A House Like a Lotus

by Madeleine L'engle

  She opened the next-to-last door on the left, which led into a pleasant room with twin beds, two desks with shelves for books, and two narrow chests of drawers. It was what I imagined a college dorm would be like, except for the dim bars of light on the floor, filtering through the closed shutters, which spoke of the tropics.

  Norine heaved my bag onto one of the beds, then opened the shutters. The windows were already wide open, and I followed her onto a balcony which looked across terraced gardens to the Mediterranean Sea. It was different from Greece, but equally glorious.

  “You like it?”

  “It’s absolutely lovely!”

  She beamed at me, then glanced into the room. “See, you have been sent coals to Newcastle.”

  Not understanding, I looked into the room and saw a vase of hothouse flowers on the desk by the window. A small white envelope was clipped to one of the stems. I opened it and pulled out a card, and read: JUST SO YOU WON’T FORGET ME. ZACHARY.

  I could feel myself blushing. Nobody had ever sent me flowers before; the ones at the King George had come from the management and didn’t count. I put my face down to sniff them to hide my hot cheeks.

  Norine laughed. “It seems that someone likes you. I may call you Polyhymnia? You will call me Norine?”

  “I’d love to call you Norine, but call me Polly, please, Polly with two l’s.”

  “But Polyhymnia is a Greek name and she was one of the Muses—”

  “I know, but plain Polly takes a lot less explaining.”

  “As you like.” She sounded disappointed. “Since you are here first, you will have the choice of bed, desk, chest. You would like the window side?”

  It was hardly a question. Fortunately, I would like the window side. “Thank you.”

  She looked down at the beds, which were unmade, showing mattresses with grey-and-white ticking. A bed pad, sheets, pillowcase, towel, facecloth, were in a neat pile in the center of each bed. “It will be very helpful, Polly, if you will make the beds. Most of the delegates will have been traveling for many hours and will be very tired.”

  I can’t say that making beds is my favorite job in the world, but I’m certainly used to it. I’ve done it often enough at home, particularly before the little kids were old enough to do their own. “Of course, I’ll be glad to,” I said.

  Norine handed me a key on a leather thong. “This is the master key. We keep the rooms locked, because sometimes the tourists come snooping around, not realizing that this is a dormitory. They are not dangerous, only a nuisance, particularly those who go in for topless bathing. It upsets the villagers.” I nodded. “If you are tired, don’t try to make all the beds this afternoon. Just a few. You can finish tomorrow, or the next day. We are sorry it is so unseasonably hot. This heat wave began today. We hope it will break before the delegates arrive.” She pulled open a desk drawer, and there was a box of matches and a mosquito coil. Norine started to explain, but I told her that I knew all about mosquito coils. Even with screens everywhere, the little kids are constantly running in and out, so we have to use mosquito coils a lot.

  “Okeydokey, that is good. You can help me explain them to the delegates. This heat has brought the insects out, the night ones especially. Even with the coil, you will have to pull the shutters to at night.” She snapped on a fan that was on the inner desk. “It helps a little. When you are in your room, you can leave the door open for cross-drafts. Now I go for my siesta. The staff will have a meeting at five o’clock this afternoon, before the evening meal. I will come for you to show you the way.”

  “Thank you.”

  As briskly as she had come in, she left, and I could hear her clip-clopping along the tile floor of the long corridor.

  I moved back to the desk with the bouquet of flowers from a florist. Even if Norine was right, and sending flowers to a flower-filled place like Osia Theola was coals to Newcastle, I was thrilled with them. I checked to see that they had enough water, and moved the vase so that they would not get the direct heat of the sun. Then I looked around the room. There was an open closet near the entrance, and on the shelf above it were grey wool blankets. I doubted that we’d need them, unless the weather changed radically. There were four wire hangers on the rod, and I was glad Max had told me to bring hangers of my own. ‘You’ll have plenty at the King George, but not in Osia Theola unless I’m very much mistaken.’

  The sun was streaming into the room from the balcony, which ran the length of the building, with high, stucco dividers between each room for privacy. There were two folding canvas chairs leaning against the wall, and I opened one and stretched out. I looked appreciatively at the view, across terraces planted with vegetables and vines, and windmills turning in the breeze; and then my gaze traveled on to the sparkling of the sea below. It was too hot to stay out in the sun for long, so I went back into the room, sniffed the fragrance of Zachary’s flowers, and then unpacked, putting my notebook on the desk nearest the window; my books on the shelf; my underclothes in one of the chests of drawers; hanging my clothes in my half of the closet, leaving the four wire hangers for my roommate from Zimbabwe.

  Once I was completely unpacked, I made up the two beds in my room. Then I took the master key and went into the hall, and opened the door of the room next to mine. It was stiflingly hot. I opened the windows while I made the beds. By the time I had done that room, and two others down the hall, I was dripping with sweat. I decided that in this heat four rooms, eight beds, were enough for a while. I felt suddenly very lonely, and at the same time I was grateful that I was going to have these first few days in the room by myself. I’ve never had a roommate. Mother says there are so many of us it’s important that we each have our own room, even if it’s no more than a cubicle.

  I opened my notebook and started to describe the room and the view, to paint in words the Conference Center of sun-gilded stone and ancient buildings. Since the notebook was for school, I didn’t mention Zachary’s flowers.

  I wrote about Krhis, Kumar Krhishna Ghose, with his gentle tan face with the long lines moving down from his eyes, and the smile that belied the sadness. Why wouldn’t he be sad? seeing his family shot and killed. He hadn’t pushed me to talk on the drive from Larnaca, and the silences between us had been good silences.

  I described Norine Fong Mar, from Hong Kong, tiny and bossy. Krhis wasn’t bossy at all, so perhaps he needed an assistant who was. Krhis was quiet; there was no static. Norine had considerable static. She was not calm inside, like Krhis. I wasn’t, either.

  Miss Zeloski, I thought, was going to enjoy my notebook. And if it hadn’t been for Max, Miss Zeloski and I would never have become friends.

  I shut the notebook. I was as hot as though I were at home. My fingers were making smudges on the paper. I went back to the balcony. There were no screens, just the long windows and the wooden shutters. I pulled the deck chair into the shade of the divider and stretched out. The light breeze from the sea, and the moving air from the fan in the room, met and blew across me. I slid into sleep.

  The breeze from the Mediterranean blew over me, blew through the window of the car in which I was sitting. No. Not the Mediterranean breeze, but a stronger wind from the Atlantic, spattering me with raindrops as I sat huddled in Ursula Heschel’s car, parked outside Beau Allaire. I sat there in the humid hothouse of the car and waited. What else could I do? It was still pouring, although the electrical storm had passed over. I couldn’t walk very far—I noticed blood and saw that I’d cut my foot on a broken shell, a deep, ragged gash. All I had on was a too-small, very wet nightgown.

  I felt tired as though I had been running for hours. A wave of sleep washed over me, and I gave in to it, as into death.

  Ursula woke me. ‘Polly. Child. You’d better come in.’

  I didn’t want to wake up.

  ‘Polly. Come.’

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘No,’ Ursula said.

  ‘Please. I want to go home.’

  ‘I can’t ta
ke you this way. Your nightgown is soaked. Your parents are expecting you to spend the night here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Polly, child, I know that you are shocked and horrified by what happened. I am, too.’

  I couldn’t hear Ursula’s shock, or any but my own. ‘Please take me home.’

  Ursula got in the driver’s side of the car and sat beside me but did not touch me. ‘Child, I’m sorrier than I can say for what Max—’

  A funny little mewling noise came out of me, but no words.

  ‘Poor child. Poor little one.’ Ursula lifted one hand as though to pet me, then drew back. ‘It wasn’t Max doing any of—of what she did. It was pain and alcohol and fear …’ I didn’t answer, and there was a long silence. Finally Ursula spoke in a low voice. ‘Max, unlike the true alcoholic, will not sleep it off and forget what happened. She will remember everything. I wish she could forget. I wish you could.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Come.’ Ursula spoke with her authoritarian doctor’s voice.

  I followed her in. I didn’t see Max.

  ‘What’s wrong with your foot?’

  I looked down, and there was blood on the soft green of the Chinese rug. ‘I cut it, on a shell, I think.’

  Ursula took me into the kitchen, washed my foot, and bandaged it. Warmed some milk. I took a sip and nearly threw up.

  ‘I’m going to give you a mild sedative,’ she said.

  ‘No—Daddy—’

  ‘I agree with your father. I do not use a sedative unless I consider it absolutely necessary. You must get some sleep.’

  I don’t remember how we got from the kitchen to the green guest room. It was as though fog had rolled in from the ocean and obliterated everything.

  ‘I’ve brought you a nightgown,’ Ursula said, and helped me into it, much simpler than Max’s satin one, but more elegant than my old seersucker.

  Did she kiss me good night? I don’t think she touched me. The sedative must have been working. Everything was blurred. I thought I heard someone crying, but I wasn’t sure whether the sound came from me or from Max.

  I closed my eyes.

  Saw Max running after me with the Laughing Christ cradled like a baby in her arms, saw the statue fall, crashing, down an endless flight of stairs—

  My scream woke me.

  A woman came hurrying toward me from the path which ran just below the balconies. “Hoy! What’s wrong?”

  I looked at her in confusion as she jumped up onto the balcony. “I think I had a nightmare.”

  “This heat is enough to give you one. You’re Polly O’Keefe, aren’t you? I’m Virginia Porcher.” She pronounced it the French way, Por-shay.

  “Oh—Mrs. Porcher—I love your writing—”

  “Not Mrs. Porcher. Virginia. Or Vee, as most people call me. We’re all on a first-name basis here. You’ll understand why when you hear the last names of some of the delegates—they make me understand why most people pronounce my last name as though it were the back porch. Simplify, simplify. And I understand you prefer being called Polly to Polyhymnia?”

  I smiled at her. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I think you could probably carry Polyhymnia, but I sympathize. Polly. Krhis tells me you’ll be helping me with the writing workshop, among your many other chores.”

  “Yes, anything I can do to help, anything at all.”

  “I expect there’ll be a good deal. I hope this heat breaks. It’s not at all seasonable. It’s usually pleasantly warm during the day, and cool at night, by late September. Weather all over the world seems to be changing drastically. Why don’t you come along to my room? Since I’m a workshop leader, I have the privilege of a room to myself. Krhis will have a folder for you at the staff meeting, but I thought you might like a preview of the schedule.” She was chatting away, giving me time to wake up, to move out of the horror of the nightmare.

  Virginia Bowen Porcher, one of my favorite writers, who wrote novels about people who were flawed but with whom you could identify, dealing with all aspects of the human being, the dark as well as the light, but never leaving you in a pit of despair. And in the simplest possible words and images she wrote poems which seemed almost light on the surface, and then, when you backed away from them, the fact that they were neither light nor simple kicked you in the teeth. Max compared Porcher’s work to Mozart. When I told Miss Zeloski that Virginia Porcher was leading a workshop, that in itself was enough to get Miss Zeloski to urge the principal to let me take the month away from school.

  And here Virginia Porcher was asking me to call her by her first name, and looking—well! Now that I had recovered enough from the nightmare to look at her, I saw that she had red hair. Not blatantly red like mine; it was much more subtle. But still, it was red. She had green eyes, really green, as my eyes are really blue. She wore a full cotton skirt with a tiny millefiori print, and a peasant blouse.

  Meeting one of your favorite writers in the world can be scary. It’s so easy to be let down. But I felt elated. I liked her, liked her as well as admired her. And she had red hair.

  Her room was almost identical to mine. One of the twin beds was covered with books and papers. “My filing system.” She picked up a blue folder, opened it, and handed it to me, and I looked at the typed schedule. Three workshops in the morning, with an hour before lunch for swimming. An hour for lunch, an hour for rest, and three more workshops in the afternoon. The evening meal. An evening program. A full schedule, indeed. The writing workshop was the first one of the day, at nine in the morning.

  “This weather knocks out swimming at noon.” Virginia Porcher sat on her bed, indicating the desk chair for me. “It’s a twenty-minute walk to the sea, and it’s much too hot under the broiling noonday sun. I’ve been taking my swim at bedtime, but Krhis won’t be able to come with me now that the staff is all here. He’ll have his hands full. This is a glorious place for a conference, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, looking around the room. On one of the desks was a picture of a man with dark hair and a kind, sensitive face. He must be her husband. He looked like the right kind of person to be married to one of my favorite writers.

  “My sister-in-law, who’s holding the fort at home, asked, ‘Why Cyprus?’ and I told her it’s more or less a mean point geographically for the delegates. But, also, if the conference were being held in—say, Detroit—I wouldn’t have accepted the invitation to lead a workshop. Krhis says you’ve had a week in and around Athens?”

  “Yes. The Iliad and the Odyssey—all the Greek myths —everything means much more to me than it did. I’m overawed.”

  “That’s a good reaction. So am I. No matter how many times I come to Greece or the islands, I’m swept out of the limited world of technocracy and into the wildness of gods and goddesses and centaurs and nymphs. We’ll have a full moon this weekend and you’ll understand anew why the moon has so often been an object of worship. The moon goddess, beneficent while she is waxing, harsh while she is waning. Astarte fascinates me. She was a Syrian goddess, but her worship spread to Greece. Aphrodite is, I guess, her Greek counterpart, though she isn’t as much associated with the moon. So. How is Ursula Heschel?”

  That startled me. “Fine, I guess. You know her?”

  “I’m one of her more remarkable miracles. I had an aneurism which would have been inoperable before microsurgery, and even with all science now knows, it was a risky business. It was a long surgical procedure, and a very long recovery, and Ursula and I became friends. And then, of course, I met Max. And through Urs and Max I met Krhis Ghose when he was in New York. A conference like this tends to be very small-worldy. You’re here because of Max, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.” Beneficent while waxing, harsh while waning.

  “How old are you?”

  “Nearly seventeen. I’m a slow developer.”

  Virginia Porcher stretched out long, suntanned legs, wriggling her toes under the sandal straps. “I was, too. Still am. Some people say that we slow de
velopers end up going further than the quick-flowering ones.”

  I nodded. I hoped she was right.

  “Are you interested in writing?”

  “I don’t think so. I enjoy it, but I’m not passionate about it. I like acting, really a lot, but I know it’s an awfully chancy field. What I’m best at is languages, but I don’t want to be a teacher, and I don’t think I want to be a simultaneous translator at the UN because I’m an island girl.”

  “Manhattan’s an island.”

  “Oh. I guess I mean small islands with low-density population.”

  She laughed, a nice, warm laugh, not at all at me. “You still have time. Sometimes it’s not an advantage to have too many talents.” She reached down to scratch a bite on her leg. “Watch out for the bugs here. They’re not bad during the day, but they’re monstrous at night, and they love American blood.”

  “I’m pretty used to bugs,” I said. “Benne Seed Island’s off South Carolina—so I’m used to heat, too.”

  “You’ll find”—she nodded—“when the delegates arrive that you’ll be spending these next weeks with people who have experienced a great deal of life under conditions where personal freedom as we know it is hardly even a dream. When I fuss because the bathwater here is tepid, it chastens me when I remember that some of the delegates don’t even have indoor plumbing. This dormitory building is going to seem wildly luxurious to most of them.” She stood up. “I’ve got work to do now before we meet at five. By the way, a word of warning.” I paused by the door. “The tap water here is quite saline, and you won’t be able to drink much of it. And this heat that clamped down on us today isn’t supposed to let up for a while. There’s a little shop outside the monastery gates and up the hill where you can buy sodas. And if you have any other questions, trivial or cosmic, don’t hesitate to ask me.”

  “Thanks,” I said, still feeling too shy about calling Virginia Bowen Porcher by her first name to call her anything. “Thanks a lot.”