Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  After supper we went for a walk on the beach. It wasn’t much fun because Silver wouldn’t talk to Ilsa, saying that Mamma wouldn’t want her to. I said, thinking of Dr. Brandes, that Papa would think it very rude of her.

  She walked back to the house in silence. When she clambered up on the dunes to get away from us, and headed toward the scrub, Ilsa called her back, saying sharply:

  “Don’t go there. You’ll get covered with red bugs. And they’re horrid to get out. You have to dig them out with a pin.”

  Without acknowledging Ilsa’s warning, Silver crossed the beach and walked by the ocean’s edge, looking down at her feet and pulling her toes away fastidiously when the long waves lapped up the sand, reaching for them.

  Ilsa and I found a big shell that we took turns kicking along the beach. We tried to kick it all the way back to the house, but we lost it off the edge of the ramp into a clump of Spanish bayonettes. Ilsa laughed a lot.

  5

  When we got back to the house Ilsa took out a book and sat down on her magnolia-wood stool. Ira was nowhere to be seen.

  “I guess it would be best if we all read awhile,” Ilsa said. “Just pick yourselves a book you like. Maybe when Ira comes in from taking care of Calypso and the cows he’ll sing us a song.”

  I picked out a book with wonderful colored pictures of plants. Silver found a book about insects. After a while Ira came in and lit the candles and the lamps. Ilsa begged him to sing to us, but he wouldn’t.

  Although I had slept so soundly all day, my eyes began to close around eleven o’clock, and, in spite of the fact that they were older, Ilsa and Silver looked sleepy, too. We all sat, looking at our books, not reading. Ira was doing something to a bottle of specimens on Dr. Brandes’ table.

  After a while I noticed a strange sound, a steady monotonous buzz, almost as though someone underneath the house were sawing away at the foundations. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to get under the house if he wanted to, because it was on a slope of dune, and the front, facing the beach, was built up off the scrub on heavy coquina legs. I realized that no one could be sawing through those, and that filing them away would be quite a proposition, but, added to the strangeness of the evening, the noise filled me with fear. I was, oddly, almost more frightened than I had been during the fire the night before. I glanced over at Ilsa to see if she had noticed the noise, but she was looking down at her book, half asleep. Then I looked at Ira; he was intent on his work. But Silver’s eyes were black with terror, staring into nowhere at the invisible something that was making a persistent, hideous rumble, her head a little to one side, her fingers clenching and unclenching as she listened and listened.

  “Ilsa!” she said suddenly, her voice sharp and thin. “What is it? Is it a ghost?”

  “Is what a ghost?” Ilsa asked, her voice blurred with sleep.

  “That noise!”

  “What noise?”

  “Can’t you hear it? Listen!”

  Ilsa tried to wake up and listen; then she started to laugh. Silver’s eyes stopped staring with fear and became dark with fury.

  “It’s the cows!” Ilsa said, laughing. “They can’t help getting covered with ticks, poor things, and at night they get under the house and rub their backs against the joists. It’s the only way they have of scratching. I’d be ashamed to be afraid of that. I think it’s sort of a sweet sound. Friendly.”

  Silver didn’t say anything. She began to turn the pages of her insect book much too quickly.

  “Ira,” Ilsa said after a while in a soft low voice like a bee in the honeysuckle. “Ira, darling—”

  “No.”

  “Please, Ira, darlingest Ira, please sing us a song.”

  “No,” Ira said again. He sounded angry. “Get upstairs, all of you, and go to sleep. I don’t want to hear another squawk out of you.”

  I thought he was one of the most disagreeable men I had ever seen. We went upstairs.

  During the night Silver had her terrible dream. I knew, because I woke up when she screamed. It woke me up all the way, so that I couldn’t go back to sleep. I heard Silver crying, and then I heard Ilsa’s voice, and then I heard Ira’s voice.

  Lying there in the dark, in Dr. Brandes’ strange, bare room, with the beach and the ocean stretching to infinity outside, I felt so small and so alone that instinctively I climbed out of bed and went to Ilsa’s room, like a lost moth heading for the light.

  Ira was sitting in the wooden rocking chair by the window, with Silver on his lap. His voice was no longer cross, but soft and slurred with sleep, like the night ocean.

  “Tell Ira about your dream, baby,” he said.

  Through her sobs Silver managed to say, “Oh, it’s a face, Ira, a perfectly ordinary face, and then it looks at me and I look at it and suddenly it begins to open its mouth in a smile, the most horrible wicked smile, and the mouth goes on opening and opening, and the face splits wider and wider apart, all the teeth and the horrible twisting lips, it opens and opens—it makes me so afraid—it’s so awful—it makes me so afraid.”

  Silver had never told her dream before. No one had asked her to. It didn’t seem to me anything awful enough to make her scream and tremble the way she did every time she had it, but Ira soothed and comforted her as though it was the most terrible thing in the world.

  Ilsa lay on the bed, looking at them with bright, wide-awake eyes. When she saw me come in she moved over, and I crawled under the mosquito netting and sat down beside her. After a while, when Silver’s sobs had quieted, and she lay limp in Ira’s arms, Ilsa begged:

  “Ira, Ira darlingest.”

  “No.”

  “Please. Please, Ira. Because I’m so wide awake, and I can’t get back to sleep, and we don’t know where anybody is or anything, and we have to talk and eat; only none of it’s real, none of it belongs to anything.”

  It was the first time she had admitted that she was worried.

  Ira rocked back and forth silently for a while. Then he started to sing, in a dreaming sort of voice:

  THE GRAVE OF BONAPARTE

  On a lone barren isle where the wild roaring billow

  Assail the stern rock and the loud tempests rave,

  The hero lies still, while the dew-drooping willow

  Like fond weeping mourners leaned over the grave.

  The lightning may flash and the loud thunders rattle,

  He heeds not, he hears not, he’s free from all pain;

  He sleeps his last sleep, he has fought his last battle,

  No sound can awake him to glory again.

  No sound can awake him to glory again.

  “Who’s ‘he’?” asked Silver, her voice coming up, up, through leagues of sleep.

  Ira looked down at her crossly. “Napoleon Bonaparte. Who else could it be, I’d like to know?”

  “Never mind, Ira,” Ilsa said. “Go on.”

  Through her sea-green blur of sleep Silver reached up and pulled gently at the flesh under Ira’s chin, as though she expected to feel Mamma’s soft white dewlap between her fingers. Ira’s eyes stopped glaring, and he began to sing again:

  O shade of the mighty, where now are the legions

  That rushed but to conquer when thou led’st them on;

  Alas! they have perished in far hilly regions,

  And all save the fame of their triumph is gone.…

  Yet, spirit immortal, the tomb cannot bind thee,

  For, like thine own eagle that soared to the sun,

  Thou springest from bondage and leavest behind thee

  A name, which before thee no mortal had won.

  A name, which before thee no mortal had won.…

  Ira paused and looked at Ilsa and me lying sleepily under the mosquito netting. Silver was relaxed peacefully in his arms. I climbed down off the bed and held the mosquito netting open for him, as he picked her up and put her in, saying softly to Ilsa, “You go back to sleep now and not another squawk.”

  “All right. Thank you,
Ira darling.”

  I followed him out.

  “Pretty little thing, your sister,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Wish I had a lot of kids. Ilsa’s as close as I ever come to having a kid. I’m right fond of Ilsa.”

  “I think she’s wonderful,” I said.

  “Surely is too bad you can’t be friends.”

  “Why can’t we? We are friends,” I said.

  “You kind of remind me of Johnny Brandes at your age.” He leaned against the chest of drawers, and a cigarette dangled out of his mouth. “Lots of things about you’s like he was when he was a kid. Only you watch out you don’t get too sweet on the girls when you grow up. Girls can be a heap of trouble. You get along to sleep, now. Still a long time till morning.” He went out.

  6

  It took me quite a little while to get back to sleep. When I woke up I heard hoof beats and the sound of a carriage coming toward the house. I ran out of the room, crashed into Ilsa, and we half fell down the stairs. She could go more quickly than I could because her nightgown was her own, while Dr. Brandes’ pajamas were much too big for me, and I kept tripping over the feet.

  They came in the back door, Dr. Brandes and Papa and Mamma. Papa and Dr. Brandes had their hands in bandages. As Ilsa brushed past me to get at Dr. Brandes, I ran toward Papa. Although he embraced me much more warmly than usual, I felt lonely, because I knew he wasn’t as glad to see me as Dr. Brandes was to see Ilsa, and even more lonely because I wasn’t as glad to see him.

  Mamma stood just inside the screen door. She seemed changed. Her face was no longer smooth and cold, like marble. It seemed somehow disintegrated, like a statue built in the sand.

  Papa sent me upstairs to get Silver.

  When we came down, Papa and Dr. Brandes and Ira were sitting at the table, drinking out of heavy-stemmed glasses, green as the light through trees in early summer. Mamma wasn’t there, so I guessed she must have gone out to the carriage rather than sit down at Dr. Brandes’ table.

  Papa drained his glass as we came down, and rose. “Well, Henry, Anna Silverton,” he said, kissing Silver on the cheek. “Thank Dr. Brandes for his kindness and his hospitality, and we must be going.”

  “But where are we going?” I asked, afraid we would have to go back to town and live in the burned-out ruins of our house.

  “We will stay in Charleston for the winter while the house is being rebuilt,” Papa said.

  “But I want to see Ilsa again!”

  “Henry, thank Dr. Brandes for his kindness at once. Your mother is waiting for us in the carriage.”

  Dr. Brandes took my still sore and blistered hand in his bandaged one. He turned it over and looked at the palm. “You did good work,” he said. “I am proud of you. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “Henry”—Ilsa still clutched her father, but held out a careless hand to me—“don’t you worry. We’ll see each other when you get back from Charleston. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” I said again.

  “Silver,” Papa said.

  “Good-bye thank you very much for your hospitality and your kindness please may we go now Papa,” Silver said quickly.

  Papa said good-bye to Dr. Brandes and Ira, and we went out to the carriage, where Mamma was sitting with her hands lying like little lizards in her lap.

  For a while we drove in silence, which Mamma finally broke by saying, “The first thing I shall do is give you both a good hot bath.”

  “But we’re not dirty,” I protested. “We washed very thoroughly last night.”

  “You will need a good deal of washing to get the dust of that house off your feet and the feel of those sheets off your bodies or my name is not Cecilia-Jane Porcher.”

  “Now, Cecilia,” Papa said. “John Brandes was invaluable during the fire. He saved many lives by his ministrations.”

  “Fortunately,” said Mamma, “we do not have a fire every night, so his ministrations are not always so invaluable.”

  “It was a great kindness on his part to take our children when they were in need of a roof over their heads,” Papa continued.

  “Kindness!” Mamma gave a small laugh like a sandpiper. “Mark my words, he was only waiting for a chance to get them into his clutches.”

  “I doubt if he has that much interest in my children,” Papa said.

  “Interest! If he has no interest, who should have?”

  “Really, Cecilia-Jane,” Papa said. “That’s quite absurd. In any event, John Brandes is a fine naturalist. He is highly thought of in the North.”

  “The North!” Mamma laughed again. “What can you expect?”

  “Some people consider Baltimore the South,” Papa said.

  Mamma’s eyes became brighter than I had ever seen them. “If I had known what was going on, those children would never have crossed the river with that man. Rather would I have seen them being carried down the stairs in their coffins.”

  “I would rather have them alive,” Papa said, laying a hand on Silver’s knee. “And the stairs are burned to a few charred pieces of wood and a handful of ashes, so you’ll never have that pleasure, at any rate.”

  Mamma looked down at her hands and sulked. Her hands were very small and delicate, and she wore too many rings on her slightly curled fingers. The flesh on the back of her hands was thin and transparent, and the veins showed through in soft raised lines. On summer evenings in the garden Silver loved to sit close to Mamma and move the veins about, or to reach up and pull her soft white dewlap. It seemed strange that with so much softness in her actual construction Mamma gave such a feeling of hardness.

  When she went out of doors she always carried gloves, which she never put on her hands except when she cut the roses; then she wore gardeners’ gloves. But whenever she was indoors, at home or when she was visiting, she wore white kid gloves, which she gave to her little maid every night to clean. We never knew exactly why she did this, and sometimes, when he had had an extra drink, Papa used to tease her about wearing gloves to serve tea in; but she never offered any explanation, and she never tried to conquer the habit which she had started after I was born.

  It was not until we crossed the bridge to town that we began to see the damage done by the fire. There would be groups of houses that were nothing but black skeletons, almost as though the flesh had been burned off them and only the charred bones remained. Then would come a house that had scarcely been touched by the fire, and then a house that had been burned down to its foundations. It was the same way with the trees. Sometimes their blackened bones seemed pressed in agony against the landscape; sometimes the tops were burned off, leaving green beneath; sometimes there would be just a stump as a reminder that there had ever been a tree there at all.

  As we drove through the streets, where smoke still lay like evil-smelling fog, we passed many funeral processions.

  “See a funeral, hear of a wedding,” Mamma said, almost gaily. Papa looked at her, and she sulked down at her ring-heavy hands again.

  There was a long funeral procession going by in front of what had once been the Silverton house. I touched Papa on the sleeve and whispered, “Cousin Anna?”

  “Your Cousin Anna is at the Woolfs’. They have very kindly offered to take the whole family in until their house is rebuilt. The wind changed before the fire reached your Uncle Montgomery’s house.”

  “But is Cousin Anna all right?” I asked.

  “Certainly she’s all right,” Papa said irritably.

  “It was so awful for her last time, I thought …” I looked away from Papa’s face. I didn’t realize it was cross mainly from worry and exhaustion and the pain in his burned hands. I looked away from his face and down at my knees in the torn, soiled knickers that had been ruined by the events of the past—how many days was it? Only two? They seemed at least as long and full as the rest of my days put together.

  We stopped off for the night in Savannah.

  After dinner at the hotel, during which
both Silver and I were too tired to eat, Mamma took Silver up to bathe her, and I went for a walk with Papa.

  We didn’t have much to say to each other. It was really the first time I had been alone with Papa, except when I was being given a lecture or a switching. Papa was almost as tongue-tied as I was. Every once in a while he would point out to me the various objects of interest, indicating them with his silver-tipped cane. Each time we came to a long stretch of silence, I resolved to ask him about Ilsa, why Silver and I were not to be allowed to see her, why Mamma had brandished the carving knife at Dr. Brandes and tried to keep him from entering our fire-doomed house, why Papa had locked at Ilsa so strangely and curiously. I had my own very definite ideas on the subject.

  Several times I opened my mouth to speak and shut it again. Then I decided I would count to ten, and when I had said ten I would ask Papa. When I had reached ten I decided I would count to a hundred.

  “Ninety-nine,” I said to myself, “one hundred!” and opened my mouth to speak.

  “It is too bad,” Papa said before I had got a word out, “that your mother insists on going to Charleston for the winter. It would be better if we stayed on here in Savannah, but I cannot persuade her. She is set on Charleston. I hope she will not regret it.”

  I felt that he was talking to himself rather than to me.

  We walked along again in silence. The moon was coming over the rooftops. Again I gathered up courage to speak. Again Papa spoke before me.

  “I know I should punish you for your astonishing behavior in running away the other day, Henry, but, in view of all that has happened, we will forget it this once. When you were at the beach, did you talk much to Dr. Brandes and Ilsa?”