Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “I’m afraid Monty may not be home until too late. If I can’t call you tonight I’ll let you know by eight.”

  “Oh. All right,” Silver said, and looked over at me. She sat curled up on a lime-green plush Victorian sofa. Although she had none of the spark that flashed at one from Aunt Elizabeth’s picture, I was relieved to see that there was no longer anything of Mamma in her. The worry I had felt when she wrote me that she was marrying Eddie vanished.

  “Come see the children,” Silver said.

  We followed her upstairs.

  The house smelled of newness. It was quite a small house and the heavy mahogany furniture, the massive silver, the portraits in the huge gold frames, all seemed crowded and degraded. It was not so much that they belonged in another house as that they belonged in another time, an age that every new event pushed farther back into the impossible.

  “Hush,” Silver said, leading us into a small room off the landing, although neither Ilsa nor I had said a word.

  I looked for a moment at the three hot sleeping babies, lingering at the middle one, the two-year-old, Henry Porcher Woolf, named after me. Then I looked at Silver as she went from crib to crib, looking down at the sleeping, heat-flushed little boys; and as I watched her face I knew why she no longer looked like Mamma. Mamma had never looked at either of her children like that.

  26

  We had a perfect evening for a picnic. I drove down to the beach with Ilsa, Monty, and Brand.

  Monty was fatter; his face looked unhealthy under a superficial tan; there were deep puffy circles under his eyes. Much of his overheartiness was gone, and he had, instead, a kind of unsteady gentleman-of-the-old-South manner. He wore a spotless Palm Beach suit, and the handkerchief with which he mopped his brow was of the purest silk. He carried a portable gramophone and a batch of records. I climbed into the back with Brand. Ilsa got in and sat at the wheel.

  Monty stood in the driveway. “I’ll drive,” he said.

  Ilsa did not move and did not speak.

  “I’m perfectly capable of driving my own car to the beach,” he said.

  Ilsa’s mobile mouth twitched slightly. “You look tired, Monty. I’m afraid you worked too hard at the office again. Why don’t you rest and let me drive? You know I enjoy it.”

  Docilely, he went around the car and sat down beside her. “Times hard,” he said. “Buried in work, up to ears.” I noticed that he was talking like Uncle Montgomery.

  “Uncle Henry,” Brand said, as we crossed the new bridge.

  “What is it, Brand?”

  “Isn’t my Papa handsome?”

  “Yes, he is,” I answered with complete truthfulness. No matter what eight years had done to his face, Monty was still handsome.

  “Don’t you think I have the most wonderful Mamma and Papa in the world?”

  “Yes,” I said, answering only the first part of the question.

  “Monty,” I heard Ilsa say in a low voice from the front seat.

  “What is it now?”

  “Will you please be out of the house by ten tomorrow morning?”

  “Why?”

  “Beulah Jackson’s coming over for a piano lesson.”

  “What did you say?” he said in a loud voice.

  “Be quiet. I said Beulah Jackson was coming over for a piano lesson.”

  “And you propose to give her this lesson?”

  “I do.”

  “Why, may I ask?”

  “We need the money.”

  “We’re getting along.”

  “The house needs painting. Brand and I need some new clothes.”

  “Oh, so it’s your vanity.”

  Through the rear-view mirror I could see Ilsa’s quick spontaneous smile, and felt like an eavesdropper.

  “This is the first time I’ve been accused of being a vain woman. I’m rather flattered.” She took one hand off the steering wheel and laid it on Monty’s, not, I fancied, because of any impulse of affection, but because she knew instinctively the healing power of those hands and used them when necessary.

  “No Woolf has ever stooped to giving piano lessons,” Monty sputtered.

  “This Woolf is going to start stooping,” Ilsa said. “Come on, darling, stop glowering. It’s a great deal better to teach than to lose one’s self-respect. You might try to find me a few more pupils.”

  As she kept her hand strongly on his, he seemed like a bristling cat whose fur slowly lies down at the mistress’s touch. I thought, as a matter of fact, it would probably have been a good deal better for them both if she had been his mistress instead of his wife. No doubt this was the decadent influence of Telcide and Paris.

  Ilsa took her hand off Monty’s and put it back on the steering wheel.

  27

  We met the others, Silver, Violetta, and Randolph, at the foot of the beach road.

  “Shall we go toward July Harbour or down Myrtle Valley way?” Dolph asked. At thirty he was already quite bald and very cadaverous. His high forehead was the color of parchment, his nose long and wrinkled, not as though he were smelling something unpleasant, but as though he were puzzled and trying to find out what was wrong. He looked older than his few years more than the rest of us. I knew that he was helping Papa at the paper mill, since I was so unsatisfactory as a son and heir, and doing very well.

  Violetta was the only one of the three women who was dressed in expensive, fashionable clothes. She wore a white-and-scarlet linen dress; her hair was waved, and her nails manicured. While Dolph had been getting thinner, she had been getting plumper, and with the added flesh her face, like Monty’s, had become coarse instead of soft. She was still pretty and vivacious, though she looked more than twenty-nine, and I didn’t think her continuous flow of conversation was going to amuse me. I thought how much nicer both Ilsa and Silver looked in their simple dresses and low shoes.

  “When people ask me,” Violetta started, “whether I want to go toward July Harbour or down Myrtle Valley way for a picnic, I never know which to say, do you, Henry? The beach looks just the same to me no matter which way you go—water and sand one way and sand and water the other—so, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t make much difference. You don’t care, do you, Randolph? Let’s just go whichever way is quickest. Silver and I put up the prettiest picnic you ever laid eyes on. Silver’s Willie May makes the best deviled eggs you ever bit into. Maybe it’s because they’re Silver’s own eggs; I mean, her own hens lay them, not Silver, but I think the way Willie May devils them has something to do with it, don’t you, Silver? Or are you going to give all the credit to the chickens?”

  Monty ignored his twin sister. “Go down Myrtle Valley way,” he said.

  I had expected Ilsa to call loudly for July Harbour, so that she could go to her father’s house, but she sat quietly, her hands loose on the steering wheel, and waited.

  “Come on,” Monty said. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go. Does anybody object to going down the Myrtle Valley road?”

  “Unhunh. It suits me fine, and Dolph, too,” Violetta said. “How ’bout you, Silver?”

  “I don’t care. Let’s just hurry. I don’t want to leave the children too long.”

  “Well,” Violetta said, “we better make our minds up one way or other. Randolph’s been working hard all day and he’s real hungry. Which way do you say, Ilsa?”

  Ilsa’s lips were pressed together impatiently. She started the car and turned around, heading down the Myrtle Valley road.

  “You needn’t be rude to my sister, Ilsa,” Monty said.

  “She wanted someone to make up her mind for her, didn’t she?”

  “Violetta’s been very kind to you. When you married me she said she was going to treat you just like one of the family.”

  “That’s more than you’ve done, isn’t it?” she asked, in a voice so low I could barely catch the words.

  We drove in silence, sprawling dunes to the left of us, scrub and swamp to the right. Every once in a while, poking tentatively, mo
ckingly out of the dunes, you could see the tops of rickety picket fences. Once someone had stumbled across the magnificent idea of building these fences across the dunes to keep the sand away from the road, the way, I believe, it is done for snow in the North; but nothing can hold back the sifting restless sand. It goes where it will, as careless of poor little fences as revolution. Toward the road, and twisting in and out of the fences, were beach morning-glory vines; at the top of the dunes, waving triumphantly like ostrich plumes in a war horse’s headdress, were the sea oats, their careless tarnished gold the color of Ilsa’s wind-blown hair.

  The road seemed to be a dividing line between life and death. Free sea and sand and sea oats on one side; on the other gnarled myrtle trees, twisted and tormented by the salt wind; stunted scrub oak; an occasional rusty palm sticking up tall and alone. Scorpions would be in that underbrush, and snakes, and strange wild birds’ hidden nests. Where the inland waterways wound their serpentine coils, near the road, but hidden by the bowed secretive trees, alligators would raise treacherous heads in the, dark waters, flamingoes would arch their scarlet frightened necks, egrets would couch, hiding their secret, forbidden plumes, and sea gulls would hover for a moment, then fly screaming back to the ocean. Over this uninhabitable land, buzzards waited; wild razor-backed pigs grunted their way across the road in front of us, and disappeared into the swamp’s dark recesses.

  On one side of the road was all the clean life and beauty of home; on the other the rich decadent death.

  Ilsa drove rapidly, angrily, until we reached one of the turn-offs at the edge of the road, with its small fountain of sulphur water. She pulled the car off here and stopped.

  “I’d forgotten the sulphur water now that we don’t have it in town any more,” I said.

  “They still have it across the river. That’s one reason—only one—why I don’t go over to see Silver or Violetta more often. Father and I always drank rain water. You’d better have a good drink, Henry. This is the real stuff. Take a mouthful of rotten eggs and you’ll know you’re home again.”

  I bent over the fountain and took a mouthful, spitting it out onto the sand immediately. “I’d forgotten how foul it was.”

  Ilsa and Brand laughed loudly. “I must remind Violetta to give you a lecture on its merits,” Ilsa said.

  Reaching into the back of the car, Monty got out his gramophone and records. “Come on and we’ll have some music,” he called to Brand.

  Brand looked from Ilsa to him and back again.

  “Go on with your father, ladybird,” Ilsa said. “Uncle Henry and I’ll wait here for the others. Your Uncle Randolph’s a darling, but he drives like a cockroach.”

  “How does a cockroach drive, Mamma?”

  “Get your father to tell you. Help him carry the records.”

  Stumbling in the soft sand, Brand and Monty disappeared over the crest of the dune. In a moment we heard the raucous rhythm of one of Monty’s dance records.

  “I should think he’d get enough of that tripe in town without having to buy records and drag them along everywhere. I loathe the hideous noise,” Ilsa said.

  I remembered the songs Telcide had sung in her deep, foggy voice, always a little wistful when they were most valiantly noisy, always crazily gay when they were most sad and despairing, and I suddenly realized that I had started going regularly to hear Telcide because her voice reminded me of Ilsa’s. But I had never even heard Ilsa sing. This, I thought, is one of the times when I should laugh at myself; but I couldn’t.

  The others drove up just then, and Ilsa and I helped them carry the picnic things up the dunes. Dolph and I spread out the steamer rugs while Silver and Violetta unfolded the white linen tablecloth and began unpacking the picnic basket. Ilsa stood watching Monty and Brand for a moment; then she turned to help with the picnic basket.

  28

  After Violetta had gorged her fill—deviled eggs, fried chicken, sandwiches, corn dodgers, cake, watermelon, sweet coffee she had brought in a huge thermos jug—after the remains of the picnic had been cleared away and Brand lay sleeping on one of the dark steamer rugs, Ilsa said to me, “Come take a walk, Henny.”

  I stumbled eagerly to my feet and followed her. Dolph and Violetta sat close together on one of the steamer rugs. I thought that there must be at least a spark of passion left between them; Cousin Anna had known what she was talking about. That made up for a lot.

  Silver sat near the gramophone, handing the records to Monty.

  Ilsa stuck her finger in her mouth and held it up to the evening. “Let’s go against the wind,” she said. “I don’t want to listen to The Georgia Grind or Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. And as for When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’—” She Hung her arms wide. “This sea breeze is good. Henry, why didn’t you say you wanted to go July Harbour way?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I stammered. “I guess I sort of forgot I’d have any say in the matter. I’ve been so used to being here only mentally I still don’t feel part of anything yet. You wanted to go back and see your father’s house, didn’t you?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “There wouldn’t have been a chance of going, then. I thought maybe if someone else wanted to go that way Monty wouldn’t say anything. The only way I got him to come tonight was pretending I didn’t want to come because Violetta’s such a bore. Heaven knows she is a bore, but I get so lonely for the ocean sometimes I feel as though I were going to burst. It’s as though someone put the ocean into a box at low tide, and when the moon came along and said, hey, ocean, it’s time for high tide, there wouldn’t be any place for it to go.… It’ll be night in a minute. Let’s walk far away so they can’t make us go home for a while.”

  She slipped off her shoes, pulled up her skirts and unfastened her stockings, then ran splashing into the water. “Come on, Henny, it’s glorious!” she called. I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up my trousers, and followed her in.

  “I wish we were kids again, so we could just take off our clothes and have a swim,” she said. “If we were alone I would, damn it, but I’m afraid the others would find out and die of horror. You wouldn’t be shocked, would you, Hen? After all, you’re like my brother.”

  I turned and waded out of the water, sat down on the sand, and put my socks and shoes on over my wet, sandy feet. Ilsa followed me and stood looking down at me.

  “What’s the matter, Henny? You look so desolate, all of a sudden. I didn’t shock you, did I? Oh, come now, after the life you’ve been leading in Paris!” She tried to make me laugh.

  I forced a smile. “I guess I’m just not used to being home yet,” I said; “I still feel strange and disoriented.”

  “On a night like this, at the beach! Look, there’s the lightship.” She pointed out over the water where the light flickered on and off. “When I look at that light coming over the ocean I can’t be frightened or discontented. It’s like magic for me. It makes everything clear and serene.”

  Ilsa had taught me her feeling about the lightship. At the time I could never quite get out of my mind Mamma’s gruesome tale, or forget that, shining and secure though the light might be, the buzzards were always there, and the sharks.

  I remembered how shortly after Mamma had chilled my blood with that horrible warning I had crept out of the house and ridden on Billy out to the woods. I left him tethered to a pine and was wandering along rather aimlessly. A number of buzzards were circling slowly overhead, and unconsciously I headed their way. Suddenly I was standing in the center of the circle—half a dozen buzzards were wheeling above me, their ugly naked heads half drawn into their shoulders, their wings absolutely motionless. Their shadows slid over the brush, around and around in the same track. They were almost hypnotic, sliding so regularly past, and I had a sudden strange feeling that they were weaving a web of some sort around me. If the sun hadn’t been so bright I’d have been frightened out of my wits. It was like being in a dream that slowly, slowly
, progresses to a dreadful end, in spite of your fighting to stop it midway.

  “There’s going to be a moonrise,” Ilsa said. “Cheer up, creature. The stars are coming out. Let’s go sit on a dune and watch it. It’s been a long time since we’ve been on the beach together. If it weren’t for Brand I’d walk down the beach to the house, and to hell with them.”

  “It’s a long walk,” I said.

  “I know.” She settled herself comfortably on the soft sand of the dune that seemed to accept her companionably, as part of itself. Me it rejected impassively; I had become a foreigner. I wriggled uncomfortably. Sand was in my shoes, in my hair, I ground it between my teeth.

  “Henny, would it be proper for you to take me out dancing some night? It would be fun to stay out all night dancing again.”

  I didn’t think the family would approve of this any more than my life in Paris. “Wouldn’t Monty take you?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. Too many of the wrong people might recognize him.”

  “I—I’m sorry,” I said, softly, miserably.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t be sorry for me, Henry! I have an awfully good time out of life. I can’t think of anything in the world that would make me stop enjoying things. As long as I can have the beach once in a while I couldn’t ever really be unhappy.”

  I couldn’t very well tell her that I wasn’t nearly as sorry for her as I was for myself.

  After a while I said, “Ilsa, do you really need money?”

  She nodded. “After the old Woolf died Monty pretty much let the practice go to pot. Edwin comes to the office every once in a while to try and straighten things out, but it’s not much use. Monty resents having to work. He’s firmly convinced he ought to be subsidized for life.”

  “I hate to think of you having to give piano lessons.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. It’ll be good discipline for me, and I don’t think I’ll be a bad teacher.”

  “You play very well.”

  “Father used to make me work hard at it. He said it was one way to keep me out of mischief.”