Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I stood still for a moment as he slammed the door, without looking back at Silver or me; then I followed Silver upstairs. She paused at the landing, and sat down.

  “I didn’t get a minute to talk to Monty alone,” she said, her shoulders drooping. “Eddie stuck to me like glue.”

  “I like Eddie,” I said, thinking of his gentle little face and his long fingers, delicate and kind as a woman’s.

  “I like Eddie, too”—Silver moved her head restlessly—“but I did want to talk to Monty. It’s been years since we’ve seen him.”

  “It’s been just as long since we’ve seen Eddie.” I was deliberately trying to be irritating.

  “Monty and I are grown-up.”

  “Eddie’s older than you are.”

  “Girls grow up quicker than boys.” She looked out the window at the lawn, spotted with camellia and azalea bushes, at the magnolia tree, at the two huge stone dogs on the side terrace. After a while she forgot that she was cross with me. “Monty’s awfully handsome.”

  “And you’re very pretty,” I said gallantly.

  She laughed and blushed. “Oh, shoot, with these big black eyebrows!” She leaned her head against the window glass again.

  I sat down beside her and stared out into the night, too, my mind filled with a strange combination of excited happiness and nervous unrest. And as I sat there, with Silver motionless and dark beside me, I drifted into an unquiet, dreamful sleep. I was dead and I went to heaven. Heaven was very white and clean and chill. Mamma sat on an alabaster throne carved all over with delicate white chameleons. Around the throne was a moat of ice, frozen so cold that little whorls and coils of gassy smoke rose from it. Mamma’s crown was of ice, too, and pressed close upon her forehead, turning her complexion a transparent frozen green. Her lips and fingernails were stained blue, and above the throne a dove hung suspended, whimpering gently. I stood looking at Mamma and she looked back at me with those glassy, accusing eyes.

  Then Violetta came up, carrying a harp. She wore long white robes and wings made out of thousands and thousands of layers of tissue paper. Her silky brown hair hung down her back in the corkscrew curls she wore when she was little. She was smiling with a strange, frigid kind of pleasure. She told me that since I had murdered my mother, of course I wouldn’t be allowed in heaven, and I should have known better than to try to come there in the first place. If I liked, she herself would personally conduct me to the gates of hell.

  I thanked her, but said I would prefer to find the way myself, and since Ilsa wasn’t in heaven, I didn’t want to stay anyhow. With a cold, clammy hand Violetta gave me a shove, and I felt myself sliding off the slippery marble platform of heaven that was like the marble top of the washstand in Mamma’s room, felt myself sliding off and falling, falling. As I plunged downward, swirling and tumbling, flinging and jerking, until I felt that every bone in my body must be dislocated, I thought that this was how Satan and the fallen angels must have felt.

  Then my breath and life were crushed out of me as my body crashed upon what felt like black glass, but as I was already dead this didn’t make much difference, and as it was unrelievedly dark I could not see whether or not I had done myself damage.

  I had never known such darkness.

  Darkness—

  Darkness so deep it had no edges, no thin line of light, no shape, no form. Darkness—complete—moving with winds that burned and parched and dried, with winds that chilled in searing damp; darkness that held the echoes of forgotten cries and faded screams undying in its folds; darkness that hid the gates of hell so only touch could tell that they were there.

  Darkness filled with the murmur of a thousand wings, wings coming from left, from right, from above, from below; Moloch, Baalim, Ashtaroth, Astoreth, Thammuz, Dagan, Rimmon, Osiris, Orus, Belial; darkness filled with blare of song, inhuman and unknown, that loosed the bars of hell and made the gates roll back with roar of all the waters of the earth raging with one voice.

  But once I entered the gates of hell I seemed to wake from my dream. The darkness and madness were gone. I thought, quite calmly, as I looked around at the dim, lost figures in the murky glow, that here I was, dead, and in hell, and it didn’t really matter because Mamma and Violetta wouldn’t be here, at any rate.

  Cousin Anna and Aunt Elizabeth walked by, arm in arm, but they didn’t see me. Their eyes were like smouldering coals, and Aunt Elizabeth’s dark eyebrows were alive with flame. Then I saw Dr. Brandes and a man in a clerical collar whom I knew to be Cousin William. They were seated at a small table in the middle of a raging furnace, playing chess. The legs of the table were of serpents, coiled and writhing about each other, and the chessmen were continually being devoured by fire. I went over to them and spoke, but realized that they could neither see nor hear me as they sat in their furnace. Then I started to go around from spirit to spirit, asking all of them where Ilsa was, but no one knew. No one had heard of her.

  Then it struck me suddenly that she might not be dead; she might not be in either heaven or hell, but on earth.

  This thought was so terrible that I was blind from the horror of it.

  The next thing I knew, Silver was shaking me, and I was back on the browh-plush window seat on the landing at home.

  “Brother, wake up, wake up!” Silver was saying over and over. “Wake up! What’s the matter?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said stupidly.

  “You fell asleep. Were you having a nightmare?”

  I nodded.

  “What was it?”

  “Just a nightmare,” I said. “It would sound silly if I told it. The really bad dreams are only bad if you’re asleep.”

  “You’d better go on up to bed.” She laid her hand in a worried fashion on my knee. “You must still be awful tired if you can fall asleep like this.”

  “All right,” I said, and stood up, stretching. “Good night, Sister.”

  “Good night, Henry.” She watched after me as I went on up the stairs.

  16

  The next time I saw Ilsa was about a week later. It must have been some time after midnight and I had already been in bed for several hours, but I hadn’t been asleep. It was hot with that dreadful final blare of heat that comes in the autumn before the cooler winter weather settles in for its few months of comparative comfort. I lay restlessly on top of my bed in molten misery. A mosquito came in through a crack in the screen and buzzed about me persistently. After a while I turned on the light and went after it with a fly swatter, working myself up into a proper lather before I managed to get it, making a bright red stain on the blue and silver stripes of the wallpaper. The creature had been full to bursting with my blood, and I looked at the spot with fury. When I went back to bed I could sleep less than ever; I selected a book but I couldn’t concentrate, and it seemed even hotter with the light on, so I lay there wretchedly in the darkness.

  I felt so insufferably alone. I remembered Miss Myra Turnbull telling us once that this desperate need we have to belong to someone goes back to our earliest forebears, the lowest form of animal life, the amoeba, each individual particle of which has to be joined to other particles to make a whole.

  Then I heard a low whistle from the garden. At first I thought it was a night bird, but when it was repeated I realized it was a human whistle, so I got up, pushed up the screen rashly, and leaned out the window. Standing below on the edge of a flower bed was a slight straight form. I called down softly: “Ilsa!”

  She nodded and beckoned. I turned back into the room, put on my seersucker bathrobe and a pair of slippers, and stole out through the kitchen door.

  As I came up to her Ilsa took my hand and held it tightly for a moment, swaying a little unsteadily. “I’m certainly glad it was you who answered my whistle. I hoped you would,” she said. Her words were just a little slurred, her voice like smoke from smouldering grass after a forest fire. “I’m a damned fool, Henry,” she said, “but I’ve got to have some black coffee.”

  “Com
e on in the kitchen.” I took her by the arm and led her in, lighting a candle, thinking it would make less light and be less apt to disturb the rest of the house than the bright ceiling light with its milky glass globe. Then I stopped in despair. “I don’t know how to make coffee!”

  “I do. Just show me where the stuff is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I’ll find it.” She walked about the kitchen, her quick, deliberate grace gone a little jerky. In a short while she had a pot of coffee brewing on the stove. Then she leaned against the door, wearily, rubbing her hand against her forehead as though it ached.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked worriedly. “Don’t you feel well? Is something wrong?”

  “I’ve had too much to drink,” she said brusquely, “and I’m not going back until I’m sober. I’m causing your Cousin Anna enough worry as it is.” She went over to the sink and turned on the cold-water tap full force, holding her hand under it until it had run as cold as it was going to. Then she cupped her hands and dashed water over her face again and again and again. It splashed down the front of her dress, leaving dark streaks. The back of her dress, between the shoulders, had a wet stain from perspiration.

  “You’ve splashed water on your dress,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It will dry.” She went over to the stove and looked at the coffee, but it wasn’t ready, so she sat down at the kitchen table “Your crazy Cousin Monty,” she said lightly, “had his wallet stolen, so he couldn’t buy me any coffee. He was just as eager as I not to have your Cousin Anna fussed up, so he dropped me off here and told me which was your window. I was going to throw gravel up at any minute.”

  “Where’s Monty now?”

  “He’s gone home. I told him you’d take me back after I’d had some coffee, but it was just to get rid of him so he could go on home to bed where he belonged. I didn’t think you’d mind giving me the coffee, but I won’t have you going back with me. I’d rather walk by myself, anyhow.”

  “Of course I shan’t allow you to walk home alone,” I said indignantly. “A young girl like you all alone on these dark streets at this hour of night!”

  She rested her head on her hands. “Don’t argue with me, Henry. I can take care of myself.” She went over to the stove, then, and looked again at the coffeepot. This time she poured herself out a cup. I noticed, as she came back to the table, that she was walking much more steadily.

  “We had a lovely time,” she said. “Danced and danced and danced. Monty’s a beautiful dancer. Did I wake you?” she asked.

  “No. I was awake.”

  “At this hour?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too hot, and there was a mosquito, and I couldn’t get my mind to stop running around.”

  Ilsa poured herself another cup of coffee. As she sipped the hot black stuff she looked at me with those disquietingly penetrating eyes of hers. “What are you worried about, Henry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The other night over at Cousin Anna’s—and now tonight—you act almost as though you had something on your conscience.”

  “Maybe I have.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you believe,” I asked her, “if you want anything badly enough, you can get it—just by wanting?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Then I have Mamma’s death on my conscience.”

  “You wanted her to die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to come home. Silver and I loathed it at that awful yellow hotel. It was like being buried alive. Mamma never let us get acquainted with any of the other guests. And there were things I wanted to come home to.”

  “What?”

  I wanted to say, “You,” but I didn’t. I just sat silent, hanging my head like the gangling, unattractive adolescent that I was, until Ilsa spoke again.

  “But you didn’t do anything about your mother’s death except want it, did you?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “Then, for heaven’s sake, hold your head up and stop brooding. If everybody somebody wished out of the way lay down and died the world would become completely depopulated in no time at all.” She spoke in an even, reasonable voice. I looked at her, relief lightening my face. “Don’t have a puny conscience, Henry. You’ve got what you wanted. Relax and be glad about it.”

  I shook my head doubtfully.

  She went on. “Or don’t allow yourself to want something you’re not going to have the courage to accept when you get it.”

  I got up from the table and poured myself a cup of coffee. Remorse slipped off me like a garment, and I wanted to tear off the hypocritical band of mourning.

  “Fill my cup, please,” Ilsa said, and I poured in the steaming liquid which she gulped down. “I haven’t any right to give you advice,” she said. “I wouldn’t, if I were quite sober, although I’m much better, thanks to this.” She waved her coffee cup. “Shall we go walk down by the river for a few minutes? There might be some shooting stars. There usually are this time of year.”

  “Oh, yes, do let’s,” I said quickly.

  “I’ll clean up the evidence first.” She took the two coffee cups over to the sink. Silently and efficiently she put everything back in its place so that in the morning no one would know the kitchen had been used during the night. Then we walked down to the river. There was a faint breeze low on the water. We went out on the old dock and sat down, swinging our feet over the edge. The dock was rickety now. Many of the boards were sagging and broken and some of them were gone entirely. I took Ilsa’s arm to guide her, though she walked with such firm unafraidness in the unfamiliar night that it seemed as though she were guiding me.

  The stars were reflected on the water. When I lay down and looked at the river beneath us, I could see, between the cracks, the faint swell of it rising and falling in black and silver.

  “The last time we were at this river was when we rode across on Billy the night of the fire,” I said.

  She nodded. “I remember.” Suddenly she pointed up to the sky. “Look! A falling star! Make a wish.”

  I looked, too late, but I made my wish, anyhow. “Why is it there’re always meteors in August and September and not the rest of the year?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. At home, at the beach, I always used to lie out on the dunes at night to watch for falling stars. Sometimes, when he wasn’t too busy, Father’d come with me and tell me about the stars. It was all wonderful and exciting, the way he told it. We’d sit high on a sand dune and wait for the late moon to rise. And it seemed to me I could watch the long swift curve of planets and the moon swinging up in the sky, turning from blood-red to bone-white, and the stars—down at the beach they really look on fire, as though you could actually see them burning off there, millions of light-years away. And then the golden comets flinging feathered tails of light like heavenly peacocks strutting across the sky.” She stopped and laughed. “I thought I was practically sober, but I must have been wrong. Listen at me. This is really only the second time in my life I’ve been drunk, Henny. The other was with Father. I’d never seen him so furious with himself—or with me, for that matter. He made me drink gallons of coffee. Are you disgusted with me for the way I’ve behaved tonight, Henry?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nice young ladies do not drink.”

  “I’m not disgusted,” I said. And I knew that nothing Ilsa did could ever disgust me, could ever really be disgusting. And I knew that I belonged to her, as much as the earth to the sun, the moon to the earth.

  I think we are all somehow conscious of our destiny even before we can possibly know it. I must always have been aware of Ilsa, known she’d be the most important part of my life. I must have known this from the time I was conceived, the way the seed is conscious of its destiny. “Do you know what I mean?” I asked Ilsa, without speaking. “It’s like the awareness in the
seed of an iris that makes it grow into an iris and not an Irish potato. And it’s like the thing that must make a crocus push its way through the snow up North and in the icy places because it knows that spring will come.”

  Ilsa stood up and stretched. “I’d better be getting along. I’m all right now,” she said.

  I scrambled clumsily to my feet. “All right. Let’s go.”

  “Really, Henry.” She sounded annoyed. “Haven’t I made it clear enough that I’d rather be alone? No one’s going to attack me, and if they do Father taught me how to defend myself.” She went ahead of me, stepping surely on the rotting boards, while I stumbled after.

  We walked back to the house in silence. Then she held out her hand. “Thank you for the coffee, Henry, and your company. Good night.”

  I took her hand, holding its coolness briefly in mine, feeling weak and stupid because I was obeying her instead of seeing her home, as I knew I ought. I stood there and watched her as she walked down the drive and disappeared into the night.

  17

  Some cousins of ours had an old houseboat which Monty persuaded my uncle to rent for the rest of the summer. We all went down one week end to get away from the heat in town. There was a feeling of storm in the air. At night, lightning hovered over the water and thunder rolled in with the waves on the other side of the long sand bar that made one arm of the inlet where the boat was anchored. And there was a feeling among ourselves that was like the oppressive waiting of the weather.

  Cousin Anna sat on the covered deck, leaning back in her canvas chair, not moving, her eyes flickering from one to the other of us. Eddie trotted after Silver like a hound puppy, completely ignored, while Silver kept her eyes on Monty, though she pretended not to. Dolph and Violetta were continually going off into corners and whispering, looking back at Monty and Ilsa, looking back at Cousin Anna and Uncle Montgomery and Papa, Violetta pleased and important, Dolph worried. And Monty and Ilsa kept ignoring the looks and the whispers that were directed toward them, and would climb up the ladder to the upper deck, stand balanced together on the rail, and dive cleanly into the water of the inlet, to swim with strong, precise strokes over to the sand bar and back.