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

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  It was easy for me to imagine Adam singing to a pod of dolphins in the same nice strong baritone I’d heard him use the night before. I liked the image. “And then what?”

  “Then I came on back to the lab. And went out again the next day. No luck. They came again the third day, and then they began coming regularly. As soon as I’d cut the engine, they’d come over to me. And then I began to reach out to pet them, and, as you saw, Basil likes to have his chest scratched. One afternoon I was scratching him and—well, I’m sure he did it on purpose. I had to lean further and further out to reach him and suddenly I fell in.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “It was so sudden I didn’t have time to be scared. The others didn’t come near me, only Basil. And that’s how it began.”

  I shivered with pleasure.

  A hand came down on my shoulder and I turned around and there was John, looking relieved. “You’re okay.”

  “Sure. Oh, John, it was—I can’t tell you how exciting it was.”

  “Okay,” John said. “I’m glad it was exciting. But I’ve felt anxious ever since I told Adam he could take you out to meet Basil.”

  “Basil didn’t hurt you, did he?” I demanded.

  “No, but—”

  “Cut it, you two,” Adam said. “Vicky made a big hit with Basil. Are you sure you didn’t tell her anything about him, John?”

  John and I both started to protest, indignantly.

  Adam apologized, “Sorry, sorry. Vicky just acted as though she’d been palling around with dolphins all her life.”

  John pulled out a chair. “Are you through, or shall I join you?”

  “We’re going to have ice cream. So join us. But don’t have a hot dog.”

  “What else?”

  “Ham and cheese?”

  “They leave the plastic wrapping on both the ham and the cheese. Maybe I’ll have a BLT.”

  “You won’t find much B and the T won’t be ripe and the L will be wilted.”

  “You can’t win.” John went off to get in line. Adam took our tray.

  I felt relaxed and happy and definitely older than not-quite-sixteen. I liked this world in which John and Adam were living. I liked the fact that Adam was pleased and surprised at Basil’s reaction to me.

  Adam and John came back. Adam said, “Dr. Nutteley approved of Vicky.”

  “But he didn’t say anything—”

  “If he hadn’t approved, he’d have said something. He sizes people up in less than a second. And you’re part of my experiment, Vicky. John doesn’t have the time to give—Dr. Nora’s a hard taskmaster—and anyhow, you and Basil quite obviously tune in to each other. Can you come again?”

  “I’d love to come again. As long as Mother doesn’t need me to help with Grandfather.”

  “Dad told me he’d asked you not to take a job this summer so you can help out at home. But he didn’t mean you couldn’t ever get away.”

  “I can’t think of anything I’d like better than being part of Adam’s experiment.”

  “You’re a good kid, Vic.” John isn’t one for giving compliments and I could feel myself flushing. “It’s easiest for me, with my job keeping me busy and out of the house all day. I think Suzy’s an idiot for not taking the job at the Woods’, which would have paid her better than anything else she can get, but she’ll get something, probably helping Jacky Rodney service the launch and being general girl Friday.”

  “Well, Suzy loves boats and machines and things like that.”

  “Sure,” John said, “and it will give her a legitimate reason to make herself scarce around home.”

  I put down my ice-cream spoon. I’m the one John usually criticizes, not Suzy.

  As though reading my mind, he said, “I’m not criticizing Suze. She has a healthy sense of self-preservation. And that’s okay. If Nora wants me to stay late and do some extra work, I don’t protest that I ought to get home to help out. So what I’m getting at is that it’s you and Mother who have to be available for Grandfather.”

  “And Rob,” I added.

  “Sure. And Rob. But Rob has his own special way of handling the—oh, I guess you might call them major life problems.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “You’re pretty vulnerable, Sis.”

  Adam said, “But that’s one of the nicest things about her. It means she’s very much alive.”

  I smiled him my thanks.

  John nodded. “I’m pretty miffed that Basil took to Vicky faster than he did to me. But, Vic—you’re the one Mother’s going to need to lean on. Did you see the look in her eyes last night when Grandfather forgot, and called you Victoria?”

  Adam spoke gently. “He’s had his threescore years and ten and quite a bit more, Vicky. It’s never easy, but it’s comprehensible when someone has had a full life, like your grandfather.”

  I said slowly, “I don’t want to be like those Immortalists in California, wanting to live forever, and going in for cryonics …”

  “What’s that?” Adam asked.

  I looked at John and he told him, and I loved John because he didn’t use it as an excuse to demolish Zachary. He ended, “I think it’s easier to understand Commander Rodney, buried here on the Island, than Mrs. Grey, frozen in California.”

  “When Grandfather—” I started, and could not go on.

  “What Grandfather wants, and what Mother wants for him”—John’s voice was level—“is to have it all as simple as possible. A plain pine box, and he’ll be at the church, not in a funeral parlor, and be buried next to our grandmother. He says they’ll be good for the land. That’s a lot better than freezing him, trying to hold on to something which isn’t there.”

  “You mean you agree with Zachary, and when you die it’s nada, nada, nada?”

  “No, Vicky, I didn’t say that at all. But whatever it is, it won’t be anything we can understand or talk about in the language of laboratory proof.” He took his tray and stood up. “I’ve got to get back to work. Nora’s waiting. Adam?”

  “I’ll walk Vicky out to her bike. Then I’m going to go report to Jeb.”

  John left from one door of the cafeteria, Adam and I from the other. We walked without talking till we came to the bike stand.

  Then he said, “It’s been a good morning for me, Vicky.”

  I was still feeling choky. “For me, too.”

  Adam gave me his probing look, the look I was beginning to think of as his scientist-looking-through-a-microscope look. “Have you cried about your grandfather?”

  “I’m not sure.” I didn’t feel free to tell him about crying with Leo. But surely my tears had been as much for Grandfather as for Commander Rodney.

  Adam took both my hands in his, a firm, warm grasp. “It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes.”

  I wanted to clutch Adam’s hands, but I didn’t. I withdrew mine, slowly. “I guess I have a lot to learn about that.”

  “At the end of the summer, when I go back to California, I’ll have to say goodbye to Basil. That’s not going to be easy. Maybe Basil will be able to teach us both something about letting go.”

  I thought of the great, smiling mouth, and the lovely feeling of resilient pewter as I scratched Basil’s chest. “If anybody can teach us, Basil can.”

  Five

  I biked along slowly, partly because it was uphill almost all the way to the stable, and partly because I wanted to hold on to the morning, not the troubling conversation in the cafeteria, but feeding Una and Nini, and seeing Ynid, who was going to have a baby.

  And meeting Basil.

  Meeting Basil was so special that it colored the entire day.

  And somehow meeting Basil made a difference to how I felt about Adam. The strange thing was that, while I felt excited about Basil, I felt comfortable with Adam, comfortable in a strengthening way, a way that made me feel that growing up and becoming an adult was not s
o terrible, even though we grow up and sooner or later we die; sooner, like Commander Rodney, or at the traditional threescore and ten like Grandfather.

  I put my bike in the shed and went around to the front of the house to check on the swallows. All I could see was a grey fluff of feathers up above the nest. The babies were taking their afternoon nap. I trotted around the stable and went in through the screened porch. Ned and Rochester were lying curled up together, but I didn’t see anybody else. Grandfather was not in his usual place on the couch.

  “Hello!” I called.

  Nobody answered.

  I looked in all the stalls and in the kitchen and nobody was there. Grandfather was not in the stall which was his study, where I’d hoped he might be. Not anywhere.

  “Hey, where is everybody?” I shouted.

  No answer. Rochester stalked arthritically in from the porch and whined at the foot of the ladder, so I climbed up to the loft and Rob was lying face down on his cot. If he’d been asleep I’d certainly made enough noise to wake him.

  “Rob.”

  He didn’t move.

  I hurried across the loft and sat down on the cot beside him. “Rob, what’s the matter?”

  He rolled over and his face was all blotchy from crying.

  “Rob, what is it?”

  “It’s Grandfather—” he started, and couldn’t go on because he was choked up with sobs.

  My heart seemed to stop. “He isn’t—”

  “He had a nosebleed,” Rob managed to say. “Oh, Vicky, he bled and bled and Daddy couldn’t stop it for the longest while and Mother—” He fished under his pillow and took out a wad of wet tissues.

  “What about Mother?”

  “She sat by Grandfather and held his hand and she—she didn’t look like Mother at all.”

  “But where is she? Where are Grandfather and Daddy?”

  “Daddy called the Coast Guard and they’re taking Grandfather to the hospital on the mainland for a blood transfusion. Daddy said they should be back by late afternoon.”

  “With Grandfather?”

  “Yes. Daddy promised him he wouldn’t leave him in the hospital.”

  I looked at Rob’s tear-streaked face and the strange darkness in his eyes, and I wondered fleetingly if all this was too much for Rob, if not the rest of us.

  He blew his nose, and then wiped his cheeks with the palms of his hands, leaving grubby streaks. “Where’s Elephant’s Child?”

  Elephant’s Child is the much-loved remains of the stuffed elephant which had always been Rob’s special thing. But he hadn’t bothered about Elephant’s Child for ages. Now he stretched across the cot on his stomach, leaning over and peering under and wriggling until he pulled Elephant’s Child, worse for wear, from under the bed, and wound the music box, which amazingly still worked, and Brahms’s Lullaby tinkled across the loft.

  “Mother asked me to stay home so I could tell you about it.”

  “Where’s Suzy?”

  “Off somewhere with Jacky Rodney. She’s going to work for him.”

  So John, as usual, was right.

  “Suzy’s not old enough to have a pilot’s license.” I don’t know why I sounded so cross.

  “Neither is Jacky. Leo has the license.”

  “She’ll just get in the way.”

  Rob looked at me questioningly, then said, “Suzy can be mighty handy.”

  I sighed. “I know. How’d it happen, Rob, how did it start?”

  “We were all sitting out on the porch, and Mother was just about to bring out lunch, and suddenly blood began to pour down Grandfather’s face …” His lips started trembling.

  “Sorry, Rob,” I said swiftly. “If Daddy’s not making him stay in the hospital, it can’t be too bad. Hey, I had a great time with Adam this morning. I even fed two of the dolphins, Una and Nini.” I wanted to tell him about Basil, to give him a present to take his mind off Grandfather, but I knew Adam was right and Basil shouldn’t be talked about.

  I told Rob about Una and Nini, and how Adam held a fish in his mouth and Nini took it as delicately as Suzy eating strawberries and cream. And I told him that Ynid was going to have a baby soon and that there were two dolphins with her to be midwives. And after a while I realized that Rob was curled up on his cot, sound asleep.

  I slipped quietly down the ladder and went into the kitchen to get things started for supper. I set the table and made the salad dressing and cut up celery and scallions and green peppers, washed the lettuce, and then fixed the tomatoes and put them in a small bowl to be added later. I looked in the refrigerator to see if I could figure out what Mother had planned for supper. There were peas, so I shelled them. I saw some hamburger and a basket of mushrooms, so I figured at least I could make Poor Man’s Beef Stroganoff, which I set about doing.

  I am really not usually that great around the kitchen. Far too often Mother has to prod me—and the rest of us—to get our chores done. Now I was keeping busy to help myself as much as Mother. But I could not turn off my mind; Rob’s description of Grandfather bleeding had been all too graphic. So I let my mind drift to Basil and Adam.

  Dolphins are communal creatures, Adam had told me. They cannot give birth alone; they need midwives, need friends. What about dying? What does a pod of dolphins do when one of them has been hurt—maybe by a harpoon—or is old? How do they help, birthing or dying, without hands? Do they surround the one who is dying and hold him by their presence? Do they have any conscious thoughts about life and death? Can they ask questions? Or do you give up questions when you give up hands?

  I jerked as Rochester barked, his welcoming, friendly, happy bark. So it must be all right.

  I was somehow hesitant to go out to the porch. But I went. Grandfather was sitting on the lumpy couch, looking a little pale, but calm and serene. Mother, I thought, looked paler than Grandfather.

  Daddy sniffed. “I smell something delectable.”

  “I just threw some things together …”

  Mother gave me a quick hug. “Vicky, you’re an angel.” “How’s—how’s everything?”

  “I’m fine,” Grandfather said. “All that new young blood and I’m ready to go try climbing one of those mountains I never had time for while I was in Africa and Asia.”

  Daddy sat down on the couch beside him. “The mountain climbing mightn’t be too bad, but I wouldn’t advise jet travel just yet.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of flying over,” Grandfather said. “I thought I’d swim. Where’s everybody?”

  “Rob’s asleep. John and Suzy aren’t home yet. They’re late. Oh—I vaguely think I heard John say something about Dr. Zand wanting him to do something after five …”

  Mother went out to the kitchen, not with her usual brisk pace, but sort of wandering. I sat in the swing. Rochester hunched down beside Grandfather and Daddy, and put his head on Grandfather’s knee. Ned sprang up into his lap and started purring. It was somehow as comforting as Basil’s smile. And I wanted to tell Grandfather and Daddy about Basil. Instead, I pushed the wooden floor of the porch with my toe so that the swing creaked back and forth.

  “Father,” Daddy said, “I am going to rent a hospital bed for you.” Grandfather started to protest, but Daddy went on, “It will be more comfortable. This old couch is a mess.”

  Grandfather’s hand stroked Ned and the purr came louder. “During my lifetime I’ve learned a good bit about dying. In Alaska, for instance, an old man or woman would prepare to die, and would call the family for instructions and farewells. And when they had done what they wanted to do, wound up their affairs as we might say, they died. It was a conscious decision, a letting go which involved an understanding of the body that we’ve lost. And I thought then and I think now that it’s far better than our way of treating death. But what I didn’t realize when I was watching someone’s sons and daughters standing around the deathbed, sometimes stolid, sometimes weeping, always moving deeply into acceptance of grief and separation, was that I do not have the strength of my Esk
imo friends. It hurts me too much to see you being hurt.”

  Daddy took his hand. “It’s a part of it, Father, you know that.”

  Grandfather looked at me. “I know. But the look in my daughter’s eyes this afternoon …”

  Grandfather was looking at me but he was seeing Mother.

  “Perhaps I’d be better off in the hospital. Perhaps you shouldn’t have brought me home … I thought I could die with you around me, and I did not realize how much it would hurt you and that I cannot stand that hurt.”

  “Perhaps,” Daddy suggested, “you ought not to deprive us of that hurt?”

  I knelt by Grandfather, and Rochester leaned against me, almost knocking me over. “I think the Eskimos are right, Grandfather, and I know you’re just as strong as anybody else in the world.”

  He looked at me and blinked, as though clearing his vision. “Vicky?”

  “Yes, Grandfather. We don’t want you off in the hospital where you’re a number and a case history. We want you to be strong enough to let us be with you.” I bit my lip because tears were beginning to well up in my eyes.

  The screen door slammed and Suzy banged in. “Hi, sorry to be late.”

  I scrambled to my feet.

  “Jacky’s really giving me a lot of responsibility,” she announced triumphantly.

  “That’s great,” I said without enthusiasm.

  “Suzy.” Daddy stood up. “Come in the kitchen with me for a minute.”

  Grandfather continued to stroke Ned. Rochester yawned and flopped at his feet. “I frightened Rob,” Grandfather said.

  “Rob’s been frightened before. He had all kinds of scary things happen in New York, I mean really scary.”

  “Victoria,” Grandfather started, then stopped. “No, it’s Vicky, isn’t it? You look very much the way your mother did at your age.”

  “Grandfather, you told us once that if we aren’t capable of being hurt we aren’t capable of feeling joy.”

  “Yes … yes …”

  “You were with Gram when she died.”

  He continued to pat my hand absent-mindedly. “That is different. Caro and I were one. This—”