Ilsa

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “When we studied Hamlet in school I didn’t see any of that,” Brand said. “It makes me understand—a lot of things. Please go on.” She spoke almost breathlessly. It was the first time I had seen her speak directly to Werner, interest in what he had to say outweighing her antagonism.

  Werner rested his hands on the back of the girl’s chair but looked over her ruddy hair at Ilsa. I felt that he believed it was desperately important that he convince Ilsa that he had become a better actor even while his star had been sinking; and I, for one, believed that he had.

  “When I did Hamlet last year,” he said, “I tried to show my audience this relationship immediately, and that no matter how he felt about Gertrude he was still powerless before her will. So I directed my queen—fortunately the director was a good friend of mine and let me do what I liked with my scenes—to get off her throne and come down to me, and look right into my face, her hand on my shoulder. So even before she said a word to me I was weakening. And then when she spoke, in a deep moving tone, ‘Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet’—tears came to my eyes and I could do nothing but give in.”

  Ilsa sat back in her chair once more.

  “You see, Ilsa?” he said. “Isn’t that better? Isn’t that more right?”

  “Yes,” she said, “much more right.”

  The shutter broke loose again and began banging violently against the wall. Out back we could hear a great clattering as the wind worried the stable.

  “Hamlet so adored both his mother and father,” Werner went on, “that he could not see anything better than either one. And when Gertrude married Claudius, he could not see how she could possibly prefer anyone to his father. He had idealized her so that he could not realize that she could have passion, and be weak enough to yield to it.”

  With a violent motion Brand flung out of her chair and ran out of the room, slamming the screen door behind her. Through the back window I saw her beating against the wind toward the refuge of the stable.

  “Brand!” Ilsa called. She sat tense, waiting, for a moment, then sprang from her chair and ran after her daughter. She still moved with electrifying rapidity when she wanted to. She was halfway across the yard before we were out of the door. We all saw the wind tear a board off the stable and fling it at her, and there was no way to warn her. From the stable door Brand screamed. Werner called her name hoarsely, then rushed toward her as the board struck her and she fell to the ground. He reached her first. Brand was kneeling beside her a moment later.

  “Is she dead? Is she dead?” she kept asking him hysterically.

  Lorenzo put a slender hand firmly over her mouth.

  “Be quiet, Brand,” he said.

  The sky was completely covered with sullen lowering clouds. The light was yellow and angry, and in a moment great drops of rain began to fall, splashing with cold impartiality on Ilsa and the rest of us. Werner picked her up and carried her back to the house.

  —She is dead—I thought—She is dead, so now the storm can break. I felt quite numb, quite feelingless. Nothing could feel in this lurid electric weather.

  But before Werner had reached the house Ilsa began to stir in his arms. Lorenzo opened the screen door and the actor carried her in. As he laid her down on the old red sofa she raised her hand to her head and spoke in quite a clear voice.

  “I think someone tried to finish me off. I got an awful wallop on the head.”

  Brand broke away from Lorenzo and ran to her mother, pushing Werner away. “Are you all right, Mamma? Mamma, are you all right?”

  “Certainly I’m not all right,” Ilsa said crossly. “I’ve got a perfectly frightful headache and all I want to know at this moment is who hit me and why.”

  “Nobody hit you, liebling,” Werner said. “It was the wind blowing a board off the stable.”

  She relaxed. “Oh. I was a little confused. I think I thought I was Queen Gertrude and Ophelia was after me with a baseball bat.” She laughed. “I’d love a cup of coffee. I feel as though I had a hangover, so maybe it’ll help. Brand, would you beg Ira to make me some coffee? I’ve a lump on my head the size of an ostrich egg. Feel, Franz. But gently.”

  Werner rubbed his fingers softly through her hair as Brand went out to the kitchen. In a moment Ira came in, scowling. “What’s this I hear about you rushing into the yard and nearly getting yourself killed?”

  “Oh, Ira darling, don’t scold,” Ilsa pleaded, using the child’s voice in which she had begged him to sing the Napoleon song and which I had never heard her use with anyone else. “Just make me some coffee.”

  “Brand’s making it,” he said. “Let me see where it hit you.” She raised her fingers to her hair and he felt the spot with strong, harsh fingers.

  “Ow!” she cried. “Have pity, Ira!”

  “You’re all right,” he said crossly. “Just a little old bump. Always did have a skull hard as a rock.” He went, muttering, back to the kitchen.

  “Why was I out in the yard?” Ilsa asked. “Brand was upset about something and I went after her. What was it?”

  “Never mind,” Lorenzo said. “Here she comes with your coffee.”

  Brand came in with a cup and put it into Ilsa’s waiting fingers. “Are you really all right, Mamma, please?”

  “Of course I’m all right, ladybird,” Ilsa said.

  And I thought that no matter what happened she always would be all right. That had always been the most Ilsa thing about her.

  64

  We went back to town after midnight. Although the storm made me nervous and neither Brand nor Lorenzo cared for it, Ilsa and Werner could scarcely bear to leave the house.

  The rain came in great drenching waves, splashing against the windows, then receding, then rushing at the house again. Palm branches cracked from the trees and flailed against the walls of the house. At high tide the waves thundered against the bulkhead and splashed over it, drenching the ramp halfway to the house with water and salt spray.

  Werner insisted on carrying Ilsa to the car. “I know quite well that you are capable of walking,” he said, “but I don’t want a branch of a tree to snap off and crack you on the head.”

  Lorenzo and Brand drove ahead. We followed close behind. We had to go very slowly. The wind and the rain were so heavy that the automobile lights did not penetrate more than a few inches ahead of us. The windshield wipers were practically useless. Sand had washed over the road and it was difficult not to skid. Just a few yards ahead of us Brand and Lorenzo were nothing but a rain-drenched shadow.

  It should have been the most difficult driving I had ever known, but somehow I felt quite calm as we pushed slowly through the night. Beside me Werner began to hum the rosy-bush song and somehow I no longer felt jealous. Ilsa reached up and ran her fingers through his thick gray-shot hair.

  “You know,” he said dreamily, “once I read in a book about a scientist who grew from a cocoon a very rare and beautiful moth. It was the only moth of its species in that country. And yet at mating time there was another moth of the same species beating against the window to get in. Extraordinary, isn’t it? But scientific fact.”

  “Um,” Ilsa mumbled. She was asleep, her head down on his shoulder.

  65

  In spite of the late hour at which I had gone to bed and the even later hour at which I had gone to sleep, I woke up early the next morning, remembering that I had forgotten to give Joshua Myra’s book. After I had dressed and had some coffee I put on my raincoat, a shabby but sentimentally loved reminder of the days of my manhood in Paris, and set off with the book, wrapped in newspaper, under my arm.

  I decided to stop for a few minutes at Cousin Anna’s. It would probably be my last chance to say good-bye to her if I was to spend the evening at Silver’s talking things over with Eddie. The next day would be spent packing, getting ready to go, and early Monday morning the train left for New Orleans.

  The wind was still strong as I splashed through the wet streets, although not so angrily violent as it had b
een at the beach. Cousin Anna would be unable to sit in her usual place under the magnolia tree, I knew; and she was not in the pearl-gray living room where Cousin William sat cradling his pipe in his curved hand and reading the newspaper. I greeted him, and we talked for a few minutes; then he told me that Cousin Anna was in the small upstairs sitting room and to go on up if I had anything I wanted to talk to her about, which he could tell by my manner that I had. He stroked his trim little Vandyke beard, faded, but still ungrayed, and his eyes smiled at me through the thick lenses of his glasses.

  I smiled back, rather sheepishly, and climbed the stairs. Cousin Anna was lying on the delicate rose chaise longue in the little sitting room, her silver shawl about her shoulders. Her eyes were closed and I didn’t know whether she was asleep or just thinking. I entered the room very quietly and stood by the huge gold harp that I had so seldom heard her touch, tracing with my forefinger the fine carvings of the wood. She looked old and fragile as she lay there, her lips puckered and almost colorless, the blue veins raised under the scarred tissue of her hands.

  After a moment she opened her eyes, looked at me as I stood uncertainly by the harp, and said, “Come in, Henry.”

  “Good morning, Cousin Anna.” I pulled a straight chair near her and sat down.

  “Did you see William?” she asked.

  “Yes. He told me that you were here and I might come up.”

  “Naturally. How does Ilsa like the storm?”

  “She loves it.”

  “You look very wet. Take off your coat.”

  “I can only stay a moment.”

  “I hear by the grapevine,” Cousin Anna said, spreading her fingers apart slowly and looking at them as they lay on the arm of the chaise longue, “that Ilsa’s actor has returned.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  After a moment I said, “We went to the beach yesterday.”

  “We?”

  “Ilsa and Werner, Brand and Lorenzo.”

  “And you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she happy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Yes. But I don’t think being happy with Ilsa is the same as it is with the rest of us.”

  “Did it upset Brand to have him come back?”

  “I think it did.”

  “And you?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “But what?”

  “I couldn’t hate him this time.”

  “I didn’t hate him before. I liked him,” Cousin Anna said. “Though Ilsa only brought him over once. How long is he going to be here?”

  “He’s leaving today. He has to get back to New York.”

  “I see.” Cousin Anna closed her eyes. I felt that I had been dismissed, but I still had not said what I had come to say; I had not said good-bye; so I sat looking down at her, waiting for her to open her eyes again.

  When she didn’t, I finally said, “Cousin Anna, I came to say good-bye.”

  Without raising her finely wrinkled eyelids she spoke. “So at last you’re leaving.”

  “Yes. Eddie says he can get me work in New Orleans.”

  “That’s fine.” She opened her eyes suddenly and looked at me with that old penetrating regard—that look that has nothing to do with the actual structure of the eye itself, but that comes from the essence of the person. “What decided you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just everything seemed to be coming to an end all at once.”

  “You remind me of something Elizabeth once said to me.” Cousin Anna let her hand fall from the arm of the chaise longue to join the other one in her lap. “We were watching the stars one night at the beach, and she picked out one star that was especially beautiful, almost blue, almost with a living pulse in its light. It was shortly after she had met Ilsa’s father. And she said to me, ‘That’s my favorite star. It always has been. If one could fall in love with a star, I’d be in love with it. But John Brandes told me that that star is dead now. Burned out, utterly lifeless. The light that we see and that I love, that is so ecstatically, frighteningly passionate and beautiful, has been extinguished for thousands of years. And we’re only seeing it now.’ We stood there and watched the star for a long time and that cold scientific fact was difficult to understand.”

  “But why do I remind you of that, Cousin Anna?”

  She smiled, her faint almost imperceptible turning-up of the corners of her mouth, the slight lightening behind the eyes. “It wasn’t like Elizabeth to fall in love with a star thousands of years too late. But it’s exactly like you. I hope you’re going to New Orleans in time, Henry.”

  “I hope so, too,” I said. “I have to go now. I have to give a book to Joshua Tisbury. Good-bye, Cousin Anna.” I stood stiffly by the chaise longue.

  “Come here,” she said. I bent down to her and she put her arms around me with tenderness; her lips were gentle as she brushed them against my cheek. “Good-bye, Henry boy. Bless you,” she said. And then, as I reached the door, “Give my love to Ilsa.”

  66

  I heard voices in the living room when I got to Ilsa’s. When I looked through the rice portieres I was grateful and pleased to see both Joshua and Ilsa there, and no one else. Joshua saw me, smiled, and beckoned, so I went in, stripping of my dripping raincoat. I heard Ilsa saying:

  “—if I were like most of the good people down here, I’d believe that I didn’t deserve happiness for what I’ve done.”

  “For what you’ve done? You haven’t done anything,” Joshua said.

  “I’ve deliberately killed life for years. If it were just me, it would be bad enough, but I’ve pulled Brand into this pool of nonexistence with me. And you, too, Henry.”

  I had entered very quietly, but her sharp ears had caught my step.

  “No,” I said.

  “And that’s what I have to pay for. That’s why there’s no answer now. Except the wrong one.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Joshua said, his voice very tender. “It’ll be all right somehow, Ilsa.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know. Thank you, Joshua.”

  “It sounds so strange to have you thank me—when it’s you I want to thank.”

  “Me? Whatever for?”

  “For just being, I guess. I think you knew when I first came here that I wasn’t just physically ill. I was beginning to go to pieces inside. I couldn’t write any more.… I don’t know. Just watching you up against so much more than I was—coming out so strong and fine—”

  “I was bitter and sarcastic,” she said.

  “Some day I’ll show you what you’re like. I’ll put you in a novel—not your story, but you as a person.”

  “You’d better write a play for Franz first.” Her laugh rang out again.

  “I’ll do that, too,” he promised.

  “I’d like to meet your girl—the one you’re going back to.”

  “You will,” he said. “You will.”

  “Will I?”

  “Yes.… Now, good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, Joshua. God bless you.”

  He bent down and kissed her mouth, then walked quickly out. I followed him to the door and gave him the book. Then I came back in.

  “Well, Henny?” Ilsa said. The rain that was still pouring down outside the long windows plunged the room into an unreal submarine light.

  “Here I am.”

  She felt for my hand. “I know how strange it seemed to me,” she said, “when Father used to apologize for keeping me at the beach. And Anna for taking me away. I know a little now how they felt and what they meant. I shouldn’t have let you get so dependent on me. You see, I truly didn’t realize that I—I could be really important to anyone—even Franz.”

  “Ilsa,” I started, then knew I couldn’t tell her yet, though I knew, too, that now there was no getting out of my leaving. Just as there was no escape from autumn once the northeaster broke, so ther
e was no longer any escape from my departure.

  Werner came in. “My bag is all ready, Ilsa. Hello, Porcher. Ilsa, where’s Brandy?”

  “She went over to see Lorenzo’s harpsichord. It’s finished.”

  “Ah.”

  For once Valdosta knocked before sticking her head in the door. “Miz Woolf?”

  “Yes,” Ilsa said impatiently.

  “I got to give my notice.” The shrill little voice was insolent.

  “Very well.”

  “I don’t like living on premises and I is got to be careful where I works. Miz Jackson she asked me to come work for her.”

  “Splendid!” Ilsa said.

  The little mosquito voice cracked. “You ain’t angry with me?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “You don’t mind my going?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I could stay if you really want me.”

  “I don’t want you.”

  “Well … all right.…”

  “When do you want to go?” Ilsa’s voice was matter-of-fact and businesslike. “Tonight? I’ll ask Brand to make out a check for you.”

  “Well … all right, Miz Woolf. I’se real sorry to leave you.…”

  “You’d better get along out to the kitchen now.” Ilsa’s voice remained cold and unmoved.

  “Well—” Valdosta’s shrill mosquito drone wavered in bewilderment as she trailed out.

  “Little she-cat,” Werner said. “She must have eyes and ears all over her body. It’s incredible that you should have to put up with this sort of thing. Ilsa, you’re coming with me and no more foolishness.”

  He didn’t seem to care whether or not I heard.

  Ilsa’s voice was trembling. “You say it’s incredible that I should have to put up with this sort of thing. Have you thought what this sort of thing means to Brand? I don’t give a damn. You know that. But it’s the most important thing in the world to the child. For some reason she’s chosen the people of this town as the people she wants to live with, to belong to. They’re not all as warped as Mrs. Jackson, nor as malicious as Beulah, but they lap up the same dirt with as much greed.”