The Small Rain

by Madeleine L'engle

  Manya met her at the station, sorry about the fellowship, tender and understanding. Tom, as usual when he was anxious about her, was irritable.

  Sunday night, before Katherine went back to the city, Manya got out her guitar and swung it about her neck.

  “Tom’s off in the lodge, wrestling with a new suite for strings. Let’s climb the mountain and watch the moon rise.”

  They climbed up through the cool, green evening. Katherine lay on her back on the flat rock, while Manya sat near her, playing the guitar and singing softly.

  As Katherine lay on her back, looking up at the sky—Cassiopeia, Vega of the Lyre, Boötes, Andromeda, Capella, the soft path of the Milky Way—she remembered the last time she had been there, wrapped in an old fur coat of Manya’s, lying there on the rock with Pete’s arms around her.

  After a while Manya put her guitar down and lay back on the rock. “The moon will be up soon,” she said. “See that sort of radiance over the mountain.”

  “Um,” Katherine nodded.

  “Here comes the moon now, Katya. Look.”

  The moon seemed to spring up from behind the mountains, a great full white disc, and float loosely in the sky. The stars were suddenly dimmed like city stars.

  “I remember once in Russia,” Manya said, “soon after I’d lost my baby. I lay all night on a mass of straw in the bottom of a wagon going from Kharkov, where I had been playing all winter in the theater, to a very small village where I had friends. I remember how I felt, lying there in the darkness, my body inert on the straw, smelling the heaviness of old tobacco mingling with the straw and sweat and the cold dew of black nights. My hand felt so heavy I didn’t think I’d ever lift it again. The driver was a dark shadow up on the box, his whip swinging in the air. I felt so terribly alone, there was no one left in the world but me, lying there, an inert mass in the night of stars pressing through thick trees above me. The wagon’s creaking seemed the earth’s slow turning on its rusty hinges, an old earth, round and bare from friction with the sky, like a pebble worn too smooth by waters turbidly flowing. And I felt that my soul, too, was bare and round from too much rubbing against life. Well! I was nineteen! So old. So very old. Shall we go down now?”

  About halfway down the mountain Manya paused. “Katya.”

  “Yes, Aunt Manya.”

  “I think you’d better go back to Paris next winter. I’m going on the road with my play. Your father’s going to be out in Chicago for a couple of months. I don’t like the idea of your being in New York with no one to take care of you. If you’re in Paris, Pauline and Charlot can find a place for you to stay near them. You can study with your Justin all winter. I’ll come and get you in the summer, or we can wait and see what our plans are by then.”

  Katherine sat down suddenly on the nearest rock. Manya sat down, too. Around them the birches were white against the dark night. Katherine sat there, leaning against Manya, and cried. Her tears came easily, gently, like a soft early rain. She realized how much she wanted to go back to Paris, back to Justin.

  She felt as though she had been in great pain, as though she had been lost in it, had ceased to be Katherine Forrester and become a part of pain. But now she was herself again. She was Katherine. And although the pain was still there, it no longer possessed her. No, she possessed it; it was part of her; she could enclose everything in the span of her mind and heart.

  When she was ready for bed that night, she re-read Justin’s letter. “I miss you,” Justin said. “Katherine, if you ever betray me by becoming mediocre, if you ever dishonor your work …”

  She folded the letter and stared out the window into the night, stared down the path where she had walked, years ago, with Julie.

  “I won’t betray you,” she said. “I’m coming back. I’m coming home!”

  She sailed early in September. Tom had already left for Chicago, but Manya came to see her off.

  Katherine suddenly felt whole and alive again. “It’s all so wonderful! It’s so exciting! It’s so exciting I can hardly bear it. Why am I so happy? Why is everything all right again?”

  “Dearest,” Manya said, and kissed her.

  The siren wailed shrilly, restlessly. A steward went down the stairs and through the passage, beating his gong. Manya put out her cigarette and stood up. “I must go now.” She took Katherine’s hand in hers, and they left the cabin and went up on deck. Katherine leaned very close to Manya, who quickly put her arms about her, whispering, “God bless and keep you, my darling.”

  She felt the cool pressure of Manya’s soft cheek against hers. Then there was the firm, light sound of Manya walking away. Katherine watched her hurry down the gangplank, turn as she reached the dock and wave a small white handkerchief. Katherine waved back. Under her feet she could feel the throb of engines. Slowly, quietly, the ship began to pull away.

  She ran in and up to the sports deck, where there were only one or two other people. Manya, growing smaller and smaller, was still waving her handkerchief. Violently Katherine waved back, tears starting to her eyes.

  After Manya had completely disappeared, when the shore was only a chain of blinking, beckoning lights, Katherine pulled up a deck chair and lay there, under the stars, under the wind, under the vastness of the universe, while land became lost in the September night, and water reached out, illimitable, mysterious, on all sides.

  Turn the page to begin reading from the follow-up to The Small Rain

  The Cathedral

  1

  The very size of the Cathedral was a surprise. The old woman looked around at the columns rising up into shadows, at the vast nave sweeping the full length of a city block. Despite a sudden, unseasonable heat wave that had turned April into summer, she relaxed into a strange coolness of space and height, of soft light filtering through the stained glass of the high windows.

  She could sense deep love in the retired bishop’s voice as he propelled her farther into the nave. “I’ve never known a cathedral more beautiful than St. John the Divine, and I’ve preached and visited in many. The fact that the building started out Romanesque and got changed to Gothic in midstream doesn’t matter. Somehow, the mishmash of architecture works.”

  Katherine turned slowly, enjoying the coolness that seemed to breathe from the stones. The soft light shimmered against the columns so that they shone like mother-of-pearl.

  The bishop said, “I suppose you’re familiar with most of the great cathedrals in Europe.”

  “Felix, I’m a pianist. I work hard. I’ve had little time for sightseeing.”

  He smiled slightly. “There are other reasons for going to a cathedral than sightseeing.”

  She laughed. “Touché. You’ve obviously changed since our non-churchgoing days. I haven’t.”

  Somewhat stiffly, the old bishop said, “I realize you thought my way of life was—”

  “Casual,” she supplied.

  “Thank you. That is a most generous way of putting it. I’m not certain that one is capable of much basic change. You might say that my priorities have shifted.”

  She put her hand lightly on his arm. “I’m not sure I was even aware your cathedral existed before you called me last week.”

  He reached for her hand. His skin was dry and felt crumply, like old leaves. “Remember—we used to come uptown to see the old French and Russian movies at the Thalia. But, as you say, we weren’t thinking about church then. How I’d have laughed if anyone had told me I’d end up as Bishop of New York, and that this gorgeous monstrosity of St. John’s Cathedral would be my true home.”

  He moved on down the nave. He wore a long, loose, off-white robe: a what? a caftan? That was not it, but she could not remember the right word. She knew that priests wore this kind of garb on occasion even now; it was, perhaps, coming back into style after all the years of clergy being more secular than the congregation. It was belted with a knotted silk rope from which dangled some kind of wooden beads, a long string of them, with a cross at the end. Not a rosary. All in
all, it was a becoming costume.

  “What do you call your caftan, or whatever it is?”

  “Cassock. Katherine, my dear, you are kind indeed to come all this way up to meet me this evening. I can’t tell you how much it means to me.”

  She would not tell him she had accepted his invitation simply out of curiosity. The idea that Felix Bodeway, that lightweight young man she had known half a century ago when they were both living in the Village, should have ended up a bishop struck her as hilarious. Felix? Had he experienced some kind of conversion, then? She was at loose ends, back in New York, widowed, retired—why not see what had happened to Felix?

  Was it just that one is never quite aware of one’s own age that made her feel that he looked older than she? He had shrunk, but not inordinately, and he still had most of his hair, although it was yellowish white. His eyes were a faded blue.

  And now he was a bishop, frail, more stooped than she, but not doddering, like many of their contemporaries. That was a relief. She glanced at him again, at ease enough now to look to see if she recognized the old Felix and, if so, if he would still awaken the long-ago pain which had been part of the past to which Felix belonged. But so much deeper pain had come in the intervening years that all she felt was a vague nostalgia for her youthful anguish.

  Brilliant sound startled her, a vivid calling of trumpets, red and blue and gold like the great stained-glass windows, she thought, and then came the mighty strains of a Bach fugue pouring from the organ.

  Felix looked toward the choir loft. “Ah. Llew Owen is practicing. Since his wife’s death he sometimes plays till two, three in the morning. I’d hoped he might be here this evening.”

  Without thinking, she shook off his hand and stood absolutely still, listening. Light and music wove and interwove; stone and sound became one. She stood absorbing, participating, until the last note of the fugue moved slowly along the length of the nave.

  “Well?” Felix demanded.

  She turned to him, incomprehending.

  “What do you think of it—Llew’s playing?”

  “He’s superb. Although I’d guess he’s fairly young, isn’t he?”

  “Around thirty, I suppose. How did you know?”

  “I’m a musician. How did his wife die?”

  “In childbirth. The baby, too. Doesn’t happen often in this day and age, and he almost went mad with grief.”

  “He’ll be all right,” she said with authority. “His music will see to that. While I was listening to him play, I realized how futile it is to try to transcribe that fugue for the piano.”

  “I’ve heard you play it, and magnificently.”

  “Don’t flatter me, Felix.”

  “I often flatter, I suppose.” His voice was rueful. “But not you, Katya, never you.” The old nickname still sounded strange to her, so long was it since it had been used. “On the phone, when you realized who I was, you called me ‘window cleaner.’ I was deeply moved that you remembered.”

  “I have a good memory, Felix.”—Too good. “Is becoming a bishop a way of becoming a window cleaner?”

  “Becoming a priest. That was my hope.” He sounded weary, and sad. He turned as they heard footsteps coming toward them, and raised his hand in greeting to an armed guard. “Evening, Steele.”

  “Evening, Bishop. You all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Mr. Owen is up there practicing.”

  “Yes, we heard him. Everything quiet this evening?”

  “So far,” the guard said, nodded at them, and walked on.

  The music started again, Messiaen now, and Katherine sat in one of the folding chairs which were lined in neat rows across the nave, with no fixed pews, as in most European cathedrals, or, at any rate, the only one she knew at all, the cathedral in Munich. She regarded the bishop in his light caftan—no, cassock—and thought that he looked pale and lonely and, despite his thinness, not as lightweight as he had been in his youth. Life had taken him a long way from the feline young man she had known for no more than a year. He had represented for her the cheapest part of la vie de Bohême, or hippiedom, or whatever it was called now, and she had tried to forget him as quickly as possible. She had not thought of him in all these years, until he had called her, less than a week after she had left the house in Paris and flown to New York, to her house on Tenth Street.

  The stiff cathedral chair was uncomfortable. She rose, pushing herself up with the ivory-handled cane which she carried largely because she felt that it helped her get the service and consideration that she demanded in her old age. She did not want to need the cane. Her back was still straight, and though she likened her fingers to gnarled carrots, they were nearly as strong and nimble on the piano as ever. She practiced daily, and if it was not for as many hours as it used to be, it was a minimum of four. “All right, Felix. You’ve got me all the way up here for something. What is it?” The organ had stopped now, but almost immediately began again, the gentle sound of one of the more meditative chorale preludes.

  He continued down the nave, stepping like a child around large, circular bronze insets. “The Pilgrim’s Pavement,” he murmured. “We have St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s towers completed, and are doing well with the transepts thanks to a completely unexpected bequest. However …”

  She stiffened. When he had urged her to meet him at the Cathedral, he had promised not to ask her for money.

  “My job in my retirement is to work with the Cathedral Arts Program. I want you to give a concert, a benefit concert for us.”

  She shook her head definitely. “I am retired. You know that.”

  “You gave a concert in Paris less than six months ago. And I’m retired and still working and you’re younger than I am.”

  “Felix, my feet hurt on this stone. I’m hungry. What about that dinner you promised me?”

  “In a minute. I want to show you the ambulatory.”

  Her voice was sharper than she intended. “I’m tired. I’m still on French time, and it’s past my dinner hour.”

  “All right. I never could say no to you. I hope you won’t say no to me, though you were always good at that. But this time … Come, we’ll go out by St. James chapel and you’ll at least get a glimpse of the ambulatory.”

  Still cross, but trying to soften her tone, she asked, “What’s an ambulatory?”

  “More or less what it sounds like. It’s a half circle behind the high altar, and off it are rayed seven chapels. My idea is for a series of distinguished chamber-music concerts in St. Ansgar’s chapel. Acoustically it’s excellent for the piano, and we’ve been given a particularly fine Bösendorfer.” He offered her the bait with eager anxiety.

  Fine pianos were nothing new. “Dinner,” she said firmly, “before I faint.”

  He jingled his bunch of keys. “I thought it would be more pleasant to take you home for a quiet meal than to go to a restaurant. Dinner’s all ready, waiting in the fridge. Vitello tonnato and a bottle of Frascati.”

  “Allons y, alors.”

  Reluctantly he led her to an elaborately grilled iron gate, to the right of which stood an antique carved chest the size of a small coffin, with a hand-lettered sign reading DONATIONS.

  “Does it ever get filled?” She smiled slightly at the size of the chest.

  “We have to empty it every day, because of thieves and vandals, but you’d be amazed at how much gets put into it in a day, widow’s mites, mostly, but it mounts up.” He selected a key from the ring that was attached to his belt, on the other side from the beads—were they prayer beads of some kind?—opened the gate and led her up the shallow steps. “Everything gets locked up at five, but I still have the keys to the kingdom, and now that we’re well into spring it’s light till late.” He pointed. “Look on your left for a glimpse of the ambulatory.”

  Obediently she turned her head and saw a curve of shadows and paneled wood holding paintings which in the twilight appeared to be early Renaissance. To the right were more grilled ga
tes and a feeling that everything was reaching up, soaring to the vaulted ceiling. Felix opened another door, a wooden one this time, and they were out on a landing, leading to a steep flight of iron steps. The door closed on the notes of the organ. “Careful,” Felix warned. “Hold on to the rail. We’re still working on the south transept. I’ll go first.” He started down, leaning heavily on the iron rail. “I’ve hardly shown you anything.” He sounded like a disappointed child. “We haven’t gone near the Stone Yard—but of course it’s closed for the night. Next time—you will come again? The Close is at its most beautiful right now.”

  “Close?”

  “The grounds,” he answered. “All this loveliness.”

  She looked around at the flowering trees, the young green grass. Everything was spring-fresh, and this first premature wave of heat was bringing all the buds into quick bloom. The thermometer was well into the eighties but the heat was not oppressive; the buildings had not yet absorbed the heat as they would during the long summer. She was grateful that she had come home in the spring rather than into the sweltering humidity of New York in summer.

  “Haven’t you read any Trollope lately?” Felix was asking.

  “No, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been this far uptown before. I’ve tended to stay close to Tenth Street and Lincoln Center when I’ve been in New York.”

  “People are often amazed at this island of beauty in what is surely not one of the cleanest parts of our fair city.” He paused to wave to two young mothers, one pushing a stroller, the other carrying her infant in a bright blue baby sling. They both returned his greeting, smiling. “This is a happy place,” Felix said, “in an often unhappy city. People come here to play, to pray, to cry, to sing. All this green space is one of the greatest gifts we have to offer in an overcrowded metropolis. You will come again, won’t you?”