The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  The most moving moment is when everybody receives the bread and wine, each person spontaneously holding out hands. This is the Church which I affirm, and the mystery by which I live.

  Clara has prepared a sumptuous lunch, and she and Mary, our neighbor across the road, have been bringing in meals for the entire household. They have been doing acts of kindness for us for many years. I never thought I would be too tired to cook, but I have been very grateful to have this chore taken care of.

  Maria and Peter will stay with the children while Jo and Alan and Bion and I go South for the funeral; Hugh is tied to New York by his television job. I know that I can count on Clara and Mary; Margie and Cynthia and Vicki and Janet and Jane will all be there when needed. I can go South without any sense of being pulled back to Crosswicks. This is the last journey I will make with my mother, and it is a strange one.

  When we reach Jacksonville and drive from the airport into town, there is the familiar smell of salt air from the ocean, with a tinge of sulphur from the paper mill. The great wings of the palms droop rustily.

  Mother’s rooms are full of her presence; and yet they are somehow empty.

  It is fearfully hot.

  The psalmist cries out his anguish: My sight faileth for very trouble; Lord, I have called daily upon thee, I have stretched forth my hands unto thee. Dost thou show wonders among the dead? or shall the dead rise up again, and praise thee? Shall thy loving-kindness be showed in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wondrous works be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land where all things are forgotten?

  O God. O God.

  To the ancient Hebrew the ultimate hell consisted in being forgotten, erased from the memory of family and tribe, from the memory of God. If God forgets you, it is as though you have never existed. You have no meaning in the ultimate scheme of things. Your life, your being, your ousia, is of no value whatsoever. You are a tale told by an idiot; forgotten; annihilated.

  I will never forget my mother. I do not think that my children will forget their grandmother. Perhaps the little girls will not remember their great-grandmother with “the vivid image and the very scene” but they are not likely to forget that they knew her, and shared in her last summer. They may absorb some of the things we have told them about Gracchi, so that these stories become part of their ousia. But their children? And their children’s children?

  And what of Greatie? And Mado?

  How many people have been born, lived rich, loving lives, laughed and wept, been part of creation, and are now forgotten, unremembered by anybody walking the earth today?

  Our memories are, at best, so limited, so finite, that it is impossible for us to envisage an unlimited, infinite memory, the memory of God. It is something I want to believe in: that no atom of creation is ever forgotten by him; always is; cared for; developing; loved.

  My memory of Mother, which is the fullest memory of anybody living, is only fragmentary. I would like to believe that the creator I call God still remembers all of my mother, knows and cares for the ousia of her, and is still teaching her, and helping her to grow into the self he created her to be, her integrated, whole, redeemed self.

  One of the canons of St. John’s in Jacksonville comes to the house to talk about arrangements for the funeral, which the dean is very kindly permitting Alan to conduct. The dean is on vacation and offered to return, but he is tired and I do not want to interrupt his rest, and I want Alan to say the final words over the mortal body of my mother.

  The young clergyman says that at his cathedral they “like to emphasize the joyful, Resurrection aspect of a funeral,” and I find myself saying, probably too passionately, that this is fine as long as the Crucifixion comes first, that we can’t have a Resurrection without the Crucifixion. Alan says that the Resurrection is more terrible than the Crucifixion, and this is probably why it is so difficult for us to accept. Certainly neither one is bearable without the other. Right now I am caught between the two.

  The young man says that we must use the funeral service in the new, trial liturgy. At least half the people in the church on Monday will be over seventy, brought up in the tradition of Cranmer, on the strong language of the Prayer Book. I do not see why it should be taken away from them at this moment, but the young canon does not understand, so I dutifully look through the new service.

  I do not want to hear the usual overfamiliar psalms suggested. From the few permissible ones I choose Out of the deep have I called unto thee. The young man then tells me that “we like to sing Easter hymns at our funerals.” I tell him that I do not want Easter hymns at my mother’s funeral. It is too soon. I am not ready for Easter yet. I have not even had time to weep. He gives me a small list of allowable hymns, and I choose A mighty fortress is our God. Strength is what I am looking for, and the courage to hope. I feel frustrated by what seems to me to be, if not the mortuary mentality, at least sentimentality in this attitude toward death.

  Then I remember the Requiem in the living room of Crosswicks. The Church was there. And it was in the dining room afterward, when we all shared the food prepared by our neighbors. No sentimentality there. Only the fortifying truth of love.

  The funeral is to be Monday. We are all very tired. I am so tired that I am confused. I feel the way an actor does after too many consecutive performances of the same play: telling everybody (and the phone and doorbell have rung constantly) the same things over and over again, until I begin to forget lines, stumble over words. I miss my husband.

  Bion is having a rough time with a really wicked headache. He stretches out on the couch in the living room and plays Mother’s records, until never again will I hear Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto without remembering this time. We go to Pat’s for dinner, and she gives him a going over, and says that the combination of a very red throat, plus heat, plus tension, is enough to give him a clobbering headache. Nevertheless, he keeps going.

  In a sense, getting Mother back now is going to be the hardest part of letting her go. We go to the funeral home to make final arrangements.

  Again I feel trapped; I am plunged into the same atmosphere of unreality and evasion and sentimentality that I felt in the funeral home in Connecticut. Here in this house of death it is impossible to think about the enormity and magnitude of death and the mystery of my mother’s empty body. One of the funeral-home managers takes me into the small parlor where my mother’s body is coffined; he bows solemnly and leaves me alone.

  I stand and look at the casket. I try to say goodbye; in somewhat the same way that I would put a sentence at the end of a sonnet; but this sonnet was completed a long time ago, and so were my goodbyes. What I am bidding farewell to now is not this remnant of decaying flesh, but the ousia of my mother, an ousia beyond my comprehension. And I am also saying goodbye to all the bad things of the last years and particularly the last weeks. They, too, are part of the mystery.

  When we leave the air-conditioned chill of the funeral home and step out into the brilliant, burning, tropical sunlight, it is like moving out of falsehood into reality.

  On Sunday we go downtown to St. John’s for the eleven o’clock service. There, where it is not possible for me to cry, I come near to flooding. This is the church where Mother was baptized, confirmed; from where, after the long Lenten services, she went to visit the families of the great-uncles who lived one at each corner; their homes are gone now, were gone when I was baptized here. So is the original church, which burned in the great fire. I know almost nobody in the pews.

  I trickle tears during a good deal of the service, but they are quiet, controlled tears.

  I do not know how to say goodbye. All I can say, within my heart, is, “I love you, Mother.”

  Monday. The funeral. I have moved again into that strange, cold, anesthetized place where feelings are frozen. The tears which were brimming on Sunday are no longer there.

  The best part of belonging to my enormous Southern family has been their response to Mother’s
death. I am moved beyond words by the gift of a jar of freshly made donax soup. This delicacy, which was part of all my childhood visits, has become a rarity; there are few donax left; it is a real gift of love.

  Many of our closest friends and relatives are away, during the fiercest heat of summer, but there are nevertheless several hundred people in the church, people of all kinds, colors, ages. I feel their love for my mother, and I share in it because I am her child.

  It cannot be easy for Alan to take this funeral, but his voice is strong and clear. I listen to the powerful words. Bion is on one side of me; Josephine on the other. Bion takes my hand in his large one and holds it firmly. When we come to A mighty fortress, his young baritone is strong and never falters.

  We go out to the cemetery. I am moving through a strange, cold place where I do what has to be done, say what has to be said. There are people to be spoken to, thanked. I repeat how grateful I am that Mother died when she did, and that the problem of the old people’s home never really had to come up.

  This Southern cemetery is familiar to me, not as familiar as to Mother, but still familiar. My grandmother is buried here; my father; my grandfather, in that order. I have been here for the burials of many friends and relatives. When I first came with Mother to bring flowers, to tend flowers, to take away wilted flowers, I was struck by the poignant sight in the family plots of many tiny stones, marking the burial places of infants and small children. I see again the four small stones with dates all within one week—those children dead of an epidemic, nearly all of a family wiped out.

  The heat of the sun beats down on us.

  The words of the burial service are familiar to me, are part of my roots. One of the undertaker’s men gives Alan what seems to be a synthetic clod of dirt to throw on the coffin, and suddenly the master of ceremonies—I don’t know what else to call him—comes to me and takes my arm to move me away from the open grave.

  None of us expected this. I start to pull away from his unwelcome, uncomforting hand. But Mother, that courteous Southern gentlewoman, would certainly not be pleased if I make a scene here at the cemetery, refuse to leave her grave until the coffin is lowered into the ground and covered with earth. There is symbolic meaning to being with a person you love all the way through to the end; there is validity in waiting while the coffin is let down into the open grave, in honoring someone’s mortal frame all the way. This is what I want to do, what I had expected to do, and cannot now, for Mother’s sake, do. I go meekly and helplessly with the professional mourner who would take me away; I do not jerk away from his unctuous hand, but let him lead me to the black graveyard car.

  I’ve written three poems to help push me through all this. The words which come out help to assure me that there may be God, after all. Perhaps whenever we have felt his presence for a while he must remove it, and by his absence force us to take the next step.

  2

  It is another summer, and much has happened. There has been the strange experience of assimilating Mother’s things into our household, into Josephine and Alan’s. The portrait Mother loved is in the place of honor in my study, the Morse portrait of my forebears, the two young women in Charleston, one playing the flute, the other the harp.

  And yet—when we went for a flying visit down South to see Pat, and drove by the street which led to the river and Mother’s home for thirty-seven years, I felt that if we drove down the street and went in, it would all be the same, the portrait in the living room, with the marble coffee table under it, and Mother sitting out on the little porch, watching the clouds over the St. Johns River.

  I have not yet cried properly, and perhaps I never will; there has never been the right time or the right place. When I have felt like tears, I have had to hold them back; when it has been possible for me to let go, the tears would not come.

  A portrait of Mother, painted when she was four, is now hanging in Crosswicks, and looks amazingly like Charlotte, who looks amazingly like Alan: intermixture and interdependence.

  Léna looks at it and says to me, “You don’t have a mother now. But you’re my mother’s mother. Where is your mother?”

  The pattern has shifted; we have changed places in the dance. I am no longer anybody’s child. I have become the Grandmother. It is going to take a while to get used to this unfamiliar role. It is not so much with my actual grandchildren, Léna and Charlotte, that I feel the difference, but one generation down, with Alan and Josephine; Peter and Maria; Bion. While they called my mother Grandmother, she held the position. Now it has suddenly become mine, and I don’t want it, but I will have to accept it, not as matriarchy—our men are all far too dominant for any of us on the distaff side to assume the matriarchal role—but as a change of pattern, the steps of the dance shifting.

  The rhythm of the fugue alters; the themes cross and recross. The melody seems unfamiliar to me, but I will learn it.

  The children grow in all ways. Their vocabulary advances in leaps and bounds. I am no longer Madden or Gan-mad-len. When they are formal with me, I am Grandmadeleine. Mostly it is Gran. Occasionally Charlotte rushes up to me and flings her arms around me. “Granny, Granny, Granny.”

  One night I put them to bed, and after all the songs and stories they beg for two last songs. “Long ones.”

  So I start the Ballad of Barbara Allen. I have sung only a couple of verses when Charlotte says, her voice quivering slightly, “Gran, you know that’s a bad one.”

  “What, Charlotte?”

  “You know that’s a bad one.”

  Both Barbara Allen and her young man are dead and buried at the end of the ballad; I ask, “Why, Charlotte? Because it’s sad?”

  “No! Because she didn’t love anybody.”

  Charlotte knows what it is all about. The refusal to love is the only unbearable thing.

  Another time, when Josephine and Alan are away, I tell the rest of the family that I’ll put the little girls to bed and go to bed early myself and finish reading a manuscript. We’ve had a very happy evening; the little girls—no longer babies—and I had a long bath hour before dinner; we had a lovely meal, with the menu chosen by the children: chicken salad and peas. I added potato salad and a big green salad. It’s warm this evening, so the mostly cold meal was just right.

  After dinner the children and I sing songs and tell stories while I get them into their nightgowns, and all is comfortable and familiar and safe and loving. We go into the bathroom to brush teeth and wash faces, and suddenly Léna looks at me and asks, “Grandmadeleine, is it all right?”

  Slightly taken aback, in much the same way I was in the Tower when she pointed to the couch and said, “You won’t be needing that any more,” I answer, “Yes, Léna, it’s all right.”

  “But, Gran, is everything really all right? Really?” It is completely cosmic questioning, coming from a small girl in a white nightgown with a toothbrush in her hand, sensing the unfamiliar surrounding the familiar. It is warm and light in the house, but the greater the radius of light, the wider the perimeter of darkness.

  “Yes, Léna,” I answer again. I think of Greatie fleeing a burning house as shots spattered the water about the little boat, and years later being rowed down that same river to visit the African princess. I think of Mado, holding a dying Yankee boy in her arms, her love and compassion concentrated wholly on his need, despite her own bereavement. I think of my mother watching her husband cough his lungs out in the cold light of the Alps, and of my father setting his name down on the empty page of the diary for the new year. It was not a tranquil world for my grandchildren’s forebears, and it is in the lives of these long-gone men and women that I find the answer to Léna’s question. I must answer it for her, looking down at her serious, upturned face, and I can answer truthfully only if I have my feet planted very firmly on rock.

  I think of the warmth of the rock at the brook, and that I will never know more than a glimpse of the ousia of the small green frog—or of my mother—or of the two little girls—

&nbs
p; and this is all right, too.

  “Is it really all right?” Léna persists.

  “Yes, Léna, it is all right.”

  And the two little girls and I climb into the four-poster bed to sing songs and tell stories.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Crosswicks Journals

  1 … The Night Is Far Spent

  New York.

  Two o’clock in the morning. A thin, chill November rain is falling. I stand at the dining-room window, holding a comforting mug of hot bouillon, and look out at the never-wholly-asleep city. A taxi moves slowly along West End Avenue. A young woman walks down the middle of 105th Street with a very large Great Dane. My Irish setter is asleep in the bedroom; he knows that it is much too early to get up.

  I enjoy these occasional spells of nocturnal wakefulness, and I am never awake alone. Across West End Avenue there is an apartment building where the eleventh-floor windows are always lit, no matter what time it is. This night, in another building, someone is studying by a single light bulb suspended from the ceiling. The Hudson River is visible through television aerials and between two tall apartment buildings on Riverside Drive. Ours is a restricted view, but it is a view, nevertheless, and I love it. There is a small ship, a freighter, I think, moving slowly along the dark water, its lights both warmly greeting and mysterious. What looks like a star grows brighter and reveals itself to be a plane coming in to land at La Guardia; but there is a star left behind in the wake of the plane, a pale city star.

  I sip hot bouillon and feel relaxed and at peace at this beginning of a new year—a new year for me. I have had another birthday, and this is always like opening a brand-new journal to the first page, or putting a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter as I start a new book; it is all ahead of me, clear and bright, the first smudges and mistakes not yet made. I know that they will come, and soon—I don’t think I’ve ever typed a full page without making at least one error; however, beginnings are always exciting and full of hope.