Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “I don’t.”

  “Of course you do,” Lorenzo said. “Everybody does.… I ought to go home and work on my harpsichord, but I’m too hot.”

  “Still making the harpsichord, Lorenzo?” I asked, seating myself on one of the white summer-shrouded chairs.

  “Yes.”

  Mattie Belle stuck her little marmoset head in the doorway “Where Miz Woolf?”

  “She went down by the river,” Brand said.

  “Did she take a parasol?” Mattie Belle asked.

  Lorenzo laughed, leaned away from the piano, and put his elbows on his knees. “You know she didn’t.”

  “She oughtn’t to be out walking in this brilin’ heat,” Mattie Belle said. “Enough to scorch the fur off a tarantula. Ain’t nothing I can do to manage her. Baby, can’t you—”

  “Don’t you talk to me.” Brand shook her head. “You know I can’t manage Mamma.” She took her spoon and scraped the last shred of persimmon from the skin.

  “I guess you got to raise a person like Miz Woolf to be able to do anything with her,” Mattie Belle said. “Old Miz Anna Silverton’s the only person I ever saw who could boss her and even she can’t keep her from being purely pigheaded. Well, I s’pose I better go down to the river and look for her. There’s something I don’t get about the ice bill this week, and I ain’t aiming to pay it till I is satisfied we not being overcharged. If you smell anything in the kitchen, go have a look, Brand.

  “Uh huh.” Brand pushed her damp hair off her forehead with a tired gesture. “What we having for dinner?”

  “Bacon and grits and baked eggplant.”

  “Oh, grits again, Mat!”

  “Miz Woolf went whipping off this morning and forgot to give me the orders. I had to figure out the best I could. And I couldn’t ask you because you was nowhere to be found, and the linen to be sorted.”

  “Oh, Mat, I forgot! I’ll go do it now.”

  “You perfectly well know I did it for you,” Mattie Belle said, but with no ill-humor, and stomped out, almost colliding with Myra Turnbull.

  I’ll never forget the day I walked into the drawing room and saw Myra Turnbull sitting there, talking to Ilsa. I felt as though I were a very little boy once more, in one of Miss Myra’s classes. My mouth fell open and I let out a startled noise that sounded more like a razorback pig grunting than anything else.

  Myra Turnbull turned around and eyed me with distaste.

  I looked at her, at Miss Myra, wearing the same heavy steel-rimmed spectacles, the short, straight nondescript-colored hair pushed behind her ears, the thin shapeless body in the thin shapeless dress. Now that I was older I saw, too, the fine eyes, the flawless complexion, the beautiful pointed ears pressed like little shells against her head. Still feeling like a child in the schoolroom, I managed to gasp out, “He—hello, Miss Turnbull.”

  “Yes,” she said, and I stared open-mouthed as she pulled a package of cigarettes out of the pocket of her shapeless silk jacket. “I thought you looked familiar. Who are you?”

  “Henry Porcher,” Ilsa said. “Do you know each other?”

  “She—she taught me English in school,” I stammered.

  “And you probably don’t remember a particle of it.”

  “Oh, but I do—I’ll never forget your classes.”

  “That,” said Myra Turnbull, “could be either a compliment or its diametric opposite.”

  “Is she—are you—” I couldn’t seem to stop stammering.

  “Yes, I’m staying here,” Myra Turnbull said. “For a month or so, at any rate.”

  That was five years ago.

  Now she came into the room, looking around for Ilsa. Brand and Lorenzo, who had been in her English classes not so long ago, rose awkwardly. I had long since thrown off my shyness and become extremely fond of Myra Turnbull, so, although I rose too, I greeted her with a “hey” I wouldn’t have thought possible or permissible five years before.

  “For an omnivorous reader you have primitive modes of greeting, Henry. Good evening, Brand. Good evening, Lorenzo.”

  Lorenzo bobbed his head.

  “Good evening, Miss Turnbull,” Brand said. “Just getting back from school?”

  “Yes,” Myra said. “I had to keep most of the class in. It is insufferable that the schools have to open in this September heat. Well, Lorenzo, why aren’t you at the theological seminary this year?”

  Lorenzo looked at the floor to hide a grin. “I don’t feel I’ve been called yet,” he said.

  “Lorenzo, hold up your head and speak like a man and not like a gangling schoolboy. You are twenty-one years old and you would do well to remember it.”

  “Yes, Miss Turnbull.”

  “And you, Brand. Why your mother didn’t send you to college this year I will never understand. You may not be brilliant, but you have a reasonably adequate brain and it would have been good for you.”

  “You know we can’t afford it,” Brand said. “And Mamma needs me here, anyhow.”

  “In that case you will speak to Miss Wells. She spends an hour in the bathroom every evening just when I want my bath and she sprays that cheap perfume of hers all over the place.”

  “I’ll speak to her, Miss Turnbull,” Brand said, again pushing her hair back with that weary gesture.

  “And if I have grits one more night for dinner I shall pack my bags and leave.” Myra started out.

  “She’d better begin packing then,” Lorenzo whispered.

  “What’s that?” Myra wheeled on him.

  “Nothing, Miss Turnbull.” He looked down at his feet until Myra had gone out through the big folding doors. Then he sat down again, this time on the floor.

  “I heard they weren’t going to ask her back to school this year,” Brand said. “I’m glad they did.”

  “Who told you that?” Lorenzo asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Why wouldn’t they ask her back? She’s the best teacher they’ve ever had in the school.”

  “Because of—oh, you know why, Lorenzo.”

  “Because they say she drinks? Well, I’ve been around here plenty and I’ve never seen any signs of it.”

  “You wouldn’t know anybody was drunk unless they passed out cold, and then you’d just think they were dead.”

  Brand got up and put her plate with the remains of the persimmon on the table by the folding doors.

  53

  I looked up quickly as Ilsa and Mattie Belle came in the French windows. Ilsa went over to the piano, her feet in their soft sandals touching the floor with the peculiar intimacy of a ballet dancer; Mattie Belle went back to the kitchen.

  Outwardly Ilsa had changed very little in the past eleven years. She was thinner, but her body was as firm and strong as ever. The lines of determination about her mouth and eyes no longer disappeared when she laughed, but she still laughed a great deal. Her hair had kept its old tawny color of the sea oats, her skin its burnished sunny gold. But it was her hands you noticed now as you never had before.

  Although she did not move them a great deal, they seemed to stand out from the rest of her, startling in their sensitive touching beauty. Her most casual gesture was fraught for me with an indescribable importance.

  Her sightless eyes still mirrored her moods, flaming with amusement, freezing cold and sharp with anger, smouldering with determination. Now that she could not see, she took less pains to control her facial expressions. Sometimes, when I wondered that blind eyes could have the life and intensity of flame, I would remember that flame cannot see.

  “Hello, Ilsa,” I said. “I went to the beach today.”

  “Did you, Hen?” Her fingers were moving gently over the piano keys, soundlessly, not striking the notes. “How was it?”

  “Wonderful. I wish you could have come.”

  “I wish I could, too.”

  “Hello, I’m here,” Lorenzo said shyly, scrambling up from the floor, and, as usual, bowing awkwardly as though she could see. Ilsa was the one perso
n before whom Lorenzo lost his serenity.

  “Oh, hello, Lorenzo, dear. How are you today?”

  As soon as she spoke to him he sat down again. “Oh, I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, too.”

  “Does anyone want a coke?” Brand asked. No one said anything. “Must you always sit on the floor, Lorenzo?” Her voice had a thin edge of irritation to it.

  “It’s cooler on the floor.”

  “It’s not that hot.”

  “Does it bother you to have me sit on the floor?”

  “Do whatever you please. I don’t care. How’s the harpsichord coming along, Lorenzo?” Brand’s voice was unpleasant. I thought it was because this fag end of summer had worn us all out.

  “It’s nearly finished,” Lorenzo said quietly, looking over at Ilsa, who sat silently, her cold blue eyes seeming to stare sternly down at the piano.

  “Miss Darlington is complaining because we have grits so often,” Brand went on. “Everyone’s sick of them, but Miss Darlington’s the worst. I wish we could put her out, but she pays more for that room than anyone we’ve had so far. Not that it does any good. Joshua Tisbury hasn’t paid his rent again this week. Why do you let him stay, Mamma?”

  Ilsa began to strum softly. She appeared not to have heard.

  “And Miss Turnbull said if we had grits again she’d leave, and we’re having them tonight. What should we do?”

  “Nothing,” Ilsa said.

  “I don’t think you’d care if we lost all the boarders.” Brand’s voice was not pretty when she complained.

  “I wish to hell we would. And Myra won’t leave.” Ilsa got up, took her mandolin off the piano—I had given it to her the year after she became blind—and began stroking the chords.

  “It was so nice when we were here alone,” Brand sighed. “You and Papa and me. It doesn’t seem to me it used to get so hot then. Doesn’t anybody want a Coca-Cola? What I’d really like is lemonade.”

  “Why don’t you go make some?” Ilsa suggested in her low voice, dark as the sea. When I read the other blind poet, Homer, I was always reminded of Ilsa’s voice when he talked of the wine-dark sea.

  “Mattie Belle’s getting dinner,” Brand said.

  “You wouldn’t be in her way if you stayed in the pantry.”

  Brand sighed again, heavily. I noticed that each time she sighed, a worried shadow crossed Ilsa’s face. “You’d think we could rent the back room,” Brand said, “when the house is so close to the river and everything. It’s just that it looks so hot. Oh.… I’m too lazy to go make lemonade.”

  “I’ll do it for you,” Lorenzo said, scrambling off the floor and shaking himself to settle his feathers.

  Ilsa called after him, “Tell Mattie Belle to make a soufflé instead of the grits for tonight, will you, Lorenzo? It’ll make Brand much happier.”

  After she heard his footsteps diminish as he went through the dining room, she turned toward Brand. I think she had forgotten, as she often did, that I was in the room.

  “Do you love Lorenzo?” she asked.

  Brand made that trapped rabbit-like movement of the head. “I’ve told you I don’t know.”

  “If you did, would you marry him?”

  “I’ve told you I don’t know.”

  “I like Lorenzo.”

  “He’ll never have a cent.”

  “Is that so important?”

  “I don’t know. I—I’m tired of being poor.”

  “You simply don’t understand him, do you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But does he really know it?”

  “You can’t make someone really know something by just telling them it’s so.”

  “Brand—”

  “What, Mamma?”

  “Why don’t you go spend a week with your Aunt Silver and the children—just for a change?”

  “She hasn’t asked me.”

  “Of course she has. She told you just to let her know any time you could come and she’d love to have you.”

  “That’s not a real invitation.”

  “You don’t need a real invitation from Silver.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You mean you won’t go?”

  “I can’t trust you.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

  Brand pulled a small box out of the pocket of her yellow cotton dress and took it over to Ilsa, putting it in her hand. “What’s this?”

  Ilsa took the box, feeling it with a quick light stroke of her fingers. “My sleeping tablets.”

  “How many have you got in the box?”

  “I don’t know, dear. Quite a few.”

  “Mr. Bell told me you only get two on each prescription. What do you want all these for?”

  “It saves me extra trips to the store in this hot weather to have them on hand.”

  “You didn’t have this many two weeks ago and these have been the hottest two weeks this summer. You must have made a good many trips to get all these.”

  “Well?” Ilsa said.

  “I’m going to keep them.”

  “You are not.”

  “Please let me keep them, Mamma. I can’t sleep if you don’t let me keep them.”

  Ilsa slipped the pills into her pocket as Lorenzo came in with the lemonade.

  “Here we are,” he said, putting the tray carefully down on the table.

  Ilsa put her mandolin back on the piano. “Lorenzo, you’re an angel. There’s nothing I love more than lemonade in hot weather.”

  Lorenzo poured her a glass and took it over to her. “There’s plenty more.”

  “Did you use up all the lemons?” Brand asked.

  Lorenzo grinned. “I wanted to, but Mattie Belle wouldn’t let me.”

  Ilsa drank down half of her lemonade. “Brand, my darling, I love you dearly, but Lorenzo makes much better lemonade than you do.”

  “I’ve watched him,” Brand said, sipping hers gingerly. “He isn’t very sanitary about it.”

  Ilsa laughed. “There’s a very comforting saying that what you can’t see won’t hurt you. I’ll take Lorenzo’s unsterile lemonade.”

  Lorenzo refilled her glass and said, “I think I can finish my harpsichord tonight.”

  “Lorenzo!” Ilsa exlcaimed. “How exciting!”

  “I feel quite queer about it,” Lorenzo said.

  “How long has it been?” I asked.

  “It’s three years, Uncle Henry. Lorenzo’s spent three years making a harpsichord.” Brand’s voice was metallic with antagonism.

  “Oh.” I looked over at Lorenzo, who plunged his hands into his pockets and shrugged his thin shoulders.

  “It must be very beautiful,” Ilsa said.

  Lorenzo looked at her gratefully. “It is. Very.”

  “May I play it?” she asked.

  “It’s over the garage. The stairs are quite bad.”

  “Darling, I’m not an invalid.”

  “I’d love to have you play it,” Lorenzo said.

  Ilsa went over to the mantelpiece and took down a picture she’d had taken of Brand on her eighth birthday. “Lorenzo.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You know this picture of Brand?” She took it to him.

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve always meant to ask someone who could really see. You’re one of the few people I know here who can. Brand was eight when this picture was taken, just before I lost my sight. Does she still look anything like it? I mean, the expression?”

  “The eyes are different,” Lorenzo said slowly.

  “I was afraid of that,” Ilsa said.

  “What do you mean?” Brand asked in a hard little voice.

  Ilsa returned the picture to the mantelpiece, went back to the piano and sat down. “I’ll ask Joshua, too.”

  “Why do you let Joshua stay!” Brand cried.

  “Because.”


  “You’ve always listened to me before, Mamma.”

  Ilsa laughed.

  I thought that she was indeed in a strange and cruel mood that afternoon.

  “More lemonade, Brand?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Yes. I’ll get it. I think it just makes me hotter, though.”

  As Brand went and poured what was left in the pitcher into her glass, Ilsa straightened up and seemed to be listening suddenly.

  “Where’s Médor? Is she in here?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Lorenzo said, getting down on his knees and looking under the sofa and the chairs. “No, she isn’t here.”

  “She was down by the river with me,” Ilsa said, “and she was so hot I sent her in. I suppose she got lost on the way to the house.”

  “Shall I go look for her?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Would you mind awfully, Lorenzo?”

  “No, of course not.” He got up and went out the window. We heard him whistling as he went toward the river.

  “Poor Médor,” Ilsa said, laughing. “Remember how she used to sit in the yard and cry when we first got her? In such an undoglike way, as though she were frightened of something. The way children do when they’re frightened and lonely and need someone to tell them they’re loved and wanted. She just used to cry off in a corner, not at the door or under a window, but just off by herself, until I heard her and came out so she could crawl up in my lap and be soothed. She wasn’t in pain, she was simply unhappy and frightened. You remember sometimes how she used to keep on her funny shivering sort of crying five minutes after I came out and began rubbing her and telling her that everything was all right, we were all here, nobody was going to take her away or hurt her. She hasn’t done it for a couple of years now.”

  “I don’t know why on earth you’ve kept her all these years, Mamma. She isn’t any help to you,” Brand said, stupidly; she ought to have known it would infuriate her mother.

  “You might as well ask why I’ve kept you all these years,” Ilsa flashed back.

  “You remember,” I said quickly, “how proud you were when Dolph and Eddie took her hunting?”

  The anger ebbed from Ilsa’s face and she grinned. “Yes. I felt just like a gratified parent when she turned out to be their best hunter. The fashionable hunters may have laughed because she squatted instead of pointing properly, but that was just her way.”