The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  “The train made two trips a day, going to town in the morning and back in the afternoon. The great event of the day was to meet the afternoon train. The tracks were level with the platform, and by crouching down and putting your ear on the rail, you could hear throbbing many minutes before the train came in sight. We children used to take two pins, cross them and lay them on the rails, and after the train had come by and flattened them into a cross, we would retrieve them and put them among our treasures.

  “There was a big, covered pavilion at the end of the line, right on the ocean front, with an artesian well and a sort of fountain spouting fresh sulphur water.” Anybody who hasn’t grown up on sulphur water is apt to find it distasteful; perhaps it does smell like rotten eggs, but to me it is good and healthy, redolent of sun and wind and sea.

  My childhood visits to Dearma were much like Mother’s to Mado. We got up early and bathed in the ocean. When we wanted crabs, we waded in front of the cottage with a crab net. The people who lived in the scrub brought in vegetables and eggs, and there were plenty of fish, which, with hominy and corn bread, was our main diet.

  And there was donax soup. Donax are a tiny, multicolored shellfish which, when boiled, make a broth more delicious than oyster or clam. At low tide they bubbled up out of the sand and were easy to scoop up. There were still plenty of donax when I was a little girl, but when automobiles began to drive on the beach the delicate shells were crushed, and now they are very rare.

  When Mother was a little girl, the dunes were higher than those I knew, and she wrote, “The cows made well-defined paths under the tall growth which I could follow for miles. I never remember seeing or hearing a rattlesnake, though I was constantly roaming around under the bushes barefooted. From the moment we arrived at the beach until we left, I don’t think I ever had a shoe or stocking on, and my big toes were usually tied up in a rag on account of ground itch. We always wore big palm-leaf hats tied under our chins with a string.

  “During the heat of the day we played under a wonderful natural arbor of wild grapevine which grew on top of the stunted yaupon and scrub oak trees. My mother could stand upright under this canopy of vines, and when the little sour grapes were ripe she made wonderful grape jelly from them.”

  When Mother was older and Grandfather was doing well, many weeks were spent on an old ark of a houseboat called the Daisy. My mother has never been one to exaggerate, so I believe her story that they threw the dinner dishes overboard at high tide, and picked them up, washed, at low tide.

  The young people in their strange bathing clothes—how did they manage to swim with all that heavy wet serge dragging about them?—used to dive off the deck of the Daisy and then, when they wanted to get aboard again, would call for someone to throw down the rope ladder. It was impossible to get up on deck without it. One day Mother felt the need of solitude and went for a swim alone. When she got back to the Daisy, no one was in sight, so she paddled about, waiting for someone to come who would lower the ladder for her. Suddenly she sensed a presence near her, looked, and there was a large shark, his white belly already exposed, preparing to strike.

  The next thing Mother knew, she was on the deck of the Daisy. It was impossible, but terror had given her body a surge of power which enabled her to leap from the water, climb up the side of the high houseboat, and onto the deck. There are many authenticated accounts of such incidents of supernatural power; sometimes it is physical; sometimes it may be psychic or spiritual, and usually we don’t even know that we’re using this extraordinary reserve until the emergency is over.

  My own reserves of power are barely tapped most of the time, though I’ve seen them released with a surge in an emergency, just as Mother’s must have been that time in Fort George inlet, with the house of the African princess and the coquina walls of the slave quarters showing whitely through the thick green of jungle.

  In the hours immediately after Bion was born, when the doctors could not stop me from hemorrhaging, I fought with this supranormal strength to live. I know that hate can unleash vast energies, but so can love. Sometimes when more than the usual feeble human love is called for, there comes a surge of loving power to fill the need.

  If I frequently use the analogy of the underwater area of our minds, it may be because the ocean is so strong a part of my childhood memories, and of my own personal mythology. If I am away from the ocean for long, I get a visceral longing for it. It was at the ocean that I first went outdoors at night and saw the stars. I must have been very little, but I will never forget being held in someone’s arms—Mother’s, Father’s, Dearma’s, someone I loved and trusted enough so that all I remember is being held, and seeing the glory of the night sky over the ocean.

  I remember hot summer nights when the necessary mosquito net kept out the breeze; and I remember the light of sun on water moving against ceiling and walls when I woke up in the morning.

  Illyria is gone now and, at the time of Father’s death, Mado would not have recognized the setting in which her rambling cottage stood. Not only had many of the great dunes eroded, so that the house was perched atop the last of the dune hills, but the vast, empty beach she knew was gone. The house sat in a few acres of cultivated wilderness, fenced in by a wall of lethal Spanish bayonets. Behind it was a road and small cottages and guest houses; on either side was a boardwalk. Illyria was incongruously in the middle of an amusement park, with roller coasters, ferris wheels, bathhouses, cheap hotels, barkers, bingo, honky-tonk. I accepted this without amazement because, since my twelfth year, life had been constant change. I even enjoyed walking along the boardwalk with friends, and I rode the rickety wooden ferris wheel which had been condemned for years. But, as always, the first act of the morning was to walk across the beach into the ocean, facing the sunrise. Then it was possible to forget the boardwalk and the amusement park and be alone with the water. I would check for sharks and undertow and then swim out beyond the breakers and lie on my back in the long, rhythmic swells, water below and around me, sky above—lie there and let my mind, like my body, float free.

  Illyria was Father’s last home, and I hope that the ocean helped him through those final months. During school holidays we often walked together on the beach, and it was then that I was able to share poetry with him. He was a ruthless critic, but when he was pleased he let me know that, too. He read one poem of mine slowly, several times, then nodded. “That is a poem, a real poem.”

  I told my parents of my moods by playing the piano. The piano at Illyria was an ancient upright; the action was kept workable in the damp air of the beach by means of a light bulb dangling in front of the hammers. There was one finger exercise I had learned in Switzerland called Storm, and I used to play it when I was angry, when I could not understand the tension between my parents, or my father’s own angers and depressions. I wish Mother had told me then something she told me later: once when Father was at odds with everything, she finally turned to him, “Charles, how can you be this way with me?” He looked at her in complete surprise: “If I can’t take my moods out on you, who can I take them out on?”

  There is a Schumann sonata which I do not play any more, and hate to hear when it is occasionally played on the radio, because it was such an exorciser of anguish. But there was also Bach. I came home for Christmas having learned a new prelude, and when Father heard me playing it he asked, “Are you using the pedal?” “No, Father.” He turned with his delighted smile to my mother. “She’s really learning how to play!”

  Illyria was not meant for winter use, and my parents kept it barely warm enough with constant driftwood and fat pine fires, and an inadequate kerosene heater; however, they had come to Illyria from the Alps, and they were used to being cold around the edges all during the winter months.

  Sometimes in the winter the house was enclosed in fog, like a pearl in an oyster shell. The amusement park would disappear then, and there was only the rambling old cottage floating like a ship in the vastness of ocean and sky.

  I
love the hills around Crosswicks, and the tiny, beautiful lake where we swim, but I will always miss Illyria and the beach.

  My Oklahoman, land-locked husband, meeting the ocean only recently, on a small Royal Netherlands freighter, responded to it with equal passion, and not a sign of seasickness in very rough waters. At night we would lie out on the tiny deck and watch the stars swing across the sky as the little vessel rolled in wave and wind.

  In the ocean is the mysterious country 96 and I sought for with our poppy-flower sandwiches; in the ocean is the undiscovered world I grope for in my stories, and where I am seeking to understand death, especially the death of the mind as we are witnessing it this summer.

  9

  One evening last week when it was cool enough for us to need a fire, Hugh and I sat in front of it watching the last logs crumble after the rest of the household had gone to bed, and he remarked that watching the fire gave him somewhat the same sense of proportion and peace as watching the ocean. But it does not do to forget that fire and ocean, out of control, are killers. The ocean ruthlessly capsized the ship in which my L’Engle ancestors were escaping from Santo Domingo. And the great fire of 1901 destroyed the entire city of Jacksonville.

  Mother was twenty at the time of the fire. She had gone to spend the day with some cousins. Another cousin came running in and told them that there was a big fire downtown, and they went up onto the Widow’s Walk to watch. It was a hot day, with a high wind. Some men on the outskirts of the city had been burning Spanish moss, and the dry moss hanging from the trees caught fire and within seconds was out of control. When Mother and her cousins climbed up onto the roof to watch, nobody realized how totally out of control the flames were.

  As they stood gazing at the fire with the aweful fascination with which one watches something terrible which is not really a personal threat, Mother saw the wind pick up a flaming brand, carry it six blocks, and drop it on the house of an uncle and aunt. Within minutes, the house was in flames.

  She said a quick goodbye to her cousins and ran home. Grandfather was there and she told him what she had seen. “Papa, the whole town is going to go.”

  Grandfather paid her the honor of accepting her words without question. Like most selfmade men he was not gullible, was, in fact, highly skeptical of anything he had not proved for himself. But he immediately started the process of evacuation. Mother and Dearma packed china and crystal in buckets. Grandfather and the boys cut the portraits out of the frames, buried what silver they could, put a few small pieces of furniture on the river bank. A few precious books were saved—including the one with Jefferson’s signature, which he had given to William Johnson. But most of Grandfather’s and Ampa’s libraries went up in flames, as did the libraries of the great-uncles at each corner of St. John’s Church, and all the books saved by François Philippe.

  Every few minutes Mother ran upstairs and out onto the roof to see how close the raging inferno had come. When the next house but one started to flame, they left. The carriage and wagons were packed with all they could hold. Then Grandfather let the riding horses out, took his crop and sent them running in the opposite direction from the fire. Many other animals, crazed with terror, ran straight into the flames, screaming in agony.

  By now the wind was sending great clouds of ash which darkened and burned their faces. The searing heat of the approaching flames was almost unendurable. The carriage horses caught the terror and began to bolt, and Mother could hear the crash and shattering as buckets of china fell to the road behind them.

  The streets were full of terrified people, black and white, draped in sheets to meet the end of the world, waving flaming torches and crying, “Jedgment Day! Jedgment Day!”

  Somehow Grandfather managed to get horses, carriage, wagons, across the river to where they were safe from the flames, found a house which was half built, and there the family spent the night, lying on the unfinished floors.

  And so an entire city burned, burned as effectively as from a whole arsenal of bombs, because of a few men trying to get rid of some Spanish moss.

  10

  Father came from a very different background. When he and Mother were married, both had a good deal of adapting to do. They were married in Jacksonville, went to the Ponce de León in St. Augustine for a brief honeymoon, and then on to New York, where Father was a newspaper reporter. They had a small apartment in what they later discovered was a red-light district, and they were happy. Father was doing work he did well, covering plays and operas and concerts. In the evening they would dress in evening clothes, very elegantly, and then proceed to take the horse-drawn trolley to the theatre.

  Many of their friends were musicians, and Mother practiced the piano several hours a day. They were nodding acquaintances with a very young couple in the next apartment, whose baby carriage was left out in the hall. One day the baby carriage was not there, and it did not reappear, and that was how they learned that the overquiet baby had died. Mother went to offer help and sympathy, and the sad young mother told her shyly that whenever my parents had musical parties, or Mother played for Father in the evenings, she and her husband would take pillows and lie on the floor with their ears to the wall, listening to the music, and this was both their entertainment and their comfort.

  The pre-World War I New York was very different from the megalopolis of today; it isn’t easy for me to visualize horse-drawn vehicles instead of our noisy buses and taxis and subways, and I get an inkling of how small the city was when I remember Mother saying, “The little park behind the Forty-second Street library was the reservoir for the entire city.”

  In summer they went to visit Father’s family in the big old house near Princeton, New Jersey. It was a beautiful house, with the kitchen wing built well before the Revolution. There were secret staircases, a secret room with peepholes through the eyes of a portrait in the next room. The grounds were dotted with marble statues, and the marble privy in the form of a small Greek temple had been designed by Thomas Jefferson.

  Father was the youngest of a large family. My grandmother had had a baby every year with what finally came to be depressing regularity. After the birth of one of the little girls she prayed, “Dear Lord, please let me go two years without having another baby.” Two years to the day, she had twins.

  Whenever possible the entire family, Father’s many sisters with their husbands and children, gathered together. I’m not sure how many of the sisters were alive when Mother first visited the tribe; I knew the families of Aunties May, Ida, Bess, Gertie, Edna, and Eva. They were all tall, blond, blue-eyed Valkyries. The entire family kissed every morning before breakfast, and every night before retiring, a new experience for Mother; indeed, communal breakfast, everybody seated at the same time around an enormous oval table, was most unusual for her. At home in the South, breakfast was set out, English fashion, in covered silver dishes on the sideboard. It was a quiet, essentially private meal.

  Not for Father’s family.

  “Tell me the story about the breakfast when Aunt Ida …”

  Aunt Ida was one of my favorite aunts, beautiful, with the family blue eyes shading into purple.

  One morning at breakfast Ida and Edna had a quarrel; family quarrels around the table were not at all unusual, but this time the quarrel grew so heated that Ida threw a glass of water across the table at Edna. Edna rose, dripping, stalked into the music room, sat down at the piano and played and sang, loudly and nasally, “Jesus loves me, this I know …”

  This scene delights me so much that I’ve put versions of it into almost every book I’ve written, and have had, with reluctance, to delete it.

  Another incident from that same summer concerns the mahogany stair rail, which curved superbly down three full stories. Mother eyed it wistfully every day, finally could not resist its lure, and slid from top to bottom. She was wearing, according to the fashion of the time, a long skirt and shirtwaist, belted in tightly; and to her horror she discovered that the belt buckle had left a long, deep, v
ery visible scratch the entire length of the banister. “I never told anybody, and I’ve always felt guilty about it, because I know one of the children must have been blamed.”

  After my birth, when Mother and Father wanted to travel, during the times he was well enough, I was sent to one of the aunts or off to a summer camp. But it was, I think, Father’s lungs rather than my advent which stopped their more exciting journeys. I think that Father knew, because of his work as a foreign correspondent, that the illusion of the Western world as too civilized ever to have another war was soon to be shattered, so they enjoyed such things as the spontaneous trip to Castle Conway with the bittersweet pleasure which accompanies the realization that an end to such carefree excursions is imminent.

  Many of their adventures were actually dangerous. One time while they were staying in Shepheard’s Hotel, an Arab sheik took a fancy to Mother. He was as tall as Father, and he wore pale blue robes with a wide red sash. At mealtimes he would appear and stalk into the dining room ahead of them, and terrify Mother by pushing Father aside in order to pull out her chair, and then would stand behind her throughout the meal. He had a dagger in his belt, and he meant business; happily, my hot-tempered father was amused.

  During one of Father’s assignments, early in their marriage, Mother and Father used to walk out to the pyramids at night and make love. I’m not sure how it was that they learned (I wish I could ask Mother: did I know once? does my memory, too, flag?) that a group of murderous bandits thought this love-making so charming that they watched benevolently, unseen, instead of robbing them and slitting their throats.

  Although I have been fortunate in travel, my journeys have been in a more discovered, more restricted, less colorful world. Travel on jet planes is simpler but (unless one is highjacked) less exciting than travel on donkey, camel, ship, train. In Arab countries, where there were long waits for trains, my parents and their associates would spread a steamer rug out on the station platform, sit around it and play halma. Mother learned this game in the South when she was a child, but it is originally an Arab game, and my parents became accustomed to being ringed by Arabs who bet excitedly on the players. Mother was skillful at all such games, and many Arabs went home slightly richer for having bet on her. It was a more innocent pastime than we would expect to find today. Alas.