The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  I think of the frequent entertaining Hugh and I do, both here at Crosswicks and in New York, where I am hostess and cook—he, host and butler; of the casualness of it, the laughter and warmth and good conversation, and I would not change it—even all those dishes to wash later. But, just as I would have liked a glimpse of that golden spoon, so too would I have liked to sit in on one of those court dinners.

  The change in ways of living has come slowly, and has increased with each of the wars. One night last winter I came home from a full day’s work and started to get ready for a dinner party. Much of the cooking I had done the night before, but there’s always a lot to do on the day itself, and I remarked to Hugh, who was helping me, “When Mother gave a dinner party she lay down all the afternoon before, and someone extra was brought in to help so the cook and maid wouldn’t get too tired.”

  Mado herself was aware that the world was not all feasting and fun; as my parents anticipated change and difficulty, so did Mado; one day she and Eugénie and Eugénie’s brothers were talking about the necessity for physical courage and endurance, and to prove their own stamina, each took a knife and plunged it into the flesh of the forearm.

  I try to visualize these fairy-tale balls, these essays in bravery on the part of the young grandees and Mado. Mother said that her grandmother had a beautiful singing voice and played the guitar, and “charmed the Spanish grandees with her voice,” and with her open, childlike friendliness, warmth of manner, and quick pleasure in all beauty.

  And I remember,

  Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,

  Nor the furious winter’s rages;

  Thou thy worldly task hast done,

  Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;

  Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

  It was a long time before Mado herself came to dust, for she lived to be a very old lady; but the fairy-tale days of court ended when she returned to the American South. When I look at her pictures, and the only ones I have are of her as an old woman, I am humbled by the serenity and joy in her face, there is never a trace of bitterness or resentment, and she had much cause for both. I see also quiet strength, silent endurance; she had need of the courage for which she and Eugénie and the young grandees tested themselves.

  She married a young army surgeon, William Johnson L’Engle, whose family was from Charleston, but who was living in North Florida. I have a picture of him which always gives me a poignant stab; it was taken shortly before his untimely death, and this strong, slightly arrogant young man looks so much like Bion that his school friends have remarked, “Hey, Bion, that’s a great picture. When did you have it taken?” And yet Bion looks like Hugh, and I find this genetic paradox delightful.

  When William L’Engle was commissioned, he wrote that his successful examination has “relieved my mind of a load of anxiety … and I have the certainty of a comfortable income as long as I live. I will write you again when I reach Charleston and let you know when to expect me.…”

  The army commission made William free to marry Mado, and it was a new freedom for him, because his parents were living as pioneer a life in Florida as Amma and Ampa in Kansas. When William was eleven he wrote to his Aunt Leonis L’Engle Johnson, in Charleston, “Father has failed entirely this year; he has made no corn and the caterpillars have made a clear sweep of all his cotton, and everybody else shares the same fate.” I am awed at the education which these unschooled children received at home. In the same letter eleven-year-old William writes of his brothers and sisters, “Edward is nine. He will soon be able to write you. Mary is almost six, and is improving fast. She reads well, and sews well; she has just commenced writing and little Johnnie, too, begins to spell. He has just recovered from a fit of ague. My health is feeble, but no fever.… Remember me to all my Charleston friends.…” Another time, not long after, he wrote, “Father is engaged near Hibernia, cutting timber. As usual, it is a hard life and not a very profitable one.”

  The cousin to whom William wrote most often was Miller Hallowes, whose plantation was called Bolingbroke—what lovely, otherworldly names the family houses had: Bolingbroke, Palermo, Hibernia, the names of the Old World translated to the new. Miller Hallowes (who was almost a father to William) had, when he was nineteen years old, left his native England and gone to South America to offer his services to Bolivar. Young Hallowes and Bolivar became close friends, and the Englishman “fought in the wars of Independence for eleven years continuously,” and at Bolivar’s death he was given the last portrait ever painted of the great hero, as a token of friendship and esteem.

  He had gone home to England, and came to America only to see to some property his mother had inherited. He expected to stay in America for a few weeks, but he fell in love and married and stayed until his death in 1877. I would guess that the flora and fauna of the Southern territory reminded him of Venezuela, and that he had become accustomed to a warmer climate than England’s.

  He was a good friend to William, and later to Mado, and Bolingbroke was always open to them.

  William, graduating from medical school before he was twenty-one, was ambitious, probably because of the hard conditions of his childhood, but his ambition was more for his family than for himself and he must have had the gift of healing in his hands and heart, for the medical methods of the day, as he describes them in his letters, make one wonder how anyone survived the prescribed treatments.

  Mado and William were married on April 3, 1854, and there was a yellow-fever epidemic in Key West in June. William, who was considered an authority on epidemics, was sent for and left, evidently in a rush, for he forgot his glass retorts at Bolingbroke. Mado followed him as soon as she could arrange for his medical supplies and her guitar to be sent by ship from Savannah to Key West.

  In the autumn of 1856 William was sent by the U.S. Army to the Department of the Pacific. Many years later, his daughter, my Dearma, wrote, “They crossed the Isthmus of Darien, now the Panama Canal. My father wanted to give my mother some pear-shaped pearls, but my mother declined the gift on account of the expense of the journey—their baggage alone cost fifty dollars to transport over the railroad. He bought her instead a little china basket of fruit, which she treasured always. It was saved from the great fire in 1901.” This was the appalling fire which burned the entire city of Jacksonville, and I shall get to it in its proper chronology.

  It was while they were stationed out West that their first child, a son, was born. Mado, with the joie de vivre which I have come to think of as her dominant trait, was not held down by motherhood. She went with the other officers’ wives from post to post, in rough wooden wagons, to dances. The baby was rolled in a shawl and put on a bed among all the wraps, and she would go in and nurse him whenever he was hungry, and then go on dancing till sunrise. She was adaptable, my great-grandmother. These dances at rough army posts must have been very different from the balls at the Spanish court, or the St. Cecilia Ball in Charleston, and yet I doubt very much if she made comparisons. She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present. My mother’s adaptability came to her both by blood and by example.

  Mado’s second child was born while she was on a vacation with her parents, and the third, my grandmother, Dearma, in an adobe hut in Camp Mason, Texas.

  When it became apparent that a war between the states was inevitable, William resigned his commission in the United States Army and applied for one in the Confederate Army. As far as I can gather, both William and Mado felt that the cause of the South was a just one, and that the real issues had little to do with slavery. It is impossible to understand their feelings from hindsight; we know too much; and we see things from a perspective impossible to them. But Mado never lost her joy, despite all the tragedy which was to come to her, and this may be what makes me know that she and William were never dishonorable or dishonest in their thinking or in their behavior.


  3

  At the beginning of the war William was called to the house of Senator Mallory in Lake City, Florida, why, I do not know, because the senator and his wife were not at home. William was having a bout of the malaria which almost everybody endured in chronic form, and sent to the pharmacy for quinine, which, in those days, was put up as a powder. A mistake was made—on purpose? by accident? no one ever knew—and he was sent morphine instead of quinine, and took a large dose. He realized quickly what had happened, and called the servants and told them to walk him up and down, make him drink hot coffee, and under no conditions to let him go to sleep. All the time that they were walking him, giving him coffee, the servants said that he kept groaning, “My God, my wife and children! My God, my wife and children!”

  By morning the servants were exhausted, and he thought that the danger was over and told them to go to bed and get some rest. And then he died.

  Remember William, dying alone,

  Buried under an alien stone.

  The flesche is brukle, the Fiend is sle;

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  The confusion of war swept over his death; it was not until his sons were grown that they were able to find out where he was buried.

  Mado was left penniless at the beginning of the war, with three small children, and everything else taken away from her. For a while she was matron of a military hospital at Lake City, Florida, and, typically, nursed Northern and Southern soldiers with equal tenderness, for in her heart there was no North nor South. “Many Northern boys died in her arms,” Mother told me. “One mother and father of a Yankee soldier were so grateful for her care of their son that they sent her a ring with a beautiful black pearl. It burned up in the great fire with so many other of our treasures.”

  Illness and death were daily companions in her life. She never ceased to grieve for her husband, but it was a quiet, personal grief; what she offered others was loving care and laughter. She wore only black and white for the rest of her life, though she did not carry an aura of mourning with her, but one of complete zest for life. She could have married many times over, but William the golden lad was the love of her life, and when she lay dying at the age of eighty-seven, she kept calling his name. She also asked for a dish of ice cream, which she ate with great appreciation and pleasure, and died shortly thereafter. Living or dying, I don’t think Mado feared the heat of the sun.

  Just after William’s death, Mado wrote a long letter to her cousin Caro Hallowes at Bolingbroke, offering her services in nursing eighteen-year-old Katie Hallowes, who was desperately ill. Despite her own grief, she was able to feel intense compassion for Caro’s young daughter. And she added, “How often I have wished since Katie’s illness that my precious husband could have been spared, if only for a little while longer, to be with you in this trial. He stood so high as a physician and was such a good, patient nurse.”

  Letters were long in those days, partly because there was no such thing as instant communication. Mado says, “I did not write to you last week as I was anxiously expecting a letter from you to tell us of Katie’s welfare. You know how deeply I sympathize with you, dear Cousin, in your distress and anxiety, and I long for tomorrow’s mail hoping that it may bring me a letter to say that Katie is better. We cannot get any letters which may come by the St. Johns [river] until Sunday afternoon, and as the steamer for Savannah returns early Monday morning and Father does not often send to town, we have no means of answering our letters by return mail.”

  She ends this particular letter, written from Palermo on July 6, 1861: “My paper and time are limited. I would not under any other circumstances ask you, dear Cousin, but do you remember the conversation I had with you in regard to the likeness of William which you have? that it was taken by William for me, and in case of anything happening to him was to belong to me. You will not blame me, I am sure, for claiming it now. I want you please to send it to me here, and I will have a copy of it taken for you, which I will send to you.”

  I’m grateful that Mother has given me copies of some of Mado’s letters which have survived, for they show me glimpses of her ability to accept change, and surely her world changed even more radically than our own. Her friendships were forever; she had continued her friendship with Eugénie when the princess became Empress of France. They wrote long letters, which perished in the great fire. She seems to have been surrounded constantly by children, her own, and various nephews, nieces, and cousins. Only once is there a deep figurative sigh as she remarks on the bliss of a day alone.

  During the difficult years between 1861 and 1865 Mado remained in Florida. It was so hot in summer that it was difficult to sleep; one of the little boys remarked, “Oh, Mama, my head is as wet as a bowl of water.” It was cold in winter, but they were able to keep tolerably warm because of plentiful fat pine wood.

  She wrote another cousin and friend: “This farm is like most farms, surrounded outside the yard by cultivated lands with the usual feature in Southern landscapes, dry girdled pines, and would look dreary if there were not a fringe of date palm trees. Near here, about a quarter of a mile or more, but the path leading to it passing the cultivated fields, there is a beautiful little lake surrounded by high banks densely covered with tall magnolia, cypress, hickory, and live oak trees.

  “It is too hot a journey to undertake very often as we must return right in the heat of the day, if we stay. Yesterday we took our work and a very pleasant book, In and Around Stamboul, by Mrs. Hornby, and Henry read aloud to us, whilst we sat on the bank under the shade of a large magnolia, and sewed, and watched a dozen wild ducks in pairs, chattering and diving for fish in the lake, and every now and then skimming over the surface. Occasionally a large, white crane goes sailing by, much to Lena’s [Dearma’s] delight, who with the other children are gathered around Minerva at a short distance, watching her string the red berries of a species of running box, which I think quite pretty.

  “It is so dark I cannot see the letters I form. I have written this last page in darkness, but now have lit my candle to continue. We do not use many candles here as tallow is scarce and one dollar or more a pound, but instead have brilliant fires of the fattest kind of lightwood. I do not hesitate to read by it as it really gives such a bright light, though I would never attempt to sew. I generally knit or read after tea for an hour or so. A candle is lit during supper and afterwards blown out.”

  It would be difficult to guess from her letters how near actual starvation the family often came; how much energy was expended on nursing the ill; and how equal love and energy had at all times to be available for Dearma and her brothers; how many hours were spent in transforming old brocade curtains or silk bedspreads into clothes for the children. Some of Dearma’s dresses and the boys’ suits were made of the beautiful velvets and satins of Mado’s gowns from the Spanish court, completely inappropriate for their Spartan way of life, and an ironic comment.

  If she cried alone at night she does not say. What she shared was love and laughter, and I am grateful for her.

  4

  At the close of the War between the States, Mado managed to get back to her parents, who were then living in Raleigh, North Carolina, “where they were quietly starving to death,” Mother wrote me once, “because they had lost everything during the war.”

  And here is a perfect example of the extraordinary interdependence of all things. Years before, while William and Mado were out in Washington Territory with the United States Army, they became close friends of General Custer, through whom they acquired an Irish cook, the wife of one of his soldiers. During the war this soldier became an officer, “and by one of those strange streaks of fortune, became Captain of the Garrison in Raleigh, N.C.” One day a United States commissary wagon drove up, and on the seat beside the driver was the captain’s lady, Mado’s ex-cook. The two women embraced; the cook took one horrified look at Mado and her family, and brought them desperately needed food. Mother added, “When finally some of the ladies of the town brought the
mselves to call on the Captain’s wife, she put on an apron and, answering the doorbell herself, said the lady was not at home.”

  It makes me wonder what harvest my own most casual actions may reap; surely Mado never thought that her instinctive loving courtesy to all people would one day be a matter of life and death. Her little daughter, my grandmother, might well have died without the food the captain’s lady brought, and I would not be here to write about any of this today.

  Mado died a year before I was born, and yet I feel that I have always known her, the stories about her are so vivid. I have never heard her name mentioned by anybody in our enormous Southern clan without its evoking a smile. There have been several Montague-Capulet schisms in my mother’s family, but I have never heard an unloving word about Mado.

  In a day when grandchildren were supposed to revere and be formal with their grandparents, her many grandchildren adored her, and no one remembers being scolded by her. One of my favorite cousins reports that the closest her grandmother ever came to reproving her was once when Tracy referred to President Theodore Roosevelt as “Teddy.” Mado said, “My child, I wish to hear you call him Mr. Roosevelt. He may be a Republican, but, after all, he is the President of the United States.”

  Another time while Tracy was a student at Wellesley and was home for vacation, her grandmother slipped into French, as naturally as though she were speaking English, and Tracy could not understand, and stopped her. She said that Mado “only smiled gently, and with a little twinkle in her eye replied, ‘I beg your pardon, since you are going to college I thought you were being educated.’”