Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

  None of us did.

  We were already in our nightclothes, and Mother said we’d forget about brushing our teeth for one night, and then she had us all go to the bathroom, one after another, and then she took a bucket and filled it with water from the tub and threw it down the toilet, and that made the toilet flush. Rob was fascinated and wanted her to do it again, but she said he’d have to wait till morning.

  It was Rob’s and my turn to have prayers in our room. Mother left a candle burning on the bureau in the little girls’ room (they don’t like being referred to as the little girls but, after all, I’m three years older than Suzy and two years older than Maggy) and she put a candle on the highboy in Rob’s and my room and another candle on the bed table so she could read to us. A room looks very different by candlelight than it does by electric light. Our house is almost two hundred years old, and in winter, even with storm windows, there are drafts that get in at odd places. So the candles would flicker and flare up into long thin orange streamers of flame with a tiny bit of purple smoke curling up beyond, and then the wind would miss its crack and the flames would settle down to fat yellow glowings. By electric light I don’t notice shadows very much, except when we play shadow games with our fingers, making rabbits and faces and things on the wall (Daddy and Uncle Douglas are the best at it). But when the candlelight flickered, the shadows moved and changed shapes. Sometimes the shadow of the lamp on the desk would be short and squat and sometimes it would seem to fly up and streak halfway across the ceiling.

  Mother read to us, and then we said prayers. Rob asked God to help make the electricity get better and then he did all the family God Blesses and then he said, “And Sally—and Sally—oh, well, God, I s’pose you’d better bless Sally, even if we don’t want her for an aunt. And, God, please don’t let that moth on the ceiling eat my clothes. And bless me and make me a good boy. Amen.”

  Mother brought her guitar and sang to us as a special treat. It had begun to get kind of cold upstairs by this time, since there aren’t any fireplaces to help keep it warm. There were all those radiators and not a bit of warmth in any of them, and we never even think of them unless they stop working. Mother heaped extra blankets on all of us and went downstairs.

  In the morning, even with all the blankets over me, I could tell that upstairs was really cold. My nose was about the only thing poking out of the covers and it was icy. I looked down at the foot of my bed to Rob’s little bed, and I couldn’t see him at all, but I knew he was in there because there was a mound of covers sticking up. The east window was completely coated with ice; you couldn’t see out at all. But you could hear that the ice was still beating against it, sharp and cold.

  When Mother comes up to bed at night she puts out our clothes for morning. She had put out ski clothes for us, warm outdoor clothes, and as I got up and dressed I knew we’d need them. When I was dressed I fished Rob out from under the covers and dressed him quickly, and we ran downstairs.

  John and Uncle Douglas were feeding the fires and Mother had managed to make instant cocoa for us in the big fireplace. Aunt Elena had bread on a long fork and was toasting it for Suzy and Maggy, who were already down. Sally had not yet appeared.

  When I looked out the south and west windows I could see that the rain had stopped falling. It was ice falling from the trees, from the roof, that I had heard hitting against the windows. There were lots of little branches and quite a few big ones from the elms on the ice-covered lawn. A big branch was split off the oldest and loveliest of the apple trees down in the orchard. And out the kitchen windows I could see that the two birch trees were bent all the way down to the ground in two iced arcs, and the little pines we put in last summer were all bowed down with ice.

  We didn’t sit around the table for breakfast, but stayed at the big fireplace in the living room. Aunt Elena said to Mother, “Now, look, Victoria, I couldn’t be happier than I am here, ice or no ice, marrow congealed in my bones or no, but as you know, it is imperative that I get back to New York tonight. Wally suggested that I take the early train. What about it?”

  Uncle Douglas said, “And since Sally feels that she has accomplished her mission in coming here, we might as well go down on the early train, too.”

  Accomplished her mission? What did Uncle Douglas mean by that?

  Aunt Elena put her hand on his knee and said, “I’m sorry, Doug. It was really my fault.”

  And John said glumly, “No, it was my idea.”

  “It was nobody’s fault,” Mother said briskly, “and nobody can foretell the final results. As for the early train, the roads aren’t bad today. They’ve been sanded and it isn’t raining any more.”

  “But if everybody goes at once,” Aunt Elena said, “it’ll mean that Victoria has to drive home from the station alone, and I don’t think Wallace would like that.”

  “I won’t be alone,” Mother said. “I’ll have five children with me.”

  “And if Sally had her way, it’d be four,” John muttered in my ear.

  “What on earth is all this—” I started.

  John said, “Shush, I’ll tell you in a minute,” and then the phone rang, a funny sort of squawk, not a proper ring at all, and Mother got up to answer it. She kept shouting, “I can’t hear you! What? What?” and finally she gave up and hung up. “That was Wallace,” she said. “At least, I think it was. I didn’t get a single word, but the voice sounded familiar. And I don’t think he heard me at all. Okay, Doug and Elena. If you’re going to go I think we’d better get ready. We need to give ourselves twice as much time as usual, though I’m sure the trains will be running late. Elena, you’d better go upstairs and wake Sally. Children, get your beds made, please.”

  John said, “Vicky, come help me with mine and Uncle Douglas’s, and I’ll help you with yours and Rob’s.” We went into the study and John said, “Now, you must promise not to say anything to the little ones, because Mother doesn’t want them upset, but she said I could tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” I demanded. “What is all this?”

  “I came down early this morning,” John said, “and it was just Mother and me building up the fires, and she told me what happened last night.”

  “But what happened?”

  “Hold on, I’m trying to tell you! Well, you see, Sally isn’t Uncle Douglas’s girlfriend at all.”

  “What a relief! She isn’t? Whose girlfriend is she?”

  “Nobody’s, as far as I can guess. She’s Mr. Ten Eyck’s niece. She’s a cousin of Maggy’s.”

  “Of Maggy’s!”

  “Yes. That was why Maggy knew her. She’d met her at her grandfather’s.”

  “But if she’s a cousin of Maggy’s, what was she doing here, and with Uncle Douglas?”

  “That’s just the point. She was inspecting us for Mr. Ten Eyck, to see if we were fit people for Maggy to stay with. And Sally decided that she could inspect us better if we didn’t know who she was or why she’d come.”

  “What a dirty trick!”

  “Well, sure, but I see her point.”

  “We fouled it up all right,” I said, and wondered why I wasn’t gladder.

  “Yeah. We sure did. Uncle Douglas said he never thought we’d really think she was one of his girlfriends. But I guess he doesn’t realize that she isn’t any more peculiar than lots of the others he’s brought up. And, of course, he couldn’t have known we’d come down to the station looking like that.”

  “But why did he play along with the game?” I demanded. “Why didn’t he just stop it right away?”

  “That’s what Mother and Aunt Elena asked him. But he said the damage had already been done, with us arriving at the station looking like that, and it was the only way he could see to make the weekend any fun at all, and he hoped all along that maybe Sally would turn out to have a sense of humor after all.”

  “But she didn’t,” I said, yanking John’s top sheet straight.

  “No. I think it was Suzy’s snake that finished her. I gu
ess she was pretty awful to Mother and Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas last night. She wanted to take Maggy right back to New York with her today. She said that if Mr. Ten Eyck couldn’t take her, then she’d offer her a home herself.”

  “So I guess Maggy won’t be with us much longer,” I said.

  John pulled up the blankets and pounded at them sort of absentmindedly. “Looks that way. Are you glad?”

  “Not as glad as I thought I’d be,” I said.

  “Neither am I. I think she’s sort of changed in the last few weeks. I mean, she’s more like just any other little girl instead of being so—so ubiquitous.”

  “Ubiquitous” is one of John’s pet long words and it’s a good one for Maggy. It means being everywhere, or sort of seeming to be all over the place at the same time. And that’s how Maggy did seem. There always seemed to be more of her in the house than the four of us put together.

  “I guess I’m really sorry for her now,” I said. “I wasn’t at first. But I am now.” And it was true. Now I could empathize with her.

  “It’s like sending her to the lions,” John said. “Can you imagine what it would be like to live with Sally? Jeepers, Vicky, we should have known right from the start she couldn’t have been one of Uncle Douglas’s girlfriends! Uncle Douglas’s really goofed on some of them, but Sally just isn’t his kind of goof.”

  “But even Mother and Daddy didn’t guess about her,” I said. “Oh, poor Maggy! I mean, we aren’t perfect, but it’s always pretty nice around our house.”

  “I’ll feel kind of awful if it’s all because of my idea she gets sent away,” John said.

  “I don’t think Sally would have approved of us anyhow,” I tried to comfort him. “There’d have been the snake, and the power going off.”

  “We couldn’t help the ice storm!” John was indignant.

  “I’m sure Sally thinks we could. And we’re always noisy. And she didn’t like it when we all sang.”

  “Well …” John said. And then, “Uncle Douglas says that he feels that certain things are meant, and what’s to be will be about Maggy, no matter what Sally says to Mr. Ten Eyck.”

  “I wish Uncle Douglas and Aunt Elena could get married,” I said. “Then Maggy could live with them. That’s what Maggy’s father wanted, anyhow, for her to be with Aunt Elena.”

  We finished the beds and then went into the kitchen. Uncle Douglas was saying to Mother, “Victoria, you are undoubtedly the worst mother in the world, but I love you anyhow.”

  And Mother got kind of indignant and said, “Come, now, I don’t think I’m all that bad.”

  And Uncle Douglas gave her a big hug and said, “You can be the mother of my children if you like.”

  Mother laughed and said, “That would hardly be proper,” and then Aunt Elena and Sally came into the kitchen, dressed to go, and Aunt Elena said, “Go see what’s looking coyly in the bathroom window.”

  None of us had been in the upstairs bathroom that morning, since it was so cold upstairs, so we all ran up like a small herd of elephants, and there, stuck right through the frozen screen, peered the television aerial!

  Just before it was time to leave for the station I went into the hall toy closet to find something for Rob, and Sally drew Maggy away from the others and into the study. I could see them and hear them from where I was in the hall, and I have to admit right here and now that I just stayed and listened. I didn’t actually eavesdrop, I just happened to be where I could hear. Or, let’s face it, I guess it was eavesdropping, and I guess it was wrong, but I’m glad I didn’t go away as I ought to have done, because it made me feel lots closer to Maggy.

  “Margaret, dear,” Sally said, “don’t you recognize me?”

  “I think I know you,” Maggy said cautiously, “but I’m not sure who you are. Are you one of Mummie’s friends?”

  “I’m your mother’s first cousin. I’m your Cousin Sally.”

  “Oh,” Maggy said flatly.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “I don’t know you very well,” Maggy said. “And if you’re my cousin, why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I wanted to see how you were getting on, and if you were happy. Margaret, dear, wouldn’t you like to come live with me?”

  “No,” Maggy said, and she didn’t add “thank you.”

  “But you know, dear, I’m your closest relative now, after your grandfather.”

  “I don’t know you nearly as well as I do Aunt Victoria and Uncle Wallace, or Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas.”

  “They aren’t your real aunts and uncles,” Sally said. I thought that was awful of her.

  “They feel lots realer than you do,” Maggy said.

  “Time to leave now,” Mother called just then.

  We all piled into the station wagon and Mother drove us down to the station. Sally sat in front between Mother and Aunt Elena and hardly said a word. When we got to the station we found out that the train was going to be quite late, but the station was open and warm, and the electricity hadn’t gone off down in Clovenford, so we left them sitting there to wait.

  In the car on the way back up the hill Mother said, “Well, children, that will teach us to play practical jokes. They’re almost always like boomerangs; they come back and hit you in the face.”

  “But we didn’t like Sally, any of us,” Maggy said. “It would be awful if she married Uncle Douglas.” I could see, then, why Mother hadn’t wanted the little ones to know who Sally was. Luckily, I don’t think Maggy realized that Sally might be deciding her fate. I think she thought Sally really was Uncle Douglas’s girlfriend; and just because she’d told Sally she didn’t want to live with her, that would be the end of that. But I was afraid for her.

  So we drove home. The roads were sanded and the car got covered with sand and the windshield splashed with mud so that the windshield wipers didn’t do much good. The trees down in Clovenford weren’t all iced, but just before we got back to Thornhill they started to be sheathed again, and we could see wires down all along the roadside and the Light and Power trucks working on them. Mother slowed down and asked one of the men when he thought the power would be back on, and he said, “Don’t ask me, lady, but don’t look for it before tomorrow.”

  During the afternoon the wind shifted, swinging around from the southeast to the northwest, and the thermometer dropped down to a shivering ten degrees. Even when the furnace is working full time the house is coldest when the wind is blowing hard from the northwest. Mother stationed us in front of the fireplaces and we kept putting logs on and as long as we stayed right close we weren’t too cold. Mother began to worry about the pipes, and she and John went upstairs and draped blankets over the radiators to try to keep them from freezing. The office phone rang once, but when we went to answer it, it was completely dead.

  Have you ever noticed how things look different when it’s terribly cold? I don’t think it’s imagination to say that things look harder—the grasses and small trees especially. And things don’t have as much color, they fade. Uncle Douglas says that this is observant of me, and absolutely true. And then there’s the feel, the cold against your face as though your skin had been turned to polished metal. And I always feel, for some reason, terribly clean when it’s specially cold. And all kinds of wood, trees, and the wood of the house creak and crack in protest.

  About six o’clock Daddy walked in, and we all rushed at him and tried to climb up on him, until Mother shouted, “Children! Daddy’s tired! Leave him alone!” And she sent us all to sit in front of the fireplace in the kitchen while she got dinner at the fireplace in the living room, and John and I knew she was telling Daddy about who Sally really was and everything that had happened.

  We all went to bed early because in an ice storm that’s the coziest, warmest thing to do.

  I don’t know how long we’d been asleep when I felt someone shaking me, and I opened my eyes and it was Mother, holding a flashlight. “Put something warm on, Vicky,” she said, “and come downs
tairs and see fairyland.”

  I put on my bathrobe and fuzzy slippers and wrapped a blanket around myself and ran downstairs, and so did everybody else. Daddy had Rob rolled up in a blanket and was carrying him, which pleased Rob very much. We looked outdoors and the moon was high and full and it streamed through the trees and every single tiny twig was cased in ice and shimmered like diamonds. And the ground shimmered, too, because it was covered with spangles of ice. The two birches were twin shining arcs of ice that seemed to be spraying off rays of light. As the wind shook the trees tiny bits of ice would break off and catch the moonlight as they fell to the ground. Little clouds scudded across the moon, and it made the moon look as though it were flying across the sky; and then the trees made long delicate shadows that came and went along the icy ground. It was so beautiful we couldn’t speak, any of us. We just stood there and looked and looked. And suddenly I was so happy I felt as though my happiness were flying all about me, like sparkles of moonlight off the ice. And I wanted to hug everybody, and tell how much I loved everybody and how happy I was, but it seemed as though I were under a spell, as though I couldn’t move or speak, and I just stood there, with joy streaming out of me, until Mother and Daddy sent us up to bed.

  And I lay there in the dark and I was absolutely positive that God would not allow Maggy to be thrown to the lions.

  The next morning the house was bone-cold, and not being able to run water and having to cook over the fireplace had lost its glamour. Rob was kind of whiny, and all of us felt a little cross. Mother said something to Daddy about sending us all somewhere where there was a coal furnace and we could warm up, but Daddy said that the power just had to come back on soon.

  After breakfast we burned the paper plates and napkins and things, but even so the sink was full of the pots and pans Mother had had to use and hadn’t been able to wash, and the whole house looked cold and kind of grimy. Daddy and John brought in loads of wood and stacked it by the fireplace.