The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  When Hugh and I were first married and Mother came to visit us, she would offer to help in the kitchen, and she was just about as much help as the grandbabies; and, as with the grandbabies, I had to think up things for her to do. My nanny used to laugh and tell me that when Mother was giving a dinner party, the house would be spick-and-span, and at the last minute in would come Mother with flowers to arrange, leaving leaves and petals on the newly vacuumed rug.

  She has always left a trail of flowers behind her. Despite her incorrigible scattering of greenery, she had enormous talent for arranging flowers. When the rather sparse flower garden at Crosswicks had nothing to offer, she could take a collection of weeds from the hedges at the side of the lane, and create a work of art. It wasn’t Japanese at all—she was much too lavish—but her arrangements were uniquely hers, and uniquely beautiful. I miss them.

  7

  There is music I will never again be able to hear without being plunged into the atmosphere of this summer. It was a year ago that Margie discovered The Magic Flute. She played the glockenspiel in the school band, and the charming music of the glock in Mozart’s opera delighted her so that she played our records at least daily. The music is more poignant this summer, because she puts it on whenever the great-grandmother is having a bad day. It hurts Margie’s lovingness that love is not enough, that it cannot push back the slide into senility.

  Bion’s new find is Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis. This is one of his favorites in the evening before dinner, and Mother still responds to music—it is the last thing to call her forth from the cloud. On the other side of the record are two pieces by Elgar, Introduction and Allegro for String Quartet and Serenade in E minor, which are unfamiliar to Mother (we discovered the Thomas Tallis together, while I was in college), and each evening she tells Bion how beautiful the music is, and asks him, “What is this lovely music, Bion?” “It’s Elgar, Grandmother.”

  During the day the young people play “their” music. It is understood that this is the time for the Beatles, for Buffalo Springfield, for the Who. Mother does not like such music, and it is good for her to respond to it, to announce loudly how horrible it is. At least it is my theory that it is good, that she should not be isolated by the narrowing of old age. A lot of the time I don’t like the music either, but I do not ask to have it turned down. If it is important for Mother to be as full a part as possible of this multi-generation household, it is important for Hugh and me, too.

  It is tacitly understood that the evening is reserved for Tallis, Elgar, Bach, Mozart (though not The Magic Flute; we’ve had that with the vacuum cleaner). Sometimes Alan and I will play violin and piano, which, for some reason, Mother has always enjoyed. She is still likely to notice, and remark, when I play a false note; if we are not accurate with tempo, she beats it out on the arm of the little sofa.

  Music has always been part of the fabric of her life, so it is not surprising that it is the last thing to reach her. As a young girl, she studied music in Berlin and played well enough to do concert work, which she hated; she went through an agony of anxiety except when playing for friends. During my early childhood, when we lived in New York, my parents used to have an open supper party every Sunday evening, and there were anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen people there. These evenings were centered around the piano—the same piano on which I play in Crosswicks, a piano considerably older than I am, but still with a felicitous tone and a responsive keyboard. Mother used to be able to read piano music the way most of us read a novel, and when friends from the Metropolitan Opera Company were there on Sundays, which was nearly every Sunday during the opera season, Mother would sit down at the piano and read off the score of Götterdämmerung or La Bohème, while the singers (and sometimes the non-singers) sang. I used to slip out of my room on those Sunday evenings, slide behind the long, red sofa, thence under the piano, to sit hidden behind the music rack and listen. Of course some of the guests spied me and were amused enough not to tell; it was not until I myself confessed that Mother learned I was not in bed asleep during these musical evenings.

  One afternoon my closest friend, a “poor little rich girl,” came to play; our great joy was to dress up in Mother’s old evening clothes, and we both much preferred my parents’ small apartment to her parents’ enormous, Italianate mansion. That day for some reason her mother came to call for her, instead of the usual nurse or governess. My mother was playing the piano, and Mrs. W. stood for a long time outside the front door, listening. When she came in she told Mother that she was a friend of George Gershwin’s, and that he was looking for someone to play two piano with, and suggested that Mother was just the person. “I was too shy,” Mother told me later. “It’s one of the greatest regrets of my life.”

  How do I reconcile my mother then and my mother now?

  One evening before dinner Bion puts on Ravel’s Bolero. We manage not to groan. How many times have we heard it? It’s been a favorite of his ever since he discovered music. I look at Mother and wonder if there is a flicker of remembrance about the evening in Paris when she and Father heard Bolero performed for the first time ever, anywhere. We are so familiar with its repetitive, hypnotic rhythm that it is impossible for me to imagine hearing it completely freshly. Mother said that after the last long mesmerizing note died away the audience sat silent, stunned, and then burst into roars of cheering.

  Another first performance at which she was present was that of César Franck’s Symphony in D minor. This time the response was not applause but boos, and it was Hector Berlioz who led the audience in the heckling. A friend of Franck’s went backstage and asked him how the symphony had sounded, and Franck smiled gently and said that it sounded just as he had hoped it would.

  It is as difficult to imagine booing such melodious music as it is to imagine never having heard Bolero. But Mother was there, and her response was eternal dislike of Berlioz and a closed ear to all his music. His behavior and his composing were coupled forever in her mind. She wanted the artists she admired to be perfect in all ways, and it always upset her that her adored Wagner was “such a horrid man.”

  Last summer there were many evenings when the past was still available to her, and mornings when we sat together to drink our coffee and she could still tell me stories. She used to be a witty conversationalist, and I could get her out of bed by saying, “Mother, you have to help me. I’ve got things to do in the kitchen, and I can’t leave the guests alone.” Like an old race horse at the sound of the bell she would go into the living room, and from the kitchen I could hear laughter, and know that all was well. Not so this summer. She talks very little. It is all turned in, and it goes nowhere. She is trapped in a lonely, fearful present.

  I want to open her memory, but I don’t have the password. I want to cry out, “Open, sesame!” so that the door to this treasure cave will open, but it is permanently locked.

  After dinner the girls get her ready for bed, and then I go to sit with her for a few minutes. The prevailing westerly wind has dropped, and it is unusually hot for our house on the hill. I sit there, not talking, holding Mother’s hand, and remember another hot evening, in the apartment in New York, when I was a small child. Mother was sitting on the side of my bed, much as I now sit by her, stroking my head and pushing my perspiration-damp hair back from my forehead.

  In the hall, between my parents’ room and mine, hung an old etching of Castle Conway, in Wales. It’s a charming picture, and I have always loved it because of the story my mother told me about it that night. It was probably the heat which reminded her, and my usual demand, “Tell me a story about you and Father.” One hot summer evening, long before I was born, she walked through the hall and glanced at the etching of Castle Conway and said, “Oh, Charles, it’s so hot. I wish we could go to Castle Conway.” “Come on!” he cried, and swept her out of the house without toothbrush or change of clothes, and into a taxi, and by midnight they were on a ship sailing across the Atlantic. In those days a trip could
be as spontaneous as that. My parents were not poor, but neither were they, by today’s standards, affluent. Father was a playwright and journalist, and their pocketbook waned and swelled like the moon; this must have been one of the full-moon moments.

  I hold my mother’s hand and ask her, “Do you remember the time you and Father went to Castle Conway?”

  She has forgotten, she who so short a time ago still remembered everything, and it troubles her, so I change the subject.

  Her loss of memory is the loss of her self, her uniqueness, and this frightens me, for myself, as well as for her. Memory is probably my most essential tool as a storyteller, and the creative use of memory takes structure, enormous, disciplined structure, in a world where structure is unfashionable. Like the Red King, I’m apt to remember inaccurately what I don’t write down in journal or notebook. “The horror of that moment,” the king went on, “I shall never, never forget.” “You will, though,” the queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

  Will I ever forget the intenseness of my anxiety about Hugh? Relief is already blunting the so-recent fear. I am already relaxing into the casual acceptance of a husband. Sooner or later I will get cross with him again, lose my temper, get hurt by something trivial. But I am sure that I shall never, never quite forget, and the setting down of the panic in my journal as well as my heart may be what will keep me from ever again taking a husband I love for granted.

  And my mother’s loss of memory will keep me from taking memory for granted.

  Who is this cross old woman for whom I can do nothing right? I don’t know her. She is not my mother. I am not her daughter. She won’t eat anything I cook, so we resort to games. I do the cooking as usual—and I’m quite a good cook; it’s one of my few domestic virtues, and the only part of housekeeping which I enjoy—and someone will say, “Eat Alan’s soup, Grandmother. You know you like Alan’s soup.” Or, “Have some of Hugh’s delicious salad.” She won’t eat the salad, when Hugh is in New York, until we tell her that Hugh made the dressing before he left.

  I know that it is a classic symptom of atherosclerosis, this turning against the person you love most, and this knowledge is secure above my eyebrows, but very shaky below. There is something atavistic in us which resents, rejects, this reversal of roles. I want my mother to be my mother.

  And she is not. Not any more. Not ever again.

  8

  I go searching for her.

  My first memories of her are early, and are memories of smell, that oft-neglected sense, which is perhaps the first sense we use fully. Mother always smelled beautiful. I remember burrowing into her neck just for the soft loveliness of scented skin.

  After smell came sound, the sound of her voice, singing to me, talking. I took the beauty of her voice for granted until I was almost grown up.

  Scent. Sound. Vision.

  I remember going into her room just before dinner, when she was sitting at her dressing table, rubbing sweet-smelling creams and lotions into her face. She had a set of ivory rollers from Paris, which I liked to play with; and a silver-backed nail buffer. Sometimes she let me buff my own nails until they were a pearly pink. The cake of French rouge, and the buffing, makes for a much prettier nail than lacquer.

  I watched her brush her hair, a dark mahogany with red glints, thick and wavy, with a deep widow’s peak. On the bed her evening dress was laid out; I remember one of flowered chiffon, short in front and long in back, that short-lived style of the twenties. Her shoes were bronze kid, and as tiny as Cinderella’s.

  My father, too, dressed for dinner every night, even when they were not having company or going out. Mother said that Father would dress for dinner in the desert or the jungle, and that he often told her that without him she’d be on the beach in two weeks. I doubt that. Until recently, I have never seen her anything but immaculate, erect, patrician. Now she has diminished; she is tiny and slumped and we have to dress her and fix her hair, but she is aware that she still has beautiful legs and she likes to show them. She responds to men, and she likes young people, which is not unusual.

  Her father, my grandfather, who died at a hundred and one, responded to women and liked young people. One of the worst things about our attitude toward old people is the assumption that they ought to be herded together with other old people. Grandfather lived past that stage; he had, as he remarked, no contemporaries. He played golf until he was ninety-five, having cut down, at ninety, from thirty-six holes to eighteen because his younger companions couldn’t keep up with him. He made the great mistake of retiring at ninety-five, and from then on began the slide into senility.

  My mother tended him, with considerable assistance. Nevertheless, the psychological drain was on her, and it told in other ways, too. She has never been very strong, and several times during Grandfather’s last years she told me that she did not think she would live to be very old. “But I don’t want to,” she added. “Don’t grieve for me if I die. I don’t ever want to be like Papa.”

  “Of course I’ll grieve for you. But I don’t want you to be like Grandfather, either.”

  Grandfather was dominant, powerful, ruthless, charming, wicked, brilliant, made and spent fortunes. It was strange to see the great man becoming an ancient baby. One night when he was around a hundred, Mother was sitting with him after he’d been put to bed, sitting with her father much as I now sit with my mother. He clasped her hand tightly, looked at her like a child, and asked, “Who is going to go with me when I die?”

  We bring nothing with us into the world, and certainly we can take nothing out. We die alone. But I wish that most deaths today did not come in nursing homes or in hospitals. Death is an act which should not happen in such brutal settings. Future generations may well regard our hospitals and “rest” homes and institutions for the mentally ill with as much horror as we regard Bedlam.

  Meanwhile, at Crosswicks I blunder along, and will continue to blunder as long as I can, although I am well aware that at the end of the summer there will be decisions to be made. Several years ago I promised Mother that I would never put her in a nursing home, and I may have to break that promise, deny what I affirm, because I will have no choice.

  Her first night in Crosswicks this summer I called Vicki and Janet aside. “Sometimes at night Grandmother rings her bell too late, and can’t make it to the bathroom in time. If this happens, call me. You’re only supposed to listen for her at night, and take her to the bathroom if she needs to go, not to clean up if she’s—incontinent.”

  Incontinent. I hesitated over the word. And my motives in telling the girls to call me if Mother soils herself were certainly mixed—but then, I have never had a completely unmixed motive in my life.

  Part of it was consideration for the girls. They are not being paid to take over the more unpleasant parts of nursing. Another reason is that I did not want anybody to witness the humiliation of my aristocratic mother.

  The girls do not call me. Almost every morning when I come hurrying downstairs they are washing the great-grandmother, changing the sheets—the washing machine goes constantly, sheets, diapers, work clothes—I am very grateful, this summer, for all my mechanical kitchen and laundry helpers. The girls are patient and gentle with Mother. I think they, too, feel that this is an unfair ploy on the part of life; it is wrong that we should lose control of our most private functions.

  Old age has been compared to being once again like a baby; it is called second childhood. It is not. It is something very different. Charlotte is not yet two, and not yet completely toilet trained. Her soiled diapers have the still-innocuous odor of a baby’s. As we grow older we, as well as our environment, become polluted. The smell of both urine and feces becomes yearly stronger.

  In hospitals, in nursing homes, when people become incontinent this weakness is used against them. We have all heard far too many tales of elderly patients ringing for the bedpan, waiting fifteen minutes, half an hour, and finally not being able to control themselves any longer; and
then, when the overworked nurse eventually arrives, the patient is scolded for lack of control.

  There are not enough nurses, or aides, or orderlies. A hospital is no longer a good place for a person who is ill. I have my own account. After the birth of our first child, during the postwar boom of babies in the late 1940’s, the eminent gynecologist who delivered Josephine did not check the placenta, and a large amount remained inside me. Three and a half weeks later, I hemorrhaged massively and was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. In this enlightened twentieth century I had childbed fever, and came very close to dying. One night I rang for the bedpan and, after waiting for over an hour, I wet the bed. And was roundly berated. I was young enough to fight back.

  Mother is beyond that, and the idea of having her abused over a soiled bed is one of many reasons why putting her in a hospital or nursing home is still impossible to me.

  One morning I dress Mother in a fresh nightgown while Vicki and Janet finish with the bed. Most mornings, Mother hardly seems to notice what has happened, or to care. She will murmur, “I’m cold. I want to go back to bed”—she who used to be so fastidious, so sweet-smelling. But this morning as I sit with my arms around her while the girls ready the bed, she leans against me and, suddenly herself, she says, “Oh, darling, I’m so ashamed about everything.”