The Other Side of the Sun

by Madeleine L'engle

  “I do not see them here, but after death

  God knows the faces I shall see,

  Each one a murdered self, with low last breath.

  ‘I am thyself—what has thou done to me?’”

  I recognized it: Rossetti. And told her so. “Point for me, Aunt Olivia,” and we both laughed.

  But Aunt Mary Desborough, coming down the stairs, shouted, “Olivia, stop it! And why aren’t you in your bathing dress?”

  “It’s Sunday; I’ll need all my strength to face the day.”

  “A swim would refresh you.”

  “I’m too tired.”

  “But you’re supposed to move. It’s not good for your joints to stay still. They’ll lock and you’ll be crippled.”

  “Daz it, I will not let my bones lock. I’ll die first.”

  “How do you know you can?”

  I intervened, “What are you doing to the piano, Aunt Olivia?”

  “The dampers stick in the beach damp. I’m trying to dry them out with the lamp.”

  “You’ll set them on fire. For goodness’ sake be careful,” Aunt Mary Desborough said. “And I’m going swimming even if you aren’t.”

  “Oh, jolly dee.” Aunt Olivia limped into the dining room.

  “The water’s lovely this morning, Aunt Des,” I said lamely, and followed Aunt Olivia.

  “Hungry?” she asked me.

  “Famished. I don’t think I was ever this hungry in Oxford.”

  “You didn’t have Illyrian air. Or Honoria’s cooking.” She poured coffee and hot milk, peered into covered dishes. “Sherried kidneys. For Hoadley. I love them, too.”

  “Shall I take your plate?”

  “No, thank you, my dear. It’s very kind of you. But it would be far too easy for me to let people do things for me. Then my bones really would lock. When you go to James’s this morning you’ll see the kind of living death that terrifies me.” She looked at me imploringly. “I talk too much.… But I don’t mind your knowing about me.”

  I smiled. “Are there things that are mindable?”

  Balancing her plate precariously, leaning heavily on her cane, Aunt Olivia limped to the table. “To how many people do we want to reveal our secret selves? Do you think I want to make myself wholly vulnerable to—oh, Irene, for instance? Or to most of my dear friends and relatives, most of whom are more dead than if they were six feet under? Death: what a strange thing it is. Some of our kin you’ll be meeting sooner or later are far more dead than Mado will ever be.”

  “Mado.” I brought my filled plate to the table and sat next to the old great-aunt. “Last night I read in Mado’s journals, mostly the parts about Nyssa. What happened to the little boy who was born after Therro?”

  “He died at Nyssa, during the war, before we came to Illyria. There wasn’t enough to eat, and nobody had resistance against illness. A great many children died in those years.” Aunt Olivia leaned on one elbow, looking rather tiredly at the sherried kidneys on her plate. “I’m sure you realize that Mado was far more than sister-in-law to me. She was the one true, real friend of my life. So many people loved her, and it never occurred to the little ones to call her anything but Mado; I think they thought the name Mado meant grandmother, that all grandmothers were mados. To me it meant the one who saved my life. I think I felt this as strongly as Honoria, though perhaps with less obvious reasons.”

  “How did she save your life, Aunt Olivia?”

  She made a self-deprecating little gesture. “Just in small, everyday ways. By making me feel that I—that I existed. It was Des who saved my life dramatically when I got caught in the undertow and was being dragged out to sea. Not that I would have cared—or would I? I don’t know. Sometimes I’m of two minds about death. But it was too close to Therro’s and Kitty’s drowning.”

  I fetched the silver coffee pot and milk pitcher from the sideboard and refilled our cups.

  “Hoadley kept telling them their little boat wasn’t seaworthy, but they wouldn’t listen. Therro was arrogant about the sea—as about everything else. He thought he could outwit it. And then one of those sudden storms came up—at least there was a storm, and nobody even mentioned that it might have been anything else.”

  Aunt Olivia answered my look. “It wasn’t that bad a storm, and Therro was as good a sailor as he thought he was. So was Kitty.” She gave the polished tabletop a sharp slap. “If we’re going to be friends, Stella, we can’t have secrets from each other. At least I can’t. I haven’t had anybody to talk to since Mado, and Mado and I were the only ones who admitted Therro and Kitty might—and even we asked it only once, when we were walking up the beach catching fireflies. Oh, Stella, they had been so gay and so in love, Therro and Kitty, and always parties and dances and music. There was a glamour about them, a brightness, as though the sun would never stop shining. They had a handsome house in Jefferson, and Therro and Hoadley were doing wonderfully well in practice together. It was because of Therro that Hoadley left Charleston and his father’s law offices and came to Jefferson. And Hoadley was pushing him—Therro had a lazy streak, but everybody said that if he wanted to go into politics here he’d be governor before he was forty. We were so proud of them—and then everybody came to Illyria for the summer as usual and there was nothing but quarreling, and Kitty rushing off crying and nobody knew why, and if you asked what was wrong you got your head snapped off. Jimmy was living back in the scrub with Belle then, but when he came around he flew into violent rages for no reason whatsoever. Honoria stalked through the room cleaning everything four and five times over. Clive sat and read his Bible. I got underfoot, as usual. And Mado—she tried to keep laughter in the rooms, but she had no idea what was going on, and I suppose we should be grateful for that. It would have killed her. And then there was Jimmy’s death and that—” She stopped abruptly, and there was the dark hole of Jimmy’s death like a chasm between us.

  “Aunt Olivia, please forgive me, but there’s so much about your country I don’t—why was Jimmy lynched?”

  She put her coffee cup down on the saucer so sharply that it overturned. She ignored the coffee spilling across the table, dripping on the floor. “Did Terry tell you that?”

  “No. Ron.”

  “Ron told you? How much did he tell you?”

  “That—that Jimmy was lynched—”

  Silence came between us, strange and dark, pushing us further and further apart. At last Aunt Olivia said, moving her hands as though to try to close the chasm, “I will try to explain it to you, Stella. But not today. Jimmy was—he was my baby, my boy—” She tried to control the tears which welled up in her faded blue eyes, reached into the folds of her skirt for her handkerchief, blew her nose, then said quite calmly, “Sorry to be such a fool. Jimmy gave me the illusion that I was alive, and Honoria let me mother him. Most of my life I haven’t been alive. Nothing’s ever happened to make me be. I’ve never even been in love, except with dreams. I mean, I was never in love with a real person, the way he actually was, instead of the way I dreamed. The nearest I’ve ever come to being in love with someone real was with the twin’s father, but of course I’m not supposed to mention that. Des knew. I don’t know how, but she did. That’s why she tries to shut me up if I mention the Captain. Afraid I’m going to embarrass her. To look at the twins you’d never guess that their father was one of the handsomest men you could possibly imagine. For all he was nothing but a cracker, he looked like a prince.” She gave a laugh which was half sob. “That’s the story of my life. The man I loved was another woman’s husband, and the babies he counted on turned out to be—to be the twins. And as close to being a mother as I’ve ever become was with someone else’s baby. Manqué, manqué, all the way. But I didn’t make Jimmy up. I knew him, all his lovingness, and all his faults and weakness, everything that led to—I wonder if I made up the Captain? Just because I needed to love a man? I wonder if I imagined someone to put into the flesh of the visible man I saw? Only partly, I think. Most of the people who live bac
k in the scrub are people of honor and integrity—very different from the Zenumins.”

  “Ron—he’s half Zenumin, isn’t he?”

  “Honoria and Clive raised him. They’re far more his parents than—”

  “But Belle, his mother—”

  I had stepped on forbidden ground again. For a moment Aunt Olivia looked angry; then she said, “I can tell you this much now: Jimmy was very young when Belle Zenumin seduced him. Some say she bewitched him, and I’m not denying that’s possible, but beauty in itself can be bewitching. Look at Irene.”

  “She’s still beautiful.”

  “Not any more. You should have seen Irene twenty years ago. Irene has not aged well.”

  “Not Aunt Irene. Belle Zenumin.”

  She drew back. “How would you know? You haven’t met her and I hope you never will.”

  “But I have.”

  “How? When?”

  “Both evenings when I’ve taken my walk.”

  “Stella, keep away from her—”

  “But why, Aunt Olivia?”

  “Stella, believe me, please, I beg of you, believe me, Belle is bad, bad all the way through. Why do you think we took Ron away from her? It’s not a light thing to take a child from its mother.”

  “What about her other son?”

  “Jimmy’s boy. He was a year older. Things were different.”

  “Why do you say ‘Jimmy’s boy’ that way?”

  She looked away. “Who knows who any Zenumin’s father is? I shouldn’t have wiped up the coffee with my napkin. Honoria will be furious. Tron looks enough like Jimmy so that we all go on the assumption that Jimmy was, in fact, his father. Stella, I must ask you please not to say anything about all this to Des. I got in far deeper than I intended.”

  “I’ve asked too many questions. I do apologize.”

  “No, no, Stella, it’s I who have—you have every reason to—just don’t ask—oh, don’t ask Hoadley, or tell him.”

  “I won’t. I promise.” It was an easy promise.

  She relaxed a little. “If you’re just around Des you’ll find she’ll tell you things. More than you want to know. Both of us do. Maybe all old people—Have I been boring you?”

  “Boring me? It’s all part of my husband’s world, what makes him Terry.”

  She nodded. “We are part of one another, aren’t we? Would you get me another piece of toast, please? I know I ought to make myself do it, but we have a long day ahead.… I’m much obliged.… I don’t have the kind of stamina Mado did, and Honoria.… How did they bear it all? Mado lost her husband, four of her five children, and then Therro, her first-born, was drowned, and she had to accept—Stella, how did she bear it? When I look back on her life it was one tragedy after another, and yet she was the most joyful person I’ve ever known. It’s strange how vividly I remember the past. It’s all so clear to me, clearer than the present. It’s not so much that I’m living in the past, as that the past is moving up to meet and engulf the present.”

  “Ladies.” Uncle Hoadley bowed slightly as he came in and went to the sideboard for coffee. “Where are Irene and Aunt Des?”

  “Getting all primped up for Morning Prayer,” Aunt Olivia said.

  “I suggest that you and Stella do the same, then, Auntie.”

  I left the table and climbed the stairs. As I neared the third floor I heard voices from my bedroom, first Honoria, saying, “Miss Irene, you are not to go in there.”

  I stopped on the stairs.

  Aunt Irene’s voice was high. “But I only wanted—”

  “Miss Irene, I warn you. Keep out of Miss Stella’s room. You been seeing Belle Zenumin again, ain’t you?”

  Aunt Irene spoke in a strange and awful wail: “You’re not accusing me of wanting to harm Stella, are you?”

  “Don’t meddle in things too big for you.”

  “You ought not to speak to me that way.”

  I cleared my throat and firmly mounted the stairs.

  Aunt Irene raised her voice. “Are you sure there are enough towels, Honoria? Or would you like Mr. Hoadley to bring more in from Jefferson?”

  “Plenty of towels.”

  As I entered the room, Aunt Irene’s voice returned to its usual warm drawl. “Good morning, Stella, honey. All through breakfast?”

  “Yes, thanks. I’ve just come to finish dressing.”

  She gave me a little pat. “We’ll meet on the veranda in about half an hour.”

  It took me only a moment to collect gloves, bonnet, a fresh handkerchief, so I went to my balcony; the ocean stretched, calm and unimpressed by my ignorance and arrogance, out to an almost invisible horizon. A woman came into my line of vision, leading a pale horse. It was Belle Zenumin. She looked up and saw me, raised her hand in greeting.

  I waved back.

  A dark shadow flew between us. It was a buzzard, in sudden descent to a fish washed up on the beach. It was an ugly sight.

  “Miss Stella.” There was a light tap on my door. “You ready?”

  I turned from the balcony. “Coming.”

  Honoria was waiting in the hall, gloved and bonneted, prayer book in hand. “Miss Olivia on the veranda. She say maybe you like to come sit with her a spell.”

  “Honoria, I just saw Ron’s mother on the beach with a pale horse.”

  Honoria’s hands in their black lace gloves tightened over her prayer book. She stood very still, peering at me as we stood in the summer dimness at the top of the stairs.

  I said, “Yesterday morning when I asked if there were any place I oughtn’t to go while I was exploring, Ron said—”

  Honoria drew herself up. “Don’t fret, Miss Stella. If God wants you to open doors we have kept closed, the key will be given.”

  “The Zenumins—”

  “Don’t fret,” Honoria repeated, and I thought she was saying it more to herself than to me. “I didn’t have no call to speak the way I did yesterday. But I ask you, Miss Stella, to stay away from the Zenumins.”

  “But why?”

  “Zenumins—” She looked down at her gloved hands. “Zenumins ain’t nobody. They some of everybody, and this sum adds up to nothing. If a body don’t love nobody, a body become nobody. You got to understand this, Miss Stella. Zenumins don’t love. They live together back in the scrub not because they a family, like some folk in the clearings; but because they hate everybody not Zenumin. They bow down and they kiss Hate and they worship.” In the dusk at the head of the stairs I could sense, rather than see, her strain. Her shadow loomed behind her, elongated and austere. But Honoria seemed even taller than her shadow, a dark, foreboding force. “Now, Miss Stella, we go down to Miss Livvy. She waiting.” She drew back to let me go down the stairs ahead of her.

  7

  Aunt Olivia was sitting on the veranda in her favorite rocker. Like Honoria, she wore an old-fashioned bonnet, the kind Cousin Augusta had worn when I was a child but which had long gone out of fashion. Her prayer book was clasped loosely in her hands; her kid gloves were yellow with age. Honoria took a palm-leaf fan from behind the shutter and waved it slowly back and forth so that we all benefited from the gentle stirring of the air. Two carriages were drawn up in front of the house, the horses waiting patiently, occasionally stamping softly on the sand or shaking their heads against the insects.

  “I dreamed about Theron last night.” Aunt Olivia gave a pleased laugh. “I just remembered! It was lovely. My brother Theron, that is, Stella. I wish you could have known him.”

  “I wish so, too. Was he killed in battle?” That sounded right, Mado’s Theron leading a victorious charge, galloping his horse uphill, his flag aloft, and a bullet piercing his heart …

  Honoria, slowly moving the fan, gave me a long look. Aunt Olivia said, “No. Being a doctor, he didn’t have to fight. As you know, he and James turned Nyssa into a hospital, but Theron also had a hospital set up in a mobile tent and he went out into the battlefields, so I suppose he might easily have been killed that way, but he wasn’t. He was mu
rdered.”

  The old woman spoke these words perfectly calmly, far more calmly than she had talked about Jimmy, but again Honoria stopped waving the fan. The breeze, too, seemed to have died down. Everything was still. A yellow jacket humming over the ilex bushes sounded louder than the ocean.

  “Murdered?”

  “To do William Hutlidge justice, I don’t think he was really party to it himself—I couldn’t bear to believe that. Theron came to Nyssa on leave, and he was sent for on a trumped-up call to take care of one of the Hutlidge slaves who had a fever. Mado took Therro, and drove Theron over. He was terribly tired, and it was a good five miles between plantations. When they got to the Hutlidge gates, the overseer was there to let them in, and right there at the gates they shot him. They shot Theron. Mado caught him as he fell. Therro saw. He saw his father killed.”

  Despite the heat I felt cold. Aunt Olivia, like Honoria, was staring out over the ocean, as though only thus could she continue.

  “Mado turned the carriage around, whipped the horses and galloped back to Nyssa, but Theron was dead. Therro held his father all the way. He would not believe his father was dead, and he had nightmares from that day on. The whole state was in an uproar. Some said Theron had been rightfully executed as a traitor to the Confederacy. That he was not, ever; and many people came to mourn him. The day after he was buried—oh, Stella—someone set fire to the house, and before anyone knew what was happening the place was a blazing inferno. James and Clive and some of the other men managed to get almost everybody out. Therro helped carry stretchers—we got all the wounded men out safely and into the old slave quarters—and his hands were badly burned; he carried the scars until he died. The two baby girls, Olivia and Lucy, and their nurse, were trapped upstairs. Clive’s brother died trying to get them out. Mado—she had baby Jamie in her arms, but it was only Clive’s holding her that kept her from rushing back in after the little girls. Stella, Stella, we have known so much pain and grief together. If Therro bore the scars on his hands, there were other scars that did not show, no matter how wildly he tried to forget them. And Mado—Mado had scars, too, not physical ones, but scars of the heart. No: scars of the soul. And yet I was the one to rage and rebel and deny God. Mado was never bitter nor resentful, never.”