Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I turned back to the pen of dogs, sick at heart. They didn’t even bark at me this time. They knew I wasn’t going to take them out hunting. They knew I was just little old Henry Porcher, so what was there to bark about?

  Silver and all the cackling hens Violetta had invited to her wiener roast might be thinking of the way Monty had looked at Ilsa, but I had seen the expression in her eyes as she held her scalded hand out to him, a look of love that had shone even through her pain, and that I knew would never be on her face when she turned to me.

  20

  Every tongue in town wagged so about Monty and Ilsa before they were married that the actual marriage itself seemed relatively unimportant, and pretty soon it was an accepted thing, except in the family. The family had to accept it on the surface, to save face, but Papa and Uncle Montgomery were pretty grudging about it, and I knew how difficult it must be for Ilsa. It would have been even worse if Cousin Anna hadn’t roused herself enough to lash out at them about Elizabeth, bringing it all back to them, and unfortunately, to herself, as vividly as possible. They didn’t like Ilsa, but once she was married to Monty even Violetta wasn’t going to allow anyone outside the family to say anything about her.

  During the weeks that followed I went of ten to visit Cousin Anna, not only because I knew she must be lonely without Ilsa, or because I myself gained repose by sitting silently with her under the magnolia tree, waiting for night to pounce on us like a lithe amorous cat, but mostly because there was always a chance that Ilsa might come. Usually, she paid her visits to Cousin Anna during the day, while Monty and my Uncle were downtown, but sometimes she would slip away from the dark house in the evening.

  The first time she came was less than a week after the wedding. Cousin Anna and I were sitting together, lost in our individual reveries, her face in shadow, her brown eyes half closed, my features stiff and stark with misery. I sat there and cursed God for making me three years younger than Ilsa. For the lack of a few meager years, I felt, my life was wasted, lost. For a moment I thought of willing Monty’s death, then thrust the idea away with horror. I am not cut out to be a murderer, and anyhow I felt that the idea was morbid and impractical.

  After some time Barbara came toward us from the house. I looked at her questioningly.

  “Miss Anna,” she said.

  Cousin Anna’s eyelids moved faintly and Barbara knew that she was Jistening.

  “Miss Ilsa here, Miss Anna,” she said, looking down at the motionless figure with loving, grateful eyes. “She say can she come out and sit with you.”

  “Of course,” Cousin Anna said. “Why does she ask?”

  “She say maybe she not welcome.”

  “Tell her to come,” Cousin Anna said.

  I had somehow expected Ilsa to be changed; but superficially, at any rate, she seemed exactly the same. She smiled at me, then stood gravely looking down at Cousin Anna, who held out both her hands. Ilsa took them in her own and held them for quite a long time. It was the first real physical contact I had seen between them.

  “You thought I wouldn’t want to see you?” Cousin Anna asked.

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “You should have known better.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Sit down.”

  Ilsa seated herself and turned to me. “Evening, Henry. Where’s Silver?”

  “She and Eddie drove over to see Violetta and Dolph,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Eddie mentioned it at supper. Why haven’t you been over to see us?”

  “I thought maybe you and Monty’d rather be alone.”

  She laughed at that, a perfectly light, gay, natural laugh. I didn’t know what it meant. Cousin Anna looked at her sharply.

  “It’s a beautiful night,” Ilsa said after a while. “It must be lovely at the beach. Monty and I are going down to spend a few days in Father’s old house next week.”

  I said on an impulse, although five minutes earlier nothing had been further from my mind, “I’m driving down to the beach tomorrow. Reuben’s going to give me another driving lesson. Can I give Ira any message from you?”

  “So your father finally got himself a motorcar,” Cousin Anna said.

  “Just tell Ira we’re coming, would you, Henny? He’ll take care of everything, as long as he expects us.”

  I promised I would. The next afternoon I set off with Reuben, the chauffeur Papa had got to go with the car. I drove most of the way. I found driving easy and enjoyed it.

  We stopped the car at the edge of the good road. I didn’t dare drive over the two sandy ruts that led to the back of Dr. Brandes’ house for fear of getting stuck, even though they were still damp and spotted from the shower that had passed us on our way down.

  I walked, stumbling, toward the house, my heart pounding with unreasonable excitement because I was going back to Ilsa’s home, where I had spent the most thrilling and, in a way, the happiest hours of my childhood. As I approached the house I half expected to see Dr. Brandes coming toward me in his Palm Beach suit or his beautiful riding habit, that had been torn and ruined by the fire.

  A redbird flashed from ilex bush to chinaberry tree, exactly as on the day when I had first come to the house. I saw sunflower seeds in a basket hanging from the tree, and in a moment the redbird was perched on it, pecking at the sunflower seeds and observing me with a circumspect eye.

  I called, but got no answer. After a while I pulled open the screen door and went into the house. It was much the same, except that the big table under the skylight was, as I had imagined it, bare and cleared of specimens. I called Ira again as I started up the stairs. Again no answer. Again no changes. I might have been the excited little boy of ten going up to undress for swimming.

  I came downstairs and went out the back door again, looking for Ira in the low shed that served as both stable and barn. The stall that had once been Calypso’s was clean and bare, but there were three stalls obviously in use that I thought were probably for the cows that had so frightened Silver and me the night we stayed at the beach.

  I began to be afraid that Ira must be off somewhere with his gun, or out setting snares. Because I had told Ilsa I would inform him that she and Monty were coming, I felt that the message was as important as any supremely vital political trust. I felt that I could never face her again unless I found Ira. I went back through the house and down the ramp to the beach. And there, to my relief, I found him digging donax.

  “Hey, Ira,” I called.

  He looked up and frowned against the light as he saw me coming toward him.

  “I expect you don’t remember me,” I said. “I’m Henry Porcher.”

  He looked at me and scowled. “I remember you all right,” he said. “You’ve growed up some, but you’re not much changed, I guess.”

  “I have a message from Ilsa.”

  His face lighted up. “She all right?”

  “She’s fine. She asked me to tell you that she and Monty would be coming down sometime next week.”

  For a moment I thought he would strike me. Then he went back to digging donax, scooping them up out of the wet sand at the ocean’s edge with an old tin can and sifting them through his fingers into the bucket. When he spoke his voice surprised me by being quite amiable. “Help me finish this here bucket of donax,” he said, “and I’ll give you a mess to take home to Ilsa. She loves donax soup.”

  I squatted down and plunged my fingers into the amorphous gray sand at the water’s edge. The tiny shells were every delicate shade imaginable, glistening blues and pinks and lavenders and greens and maize colors, and the beach was full of them, their little holes bubbling and swelling as though they were the pores of some huge sleepy sea beast. In a short time the bucket was filled, and I followed Ira back up the ramp to the house. He took the bucket of donax into the kitchen and came out with a jug of corn liquor.

  “You old enough for this?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I said, sitting on Ilsa’s magnolia-wood stool.

  Ira
hummed as he poured out the powerful stuff, and I recognized the Napoleon song he had sung to Silver, the Napoleon song I had heard Cousin Eustacia singing.

  “Sure is lonely here without Johnny Brandes or Ilsa,” he said. I nodded. We sat there, drinking our corn, not talking. After a while Ira tipped the jug again and refilled his glass. When he offered me more I shook my head and rose, thanking him for his hospitality and telling him that I must hurry back to town. I still could not realize how much less time it took in the car than by horse.

  On my way home I stopped by the Woolfs’ house to deliver the donax. Ilsa was in the drawing room, at the piano. She played very well, with a strong, firm touch. I told her about the donax, and she ran delightedly out to the kitchen to see them. As I waited in the drawing room, all the oppression and hate the walls of that house had stored up seemed to descend on me. I thought it was a pity that it hadn’t burned in the fire like the others.

  21

  Silver called me into her room that night. For a while we talked about Ilsa and Monty. Although Silver was jealous and resentful of Ilsa, accusing her of marrying Monty only to get into the family, I could see that Ilsa had a peculiar fascination for her, too. I told her that Ilsa didn’t give a damn whether she belonged to the family or not.

  Silver shrugged at that, but after a while she said, “Brother, what do you think of Eddie?”

  “He’s the only one of the Woolfs I’ve ever been able to bear.”

  “When he smiles,” she said wistfully, “he has a dimple at the corner of his mouth, just like Monty.”

  “Thank God he’s not like Monty in any other way,” I said, still feeling a little high from the corn.

  “I feel much older than seventeen,” Silver said, sighing. “And I feel as though you were older than you are, too.”

  “It’s because we were away from everything and everybody for so long. If Mamma hadn’t died when she did, our lives would have been completely wasted—if they’re not anyway,” I added, with what I hoped was appropriate bitterness.

  But it was quite lost on Silver. “I know it’s not nice to speak about such things,” she said. “But oh, Brother, I do want babies.”

  22

  It was several months before I saw Ilsa again. I knew from Barbara that she was often over during the day, but in the evenings, when I was at Cousin Anna’s, she seemed conspicuously absent.

  But one evening she did come. It was early in January, and cold. Because of the dampness, it feels much more raw and unpleasant when it is in the fifties at home than it does in drier climates when the mercury is many degrees lower. Cousin Anna and I sat close to the fire. She was wearing a gaudy embroidered scarlet shawl that one of the old gentlemen peering down from the portraits had brought over from Spain, and that somehow did not look incongruous as it lay heavily on her slight, still-erect shoulders.

  When Ilsa came in I knew there was something different about her, but what it was I did not at first realize. It was not only that the expression on her face was much older; there seemed to be something blurred and softened about her usually concise contours. It was raining, and her tawny head glistened with moisture; drops clung to her lashes and softened the ice-sharp blue of her eyes. She kissed Cousin Anna, nodded at me, then stood by the fire, holding her hands out to the blaze. She stood there for a long time, perfectly still, every nerve and muscle tense, until the log had crumbled and turned to gray ash. And suddenly I realized, as she dropped her arms to her sides and leaned her head briefly in an uncharacteristic, weary gesture against the mantelpiece, that she was with child.

  As though divining my thoughts, she raised her head and turned abruptly from the dead embers.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she said quietly.

  Cousin Anna responded dispassionately. “That’s customary, isn’t it?”

  “Before I have it,” Ilsa said, “I want to make absolutely certain of one thing. Monty told me last night that there was insanity in the family. Is that true?”

  “No,” Cousin Anna said.

  I looked up sharply at Ilsa’s words. She was staring intently at Cousin Anna, ignoring me. I might not have been in the room.

  That always struck me as a strange thing. All my life the people I have loved—Ilsa, Cousin Anna, Silver, Myra Turnbull, Joshua Tisbury—have accepted me as a friend, have confided in me—but, somehow, there has been no actual contact made. It has been almost as though they could talk to me because I didn’t exist.

  I think that’s because there has been no give and take. I have a pitcher into which the people I love have poured themselves. I have accepted everything and been allowed to give nothing. When they discover that I have passions of my own it seems to jar them.

  In this way I have sat in many rooms and walked in many gardens, and it has been as though I were a stick of furniture or a branch of a tree. I seem to have caused no sense of restraint or embarrassment. People have been able to talk freely in front of me, almost as freely as though I weren’t there. I suppose some might think this a great compliment; it has given me a curious feeling of nonexistence.

  Now Ilsa said, still looking probingly with her cold blue stare at Cousin Anna, “Monty said that Elizabeth died in an insane asylum.”

  Cousin Anna nodded. “Yes, that is true,” she said. Her hands opened and closed gropingly, her eyes widened for a moment, and she looked around the room as though she were looking for a way of escape. It was not, I felt, that she was ashamed of her words, but that she could not bear the idea of having her emotions stirred up once more.

  “Well?” Ilsa asked.

  Cousin Anna spoke with great weariness. “She tried to bring on a miscarriage,” she said. “But Montgomery and Cecilia-Jane followed her out to the stables and dragged her back. It would have been far better if she had been allowed to ride her horse to her child’s death.” She stopped and looked at the burnt-out fire for a long time, struggling to keep what she was saying a thing of words. At last she went on. “When the time came for the baby to be born the Woolfs and Violetta Porcher had worn her to a frazzle. She was underweight and overwrought and her nerves were torn and raw. Montgomery had practically deafened her with his shouts and threats. Once I saw him strike her. And nothing can be more unendurable than two pious females like Cecilia and Violetta Porcher. Montgomery was easier to endure than they were. The so-called insanity was the result of the treatment of her family and the overdose of a narcotic given her by a stupid quack, because the family pride was too strong to allow Elizabeth to have a recognized doctor or midwife. The first thing she heard when she came out from under the drug was Cecilia-Jane telling her to thank God that the baby had been stillborn. And there was Violetta leering at her over Cecilia’s shoulder, and Montgomery pacing up and down, and the doctor keeping me out in the corridor.… But any doctor, Ilsa my dear, will tell you that there is no hereditary insanity in the family, that actually there is no insanity at all, though, if you ask me, half the people who are still left wandering around loose in the South are queer as Dick’s hatband. Present company not excepted. So have your baby without undue worry, Ilsa. You’re young and shouldn’t have much difficulty.” She stopped and out her hand unsteadily to her eyes. “Please call Barbara, now, Ilsa. I’m tired. I want to go to bed. I don’t want to think.” She sounded suddenly old and petulant.

  As we were saying good night to her she turned with one of her rare quick movements to Ilsa. “Darling,” she said, “there’s nothing for you to worry about, I promise you. Have your baby and be happy with it. Bless you, my dearest.”

  Ilsa kissed her gently.

  Cousin Anna drew a long shuddering sigh. “You don’t know,” she whispered, “you don’t know what it was like to see a vital beautiful human being turned into an inert lump of clay, into a wild inhuman beast.… You don’t know.…”

  Ilsa took her firmly by the arms. “Don’t,” she said, catching her gaze and holding it with the force of her own. “Don’t, darling.”

  Cousi
n Anna clung to Ilsa’s strength. After a moment she said, “Believe me, Ilsa, I meant it for the best when I took you away from your beach and brought you to town to live with me. But I don’t blame you if you reproach me for it.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Ilsa said. “You sound like Father. He was always saying I’d find it hard to forgive him for the life he led me at the beach, and now you’re going on in exactly the same way about taking me away from it. You’re the two people in the world I’ve loved.” She took Cousin Anna’s shawl, which was slipping off her thin shoulders, and arranged it gently.

  Barbara looked at us reproachfully, put her arm about Cousin Anna’s waist, and led her upstairs.

  Ilsa and I went out into the hall. She slipped brusquely into her coat. “I’ve got to get back now.”

  I noticed that she never said home except when she referred to the house at the beach.

  She opened the door and stood looking out into the rain. “I’d like to go somewhere where there was snow,” she said. “And mountains to climb.”

  “Are you glad about the baby?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” She held out her hand and let the rain fall on the upturned palm. “What Monty said put any thoughts of gladness or resentment out of my mind. Now that I know it’s all right for me to have a child, I suppose I might as well be glad. I shan’t make a good mother, though.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  She turned to me and smiled. “I’m very fond of you, Henny. Find yourself a good wife, will you?”

  Her fingers touched mine, briefly. Then she disappeared into the rain.

  [PART FOUR]

  23

  Time and tide waiteth for no man. Time and tide waiteth for no man. Time and tide. Time and tide. Time and tide.… I woke up and stirred from my cramped position on the day-coach seat. Time and tide—my mind ground around with the wheels, and panic ground unreasonably and increasingly in my heart.