The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  And I remember a summer evening somewhere in France. We went to a tiny, one-ring circus. The ring was enclosed with a fence as insubstantial as chicken wire, and when a shabby lion came roaring out of his cage I grabbed my parents’ hands in an ecstasy of terror, fully expecting the old beast to leap over the flimsy barrier. I think that this memory must precede the winter in Chamonix, though I have lost its chronology, because I still felt complete security sitting between Mother and Father. After Chamonix I would have known that there are lions more powerful than my parents.

  The lions I feared during my childhood were the lions of war. I was born after the Armistice, and yet the specter of another war after the War to End Wars was always with me, not only because of Father’s coughing, but because of my own terror of war; I am not sure where this terror came from, but it was always with me. Quite often I would anxiously ask one parent or the other, “Is there going to be another war?”

  They paid me the honor of not trying to comfort me with false promises—though I doubt if they foresaw the enormity of change to come in the ways of waging war.

  Father’s war was not like our wars today. In his war the enemy still had a face. When you killed, you killed a man, not a town or village of people you did not know, had never seen, would never see.

  Once, a good many years after the war, my parents were eating dinner in a Spanish inn, and suddenly Father got up from the table in great excitement and rushed across the dining room to a man who, in his turn, was hurrying to greet Father. The two men embraced warmly, and Father brought his friend over to the table to meet Mother: the man was a German; he had been an officer in the Kaiser’s army; he and Father had fought against each other at the front. It is difficult to understand such an incident today. These two “enemies” were genuinely happy to see each other; they had shared an extraordinary experience; they respected and honored each other. I wonder if that can happen today, even at the higher levels of combat.

  I was in boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina, when we heard the news that Mussolini had taken troops into Ethiopia. I will never forget the leap of terror in my stomach, followed by a dull ache of acceptance: this was the beginning of the war about which I had been having nightmares since I was a small child.

  It was a worse war than Father’s war, yes, and has continued to be so, through the bombings of England, Europe, Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East.

  But there is one small note of optimism: the results of mustard gas were considered so terrible by so many people that it was not used during World War II, nor has it been used since—though we have used worse things. English children during the bombings went to school carrying gas masks, but they did not need to put them on.

  We have seen the terrible results of the atom bomb. We know how bad it is. Perhaps it, like mustard gas, will never be used again? It may be a faint hope, but it is a hope.

  6

  Here in Crosswicks I listen to Bion and his friends soberly and painfully discussing the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. For Bion this is not only the summer of the transition between high school and college, the summer of watching his grandmother become daily less human; he must also decide whether or not he can honestly register as a conscientious objector. One of his friends is a Quaker, and his position is absolute. Bion’s is more difficult. He totally disapproves of American involvement in Vietnam; but can he say, truthfully, that under no conditions would he ever fight? Given the circumstances of his Grandfather Charles’s war, what would he have done? Is there such a thing as a just war? Could the war with Hitler have been avoided? There are no easy answers.

  A little less than a year ago, at the end of the summer, the night before he went back to school for his final year, he announced to us, “I’m not playing football this year.”

  “Why, Bion?”

  “It’s a blood game, and I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

  “Well, it’s completely between you and the school. If you think you can handle it, go ahead.”

  Bion is pushing 6’5”, weighs two hundred pounds, and was expected to be a useful member of the football team. There was a good deal of pressure put on him to play, but he was adamant. They said, “But you play goalie in ice hockey. That’s much more dangerous than football.” “I’m not worried about the danger. The way we play hockey, it isn’t murder.”

  I think he expected to be ostracized. Instead, he was given both respect and support. He went with the team to the games, and one Saturday at an away-from-school game, one of the boys on the other team was hurt—not badly it seemed, and nobody was particularly worried.

  That evening many of the boys were in their coffee house when the headmaster came in to tell them that the boy on the opposing team had died. “The chapel will be open all night,” he said, “for anybody who wants to use it.” There wasn’t a boy in the school who didn’t go into the chapel, just to sit, to think about death, if not to pray.

  During this decisive period Bion came home for a weekend and announced to us that he had become a vegetarian. “I may not keep this up, but it’s the way I feel now.” We respected the fact that it was a response to his thinking about war and peace, and whenever he was home I cooked quantities of extra vegetables.

  He finally decided that he could not say that under no circumstances would he fight, ever. His two little nieces may have played a part in that decision. I think there’s no question that he would fight to defend them. He also feels deeply about Crosswicks and the land around it; he was born here; here are his roots. If his land were attacked he would fight to defend it; his land: Crosswicks: his country.

  His is only one of many reactions to the violence that is increasing all over the world. How strangely contradictory we are: we condone slaughter of villages or towns in our various wars, and yet we will do anything to keep a hospitalized body alive, a body whose central nervous system has been destroyed—a kind of reverse euthanasia. I do not want this for my mother. To be a body without ousia was what she dreaded most. She is not in physical pain, though everything within me cries out that she is in spiritual pain.

  We all in the Crosswicks household, to the limits of our capacity, share the pain. And we are learning daily lessons in interdependence. I lost my unquestioning dependence on my parents that winter in Chamonix. I am still learning to move into interdependence.

  Because of the girls who make up the great-grandmother’s retinue, because of the understanding and compassion of the entire household, there is still laughter in the rooms. Yet there are times when for no logical reason I feel an almost unbearable sense of isolation. Not only am I divided in myself, my underwater and above-water selves separated, but I feel wrenched away from everybody around me. This is part of being human, this knowing that we are all part of one another, inextricably involved; and at the same time alone, irrevocably alone.

  Alone, and yet interdependent. Much of my training has been against accepting this paradox, my good Anglo-Saxon boarding-school training. Stand on your own feet. Do it yourself. It’s your own business. Don’t bother anybody else with it. Take in your belt a notch, pull up your boot straps, and go it alone.

  Not bad advice in many ways. Who wants a clinging vine? But there’s more to it than that. Mother fought dependency as long as she could, but that’s a different thing from interdependency. She lived alone during the winters far longer than I thought was safe for her, and yet I would not take away the dignity of risk until she herself was ready—which was not until the intestinal resection, when she was nearly eighty-eight. When I think of the varied climates and conditions in which Mother lived, I marvel at her ability to adapt. Would I too be able to take with equanimity the enormity of change through which she strode?

  7

  During my last year in school—the school in Charleston, South Carolina—my parents were living at the beach in North Florida in the drafty old cottage built by my great-grandmother. In late October, Father made his annual p
ilgrimage to New York and Princeton, and my mother took a trip driving around North Carolina with Aunt Dee—one of my godmothers. Mother arrived home a day or so before Father and drove into town to meet Father’s train. “When I saw him get off the train,” she said, “I knew he was dying.”

  That night she wrote to me. The next day I was busy with some project and did not even check the mailboxes, until a friend came bustling up, being the bearer of good news, “Hey, Madeleine, there’s a letter in your cubbyhole.”

  It was a brief note in which Mother told me that Father was in the hospital with pneumonia, and asked me to write to him. She ended the letter, “Pray for him, and for me, too.”

  I had always been a bad letter writer. I managed to get off one cursory note every Sunday, in which I told almost nothing of what was going on without or within. I didn’t really know what or how to write to Father, but I copied out three poems I had written that week, and sent them to him, knowing that they would arrive too late. This knowing was not prescience; I had been watching him die for years, and I knew that he could not last through another attack of pneumonia.

  The next afternoon the headmistress sent for me and told me that my father was very ill and that I was to take the evening train home. I was not surprised at her summons, although when it came I felt shaky and cold. Two of the teachers drove me to the station and stayed with me until I got on the train. In those days it was a four-hour trip, and I had taken Jane Eyre with me to read, but I could not read. Whether or not I believe in God I have always prayed, and I prayed then, though I did not ask God to make my father get well. I prayed to the rhythm of the wheels, “Please, God, do whatever is best. For Father, for Mother. Please do whatever is best, whatever is best, is best. Please, Father. Please, God, do whatever is best for Father.”

  My two godmothers met me, Aunt Dee and Cousin Mary, my mother’s close friends since childhood. I asked how Father was and they evaded answering me, and so I knew the answer. It wasn’t until we were nearly at our destination that one of them told me that Father had died that morning, and that we weren’t going all the way to the beach, but to the house of a cousin.

  I don’t know why Father’s funeral was in this house, rather than in church. It seems very strange to me now, and I cannot ask Mother to explain. I remember feeling embarrassed as I kissed Mother, and then even more embarrassed when I was told, in the manner of those days, to go in and look at Father.

  He was lying in state in the library. I asked to go in alone, and stood in front of the coffin and looked at him. His face was peaceful and alien, and my father was not there. I closed my eyes, and then I was able to see him a little better.

  I remember nothing about the funeral, but I remember the trip to the cemetery, and the canvas canopy put up to shield us from the heat of the subtropical sun, still apt to be oppressive in late October, and that I thought the canopy out of place and would have liked to move out from under it. I remember staying that night in Aunt Dee’s great, dark house, and that Mother and I talked about trivial things in a completely calm way. For some reason we talked about toothpaste, but we were really talking about Father.

  I do not know whether or not the Church was any comfort to Mother at the time of Father’s death. It was not to me. The words of the burial service were strengthening, but not the unctuous men at the graveside.

  If the churches and synagogues didn’t condone the mortuary mentality, funerals would not be the travesties they so often are. One rainy day when I stood at a favorite cousin’s graveside, huddled with family and friends under umbrellas while the rain slanted in from the east and trickled down our necks, I was repelled by the phony carpet of green grass thrown over the pile of earth waiting at the open grave. I think we grossly underestimate the capacity for realism in the mourner.

  What would I have wanted for Father, what will I want for Mother if she predeceases me? She may not; at the birthday party in the spring a cousin said, “Don’t worry about your mother. She’s going to bury us all.”

  Alan’s grandmother, my mother’s contemporary, as a young woman in an English village was a “layer-outer.” And I would want this, to have a human being (so this is what I think of morticians!) prepare my parents’ bodies for burial. Alan’s grandmother knew each body she touched, as we know each other in our village.

  I would have been happier if my father’s body had been buried from the house at the beach, his last home. If Mother should die while she is with us in Crosswicks, I would like to have her body prepared at home, and then to have the four traditional candles placed, one at each corner of her bed, and to take turns watching and honoring her earthly frame during the night, and thinking soberly about death, her death, mine, and being free to do some grieving, some weeping over the mortal remains of my birth-giver.

  Many professional religion-mongers I have encountered are so terrified of and so disbelieving about the Resurrection that it is no wonder that they condone cozy coffins and fake grass. My own theology is very shaky here, and I find most strength in the writings of the early Byzantine Fathers, men who, like us, were living at a time of radical change. They have far more in common with the world we are living in today than thinkers of a generation ago. The early Fathers were living, as we are, in the breaking apart of a great civilization. The Roman world was shattering like an ice floe in the spring. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. So the ousia of things, all that which was true, is true, and will be true, had the same kind of importance for them that it does for us. I turn to these golden-tongued writers (long turned to dust) with a sense of familiarity, of talking with known and well-loved friends. They are our contemporaries, and I understand their language, even if I myself falter when trying to speak it.

  They are more aware of the wild freedom of creation than we tend to be. They probe beyond limited sensory evidence in an effort to glimpse ousia—the ousia of a parent, or a small green frog on a rock—to glimpse it, not with limited human eyesight and comprehension, but with the whole of themselves, that whole which encompasses the unknown worlds beneath the waters and beyond the stars.

  I am often afraid of this world. It would be simpler to restrict myself to the things I can hear and see and touch, to the things I can prove, to the things I can control.

  My senior year at boarding school I thought I was pretty well in control of my world; I was editor of the literary magazine, played leading roles in the school plays; I was, for the first time, a success with my peers, and this success was heady wine. And then Father’s death pushed me right out of the slippery world of human control, and I had no choice but to try to open myself to the darkness and horror in order to search for a hope of finding a possible all-rightness on the other side.

  My father was dead. What was all right?

  When Gregory of Nyssa’s brilliant sister, Macrina, was on her deathbed, she sent for Gregory, and brother and sister talked throughout the night. He held her hand and told her, “The Resurrection will bring about the restoration of our human nature in its original form.” This is strong and difficult language. Gregory and Macrina never doubted the Resurrection, but they thought of it neither as a vague continuing in unending time, much as we are in mortal life, nor as an awakening of the dead body from the grave, old bones and flesh reassembling themselves to make the same flawed body that died. Rather, they thought of it as a radical change of all that we have come to think of as ourselves.

  I had not encountered a theology as wild and strong as Gregory’s when Father died. I had to struggle alone, and all I knew was that Father’s death caused me to ask questions for which I could find no answer, and I was living in a world which believed that all questions are answerable. I, too, believe that all questions are answerable, but not in scientific terms, or in the language of provable fact.

  Mother sent me back to school almost immediately. And I wanted to go. I understood only dimly what the loss of a husband who had been lover, friend, companion for thirty-odd years would mean to this wo
man who was my mother.

  Back in Charleston I went at the first opportunity out into the grounds and climbed up into the ancient live oak tree which was my favorite writing and reading place, and coldly and calmly recorded the fact of Father’s death in my journal. It was a long time before I was able to cry—nearly three years; and it was falling in love for the first time which freed the tears.

  That last year at boarding school I was working on a series of boarding-school stories; it was the world I knew best and instinct told me that I should write out of experience. During the spring term I tried to write about Father’s death, and I wrote it almost exactly as it had happened—for my protagonist was a tall, clumsy, nearsighted girl—and the story had a certain amount of verisimilitude, but I knew that I had not yet really written it, that I had not got it out where I could face it. Occasionally I would talk to someone about death—not the girls at school, or the one or two teachers I really trusted, but young men.

  The only good I could find in Father’s death was that my coming-out party was canceled. But a cousin was being launched and Mother insisted that I go to some of the parties. “Your father would have wanted you to. And I want you to.”