The Moon by Night

by Madeleine L'engle

  “How do you know she’s all right? What do you know about it?” Mrs. York demanded.

  “I’m a doctor,” Daddy said quietly, as if it oughtn’t to have been obvious. “She’ll be better off if you’ll go along and get some breakfast ready.”

  Mrs. York turned without saying a word, as though she thought an American doctor couldn’t know what he was talking about, and we walked back to the communal kitchen, Rob and the other two York kids running half-heartedly on ahead. When we got back to the kitchen Mrs. York’s batch of sausage was completely shriveled up and blackened, and so was our bacon. I watched, without saying anything, while Mother and Mrs. York took paper towels and wiped out their frying pans and put in more sausage and bacon.

  Then I said, “If I was rude I’m very sorry. I don’t want you to get the idea that Americans are rude. But I knew my sister was doing the right thing.”

  Mrs. York seemed occupied with her sausage. I didn’t think she was going to answer at all, but then she said, “Perhaps I jumped to conclusions.” It wasn’t really very gracious.

  Mother briskly whipped some eggs in the smallest pot. “My daughter was upset by the picture last night. This is the first time she’s come up against any feeling against Americans. One of our faults as a nation may be our very friendliness, and our eagerness to have everybody love us.”

  John was squatting in front of the stove, shoving in little bits of resiny wood. “Is there really feeling here against the Americans?”

  Mrs. York still seemed very busy with the sausage. Sausages don’t take that much tending. If you run off to playgrounds when your daughter’s cut herself, then they burn up, but when you’re right by the stove you don’t have to watch them that closely every second. She said, “Well, yes, I think there is, a bit.”

  “We didn’t feel it in British Columbia,” John said. “We talked with lots and lots of people and everybody was friendly. Is it just Alberta?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t think so,” Mrs. York said. “You’ll probably find more of it, not less, as you go east.”

  Daddy and Mr. York came back then with Suzy and the middle York kid. She had a nice neat bandage around her wrist, and Mr. York had his arm around Suzy and began praising her all over the place to Mrs. York, and going on about how lucky it was that Suzy knew just what to do, and Daddy’s being a doctor and all, and what a great kid Suzy was, beauty and brains, and more should be made like her, and on and on. Mrs. York rushed to her little girl, and as soon as she realized that she was really all right, that all that blood hadn’t meant she was going to be brought back on a stretcher, she began to relax. Daddy said the little girl hadn’t lost nearly as much blood as it seemed from the mess, but they’d better have her checked by their own doctor when they got back to Edmondton the next day, and get a tetanus booster.

  The kids all started playing then, but this time right in the kitchen, the little girl the happiest and noisiest of anybody. The rest of us went on talking about the differences between Canadians and Americans. I think the Yorks had thought there were lots of differences, but the more we talked the fewer and smaller the differences seemed to become, and the more everybody relaxed and got all friendly and normal. Mr. and Mrs. York brought their breakfast over to our table, and the younger kids took their tin plates and mugs over to the York’s table, and we began to feel comfortable with them and to have an interesting time. The Yorks had thought that the average American was terrifically wealthy, sort of like Zachary’s parents, I guess, instead of being people like us, or like them.

  “I think the main difference I’ve noticed between Canada and the United States,” Daddy said, “is that so far in Canada there hasn’t seemed to be any nervousness about war.” He handed his plate to Mother and she gave him the last strip of bacon and a small piece of coffee cake that was left over.

  “War?” Mr. York took a mouthful of sausage and mashed potato. His face and body were relaxed—he was a big man, as tall as Daddy, and quite a lot heavier—and he looked very comfortable. “Why? What about it?”

  Daddy looked at John, and John said, “Don’t your kids have air raid drills at school or anything?”

  Mrs. York was frying more sausage. She was shorter and plumper than mother, and she wore rather baggy slacks and a sweater and a big gingham print apron over all. Now that she’d relaxed and decided that Suzy wasn’t killing her child and that Americans were just people, not bug-eyed monsters from Mars, she looked a comfortable sort of person, the kind of person you could easily cry on, even after you were big, and she’d just enfold you as though she were a feather bed, and everything would feel better. Now she looked horrified as she looked over at her children playing at the other end of the kitchen with Rob and Suzy. “Those little tykes? Goodness, no! Why would we put them through anything like that?”

  Mother said rather bitterly, “Our children have drills and they’re taught to crawl under their desks. In New York, where we’ll be living next winter, a warning siren screams fear every day at noon. Each time there’s a newscast on the radio there seems to be a new and terrifying crisis.”

  “We don’t listen to the news much,” Mrs. York said. “Would you kiddies like a little of this sausage?” John and I both had some, and Mrs. York called out to Suzy and Rob. Rob brought his plate over, but Suzy didn’t have any, of course, because of Wilbur the pig.

  “We never even think about things like that,” Mr. York said, “up where we live. You people going to see the Queen?”

  So we got to talking about the Queen and Prince Philip, and on the way back to the tent we saw a big brown bear strolling right through the campgrounds and we stopped thinking about wars and differences between Canadians and Americans.

  While we were eating our sandwiches for lunch, which we did sitting around the car, because the kitchens were crowded again, we talked about the Queen and the Prince who were coming by the campgrounds right after lunch, which was why we hadn’t gone off on a trip to Lake Louise that day. After all, if the Queen of England was going to be driving right by, we might as well stick around and see her.

  “Have you ever met the Queen, Mother?” Rob asked.

  “Honestly, Rob,” Suzy said.

  But Mother laughed. “Well, as a matter of fact, I have.”

  “Mother!” Suzy and I shrieked. “When?”

  “It was in England, when I was a little girl, and the Queen was only a little princess. I was visiting some friends of Grandfather’s—you know how grandfather has friends everywhere, from dukes to dog-catchers—and these people were minor royalty, and they belonged to the Bath Club. They took us children swimming there, and it so happened that day that the only other people in the pool were the little princesses.”

  We were properly impressed.

  “What are you going to say when you see her again?” Suzy asked.

  Mother laughed, “Suzy, darling, the queen wouldn’t know me from Adam.”

  “But you know her!”

  “It was a long time ago, and you can hardly call being in the same pool with somebody knowing her.”

  “But did you talk to her?” Suzy persisted.

  “I don’t remember, Suzy. Sorry to be such a disappointment to you.”

  “But suppose she speaks to you,” Rob said.

  “She won’t, Rob. Don’t worry.”

  “But I wish she would. I’d like to speak to her. If she should speak to me what should I do?”

  “She’s not going to speak to you, silly,” Suzy said.

  Rob’s face fell. “But I thought they were coming right through camp. Aren’t they going to speak to anybody?”

  “Honestly, Rob! They just drive through, dopey.”

  I always get mad at Suzy when she talks to Rob that way, and I guess John does, too, because he said, “If you meet the Queen, Rob, what you do is give a deep bow.”

  “Oh,” Rob said. “Okay. Did you ever meet a queen, Daddy?”

  “If you count meeting Princess Grace when she was plain Grac
e Kelly,” Daddy said.

  Now John was impressed. “You’ve met Grace Kelly?”

  “Just about the way your mother’s met the Queen of England. She happened to be visiting in the hospital where I was interning. But it did give me enough personal interest so that I’m apt to watch her and Prince Rainier when they’re on TV.”

  Rob looked up at Mother. “Is Grace Kelly beautiful like you, Mother?”

  By the time we’d finished tidying up after our sandwiches people were beginning to wander past us on the way to the road that edged the camp and along which the Queen and Prince were supposed to drive. The Yorks stopped by and we all walked over together. The grassy bank at the side of the road was already filled with people from all parts of the camp, and Mounties in their gorgeous red uniforms were wandering up and down. Every once in a while one would come by on a motor cycle instead of a horse, and everybody would begin to buzz because it might be announcing the Queen’s car. Daddy had Rob up on his shoulders, and Mr. York had his little boy, but after almost an hour of waiting in the blazing sun the boys must have been very heavy, and Daddy and Mr. York put them down, saying they’d pick them up again when the time came. The Queen’s car was supposed to go by at one o’clock, but by two-thirty she still hadn’t come, and everybody began to get restless, but nobody left. After a while we missed Rob and the little York boy, and John discovered them up a tree.

  “They were buzzing around me like gnats,” John grinned, “so I told them to go climb a tree, and they did.”

  The branches hung out over the road, and the little boys had a perfect view, so Daddy and Mr. York didn’t have to worry about picking them up again. Suzy and the York girls wanted to get up in the tree, too, but Daddy and Mr. York said it wasn’t strong enough and they were all big enough to see, anyhow. There didn’t happen to be many trees right there by the roadside that were close enough to give a good view, and the few others were already filled with other children. Rob and the York boy had managed to pick the best tree of all and were having a fine time playing Tarzan. John and I played Botticelli, and then some easier word games with the younger ones, and all of a sudden a lot of motor cycles came by, slowly, and in formation, so we knew that the Queen’s car was coming.

  I saw Suzy and the York girls climbing up in the tree with the little boys in spite of what Daddy and Mr. York had said, but just then people down the road began to cheer loudly. I knew that the Queen was coming, so I forgot about the little kids and craned my neck with everybody else. A couple of closed cars drove by, very slowly. I suppose they must have been the mayor and stuff of Banff. And then, behind them, came an open car with the Queen and Prince Philip, smiling and waving at everybody.

  Just before the car reached our part of the road there was a tremendous CRACK and suddenly in the middle of the road right in front of the car was a branch of a tree and a lot of green leaves.

  And Rob.

  Everybody shrieked, and the car with the Queen and Prince Philip stopped suddenly. Rob picked himself up out of the leaves, stood up in front of the car, and bowed, deeply, and solemnly.

  At that the tension broke and everybody laughed, and the Queen and Prince gave Rob a special wave and smile. A mountie scooted up and brushed Rob off and got him up on the bank, the car started up again, and in a moment the Queen and Prince Philip had gone around a bend in the road and were out of sight.

  Behind us we heard Suzy and the York kids being excited, and in front of us the mountie was scolding the kids all around, though not as though he really meant it, because, after all, nothing awful had happened, it hadn’t been an international incident or anything. Suzy and the York girls had tried to climb up in the tree with the little boys to see better, and of course they were too heavy, and one of the branches broke, the one with Rob on it. He was the only one to go tumbling down, and the branch broke slowly enough so that it softened his fall, and he wasn’t hurt a bit, just breathless, and excited because he’d bowed to the Queen. Daddy and Mr. York apologized to the trooper; Mr. York did most of the talking, and made a big joke out of the whole thing, and then he went on about how Suzy had saved his little girl’s life that morning, and Suzy got pink with embarrassment.

  But he didn’t say anything about our being American, and I think I’m just as glad.

  Seventeen

  What with all the excitement of the day we gave up all idea of going to Lake Louise. Daddy suggested that we go instead to a pool where the water came from natural hot springs. The Yorks said they’d gone the day before, and swimming in the hot water was wonderfully relaxing. That it was. The water in the pool was tested while we were there, and it was 100°. There were signs advising people not to stay in the water more than twenty minutes at a time, but we couldn’t even take it that long, but would inch in and stay for a few minutes, and then climb out and lie stretched supine in the sun. It was absolutely gorgeous, as close to being ancient Romans as we’ll ever get. At the shallow end of the pool were lots of elderly people, just standing there in the water. It was kind of sad, and I was glad to see Mother and Daddy swimming in the deep end.

  What with a whole afternoon of being ancient Romans (John said he missed a gorgeous slave girl to rub him down with oil afterwards) we were all so relaxed that after the movies (which were plain, uncontroversial science films that night) we all went right to sleep in spite of the noise.

  We got off quite early in the morning and had an exciting drive over the Kananaskis Mountain Road and Pass. It’s an unpaved road, a hundred and fifty miles long, and so sparsely traveled that you have to sign in with a ranger when you enter, and sign out again at the other end. I suppose if you don’t come out they send search parties for you. It’s completely uninhabited, no stores or filling stations or any sign of civilization. We passed a few fishermen’s tents down by the river, but that was all. At one of the points on the pass we got out and threw snow balls, although it was so warm that Rob started to have prickly heat again and was stripped to the waist.

  I’d really been in a very good mood ever since we reached Victoria. Once a day I’d read Zachary’s love song in the lav, and I thought about only the nice part of him, his gentleness, and his liking me the way he used to. And because he wasn’t with me, saying things to frighten me, I didn’t think about his heart condition, or Anne Frank, or any of the things that had upset me in Laguna.

  But then that afternoon we drove through the town of Frank in Alberta. First of all there was the name. Frank. Like Anne Frank. And it was as though Zachary were there standing by me and grinning because I was so dumb and so ignorant and I’d never even heard before of what had happened to the town called Frank and everybody in it.

  What happened was that about fifty years ago half of the mountain crashed down in the middle of the night, burying most of the town and the seventy people in the section it covered. There wasn’t any warning for those people in the town of Frank; they didn’t have to sleep all night with their ears half open, listening for the sound of storm troopers’ boots. They went to bed without worrying about anything at all, just the way we do in Thornhill. The mountain was there, strong and secure, when they went to bed, and in the middle of the night it fell on them.

  I thought of the psalm again. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills. The people of Frank must have thought of their mountain as being strong and permanent and reliable. They probably knew that over millions of years mountains rise and fall, but it takes millions of years, and this mountain fell all of a sudden in the middle of the night.

  The mountain was so huge that they never tried to clear up the rubble; they just rebuilt over and around it, the people who were left to rebuild. The remains of the huge slide are still there for everybody to see, with the railroad tracks and the road simply going over it.

  I wasn’t the only one to be silent after we’d driven through the town of Frank. For several miles nobody said anything at all, and then nobody really noticed that I wasn’t doing much talking. Just Vicky and her moods.
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br />   By the middle of the afternoon we were back in the United States again, in Montana, at Glacier National Park. I suppose because it was well into July and right in the middle of the camping season all the parks were at their most crowded, but we did manage to find a fairly good campsite by some nice people, two rather elderly Greek professors and their wives. Their tents were old and battered and their equipment was as elderly as they were, but they seemed to be having as good a time as though they were kids. Both the professors taught at Harvard, but they seemed really pleased about John’s going to M.I.T., and when they discovered he’d studied a little Greek and loved it, you’d have thought he’d given them an enormous present. They were really fun to camp next to, and when we discovered we were both going to have stew for dinner, we put all the stew into their big old iron pot and ate together.

  The next day we went up beyond Logan Pass, across the Continental Divide once again. We were even higher and closer to snow than we had been the day before on the Kananaskis road. We went through banks of snow more than twenty feet high, on a road that was opened from the winter only a week or so before. And here it was the middle of July!

  At one point when we’d left the station wagon and were walking along the road, Rob shouted out, “A bear! A bear!” A shaggy looking bear was sitting on the snow bank right by the car, peering at us in a much more friendly manner than the bears in Kootenay. Daddy told us to get back in the car, and we had just shut the door when the bear got up, lumbered over, and stuck his head in the window by Mother. I don’t think she was happy about this at all. He was an awfully big bear. She very gently rolled the car window up almost to the top, so the bear was left on the outside, his paws up against the car, his wet nose smearing the window.

  We drove on, and came on the Greek professors looking through binoculars up at something high on the mountain. They managed to point out three white moving dots to us, which they said were mountain goats, and quite unusual to see. So Suzy had some more animals for her book. After that we stuck with the Greek professors and they let us look at everything through their binoculars.