Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I could tell that Monty was terribly pleased with himself at his lavishness in dispensing hospitality. He was showing off and talking big, as he always had done when he was little. But somehow I could no longer hate him; I was only sorry for him, though I was angry at myself for being weak enough to feel pity.

  I couldn’t tell what Ilsa was thinking, as she sat next to Monty, relaxed, her head thrown back against the seat, singing in her smoky dissonant voice. But somehow I was more jealous at the way she looked back over the seat and smiled at Franz Werner than I had ever been at any way she had looked at Monty.

  After a while she began to sing the rosy-bush song. I didn’t join in with her, but let her sing it through to the end, alone.

  I wish I was

  A red red rosy bush,

  A-blooming by-ee

  The banks of the sea,

  For when my true

  Love would come by-ee

  He’d pluck an rose

  From offen me.

  A rosy rose,

  A red red rosy bush,

  He’d pluck an rose

  From offen me.

  “What’s that?” Franz Werner asked.

  “An old song of my grandmother’s.”

  “Would you be gracious enough to sing it once more?”

  She sang it through again. When she had finished, Werner said, “Why, it is almost like an old Elizabethan love song. It is one of the most endearing little melodies I have ever heard.”

  Monty said, “I don’t remember it, Ilsa. Why haven’t you sung it before?”

  “I used to sing it to Brand,” she said quietly. “You just didn’t listen.”

  36

  It was almost one o’clock Saturday night when we got to the beach. Silver had driven over from across the river for dinner with Papa and me and was coming with us, having sent the children over to Violetta’s for the night. Monty had wanted to ask Violetta, but I managed to dissuade him, saying Silver couldn’t come then, and anyhow, with Dolph, the car would be too crowded.

  None of us was accustomed to staying up that late; Silver got to bed most of the time by nine or nine-thirty, I always went upstairs at ten, though I read in bed, and I don’t think even Ilsa or Monty stayed up much after midnight. We were filled again with a sense of excited adventure.

  Ira met us with his usual grumpiness. He had prepared a marvelous supper, which we ate ravenously. Then we went upstairs to change to bathing suits. It was a hot sultry night, the kind of damp weather in which nothing ever dries. Our bathing suits were still sticky and wet from the day before, although they had been rinsed out in rain water and had been hanging out all day. The sand, still holding on its surface the penetrating rays of the sun, felt damp and warm under our feet. Great clumps of water hyacinth had come in with the tide and lay sprawled, brown and dead from salt water, on the beach. There was no moon; great jagged knives of lightning ripped the sky down the beach where sand and water joined together at the curl of the horizon, but there was no thunder. The stars were tremendously thick and low; where they hung over the ocean they seemed to be dripping wet and salt-crusted from the water.

  The ocean was very quiet. After we had waded out to our waists we were beyond the breakers. The water was warm. Werner ducked himself up and down with naïve pleasure. “In the Bering Sea,” he said, “the water is so cold that it collapses your lungs in less than five minutes. No one can live in the Bering Sea.” He lay on his back and kicked his long graceful legs that had looked so handsome in Hamlet’s tights.

  Ilsa was swimming with fast precise strokes out toward the flickering arm of the lightship. After a while she turned and swam back to us, much more slowly. She stood up panting. “There’s a terrific undertow tonight. I was afraid there might be.”

  “You were foolish to swim out that way,” Silver said, her little face pale and sphinxlike above the dark moonless water.

  “I wanted to test the pull.”

  “You shouldn’t have risked your life to do it.”

  “I know how to swim, Silver.”

  “Many strong swimmers have been dragged out and drowned by the undertow.”

  “I didn’t go out that far.”

  “There’s always the danger of a barracuda.”

  “Really, Silver, I’m here safe and sound. Let’s stop caviling about it.”

  Silver turned away, her face cold and expressionless as always when she was angry. She never raised her voice when she was aroused—perhaps that was one reason why she could be so infuriating. After a few moments she waded in to shore and went back to the house. I could see her shoulders drooping a little forlornly as she went up the long white ramp, her limbs gleaming wetly in the starlight. I wondered if she were missing Eddie. Then I sighed and, with a brotherly sense of duty, followed her to the house. Monty came in while I was dressing. I was sitting on Dr. Brandes’ narrow ascetic bed and pulling on my socks.

  “Funny kind of room,” Monty said. “Like a few more gewgaws myself. Like this when the old boy was alive?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Exactly. Where’s Werner?”

  “He and Ilsa still in the water.” Monty pulled off his suit and dropped it on the floor at his feet, where it lay in a salty damp puddle. He took a towel from the one chair, which he had cavalierly appropriated for himself, humming The Georgia Grind through his nose. I noticed how white and flabby his body was, and remembered how I had envied his strength and suppleness when I was a kid, having been always ashamed of my own long skinniness.

  “That Ira built me the best little old kennels you ever did see,” Monty said. “Come along over Monday and see the hounds if you can get away from the mill, Henry.”

  “How many are you getting?”

  “Five. Three grown, two puppies—nine weeks. Funniest little old bastards.” He pulled on his shirt and drawers. They were both clumsily patched. I knew that Ilsa would hate to sew. Monty stretched, then reached up and scratched the thick black hair on his chest and under his arms. “Oh, Lord, getting old, getting old,” he said. And it was true; he no longer looked young. “Glad to be home, Henry?”

  I nodded.

  “Have a gay old time in Paris?”

  “Pretty gay.”

  “Hoped I’d get to go there during the war, but neither Eddie or I got to go overseas. Think you’d have gone there if it hadn’t of been for the war? Think you’d ever have stayed there?

  “I don’t know.”

  “Lot of girls, huh? Wine, women, and song? Kind of a serious feller, aren’t you, Henry; student? Well, how’s about

  A book of verses underneath the bough,

  A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou

  —something—beside me in the wilderness,

  Ah, wilderness were Paradise enow.

  How’s that, hey? Guess where I learned that? From a Minorcan feller down at Togni’s. That surprises you, hey? Pretty good, i’n’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Nice girls in Paris? Nice little armfuls? Or don’t you like that sort of thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Was that why you stayed over there so long, hey?”

  I didn’t say anything. I went over to the damp-spotted mirror. My face peered out at me, wavering and distorted, as though I were looking at myself from endless leagues under the sea. I started to comb my salt wet hair. My body felt sticky and good from the salt water, and cool.

  “Not so bad here, you know,” Monty said. “I could show you a good time. Want to come out with Werner and me tomorrow night? Come to Togni’s?”

  “I’m going over to Silver’s for supper,” I said.

  “Okay, Henry, some other time. You just let me know when you want me to show you some fun.”

  I was disgusted with him.—You poor fool—I thought—how can you have so little taste? I knew that this was his way of apologizing for having created a scene about me that Sunday but he couldn’t have picked a worse way. And I was angrier still that he wa
s was taking Werner down to Togni’s with him Monday night after the show; it seemed as if they were both betraying Ilsa. I was angriest of all because Werner was still in the ocean with Ilsa. I forgot that I had come back to the house because of Silver, that I had intended to go in to her as soon as I was dressed. Without saying anything to Monty, I slammed out of the room and down the stairs.

  Ira was bending over the piano, reaching in and doing something to the hammers.

  “Hey, Henry Porcher,” he said, scowling at the piano.

  “Hey, Ira.”

  “Half these keys stuck. Don’t know why Ilsa keeps it here when she never uses it. Thought if I shifted the lamp down toward those lower notes might help. You been gone a right long time, Henry Porcher, away from your good home and kin.”

  “Yes, it was a long time.”

  “Back for good now?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You don’t look much different.”

  “I feel different.”

  “Don’t think you’ll ever change much. You’ll go on being about the same Henry Porcher till the day you die. Glad to be home?”

  “Very,” I said, thinking that Ira, too, never changed.

  “I used to think you might be kind of like Johnny Brandes when you growed up, but you turned out in another direction. I don’t know is it too bad or is it just as well. That actor feller looks kind of to be like him in a black sort of way.… You have a good time all these years?”

  “Oh, yes, I guess so, thank you, Ira,” I said. “Did you?”

  “I’ve had my ups and downs like everybody else.” He bit off a plug of tobacco. “Sure have missed Johnny Brandes and Ilsa. Most fun I’ve had since I’ve been alone’s a couple of years I spent rum running.”

  “You were a rum runner!” I exclaimed.

  “Sure. Over at the island off from July Harbour. Good place for it. Took them government chaps a long time to get wise to us. Then there was a fight, a regular sea battle, fire everywhere you could see, on the island, and boiling, oil and kerosene on the water. A lot of men got killed that night.”

  “Did you kill any?”

  “I don’t know, Henry. I used my gun like the rest, but whether I got anybody or not I don’t know, there was so much scurrying about. I remember being thrown out of a motorboat and swimming out in the open water with the tide pulling me out to sea, and suddenly a whole sheet of flame come at me over the ocean, so I ducked and swam under water until I thought my ears would burst or my heart split me open, it was pounding so. But I didn’t dare come up as long as I could see that glare above me. When finally I saw a dark patch I come up and breathed and then went down again. I had to do that about half a dozen times before I got out of the fire. Then I was so far out to sea I could hardly see land. I swam down the coast and then I managed to get to shore. When I pulled myself onto dry sand I just dropped and lay there until the sun came around twice before I could get strength and breath enough to crawl back.”

  “Golly,” I said.

  “See them kennels I built for Ilsa’s husband?” he asked.

  “I’m going over to see them Monday when the dogs come.”

  “You think Ilsa’s happy?” he asked suddenly.

  “I—I don’t know,” I answered.

  “Seems to me something’s been troubling her these past months,” he said, opening the smallest blade to his knife and scratching inside his ear.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That’s what I been asking you. Other day she came out to talk to me while I was building them kennels, and she tripped and fell flat smack. Said she felt kind of dizzy. Not like Ilsa to trip over things. You think maybe could be she’s going to have another baby?”

  “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t be that.”

  “Didn’t think it would be. Didn’t think she could, after she was so sick that time. I purely hate to have her peely wolly.”

  “Yes,” I said, immediately beginning to be anxious.

  37

  I turned as Silver came downstairs. In the warm muted light of lamp and candle her pale little face glowed gently; only the sudden dark eyebrows sharpened the soft blur of it.

  “I thought you were still in the water,” she said.

  “No. Everybody’s out now except Ilsa and Franz Werner.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s go sit on a sand dune,” I said, “and wait for the others.”

  We climbed to the top of one of the highest dunes, white in the starlight like the snow-covered hills that Ilsa wanted to see. The tiny grains of sand were cold under us. The stars were so quiet and serene that it was difficult to feel troubled about anything.

  “Look at the stars,” I said to Silver. “They never seem so dense and so close except over the ocean.”

  “I don’t like them.” She wrapped her arms about her knees and shivered.

  “What?”

  “I don’t like stars.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Brother. They seem to give me such a sense of—of futility—I mean, when you really think about them, they’re so immense out there and so far away and so long ago—they make us so small and so pointless—and kind of deserted by God.… I don’t like them.… They’re impersonal and cruel … and then they seem sort of like little points of knives pricking through that black old sky and you never know when one of the knives is going to go piercing right through the night and right into your heart.”

  “Good heavens, what a thing to say!”

  “That’s the way I feel.” She rubbed her little face, pale and luminous, against her knees; in the starlight she looked very childlike, all the soft womanly lines washed from her face.

  “I never think of them like that,” I said. “I just see them as being small and beautiful and exciting—stars are very exciting to me—but not dangerous—not any more dangerous than the Easter lilies when they come out like stars all over the fields.”

  The sand of the dune felt comfortable beneath me tonight; I began to feel that I was home again, accepted once more by my land. The surf came in to the shore with a low rumble; even though the breakers were small, swelling and curling over when they were near the shore, lapping against the sand in gentle, whispering crisscrossings, there was an almost subterranean roar to the ocean, steady and loud. I looked beyond the long white lines of the breakers to the quiet swells beyond searching for Ilsa and Franz Werner, but I couldn’t see them; if Ilsa had worn a bathing cap it might have caught the light and helped me to find them; but she always went in the ocean bareheaded.

  “Are you sleepy?” I asked Silver, waving away a mosquito that had begun to buzz about my head in spite of the lavender oil I was covered with.

  She shook her head. “I was at first. I thought while we were eating the crawfish I’d just put my head down in my plate like little Henry Porcher and go to sleep. But I’m wide-awake now.”

  We sat together for a long time, quietly, more at peace in each other’s company than we had ever been when we were children. I had always been fond of Silver because she was my sister; now I found myself at ease with her because she was herself. I realized all at once that it was the repose that Silver gave people that was so wonderful. She would sit silently, her little hands dropped like two small shells in her lap, and if you wanted to talk, she would listen. Sometimes she wouldn’t even look at you, but you would know that she was listening, and caring. With Ilsa it was different. She could sit just as quietly, and listen for just as long, but she would be concentrating on you so intently with all the fire of her being that you were filled with a sense of the excitement, the infinite, unlimited potentialities of life. She gave you anything but repose.

  I wondered—I wondered what she and Franz Werner were saying to each other all that time in the dark ocean.

  Then I saw them come out of the waves, and walk, side by side, across the beach and up the long white cement ramp to the house. The actor moved with the panther-like grace that was his greatest ass
et on the stage.

  “That actor,” Silver said, and I knew she had seen them and had been watching them, too.

  “What about him?”

  “I don’t mean to be nasty, Brother, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Maybe I oughtn’t to say it.”

  “Go on. If you’ve started you may as well finish.”

  “I know.… I don’t want to sound like Violetta.”

  “You couldn’t. Go on.”

  “I don’t like the way he’s been looking at Ilsa. I don’t like the way she’s been looking at him.”

  “You’re just imagining things,” I said uncomfortably.

  “Henry, be honest. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “I’ve noticed that they like each other. And that Monty and Werner get on. And that’s a good thing. It keeps Monty away from that dreadful Togni’s.” I thought I could change the subject by getting her angry over Monty, but she wouldn’t fall into the trap.

  “I don’t know anything about what Monty does. Whatever it is—if it is anything—it doesn’t give Ilsa an excuse to—”

  “To what?”

  “To—to do anything that might cause gossip.”

  “After all, Silver, it was Monty’s idea, coming here tonight.”

  “Oh, you’d stick up for her through thick and thin, wouldn’t you, goosey?”

  “I don’t think she needs sticking up for.”

  “Henry, tell me something.”

  “What?”

  “What do you see in her? What do you see in that Ilsa?”

  I didn’t say anything, but sat staring out across the ocean to where the night bent down at the horizon and became one with the wayward, irresistible water. From the house the sound of the piano and voices singing crashed suddenly across the darkness.

  “Brother, I don’t understand,” Silver said. “You’ve always been crazy about her. Why? What for? She doesn’t give a hoot about you. I don’t believe she really thought of you once the whole time you were away, and that’s all your letters were full of, asking about Ilsa. Whenever I saw her and told her you’d sent your love she’d always just smile, only you’d never know what it meant or what she was smiling at, because I’m sure I don’t see anything particularly funny about your sending her your love from across the ocean, and then she’d say to thank you and send you hers.”