Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “You’ll pay sometime.” As far as Ilsa was concerned, it was something that needed no discussion.

  “Sometime may be a long way off.”

  Ilsa shrugged. “I wish you’d fall in love with Brand,” she said, half laughing.

  “Sorry.”

  “I know you couldn’t. I—I just wish she was someone you could.… You left a girl up North you loved?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she nice?”

  “As nice as you,” Joshua said.

  “Does she love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor Joshua. Poor girl.”

  “Why do you let me stay?”

  She laughed again. “I like to be read aloud to.… You’ll be strong again soon and then you’ll be able to go back to her.”

  “That’s right,” Joshua said.

  “I know how an illness can turn things around.” Ilsa leaned back against the sofa. “Mine helped out my moral sense, but that’s all. I don’t like moral senses. Oh, God, Joshua, I feel so strange today. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Maybe it’s Brand. I’m worried about her.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you still here, Henry?” she asked.

  “Yes. Do you want anything?”

  “No. I just wondered.… Is anything in the way of the piano?”

  “No,” I said. “I put everything back in its place.”

  “Thank you, darling.” She rose and went over to the piano. Joshua made a motion to help her, thought better of it, and sat down again. After a moment Brand came in.

  “Good evening, Miss Woolf,” Joshua said.

  “Good evening.”

  Ilsa stopped playing. “Brand, someone moved the furniture. Probably your Aunt Violetta. Your Aunt Violetta would have just loved it if I’d fallen over a chair and broken a hip. Then she’d have had someone else to visit in the hospital.”

  “I’ll see you at supper,” Joshua said, laughing, and went out.

  “Brand.” Ilsa swung around on the piano bench and faced her daughter. She always seemed to be looking at people when she talked to them, but I noticed that her eyes were always directed too low when she spoke to Brand, as though she were still seeing, in her mind’s eye, the child she had last looked on. She often laughed and said that when she met new people she visualized them at approximately the right age, but those of us she had known when she could see had eternal youth as far as she was concerned.

  “What is it, Mamma?”

  “Why wouldn’t you go to the movies with Beulah and her brother tonight?”

  Brand was silent.

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  After a moment Brand burst out, “Mamma, you know perfectly well that Mrs. Jackson made Lee say he’d take me and he wouldn’t even ask me himself. Beulah had to. And you know why she had to run back so quickly. So Lee’d have time to ask a girl he wanted.”

  “Dearest,” Ilsa said, “if you’d even go out with Lorenzo more, you’d meet more people.”

  “I don’t want to leave you.” Brand continued to look stubbornly at her feet.

  Ilsa stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. “You don’t need to have such an excessive sense of duty. It doesn’t make happy to have you sticking around missing fun you’d have normally. I know you want the kind of fun Beulah has. Don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Brand, it irritates me to have you around all the time,” Ilsa said sharply.

  “I don’t dare leave you any more,” Brand said in a low voice.

  Ilsa took the pills out of her pocket and held them out to her. “Oh, take the damn pills if it will make you any happier.”

  “Why did you want to do it?” Brand implored.

  “What do you mean by prying into my private affairs?”

  “To have your mother attempt suicide isn’t very pretty.”

  “I promise you I won’t, Brand. I wasn’t very serious about it.”

  Brand began to cry softly.

  “Ladybird,” Ilsa said. It was the first time she had called her that in a long time.

  “What?” Brand said in a hard choked voice.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I get—I get so frightened.” Brand tried desperately to control her voice so that Ilsa wouldn’t know she was crying. But Ilsa knew.

  “Dearest—don’t—” she said.

  “I can’t help it,” Brand wailed.

  “Come here, my bird,” Ilsa said, and put her arms around her. “You’re getting wrinkles in your forehead from frowning. You’re too young to have wrinkles. Smooth them out. There. That’s better.”

  Brand clutched at her as though she were, indeed, a child. “Mamma, what’s happened? Why does everything have to be like this?”

  “Don’t frown so, darling. You’ll never get rid of those wrinkles.… You’re all muddled up, aren’t you?”

  “I wish I weren’t! Are other people ever muddled up?”

  “Often.”

  “They don’t seem so to me.”

  “Don’t frown, ladybird.”

  “Mamma—”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “When I was little do you remember what good friends we used to be?”

  “Yes.”

  “It isn’t because of your eyes … it’s only the past three or four years … since I’ve been grown up, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes I think you don’t love me.”

  “Brand.”

  “I’ve tried to be a good daughter, to see that you don’t want for anything—”

  “I used to be able to tell what was going on in that little head of yours by looking at you,” Ilsa said. “If only you wouldn’t hide yourself so.”

  “I can’t seem to help it. I don’t think I mean to.”

  “Brand—”

  “Yes, Mamma?”

  “Tomorrow—just to please me—be selfish all day. Make Lorenzo take you to the beach, swimming. Go to the movies in the evening. Stay away from this house all day.”

  “I’m needed here.”

  “Mattie Belle and I can manage very well without you.”

  “Why do you want to get rid of me?”

  “Because I know you want to get away.”

  “Then why don’t you marry Uncle Henry?” Brand cried.

  “Brand.” Ilsa’s voice was frightening in its anger. “Henry is in the room.”

  “I know that!” Brand’s voice was hysterical. “I wasn’t sure you remembered. He’s always here, just sitting around. You might just as well be married to him and then we wouldn’t have to run this dreadful boarding house.”

  “Brand, you will apologize to your Uncle Henry at once.”

  “Why?”

  “If you can’t see for yourself, you will do it because I tell you to.”

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. She sounded very like Monty.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “It does matter.” Ilsa’s voice was still angry. “There is no reason why you should be humiliated and hurt.” Then her voice softened. “Hen,” she said, “you know how fond I am of you, don’t you? I love having you over here as often as you care to come.” She got up from the piano bench, came over to me, and cupped her hand gently around the back of my neck, stroking it. “But you know why I couldn’t marry you, don’t you?” she asked.

  “I guess so.” As usual when she touched me my body seemed to dissolve, to burn into a hot vapor. I didn’t know how much of the feeling that her touch gave me was the enormously healing power of her hands, which I had always noticed, and how much the added sensitivity her blindness gave them. Myra Turnbull had once told me that in the tips of our fingers we all have a tiny bit of the gray matter that forms our brains. I think that Ilsa must have had more than the usual share of this, and during the past years had cultivated it with double intensity. It seemed that I could feel her fingers quiver an
d vibrate with life as they traveled softly over my neck and ran up into my hair.

  “It wouldn’t be fair to you, you know that,” she went on. “And Brand knows it, too. She can be very selfish. She will have to learn to break free and stand on her own feet without having her sense of duty taken care of. God knows why she has a sense of duty about me. She’s not in the least necessary to me. I can manage better by myself.”

  I know that she was being cruel deliberately because she felt she had to be, but she couldn’t see Brand’s face quickly drain of blood and her mouth open breathlessly, as though she had been struck.

  Ilso continued, leaving me and going back to the girl: “Brand, you keep talking about the time before your father died. You weren’t so twisted up, then. Ever since his death, or really more since you’ve grown up, you’ve become like a stranger. There’s nothing of me in you, God knows. There’s not even anything of your father.”

  “You don’t want me to be like Papa, do you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re trying to tell me you didn’t love Papa.”

  “You’ve always known that.”

  “I didn’t want to know it.”

  “You’ve got to face the truth.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Brand, do you want me to love you?”

  “Oh, God, Mamma, of course I do.”

  “Brand,” Ilsa said. “I—I’m most hateful when I’m loving you most.”

  “Sometimes I’m that way, too.” Brand leaned against Ilsa like a child again. “How is it,” she said, “you can’t know how you feel about people and things—how you can feel, can feel completely and definitely—and yet you don’t know how you feel? Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I’m like that so often. I feel something so it wants to burst out of me—and yet I don’t know what it is I’m feeling.”

  Valdosta peered around the door. “Supper ready. Miss Brand—”

  “Yes, Valdosta, what is it?”

  “The soufful done fell so Mattie Belle had to hot up the grits.” She disappeared.

  “Hurrah!” Ilsa shouted.

  “Mamma, please be nice to the guests tonight. There’ve been so many complaints lately and we can’t afford to offend them.”

  “I hate their guts,” Ilsa said.

  “Mamma!”

  “You’re such fun to shock.”

  “Please be nice to everyone at supper,” Brand begged. “You ought to realize how important it is. You’re being very unfair when you try to antagonize them.”

  “I don’t want any supper,” Ilsa said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m too hot to eat.”

  “You must eat.”

  “Want me to be rude?” Ilsa leaned back lazily against the piano.

  “No.”

  “Then don’t try to make me go into the dining room.”

  “I’ll get Mattie Belle to fix you a tray.”

  “If you do, I’ll throw everything on the floor.”

  “All right,” Brand said. “If you’re going to be childish, there’s nothing I can do.” She started out.

  “Darling—”

  “Yes, Mamma.”

  “Take me for a walk after supper and let’s have a talk.”

  “All right.” Brand’s voice was cold and antagonistic.

  “Every day we add another stone to the wall between us. You don’t like to talk, do you?”

  “It depends.”

  “Say a nice long grace,” Ilsa said. “It will please them all.”

  As Brand went out, Ilsa stretched, long and wide. “Oh, God, what an afternoon! That’s enough soul-baring to last another ten years.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, I’ll be getting along now.”

  “Will you be back after supper?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t come so often.”

  “Henry, don’t be an idiot. You’re not going to let what Brand said bother you, are you?”

  “It’s been bothering me for a good many years.”

  “If it gives you pleasure, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t come as often as you like.” She seemed to have forgotten momentarily some talkings she’d given me.

  “Maybe I will, then.” I watched as Médor crawled out from under the piano and put her head on Ilsa’s knee, half closing the yellow slanting eyes so that she looked like a sinister Chinese.

  “But why haven’t you ever married, Henny? You’d make some woman such a lovely husband.”

  “There’s been no one I wanted to marry.”

  “Why don’t you go to Paris and find your French girl?”

  “I told you she wouldn’t marry me.”

  “Why don’t you go back and look her up, anyhow?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Well, that’s reason enough,” she said dispassionately. “God knows I don’t want to interfere with anybody else’s life, Hen; it’s just that I’m so fond of you.” She gave Médor’s ear a final pull and pat and the dog returned to her place under the piano.

  “I know,” I said awkwardly, and started out. “I’m going now.”

  57

  I went out of one of the long French windows and stood a moment on the stone terrace, looking into the room through the lush evening green of the wisteria vine. It was quite dark in the room; it seemed that night had already come, though it was still light outside. Ilsa sat at the piano, her hands in her lap, leaning forward, thinking. I walked on down toward the river and sat where the roots of a water oak stretched out over the bank and formed a seat. Faintly on the wind I could hear voices from the dining room, and in the drawing room Ilsa began to play something on the piano. And I felt suddenly that I must speak to her, that I couldn’t go home without going back to her and telling her once and for all how desperately I loved her.

  As I approached. I saw a man emerge from the shadows of the bamboo grove and go toward the house. I thought for a moment that he might be a thief, and followed him, quickly and silently, trying to avoid the dry twigs under my feet. A long strand of Spanish moss brushed duskily against my face.

  The man stepped through the French windows and stood inside, very still, watching Ilsa at the piano. I knew then what I had felt at once, that he was no burglar, but someone I knew. For a moment I couldn’t place him. There was something of Monty about his shadowed form, something of Dr. Brandes. I knew it could be neither and I didn’t believe in ghosts. Then he spoke and I knew who he was. I stayed very still, hidden by the wisteria that clutched and smothered the narrow square pillars of the terrace, because I could not move. My legs were as paralyzed and lifeless as those of the poor prince in the fairy tale whose legs were turned to black marble.

  “Play the thing with the tune—the little tune—you remember—” the man said.

  Ilsa stopped playing. Her hands fell onto the keys and struck a discord. “Who is it?”

  “Turn around and have a look at me, my love,” he said. “I haven’t changed so terribly in eleven years.”

  Slowly she turned toward him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re not seeing me—” Frightened, he cried out, “Ilsa!”

  “I’ve been thinking of you all day,” she said in a voice so low I could scarcely hear. “Isn’t that strange?”

  “It was true, then,” he said.

  “I never lied to you, Franz.”

  “I thought it was just another of your excuses for not coming with me. I didn’t believe it could be true. I didn’t believe it could happen to you—”

  “But I never lied to you, Franz.”

  For a moment he stretched his arms out toward her, a gesture full of infinite tenderness, infinite protection, as she sat with her face upturned toward him. Then, very slowly, he dropped his hands.

  “Play me the little thing with the tune,” he whispered.

  Ilsa started, very softly, to play the rosy-bush song. Franz stood behind her, and she stopped playing and lea
ned against him, weakly. He sat down by her on the piano bench and took her in his arms. After a moment she began to feel his face gently.

  “You need a shave,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You aren’t much changed?”

  “Not much.”

  “That lovely mop is still there. Is it gray?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Um hm.”

  “Positive?”

  “Um hm.”

  “You wouldn’t lie to me?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe you. You always lied to me. Franz—”

  “What?”

  “Have I changed? What do I look like? You’re the first person I’ve been able to ask. Isn’t that funny?”

  “You’re more beautiful,” he said.

  “You’re lying.”

  “No.”

  “Your hair isn’t gray at all?”

  “I’ve found three white hairs,” he said.

  “Mine isn’t gray?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve still got those thick sharp eyelashes. Do my eyes look strange?”

  “No, darling. Just lost.”

  “My face has lines. I can feel them.” She took his hand and pressed it against her face. “See? So has yours.”

  “How is Whisky or Gin or whatever she’s called?” be asked.

  “She’s growing up.”

  “Was she worth it?”

  “You won’t recognize her,” Ilsa said. “She’s not a little girl any more.”

  “How’s your husband?”

  “He’s dead”

  “When?”

  “Not long after you left.”

  “That’s ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  “What did he die of?”

  After a moment Ilsa answered, “Heart.”

  “He never had a heart,” Franz said.

  “Yes. Yes, he did. That was another reason I couldn’t.”

  Brand came in, carrying a tray which she put down on the table by the door. Then she turned on the lights. As Werner and Ilsa suddenly became clearly visible human beings again, no longer dim shadows in a dream, I realized that I had been listening to something I had no business hearing. I knew now that I ought to go away, that I ought to go quickly, that what I was doing was unpardonable. But still I couldn’t move. Agonized and ashamed, I crouched by the wisteria vine and peered through its leaves into the drawing room and listened. Time seemed to be a new thing. Many days and nights were compressed into the moments I stood there. It seemed to me that I remained motionless, my breath coming quickly, as long as it would take summer to end and winter to come, and spring, the wisteria to billow purple on the vine, the Judas tree to blossom like flame, the magnolia to hold up white waxen cups, the petals to fall on the ground, brown-stained, betrayed, and summer to scorch and dry the land again. But still I could not move.