Meet the Austins

by Madeleine L'engle

  “We’d better tell her about muffins, then,” Nanny said. “That is, if she’s really interested.”

  “I’m not exactly hungry right now.” Maggy patted her stomach. “But I’m fascinated.” Her black hair was pushed back from her ears and it fell softly down to her shoulders. Her face looked white against it and her eyes were dark. Even though she had on jeans and an old red sweater that had once been mine, I thought that in comparison with the rest of us she looked very much a city person.

  There was a pause while everybody waited for somebody else to speak. Betsey said, “John or one of the Austins ought to tell her about it, because they started it.”

  “Well,” John said, “Rob really started it. It was about a year ago, and Uncle Douglas was up for the weekend.”

  John continued, “He came up without a girlfriend, but the weekend before, he came up with a girlfriend.”

  “Does he always bring his girlfriends up?” Maggy asked.

  “Usually. We kind of look them over. Some of them we like and some of them we don’t like, and we didn’t like this one.”

  “Sort of like Sally?” Maggy asked.

  “Even worse, if you can believe it, and younger. She kept asking questions about the family, Mother’s and Daddy’s families,” I said, “wanting to know all about forebears and stuff.”

  John started laughing. “Remember the aunt’s sisters?”

  I laughed, too. It was really hilarious. This girl kept talking about her ancestors, and Rob went to Mother and said, “Her aunt must have had an awful lot of sisters.”

  So John told about that and we all laughed, the way you laugh an extra lot on a picnic when you’ve filled up with good food and are feeling warm and happy.

  Maggy said, “I still don’t know about muffins.”

  So John explained. What happened was that Uncle Douglas came back the next weekend and told us that he and the girlfriend were through. And then he gave us a sort of lecture, about how we shouldn’t worry about families and the right ethnic background (I looked at Pedro as John was explaining), but you should like them or dislike them for themselves. And Uncle Douglas went on to say that his ex-girlfriend thought that where people were born made them what they are.

  Well, that same afternoon, about a year ago, Prunewhip had kittens. We knew she was going to have kittens, and we ran down to the cellar to her bed, but she wasn’t there, and we looked in the garage and Daddy’s office and under all the beds and in the closets and everywhere we could think of, but we couldn’t find her. Then, when Mother went to turn on the oven for the muffins she was making, she noticed that the oven door was partway open, and she opened it all the way, and there was Prunewhip with five kittens! We’d had kittens all over the place, but never in the oven before, and Prunewhip looked very pleased with herself, and Mother said, ah, well, we’d do without the oven that evening.

  And John said, a bit sarcastically, “Uncle Douglas, would your ex-girlfriend think the kittens were muffins because they were born in the oven?” Rob thought that was awfully funny and when he stopped laughing he started chanting.

  “Kittens are muffins

  In ovens and puffins.”

  Suzy interrupted and said, “They’d all have to be exactly alike, each one just like the other, instead of all different like Prunewhip’s kittens.”

  John said, suddenly serious, “I’d hate that. But that’s what a lot of people want—everybody the same like a row of muffins.”

  So that’s how the muffin club got started. Maggy said, “Go on, tell me more.”

  “Well, that’s really it,” John said. “You can see how we went on from the kittens not being muffins because they were born in the oven, to starting the anti-muffin club. Uncle Douglas says it will help us avoid the dangers of conformity.”

  Izzy lay on her back, looking up at the deepening sky. “Your Uncle Douglas is very nice, but most of the time I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “All he means is that you shouldn’t be afraid to be yourself, even if it means being different.”

  “Like lots of grownups,” Betsey said. “Most of them. Always so worried about what somebody’s going to think.”

  “So do you want to belong?” Suzy asked.

  Funnily enough, Maggy got all flustered. “I’d love to, if you really want me.”

  “We wouldn’t have called the meeting if we didn’t,” Suzy said. “We thought maybe you’d think it was silly.”

  “Why?” Maggy sounded indignant.

  Nanny said, “Just that it’s something you’ve probably never had to think about before, with the way you lived before you came to stay with the Austins.”

  Maggy asked stiffly, “What do you mean?”

  John said quickly, “Well, you’ve never been much around muffiny people. Your grandfather’s certainly not a muffin, the way he didn’t take Sally seriously when she told him how awful we were.”

  “We were pretty awful,” I said.

  “Yes, but not the way Sally thought. And your parents don’t sound as though they were much like most people, your father being a test pilot, for instance. And Aunt Elena’s certainly not a muffin. She goes around giving concerts and practices at least five hours a day and it certainly doesn’t bother her that she isn’t like anybody else.”

  “Is Uncle Douglas an anti-muffin?” Maggy asked.

  “Well, sure.”

  “And Aunt Victoria and Uncle Wallace? Do they belong to the club?”

  “They’re certainly anti-muffins,” I said, “but they don’t belong to the club.”

  “Why not?”

  “If you start putting parents in, it can get complicated,” John said. “Sometimes there are parents who are muffins and children who aren’t, and vice versa.” Nobody said anything. It was a little ticklish. We’re terribly fond of the Ulrichs, but they’re really kind of muffiny. Mr. Jenkins certainly isn’t a muffin, practicing his cello in the back room of the store when there aren’t many customers, but Mrs. Jenkins is; she’s always worrying about what the neighbors will think, and since they run the store and are always in the public eye, the neighbors know a good deal about them. The Xifras aren’t muffins, but then, on the other hand, they aren’t anti-muffins either, except Pedro, and I think Mrs. Xifra’d really love to be a muffin.

  “Could I ask another question?” Maggy asked.

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the point to this club?”

  “There isn’t any particular point,” John said. “Just to help us not act like muffins, I guess. If you know there are other people who feel the same way you do, then it gives you courage to stand up for your principles. You were acting anti-muffiny when you ploughed into all those kids after Sunday school. You weren’t worried about what they were going to think of you, or if you were going to be hurt, or if it was going to make you unpopular.”

  “Oh,” Maggy said. “Like that new girl who came into our grade last week. She comes from Tennessee and she has a funny accent and everybody teases her. You mean if I go up to her on Monday and try to be nice to her, and see what she’s really like, and don’t care what the others think of me for doing it, that’ll be anti-muffin.”

  “Good,” Pedro approved. “That’s it, Maggy. I used to have an accent, too, when I started school. John and Dave kept my life from being hell.”

  “And it’s partly just for fun,” John said. “The club, I mean. We don’t have any officers or dues or special times for meetings or anything. It’s just a time people who like each other can get together and have a good time, the way we’re doing this evening.”

  “Let’s sing,” Izzy suggested. “Nanny’ll sing us a solo.”

  Nanny was lying on her back chewing a fresh new blade of grass. “I might surprise you someday,” she said lazily. Actually, her voice isn’t that bad.

  Izzy started singing the Ash Grove. We all love the Welsh melody, and we sing it to words Mr. Jenkins taught us, and it’s kind of the anti-muffin song.


  “His law he enforces,

  the stars in their courses,

  the sun in his orbit

  obediently shine.”

  Izzy sang, and we all joined in.

  “The hills and the mountains,

  The rivers and fountains,

  The deeps of the ocean

  Proclaim God Divine.

  We, too, should be voicing

  Our love and rejoicing

  With glad adoration

  A song let us raise,

  Till all things now living

  Unite in thanksgiving,

  To God in the highest,

  Hosanna and praise!”

  Izzy’s clear, pure soprano was like a flute. Rob got up from where he was sitting and plunked himself down in front of Izzy and put his head in her lap. Izzy started ruffling his soft, light brown hair, and kept on singing, and Rob closed his eyes and I knew that in a few minutes he would be asleep. Then Izzy started the Tallis Canon. We all know the parts to that, so we joined in. John was singing bass, and I suddenly realized how deep his voice was, and it seemed hardly any time since it had been high and clear like Rob’s. Izzy was looking at him, and her eyes were like Colette’s when she looks at Daddy when he’s sitting in the red leather chair and she hopes he’s going to give her a tidbit. And suddenly I realized that John was growing up, and Izzy and Betsey were beginning to wear makeup as a matter of course. We were all growing up and everything was going to change; it would never be the same again. I felt absolutely desolate with sadness, and suddenly I jumped up, shouting, “Let’s play something silly, let’s play touch tag,” and the next minute we were all running around wildly, and John and Izzy and Nanny and Pedro and Dave just as laughing and panting as the rest of us, and I felt a little better. We ran and shouted till it got dark, and then we sat down again and watched the stars come out and Pedro told us about them, the names of the different constellations, and how far away the stars are, and how big.

  “We were going with Mother and Daddy to study the stars, the night—” Suzy stopped herself, and I knew she had been going to say, “the night Uncle Hal was killed.”

  “What night?” Maggy asked.

  We hadn’t gone, and the autumn had slipped away and winter had come and we hadn’t gone.

  “What night?” Maggy asked again.

  “One night last autumn,” John said, “before you came. Is that Vega of the Lyre, Pedro?”

  Mother had taken John and me to Hawk, but that was different, a part of grief.

  Pedro pointed out Vega for John, and then he said, “I love stars. I’m going to learn everything I can about them. I love them better than anything in the world. Better even than people or books. I’d give my right arm to work at Palomar or Mount Wilson or someplace like that.”

  “Maybe you will,” I said. I like Pedro a lot. When he decides he wants to learn something, or change in some way, he usually manages to do it.

  “Well, I’m going to Regional Trade School,” Pedro said, “to learn to be the electrician I’ve always wanted to be, but stars will be my lifelong hobby. Hey, look, kids, a shooting star! You don’t see many in May.

  “The thing about stars,” Pedro went on, “is that when you’re with stars, people don’t matter so much, or things like being dirty and untidy and quarreling, and nobody else caring about anything you care about, and things like that.”

  “We care,” Nanny said softly.

  And John tried to lighten things by giving me a poke and saying, “It’s all a question of the relativity of size.”

  “I hear a car,” Suzy said. “I bet it’s Mother.”

  It was, but she didn’t rush us home. Instead, she came and sat with us for a few minutes first, so we didn’t have any feeling of being pushed when we finally piled into the station wagon. Rob was so sound asleep that we had to carry him, and he slept in my lap all the way home, and then Daddy came out and carried him up to bed. So of course he was asleep when we said prayers and didn’t hear when Maggy said in her God Bless, “And thank you, God, for the best time I ever had.”

  The Visit to the Stable

  Our grandfather, Mother’s father, lives in a stable.

  Maybe I’d better explain a little about this.

  We’ve never known our Austin grandparents, because Daddy’s mother died when Uncle Douglas was born, and Daddy’s father, when Daddy was still in school. Grammy Eaton died about five years ago. John and I remember her very well, but I don’t think the little ones do. Well, of course, Rob doesn’t. Grandfather Eaton is a minister, and while Mother was growing up they moved several times, from one big old parsonage to another. Then, when Grandfather retired, they moved to Seven Bay Island, where they’d always gone for their vacations. They had friends who had a big house there, up on the only hill on the island, and at the peak of the hill (our family seems to like houses on hills, even though it means a lot of wind, particularly in winter) is an old stable. Grammy talked their friends into selling the stable to her and Grandfather about five years before Grandfather retired, and they spent the summers fixing it up and getting it ready to live in all year round.

  Grandfather has what Mother says is his only great vice: he cannot pass a bookstore. She says it’s like someone who can’t pass a bar without going in for a drink. Grandfather cannot pass a bookstore without going in and buying a book. He’s not a bibliophile, he’s a bibliomaniac. (Look those up in your dictionary!) Of course, Mother shouldn’t talk. It’s like the pot calling the kettle black or people in glass houses throwing stones.

  So one thing Grandfather and Grammy always had to think of wherever they went was bookcases for Grandfather’s thousands and thousands of books. He couldn’t bear to think of any of them lying in packing cases. They all had to be out on shelves, and none behind each other, either, so he could get at them whenever he wanted; and since he’s always consulting books for one reason or other, that’s often. And if you ask Grandfather for a book, in spite of the fact that there are so many of them, he always knows exactly where and on which shelf it is, and can get it for you without a moment’s hesitation. I feel that way about books, too. Most of the time, Mother and Daddy don’t even call me “bookworm.” They just call me “worm.”

  So, anyhow, what Grandfather and Grammy did when they bought the stable was to leave up the horses’ stalls and build bookcases in them. Is that where the word “stalls” comes from in libraries, I wonder. From horses’ stalls? Because Grandfather’s stalls look rather like stalls or stacks in a library. They take up so much room that there isn’t any real living room, just one double stall, and it has books in it, too, with a sofa and a couple of easy chairs and a table and a lamp. Grandfather has his desk in one of the stalls. And in one of them there’s nothing but children’s books, especially for us and the other grandchildren, but none of us see very much of them, the other grandchildren, I mean, because when Aunt Sue married she went out to California to live, and they don’t get East very often.

  If there’s anything we love it’s to go visit Grandfather in the stable.

  Every once in a while Mother says that Daddy will have to have a vacation or he won’t be able to go on, and one of those times came that June, just as school was almost over. It was the first big thunderstorm of the year. Daddy was home early that day, and Mother was saying, “Wally, you’ve been driving yourself unmercifully. You simply have to have a few days off.”

  Daddy said, “Look out the window,” and we looked out the big kitchen windows and watched the storm roll across the hills, great drenching sheets of rain, almost a cloudburst, and enormous sky-splitting flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder. We all sat there together watching it, and it was beautiful and I wasn’t a bit scared, but I would have been if I’d been alone. I remember one big thunderstorm came the day of Rob’s second birthday. He’d been given a flashlight at his birthday party, and every time a flash of lightning came he clapped his hands gleefully and yelled out, “Flashlight!”

  Anyhow, to
get back to the particular storm, after an enormous flash and crash that made us all jump it was so close Daddy said, “School’s over next week, and I don’t have any maternity cases due for the rest of this month. I’ll try to arrange it so we can all get away, and drive up to your father’s.”

  Maggy had never been to Grandfather’s, but we told her all about it, and she was as excited as the rest of us in no time, though at first she acted kind of funny about going to visit anyone who lived in a stable.

  By the time we were through dinner that night the storm was over and the rain had stopped. When we went up to bed it was quiet and still, and we were all excited and happy at the idea of going in just about ten days to the island to visit Grandfather.

  Mother read to us, an exciting story in one of her old Chatterboxes, and just as we were about to start prayers Rob asked, “Mother, who was the first man?”

  “I don’t know, darling; nobody knows. We call him Adam, but nobody really knows.”

  “But somebody must know.”

  “Nobody knows, Rob, except God.”

  “Well, Mother, it’s very peculiar, because if somebody, if Adam, came first, wouldn’t he have had to have a mother and father?”

  Mother laughed and said, “It’s a good thing we’re going to visit Grandfather so soon. You can ask him, Rob. Explaining theology and evolution to a very small boy is too big an order for me.”

  While we were in bed, the west wind sprang up and blew all night with all its might and main. It blew so hard it woke me up. Our house braced itself on its hill and stood firm, but quivering. As the wind drove itself against the garage and the office and the side of the house, it was as though a giant hand were taking hold of my bed and shaking it. I was very glad that the night-light was on in the bathroom, that Rob was asleep in the little bed, and that Mother and Daddy were right across the hall.