on the lips and in the eyes of some of the girls at school when they were about to tell a dirty story. “You know perfectly well what I mean,” Beanie said. “‘How odd of God,’ etc.”

  “How odd of God what?” Now she knew, but she had to make him say it before she would believe it.

  “She’s one of the Chosen, isn’t she?” Beanie asked. He spoke quietly, pleasantly, but it seemed to Virginia that his voice was enormously loud, that everybody on the dance floor, everybody sitting at the tables, all the waiters, Madame Pedroti, everybody must hear the monstrous things he was saying.

  Now her voice was cold. “I’m afraid I still don’t understand.” He would have to say it. He would have to say it out loud for them all to hear. She would not allow him to slide out of this with implications and innuendoes.—Oh, Mimi, I’m not saying the right things, what do I say to him?

  “Oh, sure,” Beanie said. “She’s a friend of yours and I admire you for sticking up for her. But just between us I think it’s a bit of a stinking trick to pretend you aren’t.”

  Virginia stood up. “I don’t think anybody around here’s pretending anything. Except maybe you.”—I’m handling this so badly, she thought. This is Mimi he’s talking about—Mimi!

  She grabbed her coat from the back of her chair.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  Virginia was trembling. “I don’t enjoy the company of slimy people.”

  She fled the room.

  On the dance floor Sam and Mimi did not see her go. But Sam said, “Mimi, you’re a gorgeous dancer, but I’ve got to stop in a minute. Leg’s bothering me.”

  “What’s the matter with your leg?” Mimi asked quickly.

  “Polio when I was six. It’s swell now, though. Just sometimes like in dancing or something I use different muscles and it gets tired.”

  “Let’s go sit down, then. Come on.”

  At the table Snider Bean sat placidly eating.

  “Where’s Virginia?” Mimi demanded.

  “Don’t know. Walked out on me. Went home to mama, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Got in a huff.”

  “You let her go alone?” Sam asked.

  “Why not? Said she didn’t care for my company.”

  Mimi sat down. “This is very unlike Virginia,” she said. “What happened?”

  “I told you. Got in a stuffy huff.”

  “I still think you ought to have walked her home,” Sam said.

  Beanie helped himself to the last cake on the plate.

  “What did she get upset about?” Mimi persisted.

  “What’s all the fuss? Can’t a girl get upset without your acting like something world shattering’s happened? Girls are always getting in huffs and pulling out.”

  “But not Virginia,” Mimi said. “I happen to know Virginia rather well.”

  “Oh, sure. Your kind always think they know everything.”

  Mimi looked at him sharply.

  “Now what exactly did you mean by that?” Sam asked.

  Beanie flung up his hands in mock dismay. “Everybody’s picking on me!” he squeaked, falsetto. “Mummy! Mummy! The nasty childrens is being mean to poor l’il Beanie.” He stood up, bowed politely to Mimi. “Uncle Beanie will go find your little red-headed vixen. Uncle Beanie always does the right thing. Farewell, mes enfants.”

  They sat still a moment, watching him go. Then Sam asked, “What was that about?”

  Mimi shrugged. “I can guess. I suppose it’s occurred to you that I’m Jewish?”

  For a moment Sam looked blank. “I hadn’t thought about it. You mean you think Beanie—”

  “Oh, sure,” Mimi said, shrugging again, pushing it off.

  Sam flushed with anger. “Golly, I’m sorry, Mimi. What a stinker. I picked a lemon.”

  “Oh, he’s all right in his place,” Mimi said, “only it isn’t dug yet. Tell me about your leg, Sam.”

  “I told you I had polio. Now I’m okay. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Look, tea bag,” Mimi said, “I’m interested from a clinical point of view. How much paralysis did you have? What did they do for you? Etc. Now talk.”

  Sam looked angry again for a moment. Then he said, “Okay, then, you asked for it. But I don’t generally go around talking about it. They said I’d never walk again without braces. But dad said to heck with that. I spent a year at Warm Springs. Then when I got back dad used to go swimming with me every day during his lunch hour. Then he got a fellow who used to be a circus performer to come work with me. Gus Swann. Greatest guy in the world. Everybody laughed at me, kidded me, nobody was sorry for anybody. What a guy my father is, Mimi. I could be a mess right now if it hadn’t been for him. There was another kid at Warm Springs the same time I was, not as badly paralyzed. He still walks with a brace. While me, I’m so nearly normal I can say to heck with the one percent. Thanks to dad.”

  Mimi looked down at her hands. She said, “I expect your father’s pretty proud of you.”

  “Oh, go play in the traffic,” Sam said. “I told you it wasn’t me. It was dad. And my grandmother. I lived with her while dad was overseas, and she kept me right at it.”

  “All right,” Mimi said. “Don’t take any of the credit. So you’re just an old coward. How do you manage skiing? Don’t your knees bother you?”

  “Some. I tumble a lot. Kaarlo was showing me some good tricks this morning to help give me control. Swimming’s my best thing, though. I feel as though I could swim the Atlantic if necessary.”

  “Sincerely hope it won’t be necessary. So go on, tell me more.”

  “Why?” Sam asked.

  “I’m turning orthopedics over in my mind. I don’t think research is my field. So what else?”

  “When I was about ten,” Sam said, “they took a hunk of bone out of my good leg because the other one wasn’t growing fast enough. That’s why I’ll never be as tall as dad.” He looked down at the tablecloth, at a stained spot where Beanie had spilled cherry tart. “Or as tall as you.”

  “I’m much too big,” Mimi said. “I have all kinds of complexes about it. You’re not short, Sam, only next to people like me, and when I’m with you I never think of you as being shorter than I am. Size is largely a—a quality of spirit rather than body, anyhow. So what are you going to do, after school and everything?”

  Sam shook his head, then looked up and signalled a waiter to bring them another pot of tea. “Don’t know,” he said. “I have another year, though I really should be through by now. But I dropped back a couple of years what with being in the hospital and stuff. Anyhow I’ll have to do a couple of years’ hitch in the army, so maybe I’ll enlist when I get through school instead of waiting to be drafted, and get it in before college. Good idea as anything. Nothing’s struck me yet as being the Thing, the way you are about medicine, no questions, there it is. I don’t see any point to living and doing something that you can’t believe in as a way of life.”

  “Lots of people do,” Mimi said.

  Across the table the solitary woman Virginia had noticed pushed back her chair and started out. She had been drinking and she moved a little unsteadily and as she passed their table they heard her murmur, “Charmant, ses petites, touts à fait charmants.”

  Sam, looking embarrassed, asked abruptly, “Hey, Mimi, this religion deal, how about it? I mean, what do you think?”

  “I’m an atheist,” Mimi said flatly. “With Clare a Catholic and Jake a Jew it’s sort of the obvious conclusion for me.”

  “Why?” Sam asked. “Do Clare and Jake—that’s your parents, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they practise their religions?”

  “Clare’s religion is science and Jake’s is music. So they practise them. How about you, Sam? What brought this up? Are you pious?”

  “I’m not an atheist, if that’s what you mean.”
Sam’s voice was slightly defensive. “I believe in God, a sort of incomprehensible God, but still God with a captial G. At home dad and I go to the Episcopal church. St. Mary the Virgin. Or sometimes the Community Church, a Unitarian church. More often there. One extreme to the other. We don’t make a big thing about it or anything. We just sort of go.”

  “Don’t be so defensive, Sam,” Mimi said. “If you want to drug yourself that’s your affair.”

  “Yes,” Sam said, snapping his jaws shut. “It is.”

  Mimi sighed and stretched her hand across the table towards him. “I’m doing it again,” she said, “Being antagonistic. Clare says it’s a sign of immaturity. I didn’t mean to set up a mental block, just get into a nice semantic argument. Aping my elders as usual. I’m sorry.”

  Sam continued to glare for a moment; then he grinned. “I’m sorry, too. It was a dumb thing to get mad about.” He looked around. The room was empty. “Hey, I’d better get you home. The Bowens will be wondering where you are.”

  Mimi looked up, startled, and remembered Virginia. “I forgot all about Vee!” she said. “I have an extremely disorganized mind. We’d better tear.”

  Virginia was almost home when Snider Bean caught up with her, shouting down the alley, “Virginia! Say, Virginia Bowen, whoa up!”

  She thought of making a wild dash into the villa, then imagined him coming in after her, shouting, disturbing her father at his desk, making a fuss so that all kinds of explanations would be necessary—She stopped abruptly, and waited, her back to him, until he came up to her.

  “Listen, you haughty little pussycat,” Beanie said, putting his hands on her shoulders and turning her around, completely sure of himself, “there isn’t a thing in the world to be so upset about.”

  Now Virginia was facing him. “I’m not upset,” she said. “Good-bye.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Beanie said, “you don’t get away that easily. I promise I won’t rub your fur the wrong way about your precious friend any more. Now come on back up to the hotel with me. Sam’s all upset about your leaving.”

  “Sam doesn’t give a hoot whether I’m there or not. As a matter of fact, he’s much happier being alone with Mimi.”

  “Okay, then let’s you and I be alone together,” Beanie said.

  “Thank you, but I don’t care to be alone with you, and I’m cold and I want to go into the house.”

  “Look, kiddo,” Beanie said, “I’m not one to stay around where I’m not wanted, but you’re old enough to grow up and face a few facts. Now your Mimi’s probably a very nice girl, there are exceptions to every rule, and she’s not right out of the grotto like some I’ve met, but why try to hide the fact that we’d all be lots better off if her race didn’t always try to ran everything?”

  Virginia stared beyond Snider Bean, up the hill to the hotel, beyond that to the sanatorium. In the sanatorium the lights made neat stripes across the face of the building with blue-lit vertical ones crossing them and defining the stairways. It seemed neat and orderly and comprehensible. With an abrupt, awkward gesture she pointed to it. “My mother has a friend who was up there,” she said, “in the sanatorium.”

  “Oh?” Beanie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you know why she was there?”

  “TB, I suppose.”

  “Yes, and do you know why?” She did not wait for him to answer. “Because all during the war which so many people seem to have forgotten, she fought Nazis and people who feel like you. Because she hated concentration camps and people burning books and—and—and people. Did you know that? Did you know people like you burned people like—like Mimi?” As she became more and more excited she could hardly get the words out.

  “Oh, come off it, Virginia,” Beanie said. “Don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little? Anyhow it’s all over.”

  “Not when there are people like you,” Virginia cried, her voice rising shrilly. “I hate you!” Now at last she managed to break from him and run into the villa.

  In his workroom Courtney was not writing, though he sat at his desk, a piece of clean paper in his typewriter. The basket beside him was filled with crushed papers, and there were papers which had missed and lay on the floor. He looked at them and thought that he would get up and gather them together and ram them all down properly in the scrap basket, but he did not move from his desk. This afternoon with Mimi and Virginia out of the house he had hoped to accomplish a great deal. He had not been able to write since the two girls had come for the holidays. Their presence, youthful and vital, was a disturbing element in the house; it was as though an electric current had been turned on, and their high young voices disturbed him and made him restless, so that he could no longer sit in peace at his desk and let the precise, disciplined words fall with felicity from the keys of his typewriter. And this afternoon Connie had wakened early from her nap and now Emily was at the piano, playing Beethoven, and it was disturbing music, and he did not want to be disturbed. He started to call out, “Emily, please don’t play for a few minutes,” but it was too much effort, and he continued to sit there, his mouth opened to call, but no words coming out.

  There should be no need, no desire, to ask Emily to stop playing. There should be more time, not less, for her to play, since music was so important a part of her life. If the words could fall from his typewriter keys as the notes were falling from the yellow keys of the piano!… If this year were the year it should have been, so that he could write with serenity surrounding him, instead of resentment and anxiety each leering over a shoulder.…

  —Damn Tommy O’Hara, he thought. Damn his hide.

  And then—No. Blaming Tommy O’Hara is nothing but an alibi. If I damn anybody’s hide it’s my own. Because I am the way I am.

  He shook his head angrily, glaring at the typewriter in front of him, the pile of blank paper beside him, the carefully sharpened pencils, the filled fountain pen. He had always been able to write with complete concentration whenever he caught hold of a stray half-hour and a stub of pencil and scrap of paper. It was only now that he had all the time in the world and the accoutrements, that the paper remained blank for hours in front of him, the pencils unblunted, the pen never dry.

  He pushed back his chair and went upstairs to get a book he had left on his bed table and in which he might want to look up something. As he started downstairs again he caught a glimpse of himself in a picture Emily kept on her chest of drawers, and he carried this glimpse with him back to his office. It was Courtney at fifteen, Virginia’s age, Courtney on one and the same day having won a tennis match and a history prize, and he was grinning and his red hair was rumpled; for some reason, Emily loved the picture and carried it everywhere with her, Courtney, confident and victorious. That, probably, was why, the confidence that shone out of his eyes, the look of participating eagerly in life.

  And was it that same spring, or the spring after (lilac in the garden, lily-of-the-valley under the big oak tree, old grads coming back), that he had almost got himself expelled from school?

  He had written an essay, an essay on Thomas à Kempis for the Scripture master who was also the English master, a young man, small, and somewhat prissy. He had never won a tennis match, nor, in all probability, even watched one. He wore rimless glasses and his hair was stringy and his mind tight, and on occasion Courtney still dreamed about him and the dreams were bordering on nightmares.

  So Ludkin had returned the Scripture papers that morning, making appropriately sarcastic remarks about most of them, but he failed to return Courtney’s, saying, “Bowen, see me after class.”

  Courtney could think of only two reasons for Ludkin’s withholding his composition: either the master thought it unusually good or he thought it unusually bad. In spite of his instinctive feeling of apprehension Courtney did not think his essay was bad.

  He stood quietly by Ludkin’s desk as the others filed out. When the classroom had emptied, leaving Ludkin sitting at the desk up on the platform and Courtney standing below
, and the smell of chalk dust blinded the smell of lilac in the spring air, Ludkin continued to study frowningly some papers on the desk in front of him.

  Finally Courtney said, “You wished to see me, sir?”

  “Bowen,” Ludkin shot at him, “are you Roman Catholic?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What do you call yourself, then?”

  “Episcopalian, sir.”

  “Have you had extensive religious training?”

  “Well, no, sir. I don’t think you’d call it extensive. My mother goes to church a great deal.”

  The elastic band Ludkin was playing with snapped and stung his fingers and a look of temper flickered into his eyes. “Bowen, why did you pick The Imitation of Christ for your Scripture report?”

  “Well, sir, I knew it was a book that had had an awful lot of influence on people, and I thought maybe it was something I ought to read. You told us just to choose anything off the Scripture shelf in the library, sir.”

  Ludkin had the report in his hand. Now he slammed it down on the desk in front of him. “All I can say of this, Bowen, is that if you were Roman Catholic you would certainly be up for excommunication. But since you claim to belong to the Episcopal Church, which is also my persuasion, and that of this school, all I can say is who the devil do you think you are?”

  “Sir?”

  “Don’t stand there looking innocent. You know perfectly well what I mean. This paper is a disgrace, Bowen, a deliberate disgrace. Unless you are willing to rewrite it completely I shall be forced to show it to the headmaster as an example of wilful insubordination.”

  “Insubordination, sir?” Courtney was completely baffled.

  “Yes, sir!” Ludkin shouted. “Insubordination, Mister Bowen!”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Courtney said blankly, looking at his maligned paper lying on the master’s raised desk.