The Moment of Tenderness

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Ak ak ak,” went the redhead like a machine gun, first at Walter, then at Julio. “Now they’re both dead so nobody has to go home.”

  “Julio.” Rebecca reached down and took his hand to pull him up. “Come and see Dr. Lindstrom. He wants to talk to you about your poetry. Don’t pay any attention to Walter, the big oaf. He doesn’t mean a word of it.”

  “But I do,” Walter said. “I’m deeply serious. It is of the greatest interest to me to talk to these mistaken idealists.”

  “Come along, amigo,” Rebecca insisted, tugging at Julio’s hand.

  He rose and followed her. As he reached Dr. Lindstrom he said, trying to be calm, to choose his English slowly and carefully, “This is the first time this has happened to me. This man is my enemy. In Spain I would shoot him if he did not shoot me first. But because I have come to America, because I am a guest here tonight in your house, I have to sit and talk to him.”

  “I’m sorry, Julio”—Rebecca kissed the top of his dark head, her curls mingling briefly with his—“but I shot him for you so it’s all right.”

  “But why is someone like him here!” Julio exclaimed. “I know you do not feel the way he does. So how can you have him in your home?”

  Rebecca kept her voice light. “Oh, he’s always been sweet to me. He paid my rent when I was broke. Before I knew Johnny. He’s such a nice guy. You can’t help liking Walter, you know you can’t.”

  “Even before you knew John you knew what that man was like. You must have known. And you let someone like that touch you?”

  “Julio,” Rebecca said warningly.

  Julio bowed his head. “I am sorry. But I do not like to see those I have loved behaving like—like—”

  Rebecca cut him short. “Walter was in the army, too. He was a second lieutenant.”

  “Where did he fight?”

  “He was in Washington. Please, Julio darling, please don’t take it so seriously. He’s just drunk. He really doesn’t mean it.”

  “He is no more drunk than I am,” Julio said. “He has been drinking nothing but ginger ale. And it is not possible to take such people too seriously.”

  “Rebecca!” someone called from across the room. “I’ve burned a hole in your carpet with my cigarette. I’m overcome with shame. And the fire in your potbelly’s almost out.” And then, as everybody shrieked, “I mean your stove. Oh, for heaven’s sakes!”

  “Take care of Julio,” Rebecca told Dr. Lindstrom, and went to investigate the damage done to the rug and to put some more coal on the fire. Johnny’s student, Horrors, found her, gave her her drink, and fixed the stove for her. She saw, with annoyance, Walter cross to Julio, then heard John calling, “Hi, Julio, come in the bathroom and help me make sandwiches.”

  “Oh, let me come, too,” the redhead said, deserting Walter’s lap. “I’ve never known such a divine kitchen. Or did you say bathroom?”

  Bless Johnny for trying to help Julio, Rebecca thought as she pushed her way towards Walter, determined to get rid of him because now the girl from the French department was arguing with him.

  “I’m hurt,” Walter said to Rebecca in a low voice.

  “Why?”

  “Johnny’s far more jealous of your crazy poet than he ever was of me. You’re a cagey one, Becky. You never once mentioned him.”

  “I told you all about him when I asked you to the party.” She did not lower her voice to meet his. “Walter, you reactionary scum, I thought I killed you dead, bang bang. Go home. Once you start arguing you can’t stop. You’ve stayed long enough. You were practically the first to arrive. Now git.”

  He looked at her with a wounded expression. “All right. If I must, I must. I have to wait till Leda stops singing, though.”

  “Leave Leda alone for once. Scram. Vamoose.”

  He stood up and took her chin in his hand, giving her a quick, gentle kiss, giving her that look that made her afraid. “All right, little earnest one. I’ll help you protect your poet.”

  She turned her mouth away. “Don’t talk like that about poets. Johnny’s a poet.”

  “But he doesn’t write about politics.”

  “Now, I’m not going to make you happy by arguing with you the way everyone else does.” She pushed him towards the door, and then leaned against the piano to listen to Leda sing the “Queen of the Night.” Walter would go now while Julio was making sandwiches and everything would be all right. She was suddenly very tired, and she stood leaning there, letting Leda’s singing pour over her as cool and refreshing as a shower in summer. There was the singing and the laughter and the tropical fish in the aquarium would be drunk and Johnny said they wouldn’t die but they’ll have an awful hangover…

  Then the laughter stopped, and she heard Walter’s voice, and Julio’s voice. Walter was standing by the door. Julio, brandishing the carving knife, smeared with peanut butter and apricot jam, was talking in a high, unnatural voice.

  John caught him by the sleeve. “Come back in the kitchen and let Walter go home.”

  It was Johnny’s restraining arm that released Julio’s fury. He flung it off and the knife swooped through the smoky air and into Walter’s stomach. In the crowd around him, Walter could not fall, but without a sound he slumped to the floor, lying huddled on Julio’s feet. The sound of the piano stopped and Leda broke off in the middle of a note.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear. Did something happen?” She could not see through the crowd around Walter. “Some of the fish are floating on top of the water,” she said as she pushed her way through the people towards the kitchen. “Is something the matter?”

  The Foreign Agent

  Well, in the first place he didn’t ask me the same silly questions everybody else does. “How do you like living in the city?” “Don’t you miss the country just terribly?” “Do the subways frighten you?” Stuff like that. And anyhow, the others aren’t really interested the way he was. They don’t listen to my answers on the rare occasions that I get a chance to give them.

  But the truth is, as I told him, that I love the city. For instance, in the country I couldn’t escape to walk the dog. I mean, there was absolutely no reason for me to walk the dog. We just opened the door and he ran out across the fields and then into the woods. I know that in the country people are supposed to go for long tramps with the dog, but this is when they don’t really live in the country. People who go for long tramps with the dog are people who either live in or really have their roots in the city.

  You’ve no idea what it’s like to escape from the country at last! Now I can say, “I’d better take the dog for a walk,” and I can get his leash and off we go. If my mother knew the places we walk! Actually I’m even beginning to pick up Spanish. I mean, I walk across the park to the West Side and I walk up and down the streets there where the people are all assorted and different, black, white, yellow, and the shops are all small and cluttered and fascinating, and you hear more Spanish than English. My mother doesn’t like this, but I enjoy it. It makes me feel that maybe I’m in a European city. I mean New York is really a foreign city as far as I’m concerned. When you’ve never been out of a small village in Vermont in your whole life, New York is really travel. Well, I have been to Brattleboro, but you can’t really count that.

  Anyhow, back to the way he didn’t ask me stupid questions like the others.

  He’s my mother’s literary agent.

  My mother writes cookbooks with comments. Regional stuff. If anyone looks unlike a native Vermonter it’s my mother, though actually she is a native Vermonter, so if she wants to write folksy things with her recipes I guess she has a right to. But she isn’t big and comfortable in an old housedress and clean white apron the way her cookbooks want you to think she is. She’s tiny and has black, black hair, and wears peasant blouses and long dangle earrings and writes poetry. Her poetry doesn’t sell but her cookbooks do. She went back to live in Vermont when my father died a few months before I was born. They lived in Greenwich Village (this is the par
t of New York where artists and other peculiar people live and that’s where she got the idea for the peasant blouses and gypsy earrings).

  Why are we in the city now? Well, because I graduated from high school this spring, and in the autumn I’m going to Barnard. I would have liked to live in the dormitories like everybody else, but my mother says I’m so naive that the sophisticated life of a college freshman would destroy me utterly if she weren’t around to help me get adjusted.

  Frankly, since I got adjusted to the island of Manhattan so easily, I don’t see why I couldn’t get adjusted to dormitory life. What I would like more than anything would be to be allowed to do things on my own.

  Well, even being in Manhattan is a step. I mean, it gives me hope that someday somebody (like my mother’s agent, maybe) is going to think of me as a grown-up. It’s not that I want to go in for smoking cigarettes in long holders, or literary cocktail parties; I’d just like my mother to take it for granted that I’m old enough to ride the subway by myself.

  I suppose the reason she still thinks of me as a baby in diapers, practically, is that we’ve lived such an isolated life. I don’t want to give the wrong impression about her.

  She’s really wonderful. I mean, all those cookbooks! She’s supported us with them. But since I’m all she has, I think she puts too much of her energies into creating me. And I want to create myself. Maybe if she sold more of her poetry instead of just the cookbooks she’d be happier.

  Back to my mother’s agent. He came up one afternoon to talk about the new cookbook. He wanted fewer recipes and more folksy talk. That way they could get two books instead of one.

  But what a surprise he was! I’d heard Angel talk about him, and sometimes she used to go down for a week in New York, leaving me with the Gadsens on the neighboring farm, but I’d never seen him. (I’d better explain about calling my mother Angel. In one of her cookbooks she had four children, all of whom called her Angel, and after that she got fearfully annoyed with me if I called her anything else. With a little effort you can get in the habit of calling people almost anything, but I’ve never pictured angels with black bangs and mascara.) Mother’s agent didn’t call her Angel, however; it was always, very respectfully, Mrs. Folger.

  His name was Roscoe Whitelaw, and he was new. I mean, the man at the agency who used to deal with Angel—is that what an agent does? Deal with his clients? It doesn’t sound quite right, but I think it’s probably accurate as far as Angel’s concerned. Anyhow, this man retired and she was assigned to Roscoe Whitelaw or he was assigned to her or something, and she was always complaining about him. He didn’t treat her with enough respect; after all, she made a good deal of money for the agency, and so forth and so on, and he was just a new young squirt, et cetera.

  Roscoe Whitelaw seems to me quite a good name for an agent and I had a very clear picture in my mind as to what he would be like. Or rather, an alternating picture. One was a man with black brilliantine hair and a striped shirt with a Yale tie with a flash stick pin and a checked sports jacket. And the other was really the same kind of man, only this time he was playing conservative and bought gray flannel suits at Brooks Brothers, and he didn’t use nearly as much brilliantine and had a touch of gray at the temples.

  So when the doorbell rang and I went to it, I thought it was a young man on some kind of survey. We’ve had quite a few of those. Do you know Linus in Peanuts? He looked sort of like a grown-up version of Linus. I’m sure when he was a little boy he had a blanket he loved and carried it around everywhere with him, and I’ll bet you anything he was still sucking his thumb and rubbing a blanket against his cheek when he was using five-syllable words. I mean, he seemed so vulnerable, and agents oughtn’t to be vulnerable. At least not agents who deal with my mother. He was quite tall, and had lots of straw-colored hair, no brilliantine. No mustache. Nice blue eyes. He looked as though he came from a neighboring farm in Vermont, but I believe it was Utah and his father was a big muggy-mug Mormon or something of that ilk.

  So I said, what do you want, and he said he wanted to talk to my mother. Angel was working at her desk on folksy sayings for the cookbook, so I said she was busy and couldn’t be disturbed. I mean, he came to the back door; how could I know he was her agent instead of the Fuller Brush man?

  Well, then he explained to me that he had an appointment with Angel, that he was from Andrews, Parkinson, Mossberg Agency, and that he’d come to the back door because our front door had just been painted and we didn’t have our name or the number of the apartment on it yet, and the back door did have the number, so I suppose he can’t be blamed for having thought that was it. So I apologized all over myself, blushing from the roots of my hair right down to my toenails. But then he goofed, too, even goofier than I had, because he thought I was the maid. Well, I did have on an apron, because it was five o’clock and I was getting dinner. Angel hates to cook.

  So I stopped blushing and he blushed instead.

  “But you don’t look in the least like your mother,” he said.

  No, I don’t. I’m at least a head and a half taller than my mother, almost as tall as Roscoe Whitelaw, and I have red hair and gray eyes and too many freckles and I’m fearfully nearsighted and wear repulsive glasses. Angel is always getting me new, fancy frames, and telling me, “For heaven’s sake, Amy, take off your glasses.” And whenever there is a school dance she’s always quoting me the tired old couplet of Dorothy Parker’s, “Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

  But let’s be honest, Angel. It isn’t because I wear glasses that the boys at school didn’t make passes at me. I never wore glasses to school dances. Angel would take them from me and not even let me carry them in my evening bag, because she said the minute her back was turned I’d put them on again. And it isn’t Angel’s fault they never made passes at me. She was actually a great help. She made me take dancing lessons, so at least I got danced with even if I didn’t get pawed. And she helped me work out a line. We sat down and created a set of questions aimed at making the boys at the dance think I thought they were fascinating because that’s the way to make them think I’m fascinating. I memorized the questions, there wasn’t any trouble about that, and I found it was quite easy to ask them and to sound as though I really cared about the answers, and at the next dance I thought it was working just beautifully when one of my partners said, “Hey, what gives? That’s the fifth time you’ve asked me those same questions.”

  That’s what comes of not wearing glasses.

  But it’s become a conditioned reflex by now, so when I realized that this wasn’t someone from the SPCA but Roscoe Whitelaw, I grabbed off my glasses and stuck them in the pocket of my apron, so I never really knew when he stopped blushing.

  “My mother’s in her study, Mr. Whitelaw,” I said. I hate calling her Angel in front of people, though she loves it. “Just follow me,” and I led him through the kitchen and pantry and into the living room, where he stopped me just in time to keep me from walking into a chair.

  “Hold on,” he said. “Let’s not disturb her for a few minutes. Give me time to get adjusted to you.”

  “But you don’t need to get adjusted to me,” I said. “I’m not your problem. I don’t write cookbooks or poetry or anything else.”

  “I thought you were a small child,” he said. “I thought you were mother’s baby girl.”

  “I’m seventeen,” I said.

  “And your name is Amy.”

  “And I’m going to college next year. To Barnard.”

  I think he smiled at that. A smile has to be awfully big before I can see it without my glasses. “Well, what do you know,” he said. “I went to Columbia. Class of ’57.”

  Well, then he was still in his twenties. I mean just the right age for a college woman, which is what I was about to be.

  Angel came out then. “Amy, who on earth are you talking— Oh, hello, Roscoe, I didn’t hear the doorbell.”

  “I came by the back door, as a matter of fact,” Roscoe
said.

  “Amy, for heaven’s sake, put on your glasses,” Angel said, and I almost fell over backwards in amazement, because, as I said, Angel’s always telling me to take them off. I took them out of the pocket of my apron and held them in my hand. For the first time, I didn’t want to wear them. I cared.

  “Put them on,” Angel said impatiently. “You know you are blind as a bat without them. Come on in the study, Roscoe, and I’ll show you what I’ve done.”

  She sailed off in the direction of the study, and Roscoe stood aside for me. “Coming, Amy?” he asked.

  “Amy has other things to do,” Angel said grandly, so I went back to the kitchen, but I didn’t put my glasses on till Roscoe had followed Mother into the study, and then I’d managed to get fingerprints all over the lenses and I had to wash them with soap and water.

  That night I sat up in bed and wrote some poetry. In the apartment I had the maid’s room and bath, which is all the way at the other end of the apartment from Angel’s room, so I’m lots more private than I was in the country, where I was just across a narrow hall. Also Bruce, the dog, sleeps with me, and he growls the minute he hears a step, so I always know if Angel is coming.

  Do I sound as though I resent my mother? Well, I do. I do. But don’t get me wrong. I love her, too. I love her very much. She needs me to take care of her, no matter how much she thinks it’s the other way around. She needs me to call her Angel and do the cooking and to give her a feeling that she’s living in a world of people and not just recipes. But at this particular time I was resenting her more than I ever had before, because I didn’t want her to hold my hand while I went to college. I wanted to do it all by myself. Because it was really her hand I’d be holding; I’d be giving her self-confidence, not the other way around, and going to college and being with completely different people was enough of a big thing to cope with, without having Angel tied to my apron strings, too.