Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “There’re some soiled clothes in the violin case,” I said, and went into Silver’s room. The white candlewick spread on the four-poster bed was smooth and creaseless; it looked barren, a bed that had not been slept in for a long time, and filled me with an even greater sense of isolation than I had already.

  I wandered downstairs, out the front door, down the white wooden steps, and walked slowly along the gravel path. The heat burned up through the soles of my feet. I thought of the chill damp grayness of Paris, and wondered if I would eventually forget that, as I had forgotten the heat at home.

  25

  I thought I would go around to the drugstore and have a soda or a sundae, something I hadn’t had since I left home; something that might make me feel part of it again. Ahead of me on the street the heat lay coiled snakily. The red sign above the drugstore quivered like something seen under water. In one corner of the store a huge fan was whining, as were the ordinary ones hanging from the ceiling, stirring around a smell of cosmetics, medicines, stale dish water, ice cream. Flies stuck on the brown curls of paper hanging from the fans, and buzzed about the counter and the tables. At the counted sat three little girls wilted cotton dresses. They might have been Ilsa, Silver, and Violetta, years ago, if Ilsa, Silver, and Violetta had ever sat in a drugstore together.

  The brownest little girl, whose bare black-soled feet twisted around the rungs of her stool, whose straight back and tanned, scratched arms might have been Ilsa’s, said at once and with decision, “I’d like a chocolate sundae, please.”

  The second little girl, in white socks and sandals, in a corn-colored dress that somehow hadn’t entirely wilted from the afternoon sun, the fair little girl who might have been Silver, said, after a moment of delicate deliberation, “I’d like a pineapple soda with chocolate ice cream.”

  The third little girl; with shiny corkscrew curls, exactly like Violetta’s, clinging hotly to her face and neck, smiled sweetly at the soda clerk and said, “I think I’ll have a douche. Mamma says they are so refreshing.”

  I looked up over their heads into the mirror and met a pair of amused blue eyes smiling into mine. Wheeling around violently, I practically knocked Ilsa over.

  “Well, Henry,” she said laughing.

  “Ilsa!” I looked at her and relief flooded through my whole body; I felt all my doubts and suspicions and uncertainties being washed clean by the sea of her regard.

  “Ilsa—”

  “Silver said you might be coming home, but we didn’t know when.”

  “I just got back this afternoon,” I said.

  “Glad?”

  “I wasn’t till now.”

  I noticed for the first time a child standing shyly close to Ilsa. She had a solemn sun-tanned face and great brown eyes that stared up at me under ruddy bangs.

  Ilsa laughed again. “This is Brand. Johanna Brandes Woolf—after Father. Ladybird, this is your Cousin Henry.”

  The child put out an obedient brown hand. “How do you do, Cousin Henry. Are you the Henry who’s been away playing the violin in Paris?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’re Aunt Silver’s brother, why aren’t you Uncle Henry instead of Cousin Henry?”

  “Because our family is far too complicated. But if you’d like to call me Uncle Henry, instead of Cousin Henry, I should be delighted.”

  “I think that would be easier,” the child said. “Mamma says you’ve been in Paris almost ever since I was born and that’s why I haven’t seen you before.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Ilsa, will you and Brand have some ice cream or something?” I looked at her happily. She looked just as she ought to look, in a faded blue-and-white-striped cotton dress and a pair of old sneakers, her brown arms and legs bare, her body as straight and firm as ever, her mobile face alight with amusement and pleasure.

  “Oh, yes, some ice cream, please!” The child looked up at me eagerly.

  “I’d love a dope,” Ilsa said.

  “A what?” I asked.

  “Oh—a Coca-Cola, darling. I haven’t started taking morphine yet. I forgot you wouldn’t be having them in Paris.” It was the first time she had called me “darling.” I winced at the casualness of it.

  We sat down at the counter next to the three little girls. The one who had asked for a douche was happily eating a banana split.

  “How does it feel to be back in an American drugstore?” Ilsa asked.

  “I expect in a week I’ll feel as though I’d never been away,” I answered slowly.

  “Mamma said she’d love to go to Paris,” Brand volunteered. “Mamma said she wondered at your coming back.”

  “All right, ladybird. That’s enough.”

  “Papa said you thought you were too good to stay here, Uncle Henry,” the child went on. “But he said he bet all along you’d come running home.”

  “Brand, what did I say to you?”

  “I’m sorry, Mamma.”

  “When I say that’s enough, I mean it.”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  The clerk put our orders in front of us. Ilsa said, “Take your ice cream over to the empty table in the corner and cat it.”

  “Yes, Mamma.” Brand drooped her way over to the small dark table and sat there, scraping little curls off the top of her ice cream with her spoon and staring at us with her huge brown eyes. When her gaze rested directly on Ilsa, her eyes were bewildered, but I knew that it was not because of her punishment.

  “Really, Ilsa,” I started.

  “When I tell my child to do something I intend to be obeyed,” she said.

  “She’s a pretty little thing.”

  “Yes. She looks like the Woolfs.”

  “How’s Monty?”

  “Oh, as ever. Have you seen Silver and Ed?”

  “No. I’ve just been back a few hours. Papa and I had a fight and I didn’t dare ask him for the car to go across the river and see them. I thought maybe I could get him in a better mood this evening.”

  “My car’s outside. When Brand finishes her ice cream I’ll drive you over if you like.”

  “I’d certainly appreciate it.”

  “Why did you come home, Henry?” she asked.

  I stared at the melting pieces of stained ice in the bottom of my Coca-Cola glass. “I don’t know exactly. Partly the reason I gave Papa—I didn’t think it was right for me to play around Paris on his money while he thought I was seriously studying music and I wasn’t.”

  “You weren’t?”

  “No.”

  “Why else?”

  “Well, partly—partly—”

  “Partly what?”

  “I don’t know. It was almost as if this place—not really this place, but something in it—was like a magnet. And I was a piece of iron and there was nothing in the world that could keep me from being drawn back to the magnet.”

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t know whether or not she understood what I meant I didn’t know whether or not I wanted her to. I looked over at Brand, who was still peeling tiny slivers off her ice cream and staring at us. “She must be about eight now.”

  Ilsa nodded. “She’s a good child, on the whole.”

  “You and Monty are still in the old house?”

  She nodded again. “It’s getting run down. Paint’s peeling off the pillars. Gloomier than ever. I suppose your father or Silver wrote you that Monty hasn’t been doing too well with his father’s law practice?”

  I shook my head. Papa’s letters contained only money and advice, and Silver would never say anything against Monty. “I don’t know anything about what’s gone on while I’ve been away. Silver wrote me that she and Eddie had a small orange grove, but it wasn’t doing too well, and they had chickens, too, and that Eddie had a job as a salesman with some company and was always traveling about the State. She sounded very ashamed of it.”

  “She needn’t be,” Ilsa said sharply. “Eddie’s working hard at something he doesn’t like, to provide a living for her and the
children, instead of taking your father’s money and wasting himself with dissipation and getting into debt.” She stopped suddenly. “I’m not sure I’m glad you’ve come back. For some reason I seem to talk to you.”

  She stood up and all at once I realized what made her look different, and yet more like herself than when I had seen her last. “You’ve cut your hair!”

  She ran her fingers through her short wild locks. “Yes. Monty was furious. But it’s so much more comfortable. I shouldn’t be surprised if Silver bobbed hers one of these days. Violetta will go to the end of her years proclaiming hers to be a woman’s crowning glory. When glory goes with discomfort I’ll have none of it. Brand’s finished her ice cream. Shall I drive you across the river?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I love to drive.” She went over to the table where Brand sat obediently, watching the flies crawl around the edge of her empty ice-cream dish. “Come along, ladybird. You can rejoin society. I’m going to drive Uncle Henry across the river. Do you want to come with us or shall I drop you off at home?”

  “Aunt Violetta’s or Aunt Silver’s?”

  “Aunt Silver’s,” Ilsa said. They grinned conspiratorially.

  “I guess I’d like to go, then,” Brand said.

  Ilsa drove a car the way she rode a horse, with great surety and considerable recklessness. It was a long Dodge touring car and we had the top down.

  “I really ought to put the top up for you, Henry,” Ilsa said after a while. “You’re not used to this sun and I’m afraid you’ll get terribly burned.”

  “I like it,” I said. The wind seemed to be blowing my eyes back through their sockets, my breath down into my windpipe, but it was an exhilarating feeling, and it was good to have purely physical sensations drive out my unformulated miseries.

  “Uncle Henry,” Brand asked, “can you speak French?”

  “Yes. I haven’t spoken much English these past years.”

  “No,” Ilsa said. “You’ve quite lost your southern accent.”

  “Was it hard to learn?” Brand went on.

  “I don’t think I really remember learning it. I didn’t know a word of French and then the next thing I knew I was talking quite easily.”

  “Would you take Mamma and Papa and me to Paris sometime?”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Will you play your violin for me sometime?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that, honey,” I said. “I left it in Paris.” I turned to Ilsa and glared at her. “I failed in that like in everything else.”

  She said quietly, “What else have you failed at, Henry?”

  “Everything.”

  “Do you care passionately about your music? Does it mean your whole life to you?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then don’t be so tragic about it.”

  “But what am I to do?” I asked. “What am I to do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t there anything you want?”

  “Nothing I can have.”

  “Your father’ll give you work in the mill, won’t he?”

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so. That’s not what I mean.”

  “No. I know,” she said.

  I had expected the gap between our years to be smaller now that I was twenty-four and she was twenty-seven, now that we were both grown up. But it seemed even greater. Because I had failed and I was lost. And though in a sense she had failed, too (I was certain her marriage with Monty was anything but a success), she was not lost; she might be disillusioned, but she was still clear and straight.

  “Ilsa,” I said. “I’ve lost my sense of humor.”

  She laughed. “I know you have, Henry. You’d better get it back.”

  “How does one go about getting back a sense of humor?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. People just strike me as funny and I laugh and then I’m all right. We’re all really very funny.”

  “I just don’t strike myself as being funny. Nobody does.”

  “Well, maybe you’re in love. Love can often do very peculiar things to senses of humor.”

  “Can it?”

  “Is that your trouble, Henny? Are you in love?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Was it someone in Paris?”

  “Good Lord, no!” I thought of Telcide and our happy animal relationship—the only simple and healthy contact I ever had with another human being in my life—and the way she had been so calm and matter-of-fact when I told her I felt I had to come back to America. “I mean, nothing that would make me unhappy. It was my own decision to come home and it didn’t have anything to do with her. Besides, she had a marvellous sense of humor.” I stopped suddenly, sheepishly, realizing what I had told her. “For heaven’s sake, don’t say anything to Papa!” I exclaimed.

  “Of course not. Who was she?”

  I looked down at Brand and then across at Ilsa questioningly. She laughed again.

  “All right. Later.”

  We lapsed into silence. As we drove through the business section of town I noticed how much more crowded it was, how many new modern five- and six-story buildings there were. When we came to the bridge, it was no longer a rickety wooden affair with loose boards moving under carefully, slowly turning wheels, but a heavy modern drawbridge with traffic lights at either end. We didn’t talk much until we got to Silver’s.

  A neat mulatto girl opened the door and told us that Eddie was downstate and that Silver was upstairs putting the children to bed, but would be down shortly.

  We sat in the drawing room to wait. It was shady and quite cool. An electric fan was blowing from behind the asparagus plant in the fireplace. The portrait of Aunt Elizabeth was almost invisible in the shadows above the mantelpiece.

  “I like that portrait of Elizabeth,” Ilsa said.

  I nodded.

  “I’ve always felt rather close to her,” Ilsa went on. “Not just because of Father and everything that happened, but almost as though somehow I did have a little bit of her in me. It’s a funny thing. She had her revenge on your Uncle Montgomery, in a way, through me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You knew he died of a stroke?”

  “Yes. Papa wrote me.”

  “I found him lying on the floor with the port running like blood down his shirt. Monty and I carried him to his room and managed to get him to bed. I stayed with him while Monty went for the doctor. And all of a sudden he opened his eyes and stared at me in the most ghastly terror and half screamed, ‘Elizabeth, don’t! I beg of you, don’t!’ Then he made a dreadful sound and died. I hate to think of him, because that’s all I see and hear. It’s strange. I don’t look in the least like Elizabeth. And anyone who didn’t know would think that the portrait was of Silver, but I don’t think it would have happened if Silver had been there instead of me.”

  “Cousin Anna said you were like Aunt Elizabeth.”

  “Yes, but why should I be? There’s no reason.… Your Cousin Anna said she understood, though—about your Uncle Montgomery, I mean. She’s been like a mother to me. Maybe even more, because we’ve never had the embarrassment of intimacy that inevitably comes when one woman has borne another. She’s a wonderful woman, with a capacity for love that’s been trampled on and trampled on, but that somehow stays alive. I love her very much.…”

  “So do I,” I said.

  “Henry.”

  Silver stood in the doorway. I got up and hurried across the room to her. She kissed me in her usual cool undemonstrative way. Only her cold trembling hands told me that she was excited and glad to see me.

  “Henry! Papa said you’d be over tonight! I didn’t expect you till then!”

  “Ilsa was good enough to bring me over.”

  She pushed me away from her and stood staring at me. “You’re so tall and skinny, Brother! I can see you haven’t been taking care of yourself or eating properly. And older—”


  “Well, eight years is a long time.”

  I looked hard at her little face. The gray eyes had lost the look of fear that had lurked behind them in the old days; now they were serene and contented. Her expression was, as always, cool and unemotional, but her body had softened and filled out, though she was still slender. She wore a simple lemon-yellow dress that made her look very young—not at all the mother of three little boys.

  “Ilsa—” she said. “Excuse me for not speaking to you. I’m every which way for Sunday. Thank you for bringing Henry over.”

  “I was glad of the drive.”

  “You never come to see us.”

  “I didn’t think you particularly wanted me to.”

  “I’d always be glad to see you,” Silver said. “After all, you’re my sister-in-law.”

  “That needn’t make any difference to your feelings.”

  “Perhaps not. But it does make a difference to my manners,” Silver said coldly.

  “It shouldn’t.”

  Brand had been sitting quietly in the corner looking at an album of photographs. Now she called attention to her presence, saying, “Please, Aunt Silver, may I go see the chickens?”

  “Darling, I didn’t see you!” Silver said. “Of course, you may go see the chickens. Come with me and I’ll get one of the men to take you around.” They went off together.

  “It’s a funny thing with Silver and me,” Ilsa said. “Sometimes we’re the best of friends, and sometimes there’s this cold thing like a sheet of ice between us. We can see each other, but we can’t reach through to each other. I suppose it must still be Monty, though I thought she’d outgrown that long ago. God knows she ought to have.”

  Silver came back in, saying, “Henry, Violetta and Dolph and I had planned to go down to the beach tomorrow evening for a picnic supper. Could you come with us? Papa wouldn’t mind, would he?”

  “Papa said he wanted to see as little of me as possible. I’d like very much to come.”

  “Do you think you and Monty could come too, Ilsa?” Silver asked, a little tentatively.

  “I’ll have to ask Monty. I think it would be very pleasant. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  “Could you let me know tonight? I want to do the marketing first thing in the morning.”