The Small Rain

by Madeleine L'engle

  “I think I’ll go and lie down just for a little while,” she said, and dragged herself slowly upstairs. Katherine followed her and helped her undress. “Wake me in a couple of hours,” Julie said, “I promised the Brissarts I’d go over there for tea.”

  Katherine went into her own room and read for two hours. Then she went back to her mother’s room. Julie’s cheeks were flushed with fever, and she was breathing with great effort. She looked at Katherine and tried to grin.

  “I think the Brissarts will have to do without me today. Phone them, will you?” She spoke with difficulty and coughed heavily. The coughing shook her whole body, and tears came into her eyes with the effort to catch her breath. Little cold drops of sweat stood out on her face, and the scar across her cheek was crimson. Katherine wanted to put her arms around her and hold her to stop this horrible coughing, but she stood still by the foot of the bed and waited. When Julie lay down again, her face was very pale, around the mouth almost blue. “Go and phone the Brissarts,” she whispered.

  Katherine went downstairs and phoned the Brissarts. Then she phoned the doctor her mother had called in when Katherine had had flu the winter before. It was nine o’clock that evening before he came. Katherine sat by Julie’s bed, watching the struggle to breathe become harder and harder. Once Julie looked at her and whispered, “I can’t breathe,” and again, “Katherine, go away.”

  But Katherine didn’t move. She sat quietly in the straight chair by Julie’s bed. When it began to grow dark, she asked her mother if she wanted a light, but Julie shook her head; and as it grew completely dark and Katherine became only a small shadow by the bed, her mother stopped being conscious that she was there. She no longer tried to suppress her battle for air; and in listening to her mother fighting against a power stronger than she was, Katherine suddenly knew that Julie was going to die. She had read somewhere that an ancient Greek philosopher had said that the thing that was Life lay in the pupil of a person’s eye, because with death, the eye loses its power to hold a reflection. She wanted desperately to put on the light, to lean over her mother and see if she could still see her reflection in her mother’s eye, but she sat very still and didn’t move even when Julie coughed and she was afraid the coughing would kill her out-right. She said over and over again in her mind—God, please make Mother be all right, dear God, please make my mother be all right—until the words stopped making sense and got all jumbled, and she found herself saying—Mother, please make my God be all right.—

  When the doctor finally came, he ordered Julie to the hospital, and went downstairs to call the ambulance. Julie was in the hospital for two days before she died. Then Katherine called her father and Aunt Manya. It was evening before she reached them. Manya answered the phone. Her voice was warm and delighted.

  “Katyusha! Katyusha, my baby!” she said, and Katherine heard her call away from the phone, “Tom, it’s Katherine!”

  “Mother is dead,” Katherine said into the telephone. “Mother is dead. She died this morning. I thought you and Father ought to know.”

  “We’ll come. We’ll leave at once,” Manya answered.

  “I can manage by myself,” Katherine said. “I’d rather.”

  “We’ll come. Do you want to speak to your father now?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll come,” Manya said, and hung up.

  Katherine went upstairs and bathed, and brushed her hair and braided it again. Then she went into her mother’s room. She had had to lie to be alone this evening, promising each group of well-meaning faculty members that she was going to be at someone else’s house until her father and Aunt Manya arrived. She went into her mother’s room and stood in the doorway for a minute. She hadn’t been in the room since Julie had been taken to the hospital, and the bedclothes were still all tumbled as she had left them. Katherine flung herself down on the bed and lay there for a long time. Then she got up and made the bed carefully, and straightened up the room. She went to her mother’s jewel box, and put on her mother’s wrist watch, a handsome one with a silver strap. Then she took out a heavy, old, gold locket that had belonged to her father’s mother, which Julie had loved very much. In one side of the locket was a picture of her grandmother as a young girl. The other side was empty. Katherine stared at the picture of her grandmother, and might almost have been staring at herself—the same heavy, dark hair, the same small, pale face with the large eyes, the pupils very full, the iris so dark a purply-blue that it was difficult to see where the pupil left off and the iris began. Katherine said to the picture, “I wish I’d known you. You loved my mother. If you hadn’t died, maybe nothing would have happened.” She put the locket down, ran into her room, and took out of her desk a snapshot, taken the summer before by one of the students, of Julie at her piano at Sage Hall. She went back to her mother’s room, cut out the picture carefully, and fitted it into the other side of the locket; then she put the locket around her neck, under her sweater, so that it felt cold and yet somehow comforting against her flesh. If she put her hand up, she could feel it, and no one would know she was reaching out for strength.

  She went downstairs and opened the piano. “I’ll play for you now,” she said, and then again, “I’ll play for you.”

  It was long after midnight when her father and Aunt Manya arrived. She lifted her hands from the piano keys and rubbed the back of her neck. Then she closed the piano and went to the door.

  Manya had been crying, and when she saw Katherine she began to cry again. She put her arms around her and held her close, and her furs were soft to lean against, and had the faint exotic fragrance that Manya’s clothes always had. Her father held her close, too, clumsily. But she didn’t want to be held by anyone, to feel anyone’s body against hers, to get comfort from any human being.

  “She’s at the undertaker’s,” she said. “We can go there now if you like. I think it would be easier if we went in the car. Everything’s been taken care of. Everyone’s been very kind.”

  “Why are you alone?” Manya demanded.

  “I didn’t want anybody. I lied to them. Everybody thinks I’m with someone else.”

  At the undertaker’s Katherine stayed outside, while her father and Manya went in to Julie. When they came out, she said, “Wait a minute,” and went in. She couldn’t help going in, although she was afraid to look at her mother too often, afraid that she might remember her mother dead instead of alive. Julie with the life gone from her, Julie just a pale mask, was very unlike Julie alive, although Katherine was not quite sure why. It was like the difference between her playing before and after her shoulder and arm had been crushed. Katherine stood looking down at her mother, and her hand reached up and caught hold of the locket lying close against her breast beneath her sweater. She had come to look again at her mother, hoping that somehow she might get help from her, that in the short while she still had to look at her mother’s body she might find something of her and be strengthened. But Julie’s body was an instrument, even now, with her fingers folded together and the scar across the cheek showing much more strongly in death than in life; even now Julie’s body was an instrument; not a prison that remains the same even when the prisoner is gone, but an instrument, a piano with the sounding board broken and the strings all snapped; nothing, when its music is taken away. Katherine rubbed her fingers against the heavy gold locket, turned away from her mother, and went out to Manya and Tom.

  FIVE

  After the funeral Manya took Katherine back to the country with her. Tom stayed there, too, but Manya went back into town, where her play was in its last three weeks. Katherine had the same tiny blue-paneled room she had had before. They arrived quite early in the afternoon. Katherine left Tom downstairs and went up to her room and locked the door. She unpacked slowly, very carefully. She would probably be in this room for quite a while. On her chest of drawers she put the picture of her mother, taken just before her last concert in Carnegie Hall, and on the small bed table she put a picture of Julie and herse
lf, taken when she was five. The only picture she had of her mother since the accident was the snapshot in the locket, because Julie had refused to have any pictures taken. She finished unpacking and was sitting on the bed, staring out the window, when there was a knock on the door.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Charlot,” a voice answered.

  “Oh.” She got up, unlocked the door, and let him in. Charlot was eighteen now, and he looked older; but he still moved with the same leonine grace, and his lashes were as long and black as ever. His hands were very brown and long and strong, with a black line of dirt under the nails and earth ground deep into them. He held them out.

  “I ought to wash my hands, but I’ve been working and I wanted to see you. You still don’t look like your mother.”

  “No,” Katherine said.

  “I run the place now.” Charlot sat down on the bed beside her. “We have all our own vegetables and we have pigs and three cows and a heifer. I’ve built new chicken coops, too. And the garden is much more beautiful than it used to be. Do you have a picture of your mother I could have?”

  “No,” Katherine said. “But maybe Aunt Manya has.”

  “I’d rather not ask her. Will you ask her for me?”

  “Why?”

  “She’s always teased me and said I was in love with your mother.”

  “Were you?”

  “You don’t have to be in love with a person to love her.”

  “I’ll see if Aunt Manya has a picture,” Katherine said.

  “Thank you.”

  “These are the only ones I have.”

  Charlot studied the two pictures very carefully. Katherine watched his face closely. She saw that there were tears in his eyes, even though he clenched his teeth to keep them back. “If I show you something, do you promise never to tell?” she asked.

  “Whom would I tell?”

  “You wouldn’t tell Aunt Manya or Father?”

  “Of course not.”

  Katherine pulled out the locket and opened it. Charlot moved closer to her, with his arm around her so that he could see better, and looked long and steadily at the picture of Julie. Then he turned to the picture opposite it. “Who’s that?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “She looks like you.”

  “I know.”

  “Your mother’s mother?”

  “No. Father’s.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mother loved her very much. And she adored Mother. She died when I was two, so I don’t remember her very well. She was a singer.”

  “Oh.”

  “She sang at all the courts of Europe.”

  “She doesn’t look like that sort of person.”

  “She wasn’t. That’s why Mother said she was wonderful. She gave this locket to Mother.”

  “You haven’t cried, have you?” Charlot asked.

  “No. How did you know?”

  “I could tell by your eyes.”

  “They thought it was dreadful of me not to cry. I think Aunt Manya and Father understand, but none of the people at Smith do. They think I don’t care.”

  “I understand,” Charlot said.

  “Yes. I know.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to cry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t hurt inside here so much if you cried. After my mother and father were killed, I felt much better when I cried. When I got to America, I started re-reading some of Father’s poems, the ones to Mother. And then I cried—you won’t tell anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you might be like your mother, even if you don’t look like her.”

  “I wish I could someday. I wish it more than anything. But I don’t think I could ever be strong and wonderful, like Mother.” She shut the locket and slipped it inside her sweater again. “I think I’ll …” she began, then stopped and shook her head.

  “You think you’ll what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “Did you know we’re going to England in August?”

  “To England!”

  “Yes. Aunt Manya is going to do a play in London.”

  “Is Father going, too?”

  “He’s her husband.” The lines on either side of Charlot’s mouth showed white. “I didn’t use to think that anything that hurt anybody could have any good in it, but I guess it can.”

  “Yes. Mother said that.”

  “Will you talk to me a lot about your mother?”

  “Yes. Will I go to England, too?”

  “Of course. I’m going to Paris. To study. Aunt Manya is going to lend me the money, but I’ll pay her back. I’m going to study medicine. I’m going to be a doctor, and I’m going to be a veterinarian, too. Do you like animals?”

  “I love them. Mother and I had a dog, the most beautiful Norwegian elkhound you’ve ever seen. He was called Boërre. You pronounce it like ‘butter’ in French, but it isn’t. He was run over last Christmas by a bunch of Amherst boys. I was really afraid Mother was going to kill them all. He was such a wonderful dog. We felt so empty without him. Maybe if you’d been a veterinarian, you could have saved him. Mother thought he should have been saved, but the man was so stupid, and he didn’t care. He said that if nature wouldn’t save him he couldn’t do anything. Mother said he was all wrong and Boërre could have lived if someone had really known what to do.”

  “It’s a funny thing about nature,” Charlot said. “How she’s called Mother Nature, and it’s true; when you’re unhappy and it’s all through you so your whole body aches with the unhappiness, if you go out alone and press yourself close against the earth, you get comfort. But I think that’s because it’s only when you’re dead that nature is a mother, and when you go and lie tight against the earth, you’re sort of trying to get as close to it as you do when you’re dead. When you’re alive nature doesn’t care. She doesn’t give a damn. But when you’re dead she becomes your mother and takes you back to herself again. When you die you stop being yourself and become part of nature; you go back to being earth and air and water and fire.”

  Katherine stood up. “Charlot—”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You don’t believe that Mother is now?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But do you? Do you believe that Mother is now—herself, somewhere, actively living, herself?”

  “Well, what you believe about things like that is just your own personal opinion, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t think she is. You think she’s just nothing, don’t you?”

  “Well, that needn’t stop you from thinking she’s still herself somewhere, need it?”

  Katherine backed away from the bed and stood against the chest of drawers. “But, Charlot, I saw her when she was dead! I saw Mother, and it just wasn’t Mother. It’s like looking at a photograph; it looks like the person, but the person isn’t there. Mother wasn’t there! Not what’s really her! And if she wasn’t there, she’s got to be somewhere!”

  “Yes,” said Charlot slowly, “but what is a soul without a body, without senses? Can you imagine existing, being yourself, if you couldn’t see? Or hear? Or feel? And, after all, we think with our brains. How could you be yourself if you couldn’t even think?”

  Katherine began to cry, tears of fury. “I don’t care! It’s all crazy!” she cried. “If you die and then you’re just nothing, there isn’t any point! There isn’t any point to anything! Why do we live at all if we die and stop being! Mother wasn’t ready to be stopped! Nobody’s ready to be stopped. We don’t have time to be ready to be stopped! It’s all crazy!”

  “I shouldn’t have talked. I’m sorry. Katherine, I’m terribly sorry. It was stupid of me.”

  “It’s crazy! It’s just crazy!” Katherine shouted at him again. “You, going to be a doctor! You ought to know better! If you can’t see well, you get glasses and then you can see, but it’s not the glasses that are doing the seeing—i
t’s you! It’s not the eyes that are doing the seeing, either—it’s you! I don’t think Mother’s eyes are seeing now, but she is! She’s got to be! I think we’re given rotten bodies on earth. I bet Mother’s got a much better one now. You’re just crazy! You go away!” The tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she stamped as she shouted at him.

  Charlot jumped up and caught her to him and held her. “Katherine, stop. Stop, Katherine, stop,” he said over and over. She fought him, hitting him and trying to bite, but he was much the stronger and finally held her so that she stood pressed against him, panting. “Katherine, forgive me, forgive me,” he said, and kissed her very softly on the cheek. She clenched her teeth together tightly, snarling like a little animal, and almost wrenched herself free. “Listen, please listen,” Charlot said, the lines on either side of his mouth standing out very white. “I haven’t had anybody to talk to. I haven’t had anybody to talk to since I came to this country. Aunt Manya’s beautiful and I love her. I love to be with her and watch her; and she’s brilliant, too, she isn’t just beautiful, but I can’t talk to her. And I can’t talk to your father. He’s always off in a cloud, and only Aunt Manya can get through to him. I’ve needed someone to talk to. I’m a person who needs someone. And that week your mother was staying here, before you came, she let me talk to her, and it was so wonderful. It’s the most wonderful week I can remember. It wasn’t that I meant anything to her. It’s just that she was wonderful. And you’re her daughter, and so I thought maybe I could talk to you. I forgot for a minute that you weren’t somehow your mother, and how you must feel. Please, please don’t hate me.”

  As he was talking, Katherine’s body relaxed slowly, and Charlot let her go. She sat down on the bed again, her shoulders drooping. “I don’t hate you. Only don’t talk like that. I don’t want to be frightened—I’m not strong enough—I haven’t anybody to help me any more—I’m not strong enough … Have you a handkerchief?”

  “Here. It’s really clean.”