The Moment of Tenderness

by Madeleine L'engle

  The Brechsteins, of course, were atheists, but the little boys wanted to go to Sunday school with their friends, so the Brechsteins, after too many too public conversations on the subject, decided it wouldn’t contaminate them, and let them go. The next thing we knew the Brechsteins were single-handedly going from door to door trying to raise money for a fire escape.

  Now, we’d all been working in our own quiet ways on that fire escape for some time; it bothered all of us that the inadequate Sunday school facilities, particularly the kindergarten and primary rooms that were upstairs, were fire-traps, and we’d been working very hard trying to do something about it. Most New Englanders, my husband included, will not do today what can be done tomorrow, but we were beginning to make progress. It was going to be brought up again at the annual church meeting in January, and we all felt that the money for the fire escape would be appropriated and that perhaps we might even get somewhere on building a parish house with proper Sunday school facilities. When Mr. Brechstein came to our house, full of zeal and enthusiasm and talk about the safety of the kiddies’ bodies as well as their souls, I wanted to tell him, Listen, Mr. B., you’ve just killed all our chances of a fire escape and parish house. Don’t you, with all your pretensions to intellect and psychology, know that if you want to get something like this done in New England you have to sell it to a couple of open-minded old residents here and let them do the canvassing? But he was somehow so pathetically eager and he looked, with his balding head with the curly dark hair over the ears, so like a spaniel that I dug down and produced ten dollars instead.

  “Fire is something you can’t be too careful about,” Mr. Brechstein said. “Next week we’re having our whole house rewired as a precaution.”

  So most people forgot the fire escape and remembered Mr. Brechstein.

  “I won’t have that damned communist telling me what to do.”

  “They ought to be driven out of town.”

  “They better watch out.”

  Of course Wilburforce Smith and his gang were behind most of the talk, or at least the gentle push that was all that was needed to get it going, and if anybody had asked me whom I liked least, Mr. Brechstein or Wilburforce Smith, I’d have been hard put to it to decide.

  It was pretty gruesome, and it also got very tiresome, having everybody talk about nothing but the Brechsteins. Sooner or later someone else would do something or something would happen to deflect people’s tongues, but the Brechsteins were the current scapegoats.

  One afternoon, Mrs. Brechstein dropped into the store for a loaf of bread and nobody else happened to be there.

  “Why,” she demanded, looking me straight in the eye, “doesn’t anybody like us?”

  I was too embarrassed to say anything.

  “No, please tell me,” she said. “We both know it’s true. I didn’t expect to find any intimate friends in a place like this, of course, but—”

  “Well, maybe it’s because you didn’t expect to find friends,” I said tentatively.

  “But it’s more than that,” she said. “I can do without friends, with my independent mind, but I don’t understand the feeling of dislike we get everywhere we go.”

  “Well,” I said, “you know you’ve talked a good deal about how you bring your children up, about how you never tell them what to do, but try to unobtrusively guide their minds to the right decisions? It might be better if you treated everybody else that way, too.”

  “What do you mean?” she demanded.

  “People around here don’t like being told what to do. It isn’t just the new parish house and the fire escape. It’s everything else. You tell us all how we should run our lives, what we should read and what we should think of what we read, and what kind of wallpaper we should use and what colors we should wear, and even who we should go to bed with.”

  “What do you mean by that last remark?” she snapped. And then to my horror a great tear slipped out of one eye and trickled down her cheek. “Of course I know what you mean,” she said. “I’d had too much to drink and I was scared out of my wits by all of you people who knew each other so well. And I did expect to make friends, but I didn’t know how. So I said it just to bolster my self-confidence. Of course I don’t go around having affairs. I just thought it would make you—make you—” and she rushed out of the store and got in her car and drove off.

  I was appalled. And ashamed. Surely we should have realized. All that brashness. All that arrogance. Just a front, and one that we should have been able to see through.

  Hugh and I talked it over that evening. Mr. Brechstein had come to him, too, with complaints about the unfriendliness of New Englanders, their lack of hospitality, their suspicious natures.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever really like them,” I said, “but I do feel terribly sorry for them now. They’ve managed to hit me so often on my vulnerable spots that I never stopped to look at it from their point of view. Pretty Brechsteiny of me, wasn’t it?”

  Just after we had first fallen into sleep, that deep, heavy sleep out of which it is almost impossible to rouse, the fire siren started. The wild screech going up and down the scale, up and down, over and over, shattering the peace of the night, pierced insistently through my subconscious, until at last I was aware that I was listening to something. Unwilling to be roused, I pushed down under the covers and turned my face into the pillows. But the wailing of the alarm kept on and on until at last I wakened enough to realize what it was. I lay there and started to shiver as I always do when I hear the siren. Up and down, on and on, over and over, the high, penetrating scream probing through sleep. I raised up on one elbow and looked over at Hugh, and he was still sound asleep. He’s so tired, I thought, he’s been working so hard lately, I can’t wake him. I turned over on my side. Still the siren screamed. Suppose it was our house, I thought, and somebody else’s wife said to herself, Oh, my husband’s so tired, I don’t want to get him up to go out in the cold. No, I can’t do it, I thought, I’ll have to wake him. Even if it’s only a chimney fire, which it probably is on a cold, windy night like this.

  I took Hugh’s shoulder and shook it gently. Against the windows the wind beat and the sound of the siren rose and fell.

  “Hugh. Hugh. It’s the fire siren.” He groaned and rolled over.

  “It’s the fire siren,” I said again.

  Suddenly and all at once he was awake, swinging his legs out of bed, going to the south windows, then the east windows, standing with his bare feet on the ice-cold floor.

  “It’s in the center of town and it’s a big fire,” he said suddenly, and started to dress.

  “Please dress warmly,” I begged. “I know you’re rushing but please don’t forget your boots. You won’t be any help to anybody if you freeze.” Do all men, if their wives don’t plead with them, tend to dash out of the house in midwinter as though it were July?

  I got out of bed and went to the window, and the eastern sky was lit with a great glow. I thought of all the houses in the center but the glow was so general that it was impossible to tell where the fire actually was. “It looks as though it might be the church,” I said.

  “If it is, thank God it’s at a time when there’s nobody in it.” Hugh pulled a ski sweater over his head.

  “And Mr. Brechstein will be right, as usual,” I said, trying to make myself smile. Hugh went downstairs for his overclothes, and I said, “Please be careful,” and then he’d gone out into the dark and I could hear the cold engine of the car cough as he started it. Before he was out of the garage there was the sound of another car hurrying down the road, and then another, and then Hugh was following them.

  I knew that I couldn’t go to bed till he got home, so I went upstairs and pulled on my bathrobe and stood again at the east window looking at the horrible red glare. It was so violent and brilliant that I could see bursts of flames thrusting up into the night. The phone rang and I ran to answer it. It couldn’t be that something had happened to Hugh; he’d scarcely had time to get
to the center.

  It was my neighbor up the road. “Madeleine, do you know where the fire is?”

  “No. It’s in the center. It looks as though it might be the church. Has Howard gone?”

  “Yes. Listen, if you hear where it is, call me, will you?”

  “Yes, I will, and same to you, please.”

  All over Mt. George women would be awake and wondering where the fire was, and there was no longer the comforting thought that on a night like this it was probably a chimney fire; that ghastly red glare was visible for miles.

  I was too nervous to sit down, too nervous to do anything. I went down to the kitchen and put on a kettle for tea, and then I went back up and checked the children, tucked them in, walked our littlest boy to the bathroom, tidied up some clothes that had fallen on the closet floor, picked up Raggedy Ann and tucked her back in beside my small sleeping girl, went back down, and drank a cup of tea.

  The phone rang again. Someone else wanting to know if I knew where the fire was. Three more calls. We all knew it was in the center, and we all thought it might be the church. I looked in the refrigerator to see what I could make into a sandwich for Hugh when he got home. The phone again. My neighbor. “Madeleine, it’s not the church, it’s down the hill to the Brechsteins’.”

  “I wouldn’t raise a finger,” Wilburforce Smith had said, “if his house burned down.” There had even been some wild talk about burning those communists out.

  The phone again. It would waken the children. “It’s the Brechsteins,” I was able to say this time.

  It takes more than a phone call to rouse the children. Were those little beasts the Brechstein boys all right? Little beasts or not, the thought of a child in a burning house is an unbearable one. I rushed upstairs to stand looking at our own children, lying safe and sweet in their beds. Naughty and noisy as they might be by day, at night they looked like cherubs; all children do, and I was sure the Brechstein boys were no exception.

  The phone rang again. “It’s the wing of the house, Paul says. Not a chance of saving it, but they might be able to save the main house.”

  The wing. The wing was where the boys’ bedroom was.

  If it weren’t for our sleeping children, how many of the Mt. George women would have followed their men over to the fire! We were thinking of the Brechstein boys, we were thinking of our men recklessly trying to fight the flames; none of us, native or newcomer, could stop our nervous pacing, and the phone was our only relief from tension.

  “Those boys sleep in the wing.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Do you suppose they’re all right?”

  “My Johnny gave Peter Brechstein a bloody nose in school today. The kid asked for it, too, but now—”

  “They’ve called the Clovenford fire department, too.”

  “Yes, and Litchfield.”

  I drank another cup of tea. I checked on the children another time. I stood at the window and the glare had died down. There was no longer the bright bursting of flames, and the sky looked murky and sick, and at last I realized that part of the light was coming from dawn.

  A car came up the road, and then another, and then the kitchen door opened and I ran to meet Hugh. His face was black with soot and he looked exhausted. While I fixed him something to eat and drink he began to tell me about it.

  “It was the wing of the Brechsteins’ house. Burned clear down. But they saved the main house. Couldn’t possibly have done it if everybody hadn’t got there quickly.”

  “But the boys, what about the boys?” I asked.

  “Wilburforce Smith went in after them,” Hugh told me. “Burned his hands badly, too, but the boys weren’t touched.”

  Relief surged through me. “No one was really hurt?”

  “No. Everybody’s okay, Mr. Brechstein worked like a madman. Everybody did.”

  “You included,” I said.

  “A lot of them are still there. Don’t dare leave while it’s still smoldering.”

  “How did the fire start?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows for sure. They think faulty wiring.” He stretched and yawned.

  “Try to get a nap,” I begged, “before time to get up.”

  A nap, of course, was all it was, and then there was the usual rush getting the children ready for school, and Hugh off for the store, and then the phone started ringing, and we were all off in a mad whirl of baking pies and cakes for the men still working on the debris of what had been the long white wing of the house, and collecting clothes for the Brechsteins, and cleaning up the main house for the Brechsteins so that there was no sign of smoke or water or broken windows. For a few brief glorious days, thousands of cups of coffee were swallowed and all the tensions were miraculously eased, and the church women held a kitchen shower for the Brechsteins because the kitchen, too, had been in the wing, and Mrs. Brechstein managed not to put her foot in her mouth, and people forgot for an evening who was old and who was new and nobody called anybody else a communist. It was at least a week before somebody else came into the store and said angrily, “Did you hear what Mrs. Brechstein did now?”

  So perhaps New Englanders are unfriendly and perhaps they are inhospitable, and perhaps I’ll never understand or like either Mr. Brechstein or Wilburforce Smith, and perhaps we’ll never feel like anything but newcomers in this tight little community. But where, after we have made the great decision to leave the security of childhood and move on into the vastness of maturity, does anybody ever feel completely at home?

  The Fact of the Matter

  Old Mrs. Campbell leaned over the counter towards me, first looking towards the back of the store to make sure we were alone, then to the door to see that no one was coming up the steps. “How she would love to be an Eskimo just for one night!” she said softly.

  “An Eskimo? Who?” I asked, stupidly, for Mrs. Campbell had been on one of her long monologues and I had only been half listening.

  “Alicia. My daughter-in-law.”

  “But why an Eskimo?” I asked.

  “Eskimos put old people like me out on an ice floe to freeze to death. Of course it wouldn’t bother me too much if she did try something like that. I have my connections and I’d get off.” But she sounded very agitated.

  Old Mrs. Campbell talked at length to me when she came into the store, and on almost any subject, but she had never before made me wonder whether her mind might be affected. I said soothingly, “Anyhow, there aren’t any ice floes around here.”

  Mrs. Campbell looked down at the little girl who was clinging to her. “You help Granny now, Sylvie,” she said. “We’ll start with the Campbell’s soup, of course. Wouldn’t do to slight a family connection, no matter how distant. Bring Granny a tomato soup like a good girl.”

  When Sylvie had gone after the soup, Mrs. Campbell leaned closer to me. “You may wonder why I’m talking like this, Mrs. Franklin, but I have my reasons. Do you know how cold it was last night?”

  It had been the coldest night of the autumn so far, that first shocking plummeting of the mercury, when the grass crunches beneath your feet and the stars seem made of ice. “Well, the thermometer on our north wall said fifteen degrees this morning,” I said.

  Mrs. Campbell nodded. “Mrs. Franklin, last night at bedtime when I was heating water for my chamomile tea, I went to let in Nyx”—she looked out the door to where her great cat brooded, waiting for her on the store porch—“and she took her good time about coming in, mincing across that frozen lawn as though it were mid-summer. And when I turned to go back into the house the door had been shut behind me. Shut and locked. And it was my daughter-in-law who did it.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Mrs. Campbell!” I exclaimed in a shocked voice.

  “Nonsense my aunt Osiris,” Mrs. Campbell retorted. “We may not have any ice floes, but if I had been left on the doorstep all night I would have died of the cold or had pneumonia at the very least.”

  “But you weren’t left on the doorstep,” I said comfortingly.

/>   “Oh, yes, I was serious, that door was shut and locked. On purpose. But I got in. So, yes, I got in. I know a few little tricks, I do. And when she saw me she looked as though I were a ghost. She didn’t expect me back in that house alive. ‘Why, Granny, I thought you’d gone up to bed,’ she said, ‘and I locked the door. How did you get in?’ Not much point in telling her, was there? I was in and that was the point. And my fool of a son sat in front of the television grinning at some program without the least idea of what was going on in his own house. Of course I’ve always told him he underestimates her.”

  “But, Mrs. Campbell,” I tried. “You can’t mean what you’re saying! Surely Alicia wouldn’t do anything like that. You said yourself she thought you were upstairs. And anyhow, you know how good she is, always thinking about other people.”

  For Alicia Campbell has the unusual reputation of being as saintly as she looks.

  Old Mrs. Campbell shook her head. “Yes, that’s what bothered me. First time I’ve ever known Alicia to do anything human.” She leaned across the counter. “Mrs. Franklin, you believe me, don’t you?”

  “No, of course I don’t,” I said.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” she whispered. “You don’t like Alicia, do you?”

  This is not the kind of conversation the wife of the owner of a general store ought to get involved in. Fortunately, just at that moment the bells over the door jangled. Old Mrs. Campbell cackled and whispered to me, “Speak of the devil,” and cackled again, and Alicia came in. “And I don’t intend to ask her where she’s been,” she said, sotto voce, “because she’s probably been doing her marketing at the A&P. As for me, I would never darken the doors of a concern that changed such a beautiful and melodious name as the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company to anything as plebian and unpoetic as the A&P.”

  “Oh, there you are, Mother C.,” Alicia said in her crisp, no-nonsense voice. “You and Sylvie can ride home with me. It’s really much too cold for you to walk.”