A House Like a Lotus

by Madeleine L'engle

  Mother continued. ‘Trusting people is risky, Polly, we are aware of that. Trust gets broken. But when I think of Max and Ursula, I don’t feel particularly curious about their sex lives, one way or another. They’re opening a world of ideas for you, ideas you’re not likely to bump into at Cowpertown High. I’m sorrier than I can say that there’s been ugly gossip from the Mulletville girls and that the gossip has touched you. You’re young to bump into this kind of gratuitous viciousness, but it hits us all sooner or later. I’ve had to sit out a good bit of gossip about your father and female colleagues.’

  ‘But it wasn’t true!’

  ‘No, it wasn’t true, Polly. That’s the point I’m making. If you can, try to forget Xan and Kate’s fourteen-year-old gossip.’

  Now I sighed. ‘I’ll try. But I wish they’d kept their big mouths shut.’

  ‘So do I, Polly, so do I.’

  She had not told me whether or not she thought Max was a lesbian. But perhaps that was part of the point she was making.

  April, turning into May, was Benne Seed’s most gorgeous weather. We had a few summer-hot days, but mostly it was sunny and breezy and the air smelled of flowers and the sky was full of birdsong. Kate made a tape of a mockingbird to take home.

  Daddy and Ursula drove down to Florida again, overnight. Daddy was to give a paper on new developments in his experiments with octopuses, with Ursula giving another paper about how it could be applied to neurosurgery on human beings. I found myself wishing that Xan was still concerned about Daddy and Ursula.

  Max called when I got home from school, as she almost always did when Ursula was away. I drove over; Urs and Daddy had taken Ursula’s car; a Land-Rover’s not great for long distances. And suddenly, when I was about halfway to Beau Allaire, the fog rolled in from the ocean, and the outlines of the trees were blurred, and the birds stopped singing. There was a damp hush all over the island. Turning on the headlights just made visibility worse, and the fog lights didn’t help much. I slowed down to a crawl, and was grateful to arrive safely at Beau Allaire. We went right up to Max’s room, which is always the pleasantest place when the wind swings to the northeast. When the sun is out on the Island, it’s warm, even in winter. When the sun is hidden by fog, it feels cold, even if the thermometer reads 80°.

  We were sipping tea when Mother called, to make sure I’d arrived safely and to say that the visibility at our end of the island was nil. She agreed without hesitation when Max suggested I spend the night and go to school in the morning on the bus with the kids from Mulletville.

  That was the only part I didn’t like. I looked into the fire so Max wouldn’t see my face.

  But she saw something. ‘Your mother’s confidence in me means more than I can say. But—’

  ‘But what?’ I asked, still looking away from her.

  ‘For some reason you’re not happy about going to school with the Mulletville contingent.’

  ‘They’re all snobs, and anyhow, I’m needed at home to handle the boat.’

  ‘And you don’t want the students from Mulletville to know you spent the night here.’ Her voice was flat.

  ‘If the fog lifts, I’ll get up early. Anyhow, I have to get the car home—Mother didn’t think of that.’

  ‘What she was thinking of was your safety. When your father and Ursula get back, Urs can drop him off here and he can drive your Rover home.’ I didn’t say anything, but I turned to look at her, and her eyes were bleak, the color of ice, and the shadows under them seemed to darken. ‘I hope this isn’t going to compromise you any more than you’ve already been compromised.’

  I stared back at the fire. ‘I don’t care.’

  I could hear Max draw in her breath, let it out in a long sigh. ‘It’s taken a long time for gossip to reach you, hasn’t it? I expected it to raise its ugly head long before this.’

  ‘Gossip is gossip. Mother and Daddy take a dim view of it. The girls from Mulletville are the bitchiest group at school.’

  Max sighed again, and I turned once more to look at her, lean and elegant, stretched out on her side, leaning on one elbow. ‘I’d hoped this conversation wouldn’t be necessary. Urs said it would be, sooner or later, since the world considers personal privacy a thing of the past. Have you noticed how, whenever there’s a tragedy, the TV cameras rush to the bereaved to take pictures, totally immune to human suffering?’

  ‘Well—our TV doesn’t work—but I know what you mean.’

  ‘And I’m avoiding what I need to say. You’re pure of heart, Polyhymnia, but most of the world isn’t. I wish Urs were here. She could talk about it more sanely than I, so that it wouldn’t hurt you. We—Ursula and I—have been lovers for over thirty years.’

  I stared down at the white fur of the rug. If Max wanted to avoid this conversation, so did I.

  ‘When people think of homosexuals they usually think of—Ursula and I have had a long and faithful love.’

  In my ears I heard Xan’s words about two dykes. It didn’t fit Max and Ursula. Neither did the words I heard at school, gays and faggots and queers.

  ‘I love you, Polly, love you like my daughter. And you love me, too, in all your amazing innocence.’

  There was a long pause. I hoped the conversation was over. But Max went on. ‘Ursula’—she paused again—‘Ursula is the way she is. She’s competed in a man’s world, in a man’s field. There are not many women neurosurgeons. As for me—’

  —I don’t want to know, I thought.—Keep this kind of thing in the closet where it belongs. That’s what doors are for. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.

  ‘We’d better go downstairs,’ Max said. ‘I asked Nettie and Ovid to set the table on the verandah.’

  I followed her. Instead of going directly out to the verandah, she paused at the oval dining room, switching on an enormous Waterford chandelier which sparkled like drops of water from the ocean.

  Mother and Daddy have eaten in the oval dining room at Beau Allaire. When I ate with Max and Ursula, it was supper, not dinner—sometimes if it was chilly, on trays in the library, or sometimes on the big marble-topped table in the kitchen. Ursula kneaded dough on that table, and the kitchen usually held the fragrance of baking bread.

  ‘Nettie, really!’ Max exclaimed, and I saw that two places had been set at the mahogany table, which, like the room, was oval.

  As though she had been called, Nettie came in through the swing door which led to the breezeway and the kitchen. ‘Verandah’s too damp, Miss Maxa. Table’s wet. Fog’s thick.’

  ‘Fine, Nettie,’ Max said. ‘You’re quite right. We’ll eat here.’ She sat at the head of the table and pointed to the portrait over the long sideboard, a portrait of a man, middle-aged or more, stern and dignified, with white hair and mustache, a nose which was a caricature of Max’s, and a smile which made me uncomfortable.

  Ovid came in and lit the candles on the table and in the sconces on the wall.

  ‘My papa.’ Max nodded at the portrait and her smile matched the smile on her father’s face. I felt cold, chillier than the dampness the fog brought in.

  ‘Looks like him,’ Max said. ‘Spitting image, as they say. It’s not a bad piece of work. One has to admire the artist’s perception which transcends the stiffness of his technique. What do you think?’

  I couldn’t very well say, ‘His smile gives me the creeps.’ I said, ‘He looks rather formidable.’

  ‘Formidable? Oh, he was.’

  Nettie and Ovid came in with silver dishes, cold sliced chicken, hot spoon bread, served us, and withdrew.

  Max said, ‘When my sister and I were little, we used to think God looked like Papa, and I suspect he fostered the idea. Papa liked being God. You don’t make as much money as Papa did without a God complex. Beau Allaire belonged to Mama, and Papa got a job in the family bank. He was a big frog in a little pond, but he made the money not only to keep up Beau Allaire but to build a hospital. And he had no hesitation in shoving people aside if they got in his way. After a
ll, isn’t God supposed to do whatever he wants?’

  That wasn’t the way I thought of God. Or the way I thought Max thought of God.

  She took her fork and spread spoon bread around on her plate. ‘I wonder if God ever feels guilt? The M. A. Horne Hospital is Papa’s big guilt offering. Urs sees God as a benevolent physician. That’s a better image than mine. The only way I can get rid of the false image of Papa as God is to think of the marvels of creation. The theory now is that everything in the universe, all of the galaxies, all of the quanta, everything comes from something as small as the nucleus of an atom. Think of that, of that tiny speck, invisible to the naked eye, opening up like a flower, to become clouds of hydrogen dust, and then stars, and solar systems. That softly opening flower —I visualize a lotus—is a more viable image of God for me than anything else. I keep the portrait of Papa to remind me that God is not like him.’

  I liked the image of the gently opening lotus. I didn’t like the man in the portrait.

  Ovid came in with a bottle of wine in a napkin and poured a glass for Max. ‘This will help your appetite, Miss Maxa. You need Nettie’s good spoon bread.’ Then he put a very small amount in my glass and filled it up with water. My talk with Daddy was still clear in my mind. That was plenty for me.

  ‘M.A. and I were only eleven months apart, and were more like twins than just sisters. Not that we didn’t think for ourselves, but there wasn’t anything we couldn’t tell each other. She was the younger, and when we were four or five years old our mother died—she had a weak heart—and that made us closer than ever. Mama’s portrait is the middle of the three across from you.’

  I looked at the three gold-framed portraits. The middle, and largest, was of a fragile-looking woman, almost beautiful, but too washed-out to make it. She was not vivid like Max, or translucent, like M.A. in the portrait in the library. ‘She looks pretty. But tired.’

  Max laughed, not a happy laugh. ‘Papa was a tiring man. Our maternal grandfather, our Allaire grandfather, must have been equally tiring. Poor Mama. Her name was Submit, and her two sisters, in the portraits on either side of her, were Patience and Hope. Which gives you an idea of the frame of mind of our Allaire grandmother. Mama’s calling us Minerva Allaire and Maximiliana Sebastiane may have been her way of getting even. She died before we had much chance to know her, but she was affectionate and gentle.’

  Ovid came to take away our plates, checking that Max had eaten most of her meal. Nettie followed him with salad, delicate greens from the Beau Allaire greenhouse.

  ‘Keeping this enormous house with inadequate help killed Mama. I have one wing completely closed off, but while Papa was alive, all the rooms had to be ready at a moment’s notice. Papa did not make his business deals on the golf course, he made them here in the oval dining room, over port.’ She paused. ‘The portrait’s uncannily like him. I don’t think the artist realized how accurate he was.’

  We sat in silence for a while. Then she said, ‘I’m not really a portraitist, but every once in a while there’s someone I know I must paint—like you. Ursula’s never allowed me to paint her, but she can’t stop me from making sketches.’

  Nettie came in, bearing crème brûlée, which she put in front of Max, beaming. When she went back to the kitchen, Max laughed, a nice laugh this time. ‘Nettie feels she must compete with Urs. Bless Urs. She has to make godlike decisions all the time, but she has more genuine humility than anyone I’ve known. She picks up her scalpel and she holds life and death in her hands. No wonder she comes home from the hospital and bakes bread and creates casseroles and listens to Pachelbel and Vivaldi.’ She served me a luscious dish of crème brûlée. ‘Bless Nettie, too. I’m far better served than I deserve.’

  When we had finished dessert, Max suggested we go upstairs again. The fire had died down, and she rebuilt it, then sat on the rug, head on her knees, watching the fat pine take flame. ‘As soon as we were old enough, M.A. and I became Papa’s hostesses. After Mama died, he got a good housekeeper, but M.A. and I sat with him in the dining room every night, were with him when he entertained business guests. I think it was expected that eventually we would marry from the guest list. Money tends to marry money. And when Papa snapped his fingers, we did whatever he wanted us to do. He wasn’t beyond hitting us if we didn’t obey promptly. M.A. was deathly afraid of him. I suppose I was, too, but I pretended I wasn’t. I talked back to him, and he liked that. One didn’t show fear in front of Papa.’

  Something in Max willed me to turn from the fire and look into her eyes, grey, like the fog, the silver glints dimmed. She spoke in a low, chill voice. ‘Papa was a lecherous old roué. It killed my mother. But she submitted, poor darling, until her heart gave out, living with a man completely unprincipled. He killed M.A., too. He hated women, I think, but he wanted them. All of them. One night when I was away, he … She got away from him and ran out into the rain, and died of pneumonia. And anguish. I will never forgive him.’

  I shuddered. The fog seemed to be creeping into the room. It did not seem like May.

  ‘Sorry, Polly, darling Polly. Hate is a totally destructive emotion, I know that. But I hate him. I hope you will never have cause to hate anyone as I hate Papa. I would like to forgive him, but I don’t know how.’

  I stole another look at her. Her eyes burned, and I thought she had fever.

  ‘It’s extraordinary how I can hate Papa—and at the same time acknowledge that in my youth I wasn’t unlike him, completely indiscriminate in my affairs after my marriage broke up. What I did had little connection with love. And then I met Ursula. Blessed Ursula, who loved me and healed me. We have been good for each other. Nourishing. As your parents nourish each other.’

  Max comparing herself and Ursula to my parents? Was that possible?

  ‘Sandy trusted me enough to bring you over to me. I value that trust. I want never to hurt you. And I already have, haven’t I? Or vicious gossip has. People are assuming that because you are very dear to me, you are like me. The world being the way it is, they’d assume it even if I was straight as a pin.’

  ‘Never mind,’ I said clumsily. ‘They’re stupid.’ I thought of the girls from Mulletville who thought they were better than anybody else. To put themselves up, they had to put other people down.

  Max said, ‘I love you as I would have loved the daughter I couldn’t have. You don’t need a mother, you have a fine one. But every adolescent needs someone to talk to, someone to whom she is not biologically bound, and I serve that purpose. We are alike in our interests, you and I, but not in our ways of expressing our sexuality.’ She looked straight into my eyes. ‘Don’t be confused about yourself. You’re not a lesbian. I know.’

  I suppose, looking back on it, that it was brave, maybe even noble, of Max to tell me all this.

  She took a long brass wand and blew into the fire. The flames soared. She put the wand back, speaking as though to herself. ‘Bad hearts run in the Allaire family. Mama. M.A. My little—’ She broke off. ‘I have a heart as strong as an ox. What irony.’

  I didn’t understand the irony.

  A sudden crash of thunder cut across my thoughts. Almost daily thunderstorms are part of summer on Benne Seed Island. Five minutes of lightning and thunder and rain and the air would be cleared. This sudden storm would dissipate the fog.

  ‘Your father and Urs are friends, Polly. I don’t know whether or not they’ve talked about this, because it isn’t within the context of their interests, but I suspect your father knows.’

  I suspected that both my parents knew. That they knew before Xan and Kate brought it up at dinner.

  Max said, ‘I asked Ovid to light the fire in the green guest room to cut the damp. We’ll just wait till this storm is over.’ She took a soft wool blanket from the chaise longue and tucked it around me. I was overwhelmed by great waves of sleep, a reaction of shock from what Max had told me.

  ‘Little one,’ she said softly. ‘Let it go. You don’t have to bear it with me. It’s over. You
have a terrifying ability to enter into the experience of others, that’s why you’re such a good little actress. You feel things too deeply to bear them unless you can get them out of yourself through some form of art.’

  I closed my eyes and her words drifted away with the smoke.

  When I woke up, it seemed that a light was shining in my eyes. The fog had cleared, and the moonlight was coming through the windows. By its ancient light Max was looking at me, her eyes as bright and savage as a gull’s.

  But her voice was gentle. ‘Time for bed.’

  I staggered to my feet and followed her to the green guest room. The fire had died down to a glow, but it had taken the damp away, and the breeze coming in from the window was summery. I slipped into bed, and Max tucked the covers about me. I drifted back into sleep.

  In the morning I got up early, drank a glass of milk, drove the length of the Island to our house, and took the boat across the water to Cowpertown and the school bus.

  Stubbly grass was prickling against my cheek, and a hand moved gently across my hair. I opened my eyes and looked up at Zachary.

  “Have a nice nap?”

  I sat up and pushed my fingers through my hair. “I guess I’m not quite over jet lag yet. Sandy says it takes a day for each hour.”

  “Sandy? Who’s Sandy?” he asked suspiciously.

  “My uncle. He and Aunt Rhea are coming into Athens tomorrow, late afternoon, I think.”

  “Are you going to ditch me for them?”

  “We do have plans …”

  “Will you at least spend the day with me, Sleeping Beauty?”

  I probably looked a mess, with grass marks on my cheek and my hair sticking out in all directions, and here he was asking me to spend another day with him. “I’d love to spend the day with you.”

  “You cried out in your sleep,” Zachary said. “Listen, about whoever it was who hurt you, remember I’ve been hurt, too. It’s not a nice feeling. It takes the already shaky ego and shrivels it, like putting a match to a plastic bag. I’m not pushing you, Polly, but it really might help if you talked about it.”