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

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I picked at my salad. “Maybe it’s like school. And this life we’re in now is probably like being way back in kindergarten. And I want to go on all the way through school, and college, and everything. But when you’re in kindergarten you don’t have any idea what college will be like. And when you’re four or five years old you’re not able to understand things that will seem simple later on.”

  “I like that.” Leo smiled, and when he smiled his whole face smiled, even his summer’s sprinkling of freckles. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with freezing people. You arrest them in the kindergarten stage and they can’t grow up.”

  The waitress came and asked if we wanted a sundae or pie. Leo chose lemon-meringue pie and I decided on a chocolate sundae with coffee ice cream, nuts, and whipped cream. I hadn’t gained any weight this summer as far as I could tell, and Leo was right, or at any rate his mother was. It was an affirmation.

  Nine

  It rained all night, as though the heavens were having a gigantic weep. The ocean soughed and sighed and susurrated. It wasn’t a storm, with waves crashing roughly into shore, just a slow, steady emptying, rain onto earth and sea, sea onto sand.

  It made me want to weep, too, and yet I didn’t know just what I wanted to weep about.

  When I woke up in the morning, a little after six, I was bathed in blue and gold. Everything was washed clean; the sky looked as though somebody had scrubbed and swept it; there wasn’t a cloud in the unblemished sweep of blue. The ocean sparkled with diamonds; it wasn’t a bit like Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” The beach seemed to have absorbed the gold of the sun, and the grass was green, with a burnishing of brass.

  The bike ride was cool in the early-morning air, and the breeze blew my hair back from my face and the air was sparkling. It was like music. Mother says there are certain pieces she can’t play or sing and feel sad or sorry for herself, and this day was like that. I was in a tingly way apprehensive about seeing Adam, but I no longer felt rejected.

  I parked my bike and walked toward the cafeteria. Adam hurried along the path from his barracks, or whatever the dormitory-type building was called. He waved and I waved back.

  We didn’t talk until we’d put our trays on a window table, and the silence was heavy. I tried to concentrate on choosing breakfast.

  “Okay, tell me.”

  So I told him about the hospital, and then swimming in the rain to wash off the terror, and then crying out for the dolphins, not deliberately but instinctively, and then Norberta and Njord coming to reassure me and waving their flukes at me and then disappearing without Leo’s even seeing them.

  “You’re sure it was Norberta and Njord?”

  “Who else? You don’t mind, do you? that they came when you weren’t there?”

  “Mind?” Adam seemed to chew the word along with his pancakes. “I admit to a pang of what I suspect is jealousy. But it does bear out my thesis. Okay. Now, you haven’t shown me anything you’ve written yet.”

  I tried not to sound stiff. “I did write a poem for Jeb and Ynid. But—” I dribbled off.

  “You mean I haven’t been very encouraging?”

  “Not very.”

  “I’m going to get more coffee. Want some?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  I’d made a big production about paying my own way with Leo. What about with Adam? There wasn’t a cashier at the cafeteria. Food went along with the salary and housing. What about guests? I’d have to ask him.

  He came back and sat down, and stirred approximately three grains of sugar into his coffee. “Maybe you’ll let me see the poem you wrote for Jeb and Ynid?”

  I reached into my jeans pocket. “As a matter of fact …” I pulled out a very crumpled piece of paper. “I’m not sure it’s still legible.”

  “Let me see.” He reached across the table and took the paper, smoothing it out. I felt my hands going cold and clammy while he read; he looked back up at the top of the page and read again. “Hey, Vicky, I really like that, it’s good,” he said at last. “Nothing loved is ever lost or perished. Okay if I show it to Jeb?”

  “Is it too messed up? Should I copy it again?”

  “No, it’s fine. Is this your only copy?”

  “I have the original scrawl.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for showing it to me. Listen, don’t ever change.”

  I tried raising one eyebrow the way John and Daddy can do. “Is it all right if I grow up?”

  He grinned. “It really teed you off, my calling you a child, didn’t it?”

  I found myself grinning back. “It did.”

  “Okay, let me try to explain. It isn’t just chronology. It’s a quality, too, that I don’t think you have to lose when you’re fully mature physically. Your grandfather has it, and he’s one of the most mature people I’ve ever met. It’s a kind of freshness that cuts through shams and sees what’s really there.” He paused and took a gulp of coffee. “In this psych course I took, it’s called archaic understanding.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s understanding things in their deepest, mythic sense. All children are born with archaic understanding, and then school comes along, and the pragmatic Cartesian world—”

  “Cartesian?”

  “After Descartes.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” I felt stupid, so I added, “I think, therefore I am.”

  “That’s the guy. The thing is, the Cartesian world insists on keeping intellectual control, and that means you have to let go your archaic understanding, because that means going along with all kinds of things you can’t control. Does all this make any sense?”

  “When dolphins went back to the sea, and gave up hands, did they keep their archaic understanding?”

  “That’s a good question. I’ll have to think on it. Okay, now. When you write, you go with your writing, where it wants to take you, don’t you?”

  “I try.”

  “So you let go your own control.”

  “I guess. Yes.”

  “So, if you’re lucky, you’ll still keep that willingness to go into the unexpected even after you’re grown up. It’s easy for you now because you’re still as close to childhood as you are to adulthood.”

  “Hey, wait, it’s not all that easy. And chronologically you’re still an adolescent, too,” I pointed out.

  “Yah, but I’m closer to the other side than you are. And I’m a scientist, not a poet. Even when I was a kid I read Scientific American, not fairy tales. My academic parents didn’t encourage fairy tales. And I think it was my loss. You did read fairy tales, didn’t you?”

  “Fairy tales, fantasy.”

  “And you communicate with dolphins. Don’t you see that it’s a bit humiliating for me to have my dolphins come more quickly and respond more fully to you than to me?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s the way things are. It’s nothing for you to be apologetic about. A lot of discoveries come through teamwork, with two completely different types of imagination working together and being far more than either one alone. We make a good team.” And just as I was feeling warm with happiness, he went on, “But we also have to face the fact that after this summer we’ll probably never see each other again. Berkeley’s all the way across the country.”

  “There is, after all, the mail,” I ventured. “Some letters actually do get delivered.”

  “I’m a lousy letter writer. But sure—we’ll write.” He didn’t sound at all sure.

  “What about next summer?” I was afraid I was pushing it, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “I have a good grant here for this summer. I’ll take whatever’s the best offer I get, for next summer. I’d like to work with Dr. O’Keefe again, for instance. And what about you? Will you be coming to the Island when your grandfather’s not here?”

  “I don’t know. But, Adam, this isn’t next summer. It’s this summer. And we’re here, now.”

  “Yah, you’re right.” He changed the subject. “We’d better wait for a
while before we go swimming. And there’s something I want to try … C’mon.” Adam pushed back from the table.

  “Adam—when I eat here, do you have to pay for me?”

  “It’s minimal.”

  “I can afford to pay my own way.”

  “Don’t be stuffy. It’s the least I can do, for all the help you’re being to me. We’ve got Jeb really excited.”

  I followed him out of the cafeteria, into the lab building, through the big room with the tanks of fish and starfish and lizards, and along to a corridor lined with doors. Most of the doors were open, so there’d be a cross-draft. Adam went to the last door on the left and knocked on the door frame.

  Jeb Nutteley’s voice called out, “Come!”

  He was sitting at his desk, his swivel chair tipped back, his feet up on the desk. When he saw me he stood up. His office was small and crowded; three walls were covered with bookcases jammed with books, papers, all kinds of electronic equipment, snapshots of dolphins, whales, sea lions. The fourth wall was window, and light from the ocean sparkled all over the desk, splashing the mess of books and papers with sunshine.

  “What’s up?” Jeb asked.

  “Okay if we have Vicky listen to some of your dolphin tapes?”

  “Sure. Take over. I’m just off to the dolphin pens. Have fun.” And he ambled out.

  Adam had me sit down in Jeb’s chair. He fiddled with a big reel-to-reel tape machine, and then fitted headphones on me. I leaned back in the chair and listened, and heard chirpings and cluckings and all the dolphin noises I’d become familiar with.

  Adam asked, “Can you tell what they’re saying?”

  I lifted the phone from one ear and he repeated his question. “No,” I answered. “I haven’t any idea.”

  “Not any?”

  I couldn’t tell whether or not he was disappointed. “Adam, they’re not talking to me.”

  “Yah. Listen a little longer.”

  I listened, but it was just noise. I looked around the room, at the desk, and there in a silver frame was a picture of a young woman and a small boy: it must be Jeb’s wife and child. I felt a wave of cold wash over me, as though the sun had gone in, but light continued to splash brightly all over the room, and onto the picture.

  “Does it make any sense at all?” Adam asked.

  I lifted the earphone again, and he repeated his question patiently.

  “No. And I don’t think Basil could understand me if he just heard my voice on a tape. Anyhow, this is a lot of different dolphins, not Basil or Norberta.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s go pay them a visit.”

  When we’d swum out, the water dazzling our eyes, I asked, “Do you want me to call all of them, all three?”

  “Try calling just Basil, since you saw Norberta and Njord yesterday.”

  I turned on my back and floated, closing my eyes against the glare, against Adam, against outside thoughts. Basil. Basil. Basil.

  I tried to put myself outside of time passing, tried not to think whether it was taking a long or a short time, tried to be in the very moment.

  “Here!” Adam called, and I rolled over.

  He came first to Adam, then quickly to me with pleased nudgings and chirrupings of greeting, then back to Adam, and the two of them went into a noisy wrestling match. Finally Basil flung Adam from him, so that he splashed into the water, laughing.

  Then Basil came to me.

  What shall we do? I asked him silently, and listened for his response with my inner ear. I seized his dorsal fin and we went flying through the air. Then he dove into the water, what must have been a shallow dive for the dolphin but was deep for me, and up, up into the air again. He was much gentler with me than he was with Adam; it was, in fact, a completely different game. He wasn’t trying to dislodge me, but to see how high he could leap into the air with me holding on, how deep he could go without my having to let go and surface. Leap, dive, in a regular but increasing rhythm, so that each time we were longer out of the water, deeper under the wrinkled skin of the surface.

  He seemed to know just when it would have been impossible for me to hold my underwater breath one moment longer, for he broke up into the air and gently flipped me off. Then he swam rapid and widening circles around Adam and me, then came back and nudged me, as though wanting something.

  I began to scratch his chest, gently but firmly, and he wriggled with pleasure.

  “Right,” Adam said. “Playtime’s over. Ask him something.”

  I pushed slightly away from Basil and he bathed me with his smile, and my hand almost automatically reached for his dorsal fin, and he did a dolphin cartwheel with me holding on.

  Now a backward one with Adam. Aloud, I said, to Adam, “Take his dorsal fin.”

  And Basil flipped over, backward.

  “Terrif,” Adam said. “Try something else. Simple. In a few minutes you can try something more complicated.”

  Swim, dear darling Basil, and I mean every bit of the dear and darling because you’re very dear and darling to me. Swim out to the horizon and then turn around and come back to us.

  Like a flash he was gone, and then as he was about to vanish from sight he was back.

  “Right,” Adam said. “Now maybe you could try something a little more subtle.”

  What I wanted to do was to ask Basil to give me all the answers to everything, as though he weren’t a dolphin but some kind of cosmic computer. And I knew that that was not only not realistic, it wasn’t fair. But I wondered …

  I thought of Ynid and her grief at her dead baby, and I asked Basil, Is Ynid’s baby all right? (Is Commander Rodney all right? Is my grandfather all right? Am I? Is it all right?)

  Basil pulled himself up out of the water and a series of sounds came from him, singing sounds.

  And what it reminded me of was Grandfather standing by Commander Rodney’s open grave and saying those terrible words and then crying out, full of joy, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

  Then Basil was gone, flashing through sea and sky, to disappear at the horizon.

  Adam beckoned to me, and turned to swim into shore. I followed.

  He was standing on his head when I splashed in. “Good for the brain,” he said, upside down.

  I sat down at the edge of the water, letting the little waves lap about me.

  Adam gave a dolphin-like flip and stood on his feet instead of his head. “I wish …”

  “What?”

  “Oh, several million unobtainable things.” He came and sat down in the water beside me. “When it occurred to me to involve you in my project, I was thinking of John Austin’s kid sister, who was a bit at loose ends and available. I did think of you as a child, at least in comparison to John and me. And then—”

  I didn’t look at him. I looked down at the water and traced the pattern of a wavelet with my fingers.

  “You’re full of surprises, Vicky. First, there’s that incredible rapport you have with dolphins. And added to that, you very quickly stopped being just my friend’s young sister. You’re very much Vicky. Very special Vicky. And it’s too soon.”

  “Too soon for what?” It simply was, and sooner or later didn’t have anything to do with it.

  Adam, too, dabbled his fingers in the water. “Added to which, you’ve gone far beyond my wildest dreams in my project …”

  “Is that bad?”

  Now he sprang to his feet. “It’s so good I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

  “Why not do as Confucius advises?”

  “Relax and enjoy it?”

  “Right.”

  “Yah, I should be able to. But I’m confused.”

  “So join the club,” I said bitterly. “Zachary tells me he’s confused. Leo tells me he’s confused. Now you tell me you’re confused. So what’s new? I’m confused, too. Life is confusing.”

  “Is John confused?” he asked me.

  “He hasn’t told me he is, but John’s human, so he’s confused. Anyhow, he’s old-
fashioned.”

  “You mean conservative?”

  “I think John thinks of it more as being radical.”

  “John and I feel the same way about a lot of things; that’s why we became good friends so quickly. Okay if I invite myself to dinner tonight?”

  “Sure, that’ll be fine.”

  “Listen, will you do something for me?”

  “What kind of something?”

  “Will you go home and write about you and Basil, and you and Norberta and Njord?”

  “Write how?”

  “I’ve been keeping very detailed notes, but it’s all from my point of view. So what I want is to have you write it all out from your own point of view, how you feel about them; how they feel about you. How Basil answered your questions. How he tells you things. I realize I’m asking a lot of you, but would you try, please? It could be invaluable.”

  “If you don’t want anything formal, I’ve already written a lot about them. Since I can’t talk to anybody except you about them, and I go home bursting with wanting to talk, I write it all out in my journal. I could copy some of that for you.”

  “That would be great! And it is okay if I show your sonnet to Jeb?”

  “Why not?” Suddenly I wasn’t afraid of having Jeb see my work.

  “See you tonight, then,” Adam said.

  As soon as I got home I went in to Grandfather. His eyes were glittery, as though he had fever.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “Should I get Daddy?”

  “I just have a small cold. Don’t bother your father. Are we going to read?”

  “That’s what I’m here for.” And I opened the book we’d just started, The Limitations of Science. I was deep in it, and so I was startled when Grandfather burst out: “Why all of this, my Lord and my God? Either bring the world to an end or remedy these evils! No heart can support this any longer. I beseech Thee, O Eternal Father, do not permit any more of this—”

  I dropped the book. “Grandfather!”

  “Teresa of Avila said that, in the sixteenth century. It should comfort me that there have always been outrages to the Divine Majesty. But it doesn’t.”