The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  We drove down to New York to the funeral home. Funeral “home”—another obscenity. Right after the service, Maria came up to me and caught hold of my hand and would not let go. When it came time to leave the cloying and fetid atmosphere of the funeral home, Maria kept repeating to anyone who came near her, “I’m staying with Aunt Madeleine. I’m going where she goes. I’m not going anywhere she doesn’t go. I’m staying with her.”

  So Hugh and I, Maria, and Ezra, the lawyer who had been so helpful to Liz, went to a nearby restaurant for something to eat, and Ezra disappeared. We didn’t know where he’d gone, or why, and just as we were beginning to wonder, he walked in, saying, “We couldn’t just let your birthday go by,” and handed me a corsage, and a rosebud for Maria.

  Late that night, back in Goshen, I wrote, “Let me start now to write a little about the events of the past hours—and one of the strangest birthdays I ever had.” I wrote about the funeral, and the lunch, and then going back to the apartment with Maria. I’d climbed up the several flights of stairs with Maria still holding tightly to my hand, and I recorded in my journal some of the things she said. “Can I come live with you? … Can I live with you forever and ever? … Can I spend next Christmas with you? and the next? and the next? and the next? I hope … I’d like to adopt you. Do you think you could adopt me? … Would Mommy want me to come live with you? … Will Bion and Jo be my real brother and sister, then?” She was grasping for answers, for reassurance. Her grandmother had asked her, “Do you want to come to your mother’s funeral, Maria? Of course you don’t have to come if you don’t want to, but you can come if you like.” What a responsibility to put on an already shocked seven-year-old!

  I wrote the next day, “I know I’ve left out all kinds of important things, but it’s terribly difficult to write with so many interruptions, and besides we’re terribly tired still, emotionally and mentally.

  “We got home around five o’clock and Hugh went right to the store and I got dinner. It was choir night, so I knew we’d have to hurry. While I was getting dinner the phone rang; one of our close friends had been rushed to Boston for emergency surgery for an intestinal stoppage. My heart began to thud: O God, not something else! Even after her husband had assured me that the operation had been successful and she was going to be all right, I still felt panic at the ruthlessness of fate, and our total inability to stop the phone ringing with a message of another tragedy. Meanwhile, I must seem as normal as possible for the children, who are very shaken by the death of the beautiful woman they called Aunt Liz.”

  I wrote, “We had a steak for dinner to mark my birthday, and then I dashed over to choir, and it was a good rehearsal, and as I dismissed them, Grandma [who has played the church organ for seventy plus years and is called Grandma by us all] started to play ‘Happy Birthday,’ and everybody sang, and Gill said I got bright pink. I said I couldn’t think of a nicer way to spend my birthday than directing choir, and then Herb said, ‘Look who’s here,’ and there was Hugh standing in the doorway and I said, ‘What are you doing here!’ and it was for birthday cake and tea and coffee downstairs. What a darling thing for them to do! The birthday cake had ‘Happy birthday, Boss’ on it, and Ella had set the table prettily, and the whole thing gave me a warm glow and somehow made the whole day seem all right.

  “Today has been cold and raw. I wrote another number for the operetta—how do people who don’t have work bear things? … The moment I felt the loss of Liz most was Wednesday evening, walking from the parking lot on Thirteenth Street to Sixteenth Street … I’d left the car there so often and then walked over to Liz’s, and suddenly I realized what had happened and that it was never to be again, and felt my first real rush of grief … I’m bone-tired but I must write to Maria. Tired and letdown and tense and sad and depressed.…”

  There were a number of unexpected problems to be overcome before Maria could come to us, and she had an extremely upsetting several weeks, including Christmas, until I was abruptly telephoned, on the morning of January 5, to come down to New York—one hundred miles—and fetch her.

  When we got back to Crosswicks late that afternoon, there was a small shape huddled in the back of our garage; it was Bella, a seventeen-year-old girl who used to babysit for us until her family moved away when she was fifteen. She sat waiting for us on an old tricycle, shivering in an inadequate coat, pregnant, and unmarried. So our family increased rapidly. It is odd how large events are indicated by small ones. The first difference I noticed was how quickly the toilet paper and toothpaste got used up.

  Worrying about Maria and Bella usurped all other emotion, so that I had no time to grieve for Liz, a grieving that is still to be done. We can put off such essential acts when necessary, but not indefinitely. During the years of our friendship Liz and I talked as only friends of the right hand can talk; she took a goodly number of confidences of mine to the grave with her; I carry secrets of hers locked in my heart. When I pass her picture each day I feel a brief, almost unacknowledged stab.

  I lie back on the rock which holds the warmth of the sun and look up at the sky. The clouds are moving across, the heat-hazy blue from the northwest: good weather tomorrow. A hawk breaks across the sky with a powerful swoop. He is very sure of himself. I am not a hawk, and I will never be that certain.

  But I am peaceful, lying on the rock for half an hour until time to return to the house and start dinner.

  11

  The life of an actor is sometimes considered to be unreal, to be a sham. But I have been close to many actors and actresses and they have made me feel that an actor in his various roles is trying on aspects of himself, is trying to find out who he is, what is the nature of humankind, much as I struggle with the same questions through the characters in my stories. If the actor plunges into this openly and vulnerably, he shares his discoveries with the audience; his insights become ours. I have learned both about Hugh and about myself from his “play acting.” From a presidential candidate to a fifteenth-century cardinal to a twentieth-century con man, he moves with ease and grace, and I discover things about him in this way that I might never learn in the ordinary process of daily living. This summer we turn television on every day to watch Hugh as an urbane, ever courteous physician, Dr. Charles Tyler. The television set is in Mother’s room and she would not miss this program. But one day she refuses to acknowledge that the man on the screen is Hugh. “That is not Hugh,” she announces in her most authoritarian way. “That is somebody else pretending to be Hugh.” Nobody can convince her. I’m glad that I am not alone in saying, “But it is Hugh.” She is so definite that I almost find myself wondering.

  How do I know that Hugh is Hugh and not anybody else? That I am me? That this stranger questioning my husband’s identity is my mother? Suddenly the whole structure of human identity seems precarious, but perhaps part of my confusion is caused by fatigue. Last night was another of those nights when I couldn’t help staying awake almost all night, listening. Mother was calling out, and I had to decide each time whether or not to go downstairs. Mostly I thought she was calling in her sleep, and not really wanting anyone. She can still find her buzzer, or call the girls. What I listen for is fear in her voice, because I cannot bear the thought of having her afraid alone in the night.

  But for me to stay awake all night, fearful of her fear, is folly. Janet and Vicki are on folding cots in the living room, by the open door. There is only the narrow, New England front hall between living room and Mother’s open bedroom door. The two girls are there to tend Grandmother, as they call her. They are there so that the rest of us can sleep. For me to spend half the night up on my elbow, listening, is sheer stupidity. I’ll never last the summer this way, and what good will that do Mother?

  In the Tower there is a couch which pulls out from under the eaves to become a double bed. The only sensible thing for me to do from now on is to sleep out there, the one place where I can’t hear everything that is going on in the house; sensible not only for my sake but for Mother’
s, for the whole household.

  But her fears concern me, and I don’t know how to assuage them. Far too often during the day, especially as she is being moved from her bed to the big chair by the window in the kitchen, she will repeat, like a needle stuck in one groove on a record, “I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid.” She cannot tell us what she’s afraid of, except falling. We all promise her that we won’t let her fall. “It’s all right, Grandmother. We’re with you, we’ll hold you. It’s all right.”

  It is an instinctive refrain, even in the very young girls. We are surely promising her more than that we won’t let her fall; perhaps the girls aren’t aware of all that they imply, but it is in their voices. It is in mine, and I have certainly learned that “Mother,” no matter how much she may want to, cannot stop accidents, cannot stop war, cannot stop death, cannot control the future. I am promising something beyond all this; I am promising a reasonable and loving power behind the creation of the universe, and this is something I am going to have to think about, and to question.

  Whenever possible, two of us move the great-grandmother, one on each side, holding her close and tight. I hope that the constant physical support will give her some of the spiritual support she needs, because her fears are as much of the future as they are of falling. When her mind clears at all, she is afraid of the trip back South, and I am convinced that she cannot make it; it took too much out of her to come to Crosswicks, and she has failed radically since then. All we can do is try to ease her fear, her fear of leaving us, not to take the plane down South, but leaving us to go into the unknown country of death. She used to tell me that she was not afraid of death, but “I’m afraid of the mechanics of dying.” Yet timor mortis is in her now, unspoken, but apparent to us all.

  During the day the big chair is the best place for her, because she is part of all the household there. The windows in the dining half of the kitchen are an expanse of about fifteen feet, and from them she can watch Hugh working in the garden, watch the babies on their swings or in their little paddle pool. She can look through the open doorway into the living room, where Margie is polishing brass. She can see me at the stove, or cleaning vegetables in the long sink. Josephine or Alan will read to her, or try to talk to her. Clara brushes her hair, still thick and white and wavy and beautiful, until she relaxes under the gentleness and forgets her fear. When Maria and Peter are with us they, too, try to keep her in life. A great deal of the time she watches nothing, but nods in her chair, and doesn’t even notice the usual kitchen noisiness, babies, pots and pans, the pantry door which doesn’t shut unless it’s slammed loudly, conversations, snatches of song …

  This morning I said to Clara that Mother has often wished she could die like Grandfather, just turn over in bed and die, and we both agreed that if she could do just that, it would be the best possible thing. She is older at ninety than Grandfather was at a hundred. After the big one-hundredth birthday party, Grandfather decided to die, and it took him just a little over a year to wind down. Mother is fighting, fighting death, fighting us. Last night she started to throw a fork at Bion; fortunately her hand picked up her napkin instead. She makes wild accusations. “How can anybody be so cruel to anybody? My own daughter, how can anybody be so cruel?”

  I am foolish enough to be hurt, even though I know that the ousia of my mother could never say such a thing, that she has always loved me and always will. Part of what she is doing now is an act, put on for Josephine and Alan’s benefit or anybody else available to be an audience, but only part; in any case, it’s an act she’s not responsible for, and can’t control. She is no longer able to govern what is happening in her brain. There are only the rarest, briefest flashes of a person in this huddled, frightened, frightening, ancient woman.

  I begin to understand that her atypical rage is an instinctive rebellion against her total inability to control what is going on in the arteries of her brain. We have learned that when any group of people is oppressed for too long, no matter how peaceable they may be natively, powerlessness and impotence will eventually lead to violence. Surely Mother’s outbursts of violence come from that part of her subconscious mind which still functions through the devouring of arteries by atherosclerosis. It is frustration which sparks the wild rage.

  And my own angers startle me. My boiling point seems to get lower day by day, and it is small, unimportant things which cause the volcano to erupt.

  This summer, when writing is next to impossible, walking the dogs to the brook is my outlet. Sometimes I cry out at the imperturbable green surrounding me: “How can you let something like this happen to my mother? Why can’t you let her die!”

  A bird gives a call and flies off. The throat of the little green frog flutters with anxiety, and I quiet down. But if I get it out of me this way, I’m not as apt to take it out on the family. Out it has to get, one way or another. I do not understand why it is not, as usual, work on a book. Most of the time I can write my way through anything; I have written some of my best poems in hospitals, waiting for X rays; in the middle of the night when pain keeps me awake.

  But my creative energy is being drained. When I was pregnant with Josephine, a friend who was a successful dancer and the mother of several children told me that a woman cannot be creative in two ways simultaneously, and that I would not be able to write while I was carrying the baby. Obviously she could not do a tour jeté when she was five months pregnant, but I saw no reason not to go on writing, and write I did. The odd thing is that nothing I wrote during my pregnancies ever came, itself, to term. It was like practicing finger exercises, absolutely essential for the playing of the fugue, but it did not lead to the fugue till after the baby was born. I do not understand this, but I do not think it coincidence.

  In a reverse way, sharing my mother’s long, slow dying consumes my creative energy. I manage one angry and bitter story, and feel better for it, but most of me is involved in Mother’s battle. Watching her slowly being snuffed out is the opposite of pregnancy, depleting instead of fulfilling; I am exhausted by conflict.

  Periodically I check with Dr. John. This morning he came and gave Mother a complete going over. We have known John and his family ever since we have been coming to Crosswicks; it was John who delivered Bion. He affirmed that Mother is, indeed, doing a good bit of play acting. She can’t help it; she’s playing games with all of us. He assured us that we are doing all we can, that we must continue to keep her moving, and to take her for a short walk in the afternoon to keep at least a little circulation going. I trust John, and I know that Mother can go on this way indefinitely. Nevertheless, I still see her as in the act of dying.

  Alan says that one of the hardest things for all of us is the fear that one day we will be like this. Because I am already a grandmother, this fear is acute in me. It will be a long time before I am able to forget my mother as she is this summer, and remember her as she used to be.

  I struggle for ousia, for that which does not change with the change and decay in all around I see. Small joys give me glimpses of reality, and keep me going. “Cammy me, Madden,” says Charlotte, holding up her little arms. “You not going anywhere, Ganmadlen,” says Léna, reaching out for security in an insecure world.

  I learn from them; I learn from their great-grandmother’s terror anticus; perhaps the forcible awareness of insecurity is one reason why I respond so deeply to the fugue. I should think that by now Hugh—and the rest of the family—would be sick and tired of Bach’s C minor Toccata and Fugue, but it has pulled me through many bad moments, and helped express the joy of happy ones. If I leave Mother after a non-conversation which has me churning and out of proportion, the minutes of working through that particular fugue, which I am in the midst of memorizing, will bring me back into enough perspective so that I can return to Mother with love, instead of indulging in my own reactions. If I want an answer to my questions about all-rightness, all I need to do is play the C minor Fugue. The family knows how much the piano puts me into perspective. When I
am overtly upset or angry, Bion will say, as to a child, “Why don’t you go play the piano, Mother?”

  It has been a long time since the great-grandmother played the piano, and I learned, in early adolescence, that when she played Bach for several hours, or when she played game after game of solitaire, she was unhappy; I was old enough to understand the fact of the unhappiness but not the reasons, and so got caught up in unhappiness too. Anyhow, I mustn’t play the C minor too often this summer, and preferably only when the girls take Mother for her afternoon walk and she can’t hear the powerful, austere interweaving of theme, and be reminded of unhappiness.

  It is frightening to be in such a position of power over another human being that I must question even what I play on the piano. We are all in positions of power over the great-grandmother, and I know that I can trust this Crosswicks household not to abuse it. Vicki and Janet are unfailingly patient over soiled sheets. Clara will never pinch or hurt while the bath is being given, or be rough when she is brushing Mother’s hair and keeping it fresh and clean. Daily I learn lessons in patience and forbearance. Margie questions me about forcing Grandmother to take the walk in the afternoon when she doesn’t want to go. I explain that Dr. John has told us it is the only way to keep any blood circulating in the clogging arteries; it hurts me, too, to make my mother walk against her wishes. It would be easier to give in, and let her turn completely into a vegetable. “And that wouldn’t be loving my mother, Margie.” Slowly Margie nods. “Okay, Madeleine. I understand now.”

  I do not want power over my mother. I am her child; I want to be her child. Instead, I have to be the mother.

  12

  Meals become a nightmare. Finally, after discussion and support from the family, I decide that we will no longer try to make Mother eat. If her body really wants food, its want will be heard and she will take a few bites of baked potato. But we will stop this farce of urging her to eat, and I will not allow anybody to feed her as though she were a baby.