Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

The Scream in the Office

  I had thought, getting into bed after we came down from Hawk, that now everything was beginning to straighten out, that things would get back to the way they always were. But I guess it was just because I wanted to think it. And maybe it wasn’t just Uncle Hal. Maybe it was because John was fifteen and I was twelve and everything was ready to change anyhow.

  The first thing that happened was that I woke out of a deep sleep with my ears filled with ear-splitting screams. I sat up in bed, still so sleepy that I didn’t know what was going on, only that something awful must be happening. The light switched on in Mother and Daddy’s room, and then in the guest room, where John was, and I heard feet hurrying into the room where Suzy and Maggy were, and the screams went right on. I flung myself out of bed and ran in, too, my heart pounding, and Maggy was sitting up in bed screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Daddy said, “John, Vicky, go back to your rooms.” When Daddy speaks that way, we hop. I heard him saying, “Margaret, you are to stop screaming by the time I count to three.” He counted slowly, “One, two, three,” and Maggy was quiet as suddenly as though Daddy had turned off a faucet, and then she bellowed, “My mother’s dead and my father’s dead and you should be sorry for me!”

  Daddy’s voice was very quiet, but I could hear every word. “Maggy, no matter what bad things happen to us—and very bad things have happened to you—we still have to have a certain amount of consideration for other people. There are six people in this house besides you who are trying to sleep and who need their sleep. Suppose you come downstairs with me for a few minutes and we will see if we can’t get you calmed down. Meanwhile, Suzy, I want you to go back to sleep. Maggy is not going to make any more disturbances tonight.”

  Daddy kept Maggy downstairs for quite a while; I was half asleep when I heard them coming back up. There wasn’t a sound out of Maggy as Daddy tucked her in, and after the light went out in Mother and Daddy’s bedroom a moment later, there wasn’t another sound that night.

  In the morning Mother had on a dark dress instead of a skirt and sweater, and she and Daddy drove us to school instead of letting us walk down the half mile to the school bus as usual. This was so they could introduce Maggy to Suzy’s teacher. They’d had a talk with the principal the evening before and decided that Maggy would start in Suzy’s grade; it would make it easier for her to be in with someone she knew. Mother and Daddy said they’d be back in time for dinner and that I was to start the potatoes, and John and I were to take care of the little ones. Rob was at a neighbor’s until I got home from school; I was to pick him up on my way. I felt distinctly nervous about an afternoon with Maggy without Mother and Daddy, and I had a feeling that John did, too.

  After school, Maggy and Suzy and I got off the school bus and started up the hill to our house. John goes to the Regional High School and he doesn’t get home till after four, so I had over an hour to be in charge and I didn’t like the idea a bit. Suzy will do what John says, but she almost always argues with me or just doesn’t pay attention. And with Maggy to boss her around, heaven knew what she’d do. I felt distinctly trepidatious.

  We stopped for Rob. He had Elephant’s Child with him. As usual. Elephant’s Child is an elephant that used to be blue but is now gray—a more ordinary color for elephants, anyhow—and it has a music box inside that plays Brahms’s Lullaby, and Rob adores it. He’s had it since he was a baby, and he’s always been very careful of it and never over-wound it, and it still played all of its tune—something that Suzy’s and my music-box toys never did, because we always managed to break them.

  As soon as Maggy saw Elephant’s Child she wanted to hold it. Now, maybe it wasn’t very generous of Rob to say no, and pull away, and hold Elephant’s Child even closer to him, but in his place I think I’d have felt exactly the same way.

  Maggy pouted, but she didn’t say anything and kept on walking up the hill, just behind Rob. When we were almost at the house she reached out and grabbed Elephant’s Child and raced on ahead with it, laughing in a horrid, screechy way, keeping just out of reach of Rob and winding the key to make Elephant’s Child play.

  Suzy didn’t say anything, but she looked troubled. Rob howled. I was no good at all, because both Rob and Maggy were making so much noise no one could hear me. Finally I made myself heard over the din. “Give it to him, Maggy, please!” Maggy flung Elephant’s Child in the vague general direction of Rob, and it landed in the middle of a barberry bush. Rob plunged in after it, getting all scratched up and howling louder. I finally managed to get everybody herded into the house. I may get mad at John at times, but I’d have given anything in the world to have had him walk in at that moment. Rob was sobbing, “He’s broken! Elephant’s Child is broken!”

  “Give him to me, Rob, let me see,” I said.

  He handed me Elephant’s Child, and I twisted the music-box key and it just went around and around the way those things do when they’ve been too roughly handled, and Brahms’s Lullaby didn’t play.

  “Oh, Rob,” I said helplessly. “Maybe Mother or Daddy can fix him.”

  “Let me see,” Suzy said. “I bet he isn’t broken at all. We’re just making a fuss over nothing and making Maggy feel bad. I bet I can make him work.”

  “Okay, Doc,” I said. “You try.”

  “Well …” Suzy said, when she realized the music-box part of Elephant’s Child was indeed broken.

  Rob had stopped yelling. He took Elephant’s Child from Suzy and held him close and went into the study and sat down in the big black leather chair and put his head down against Elephant’s Child, and I could see that his lip was quivering and tears were sliding down his cheeks, but he wasn’t making any sound.

  And I wasn’t feeling any empathy about Maggy at all.

  “What a lot of fuss about a stupid old toy,” Maggy said crossly. “Can’t your mother and father get him another?”

  “I suppose if you break a toy you just get another one?” I demanded angrily.

  “Of course.”

  There was no use saying that we didn’t, and that even if Mother and Daddy could get Rob another Elephant’s Child it wouldn’t be the same.

  “Maggy didn’t mean to break it,” Suzy said, but her voice was uncertain. “Don’t make her feel bad.”

  As far as I could see, Maggy didn’t feel bad at all. “Do you two have any homework?” I asked them.

  “Just some spelling words.”

  “Well, get them done, then.”

  “Let’s play first,” Maggy said. “We can play hospital again. Come on, Suzy.”

  “We’re supposed to do our homework before we play,” I said.

  But Maggy had already started upstairs, and Suzy went after her.

  “Suzy,” I shouted, “Mother’ll be furious if you don’t get your homework done.”

  “I’ll do it later, silly,” Suzy called back, and ran after Maggy.

  I went in to Rob. He was still crying silently, and when I tried to comfort him he pushed me away. I brought in my homework and sat down at the desk near him, but I couldn’t concentrate on anything properly. After a while he got up and climbed into my lap and put his arms around my neck and I felt better.

  I thought I ought to go upstairs and check on Suzy and Maggy, but I could hear them playing, and I decided that as long as there weren’t any horrible screams I’d just leave them alone. Rob got out his wooden trains and set them up on the floor by me, and I worked on my homework till John got home.

  I could hear him hanging up his things, and then he came into the study and dumped his books down. “How’re you making out, Vicky? Everything sounds okay. Hi, Robbie, old man.”

  I looked at him glumly. “As a baby sitter I’m a complete flop.”

  “Why?”

  I told him what had happened. “And I wasn’t any help at all,” I finished. “I was worse than no good. Thank heavens you’re home, John. I don’t know what I’d have done if she started anything else.”

  John was examini
ng Elephant’s Child. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, putting Elephant’s Child down. “She’s a spoiled brat from way back.”

  “What’s the matter with her, anyhow?” I asked John. “Do you suppose this is just the way she is—I mean, spoiled rotten and everything—or do you suppose it’s because of her mother and father?”

  “Well,” John said slowly, “how would we feel if …”

  “Stop,” I said quickly. “Stop.”

  “She does make it rough,” John said. “I know I’m not as sorry for her as I ought to be.”

  “Yeah, that worries me,” I said. “Suzy feels all sorry for her the way I ought to, and I can’t seem to make myself.”

  “I suppose the thing to do,” John said, “is to try to think how we’d feel if it was one of us. I mean, if there weren’t four of us, if none of the rest of you had been born, I might be spoiled rotten, too.”

  “That’s a nasty thought,” I said. “Not so much you being spoiled as the rest of us not being born.”

  “Sometimes I’d be just as happy if you hadn’t been,” John said, and I was about to make an angry retort when he said, “Oh, let’s not fight, Vic. You know I didn’t mean it. I’d better go upstairs and check on those two now.”

  When he came down he said, “Well, they’re happily tearing up Suzy’s best doll so Suzy can do an operation.” Usually Suzy operates on dolls that get broken somehow or other. I didn’t think just deliberately destroying one was such a hot idea, and I didn’t think Suzy would, either, when it was all done and too late. But John and I thought, under the circumstances, we’d just let it go.

  “I know what you mean,” I said grimly. “Let’s keep peace and quiet at all costs. I think I’d better go fix the potatoes now before anything else happens. I’d hate to have Mother and Daddy get back and find I hadn’t done anything they asked me to.”

  “I’ll help you,” John said unexpectedly. His jobs are things like chopping wood and keeping the wood basket filled and mowing lawns and shoveling snow. We got out the scrapers and set to.

  “Sounds funny without Mother playing records,” John said. “Shall I put something on?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  John put on Rosenkavalier, and I was glad, because it’s lovely and gay, and I wasn’t in the mood for anything that wasn’t, and the sound of it made the house feel better, somehow.

  Well, we had only one more crisis, and that was when John tried to get Maggy and Suzy to do their homework before they watched Mickey Mouse Club. But he gave up, and we sat in the kitchen and realized we were starved because we’d forgotten to have anything to eat when we got home from school. So we had milk and cookies and took some in to Rob and Suzy and Maggy, and Maggy and Rob fought over them and we wished we hadn’t. I don’t know when we’ve been as glad to see Mother and Daddy as we were when they walked in at six.

  After Mother had read to us and the three little ones were in bed, John and I went back downstairs in our nightclothes. Mother said that as long as I was sleeping in with Rob I could stay up half an hour later, and John stays up till he gets his homework done. If I think I have a lot now, what’ll I do when I get to high school? Daddy said that since Suzy and Maggy had not done their homework they would simply have to tell their teacher that they had played instead, and take the consequences. Neither of them liked that one bit. They wanted to sit up late and do it, but Daddy said no.

  “How about you kids,” Daddy asked John and me. “You about through?”

  “I didn’t have very much today,” I said. “I’m all done.”

  “John?”

  “I just have to finish a book report.”

  “Let’s talk for a few minutes, then.” He put another log on the fire and sat down. Mother turned from getting things ready for breakfast and sat down, too.

  “So you had a rough time this afternoon, didn’t you?” Daddy asked us. We nodded. He thought for a minute, then he said, “The way things stand now, it looks as though Maggy will be with us for quite a while, and it’s going to be an adjustment for all of us. But we must remember that it’s going to be an adjustment for Maggy most of all. Now, I know you’re both very sorry for her—”

  John broke in, “But that’s the trouble, Dad. We aren’t. We try to be, but we aren’t.”

  “And at school today, Daddy,” I said, “at recess, she kept sort of bragging about it, and telling people—about her parents being dead, I mean, and her father’s plane having exploded.”

  “She was a new girl in a new school,” Daddy said. “Maybe that was all she had to brag about.”

  “I don’t think Vic or I would,” John said. “If anything happened to you or Mother I don’t think we’d go around talking about it to people.”

  “Now, wait a minute, John,” Daddy said. “I was just about Maggy’s age when my mother died when Uncle Douglas was born. And it was inconceivable to me that everybody in the world didn’t know about it, that anybody could be unaware that my mother was dead. And when the paper boy came by our house that night, he didn’t know, and he called out to me just as usual, as though nothing at all had happened, and I was embarrassed for him, that he shouldn’t know about an event that must surely rock the foundations of the universe. And I told him that my mother was dead, and I’m sure I felt more a sense of importance than grief.”

  “Grief for the big things takes a long time to come,” Mother said. “You know how, when you cut yourself badly, you don’t feel it at all for a long time? It doesn’t hurt till the numbness wears off? Grief is like that.”

  “Yeah, I think I see,” John said slowly.

  “On the other hand,” Mother went on, “I don’t think Maggy’s reactions to her tragedy are quite the same as yours were, Wallace, or as our children’s would be. For one thing, she’d only been with her father for a month when the accident happened. She’d never known him at all before then.”

  “Never known her father! But—” I started.

  “Okay, Vicky,” Daddy said, “let’s let Mother tell you a little something about Maggy’s background. I think it will help you to understand why she is the way she is. We must all try very hard to understand, because we can’t have any one child, no matter how tragic her circumstances, disrupting an entire family.”

  “She’s made a good start,” John said.

  “Suppose you’d never known what it was like to be loved?” Mother asked him. “Suppose you never saw Daddy, and I spent all my time going to parties and on cruises and left you with nurses and governesses and did my best to forget I had any children?”

  “I’m glad you don’t,” John said.

  “But that’s what it was like for Maggy,” Mother told us. “All the toys and clothes in the world and not one moment of spontaneous family love. None of the easy security you children take for granted. She had dinner with her grandfather every Sunday. That was as close to family life as she got.”

  “Did her grandfather love her?” I asked.

  “In his way, I think he did, very much. But he’s evidently not a bit like our darling Grandfather, Vic, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s solitary and strict and stern. And he’d had a bad heart attack just at the time of Maggy’s mother’s death, which was why she went to her father at that time.”

  “How … how did her mother die?” John asked.

  “Of pneumonia, while she was traveling in Spain.”

  “All this help you to understand a little?” Daddy asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But how come she’s living with us?” John asked. “And for how long?”

  “Her grandfather is still ill,” Daddy said, “so we’ll just have to take things as they come, from day to day. Dick Hamilton was overjoyed when his little girl came to live with him, just a month before he died. And he had no idea how to handle her at all, except to give in to her completely, to give her whatever she wanted the minute she wanted it. At least he gave her love, real love, which was something she’d never had before, and Elena
feels sure that, given time, things would have worked out, that he’d realize he was spoiling her just as she’d always been spoiled. But he wasn’t given time.”

  Daddy paused and John said, “Doesn’t her grandfather want her as soon as he’s well? I mean, wouldn’t that be the logical thing? If he has lots of money and everything, she wouldn’t be in his way.”

  “No, she wouldn’t, and it would be a pretty sad life for a child, wouldn’t it? Maybe Mr. Ten Eyck—that’s his name—realizes this. We aren’t sure yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You see,” Daddy said, “Dick Hamilton didn’t have any family at all, nobody who belonged to him who could take care of Maggy if anything should happen to him. And in the nature of his work he knew that something might happen to him at any time. So he asked Aunt Elena and Uncle Hal if they would be responsible for her. In his will he has asked that they be her legal guardians.”

  “Then why doesn’t Aunt Elena take her, if that’s what he wanted?” John asked.

  “It isn’t as easy as that, John,” Daddy said. “In the first place, legally, a wish like that isn’t binding. You can will your property, but, according to the law, you cannot will a person. You can only express a wish. In the second place, Aunt Elena doesn’t have Uncle Hal anymore. She’s all alone. She leaves for a nationwide concert tour next month, and she has a living to earn. And for her own sake she needs her music right now.”

  “So it’s all a mess, isn’t it?” John asked.

  “Yes. And Aunt Elena’s doing what she can to make it a little less of a mess. She has paid us the great compliment of thinking that this is the place where Maggy can best learn to live the normal life she’s never known.”

  “Or we can learn to be abnormal,” John muttered.

  Daddy laughed and said, “I hope you have stronger personalities than that. Mother and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas and I had a talk with Mr. Ten Eyck this afternoon. Legally he’s her next of kin, and the decision has to come from him. Whether Maggy’ll be with us for a couple of weeks, or months, or a year, we don’t know. This is just a temporary solution until he’s well enough to decide what he thinks is best.”