Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

  Now, I am very good at untying knots and I always untie John’s knots for him and I started to say so, indignantly, but then I realized what John was doing and I shut my mouth, just in time. Aunt Elena bent over John’s shoe, and the tears that had been starting in her eyes went back, and when she handed John the shoe she smiled and looked like herself.

  “Where’s everybody?” John demanded.

  “Your mother’s out picking carrots,” Aunt Elena said.

  “Oh, no, not carrots again.” John groaned. “I wish Rob had never planted those carrots. Where’re the kids?”

  “Your Uncle Douglas took them for a walk.”

  “What’s for dinner—other than carrots? Carrot sticks this time, I hope. We had ’em cooked last night.” He went over to the stove, lifted the lid off a big saucepan, and sniffed. “Um, spaghetti. Garlic bread?”

  “But of course,” Aunt Elena said as Mother came in, her arms full of carrots.

  I was helping Mother scrape the carrots when there came the sounds of shouting and talking and then in they came, seeming like a whole horde of children instead of just three and Uncle Douglas.

  And a dark-haired little girl came dancing in, screaming shrilly, “You can’t catch me! You can’t catch me!” and went dancing around the table, Suzy and Rob after her, and, of course, Rochester came dashing in to see what was going on and knocked over a chair, and the little girl knocked over another chair, not because she was clumsy, like Rochester and me, but because she wanted to hear the crash.

  “All right,” Mother said, far more pleasantly than she would have if it had been just us or one of our friends from around here, “this furniture has to last us for quite a long while. Let’s keep the rougher kind of roughhousing for outdoors, shall we?”

  And the little girl paid absolutely no attention. “C’mon, Suzy, chase me!” she shrieked, and knocked over another chair.

  Mother’s voice was still pleasant but considerably firmer. “Maggy, I said not in here, please. Suzy and Rob, pick up the chairs. Maggy, you haven’t met John and Vicky yet. John and Vic, this is Margaret Hamilton.”

  John shook hands with her and said, “We’re glad you’ve come to stay with us for a while, Maggy.”

  Maggy looked him up and down and said, “Well, I don’t know if I’ll like living way out in the country,” in a sort of a disapproving way.

  I shook hands with her and she looked me up and down in the same way she had John and said, “You’re not as pretty as Suzy.”

  Now, this is true, but it wasn’t very tactful. Suzy is pretty and fluffy and she has curly blond hair, and I’m tall and skinny and my hair is sort of mousy and doesn’t have any curl at all and I cut off my braids when I went back to school this autumn and I wish I hadn’t. I know all this about myself, but I still got kind of red and unhappy when Maggy said that about Suzy and me.

  Uncle Douglas said quickly, “Remember the story of the ugly duckling, Maggy? Vicky’s going to be the swan of you all. Someday I’m going to paint her.”

  I could see that Maggy didn’t like that very much, because she flounced over to Suzy, saying, “C’mon, let’s go up to our room and play.” Even when she flounced she was graceful, sort of like a butterfly, and if you hadn’t known she wasn’t Aunt Elena’s daughter or any relation at all you would have thought Aunt Elena was her mother, because Maggy has the same shiny soft black hair and enormous dark eyes. Well, I guess that’s really all that’s alike, because under the flesh the bones are shaped differently. Aunt Elena’s features are strong and definite, and her nose has a high bridge. And Maggy’s face is soft and wistful, and her eyes are just a tiny bit almond-shaped.

  She and Suzy started to dash upstairs and Mother called Suzy back down and told her to set the table first, and that from now on Maggy could help her.

  “I don’t know how,” Maggy said flatly.

  “Suzy will show you.”

  “Sure,” Suzy said. “Come on, Maggy. How many tonight?”

  “Count,” Mother said automatically.

  “Six of us,” Suzy said, “and Maggy and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas is … is …”

  “Seventeen,” Rob said.

  “Nine,” Suzy said. “So we’ll have to put the leaves in the table.”

  John went to get the leaves, because they’re quite heavy, and there was a frantic scratching and a shrill barking, and Rochester bounded to the door, and we realized that Colette had been left out.

  “I’ll let her in,” I said. “I’ll be back in just a minute.” Usually, just before dinner is the nicest time of day, but this evening I suddenly wanted to be alone for a few minutes. Was it just because Maggy had reminded me that I am plain? Mother says that I’m getting very broody, and part of it is my age, and most of it is just me.

  I walked slowly around the house, with Colette prancing about me. It was nearly dark and lights were on in almost all the windows of the house and rectangles of light poured out onto the lawn. There were still a few leftover summer noises—a frog or an insect—and the air was clear and cold, and finally I had to run to keep warm and Colette began yipping and nipping at my heels in excitement, thinking I was playing a game just especially for her.

  Then there came the sound of the piano, coming clear and beautiful out into the night, and I knew that Aunt Elena must be in the living room, playing. When she’s with us she often sits at the piano and plays and plays and plays, but somehow I hadn’t expected her to this time, and it made me feel more the crying kind of unhappy than I’d felt since the phone call. It wasn’t that she was playing anything sad or anything—mostly it was Bach, I think—but just having her sit there at the piano, playing, and knowing that Uncle Hal would never hear her again made me want to go find Mother and put my head against her and howl.

  I stayed out, listening for a moment, and when I went back in the house things had calmed down considerably. Aunt Elena was still at the piano; Suzy and Maggy must have gone upstairs; Rob and Uncle Douglas were watching television in the study; and John and Mother were talking while Mother made the salad.

  “Vicky,” Mother said, “tell Rob he hasn’t put the napkins on the table yet and to come do it as soon as there’s an ad on.” Putting on the napkins and the table mats, when we don’t use a tablecloth, is Rob’s part of setting the table. Suzy does the silver and I do the china and glasses.

  I went in to tell Rob, and when he’d gone into the kitchen to do his job I sat down on the arm of Uncle Douglas’s chair.

  “Turn that thing down, Vicky,” he said. “It’s blasting my ears off.”

  I turned down the volume and then went and sat by Uncle Douglas again. “What’s on your mind, young lady?” he asked me.

  I did have something on my mind; I did want to talk to him; how did he always know? “Uncle Douglas,” I said, “why is it that John can show Aunt Elena he’s sorry about Uncle Hal and I can’t, and I’m so terribly, terribly sorry?”

  Uncle Douglas put his arm around me and his beard rubbed gently against my cheek. “Aunt Elena knows you’re sorry, dear.”

  “But why does John know what to say, and how to say it, and all I can do is act stupid, as though it didn’t matter?”

  “Just because it matters too much. Have you ever heard of empathy?”

  I shook my head.

  “John can show Aunt Elena how sorry he is because he has a scientific mind and he can see what has happened from the outside. All good scientists have to know how to be observers. He can be deeply upset about Uncle Hal and deeply sorry for Aunt Elena, but he can be objective about it. You can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you have an artistic temperament, Vicky, and I’ve never seen you be objective about anything yet. When you think about Aunt Elena and how she must be feeling right now, it is for the moment as though you were Aunt Elena; you get right inside her suffering, and it becomes your suffering, too. That’s empathy, and it’s something all artists are afflicted with.”

  “Are you?”


  “Sure. But I’m older than you are and I can cope with it better.”

  “But, Uncle Douglas, I’m not artistic. I haven’t any talent for anything.”

  Uncle Douglas patted me again. “Don’t worry, duckling. That will come, too.”

  Uncle Douglas can always make me feel more than I am, as though I were really somebody. It’s one of the very nicest things about him.

  Rob came in just then and turned the volume up on the TV again, so I kissed Uncle Douglas and went back out to the kitchen because I didn’t feel like watching cartoons.

  After a while Daddy came home and Mother told me to go up and tell Suzy and Maggy to wash their hands and get ready for dinner. I went into the bathroom with them to wash my hands, too. Suzy and Maggy were kind of giggling together while they washed up, as though they were sharing a secret they weren’t going to let me in on, but after she’d dried her hands Maggy turned to me and her eyes seemed to grow very dark and big and she said, “My father’s plane exploded yesterday.”

  “Yes,” I said. I thought I ought to say something else, but I didn’t know what else to say. You can’t just politely say “I’m sorry,” as though it were one of Rob’s toy airplanes.

  “If he hadn’t died he was going to take me to the ocean for two weeks and I did want to go.”

  Now I could say, “I’m sorry.”

  “People ought to be sorry for me,” Maggy said. “I’m an orphan.”

  “I’m sorry for you,” Suzy said earnestly. “I’m terribly sorry for you, Maggy.”

  “So you’ll be nice to me, won’t you?” Maggy asked.

  “Of course!”

  I was sorry for her; with my mind I was sorry for her, but I wasn’t feeling any empathy. And that was peculiar: here was Maggy, almost my age, only a couple of years younger, and her mother and father were both dead, and I couldn’t think of anything more horrible in the world; and Aunt Elena was a grownup, so of course I couldn’t feel about her the way I could about another girl. But it was Aunt Elena I ached over, and for Maggy I could feel only a strange bewilderment.

  Mother called us down for dinner then, and after dinner Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas left. The funeral was to be the next day, and Mother and Daddy were going down in the morning.

  Bedtime was even stranger than it had been the night before. Mother read to us in Suzy’s and my room, only now it wasn’t Suzy’s and my room, it was Suzy and Maggy’s room. Suzy and Maggy giggled together while Mother read, and when I told them to be quiet so the rest of us could hear, Maggy said, “My, but she’s bossy.”

  Suzy said, “I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself, Victoria Austin.”

  Rob said, “What for?”

  And John said, “For crying out loud, all of you kids shut up.”

  Mother didn’t say anything. She looked around at us with sort of a quizzical look on her face and went on reading.

  Rob went to sleep right away; he always does. I was allowed to read till nine, but even after I turned out the light I couldn’t sleep—partly, of course, because I’m older, but also, I wasn’t used to being in John’s bed. John has a big double bed, and Rob’s, which is across the foot of it, is much, much smaller.

  Rob has allergies and he often snores in the autumn, and he snored that night and it was a cold night again and he burrowed down under the covers and only a tuft of light brown hair showed and his snores sounded contented and comfortable. I could see him because we always have a night-light on in the bathroom all night, and it makes just enough light come into our bedrooms so you can see a little.

  I was just about to settle myself and try to go to sleep when John tiptoed in. He had on blue jeans and his heavy red jacket, and he came over to the bed and whispered, “Get dressed in something warm—you know, jeans or slacks—and come on down,” and disappeared.

  I got up and dressed and went down the back stairs into the kitchen and Mother was standing there in her polo coat and she said, “Get your jacket, Vicky. I thought maybe you and John and I might take some blankets and just go sit outside and watch the sky.”

  “Can we go up Hawk,” John asked, “and watch from the top of the ski trails?”

  Mother hesitated. “Let me check with Daddy.”

  Daddy was in the study reading an article in a medical magazine, and he said to go on, he wasn’t expecting any calls, but we’d better not stay more than half an hour; it was too cold, anyhow.

  So we got in the station wagon, with Colette in my lap and Mr. Rochester in back sitting on the three army blankets we’d brought, and drove to Hawk. Hawk is a beautiful mountain with ski trails and picnic places, and from the fire lookout you can see five states, and we love to go there. When we got out of the car Colette dashed out and barked madly and rushed around in circles the way she always does, and Mr. Rochester bounded around, and Mother and John spread one of the blankets out on the grass and we sat down on it and put one of the other blankets about our shoulders and the other one over our laps. Mother sat in the middle and both of us sat as close to her as we possibly could. The sky would probably have been just as beautiful if we’d sat on the north lawn at home, but we could have seen the lights of the village, and up on the mountain it seemed as though we were miles and miles from everywhere. The sky was enormous and terribly high. It’s a funny thing: the colder it gets, the farther away the sky seems and the farther off the stars look. The sky was so thick with them it was almost as though it had been snowing stars, and down below us there was a white fog, so it seemed as though we were looking out over a great lake. The Milky Way was a river of light, and John began pointing out the constellations, and I found the Big Dipper and the North Star and Cassiopeia’s Chair and Scorpio and Sagittarius. Sagittarius is my favorite because it’s my sign of the zodiac and I like the idea of aiming for the stars.

  Mother said, “I know you’re both very upset about Uncle Hal and Maggy’s father. We all are. I thought maybe if we came and looked at the stars it would help us to talk about it a little.”

  Just then a shooting star flashed across the sky, and John said, “There’s a shooting star and I don’t know what to wish. I want to wish it back to before yesterday and that none of this would have happened, but I know it wouldn’t work.”

  I said, “Mother, I don’t understand it,” and I began to shiver.

  Mother said, “Sometimes it’s very hard to see the hand of God instead of the blind finger of Chance. That’s why I wanted to come out where we could see the stars.”

  “I talked to Aunt Elena for a while,” John said, in a strained sort of voice, “when everybody else was busy. We took Mr. Rochester and Colette for a walk.” Mr. Rochester came up to us then and lay down beside me with a thud, putting his heavy head across my knees. Colette was already cuddled up in Mother’s lap. I looked toward John, and the lenses of his glasses glimmered in the starlight. “She said that she and Uncle Hal knew that they were living on borrowed time,” John said. “They’d always hoped it would be longer than it was, but the way their lives were, they only lived together in snatches, anyhow. And she said she was grateful for every moment she’d ever had with him, and, even if it was all over, she wouldn’t trade places with anybody in the world.”

  “She said that to you, John?” Mother asked.

  “Yes,” John said, and then another star shot across the sky, this time with a shower of sparks. We sat there, close, close, and it was as though we could feel the love we had for one another moving through our bodies, moving from me through Mother, from Mother to John, and back again. I could feel the love filling me, love for Mother and John, and for Daddy and Suzy and Rob, too. And I prayed, “Oh, God, keep us together, please keep us together, please keep us safe and well and together.”

  It was as though our thoughts were traveling to one another, too, because John said, “Oh, Mother, why do things have to change and be different!” He sounded quite violent. “I like us exactly the way we are, our family. Why do people have to die, and peop
le grow up and get married, and everybody grow away from each other? I wish we could just go on being exactly the way we are!”

  “But we can’t,” Mother said. “We can’t stop on the road of Time. We have to keep on going. And growing up is all part of it, the exciting and wonderful business of being alive. We can’t understand it, any of us, any more than we can understand why Uncle Hal and Maggy’s father had to die. But being alive is a gift, the most wonderful and exciting gift in the world. And there’ll undoubtedly be many other moments when you’ll feel this same way, John, when you’re grown up and have children of your own.”

  “I don’t understand about anything,” John said. “I don’t understand about people dying, and I don’t understand about families, about people being as close as we are, and then everybody growing up, and not having Rob a baby anymore, and having to go off and live completely different lives.”

  “But look how close Grandfather and I still are,” Mother said.

  John shook his head. “I know. But it isn’t the same thing. It’s not like when you were little.”

  “No,” Mother said. “But if I’d never grown up and met Daddy and married him you wouldn’t be here, or Vicky or Suzy or Rob, and we wouldn’t be sitting up here on Hawk Mountain shivering and looking at the stars. And we must have been here at least half an hour. Time to go home.”

  We went home and then we just stood outside for a while. The moon was sailing high now, and the sky was clear above the black pines at the horizon, with Northern Lights, which we hadn’t seen up on Hawk at all, sending occasional rays darting high up into the sky. Daddy had heard us drive up, and he came out and stood with us, his arm about Mother. I’d never seen such a startlingly brilliant night, the fields and mountains washed in a flood of light. The shadows of trees and sunflowers were sharply black and stretched long and thin across the lawn. It was so beautiful that for the moment the beauty was all that mattered; it wasn’t important that there were things we would never understand.