When the little ones were in bed, with Uncle Douglas in the loft reading Doctor Dolittle to them, Daddy said to John and me, “Of course, if Aunt Elena should remarry, as one day she probably will, I imagine she’ll want to have Maggy with her then.”
I couldn’t help saying, as I’d said once before, “Daddy, don’t you think Uncle Douglas is in love with Aunt Elena?”
John said, “I think he has been for years. You know that.”
“Well, wouldn’t it really be wonderful if they ended up getting married?” I asked.
“Still at it!” Mother said, and laughed. “You’re both incorrigible.”
“Yes, but wouldn’t it?”
Daddy said, “Uncle Douglas knows that things like that can’t be rushed, children. I trust you’ll keep your ideas on the subject strictly to yourselves.”
“Of course!” John said. “But, Dad, it wouldn’t matter that Uncle Douglas is younger than Aunt Elena, would it?”
“When people are compatible, a few years’ difference one way or the other doesn’t matter much. I’m five years older than Mother.”
“Now, matchmakers,” Mother said briskly, “we’re going to try to make an early start tomorrow morning. It’s time you went off to the loft, too.”
So it was the last night in the loft, though it didn’t seem possible that two weeks had passed so quickly and so much had happened. I sat up in my cot and looked out the window and listened to the ocean and smelled the wonderful sea wind and saw and felt the golden bar of light from the lighthouse sweeping over me until I was so sleepy that I had to lie down and go to sleep.
And then, the next morning, it was time to leave Grandfather, and oh, how we always hate to leave him! When we left, he stood on the steps and waved and waved to us and the sun shone on his lovely white hair and we all looked back and waved and waved until we couldn’t see him any more.
Then, on the way home, we had another wonderful thing, a surprise for all of us, for a celebration.
“We’ll go home by a different way this time,” Daddy said. “We haven’t been to Boston for a long time.”
We got to Boston in the late afternoon and took baths and went for a walk on the Common and fed the swans and then went and had a lovely roast-beef dinner at our hotel, and then, when we expected to be sent up to bed, Mother and Daddy told us that they were going to take us to Symphony Hall to hear the orchestra, because we didn’t get many chances at home to hear live music, and no matter how wonderful our records are, they’re still canned.
We all went, even Rob. John and I started in looking at our programs, and John said, giving me a poke so big that I thought he’d broken one of my ribs, “Hey!”
“What in the—” I started.
But John said, “Look, Vic!” And he pointed to his program and underneath the symphony and the conductor there was Aunt Elena’s name! She was to be the soloist with the orchestra and to play Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto!
Mother and Daddy and Uncle Douglas were smiling enormous smiles and Maggy let out a squeal and people turned around to look, so we all calmed down, and then the members of the orchestra started coming out on the stage and Mother told us to be quiet and watch and listen. Rob and Suzy had never seen a whole orchestra before, and neither John nor I had many times, and it’s one of the most exciting things I know about, particularly as they start tuning up. It isn’t music, the sounds that the instruments make as they catch their note, but to me it’s very beautiful.
Finally the conductor came out and everybody applauded and then the house settled down into silence and the conductor raised his baton and the music began. They started with Handel’s Royal Fireworks Music. This is something Mother plays on the phonograph quite often, so we all knew it, and she was right: it did sound very different to us, sitting there, with the music flowing out at us from the stage, surrounding us, filling us—yes, it was quite different from when we listen to the record at home.
But, of course, the exciting moment was when Aunt Elena came out onto the stage. She wore a long black dress and her neck and shoulders and face shone out very white between the dress and her hair.
Her music was very different from the Fireworks Music. The Fireworks Music is gay, and even if I’m depressed when I start listening to it, I end up by wanting to get up and dance. But in the middle of the Rachmaninoff I suddenly felt so sad, though it was a sort of beautiful sadness, that I wanted to clutch Mother and Daddy for comfort and cry and cry.
When Aunt Elena finished playing, the applause was almost like a thunderstorm, it was so violent, and I looked over at Mother and she was sitting there, clapping and smiling with tears in her eyes because she was so moved by the music and so proud of Aunt Elena.
Then we all went back to the hotel and up to Aunt Elena’s suite to have supper with her, and Aunt Elena ordered champagne and we all had sips. Uncle Douglas was so sweet and gentle with Aunt Elena, and it seemed to me her eyes shone more when she was talking with him than with anybody else, and I felt sure deep in my heart that everything was going to work out with them just as I hoped it would. Grownups are often disappointing that way, but I was sure they wouldn’t be.
Then it was time for us all to go to bed and we kissed everybody good night, and Mother and Daddy kissed Aunt Elena and thanked her and told her again how proud they were of her, and then Rob said sleepily, “Everybody’s kissed Aunt Elena except Uncle Douglas.”
Uncle Douglas said, “That will never do,” and kissed her, and she looked even happier after that, and stood in the doorway waving and watching as we walked down the hall and around the corner to the elevator.
We slept late the next morning and had a nice, leisurely breakfast and then we set off for home. It seemed impossible that our vacation was completely over, and that so much had happened in just two short weeks, but it all had. We sang and sang on the way home, and suddenly we were in Clovenford. There was the road up the hill to the hospital, and there was the street that led to Daddy’s office, and there was the railroad station. As we left the town and started up the hill to Thornhill we all stopped talking. Daddy just drove, and both Colette and Mr. Rochester sat braced and quivering with excitement but not moving. We passed the school and the church and the store, and then we were driving up our road, up our hill, and we saw our house, our own beautiful big rambly white house, and Daddy was pulling up to the garage, and we were home.
Home!
Our tongues and our muscles were suddenly freed and we piled out of the car and in through the garage and into the house, into the kitchen.
It was home and I remembered it with every bit of me, and yet in a funny way it was completely different. I can’t quite explain. Sizes weren’t the same. When I first looked at things they seemed smaller, and yet when I came back to them and looked at them again they seemed the same size they ought to be, and it would be as though we’d never been away at all.
Suzy had her arms full of cats and Colette was chasing Prunewhip and Mother was looking into the stove and the refrigerator and the cupboards and corners as though she had been away two months instead of two weeks.
And then we were all dashing all over the house to our special places. I ran up to Rob’s and my room, and there was his little bed at the foot of my big one, and I would keep on sleeping there because Maggy wasn’t being thrown to the lions, and the catalpa tree outside the east window was in full bloom and it had still been bare when we left for the island. I kept going from room to room, bumping into the others, and that’s what we were all doing, feeling the feel of home again. Rochester was running up and down the stairs, up and down the stairs, thud, thud, thud, no longer grounded by a ladder he couldn’t climb. And after she’d finished chasing Prunewhip, which she considered her natural duty, Colette curled up on her own green velvet cushion and went placidly to sleep.
We all ran outdoors (except Rochester, who was still practicing stairs) to the swing, to John and Dave’s tree house, John, of course, to the barn to his
space suit. We ran all the way around the house, looking at it from all four points of the compass, and then back into the house again, and Mother had music on the player, and the phone kept ringing, all the kids to ask us about our vacation, and the office phone, because Daddy’s patients knew he was home again.
Rob grabbed my hand and pulled me back upstairs to our room and he said, “Oh, my bed, my own bed,” and I knew his God Bless that night would go on for hours if someone didn’t stop him from blessing every piece of furniture in the house and every tree outdoors.
Mother called us to help, and she was getting dinner and we realized that it was dinnertime and we were all starved, so we set the table and I mashed the potatoes and Suzy cut up the tomatoes for salad and Rob went around the table giving everyone three napkins. Then we were all around the table holding hands to say grace, and we said the kind of grace we always do on special occasions, each of us in turn saying our own, and when it came to Rob he said, “Oh, God, thank you for letting Maggy stay with us and making her not break so many of my toys any more, especially Elephant’s Child, and thank you, God, for my good dinner, for the meat and mashed potatoes and gravy and ’sparagus, oh, no, God, I forgot, I don’t like ’sparagus, and thank you for the milk and rolls and butter. Amen.”
Of course, we couldn’t help laughing, though Rob couldn’t see that there was anything funny about it, and then everyone started to jabber all at once and to eat like pigs (though not Wilbur) and it all seemed right and comfortable and home. The office phone rang and Daddy answered it and said he had to go out for a few minutes but he wouldn’t be long, and Mother said, “Now I know we’re home again,” and everybody laughed.
Maybe that’s the best part of going away for a vacation—coming home again.
The L’Engle Cast of Characters
THE AUSTIN FAMILY
BOOKS FEATURING THE AUSTINS:
Meet the Austins (MA)
The Moon by Night (MN)
The Young Unicorns (YU)
A Ring of Endless Light (REL)
Troubling a Star (TS)
The Twenty-four Days Before Christmas (TDC)
A Severed Wasp (SW)
THE MURRY-O’KEEFE FAMILY
BOOKS FEATURING THE MURRY-O’KEEFES:
A Wrinkle in Time (WT)
A Wind in the Door (WD)
A Swiftly Tilting Planet (STP)
Many Waters (MW)
An Acceptable Time (AT)
The Arm of the Starfish (AS)
Dragons in the Waters (DW)
A House Like Lotus (HL)
CHARACTERS WHO APPEAR IN BOTH SERIES:
CANON TALLIS (AS, YU,DW)
ADAM EDDINGTON (AS, REL,TS)
ZACHARY GRAY (MN, REL,AT,HL)
MR. THEOTOCOPOULOUS (YU,DW)
EMILY GREGORY (YU,DW, SW)
GOFISH
QUESTIONS FOR THE AUTHOR
MADELEINE L’ENGLE
What did you want to be when you grew up?
A writer.
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
Right away. As soon as I was able to articulate, I knew I wanted to be a writer. And I read. I adored Emily of New Moon and some of the other L. M. Montgomery books and they impelled me because I loved them.
When did you start to write?
When I was five, I wrote a story about a little “gurl.”
What was the first writing you had published?
When I was a child, a poem in CHILD LIFE. It was all about a lonely house and was very sentimental.
Where do you write your books?
Anywhere. I write in longhand first, and then type it. My first typewriter was my father’s pre–World War I machine. It was the one he took with him to the war. It had certainly been around the world.
What is the best advice you have ever received about writing?
To just write.
What’s your first childhood memory?
One early memory I have is going down to Florida for a couple of weeks in the summertime to visit my grandmother. The house was in the middle of a swamp, surrounded by alligators. I don’t like alligators, but there they were, and I was afraid of them.
What is your favorite childhood memory?
Being in my room.
As a young person, whom did you look up to most?
My mother. She was a storyteller and I loved her stories. And she loved music and records. We played duets together on the piano.
What was your worst subject in school?
Math and Latin. I didn’t like the Latin teacher.
What was your best subject in school? English.
What activities did you participate in at school?
I was president of the student government in boarding school and editor of a literary magazine, and also belonged to the drama club.
Are you a morning person or a night owl?
Night owl.
What was your first job?
Working for the actress Eva Le Gallienne, right after college.
What is your idea of the best meal ever?
Cream of Wheat. I eat it with a spoon. I love it with butter and brown sugar.
Which do you like better: cats or dogs?
I like them both. I once had a wonderful dog named Touché. She was a silver medium-sized poodle, and quite beautiful. I wasn’t allowed to take her on the subway, and I couldn’t afford to get a taxi, so I put her around my neck, like a stole. And she pretended she was a stole. She was an actor.
What do you value most in your friends?
Love.
What is your favorite song?
“Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes.”
What time of the year do you like best?
I suppose autumn. I love the changing of the leaves.
I love the autumn goldenrod, the Queen Anne’s lace.
Which of your characters is most like you?
None of them. They’re all wiser than I am.
Austin Family Chronicles
MEET THE AUSTINS
For a family with four kids, two dogs, assorted cats, and a constant stream of family and friends dropping by, life in the Austin family home has always been remarkably steady and contented. When a family friend suddenly dies, the Austins open their home to an orphaned girl, Maggy Hamilton. The Austin children—Vicky, John, Suzy, and Rob—do their best to be generous and welcoming to Maggy. Vicky knows she should feel sorry for Maggy, but having sympathy for Maggy is no easy thing. Maggy is moody and spoiled; she breaks toys, wakes people in the middle of the night screaming, discourages homework, and generally causes chaos in the Austin household. How can one small child disrupt a family of six? Will life ever return to normal?
978-0-312-37931-5, $6.99 US/$7.99 Can.
THE MOON BY NIGHT
As if simply being fourteen-years-old weren’t bad enough—what with the usual teenage angst and uncertainty—Vicky Austin’s always comforting and reliable home life is changing completely. Her brother John is going off to college in the fall. Maggy has gone to live with her legal guardian. And the rest of Vicky’s family is moving from their quiet house in the country to the heart of New York City. But before the big move, the entire Austin family is taking a meandering trip across the country in their station wagon, stopping to camp along the way, with no set schedule and not a single night of camping experience among them. Wild animal attacks. Life-threatening natural disasters. Cute boys on the prowl. Anything can happen in the great outdoors.
978-0-312-37932-2, $6.99 US/$7.99 Can.
THE YOUNG UNICORNS
The Austins are trying to settle into their new life in New York City, but their once close-knit family is pulling away from each other. Their father spends long hours working alone in his study. John is away at college. Rob is making friends with people in the neighborhood: newspaper vendors, dog walkers, even the local rabbi. Suzy is blossoming into a vivacious young woman. And Vicky has become closer to Emily Gregory, a blind and brilliant young musician, than t
o her sister Suzy. With the Austins going in different directions, they don’t notice that something sinister is going on in their neighborhood—and it’s centered around them. A mysterious genie appears before Rob and Emily. A stranger approaches Vicky in the park and calls her by name. Members of a local gang are following their father. The entire Austin family is in danger. If they don’t start telling each other what’s going on, someone just might get killed.
978-0-312-37933-9, $6.99 US/$7.99 Can.
A RING OF ENDLESS LIGHT
After a tumultuous year in New York City, the Austins are spending the summer on the small island where their grandfather lives. He’s very sick, and watching his condition deteriorate as the summer passes is almost more than Vicky can bear. To complicate matters, she finds herself as the center of attention for three very different boys. Zachary Gray, the troubled and reckless boy Vicky met last summer, wants her all to himself as he grieves the loss of his mother. Leo Rodney has been just a friend for years, but the tragic loss of his father causes him to turn to Vicky for comfort—and romance. And then there’s Adam Eddington. Adam is only asking Vicky to help with his research on dolphins. But Adam—and the dolphins—may just be what Vicky needs to get through this heartbreaking summer.
Meet the Austins Page 19
