A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “Let’s go in,” Adam said. “Maybe Jeb might need me. If he does—”

  “I’ll evaporate. Don’t worry.”

  We swam in and dressed without waiting to dry; it would have taken too long, anyhow. The cloudy sky held the dampness of the day down on us, as though we were in an inverted bowl. We walked through air so saturated with moisture you could almost have put out your hand and squeezed it. We walked without speaking until we came to Ynid’s pen. There were no cartwheels today. Adam walked as though gravity pulled him down.

  Dr. Nutteley was standing, slumped, looking down into the pen, and if he saw us he gave no indication of it.

  Walking softly, not to disturb him, we approached the pen.

  Ynid was swimming in slow circles, carrying a tiny, motionless dolphin on her back. The two midwives swam beside her, pressing close against her as the two dolphins had swum with Adam.

  I did not need to be told that Ynid’s baby was dead. Or that Ynid, swimming with the perfect little dead body on her back, was hoping against hope that the stilled heart would start to beat again.

  And then she must have had a stab of hopelessness, the realization that her baby was dead, because suddenly she streaked ahead of the two midwives and began beating her body wildly against the side of the tank.

  “No, Ynid!” It was Jeb who, with a great cry, plunged into the water and swam to the distraught dolphin, trying to put his arms about her without dislodging the dead baby, trying to keep her from beating herself against the side of the pen, in complete disregard of his own safety, putting himself between Ynid and the side of the pen. He was calling out to her and tears were streaming down his face.

  And Ynid, perhaps because she would not hurt Jeb, stopped her wild beating. It seemed that Jeb was shedding for her the tears that she could not shed, a wild sobbing such as I had never heard from a grown man.

  I slipped away and got my bike from the rack and went back to the stable.

  John brought Adam home for dinner.

  It had rained in the afternoon, but by late afternoon the rain had stopped completely. The wind was moving from the south-east to the northwest, and the heaviness was gone from the air. As the breeze lifted, the weight that had been tightly clamped about my heart loosened just slightly.

  Grandfather didn’t come out for dinner. I took him his tray, and he was propped up in the hospital bed, his Bible by him, but he wasn’t reading. I thought he probably knew most of it by heart.

  He jerked slightly as I knocked and came in.

  “Here’s your dinner, Grandfather. I’m sorry if I woke you.”

  “You didn’t wake me. I was meditating.”

  Mrs. Rodney had brought over a hospital table, which I swung over the bed for the tray. “What were you meditating about?” I asked, unfolding his napkin for him.

  “You don’t meditate about.” His nicest smile twinkled at me. “You just meditate. It is, you might say, practice in dying, but it’s a practice to be begun as early in life as possible.”

  “Sort of losing yourself?” I asked.

  “It’s much more finding than losing.”

  I wanted to stay and talk, because his mind seemed completely clear, but I knew I had to get back to the dining table.

  “Vicky,” Grandfather said as I turned to go, “I’ll come out to the porch for the reading.”

  Mother’d finished Twelfth Night and we’d started on Joseph Andrews, a really funny book by Henry Fielding, who also wrote Tom Jones, but Joseph Andrews is lots shorter and, according to Grandfather, funnier, and wouldn’t take us all summer.

  After Mother’d read, we sang, and then she sent Rob up to bed, and Daddy went with Grandfather to help him get ready for the night. Suzy scrambled up from the floor, yawning.

  I still felt that the day was somehow unfinished.

  Adam looked across the porch at me. “Want to go for a walk?”

  For answer I nodded and stood up.

  Mother looked at her watch. “Don’t be too long.”

  Adam also checked his watch. “We won’t be. But Vicky and I have things we need to talk about.”

  He had talked about Ynid and the dead baby at dinner, and Suzy had demanded to know if the baby would have died if it had been born at sea rather than in captivity. And Adam had replied that there was no way of knowing, but that congenital birth defects did occasionally happen in the wild. He had not said anything about Jeb and his bitter grief.

  “Better put on a sweater, Vicky,” he advised.

  After the heat of the past days it was hard to believe that I’d need a sweater, but I went up to the loft, where Rob was sound asleep and Suzy was getting ready for bed, and grabbed a bulky fisherman’s sweater that would have fitted any of us, and pulled it over my head. It was still warm in the loft so I opened the windows wide before going down the ladder.

  Mr. Rochester was waiting, his thin tail whipping back and forth in anticipation, so we took him with us. The steep path directly down to Grandfather’s cove is too difficult for Rochester, in his arthritic old age, so we walked along the road toward the lighthouse, and then turned oceanward.

  Not looking at me, Adam said, “I didn’t stay this morning, either. Jeb didn’t need me. He didn’t need anyone except Ynid. I’m not sure he even knew we were there. Not that he’d have minded. He’s probably one of the most free and open people I’ve ever known.”

  I thought of Jeb wiping his eyes at Commander Rodney’s funeral when almost everybody else was being stoic. Then I asked, “Is Ynid all right?”

  “She’s going to be. She let Jeb take the baby. And she’s stopped trying to beat herself to death against the side of the pen. She wouldn’t eat, but that’s to be expected for a day or so.”

  “And Jeb?” We had reached the beach, a cove or so up from Grandfather’s, past the dead elm, and were walking close to the water’s edge, Rochester prancing along ahead, looking for the moment like a young dog.

  “Jeb lost his wife and baby in a car accident.”

  “When?”

  “A couple of years ago. But he still isn’t over it. He was driving, and that has to make it all the harder, though it wasn’t his fault. The car had defective brakes.” We walked a little farther, both looking down at the faint whiteness of the lacy edge of the wavelets as they lapped against the night beach. Then Adam said, “In the end I think Ynid comforted Jeb as much as the other way round, and maybe that was the best thing he could give to Ynid, his own pain.”

  Adam turned in from the sea and headed for a low dune which leaned against the cliff. He brushed away the damp sand on the surface, till he had cleared enough space for the two of us and Rochester to sit on warm, dry sand. The sky was covered with clouds which were moving in the wind. The cloud cover was still so thick that the only hint of starlight was a faintly luminous quality to the night, and a delicate tracery of light as the waves moved and turned. The breeze was cool and I was grateful for the warmth of the big, bulky sweater.

  Mr. Rochester sat on his haunches beside me, peered intently into my face, and gave me a gentle kiss on the nose. Then he flopped down and put his heavy head on my knees. Adam sat on my other side, picking up sand and letting it trickle slowly through his fingers.

  “Like an hourglass,” I said.

  “What?”

  I indicated the softly falling sand. Sand sifting down through the hourglass of life, time irrevocably passing, passing swiftly, too swiftly …

  “Vicky—”

  I turned toward him.

  He was looking at the sand slipping through his fingers, not at me. It was as though he were somehow thinking my thoughts. “You’re upset because Ynid lost her baby.”

  “Of course. Probably not as upset as you are, but sure, of course I’m upset.”

  “You’re more upset than just of course. Why?”

  “It’s just—it’s just—there’s death everywhere—Commander Rodney—and watching Grandfather, and now Ynid’s baby for no reason—it’s just every
where.”

  “Always has been. It’s part of the price of being born.”

  “It just seems that lately …” My voice trembled and I leaned forward and carefully scratched Rochester behind the ears.

  “Is the price too high?” Adam asked.

  I shrugged, in the way that Mother hates.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked softly.

  Yes. I didn’t say it aloud. I didn’t need to.

  “Of what, Vicky?” He picked up another handful of sand, and started trickling it through his fingers. “Dying?” His voice wasn’t loud, but the word seemed to explode into the night.

  Mr. Rochester shifted position and I continued absentmindedly to scratch behind his ears, his short fur rough under my fingers. “Not so much of dying, if—I’m afraid of annihilation. Of not being.”

  Adam let all the sand fall. “I guess we all are, if it comes to that.”

  “Is that what you think it comes to? That Commander Rodney was just snuffed out? And Ynid’s baby? And that Grandfather will be? And all of us?”

  There was a long silence against which the waves moving into shore and the light wind in the grasses and Rochester’s breathing sounded in counterpoint.

  At last Adam spoke. “I’m not a churchgoer, Vicky. I hadn’t darkened the doors of a church since I sang in choir at school till—till Commander Rodney’s funeral. So maybe what I think is kind of heretical.”

  “What do you think?” I desperately wanted to know. Maybe because of Basil, I trusted Adam. The breeze lifted and blew across us, pushing my hair back from my forehead. I must have shivered, because Adam put one arm lightly across my shoulders.

  “When are you most completely you, Vicky?”

  It wasn’t at all what I had expected him to say. I was looking for answers, not more questions.

  “When?” he repeated.

  Maybe because I was feeling extraordinarily tired I was thinking in scenes, rather than logical sequences, and across my mind’s eye flashed a picture of the loft, with the old camp cots, and the windows overlooking the ocean, and the lighthouse at night with its friendly beam, and on the far wall the lines of the poem Grandfather had painted there, If thou could’st empty all thyself of self …

  I was not really myself when I was all replete with very me. So when was I?

  “When you first took me to meet Basil,” I said slowly, “and when I was petting him and scratching his chest …”

  “Who were you thinking about?”

  “Basil.”

  “Were you thinking about you?”

  “No.”

  “But you were really being you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s contradiction, isn’t it? You weren’t thinking about yourself at all. You were completely thrown out of yourself in concentration on Basil. And yet you were really being really you.”

  I leaned my head against Adam’s shoulder. “Much more than when I’m all replete with very me.”

  His right hand drew my head more comfortably against his shoulder. “So, when we’re thinking consciously about ourselves, we’re less ourselves than when we’re not being self-centered.”

  “I suppose …”

  “Okay, here’s another analogy. Where are you when you write poetry?”

  “This summer I’m usually up in the loft.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean. When you’re actually writing a poem, when you’re in the middle of it, where are you?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m more in the poem than I am in me. I’m using my mind, really using it, and yet I’m not directing the poem or telling it where to go. It’s telling me.”

  His strong fingers moved gently across my hair. “That’s the way it is with science, too. All the great scientists, like Newton, like Einstein, repeat the same thing—that the discoveries don’t come when you’re consciously looking for them. They come when for some reason you’ve let go conscious control. They come in a sudden flash, and you can receive that flash, or you can refuse to. But if you’re willing to receive it, then for that instantaneous moment of time you’re really you, but you’re not conscious in the same way you have to be later on when you look at what you saw in the flash, and then have to work out the equations to prove it.”

  I heard every word he said. And I think I understood. At the same time my entire body was conscious of the feel of his fingers stroking my hair. I wondered if he felt it as strongly as I did. But I asked, “Has that happened to you, that knowing in a flash?”

  “Not in the way it did to Einstein, with his theory of relativity. Or to Dr. O’Keefe, with his work on limb regeneration. But in little ways with Basil, yes. He’s taught me more about himself than I could have learned with just my thinking self. And Basil—Basil has taught you, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  He lifted his hand and stopped stroking. “And you saw Jeb with Ynid.”

  Yes, I had seen Dr. Nutteley with Ynid. In the midst of his pain, Jeb had been wholly real.

  “What I think”—Adam’s hand began caressing my hair again—“is that if we’re still around after we die, it will be more like those moments when we let go, than the way we are most of the time. It’ll be—it’ll be the self beyond the self we know.”

  At that moment there was a rip in the clouds and an island of star-sparkled sky appeared, its light so brilliant it seemed to reach down beyond the horizon and encircle the earth, a ring of pure and endless light.

  I wasn’t sure that Adam’s words were comforting. But his arm about me was. He made me feel very real, not replete with me at all, only real, and hopeful.

  He turned toward me and I thought he was going to kiss me and I wanted him to kiss me. But he just looked at me for a long time without smiling, and I wondered how much he could see in the island of starlight. His face was shadowed, and maybe it was just that more clouds opened, but it was as though his light had come on, and he smiled. “I knew we were going to be able to talk, Vicky. I knew it when I first met you. I don’t talk this way to many people.”

  I murmured, “I don’t either.” Only, maybe, to people like Grandfather. But this was different. As different as being with Basil.

  And I knew that if Adam kissed me it was going to be different from Zachary, with all his experience, or Leo, with all his naïveté.

  Adam did not kiss me.

  Yet I felt as close to him as though he had.

  Seven

  I woke up early the next morning, with the summer sun pouring across my bed and my eyes. I looked at my watch. Not yet six. Nobody’d be stirring for another hour.

  I pulled my writing things from under the bed, dressed, and slipped quietly down the ladder.

  The house was silent. No sound from the big four-poster bed where my parents were sleeping. No sound from the hospital bed in Grandfather’s study. If he was awake he would be either reading or meditating.

  Rochester rose from his battered red rug at the foot of the ladder, stretched, and followed me. Sunlight streamed across the kitchen. I wanted to write something for Ynid. I stared across the porch to the blinding early-morning light bursting across the sea. A sonnet. A sonnet for Ynid and her baby.

  Ynid couldn’t read. But Jeb Nutteley could, and Adam, if I wrote something I dared give them.

  I stopped thinking about Dr. Nutteley and Adam and focused on the poem. It came swiftly, with lots of quick crossings-out, as new words, new lines pushed aside what I had first written down.

  The earth will never be the same again.

  Rock, water, tree, iron, share this grief

  As distant stars participate in pain.

  A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,

  A dolphin death, O this particular loss

  Is Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried,

  If this small one was tossed away as dross,

  The very galaxies then would have lied.

  How shall we sing our love’s song now

  In this strange land whe
re all are born to die?

  Each tree and leaf and star show how

  The universe is part of this one cry,

  That every life is noted and is cherished,

  And nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

  Did I believe that? I didn’t know, but I had not, as it were, dictated the words, I had simply followed them where they wanted to lead.

  And whether or not it was a passable sonnet I didn’t know, nor whether or not I’d presume to show it to Dr. Nutteley or Adam.

  But I felt the good kind of emptiness that comes when I’ve finished writing something. The emptiness quickly translated itself into plain, ordinary hunger.

  I’d just put a saucepan of milk on the stove to warm when the phone rang.

  “Vicky, I’m glad it’s you. This is Adam.”

  “Yes. Hi!”

  “I hope I didn’t wake anybody. Listen, can you come over this morning first thing?” His voice sounded eager. “I want to try something new in my dolphin experiment, and I need you.”

  “Sure I’ll come.” I didn’t even try to keep the rush of gladness out of my voice.

  “Can you come right now? I mean, don’t wait for John. Have you had breakfast?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How about meeting me at the cafeteria and we’ll have coffee and an English or something while I clue you in to what I hope to do this morning.”

  “Okay. Be there as soon as my bike’ll get me there.” I turned off the heat under my milk and left a note: “Hope somebody wants café au lait. I’m off to the lab. See you when.”

  As I got my bike out of the shed I heard someone else stirring about the house, so I pedaled off quickly to avoid conversation or explanation.

  I’d grabbed my bathing suit and a towel from the line and stuffed them, still damp, into my bike basket. The early morning was cool and misty, but I sniffed the salty air and felt the warmth of sun above the mist and decided that it was going to be a fine day, and we’d be back in summer heat.

  It takes nearly half an hour to get from the stable to the labs and I worked up an appetite. Adam was waiting for me at the entrance to the cafeteria, and we got trays and joined the line of early breakfasters. The line moved quickly. Adam led me to a table in the corner.