Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Mamma, please try—” Brand said, and then she saw Werner. She stood stock-still.

  “Brand, you remember Franz Werner,” Ilsa said.

  “Yes. I remember.” Brand’s voice went rigid.

  “Brandy! That’s it.” Werner exclaimed triumphantly.

  Now that the lights were on, I could see how shabby and down-at-heel the actor looked. His Palm Beach suit was wrinkled and threadbare and hung loosely on his thin frame. His hair, though plentiful as ever, was shot through with white; his cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken, though they still had the same passionate fire and he moved with the old beautiful conscious grace.

  Brand picked up the tray and carried it over to Ilsa. “Mamma can you eat this?”

  “I’m not hungry. Have you eaten, Franz?”

  “No.”

  “Give it to Franz, Brand.” As Brand, with compressed lips, put the tray in front of the actor, Ilsa said, “How’s everyone? Did they all scream at the sight of grits?”

  “They think you’re ill because you didn’t come to supper, and that’s cheered them up,” Brand answered.

  “Your Aunt Violetta ought to come and live here,” Ilsa said. “She’d feel right at home, and maybe Dolph could have a rest.” She laughed. Although she still laughed a great deal, it was the first time I had heard that particular laugh in a long time, and I had almost forgotten it.

  “Will you murder me if I tell you you’ve grown, Brandy?” Werner asked. “Ilsa, you didn’t want to give such an inebriated name to a poor defenseless baby, did you?”

  “Brand is a family name,” the girl said tightly.

  Ilsa laughed. “It’s my maiden name. She’s called Johanna Brandes, after my father.”

  “I like my name,” Brand said.

  Werner smiled at her. As I remembered, he had a singularly sweet smile. “No frills. It suits you.”

  “Are you going to be in town long?” Brand asked.

  “No. I just stopped off on my way North.”

  I tried to see Ilsa’s expression then, but I was too far away and the wisteria leaves were blocking my view.

  “Where are you staying tonight?” she asked.

  “You have a sign up.”

  “All the rooms are full,” she said quickly.

  “What about the back room?” Brand asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll go to a hotel then,” Werner said.

  Ilsa nodded, then asked suddenly, “Have you enough money?”

  “I’ve plenty of money.”

  “Does he look prosperous, Brand?”

  “Quite,” Brand answered, after a second during which the actor gesticulated to her violently.

  “I’ve been successful since you last saw me,” he said. He was eating hungrily.

  Brand turned away. “I’ve got to get back to the dining room. They’ll be wondering what’s kept me. I’ll see you after supper?”

  “You will, Brandy, my girl.” He crammed food into his mouth as though he hadn’t had a decent meal in weeks.

  Brand went out toward the dining room, her shoulders drooping in an utterly defeated manner.

  After a moment of sitting very still, Ilsa said to Werner, “When must you go?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to New York. Helstone thinks he’s got something for me in town again.”

  “Helstone’s your agent?”

  “That’s what he calls himself.”

  “You haven’t done anything in New York for a long time?”

  “Not for five years.”

  “Why?”

  “No luck.” He seemed to have forgotten his big talk of a minute ago.

  “Where have you been?”

  “All over the goddam place from the Borstch circuit to South America. I even did a couple of lousy pictures in Hollywood. Playing sinister gangsters. You know the kind of stuff. You ever go to the movies?”

  “No.”

  “Blind guy I know, divides his life between the movies and—well, never mind.… I was down in Panama when Helstone called me. When I knew I’d be coming through here I wanted to wire you—and then—well, I didn’t know how things would be—I thought I’d better just stop and see for myself.”

  “Yes.… I—I hope it’ll be good, whatever Helstone’s got for you.”

  “I’ll take it, whatever it is. I can’t afford to be choosy any more.” He had finished his supper and was slumped exhaustedly over the table. “Mind if I use your phone later on?”

  “Of course not darling.”

  “Can you afford it or should I make it collect?”

  “One of your telephone conversations to New York? You’d better make it collect.… But can’t you do anything besides act?”

  “Not a thing. I tried.”

  She smiled. “What did you do?”

  “I started a religion. I grew a long beard and looked wise and kind and rented a hall on Fifty-seventh Street. I was the apostle of kvetch.”

  Ilsa threw back her head and laughed.

  “All the middle-aged ladies came,” he went on. “I felt so sorry for them. It was so unfair.”

  “Yes,” Ilsa said.

  “They all loved me so.”

  “Yes.”

  “I had music in the background always, and beautiful dim lights.”

  “Cruel Franz.”

  “It kept me comfortably alive for a year.”

  “Franz, come here.”

  He went and sat down beside her. She raised her hands and caressed his face.

  “You do need a shave,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Your hair’s too long. But that’s like you.”

  “Is it?”

  “Your coat feels worn.”

  “Does it?”

  “It feels quite threadbare.”

  “Your cheeks feel hot,” he said.

  She held him tightly. “You’d better stay here tonight.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Where would you have stayed?”

  “Down by the river.”

  “Do you still have a hard lime getting to sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s too hot to sleep now, anyhow,” she said.

  “Play me that little thing again,” he said. “That little thing with the tune.”

  She turned around at the piano and began playing softly the rosy-bush song. She sang in her smoky voice:

  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.

  58

  It was as though that song was the magic key to my paralysis. Slowly, as though I were a somnambulist, I moved away. I walked down the driveway and out onto the street. I walked as though I were a stranger, as though I had never been in this town before and the tangled streets were new and confusing to me.

  At the corner of Ilsa’s street I saw some children playing in the last light before they were sent off to bed. Two of them belonged to a family that had just moved into the big house across the way. As I went by I heard the little boy say, “I saw the blind lady today.”

  One of the little girls said, “Oh, that’s nothing. We see her all the time. She even came to our house for tea once.”

  I walked on quickly. The words were as much of a shock to me as the first plunge into the ocean in the spring when the water is still icy.

  Ilsa was so integral a part of my life that I never thought of her as being someone whom you would mention seeing, as those children had. I never thought of her as being blind; they had talked as though she were some sort of freak.—But they’re the freaks—I thought.—Cruel little beasts. But after a
ll, what had been so cruel? They had simply mentioned seeing a blind lady.

  My anger and shock at hearing her referred to in this way momentarily blotted out my turmoil at the scene I had just unpardonably witnessed. But before I had gone another block it rolled over me again like mist over the ocean.

  I stared down, in my shame, at the sidewalk, at the octagonal pieces of cement, laid together like bathroom tiles magnified many times, the bright spears of grass and weed pushing up between them; and I wanted to run, to run forever through time as well as space, until the past hour dwindled and diminished in the distance. For a long time the persistent honking of a car didn’t penetrate my fog of misery and reach me, though, when all at once I realized what it was, I knew that I had been hearing it for several yards. I turned slowly toward the street, moving my body with difficulty, as though an illness had suddenly come upon it.

  The car was Silver’s. She sat at the wheel with the three boys crowded in around her.

  “Hey! Henry! Hey! Brother!” she was calling. When she saw my face she sprang out of the car and ran around to me. She grabbed me by the shoulders. “Brother, what is it? Are you sick?”

  I shook my head.

  “You come right with me,” she commanded. “Boys, get in the back. Come on, Henry, get in.”

  I didn’t speak while she drove rapidly across the river and home. The three boys went off to their evening chores and I followed Silver upstairs to the bedroom. I lay down on the huge four-poster bed, watching her as she stood beside me in her pongee dress, looking down at me with her quiet little face, her eyebrows so strong, her eyes so gray and steady, her hair the color of her dress, still unfaded, her pale little face almost unlined. And around and around in my head went the rosy-bush song, beating and beating against my brain like the little hammers against the wheels of a train when it is pausing at a station. I wished I were a red red rosy bush or magnolia vine smothering the oaks or a twisted little fig tree—anything, anything but Henry Randolph Porcher.

  “Now, Brother,” Silver said. “Suppose you tell me what’s the matter.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Sister,” I said.

  “Never mind about being sorry. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

  “I’ve done something—something terrible,” I said.

  “What have you done?” She didn’t look away from me. But I could tell by the way her dark brows drew slightly closer together that my words frightened her.

  But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. “Something terrible,” I repeated.

  “All right, Henry. You needn’t be afraid to tell me. You know whatever it is, Eddie and I’ll help you.”

  “If I’d killed someone,” I asked, “would you and Eddie still help me? Would you hide me away from the police?”

  “Have you killed anyone?” Her voice was very steady and I knew that she was ready for anything I might have to tell her.

  “No.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s—oh, Silver, that man is back!”

  “What man?”

  “That actor.”

  “What actor?” Her voice was beginning to show a faint tinge of impatience, like the stain coming to the edge of a white magnolia petal.

  “Werner. Franz Josef Werner.”

  “You mean the actor who was here with that stock company just before Monty’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Where?”

  “At Ilsa’s.”

  “And what have you done that was so dreadful?”

  “Oh, Sister,” I said, “I started to go home and then I felt that I must go back and talk to Ilsa and he came out of the bamboo grove and went in through the French windows and I stood by the wisteria vine on the terrace and listened. I listened and watched. I saw them together. I heard them. For a long time. It was something I wasn’t meant to see or hear.”

  She was silent. At last she said, “You mean you spied on them?”

  “I guess if you want to put it down in black and white, that’s what it was. But it didn’t seem like that at the time. I—I wasn’t aware of what I was doing until after I’d left. I couldn’t move. I just stood there and I couldn’t move.”

  “Well, it’s done now and there’s no undoing it,” Silver said “It’s hurt no one but you, except you shouldn’t have told me.’

  “I know.”

  She wandered over to her chiffonier, picked up her silver comb and brush and mirror, and set them down again. Then she came back to the bed and sat down beside me, running her fingers gently over the polished mahogany post. “Henry I wish you’d go away,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. It doesn’t much matter, so long as it isn’t here. Go back to Paris. Or go up North. Just anywhere to get away from here.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, Brother, you know why. I hate to see you like this, and every year it just gets worse. You’re still young. You’re only thirty-three. It’s not too late to go off somewhere and begin over again.”

  “Begin what over again?”

  “Your life.”

  “Does it matter that much?” I asked. “Is it worth beginning over again? I don’t think my life’s that important. I don’t think it much matters what happens to it.”

  “That’s no way to talk.”

  “Why not? I think the importance of the individual is horribly overestimated.”

  “Then why do you overestimate the importance of one individual?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  I rolled over and buried my face in her lap. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose I know.”

  “You know, Henry; it’s a funny thing,” she said. “I guess we’ve both changed. I know I take for granted now things that would have shocked me horribly ten years ago. It’s probably having a contented marriage and a bunch of uninhibited children. But you always used to be so worried about my turning out to be like Mamma. And now I think you’re much more like her than I am.”

  “No!” I shouted.

  “I know you always hated Mamma, and I suppose that was because it was certainly unnatural of her the way she never loved you. But the way Mamma never could get close to people even when she did love them. You’ve got a lot of that in you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Yes, you do. I’m talking about you. And Ilsa. The way you’ve always put her up on a pedestal and kind of bowed down to her and worshiped her as though she were some sort of Greek goddess. When everybody talked about maybe you and she would get married after Monty died, I knew you wouldn’t. I knew there wasn’t a chance of it.”

  “Well?”

  “Did you ever even ask her, Henry?”

  “I don’t think so.” Had I asked her that time or was it just part of the delirium?

  “You don’t know? Why not? You had plenty to offer her. Love and a home. It can’t have been much fun for her running that awful old place all these years with all those awful people complaining about this, asking for that, being disagreeable about the other. I had to lend her some money a couple of years ago. Oh, she paid me back—she’d rather die than be in debt—but it hasn’t been easy for her, and she’s made of flesh and bone like the rest of us. She’s no marble statue. Even if she is blind. I’m glad Franz Werner’s back. The Lord knows there’s been no one here who’s understood her since he left.”

  “He’s only on his way through,” I said.

  “Then I hope he takes her with him. Maybe if she gets out of here you’ll be able to stand on your own feet and behave like a man. Oh, I know why you never had the nerve to ask her to marry you, Brother. You like her up on that pedestal. You’ve got her in a niche like your own personal patron saint. If you ever discovered that she was just another human being in relation to you, you’d be terrified. You’d run like mad. As long as she’s a dista
nt goddess for you to worship like a child it’s fine. You’ve been giving her all these years the kind of love you’d like to have given Mamma. That’s no kind of love to offer a woman like her. I know it’s not a nice thing to say, Brother, but I believe you’d die of horror if she offered to sleep with you. I know you’re upset because you saw her with a man she loves. I mean that way. You’re really more upset about that than you are about having spied on her. Oh, Brother, wake up!”

  She took me by the shoulders and shook me.

  “It’s not true! Not a word of what you’ve been saying!” I cried. My teeth were chattering as she shook me back and forth.

  She released me. “All right. It’s not true. What difference does it make? I guess you’re right, Henry. You’re not worth much. It doesn’t make any difference about you.” Her eyes filled with tears. “But it does. You’re my brother and I love you and I mind what happens to you. And if God cares about the smallest sparrow I guess it makes a difference to him, too.”

  I put my arms around her. “Ah, Silver, I’m sorry.…” It was always unnerving to me when my sister cried. She so seldom showed it when she was moved.

  She turned away from my embrace. “If you wanted a job out of town I think Eddie could arrange one for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know.”

  She smiled a very little smile. “All right, Brother.”

  We sat for a time in silence. Then she said, “I know Ilsa hasn’t meant to just keep you hanging around, but I do think she should have tried harder to—to—”

  “She has,” I said.

  “Has what?”

  “Tried to get me to go away. She was quite awful about it once. Cold and cruel. The way she is to Brand sometimes. But this summer it’s been so hot and she’s seemed so tired. I guess she just gave up trying.”

  “I see,” Silver said. Then, after a moment, “I expect you want to go back to town now?”