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

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  The house was whitely visible between the trees, a great stone building with many gables and chimneys and wings. Between the house and the chairs was a platform holding a grand piano.

  The seats were arranged in clumps, and our tickets took us to the clump just to the left of the piano, where we’d have a perfect view of the keyboard; Zachary was really doing me proud. I looked at the program and it was everything I like—Bach’s Fifth French Suite and a Mozart sonata and some Poulenc and Ginastera—a nice mix. There was a little breeze and I put Mother’s lacy shawl over my shoulders and watched while some girls in long swirly dresses came out with tapers and lit the lanterns. Zachary slipped one arm across my shoulders.

  I should have felt comfortable enough to lean against it and I was furious at myself for automatically stiffening.

  “Relax, Vicky-O.” His long fingers moved gently across the hair at the nape of my neck.

  I tried to sound sophisticated and experienced. “Okay, but I want to listen to the music.”

  At that moment there was a burst of applause and a woman climbed the steps to the platform, bowed to the audience, and sat down at the piano. She was small and slight, with dark hair piled high on her head, showing a beautiful neck.

  When she raised her hands over the keyboard I had a sense of total authority, and also a sense of terrific love, as though the piano were not an inanimate object but a dearly beloved person. And when she started to play, it was as though she and the piano were playing together.

  Music has always been part of my life, taken for granted like the air I breathe. At home, Mother has the record player going most of the time; she says she’d never do any housework without the help of music: for cleaning she puts on something loud, like a Brahms or Beethoven symphony, which can be heard over the vacuum cleaner. For cooking, which she enjoys, it’s more likely to be Bach or Scarlatti or Mozart, or chamber music of some kind. So, sitting there in the gathering twilight, I was lifted up on the music, soaring with almost the same freedom and joy as Basil leaping into the sky.

  The notes of the Bach hit against the air as clear as stars on a cold night. The audience shifted and stirred and then, caught in the music, stilled and listened. The wind blew softly and the heat of the day fled away. The lanterns moved in the breeze and the shadows rippled to the music like dancers. The long, lingering mid-July day slowly faded to streaks of rose and mauve, forecasting another clear, hot day. And then the color was gone and the stars began to come out, seeming to tangle with the Japanese lanterns. It was magic. I put my head down on Zachary’s shoulder and closed my eyes and let the music wash over me like the ocean.

  When the concert was over, the applause was long and sustained.

  “We’ve got to go, Vicky.” Zachary patted my arm gently. “It’s nearly eleven now, and Leo’ll be waiting.”

  Reluctantly I rose, leaving the music. “Oh, Zachary, that was superb.”

  “Vigneras’s got a good reputation,” he said shortly. “Come on, Vic.”

  “It’s so beautiful it’s hard to leave.”

  “Glad you liked it. That kind of music doesn’t do much for me.”

  I turned to him, amazed. “Then why did we come?”

  He bent toward me and with one finger drew the lines of my eyebrows, and a slow shiver of pleasure went through me. “I knew it was your kind of thing.” And, as I continued to look surprised, he added, “If I remember correctly from last summer, don’t you have an aunt in California who’s a concert pianist?”

  For Zachary to remember, for Zachary to care … “Thanks—thanks, Zachary, thanks.”

  We were walking toward the parking lot. “Don’t you know I’d do a lot to make you happy, Vicky-O?”

  “Thanks,” was all I could repeat, inadequately. For Zachary to spend an entire evening doing something he didn’t like was not what I would have expected of him. But then, I should have learned not to have preconceptions.

  Not only had I never been up in a plane, I’d never ridden in an open car before today. After the heat of the day it was so cool that I had to put Mother’s shawl up over my head, and Zachary spread a rug over my knees.

  “It’s too pretty to put the hood up.”

  It was. The sky was purply black, with the galaxies clustered above us and a lopsided moon just rising. If music means a lot to me, so do stars, and I missed them desperately in the city, where the street lights and neon signs take away from the stars so that only the most brilliant ones are visible. If I’m confused, or upset, or angry, if I can go out and look at the stars I’ll almost always get back a sense of proportion. It’s not that they make me feel insignificant; it’s the very opposite; they make me feel that everything matters, be it ever so small, and that there’s meaning to life even when it seems most meaningless.

  Zachary must have felt the beauty, too, because he didn’t press his foot down on the gas pedal. “I don’t want this evening to end,” he said as we approached the dock.

  Leo was there, sitting on a keg, opposite an old-salt-type man with a long beard and a woolen cap. They had a chessboard between them, also on a keg, and were playing by the light of a street lamp. We stood and watched until the old sailor checkmated Leo, who groaned and hit his hand against his forehead. “I’ll get you one of these days, Cor, so help me.” And the old man cackled with pleasure and began putting the chessmen away, touching each one lovingly, and I saw that they were hand-carved, and figured that probably he’d carved them himself.

  Leo insisted on helping me into the launch. The ocean was swelling gently and I relaxed into the rocking boat like a baby in a cradle. Leo was concentrating on piloting us back to Seven Bay Island, and Zachary sat silhouetted against the night sky, looking like an enchanted prince out of a fairy tale.

  At the Island dock Zachary’s hearse was waiting darkly. We said good night to Leo, and then drove the winding way up to the stable. We went around to the porch and just before we got to the screen door Zachary stopped and kissed me.

  Well, I’d expected him to. I wanted him to and I didn’t want him to. He’d kissed me before and I’d liked it. I’d liked it very much. I still liked it. I liked it in a lovely warm tingle all through my body.

  After a moment Zachary drew back and made a funny, groaning sound. “I won’t push you too quickly, hon.” He kissed me again, gently. “Don’t you know you’re all that’s between me and chaos?” And then he broke away and said, “I’ll be calling you,” and ran around the stable and I could hear the door to the station wagon close with a slam.

  It’s amazing how quickly you can get into a routine. And how quickly you can get used to things you never thought you could possibly get used to, like Grandfather more and more often calling me Victoria and confusing me with Mother when she was my age, and wondering where Caro was. Caro. Our grandmother, Caroline. I didn’t like it. I hated it. But I got used to it, and I stopped trying to make him know who I was, and let him see me as whoever he wanted me to be.

  The best parts of the routine were breakfasts on the porch; Grandfather usually got up for these and his mind was clearest in the early morning. And then there was the reading aloud at night, which usually ended with all of us singing. And it was good knowing that Adam would likely be with us for dinner several times a week, because John was rescuing him from the cafeteria.

  Zachary dropped by to ask Mother and Daddy about taking me flying. After he’d left, Suzy said, “Why does Zachary keep on saying zuggy?”

  I hadn’t even noticed. “Oh, it’s just his word.”

  “Some word,” she said.

  “What’s wrong with it? He says all the other words simply reveal a paucity of vocabulary and a lack of imagination and he’s tired of them.”

  Suzy said, “I wish he’d use his imagination then; he was saying zuggy last summer. Has he graduated from high school yet?”

  “Yes,” I said stiffly.

  “I don’t get what you see in that moron.”

  “You’re just jealous,” I r
eplied automatically, and then thought that maybe she really was. Jacky Rodney was the one who looked like his father, not Leo, so it was okay for Leo to like me. But Suzy was not used to having people prefer me over her.

  We dropped the subject.

  After breakfast I read to Grandfather. A lot of what I read was over my head, because, somewhat unexpectedly, he asked me to read the works of scientists, mostly cellular biologists or astrophysicists.

  “Grandfather, I didn’t know you were interested in science.”

  “I’m interested in everything,” he said gently, “but I want the scientists right now because they are the modern mystics, much more than the theologians.” So we read about mitochondria, and we read about black holes, those weird phenomena which follow the death of a giant star. I found myself nearly as fascinated as Grandfather obviously was. When a giant star dies, there’s what one article called a “catastrophic gravitational collapse.” The extraordinary thing is that the star collapses so totally that it actually collapses itself out of existence and becomes what mathematicians call a “singularity.” How can you take an enormous mass and shrink it down to nothing? But this nothing isn’t really nothing. Its gravity is so great that nothing can escape it, and if you went through a black hole you might find yourself in a completely different time, or even a different universe. And this isn’t science fiction. I began to see what Grandfather meant about the scientists being mystics.

  Grandfather’s span of concentration was about an hour, but it was very dense stuff we were reading, and my own span of concentration wouldn’t have been much longer.

  Sometimes at dinner I discussed our reading with John. “You’ve got a lot more sense of science than I thought you had,” he said.

  “Science is a lot more like poetry than I thought it was,” I replied.

  Rob, who had been listening, said, “Maybe when you die, it’s like going through a black hole.”

  Suzy opened her mouth, but Daddy stopped her, saying quietly, “We won’t any of us know till it happens.”

  And John said, “You know what, I’d like a good thick milk shake right now, after those skim-milk and water ones we get at work. I’ll make one for dessert if everybody’d like.”

  Grandfather had another nosebleed, but not a bad one. Daddy got it stopped quite quickly. But he decided that Grandfather should have weekly transfusions, and that Mrs. Rodney could give them, as she suggested, right at home, without having to put Grandfather through the hard trip to the mainland hospital.

  This was Monday and I didn’t know about it till it was all over because Monday was my day with Leo.

  It was a quiet day. We didn’t get cosmic about anything. We swam, and had a picnic, and walked along the beach and swam again, and had another picnic and went to the movies. Nothing exciting, and yet there was a warm, summery beauty about it. I didn’t have to worry about what Leo was going to do or say next. We talked about Columbia and New York. And I told him about reading to Grandfather, and black holes, and he asked, “How does anybody’s individual death fit into that enormous picture?” His eyes were bleak and I thought of Commander Rodney, and the empty space in the world his death had made.

  “If a star’s dying matters, so does a person’s.”

  “To you and me. But to the universe?”

  “I don’t think size matters. Every death is a singularity,” I said slowly. “Think of all the tiny organisms living within us. I somehow think every mitochondrion and farandola has to be just as important as a giant star.”

  “Well—” Leo sounded both hopeful and doubtful, and characteristically changed the subject. “I was going to major in something practical, like accounting, but I don’t think I could spend my life behind a desk. I think I have to do something that will keep me by the sea.”

  “Marine biology, like Adam?”

  “Something to do with ships, I think.”

  “Building them?”

  “Designing, maybe. But mostly sailing them.”

  And then he kissed me.

  I knew he was going to.

  I sort of patted him like a brother and turned away.

  “Why, Vicky?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why won’t you let me kiss you?”

  Zachary’s kiss touched every part of my body. It made me quavery with excitement. Leo’s kiss didn’t do any of that. It didn’t do anything. And yet I found myself liking Leo more and more. “I don’t think we’re ready for kissing yet.”

  “I am.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Okay.” He drew away. “But I don’t disgust you or anything?”

  Not any more. “No, Leo. I like you. You’re my friend.”

  He looked out over the ocean, but the sky was cloudy. There weren’t any stars, and the air was almost chilly. “I guess I’ll have to settle for that. For now.”

  Wednesday was still cloudy, though warm.

  I thought Adam seemed a little preoccupied when I met him at the lab, but he said quickly, “Let’s go see Basil, first thing.”

  I changed to my bathing suit behind the big rock, and we swam out, past the breakers, swam for a good ten minutes, steadily. This time Adam didn’t have to call for more than a few seconds before Basil came leaping to greet us. And this time my heart was beating with anticipation and excitement, not fear.

  Adam put his arms about Basil’s great silvery bulk. Then Basil leapt up into the air, dislodging Adam, and dove down and surfaced by me, butting at me.

  “He wants to play. He’s apt to be a bit rough,” Adam warned, “but he won’t hurt you.”

  I knew he wouldn’t. I began to scratch Basil’s chest. He closed his eyes with pleasure. Then he went under the water and came up again, between my legs, lifting me, so that I was sitting astride him. He was slippery and I almost slid off him, but he wriggled his body in such a way that I stayed on while he swam in a slow circle around Adam. Then he went underwater again, leaving me, and I watched, treading water, as he turned toward Adam, his great body wriggling playfully. Adam seized the dorsal fin, and Basil leapt up into the air, with Adam holding on and shouting. Down Basil dove, not too deep, just deep enough so that Adam was gasping for air when they surfaced. Fascinated, I watched them play. I couldn’t possibly have held on as Adam did, and the game was evidently to see how quickly Basil could dislodge him. Finally the dolphin dove down and Adam surfaced while Basil flashed up into the sunlight, giving every evidence of laughing because he’d won the game. In a funny way he reminded me of the old sailor beating Leo at chess.

  Then he dove again, and I was looking for him in the direction of the horizon, when suddenly he popped up out of the water behind me, making a loud noise which startled me so that I went under and choked on a mouthful of salt water. Basil was as pleased as a child coming out from behind a tree and shouting “Boo!” He butted at me and asked me to play.

  I grasped the dorsal fin in both hands the way Adam had done, and held on for dear life. Basil swam swiftly toward the horizon, towing me with him, then turned with such speed that he almost, but not quite, dislodged me, and returned to where Adam was waiting for us. Then Basil submerged and did his Boo! trick for Adam, and I knew as clearly as though Basil had spoken to me that he was trying to make us laugh because something was wrong.

  What could be wrong?

  Basil butted very gently at Adam, who reached out for the dolphin and leaned his cheek against the great grey flank.

  Somehow or other Basil knew that something was wrong, knew without words far more about whatever was troubling Adam than I knew.

  Adam leaned against the dolphin, his eyes closed, the lines from nose to mouth etched with pain. He leaned there till Basil submerged, and reappeared far from us, leaping against the horizon. And then another dolphin was leaping with Basil, in unison, the two together in perfect rhythm, like ballet dancers.

  Adam turned to me in surprise. “That’s another of the pod.”

  He stopped, watching in awe as the
two dolphins came toward us in flashing curves, rising from the sea, gleaming through the air and seeming to brighten the cloudy sky, then diving down again, until they surfaced just in front of us, standing on their great flukes, their bodies almost entirely out of the water, smiling benignly down at us. Then they flopped down, splashing us so mightily that once again I swallowed a mouthful of sea water and choked, sputtering, which they seemed to find extremely funny. And it was as though I heard Basil telling me: A good laugh heals a lot of hurts. And I thought of Grandfather’s gravity and levity.

  Then the two of them swam, one on each side of Adam, as though holding him against whatever it was that was hurting him. It couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds, though it seemed longer, like time out of time. Then they left us and were gone like a flash, to reappear near the horizion and vanish from our sight.

  “How did Basil know?” Adam asked the vast, cloudy sky.

  “That something’s wrong?”

  “You know, too?”

  “Only that something’s upsetting you.”

  “Have I been that obvious?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Then how—”

  I trod water, looking down at the surface of the sea and away from Adam. “It sounds nuts, but I think I knew because Basil knew. Adam, what’s wrong?”

  “Ynid’s baby is not going to live.”

  “Oh—Adam. Why not?”

  “Jeb says the heart’s not right. That’s why I didn’t take you to the dolphin pens. Jeb wants to be alone with Ynid and the baby and the midwives.”

  “Oh, Adam, Adam, I’m so sorry. Can’t anything be done?”

  “Jeb says not. The heart isn’t pumping enough blood and the baby’s dying for lack of oxygen.”

  “Couldn’t he operate?”

  “No. He says the heart’s too badly damaged.”

  I felt as though a wave had broken over me.