Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll drive you to the bridge. You can take the bus from there.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  She waited until she saw me step aboard the bus. It was the one which went past Ilsa’s house. I had resolved to go straight home and spend the rest of the evening reading, but then I remembered that I had promised to come back after supper, and since the bus went right past the house …

  I looked at my watch. A few minutes past ten. I would just drop by to say good night and the next day I would talk to Silver about getting out of town.

  59

  As I walked between the Ligustrum hedges up to the house I heard voices and laughter. Ilsa and Werner were sitting on the veranda steps; Werner had Ilsa’s mandolin on his lap and was picking out the rosy-bush song. Lorenzo sat on the railing, chin in hand, his little hummingbird face flickering out white and peaked in the heat lightning that was brooding over the horizon.

  I went up the steps. “It’s Henry,” I said.

  Ilsa sprang to her feet. “Hen! Bless you, darling! Hen, look who’s here!” Without giving me time to look, for which I was very grateful (and in any case it was too dark on the steps to see), she went on. “It’s Franz! Franz Werner! You remember him, of course!”

  “Of course.” I held out my hand to the actor in his wrinkled Palm Beach suit.

  “Porcher! I’m delighted to see you again after all these years,” he murmured, not taking his eyes away from Ilsa. The long fingers of the hand with which he still held the mandolin were nervously moving over the strings.

  “Please don’t stand,” I said.

  “Franz made a very special punch.” Ilsa sat down close to Werner, leaning slightly against him. “It’s in the big silver bowl on the table. Give yourself some.”

  “Thanks. I will.” Filling myself a glass of punch, I wandered about the veranda. Myra Turnbull lay in the hammock, smoking, her eyes closed. Joshua Tisbury sat on the floor near her, his legs stretched out in front of him, leaning back against the house, waving the mosquitoes away with a fly swatter. He nodded to me as I passed. Brand I saw nowhere. I went up to Lorenzo.

  “Where’s Brand?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. In the house, I guess,” he answered.

  From her hammock Myra Turnbull sighed heavily. Werner rose, went to the punch bowl, refilled his glass, and looked over at Myra on the hammock, where the hall light glimmered on her lean face.

  “Maybe there’ll be a thunderstorm to cool things off,” Lorenzo said. “We haven’t had one for a couple of days.”

  “Not with this heat lightning,” I answered, pulling myself up onto the railing beside him.

  “Have some more, Miss Turnbull?” Werner asked.

  “Yes, I will,” Myra said. “The only other person I ever knew who could make a punch like this was my grandfather.”

  “Mrs. Woolf taught me,” Werner said.

  “You’ve known her before?”

  “Yes. For years. Here you are.” He handed her a glass which she drained at one gulp.

  “Much obliged,” she said, handing it back to him to be refilled. When he gave it back to her she turned away, looking into the blank wall of the house, and lit another cigarette. The conch shell on the floor beside her was already full of butts.

  “Give me some more, Franz,” Ilsa said.

  “You haven’t finished that glass.”

  “I want some more anyhow. I’m glad I had one bottle of really good whisky hidden away.” She turned and listened as he went over to the table and filled her glass. “Thank you, my darling,” she said as he put it into her waiting hand.

  It was a dark night. The moon was old and would not rise for another hour. It was always dark on the porch anyhow, because the trees and bushes pressed close against it, veiling it in the daytime in a moving green light and in the nighttime in a lush velvet blackness. The darkness on the porch, with faces visible only in the flashes of lightning, gave one a false sense of privacy. You felt that because you could see only the dim shadow of whoever sat closest to you, you could voice your thoughts aloud and they would be as unheard as they were unseen. Ilsa and Franz Werner on the steps were almost invisible, lost in darkness for minutes together and then appearing faintly as they were touched by the heat lightning which barely penetrated the shrubbery.

  “You haven’t changed, Ilsa,” Werner said.

  “Neither have you.”

  “I look very different.” His voice was bitter.

  “I must look even more different.”

  “No,” he said quickly.

  “Not even my eyes?”

  “No.… Darling—”

  “What?”

  “Could we go to the beach tomorrow? Please?”

  She nodded. “Yes. I let it only till the first of September this year. It’s all closed up, but we can open it.”

  Lorenzo said, “Why don’t Brand and I drive down early tomorrow and run up the flag for Ira and get it ready?”

  “That would be wonderful, dear,” Ilsa said. “If I know Franz he won’t be ready till noon.” She turned to the actor. “I don’t suppose you’ve got round to learning how to drive?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I can ride an elephant.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to be satisfied with a Ford. Hen, could you drive us down? You’d like to come, wouldn’t you? Are you busy tomorrow?”

  “No, I’d love to,” I answered.

  “Good, it’s all settled, then!” She clapped her hands together with pleasure.

  “Liebling,” Werner said, “I don’t suppose you’ve a razor I could use?”

  “I’ll get Joshua to lend you his.”

  “I don’t think I like that Joshua,” Werner muttered. I looked toward Joshua, still leaning against the house, illuminated by a shaft of light from the hall, but he seemed lost in his brooding.

  “Don’t be absurd.” Ilsa laughed. “He’s wonderful. And don’t raise your voice.”

  “He can’t hear me. Do you like him?”

  “Very much.”

  “Do you think he’s attractive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think he’s handsome?”

  “I’ve never seen him.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I don’t love him, Franz. And stop shouting.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’ve never lied to you.”

  “You love him.”

  “He’s much younger than I am.”

  “That wouldn’t matter.”

  “Darling, why does it bother you? Because I don’t love him.”

  “He loves you.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “He has a girl in the North. Now shut up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no money. You have no money. I am blind. Brand.”

  I got down from the rail, realizing suddenly that Lorenzo had gone before me, and went over toward Myra. Inside the house the telephone began to ring and Lorenzo went in to answer it.

  Ilsa’s voice came from behind me.

  “Joshua—”

  The young man scrambled to his feet and stood facing her. “Hello, here I am.”

  She turned in the direction of his voice. “Joshua, have you a razor?”

  “Of course.”

  “Will you let Franz use it?” She put out her hand and felt for his.

  “Certainly. Right now?”

  “I might as well.” The actor put his arm possessively about Ilsa.

  “Make him shave well, Joshua,” Ilsa said.

  “I promise.” He smiled, then reached out and touched her hand gently, remembering that she couldn’t see the smile.

&nbs
p; “And don’t let him stare at himself in the mirror too long.”

  Joshua started out. Werner held back, his gaze seeming to cling to Ilsa. “If someone,” he said, “who had never seen were suddenly given sight and saw for the first time a square and a sphere which he knew by touch, would he know without touching them which was which?”

  “I don’t know.” With one finger Ilsa traced the line of his lapel, then plunged her hands back into the pockets of her linen dress. “I shouldn’t think so. And you can’t put off shaving that way. Run along.”

  “Will you come this way?” Joshua asked.

  “Thanks.” Werner followed him out.

  Myra Turnbull rolled over in the hammock and faced Ilsa. Abruptly she asked, “Do you want to live?”

  “Yes, very much.” Ilsa smiled, a smile that was entirely to herself, as her facial expressions often were. “Why?”

  “That’s what I want to know.” Myra’s voice was flat. “Why?”

  “Perhaps because we’re all afraid of death,” Ilsa said. “It’s perfectly natural.” But that wasn’t her reason. That was not the way she had reasoned earlier in the day.

  “But why live?” Myra asked desperately. “Life isn’t attractive. We have to struggle to eat, struggle against the weather, we ride in crowded buses, teach stupid children things they don’t want to know, we drink and smoke and walk down the street to the drugstore, go to church and sing hymns in shrill nasal voices, go to recitals at the Woman’s Club—and why? For what? Just because we want to live? I don’t think so. I used to think it was because of an unquenchable belief in the potentialities of the future. I used to have an unquenchable belief in the power of man to rise beyond himself to something greater than himself, an unquenchable belief in what man will ultimately become, and a feeling that my own life was part of that becoming.… But now …”

  Brand pushed open the screen door and came out onto the porch. She stood for a moment looking around, speaking to no one, acknowledging no one. At last she murmured, “I guess I’ll have some punch.”

  “Help yourself, bird,” Ilsa said, turning toward her.

  “… but now,” Myra went on, “every year I find myself further off from what I might be. My students seem to me more and more crass. The world is turning away from Christ and toward Jehovah, and Jehovah is destroying us. God made the world,” Myra said, “and made a mistake, and now he is finishing it off. God is a vengeful creator, annihilating his own creation.”

  Lorenzo heard her as he came out. “If God were to destroy the world, Miss Turnbull,” he said, “since God is the world and the world is God, it would be suicide. Somehow I don’t believe in a Divine suicide.”

  “I don’t want to believe in God,” Myra said fiercely, sitting up in the hammock and lighting another cigarette with trembling fingers. “But I’ve got to because I’m afraid. Even a cruel, despotic, Old Testament God is better than none. To be lost in a Godless world is the most terrible of all punishments.”

  Lorenzo said shyly to Ilsa, “Would you mind if I had some punch?”

  “Of course not, dear.” She had gone back to the shadows of the steps and her disembodied voice came out of the incomprehensible darkness in which she always lived. “Help yourself. Who was the telephone for?”

  “Joshua Tisbury.”

  “Did you find him? He went in to lend Franz a razor.”

  “Yes,” Lorenzo said. “It was long distance.”

  Myra could not seem to stop talking. She lay back in the hammock, her cigarette hanging loosely from her fingers, and talked, almost as though to herself. “Most of us feel,” she said, “that the only point in our living at all is because of the few great individuals who inspire us to rise out of our mediocrity. But my God, my God in heaven, it is these individuals who have caused our downfall, who have made the world the confused and agonizing place that it is. Because they are greater than we are, they have betrayed us. They’ve made great discoveries, especially in science, and they’ve been able to teach us the mechanical side of these discoveries. But the more important, the spiritual aspect hardly anybody can understand. We haven’t progressed far enough along in civilization to be able to understand. It’s all wrong, the way we’ve grown intellectually, scientifically, much too quickly. In understanding we haven’t begun to catch up, we’re still back in the dark ages. I am forced, therefore,” she said, the slight slur suddenly sloughing off the edge of her words, so that she sounded like a schoolteacher once more, “to realize that the great individuals who are our only hope of salvation, instead of saving us, are destroying us.”

  “What made you think of that just now, Miss Turnbull?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Because I’m not at all sure that Mrs. Woolf isn’t one of the people I’ve been talking about.”

  Sitting over there on the steps Ilsa, with her quick listening ears, had heard. “Don’t talk rubbish,” she said angrily.

  Myra pulled herself out of the hammock. “I’m going in. I’ve got to correct two batches of papers before tomorrow, and it’s late. Good night.”

  “Good night, Myra.”

  “This has been such an awful month,” Brand said, watching after her. “I saw the new moon through glass, so it’s to be expected. And a mockingbird flew into the kitchen tonight. It took me five minutes with the broom to get it out. Thank goodness I managed before Mattie Belle came back.”

  “Come sit over here, Brand,” Lorenzo called, climbing up onto the railing again. Languidly, Brand crossed the porch and pulled herself up beside him.

  The screen door burst open and Werner came out, Mephistophelean in a sudden flash of lightning. “Feel me!” he crowed. “Soft as a baby!”

  “Franz, you were quick,” Ilsa said, laughing like a child. “What happened?”

  “I always do everything you tell me to, my love. Feel me Brandy.”

  “Lorenzo’s going to finish his harpsichord tonight,” Ilsa said as Werner flung himself down on the shadowed steps beside her.

  “He’s making a harpsichord?” Werner asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s quite a feat, isn’t it?”

  “It took him three years,” Ilsa said.

  “May I see it?” Werner asked.

  Lorenzo’s voice was unenthusiastic. “If you’d really like to.”

  “We’ll go over tomorrow when it’s finished,” Ilsa said, “and I’ll play the rosy-bush song on it. I’d like the rosy-bush song on a harpsichord.”

  “My mother used to play the harpsichord, my boy,” Werner told Lorenzo. “She was a Greek actress. I was born, though, as a matter of fact, in Norway, in Grieg’s town, Bergen.”

  In the lightning I could see Ilsa’s lips twitch with amusement.

  We fell into silence. The hammock was still swinging gently. Brand slipped down from the rail, went over to it, and stopped its motion, then climbed up beside Lorenzo again.

  Every once in a while, out of the darkness we were staring into, a branch of palm like a draggled bird’s wing, or an oak branch burdened with Spanish moss, would stand out in sharp silhouette against the sheet lightning. Down by the river crickets were shrilling, katydids calling, frogs complaining. There was something hypnotic about their songs and the continuous flickering of the lightning. My thoughts stopped turning in my mind and I began to listen to the katydids, my mind beginning to imitate the rhythm and the pattern of their notes until everything else dropped back. I felt that I didn’t want to think of anything else for two weeks, I could no longer say to myself, “Here I am, and this is where I must be.” Suddenly there were no more heres and theres to put my finger on. But katydids don’t need heres and theres and concrete facts. They never did, so they don’t change. One shrills from this tree, one from the grass, another from the shrubbery—each has his own note and his own tune. They’re like Ilsa’s ocean, infinitely soothing and relaxing. They slip in and everything else slips out.

  The screen door burst open again and Joshua came tumbling onto the porch. “Ilsa
! Brand! Everybody!”

  Brand jumped down from the rail nervously. “What is it?”

  “The most amazing thing—I can’t speak—I can’t believe it!”

  “Is it good?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Yes, it’s very good. It’s so good I’m completely staggered.”

  Ilsa got up and went over to him, resting her hand on his shoulder. “What is it, Joshua?”

  “It was my publisher on the phone. Do you hear that? My publisher!” He whirled around toward Werner. “Did you find the shaving things all right? Did you have everything you needed?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Werner said.

  Joshua grabbed Ilsa about the waist. “It’s so silly—but it’s so enormous, it means so much to me that I seem to have lost all my words—all I can do is laugh. Now I can go back, now I can go home, don’t you see? I’ve been well enough to go back to the paper for a long time, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t get away from the Illness of my failure, strangling me like the water hyacinth choking up the river.”

  “When are you going?” Brand asked.

  “The day after tomorrow, as soon as I can get packed and on a train, as soon as I can get myself together—I’m going to New York, bless New York, I love it so—away from the South and the filthy Spanish moss hanging off the trees like dead men’s beards; away from scorpions and bats and hoot owls—I’m going to New York!”

  “But what’s happened?” Lorenzo asked.

  “My novel has been accepted,” Joshua cried. “My novel that I wrote with my life’s blood and that drove me down here to die, I thought—” He caught Ilsa about the waist and began waltzing around the porch with her. “Play something, Lorenzo; play something gay and triumphant and mad! Oh, my darling, what a glorious, glorious night, what stars, what a river coiled like a dark snake between the trees—” He flung her off, then caught her to him again. “Oh, you must let me dance with you, so beautiful, so wonderful, so mysterious—” They whirled around the porch again, then he let her go and caught hold of Brand. “And you, too, little solemn one, little disturbed confused creature, just wait and something wonderful will happen to you, too.

  Weeping may endure for a night