The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  She was probably the most normal part of my childhood, and I will always be grateful for her. I think I realized that I was a subject of disagreement between my parents, and yet I managed to think that both of them were always right, and I’m sure Mrs. O had something to do with this. When I was asked by playmates which of my parents I loved best, I answered truthfully that I loved them both best. Maybe it was because I saw far less of them than the average American child sees of his parents; certainly a great deal less than my children saw of me. Mother was never very strong, and after she lost a little boy, at seven months—he lived a few days—it took her a long time to get her strength back. There were many times when she was in bed for weeks, with a white-uniformed nurse bossing the household.

  The beginning of my life coincided with an end to my father’s old way of life. Before the war he had been a foreign correspondent, traveling all over the world, often taking Mother with him. The dose of mustard gas in the trenches so damaged his lungs that it was necessary for him to live a quieter life than he had been used to. During my childhood he wrote mostly short stories, detective fiction, movies, plays. He had an office in the Flatiron Building, and he slept late and wrote late. Until his lungs took us abroad, to the Alps, when I was twelve, I don’t think I ever ate at the table with my parents except on Sunday, and then, Mother said, “You didn’t know what to say to us.” I preferred eating alone off tray, with a book propped on my lap. This may explain why the entire family eating together, around the table, is so important to me.

  2

  During the early years of my parents’ marriage, Father was music and theatre critic for the old New York Evening Sun, and he knew and loved opera; he belonged to the Opera Club, which meant that he was free to use the club box at the Metropolitan Opera House whenever he felt like it, and often, toward the end of a meal, he would say to Mother, “I think I’ll just go down to the Met and catch the last act of Boris.”

  I must have been around eight when Father decided that it was time for me to go to the opera. On one Saturday a month the men of the Opera Club were free to bring a lady, so I was taken to a matinee of Madame Butterfly. I listened and watched in fascination, absorbed by the music and the exotic story, but I was totally unprepared for this fairy tale not to have a happy ending. I went back to the apartment in a state of shock. When Father asked me if I had enjoyed the opera I replied that I had, and I told neither of my parents my pain at being drawn into the Butterfly’s anguish.

  Thinking that the first opera had been successful, Father next took me to Pagliacci. As soon as we had settled ourselves in our seats I turned to him: “Father, does this opera have an unhappy ending, too?” He told me that it did, and I began to cry, long before time for the curtain to go up. I cried and cried about the fate of Madame Butterfly, about the fate of Pagliacci, about all the unhappy endings I had been forced to realize were being played out all over the world; I cried until Father got up and took me home before the opera ever began.

  It was a long time before he took me again.

  Mother went with him to the Saturday matinees, and often in the evenings, too. I’m sure they were home more frequently than I remember, but I wasn’t lonely. As a child, I enjoyed my solitary meals, my solitude in general, which, as I grew older, was interrupted by all the various lessons. Piano lessons I will be eternally grateful for. Dancing lessons were a horror; I was gauche on the ballroom floor as a child, and gauche I have remained. School was mostly something to be endured; I don’t think I learned nearly as much from my formal education as from the books I read instead of doing homework, the daydreams which took me on exciting adventures in which I was intrepid and fearless, and graceful, the stories Mother told me, and the stories I wrote. It was in my solitudes that I had a hand in the making of the present Madeleine.

  When I was a little girl—and older—I used to urge Mother to “tell me a story.”

  “A story about what?”

  “About when you were a little girl.”

  The world of Mother’s childhood, filled with playmates, most of them cousins, is a world I have never known. My children, spending their early years here in Crosswicks, came closer to the kind of childhood Mother had than I did. For the last decade or so, Mother has included reminiscences in her letters, so that I will have them to share with my children and grandchildren. A few years ago she dictated some accounts of the events of her childhood to a friend, but those typewritten pages lack the charm of her letters and conversations. She has not been able to write a letter for a long time. I will always miss the familiar blue paper with her beautiful handwriting.

  The mother of my childhood and adolescence and very young womanhood existed for me solely as mother, and I suppose it is inescapable that for a long time we know our parents only as parents, that their separate identity as full persons in their own right unfolds only gradually, if at all.

  I get a glimpse of what Mother was like as a very young woman when I think of her telling me about her first trip to Athens, before she was married. “I spent the first night on my knees by the window, worshipping the Parthenon.”

  It is not difficult for me to imagine that scene (and even easier, now that I have been to Athens myself), because it is completely in character.

  My first actual memory of her is one of those complete, isolated visual glimpses, and is set in Cornish, New Hampshire, where my parents often spent the summer as part of the Saint-Gaudens Artists Colony. Homer Saint-Gaudens was one of my father’s friends from the war, and he found the quiet and companionship a nourishing climate for his writing.

  I was standing in a room surrounded by green—the house was aptly named Tree Tops—and Mother was showing me a small, white, embroidered dress, a dress for me, embroidered all around the hem with small red roosters, I thought it was beautiful. That dress, Mother told me later, was given to me by Madam Saint-Gaudens when I was two years old. What a strange, feminine first memory, especially for someone who has never had much of a flair for fashion! I have a feeling that there’s more to it than that, that this gentle memory followed something hurtful—but I’ll never know.

  Although a writer of stories works constantly to train an observant and accurate memory, remembering is not necessarily a conscious act; it is often something which happens to me, rather than something I do. If I am ever tempted to take personal credit for remembering, all I need do is to think of the summer when I was eight or nine years old and Mother had cause to drag me with her around France. I must have driven her distracted, and she was convinced that I saw nothing.

  However, my creative unconscious was storing up all that I saw, heard, smelled, tasted. Right now I have a completely sensory recollection of being sent on picnics in Brittany with three small boys, to get us out of the grownups’ hair. For lunch we were given sour bread with sweet butter and bitter chocolate, and I still remember the marvelous combination of taste and texture. While we were eating we were surrounded with the sound and smell of ocean and wind, and our eyes were half closed against the brilliance of sky and sun, a blue and gold shimmer which comes only from sunlight on sea water.

  Mother remembers a skinny, awkward, sulky little girl who saw nothing as she was dragged through châteaux and museums. Years later I amazed Mother as I described places and people of that summer in my first serious stories. What does—did—Mother remember of that summer; what was it like for her? I don’t even know why we were there, without Father, and it is too late to ask her. I can only remember the summer as it was for me, not as it was for her.

  When I needed memory of that summer for a story, my subconscious mind, with a porpoise-like flick, flipped it up out of the water for me. And I’m still young enough, active enough, that an enormous underwater treasure trove is available to me; I can swim for hours beneath the surface; or I can bring a shell, a piece of coral, up into the sunlight. Mother is like a sunken ship held at the bottom of the sea, with no choice as to the fishes who swim in and out of the interstices, the eel
s and turtles who make their homes in the remains.

  When I remember the years in the apartment on Eighty-second Street, it is mostly the good things that I remember at home, and the bad at school. When I look at the apartment in my mind’s eye, it is likely to be Christmas. This was the time when Father lifted from the physical pain in which he constantly lived, and the equally acute pain of knowing that his postwar work was not as successful as his earlier work. I did not understand my father’s pain, but I knew that at Christmastime the apartment, instead of being heavy and dark, became sparkling and light as champagne, with Father sneaking home with an armload of presents, and writing stocking poems, and believing (I think) for a few weeks in a future in which there was hope.

  On Twelfth Night he walked out of the house, leaving Mother and Mrs. O to strip the tree, remove the holly from around the house, the sprig of mistletoe from the double doors to the dining room. And it was over for another year.

  There was laughter at other times, too. One of Mother’s favorite stories—and I know it only from her telling of it—was of an evening when Father went to the opera, and Mother, who wasn’t feeling well, went to bed. After the opera was over, Father returned with a friend—my godfather—who went bounding into Mother’s room, climbed into bed with her, and put his furled umbrella between them, announcing, “It’s all right, Madeleine, this is Siegfried’s sword.”

  I want to remember everything I can. Whenever Mother has a moment of clearness she is apt to reminisce, but these moments are becoming more and more rare. For most of it I must go deep-sea diving on my own.

  3

  I am only beginning to realize how fragmented and uncoordinated I am. My left hand does not know what my right hand is doing. My heart tells me to go in one direction, and my mind another, and I do not know which to obey. I am furious with Mother for not being my mother, and I am filled with an aching tenderness I have never known before. There are rough waters below the surface of my consciousness, and strange, submarine winds. The submerged me is more aware of wild tides and undertows than the surface. One deep calls another, because of the noise of the water floods; all the waves and the storms are gone over me. And above the surface the brazen sun shines, heat shimmers on the hills, and the long fronds of the golden willow Mother planted ten or more years ago droop in the stillness.

  I first became aware of the dichotomy between the daily world and the “real” world the year I was twelve. During my first years in New York as a solitary child, the world of my imagination and the world of daily life were not in conflict, because I had not grown up enough to see any difference between them. My real life was not in school but in my stories and my dreams. The people I lived with in books were far more real to me than my classmates. The Madeleine I wrote about in my stories was far more my real self than the self I took to school.

  During that winter my father had one of his many bouts of pneumonia. If I was left to my own devices more than many children, it was because Mother’s attention was focused on Father’s injured lungs. He nearly died of that attack of pneumonia, and when he began, slowly, to recover, it was apparent that he could no longer live in the cities he loved—New York, London, Paris. He would have to be some place where the air is purer than in the city. During those Depression years it was less expensive for my parents to live abroad than in this country; Father’s work went with him, with his small portable typewriter (it’s still here, in the Tower) which had gone around the world with him on many assignments. But he was able to write little that winter of pneumonia and its aftermath. Money was short and for a few weeks Mother did the cooking—but only for a few weeks.

  Fortunately, Mother had inherited her father’s flair for business (even though she could not cook), so what investments she had been able to make before the Depression were not wiped out. Her first indication of financial talent came during the early years of her marriage. She had been downtown shopping and was returning home on the Fifth Avenue bus. Two men in dark business suits, bowler hats, and attaché cases sat in front of her, and she overheard them talking of a certain stock which could be bought for “practically nothing” and which was shortly going to increase immensely in value.

  That evening she and Father went to a dinner party in a large town house. After dinner a string quartet provided entertainment. Mother was seated behind a large potted palm, and by a man who was a stranger to her. “I was terribly shy, I felt completely out of place in all that elegance, and just to make conversation I mentioned the stock I had heard about that afternoon. He gave me a very funny look, and changed the conversation, and I thought I’d made some awful gaffe. But the next morning he telephoned me and said that I had startled him the night before, but he felt he ought to tell me that he was putting everything he owned into that stock. He offered to buy some for me, so I bought a hundred shares, which took what was a lot of money for us in those days. When I told your father, he was furious, so when my stock had doubled in price I sold fifty shares and paid him back. It more than doubled.”

  Mother seldom looked smug, and she did not when telling this story. The closest I have ever seen her come to looking smug was much later, when she told Hugh and me about going against all advice in buying some stock, and hitting the jackpot again. “I had the reputation of being able to put my hand down in the mud and come up with a piece of gold.”

  I, alas, have inherited none of this financial flair, and I certainly do not have what it takes to be a gambler. Once when my parents and I were in Avignon, Father gave me twenty-five centimes to put in one of the hotel gambling machines. I couldn’t lose. Money kept pouring out. When I realized that the machine was broken, I took my ill-gotten gains to another machine and lost everything—except the original twenty-five centimes, which I kept.

  Mother wasn’t a coward about money, and it was her financial acumen which kept things going during many lean periods.

  The spring after Father’s bout of pneumonia, Mother broke up the apartment where she and Father had lived for nearly twenty years, put some of their more treasured things in storage, and off we went into an indefinite future of searching for places where Father could breathe more easily.

  We spent the first summer in the French Alps, above Lake Geneva. With my godfather and his family, which included the three boys I had picnicked with in Brittany, my parents rented an old château in Publier, a tiny village off the beaten track. It was found by accident: the real-estate agent had been showing us hideous modern villas which he considered more appropriate, and happened to mention the untenanted Château de Publier, and my parents had to argue him into taking them to see it.

  There must have been a hundred rooms, most of which were left with sheets draped over the furniture. The kitchen had not changed since the Middle Ages, but the village girls who came to work for us had never cooked in any other way and would have disapproved of a modern kitchen. In the vast living room was a fireplace large enough to roast an ox, and a small, usable harmonium, which was my delight. Off the duchess’s bedroom, in which my parents slept, was a small, octagonal chapel, with old, stained-glass windows, and a carved mahogany priedieu with a red velvet kneeler. The château actually had a bathroom, put in during the early days of plumbing. Under the tub was a firebox in which a fire had to be built in order to heat the water in the tub. I don’t remember having a bath in it, and I probably never did. In all the bedrooms were large china pitchers and bowls, and most of our washing was done there in the old-fashioned way.

  I was happy that summer because I lived completely in the world of the imagination—the only way I could escape being drawn into my parents’ unhappiness. I wandered through the centuries, being the daughter of the château, Madeleine in the twelfth century, the fifteenth, the eighteenth. I wrote stories and poems, and I lived an interior life which protected me from the teasing of the three boys as well as from the world of the grownups.

  It was during that summer that I was punished by my mother for the first time unjustly—at
least, I felt it to be unjust. We had driven down to Lake Geneva to go swimming, and I had been allowed to go out by myself in a small sort of kayak, quite safe, since it was flat-bottomed. I paddled well out into the lake, lost, as usual, in reverie. It must have been a long dream, because when I turned my kayak around and paddled back to shore, everybody was furious with me, and I was punished because I had not come when I was called.

  “I didn’t hear anybody call,” I told my mother. Nobody believed me, and it was probably not distance which kept me from hearing, but the depth of my concentration on my dream. My punishment was that I was not to read or write for twenty-four hours, which was the most terrible punishment possible to me, and I felt unjustly treated. At twelve I still stubbornly insisted on seeing my parents as Olympian, above earthly pain or problem. I’m not sure whether I did not realize what an unhappy summer it was for them, or whether I refused to realize. Father was having to face that never again could he live in the cities where he had the intellectual companionship he needed, the sharpening of wit against wit. Friends he had expected to stand by him were turning their backs, now that he was ill, now that his writing was not as successful as it had once been. Mother shared in both the suffering and the exile. The parents of the three boys were often away, and she had the responsibility for them, something she was not accustomed to. As I look back on it now, the fact that Mother and Father managed to keep the summer happy for me speaks of considerable nobility.

  The medieval inconveniences of the château which were a delight to me must have been a daily irritation to my mother. It was an unusually hot summer, and there was no refrigeration. Friday was a special day because the fishman came through the village with his horse-drawn, high-smelling wagon, and the fish were kept passably fresh with ice. Mother bought not only fish for the evening meal but a small amount of ice—very small, just enough so that on Friday nights the grownups could have martinis before dinner. After dinner my special treat was to take a lump of sugar and dip it in Mother’s or Father’s demitasse, and then slowly let the warm, coffee-saturated lump dissolve in my mouth.