Emily’s face was solemn, almost expressionless, with a hidden intensity which again reminded Katherine of herself as a child; even the slight limp was reminiscent, as she, too, had had a troublesome hip which caused a mild limp that she outgrew with adolescence. John was able to show his delight openly, vulnerably. Katherine, like Emily, had found it excruciatingly difficult to reveal her innermost feelings.
“Katya—” It was the bishop. “I hate to mention time, but it’s well over half an hour, and Mimi will be waiting at the garage.”
She rose, stiffly, reaching for her cane, which John handed her. “Yes, you’re right, John, this piano does become an extension of the fingers.”
They started out of the ambulatory and down the marble steps, and saw Mimi Oppenheimer and Suzy Davidson coming toward them. Emily whispered, “Don’t say anything about the pennies. Mom hates it, and it scares Tory.”
“It scares me, too,” Llew said grimly. “I’m going back to the organ for a while.” And he left them.
8
As the rest of them drew together, Suzy said, “Dave has been called out—there’s been another stabbing a few blocks down Amsterdam.”
Josiah said, “People seem to think Dad can work miracles.”
Felix said softly, “No, he reassures them, and that’s why they want him.”
Suzy added, “And he speaks Spanish and makes them comfortable because he’s one of them. I wish I could do the same with my Spanish-speaking patients.”
John turned to his mother, saying, incomprehensibly to Katherine, “V & T?”
“Just what I was going to suggest.” Suzy turned, pausing to explain. “My offspring love pizza and the best pizza in New York is made just across the street at the V & T—one of our local restaurants. Just up the street there’s excellent Hungarian food at the Green Tree—”
They started down the steps, John at Katherine’s elbow. “And French at—”
“And Israeli—”
“And Greek—”
Felix cut into the young Davidsons’ recitation. “How about it, Katya? When did you last eat pizza?” They stood in the shadow of one of the great buttresses.
“At least a thousand years ago.”
“Why not, then?” Mimi strode ahead.
Katherine turned to Felix, “Not since—” She broke into laughter. “Not since I had pizza after the theatre with you and Pete and—what was her name?”
“Sarah.”
“Yes. Did they marry?”
“No. I married Sarah.” He rode over her surprise. “Forget it.” He looked around as though to be sure no one had heard. “Will you come with us? It really is good pizza, and there are plenty of other things on the menu if you like good, solid south Italian food.”
Felix married to Sarah? Curiouser and curiouser.
Once in the restaurant they were welcomed like old friends, which no doubt the Davidsons were, and shown a table by the window, looking across Amsterdam Avenue to the Close. The place was crowded with what Katherine took to be graduate students from Columbia; a few uniformed policemen; white-coated doctors and technicians from St. Luke’s Hospital. Occasionally a pocket beeper would sound, and someone would hurry out. There were several people in clerical collars, to whom the Davidsons nodded or called out greetings. Katherine recognized the Levantine-looking Bishop Juxon sitting at a side table with a young woman who was trying to conceal the fact that she was weeping.
Felix murmured, “Our local restaurants often take the place of confessionals,” and helped Katherine into a chair.
“Pizza with everything,” Tory announced with enthusiasm. “Peppers and anchovies and mushrooms and sausage and onions and pepperoni—”
“I’m glad there’s a doctor in the house,” Katherine said.
“Halt!” Suzy cautioned. “I deal with hearts and I doubt if pizza will give you a coronary.”
And Mimi put up a restraining hand. “And I try to mend bones. I haven’t pumped out a stomach since I was an intern. However, I don’t think one piece of pizza will do your innards any harm, and I’ll give you a settling tisane when we get home.”
“For an orthopod,” Suzy said, “you do hold great stock in your home brews.”
“It’s my French blood, and they haven’t failed me yet. I prescribe them for my patients; they help bones to knit.”
Suzy began to involve Mimi in a discussion of some especially intricate heart surgery, and the young men were talking with Felix, so Katherine turned her ear toward the girls. Emily and Tory were evidently at the age of constant bickering.
Tory’s voice was irritatingly smug as she said, “Mrs. Undercroft happens to prefer me to you.”
Emily rose to the bait. “Mrs. Undercroft is a frivolous fart.”
“You’re just jealous.”
“You’re welcome to her.”
“My theory about you,” Tory continued the attack, “is that you were an accident. Then they had to have me, to go along with you. So I was planned, and you weren’t.”
Suzy turned from her conversation with Mimi. “Girls, if you’re going to fight, you can leave.”
“We weren’t fighting,” Tory defended. “We were talking.”
“It sounded unpleasant. Therefore, desist.”
The pizza arrived and was, as promised, excellent. “I would have asked you up for dinner,” Suzy said, “but I know our stairs are too much for someone who is not used to them, and cooking is not one of my many talents. You’ll get a much better meal here than if I’d prepared it.”
“You’re not that bad, Mom,” John defended. “And you always cook lots.”
“Quantity, if not quality,” Suzy agreed.
“A voracious vulva.” Emily’s voice rang out during a lull in the conversation.”
“Emily!” Suzy snapped.
Emily scowled. “It’s a perfect description of her.”
“I don’t know who you’re describing and I don’t want to know. Do you know the meaning of your words?”
“They’re alliterative.”
“The next time you want to be alliterative, look your words up in the dictionary.”
“Okay.” Emily’s odd, fair brows drew together. Somehow she looked frightened, rather than angry.
Felix reached across the table for her hand. “You can use my dictionary.” A glance of the intimate love which occasionally exists between the very young and the very old passed between them.
“Thank you,” Emily said softly, and then smiled at Katherine. “As you can guess, Madame, we’re all mad fans of yours.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Katherine said. “And I’m pleased. I don’t think you’re ‘mad fans’ indiscriminately.”
“No, we aren’t. We’re frightfully discriminating.”
“And you play the piano?”
Emily spoke in a calm voice. “I had been preparing to be a ballet dancer, but that’s out, so I have to acquire a new passion. I’ve been thinking for the past year that it’s going to be the piano. If I could be like you, I’d be sure it was.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Katherine said.
“I’m not afraid of work. But my piano teacher—well, I don’t know whether or not I have the gift, the way John has.”
To her own surprise, Katherine heard herself asking, “Would you like to play for me?”
“Oh, yes, please! But not yet—I need a while to prepare some pieces for you.”
“Just let me know when you’re ready, then.”
“I will, and, oh, thanks.”
The conversation continued generally, and amicably now.
Once Katherine heard Emily asking softly, “Uncle Bishop, are you ever afraid in the night?”
Felix replied, equally softly, “Yes, Em. I am.”
Mimi, too, had heard, because her brusque voice joined in. “Good heavens, everybody is afraid sometimes. It’s part of the human condition.”
“Even you?” Felix asked.
“Christ, yes. Even I.”
>
Suzy said, “I do hope Dave won’t be long. I worry when he gets involved in these internecine shootings.”
Katherine turned her mind away, and then realized, when Felix asked her a question and had to repeat it, that the below-the-surface part of her mind was busy planning the recital she would give on the Bösendorfer for Felix, who held the hands of old women who were dying badly. And who had married the young woman who had replaced Katherine in Pete’s arms.
Buy A Severed Wasp Now!
A Biography of Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle was the award-winning author of more than sixty books encompassing children’s and adult fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, and books on prayer. Her best-known work is the classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal for distinguished children’s literature and has sold fourteen million copies worldwide. The Washington Post called the science fantasy tale of an adolescent girl and her telepathic brother’s journey through space and time “one of the most enigmatic works of fiction ever created.”
L’Engle was born on November 29, 1918, in New York City, where both of her parents were artists—her mother a pianist and her father a novelist, journalist, and music and drama critic for the New York Sun. Although she wrote her first story at the age of five and devoted her time to her journals, short stories, and poetry, L’Engle struggled in school and often felt disliked by her teachers and peers. She recalled one of her elementary school teachers calling her stupid and another accusing her of plagiarism when she won a writing contest.
At twelve, L’Engle and her family moved to France for her father’s health (he had been a soldier during World War I and suffered lung damage), and she was sent to boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Two of her novels, A Winter’s Love and The Small Rain, drew on her experiences in Europe. She returned to the United States three years later to attend another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. L’Engle flourished during these years and went on to graduate from Smith College with honors in English.
After college, she moved back to New York City and started work as a stage actress while devoting her free time to writing. During this time, she published her first two novels, The Small Rain and Ilsa, and wrote many plays that were produced in regional theaters. While touring in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as an understudy, she met actor Hugh Franklin, and they married in 1946. After the birth of their daughter Josephine the following year, they bought an old farmhouse, which they called Crosswicks, in Goshen, a small town in rural Connecticut, planning on weekends in the country. When she became pregnant with their second child, Bion, they moved to Crosswicks permanently and ran the local general store. Their family grew with an adopted daughter, Maria. After nearly a decade in Connecticut, they moved back to New York so her husband, who would go on to star in All My Children, could focus on his acting career. She was happy to return and hoped that she would find success as an author again. Indeed, A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962.
The family often returned to Crosswicks over the years and these visits inspired L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, including Two-Part Invention, which tells the story of her marriage, and A Circle of Quiet, in which she explores her role as a woman, mother, wife, and writer.
Back in Manhattan, L’Engle worked as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a position she held for more than three decades. Her lifelong fascination with theology and philosophy, and her personal faith, largely influenced her work. A Wrinkle in Time hints at many Christian themes, yet religious conservative groups have spoken out against the book, accusing L’Engle of misrepresenting God in a dangerous world of witchcraft, myth, and fantasy. It has been one of the most banned books in the United States. Apart from her religious influences, she said that Einstein’s theory of relativity and other theories in physics also served as inspiration. The novel’s combined use of both science fiction and philosophy established it as a sophisticated work of fiction, proving L’Engle’s belief that children’s literature deserves a place in the literary canon.
However, L’Engle initially struggled to achieve success and recognition for her work, and she almost quit writing at forty. She finally broke out onto the literary scene in 1960 with Meet the Austins, the first in her popular young adult series about the Austin family, which includes Newbery Honor Book A Ring of Endless Light. Even A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Although it was an instant commercial and critical sensation and has never gone out of print, the book’s strong female protagonist and intellectual themes were unusual in children’s fiction at the time.
L’Engle’s long literary career expanded far beyond the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. Among her many books are adult novels dealing with relationships, faith, and identity, including Certain Women, A Live Coal in the Sea, and A Severed Wasp; several books of poetry; and more overtly religious works like her Genesis Trilogy of biblical reflections. She won countless accolades, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the National Religious Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal. L’Engle lived out her final years in Litchfield, Connecticut, and passed away at the age of eighty-eight on September 6, 2007.
A portrait of L’Engle in her first years of life.*
L’Engle ice-skating in Brittany, France, circa 1926.*
L’Engle with her dog, Sputzi, circa 1934.*
From July to September 1943, the Repertory Players at Straight Wharf Theatre produced two of L’Engle’s plays, The Christmas Tree and Phelia. She acted in both plays, among others.
L’Engle with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, in 1946.*
L’Engle and her husband renovated and ran a general store in the late 1940s.
L’Engle always illustrated her family’s Christmas cards, including this one from 1952.
L’Engle with her granddaughters Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Lena Roy at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Cathedral Library, circa 1975.
L’Engle in the library of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1977.
L’Engle at a Manhattanville College commencement ceremony, where she received an honorary degree in 1989.*
L’Engle with her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis the night before the young woman’s wedding on August 30, 1996.
L’Engle speaking at a church in 1997.
L’Engle at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1997.*
*Photograph courtesy of the Madeleine L’Engle Papers (SC-3), Special Collections, Buswell Library, Wheaton, Illinois.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1972 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
Introduction copyright © 1984 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4152-2
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
MADELEINE L’ENGLE
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