Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Sunday morning Ilsa and Monty took the outboard motor and went off mulleting with Ira. The rest of us were to go to dig for clams. We left Uncle Montgomery and Papa sitting with Cousin Anna; they were arguing in intense, low voices.

  “I don’t like it any better than you do,” I heard Cousin Anna say as I climbed into the rowboat after the others. “But what we like isn’t the important part. I think you had better remember Elizabeth.”

  “What is all this business about Aunt Elizabeth?” I asked.

  Violetta raised her eyebrows in a pleased way. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I knew,” I said.

  Violetta settled herself righteously next to Dolph. “I guess if Aunt Cecilia-Jane or your father didn’t say anything to you it’s none of my affair.”

  Eddie took the oars; he was almost as strong as Monty in spite of his littleness. “I think it’s silly to make a family skeleton of it,” he said. “The whole thing was silly in the first place. And if Monty and Ilsa want to get married, that’s their business.”

  A thin tail of smoke on the horizon was all that could be seen of a passing ship, and I longed to be on it, to run away from his words. I had a sudden violent physical desire to jump into the water of the inlet, to swim across to the arm of the beach, run stumbling over the mile of dune and scrub to the ocean, and swim out to the ship. It was the same sort of kinesthetic longing some people get when they are on high places, an almost irresistible instinct to jump, so that they draw back, shuddering. I knew that I would drown if I tried to swim to that thin plume of smoke, but I had to cling to the gunwales to keep myself from jumping overboard.

  Silver’s voice came jerky and angry. “What do you mean, marry? Monty’s not thinking of marrying anybody yet. Certainly not that girl.”

  “Why not?” Eddie asked reasonably.

  Silver’s dark brows drew together in fury. “I don’t see why Cousin Anna didn’t leave her down at the beach where she belongs. She’s not one of us and there’s no good her trying to be.” Her eyes filled with sudden tears, and she turned away, trailing her fingers in the water.

  “You watch out, and if you see a turtle, pull your fingers in quick,” Eddie said. “They snap a lot faster than we can move.”

  Silver didn’t answer. She turned away from the violent blue of the sky, away from the brilliance of the day, the intense ecstatic colors, blues and greens and yellows and sharp blazing whites. A large tear rolled off the end of her nose to join the salt water of the inlet.

  Violetta pulled away from Dolph, and reached out, putting a plump hand on Silver’s shoulder. “What’s the matter, sugar? What you crying over?”

  “I’m unhappy about Mamma!” Silver said fiercely. “Have you no decent respect for—for—” her voice faltered again. Dolph pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to her; stifling a sob, she buried her face in it.

  With a strong sure pull of the oars, Eddie swung the boat around and grounded her on the beach, the flat bottom scraping softly against the broken shells that lay like a tawny shadow along the edge of the water. He helped Silver out, and the rest of us scrambled after. I was glad that all the attention was on Silver, that no one could see my bleak, miserable face. I was filled with a rank jealousy for Monty off mulleting with Ilsa and Ira.

  Eddie put his arm around Silver. “Come along, honey, and I’ll show you something.”

  She blew her nose and nodded.

  “Come along,” Eddie called to the rest of us. “There’s a mess of fiddler crabs just over this dune here.” He turned back to Silver. “Watch out you don’t cut your foot on broken shells. My feet are so calloused nothing’ll go through ’em, not even a snake fang.”

  We followed him, Silver and I, like strangers, raising our bare feet sharply against the knifelike edges of shell that the others, even Violetta, walked on with easy familiarity. When we had crossed the bar of shell the sand felt warm and soft and I dug my toes deep into it.

  As we climbed the dune we saw a swarming mass of little creatures crawling busily and haphazardly about, hundreds and thousands of clean brittle little fiddler crabs, ludicrous as they scampered sideways over the sand. “Watch!” Eddie said, and started to walk around them in large concentric circles. As he went around and the circle became smaller and smaller, the fiddlers seemed obsessed with the idea that they must stay within it. Soon they were scrambling on top of each other, and while Eddie walked around in smaller and smaller circles, they made a little hill of themselves. We watched, fascinated.

  Eddie walked back to us. “Just like people.” he said. “Come along. Let’s go find some clams.”

  We found a good gray mudbed of clams. The sea grasses grew in the mud, strong and green and sharp as knives. Violetta cut her finger and kept sucking it; it was a good excuse not to dig. But the rest of us plunged our fists into the thick, wet clay until we were smeared all over with it, and the sun was baking it right onto our backs.

  After a time Silver came over to me, pushing a strand of fair hair back from her face with her muddy hand, leaving a streak across her forehead. “Brother, you think Monty and Ilsa’ll get married?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt that there wasn’t much use our talking about it, even though we agreed for once, because she didn’t like Ilsa and I didn’t like Monty. But after a while I said awkwardly, “I know you’re fond of Monty.”

  “Fond of him!” She flashed me a look of hatred that I knew was meant for Ilsa. “After all, he’s my cousin. I’m fond of all my family.”

  “That’s it!” I said, plunging my fingers into the fish-smelling mud and pretending to dig for a clam. “He’s our first cousin. It isn’t good, really, to be fond of him—that way.”

  “What way?”

  “You know what I mean. It’s not good for cousins to marry.”

  “According to the Bible it’s perfectly all right,” she said angrily. “You didn’t make a fuss about its being wrong when Violetta and Dolph married.”

  “That’s different. They’re only fourth or fifth cousins. It was only Cousin Randolph’s grandfather and Mamma’s and Uncle Montgomery’s grandfather who were brothers.”

  “The number doesn’t matter. Kin is kin, if you’re going to start being fussy about it. Papa and Mamma were cousins. All the Porchers and Woolfs are cousins of one sort or another.”

  I dug deeper into the mud and pulled out a grandfather clam that squirted up into my face. Throwing it into the bucket, wiping my face on my rolled-up shirt sleeve, I said, “Well, I hope they’ll be happy.” My voice sounded flat and ugly.

  “Happy! If that girl isn’t happy now she’s getting what she wanted—though, mind, I won’t believe it till it happens—she’s even more no’count than I thought.” Her little nostrils drew themselves in. Her lips seemed to tighten and become thinner. I was suddenly afraid of her.

  “Sister! Stop!” I cried. “You sounded just like Mamma! You look just like Mamma!”

  Her face fell back into its own lines again. It became angrily determined. “Don’t you worry, Brother,” she said. “I won’t be like Mamma. I want things Mamma never wanted, and I’m going to have them.”

  “Hey!” Dolph called, picking up one of the clam-filled buckets with an effort. “We’ve got enough, now. Let’s go back to the boat.”

  18

  I couldn’t sleep that night. The deck was hard and uncomfortable beneath me, the cotton blanket was too short, mosquitoes tormented me. I moved away from Dolph, Eddie, and Monty, without disturbing them, and climbed up to the upper deck. Ilsa was there before me, sitting with her back against the railing, looking over the arm of sand dune and scrub to the open sea. She looked up and nodded as she saw me.

  “How did you get up here?” I asked.

  “I slipped up about an hour ago. You were all sound asleep. It was too hot in that cabin. I couldn’t bear it. Anything wrong?”

  “No. I just couldn’t sleep. Ilsa—”

  “What?”
/>
  “Are you going to marry Monty?” I held my breath.

  In a flash of lightning I saw her wide, spontaneous smile. “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  I turned away from her, away from the purple sky that seemed to be breathing with stars and the flittering of lightning, away from the ocean that broke on the long beach across the mile of dunes; and stared down at the water below me, the water that seemed to hold all the darkness that flooded my mind. My mind was so dark, indeed, that I no longer could see the reflections of the stars that broke the blackness of the water and made it bright.

  After a long time I said, “I guess we should have expected it.”

  “Should you?”

  “So that’s what everyone’s been whispering about all week end, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “But what’s it got to do with Aunt Elizabeth?” I asked. “Cousin Anna keeps telling Uncle Montgomery and Papa not to forget Elizabeth.”

  “Your Aunt Elizabeth and my father were in love,” Ilsa said quietly. “They wanted to marry and your family prevented it.”

  “Oh—” A great wave of comprehension raised itself from the dark waters, curled over, and spread across my mind. But there was still another question. “Why did they want to stop it—their getting married?” I asked. “Why shouldn’t they have married?”

  “Father came from a poor family down state. They didn’t think he was good enough for the family.”

  “Oh.”

  “And Elizabeth was engaged to your Cousin Anna’s brother, William, the minister.”

  “Oh, my golly,” I said. “What happened?”

  Ilsa sighed. I knew that she had Cousin Anna’s capacity to feel the sufferings of others more than her own. What happened to herself she could shrug off; what happened to anyone else she felt deeply. “It was really quite simple,” she said after a moment. “Elizabeth and William were engaged. They were very fond of each other, but that’s about all. Their marriage seemed an excellent idea and they were both mildly happy about it. It wasn’t exactly a marriage of convenience—to them, at any rate—but it certainly wasn’t any great passion. Anna knew that. She told me she had been afraid all along that something would happen. Elizabeth was too violent a girl just to marry quietly and settle down to being a good wife to a man she was merely fond of. But even your Cousin Anna didn’t expect anything to happen quite so soon. It was only a week after the engagement was announced that Elizabeth met my father and they fell in love and there wasn’t anything any of them could do about it. William, who must be an amazing creature, understood the whole situation, and was willing to release her to Father, but then your family stepped in. They didn’t know she was pregnant, and when they discovered it, it was too late.”

  “Why?” I asked, “I should think when they knew Aunt Elizabeth was going to have a baby they would have let her marry your father. Wouldn’t that have been the best thing to do under the circumstances?”

  “Of course. But they were too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Father wasn’t there to marry her.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He got a chance to do some special work abroad with a scientist he admired very much. He wasn’t even in America.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “He met my mother while he was in Europe. I don’t know anything about her. I’m not even named after her—Father just chose Ilsa. I know he met my mother in Budapest and I think she was English and I think she was a dancer. Father never wanted to talk about her and, of course, I never urged him. I’d like to know more about her. I don’t even know how Father felt—whether he loved her—or whether he was just fond of her and knew he couldn’t have Elizabeth.… You see, when he left, he was angry and furious and hurt and he didn’t leave any address. He didn’t know that your Aunt Elizabeth was as closely guarded as though she had been a prisoner. He thought she’d betrayed him. That was what hurt her more than anything, that he could believe that of her. But sometimes Father could be awfully weak. I’ve never understood it, because mostly he seemed so strong.… Well, there you are, Hen.… I guess it’s pretty hard on your family, having me pop up like this to marry Monty. It’s not that I have any great desire to become a member of your august tribe, I can assure you.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I know you’d never do anything for that reason.”

  She looked over at me quickly. “You do, don’t you?” she said. “I’m very grateful to you.” After a moment she added “Monty is, too.”

  Under my breath I muttered, “I don’t want his thanks.”

  If she heard me she took no notice. “I think I’ll go for a swim. Want to come?”

  “Now?”

  “Why not? It’s a lovely night.” Our bathing suits were hanging over the railing. “Go down and put your suit on,” she said, handing mine to me. “I’ll be ready when you come back.” She raised her arms over her head and stretched, a gesture of sheer physical well-being. “Oh, Hen, I’m so terribly happy,” she said.

  I slithered down the ladder. She was lounging against the rail, waiting for me, when I climbed up again. Without speaking she smiled at me, pulled herself up onto the rail, stood poised for a moment, then plunged into the water. She dove deep and quiet, with hardly a splash. I knew I would wake the others if I tried to dive, so I crept downstairs again, lowered the rope ladder, and slid into the water. A faint disturbance on the dark surface a few yards away I knew must be Ilsa, so I swam toward it. As I came up to her, she rolled over onto her back and floated; I paddled by her side so I could watch her face. The trouble that had darkened it up on deck was gone now; it gleamed peaceful and white out of the dark water like one of the stars that hung low above us.

  “I want to the in the sea,” she said. “If I know I’m dying, and I’m inland, I’ll get myself to the ocean somehow and die there. I wouldn’t feel clean dying anywhere else. We buried Father at sea. It was what he wanted.”

  I remembered Myra Turnbull reading Shakespeare’s lines to us:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made:

  Those are pearls which were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.…

  For the first time I caught the beauty of the words. I wanted to repeat them to Ilsa, but I was afraid to speak.

  “It’s the only clean way to die,” she repeated. “To become part of the salt water. The most beautiful things in the world belong to the ocean—coral and pearls and wonderful strange breathing plants and gulls and sandpipers and starfish and sand dollars and conch shells. There’s no place left in the world that’s free, except the ocean.”

  I nodded. The black night water lapped about me possessively. My teeth began to chatter with cold. Ilsa noticed.

  “We’ll go now,” she said.

  We swam back to the boat.

  19

  During the next weeks I kept thinking of the way Ilsa had stretched up there on the deck, the way she had exclaimed, almost involuntarily, “Oh, Hen, I’m so terribly happy!”

  And she was. Happiness seemed to sparkle from her like light on the water. And while she was happy, I was resentful, and Silver was miserable.

  We went over to Violetta and Dolph’s for a wiener roast.

  Wiener roasts were very fashionable, so, of course, Violetta had to be constantly giving them. She had a whole mess of people, most of whom Silver and I hadn’t seen since we were little. All the time we were shaking hands and telling people how glad we were to see them, we both kept our eyes on the driveway. Last of all, late as usual, the Woolf car drove in, bouncing over the uneven road, with Eddie, Monty, and Ilsa.

  “I wish Monty wasn’t so beautiful to look at,” Silver whispered fiercely.

  For once Monty had eyes for none of the girls in their frilly dresses. He kept looking at Ilsa and the lines of his face softened into a
tender expression I never remembered seeing before.

  I felt lonely and out of things. Somehow I didn’t have anything to say to all these people. One couldn’t go on reminiscing indefinitely about things that had happened when one was ten; so after a while I walked around to the back of the house and stood looking into the wire pen where Dolph kept his hunting dogs. When they saw me coming they started barking and hurling themselves against the pliable wire of the pen, but when they realized that I hadn’t come to take them hunting, they quieted down, all but one who kept flinging himself toward me and yelping in an agony of pleading.

  Then all at once, through the sharp sound of barking, came the shrill sound of a scream, echoed by several others, and then the excited raising of voices. I hurried back to the benches set about under the live oaks, forming a rude circle about the fire that was much too hot for the early autumn day.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked Lee Jackson.

  “Violetta got knocked and she spilled a whole pot of boiling water over someone’s hand.”

  “Whose?”

  “That girl who lives with Mrs. Silverton. What’s her name? Ilsa something.”

  I pushed my way through the crowd. Monty had grabbed a plate of butter and was spreading the soft yellow grease over Ilsa’s hand and wrist. Her face was white with pain, her lips shut in tight control, but the hand she held out to Monty was steady. He bound his handkerchief loosely around it, then put his arm about her waist.

  “I’m just going to drive you in to the doctor, honey,” he said to Ilsa, and led her to the car. A moment later they drove off, and I heard one of the girls saying to Silver, “Golly, it would be worth getting a little old burn if Monty Woolf looked at you like that.”