A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Poems are private, and I appreciated his wanting to wait. That was nice, really nice.

  Daddy pushed back a little from the table. “If we all pitch in and do the dishes, we’ll have time for some singing. Go get your guitar, Victoria, and the kids and I’ll take the dishes out to the kitchen.”

  It didn’t take us all that long. Grandfather doesn’t have a dishwasher, but the men brought everything out to the kitchen and I washed and John dried and Suzy and Daddy put things away and Rob and Adam wiped off the table and the counter.

  And then we were back on the porch, to catch whatever ocean breeze came across the water on this hot night. Rob’s hair was damp with heat.

  “If it’s like this at the ocean, what do you suppose it’s like in the city?” Daddy asked the world at large. “Guitar tuned, Victoria?”

  “Adequately.” Mother twiddled the little knob for one of the strings. “There. That’s better. What’ll we start with?”

  “You start,” Daddy said. “How about Come unto these yellow sands?”

  When Mother had finished, nobody said anything. I was sitting on the floor by Grandfather’s couch, leaning back against it. Daddy and Rob were on the swing. John and Adam had their chairs titled back, leaning against the porch rail. Suzy sat on the floor near Mother. The fan whirred slowly above us, stirring the sluggish air. A moth beat its pale wings against the screen. There was no need for words.

  Mother plucked a few chords, then sang another song from one of Shakespeare’s plays, When that I was and a little tiny boy. She’d sung us those songs as lullabies, and we all loved them. They made me feel safe and comforted and secure.

  When she put down her guitar this time, Adam said, “Mrs. Austin, that’s tremendous! You could have been a professional!”

  “She was,” Suzy told him proudly. “She sang in a night club.”

  “Very briefly.” Mother smiled. “I met your father and that was the end of my career.”

  “But it didn’t have to be.” Suzy was vehement. “You could have gone on if you’d wanted to. Daddy didn’t make you stop.”

  “Of course he didn’t, Suzy. I stopped singing in public because I made other choices. And”—as though to answer Suzy’s unspoken but almost audible arguments—“they were my own choices. Society didn’t force them on me; neither did your father. It’s inverse sexism again not to allow me the freedom to make the choice I did.”

  Daddy laughed. “Victoria, I do love you when you get up on the soapbox.”

  “And other times, too, I hope.” Mother laughed back.

  Suzy continued her own train of thought. “Mrs. Rodney’s going back to nursing.”

  Mrs. Rodney was going back to nursing largely because her husband was dead and she needed the money. But Leo had said she’d been thinking about it anyhow …

  Mother said calmly, “I’ve sometimes wondered what I’ll do when you kids are all out of the nest. But it won’t be to go back to singing. I can put over a song, but I don’t have a real voice. We’ll just have to wait and see.” She looked at Rob, leaning sleepily against Daddy. “I still have a few years before I have to worry. Okay, now, let’s all sing together.” Her fingers moved over the guitar strings again, the merry strains of The Arkansas Traveler.

  So we all joined in.

  And while we sang I remembered that Adam was going to introduce me to his dolphins the next day.

  And I wondered where Zachary was and what he was doing.

  Four

  In the morning I biked over to the station with John, my bathing suit rolled in a towel and stuffed in my wicker bike basket, because Adam had said something about maybe going for a swim.

  For the first time I found myself wishing I’d paid more attention to science in school and less to composition and music and things like that. I didn’t know anything at all about dolphins, not even the difference between a dolphin and a porpoise, though I thought that porpoise was a generic name which included several kinds of dolphins. At breakfast I’d thought of asking and then decided against it. Anything I was going to learn about cetaceans (as John called them) was going to have to come from Adam. My excitement about going on a date with Adam was very different from the way I felt when I went out with Zachary. With Zachary I was excited and nervous and somehow playing a role, almost like when we used to go up to the attic in Thornhill to the costume trunks and put on plays. With Zachary I wore at least an imaginary costume, because I was trying to live up to his expectations of me, and maybe that was why I felt uncomfortable with him at the same time that I was thrilled. And going out with Adam was even more different than going out with Leo. Leo was turning out to be human, but I didn’t think doing something with Leo was going on a date.

  Adam was different from anybody I’d ever known. He wasn’t spectacularly gorgeous, like Zachary, but he had a kind of light within that drew me to him like a moth to a candle. At the funeral his light was doused, and I felt a deep hurt within him, beyond the hurt caused by Commander Rodney’s death. And then, when he talked about dolphins, he was alight and alive and I wanted to know why. And I didn’t think this was going to be easy, because there was something—reticent, I guess is what I mean—about him.

  He was living in a kind of barracks, a long, grey building up on stilts, which would make it cool in summer and cold in winter. He was sitting on the steps, waiting for us. He had on cut-off blue jeans, and his legs were long and tan. Old sneakers, with the ties broken and knotted. A faded blue T-shirt. He smiled, and the light came on inside him.

  He jumped down the steps and came over to show me where to park my bike in the long rack in front of the lab, which was a building like the one he lived in. Inside the lab was a smell of ocean and fish and Bunsen burners. There were lots of tanks with various species of fish, and what seemed as many starfish as Grandfather has books. Most of them were growing arms: fascinating.

  John went off to the other end of the lab to check on a tank of lizards. I could see his boss, Dr. Nora Zand, talking to him in an excited way, and John was peering into the tank. Adam and I stood by a big tank in which there were a dozen or more starfish, each with an arm partly regenerated.

  “Wouldn’t it be terrific,” I suggested, “if people could do that? Then surgeons wouldn’t have to pull out their knives so quickly.”

  “It’s not outside the realm of possibility.” Adam was looking into the tank, studying the starfish. “Human beings and starfish are both chordates and come from the same phylum.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant. “You mean they’re sort of our distant ancestors, way back on the family tree?”

  “Yah.” Adam moved on to the next tank, and I followed. At the end of the lab, John was sitting on a high stool, writing on a clipboard. Dr. Zand had gone. Adam bent over the tank. “So what we learn about starfish and how they regenerate could someday apply to human beings. You’re quite right, it would revolutionize medicine.”

  “Isn’t it more what things ought to be, rather than knives and stuff?”

  “Probab ly.”

  “How much do we know about it?”

  “The central nerve disc is vital. We’ve been able to make some isolated arms regenerate by implanting them with part of the central nerve disc, which seems to provide the electric energy for regeneration. But we haven’t made that much progress. Starfish have fascinated people for centuries. The first formal paper on regeneration was written by an Italian, Lazzaro Spallanzani, way back in 1768. We know a little more than he did, but not as much as you might expect.”

  I stared down at a starfish with all five arms, the fifth not quite complete, still in the process of growing itself back. “We’ve been spending more time on machines and bombs and industry than we have on things like starfish, haven’t we? Has anybody tried anything with people? I mean, do we have an equivalent of the central nerve disc?”

  He gave me an oblique look. “We don’t know all that much about it yet. Electrical charges have been used in stimulating broken
bones to heal. But in the wrong hands it could be disastrous, producing malignancies and all kinds of horrors. Come along and I’ll show you the dolphin pens. Got your bathing suit?”

  I indicated the rolled-up towel.

  We paused as we passed John, who pointed at a lizard in the tank; regeneration was just barely visible in a severed foreleg.

  “Terrif,” Adam said. “We’re off to Una and Nini. See you later.”

  I assumed Una and Nini had to be dolphins. We left the lab building and walked downhill toward the water. One of the loveliest things about Seven Bay Island is that each of the seven bays has several coves, some quite large and open, some small and protected, like Grandfather’s cove. The path down to the beach from the lab hairpinned and zigzagged instead of descending precipitously like the one to Grandfather’s cove, so it was easier walking. Even so, the sun beat down on us and I could feel sweat trickling down the small of my back. We headed for a long and narrow cove in which several pens had been built. We paused at the first pen, where two pale-grey dolphins were leaping up into the air, shedding sparkles of water, while a middle-aged man with a balding head tossed them fish from a bucket. I thought he was the man who had cried at Commander Rodney’s funeral. His baldness was sort of like a monk’s tonsure, a dark fringe all around his head, with a pink circle of skin at the crown. He had brown spaniel eyes and I liked him.

  He saw us, gave me a quick look, and called out, “Hey, kids, want to take over?”

  “Sure, Jeb. This is John Austin’s sister Vicky with me today. Vicky, this is Dr. Nutteley, my boss.”

  We shook hands, and his eyes met mine in a brief smile, and then Dr. Nutteley took off at a jog trot for the next pen.

  Adam reached into the bucket and took out a silver wriggling fish and tossed it high into the air. “Get it, Una!” One of the dolphins leapt completely out of the water and caught the fish in mid-air. Adam threw another fish across the pen. “Get it, Nini!” The other dolphin dove down and in less time than I would have thought possible, even knowing how swift dolphins are supposed to be, she surfaced with the fish in her mouth.

  “You’ve probably heard,” Adam said, “that according to the laws of aerodynamics it’s impossible for a bumblebee to fly.”

  I nodded. “But it flies. I like that.”

  “Okay, and according to the laws of hydronomics, it’s impossible for a dolphin to swim as swiftly as it does. Nobody’s figured out why the bumblebee can fly, but we think that with dolphins it’s something to do with their delicate skin, which ripples with the movement of the water, and also sheds, far more swiftly than we human beings shed our skin. Una and Nini, I think I told you last night, are bottle-noses. The absolutely fascinating thing”—as he was talking, his light was really turned on, bright as the sun—“is that dolphins were once land animals, mammals like other land creatures.”

  “Aren’t they still mammals?” I watched, fascinated, as Una and Nini bobbed up and down in front of us, half their sleek bodies out of water, as they chirruped at us for more fish.

  “Yah, they’re mammals. They aren’t fish. They’re small whales who left the land somewhere in prehistory, and returned to the sea. Here, Vicky, you toss them a fish.”

  I didn’t want him to think I was chicken. Those fish wriggling in that bucket of water were still alive. I’d never been fishing, and never had I touched a live fish. I was afraid they’d be slippery, afraid they’d slide out of my fingers before I could throw them. To mask my fear, as much from myself as from Adam, I said, “Didn’t someone call the sea the primordial womb from which all life came?” And while I was speaking I reached into the bucket and grabbed a fish and threw it. “Get it, Una!” And another. “Get it, Nini!”

  I don’t think Adam realized how nervous I was. He said, “All life started in those early oceans as far as we know, and then when weather and land masses more or less stabilized, some of the ocean creatures ventured ashore and became land creatures.” He reached into the bucket and pulled out a small fish, but he didn’t throw it. Instead, he leaned so far over I thought he might lose his balance and fall in. “Nini!” he called. Then he held the tail of the fish in his teeth, and Nini jumped up and took it from his mouth, delicately, gently.

  Delicate and gentle or not, I hoped he wouldn’t ask me to do that.

  “Dolphins don’t chew their food,” he said. “They swallow the fish whole.”

  I had seen Nini’s open mouth. “They appear to have very formidable teeth.”

  “They use their teeth to grasp the fish. They don’t have fingers, after all.” He tossed a fish to Una. “As far as I know, whales and others of their kind, like these dolphins, are the only land creatures who left the land and returned to the sea.”

  “Mermaids,” I said, without stopping to think how unscientific I was going to sound.

  But, instead of putting me down, Adam said, “Some people think mermaids came from porpoises, and their singing sounds like dolphins chirruping. Dolphins have always fascinated human beings. It’s amazing, for instance, how so much that Aristotle wrote about dolphins is true. How could he have known all that he knew, way back then?” He tossed the dolphins a few more fish, looked into the nearly empty bucket, and turned to me. “Give Una and Nini the rest of the fish.”

  I didn’t exactly like it, but I did it, and without flinching, because I did like Una and Nini. In a funny way, they reminded me of Rochester, not in looks, of course, but in essence.

  When the fish were gone, we moved on to the next pen, where Dr. Nutteley was studying three dolphins.

  “Next week Ynid”—Adam pointed to one of them—“is going to give birth. The other two you might call her midwives. Dolphins can’t deliver alone. They’re communal creatures.”

  “Like us.”

  “In that way.”

  I looked at him, and his eyes had that deep inward look. “You mean,” I ventured, “we hear about man’s inhumanity to man, but never dolphin’s inhumanity to dolphin?”

  He nodded, without speaking.

  “What about John’s Nature is red in tooth and claw?”

  “It doesn’t seem to apply to dolphins.”

  “They do eat live fish,” I pointed out regretfully.

  “Yah, but I can’t see that it’s any worse than if they were dead and cooked. One way or another, they’re eaten. And there’s no getting around the fact that all life lives at the expense of other life.” He stared at the three dolphins for a long moment. “Porpoises are warm-blooded, like us, not cold-blooded, like fish. And if you look carefully at their flippers you can see that they’re really made-over paws; they’re not fish’s fins. They have the bone structure of forelimbs.” He moved along, waving goodbye to Dr. Nutteley, and I followed, clutching my towel, which had got quite damp from splashes while we were feeding Una and Nini. I didn’t know where he was taking me now, but I didn’t ask; I just followed.

  “What really gets me”—he paused on the sandy path which led in a rambly way across the dunes—“is that when the dolphin returned to the sea, he had to give up what once may well have been hands.” He held his hands toward me and I looked at him as he stood at the crest of a dune, silhouetted against the incredible blue brightness of sky, so it was difficult to see his expression. “The hand with its opposable thumb—can you imagine what it would be like not to be able to pick anything up, not to be able to hold anything and look at it?”

  I, too, held out my hand, putting thumb and forefinger together. “Yesterday when I was swimming with Leo we saw a dolphin leaping, and it looked so free and—and joyous. Do you suppose way back millions of years ago the dolphin had to choose to give up its hands in order to have that kind of freedom?”

  “I don’t know.” Adam started toward the ocean, so that the dolphin pens were hidden by an arm of dune. We were in a larger cove, a wide, gentle curve of sand. “I don’t even know if I think it would be worth it, at that price.” He stretched out his fingers again. “Without writing, writing down wor
ds on stone or papyrus or parchment or paper or microfilm so they can be kept, we wouldn’t have any history. And without history there isn’t any future.”

  “Word of mouth?” I suggested. “Oral tradition?”

  “It gets changed, like in the whispering game we played at kids’ birthday parties.”

  “Someone whispers a sentence, and you pass it along, and in the end it comes out all garbled?”

  He looked at me over his shoulder. “Yah, that’s what happens to oral tradition unless someone comes along and sets it down.”

  “Oh, wow,” I exclaimed. “I guess that’s why Grandfather thought it was so important to write down the stories and traditions of the tribe he was living with. I never thought about it that way before.”

  “I didn’t either, not till I began my project this summer. We take an awful lot for granted. Without hands, we wouldn’t have any painting, or sculpture, or poetry.”

  I thought of Grandfather reading to me the day before: I saw Eternity the other night like a great ring of pure and endless light. And then I thought of the dolphins returning to the sea, and losing fingers and thumb and the ability to grasp, and Una and Nini and their loving smiles, and they seemed to me to be bathed in a deep but dazzling darkness.

  Adam stood at the water’s edge. “We wouldn’t have any music, any symphonies or operas or even the songs we sang last night to your mother’s guitar.” We left the shallow cove and turned into a deeper half-moon of beach. “Jeb is making tape after tape of Una and Nini, to see whether or not their Donald Duck gabblings and their underwater whistlings are part of a real language, with a complex vocabulary, or whether it’s all—I mean, do they think, or is it all instinct, the way it is with ants?”

  I looked across the blinding glare of ocean disappearing into the horizon. “Ants never seem to me to be particularly happy.”

  “Yah, you have a point there. Dolphins undeniably have a great sense of fun. And humor is a sign of intelligence. You’re quite a girl, Vicky. Before I—” He stopped and looked at me, probingly, and I waited for him to say something, and when he did, it wasn’t at all what I had expected. “This Leo: are you his girlfriend?”