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The Small Rain
A Novel
Madeleine L’Engle
To my father,
CHARLES WADSWORTH CAMP
Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
The Small Rain is very much a first novel. It was begun in college, and then worked on more single-mindedly after I graduated and went to New York, sharing an apartment in the Village with three other girls—two aspiring actresses, an aspiring pianist, and myself, an aspiring writer.
A writer of fiction does not earn a living by writing novels, at least at first, so, with less naïveté than it might seem, I decided to try to earn my living in the theater. I’d had a couple of summers of stock, and had spent most of my extracurricular time at Smith working in plays. I knew I was a good actress. I also knew that I was much too tall and clumsy to become a star, and anyhow, what I wanted to be was a writer. So I was willing to take any kind of job whatsoever in the theater—general understudy, assistant stage manager, anything.
It so happened that Eva Le Gallienne, Joseph Schildkraut, and Margaret Webster were offering auditions, that winter, to any aspiring young actor or actress who wanted to apply. So of course I applied. I did have the sense to use my own material, geared to a gawky, still-adolescent young woman. Most of the girls were doing Shakespeare for Miss Webster, Chekhov or other familiar playwrights for Miss Le Gallienne and Mr. Schildkraut, and there I was, anything but the glamorous young actress, saying lines they had not heard before. So they listened.
And that led to my first job, in Uncle Harry, the play in which Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut were then appearing. The understudy was leaving, and I was given the job. I also played the matron of the prison in the last scene, and I had two lines to say: “But it might be important, sir.” “But it can’t do any harm.”
And I wrote. I wrote backstage. I wrote, after the play closed on Broadway and went on tour, on trains, in hotel rooms I shared with other girls, in dressing rooms. And I sent out, mostly to little magazines and university quarterlies, stories I had written in college, and I began to get acceptances. To my surprise, I received letters of inquiry from several publishers who had seen my stories and wanted to know if I had a novel in mind. Of course I did. I had a novel almost finished, in longhand.
When we came back from the tour of Uncle Harry, I typed up the manuscript and sent it off to the first publisher who had written to me.
It was my good fortune that there was at that time at Vanguard Press a young editor named Bernard Perry. Bernard was able to make me know how to take my shapeless manuscript and turn it into a book. I was given a hundred-dollar option, and I spent that summer rewriting my novel. I had a deadline, not set by the publishers. In the autumn I was going to be general understudy, assistant stage manager, and play several bit parts in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, produced and directed by Margaret Webster, with Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut as stars. I wanted to have the book done before we went into rehearsal.
I had left the apartment I shared with three other girls, and moved into a smaller one of my own where there were no interruptions. I had more to pay out in rent, but I had managed to save a good bit out of the $65-a-week Equity-minimum salary, and I had that hundred dollars option money, and I lived frugally. And wrote.
I was not unaware of the world around me. The United States was at war, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I was corresponding with school friends in England who were spending nights in bomb shelters, or were nursing at the front lines. In France, I had cousins who were fighting with the Maquis, going to Africa with de Gaulle. The streets of New York were full of soldiers and sailors.
And yet the pages of that first novel make no mention of war at all. The story is set in those years of precarious peace between the First and Second World War—still, I find it strange that my personal preoccupation with war is in no way reflected in the book.
Most first novels are a mishmash of the writer’s experience. The Small Rain is not autobiographical, but my theater experience is on the first page. I am not Katherine, though we share much in common. I was a slow developer, Katherine a quick one. I was a writer, Katherine a pianist; but she approached her work with the same determination and single-mindedness with which I approached mine. Katherine’s mother died when she was fourteen, and I was blessed in having my own mother live to be ninety. But my father had died when I was seventeen, and I worked out some of my grief in the death of Katherine’s mother.
No fictional character can come only from the author’s imagination. Our subconscious minds store up millions of impressions for us. But I do not deliberately write from anyone I know, and until a fictional character becomes as real for me as my family and friends, I can’t write about that person. So Katherine and the people surrounding her—Julie, her mother; Manya, her stepmother; Justin, her piano teacher; Felix, Sarah, Pete, her friends—became vividly alive for me. Like Katherine I went to a boarding school in Switzerland, and like Katherine I was lonely and unhappy. I had a piano teacher I loved, a gentle Frenchwoman who encouraged me. I did not have a special friend like Sarah during those years; my second year at school I had some good friends, but no one with whom I was able to talk as Katherine was able to talk with Sarah. I did not share with anyone my grief about my father until after high school.
My Greenwich Village experience was not unlike Katherine’s, but it was mine, and Katherine’s was hers. The deeper I got into the novel, the more Katherine became Katherine and the less Madeleine. But we are sisters, there’s no doubt about that.
The Small Rain was a surprise success, and did well enough so that I could live comfortably for a couple of years, and I thought I was on my way. In a sense I was, though the way was more roundabout and far more bumpy than I expected. I worked on my second novel, met my husband, Hugh Franklin, in The Cherry Orchard, and married him in The Joyous Season. We had our first child; I published a third book, and a fourth while I was again pregnant, and we had left the theater and moved to the country, where we ran a general store, and finally, after a near decade, returned to the city, and Hugh to the theater.
That was a rough decade. There were babies, and washing machines which froze when full of diapers, and the deaths of friends, and hard work building up a store, and rejection slips for me, hundreds of rejection slips.
I did some of the growing and hurting and living I knew I needed to go through before I could write another book about Katherine—for, ever since the publication of The Small Rain, I had known I was going to find out what happened to her. There are twenty-nine books and thirty-seven years between the publication of The Small Rain and that of A Severed Wasp.
After that desolate decade my books began to sell. When Farrar, Straus and Giroux accepted A Wrinkle in Time, I had finally found my publishing home. There, I am given a freedom seldom available to writers, to write whatever I want and need to write, moving from fiction to non-fiction to poetry to drama, to books marketed for children to books marketed for adults.
Finally I began to get hints in the creative subconscious mind of what kinds of things might have happened to Katherine in the intervening years, very different from the things which had happened to me, and yet nevertheless within the context of my own being, for Katherine and I are still sisters, especially in our attitude toward our work.
In A Severed Wasp I returned not only to Katherine but to other
characters from The Small Rain. Characters continue to grow when the writer is not looking. I was surprised indeed to have Felix a retired bishop; I never thought he’d turn out that way! The war which was not in The Small Rain had its drastic effects on Katherine and Justin, as it had on all of us who were young during those dark years. I was surprised to find Mimi Oppenheimer, a character from a much older novel, A Winter’s Love, be both friend and foil for Katherine, and I became very fond of Mimi.
I hope that I will be able to move into old age as realistically and graciously as Katherine did. I hope that I will continue to serve my writing as she served her music. Because she was the protagonist of my first novel, I feel a special closeness to her, and that closeness deepened and strengthened as I wrote A Severed Wasp. I am pleased The Small Rain is back in print, for it completes a circle.
MADELEINE L’ENGLE
New York 1984
ONE
Katherine knew, before the first act was half over, that something was wrong with Manya. She stood in the wings, waiting for her entrance, a good ten minutes early, because she could hear no cues from her dressing room. Manya’s voice, coming from the stage, was rich and vibrant, as usual, but there was a break a fraction of a second long in the middle of one of her speeches, and the child knew, without seeing, that Manya had pressed the palm of her hand against her forehead to collect herself before she went on. Katherine turned to Mac, the property man, who was arranging the tea tray on his small table in the corner.
“Mac, what’s the matter with Aunt Manya?”
Mac put his hand behind his ear, and she repeated her question in a louder whisper, but he just shook his head and stirred the tea in the teapot, cut two slices in the loaf of bread and fitted the pieces together again. Katherine left him and went to stand by the fire inspector, who had watched the play from his post in the wings every night for six months, and every night for six months had confiscated Manya’s cigarettes only when she had smoked them down to the end. He put his arm around Katherine when she came up to him but didn’t take his eyes off Manya on the stage. The child stayed leaning against him in the shadow for a moment, then wandered over to where Pete Burns, the assistant stage manager and general understudy, was holding the book. When he saw her he beckoned.
“It’s kind of slow tonight, kitten. See if you can pick up the pace.”
Katherine loved Pete because he treated her as though she were an adult. “What’s the matter with Aunt Manya?” she whispered.
“With Madame Sergeievna? Nothing, kitten. The whole act’s just dragging. It’s almost time for your entrance.”
Katherine left him, tiptoeing across the back of the stage, running her forefinger softly over the mass of radiator pipes that lined the back wall higher than organ pipes, radiators that were never very warm, because Manya could not bear to have the backstage or her dressing room too hot. Katherine was glad because she disliked heat, too. She climbed the wooden stairs with the inadequate railing that had given way once at an understudy rehearsal when Pete Burns leaned too heavily against it, and stood on the platform, waiting for her cue. She ran her fingers through her heavy, dark hair to make sure that it fell down her back in a shaggy mane, peered through the peephole until Manya crossed slowly to the fireplace and sat down beside it, and waited until Manya leaned down and pulled off one jeweled shoe; then she ran down the stairs. The scene went easily, quickly. She did not have to worry about picking up the pace. But sitting at Manya’s feet, looking up at her, speaking her lines with unaffected sincerity, she still felt that something was wrong, and she was not surprised when Manya did not come in on cue. In the silence that followed, a silence that seemed gigantic but in reality lasted only a second, Katherine saw Pete in the wings, his lips half opened, ready to throw Manya the cue if he had to, saw Manya push against her forehead again with the palm of her hand, saw the dark, Slavic eyes suddenly go blank. Manya’s line was not an important one, and Katherine came in with her own next one. The expression came back to Manya’s eyes, she picked up her cue, in the wings Pete Burns relaxed, the scene continued without difficulty, and certainly no one in the audience knew that anything had happened.
Pete Burns came into Katherine’s dressing room while she was taking off her make-up. Because the cast was so small, she had a dressing room to herself, and Pete sat down in a straight chair, tipped it back, and leaned his fair head against the cream-colored plaster of the wall, watching her smear cold cream onto her face.
“That was nice work, Miss Forrester, covering Madame Sergeievna like that.”
“Was it all right?” she asked, a little anxiously. “I didn’t think her line mattered right there.”
“It was the best thing you could have done. You’ve an amazing instinct, kitten. You ought to be a very fine actress someday.”
“I don’t think I want to be an actress.”
“Oh,” he said. “I suppose you want to be a policewoman or get married and have eleven children.”
“No. I want to be a pianist like my mother.”
His face lost its teasing look and became almost reverent. “I heard your mother play once,” he said. “I think it was the last concert she gave at Carnegie. She was soloist with the Philharmonic. I remember it very clearly, because it was my seventeenth birthday and I’d just been given my first job, a bit part in a musical that closed out of town. I was awfully excited about it at the time, though, and I went to the concert to celebrate. I did what I always wanted to do in the theater, bought a seat in the front row, even though I knew that wasn’t what you’re supposed to do for music, but I’m glad I did, because I could really look at your mother. I certainly fell for her. Baby, I dreamed about her for months. I don’t know what it was, her music or something about her, but I fell.”
“Yes,” Katherine said, wiping off a layer of cold cream and putting on another. “People always did.”
Pete untilted his chair so that all its four feet stood on the floor. “It wasn’t that she was beautiful. Manya Sergeievna, now, is what I call beautiful. But there was something about her, I don’t know, a magnetism, something that certainly got me. It’s funny how you can fall in love with someone you don’t know. I never did with actresses or movie stars. I thought it was crazy. I thought I was above that kind of stuff.” He paused, and Katherine knew he wanted to ask her something, but when he spoke, all he said was, “Look, kitten, how old are you?”
“Ten. I was ten in October. I haven’t seen Mother for three years. I wish I could see her. I want so awfully to see her. It’s so hard to have a mother and not be able to see her.” This was something she had never said; not to Aunt Manya, with whom she lived; not to her father, with whom she had dinner every Sunday, but with whom she didn’t live because he was a composer and much too vague and preoccupied with his music to be any good at taking care of Katherine. Manya could go from one play to another, entertain lavishly, work on innumerable charities, and still find time for Katherine, who was really no relation at all, just the daughter of Julie and Tom Forrester, her closest friends.
Katherine’s lip trembled. “It’s not that I don’t love Aunt Manya, you know,” she said. “She’s wonderful to me. It’s just that I need my own mother.”
Pete didn’t say anything, but he smiled at her, and she felt that she could talk to Pete, although she had never been able to talk to anybody else, because he loved her mother.
There was a knock on the door, and Irina, Manya’s maid, stuck her head in. “Miss Katherine?”
“Yes, Irina, come in.”
“Mme Sergeievna will be a little late tonight. She has visitors, so she says just to wait.”
“Oh. All right.”
“Does she want me to take the baby home?” Pete asked. He sometimes took Katherine home when Manya was going out and her nurse couldn’t come for her.
“No, thank you, Mr. Burns. She’s going right home. She just has—someone—in her dressing room. And a dozen people waiting to see her tonight, when she’s so
tired. So she says will you just wait for her, please, Miss Katherine.”
“All right. Thank you, Irina.”
When Irina had gone Katherine turned back to Pete. “Aunt Manya said as soon as Mother was well I could see her. I should think a person could get well of almost anything in three years, wouldn’t you?”
“Well,” Pete said, “I guess she was hurt pretty badly.” He looked embarrassed, as though he weren’t sure how much he should say.
Katherine got up, her face shiny with cold cream, some of her blue grease paint still smeared about her eyes, and stood in front of Pete. “Pete,” she said solemnly, “if you know anything about Mother, please tell me. It isn’t fair that I shouldn’t be told things. I’m old enough. I ought to know.”
“Well, kitten,” Pete said slowly, “tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know anything,” Katherine said, “except it was the day before my seventh birthday and Mother was driving out to Aunt Manya’s place in Connecticut and she had an accident. I know her left shoulder and arm were badly crushed, and I guess it means she can’t play any more. I don’t know. I woke up on my birthday and nobody was there but Nanny and she was crying and I knew something awful must have happened because Nanny never cries and she never lets me cry, and then Dr. Bradley and Father and Aunt Manya came in and Dr. Bradley told me Mother had hurt herself and I wouldn’t be able to see her for a few days until she was better, and I was naughty because it was my birthday and I didn’t want my birthday to be spoiled and I wanted God to take back everything that had happened. And Father and Aunt Manya couldn’t do anything with me, and then Dr. Bradley took me off and talked to me, and he said he’d lend me half his birthday. His birthday was in July. And he did, too. I went to his house and he gave me strawberries and cream and he was lovely to me and talked and talked. I guess he loved Mother sort of like you. I haven’t seen him much since then because he and Aunt Manya fight, and anyhow I think he’s mad with Aunt Manya about something.” She was talking rapidly, letting her thoughts tumble out in any order they came to her. “And I remember the afternoon of my birthday Nanny took me to the park and I played with a little girl called Sarah Courtmont and she said I ought to find out what hospital Mother was in and sneak out after I went to bed and go see her. And I tried. I got to the hospital; I found out which one it was from Aunt Manya; but they wouldn’t let me see Mother, and Aunt Manya came and got me, and then a few days later I went to live with her. Nanny came, too. You know Nanny.”
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