The Small Rain

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Um-hum.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I did indeed, kitten.”

  “Aunt Manya’s wonderful, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mother says she could watch Aunt Manya every night and never get tired of her. Mother says she has infinite life and variation in her work. Mother says she’s great because she works both with her brains and her guts and not just one or the other.”

  “Mother says hurry up,” Dr. Bradley said.

  “I’m all ready. I just have to put my towel over my tray. Isn’t it pretty? It’s blue. It’s handwoven. It’s a nice color blue, isn’t it?”

  “Very nice. Ready now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come along, then.”

  Katherine locked the dressing-room door carefully, and they went down the iron stairs to Manya’s dressing room, which was just off the stage. Manya was at her dressing table, most of her make-up still on, her long, dark hair loose over a crimson dressing gown. Julie was curled up on Manya’s chaise longue, looking small and pale in her blue tweed suit, the scar on her face and neck showing strongly in the bright light.

  Manya reached out and pulled Katherine close to her. “You gave an extra-good performance tonight, baby,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Come along.” Dr. Bradley loomed big and impatient in the doorway.

  Julie got up from the couch and stretched. Then she kissed the top of Manya’s head and tweaked her nose. “See you Monday,” she said, and they left.

  They went to a small bar on Forty-fourth Street, and sat down at a table in an alcove with faded murals on the walls reminiscent of Watteau. There was a lamp on the table with a warm pink shade, and the orchestra wasn’t too loud and was playing nostalgic tunes from the Noel Coward plays. “A lovely setting, isn’t it?” Julie murmured.

  Dr. Bradley grinned at Katherine. “Well, kitten, do you think I’m corrupting you, bringing you to a place like this?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “What’ll you have? Scotch and soda, like your mother?”

  “I don’t like Scotch. Could I have a lemonade?”

  “I think it might be arranged.”

  Dr. Bradley gave the order, but it had scarcely been brought when the headwaiter tapped his shoulder and called him to the telephone.

  “Do you like Jack Bradley?” Julie asked.

  “Yes. He gave me half his birthday once.”

  “Have you seen him much these past three years?”

  “No. Aunt Manya had Dr. Koteliansky whenever I was sick.”

  “She and Jack never got along very well. That’s true. He’s helped me a lot.”

  “Has he?”

  “Helped me to get back a lot of my self-respect.” Julie laughed a little. “He still thinks I’m beautiful.”

  “You are.”

  “You love me, darling.”

  “Charlot thinks you’re beautiful. Pete does, too.”

  “Let’s not go into it. Lemonade good?”

  “Um-hum.”

  Dr. Bradley came back to the table looking very glum. “It’s the Petersen boy,” he said. “I’m quite sure he’s all right, but that mother of his is having fits, so I’ll have to go. I don’t suppose you’ll wait for me, Julie?”

  “I have to take Katherine home.”

  “Well, maybe I could come down to the apartment later on.”

  “Not tonight, Jack. I’m tired. And Katherine and I have to get up early tomorrow to fence.”

  “Well, good night, then.” He leaned across the table and kissed Julie gently, then kissed Katherine on top of the head. They watched him weave his way through the tables and out.

  “He wants me to marry him,” Julie said.

  “Oh.”

  Julie stared intently at Katherine, but the deep-blue eyes staring back into hers were unreadable. “I’m not going to,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like me to?”

  “No.”

  “He’s very sweet and gentle. Understanding, too. But it’s useless to try to turn to somebody you’re just fond of, when what you really need is something more. Besides, I have you and we’re very happy together, aren’t we, baby?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “Poor Jack didn’t have time for his whisky. Mustn’t let it go to waste. I’ll drink it. Do you want another lemonade, kitten?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Julie beckoned to the waiter. “A double Scotch and soda and a lemonade, please … Katherine.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Are you really happy with me?”

  “Oh, yes, Mother!”

  “I’m not working you too hard at your music?”

  “No.”

  “It would be wicked of me to drive you into doing what I wanted just because I can’t do it myself any more.”

  “I like it. I like being with you all day. I didn’t like school. I didn’t like anybody and nobody liked me. This lemonade’s awful sour.”

  “We’ll ask for some more sugar.”

  “No. I like it sour.”

  Julie finished Jack Bradley’s whisky and began on her own. She drank it quickly, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “Let’s get out of here. Oh, Christ, let’s get out of here,” she said. Katherine followed her out. They stood on the corner and waited for a taxi. Julie waved violently at each one that came along, but they were all taken. It was fifteen minutes before an empty one came along and pulled up at the curb, and then, before Julie could get to it, a tall man in a top hat and tails had opened the door and was climbing in. Julie ran up to the cab, held the door, and put her head in.

  “I’ve been waiting here fifteen minutes with my little girl. This is my cab. Get out.”

  The man didn’t move. He leaned back in the cab and smiled weakly at Julie. “Well, really, I—”

  Julie glared at him. “Get the hell out,” she said.

  “Well, I—” the man began again, then looked into Julie’s face and climbed out, waving his arms vaguely. “That child shouldn’t be out so late anyhow,” he muttered. “I’ve a good mind to report you.”

  “To whom?” Julie asked. She leaned against the street lamp, and her scar showed livid.

  Katherine pulled her mother’s arm. “Come on, Mother,” she begged, “please come on.” She climbed into the taxi, pulling Julie after her, and slammed the door. “Thirty-five West Tenth Street, please,” she told the taxi driver, who grinned insolently and started.

  Julie leaned back in the corner of the taxi. “Bastard,” she muttered, then clamped her mouth tight shut. She didn’t say anything until they were in the apartment and she had turned on Katherine’s bath. Then all she said was “Hurry up,” and went into the kitchen. Katherine turned off the bath and followed her. Julie was taking a bottle of milk out of the icebox and she turned savagely as Katherine came in.

  “Will you go take your bath?” she said, between her teeth.

  Katherine stood terrified in the doorway watching her mother with the half-empty bottle of milk in her hand. Julie’s teeth were clenched together to keep her mouth from trembling, and she glared at Katherine until the child turned and left. Katherine turned the water on in her tub again and undressed. But when she turned the water off and climbed in, she could hear Julie banging about in the kitchen. Sometimes she could hear her mother’s voice, but she couldn’t get the words.

  She washed and dried herself automatically, all her energy concentrated on listening. As she pulled on her flannel pajamas, she heard her mother go into the living room, bumping into a chair and swearing, and then she heard the piano. She stood very still, one arm stuck half in the sleeve of her bathrobe, and listened. Her mother was playing the Gigue from Bach’s Fifth French Suite. Katherine remembered it very well, and it was the happiest music she knew. She stood there and listened to the music coming clear and brilliant from the p
iano, and she could only sense dimly, not understand, the difference between the way her mother was playing now and the way she had played before the accident, could only feel that something had been there and was lost, that the effortless, childlike grace of her mother’s playing was gone, and that the rich, mature passion that had come with such magnificent contrast was held back by the broken bones of the shoulder. Katherine stood there, half in and half out of her bathrobe, until her mother suddenly banged down on the piano keys with a discordant crash, and she heard her go back to the kitchen. Katherine went into the living room, tying her bathrobe belt; went over to the piano; stroked the dark wood gently. A half-empty glass of whisky was standing by the music rack. Katherine stopped stroking the piano and looked at it for a moment, then went into the kitchen.

  Julie was pouring hot milk from a saucepan over a charred piece of toast in a blue bowl; her hand was shaking so that half of the milk was spilling on the table. She pushed the bowl at Katherine and said, “Eat this.” Then she put the saucepan in the sink and turned the cold-water tap on full force so that it spurted into the saucepan and splashed out back at her. She turned it off and stood there for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was low and controlled. “I’d always heard of the body being a prison. It never seemed one to me. It seemed like an instrument, and some people were good instruments, and some were not. I was a very fine one, and what I cared about most in the world was perfecting and improving my instrument so that if any higher power should want to speak through me I’d be ready. But, Jesus God, Katherine.” She wheeled around suddenly and faced her daughter. “I know now what they meant when they said the body is a prison. There is so much in me that wants to come out! And it’s all locked in—it’s locked in, and it’s battering against me every second!” She held her hands out and looked at them for a moment; then she dropped them to her sides as though they were very heavy and she couldn’t bear the weight of them any longer. “Everything that I am,” she cried, “everything I’ve worked for, everything I’ve learned from my living, all the hundreds of things I want to say—they’re all locked in, and then they stop being good—they turn into devils—it’s as though I were filled with a thousand devils!”

  She paused for a moment, very still, almost as though she had stopped breathing, stopped existing, then she turned abruptly and came over to the table and banged her fist down on it. She stood there for a long time and stared at Katherine, who stared back, motionless. Finally Julie leaned over the table, very close to Katherine, breathing heavily into her face, and said, “Why aren’t you eating?”

  “I’m not hungry. I think I want to go to bed. I think I’m sleepy,” Katherine said.

  “All right. Go to bed, then.” Julie stalked out of the kitchen, and Katherine followed her. She climbed into bed silently and lay down, still in her bathrobe, and pulled the covers over her. Julie opened the window wide, came over to the bed, and looked down at Katherine for several minutes. Then she turned out the light and slammed the door.

  Katherine lay motionless and tense for a short time. Then, suddenly, unaccountably, her whole body relaxed, and she fell into an exhausted sleep.

  When she awoke it was morning. She lay in bed and waited, because Julie always came in to wake her up when breakfast was ready. It was desperately hard to lie there doing nothing, not even thinking, but she knew that she had to. When she realized that she still had her bathrobe on, she sat up in bed and pulled it off, flinging it over the foot, then lay down again and wrapped the covers over her shoulders. When Julie came in, still in her pajamas and bathrobe, Katherine closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. Julie sat down on the bed beside her and kissed the tip of her nose and pulled it gently.

  “Wake up, kitten,” she said. “Wake up. Breakfast is ready, and we have a fencing lesson.”

  Katherine looked at her mother for a moment. Then she jumped out of bed, and suddenly she felt as light as air. “I’ll be ready in a second, Mother,” she said.

  Katherine’s play ran until well into the spring. A week before it closed, Julie took Katherine out to dinner and ordered a bottle of Château Neuve du Pape.

  “How would you like to go to college, kitten?” she asked.

  “College! But I don’t even go to school.”

  Julie laughed. “Well, you see, baby, I’ve been offered a position in the music department at Smith College and I’m going to take it. In the first place, we haven’t any more money left. Your grandmother, your father’s mother, left me quite a lot. She left it to me, not to your father, because she loved me and wanted me to have it, so I’ve felt all right about using it. But my hospital bills, et cetera, et cetera, took up most of it, as well as everything I’d made, and now there isn’t anything left. In the second place, I want to do something. Working with you is wonderful, my darling, but I have a tendency to drive you harder than you ought to be driven, and in the long run that would do you more harm than good. You grasp things so quickly that it’s a temptation to push you on and on, far beyond your years. But that would be a transitory kind of progress. You need time to absorb, in between leaps.”

  “Oh,” Katherine said, and sipped her wine.

  “They have a very good music department there, you know, and they’ve offered me a wonderful salary. They wanted me to go to Curtis, but I want to have some practice at teaching before I tackle a lot of people who are really serious about their music—or think they are. I’m really a creator rather than a critic, so I don’t know how good a teacher I shall be. Maybe I’ll be rotten, and this is one way to find out.”

  “You’re a wonderful teacher.”

  “No, my kitten. You’re a wonderful student. It’s rather amazing that I can work so well with you. Usually mothers and daughters squabble like hell. Maybe it’s because we were away from each other just at the time when you were becoming yourself and realizing that other people are individuals, too. We aren’t stale. We’re still discovering each other … I must be drinking too much. I’m talking a blue streak. You’re not very talkative, are you, my chicken? You talked a lot more when you were a baby.”

  “Well, where is Smith College?” Katherine asked.

  “It’s in Northampton, Massachusetts. I’m going to send you to Aunt Manya’s for this last week of the play, while I go up and find a house for us. They have a summer school of music there, and I start teaching in just a little over a month. And we’re going to have a nice place to live in. I’ve got a good salary, and we’re going to have a white house with a garden.”

  “I’d rather not go to Aunt Manya’s, if you don’t mind.” Katherine concentrated very hard on cutting her meat into tiny pieces.

  “She wants very much to have you. And Nanny’ll be there. You’ll like being with Nanny, won’t you? Nanny’s going back to England, you know, and you may not have a chance to see her again.”

  Life without Nanny to bully her when necessary seemed inconceivable, but Katherine couldn’t realize it might ever happen; right now she couldn’t even think about it. “Well, Father’ll be there, too, lots and lots,” she said. “And I don’t like it. It makes me feel funny.” Katherine didn’t look at Julie. She kept staring down at her plate and at the little bits of roast beef she had cut up. She started arranging them in a neat circle around her peas.

  Julie poured herself another glass of wine. “Baby. You love your father. And you love Aunt Manya. And once we leave New York, you won’t see either of them for a long time. Let them have you this one week.”

  Still Katherine didn’t look at Julie. “If you want me to. All right,” she said. And they ate in silence until their dessert was brought in. Then Julie began to pour herself another glass of wine, and Katherine reached over and caught her wrist. “You told me to stop you,” she said.

  “Oh, let me have just one more glass.”

  “You told me to stop you when I thought you’d had enough.”

  “I hate like hell to go to Smith College. Come on. Let me have another glass.”


  “No.”

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  Julie put the bottle down and they ate their dessert.

  FOUR

  They lived in a small white house with a garden for four years. Four happy years. Even the periods when Julie was morose and bitter and Katherine couldn’t stop her from drinking too much faded out as she looked back on them. She remembered only sitting at the piano and playing, while her mother stood over her, and strength poured into her; remembered sitting curled up in the big, blue wing chair in the corner, looking at the room through a haze of smoke and listening, until she fell asleep, to the discussions that lasted until far into the night; remembered the garden and her mother out in it every moment she could spare, digging and planting and growing things; remembered her first concert in Sage Hall and Julie kissing her very solemnly afterward and crying a little and not saying a word.

  In the spring of their fourth year there, when Katherine was fourteen, Julie caught a cold. For the past few months she had consistently been smoking and drinking more than she should—just enough more so that only Katherine knew that it was too much—and when she got the cold, she wouldn’t stop going, she wouldn’t have a doctor, and she wouldn’t go to bed.

  “I’m much better if I don’t give in to things,” she said. “It’s only when you give in to things that they get you. Remember that.”

  “I’ll remember.” Katherine looked at her mother’s too-bright eyes and frowned. “But I wish you’d stay in today, Mother. It’s cold and windy again. And your cough’s much worse, anyhow.”

  “The wind on my face is just what I want,” Julie said. “I feel hot and smothered. If I get out, maybe I can breathe.” She pulled on her old fur coat and opened the door.

  “Wear your hat,” Katherine said.

  “Nonsense. I never wear a hat. It’s spring now, anyhow.”

  “Please wear it.”

  “Oh, all right, little bully.” Julie jammed her fur cap on her head and stalked out.

  Katherine didn’t go to any classes that day, but waited for her mother to come back. She sat at the piano, practicing. When she heard Julie at the door, she jumped up and ran into the hall. Julie came in and shut the door and leaned against it as though she could hardly stand.