The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

by Madeleine L'engle

  A story should be something like the earth, a blazing fire at the core, but cool and green on the outside. And that is not a bad description of my mother. Her exterior was so reserved that it was a long time before I realized that there were flames beneath the surface. She was, in my presence at least, an undemonstrative woman, undemonstrative with me, with my father, with everybody. What Mother and Father were like alone I don’t know, especially what they were like in the early years of their marriage, when they were young, when Father’s health was unimpaired. I never knew the young couple who traveled all over the world at any and every opportunity in all sorts of conditions; who, when they were in New York, ran with a pack of artists of all kinds, as well as with a small, close-knit group of intimate friends. It is difficult today to understand the deep and abiding friendships among men who had survived the First World War together, but the inner circle of friends was composed of three or four men who had fought side by side with Father, and of their wives.

  As I look back to the New York years, there seem to have been countless parties. Mother told me, “Your father could walk cold sober into a dead party, and in five minutes everybody was having a good time. He was like champagne.”

  I had only glimpses of this effervescent man in my own life; I understand far more of his ousia now than I did while he was alive. Sometimes in restaurants he embarrassed Mother—and so me—by being what she thought was rude and overdemanding. The strange thing was that the waiter or headwaiter she thought he had insulted, instead of being insulted, thought Father was marvelous, and though this always happened, Mother could never get accustomed to it. When he went into a fine restaurant he demanded fine food and fine service, and when he did not get them, he let people know, and in no uncertain terms. After one hotel dinner somewhere in France when Father had been his most imperious, and Mother less understanding than she might have been, she apologized by telling me of a time when they had gone to a restaurant in Paris where Father had made what she considered a scene; several years later they returned to the same restaurant; the maître d’hôtel greeted Father by name, as an honored client; and the headwaiter served them exactly the same meal Father had finally managed to get years before. Even during his last years my father had a quality about him that was not easy to forget.

  I remember my parents coming, night after night, to kiss me good night and goodbye in their evening clothes, Father often with his top hat, looking like a duke, I thought.

  Why do I remember with such pain going to sit in Mother’s lap one day when she had someone in for tea, and she pushed me down, gently, and said in her quiet, just slightly Southern voice, “You’re too old to sit on my lap now.”

  How old was I? I don’t remember, but not, I think, very old. Perhaps that is why I let my children make their own decisions as to when they were too old for lap-sitting.

  I told this to Mother, once, perhaps in defense of my lap-sitting policy. She did not remember the incident, and I think that this is part of the human predicament, that most of us are not aware of the small things we do—or don’t do—that cause pain which is never forgotten.

  One memory of being pushed away from Mother’s lap? That’s all? One memory of being punished unjustly?

  Oh, we had our clashes, Mother and I, we’re both temperamental enough for that. During school or college holidays I wanted to write or read or paint or play the piano when Mother wanted me to be social. I could not be for her the gracious and graceful young woman she dreamed of. Nevertheless, I often heard her say that one belief in which she never faltered was that I had been born for a special purpose, and this belief led her to set up impossible standards for me, and when I failed to live up to them she would scold. It sounds as though her expectations put an intolerable burden on me, but somehow she managed to keep them from doing so, and it has been only in the past years that she has referred to them frequently.

  “I know you were born for something special.”

  This would have been more of a burden to me if it weren’t part of my mythology that this is true of every child. The fairy godmother or guardian angel bestows on each infant a unique gift, a gift to which the child will be responsible: a gift of healing; a gift for growing green things; a gift for painting, for cooking, for cleaning; a gift for loving. It is part of the human condition that we do not always recognize our gifts; the clown wants to play Hamlet.

  While Mother was still herself, I never wondered overmuch about this. Whether or not my gift is with words, which she hoped it was, I will never know. In any case, writing is something I’m stuck with, and I realized this when I first hurt her with something I had written—hurt Mother, not Father, because I did not begin to probe the past until after he died. Until then my writing was poetry, which wrote me, rather than vice versa, and stories of wish-fulfillment and wild and improbable fantasy. But the year that Father died, writing began to push me.

  One has to listen to a talent, and whether the talent is great or small makes no difference. As I fumbled for truth in my stories I was not consciously aware of responsibility to them, I only knew I had to write what was asking to be written. So I wrote story after story of a man and woman and their young daughter wandering across Europe. Many weaknesses which I did not consciously acknowledge as being part of the make-up of my parents were clearly delineated in these stories, although when I was writing I had no idea how coldly accurate they were. I didn’t even fully realize that I was writing about my parents. All I knew was that I thought they were good stories, and I showed them to Mother for appreciation.

  I was appalled when she cried. My reserved mother seldom permitted herself the indulgence of showing emotion, and I had made her cry. I had no idea how close the stories had hit home. I did not know that in the stories I knew more than I knew.

  I was full of sorrow that I had hurt her. But I continued to write stories and I continued to show them to her, and occasionally made her laugh instead of cry; and even when I hurt her, she could move from her first, instinctive, “I don’t see how you could write that!” to, “But it’s a good story. It’s very good. Keep on.”

  Ever since I have been old enough to drink coffee, we have had our morning coffee together whenever she has been in Crosswicks, or whenever I’ve been with her in the South, and these long kaffeeklatsches have strengthened our friendship. It frightens me this summer that I can no longer talk to her about her fears. When I went to be with her at the time of the intestinal operation, she was still able to put her fears into words, and to receive comfort from my presence, my hand in hers, if not from anything I tried to say.

  Several times she reached out to me. “I know that even if I get through this operation I don’t have very long to live, and I don’t know where I’m going. I feel hypocritical when I go to church, because I can’t say the Creed.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t believe it any more.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Mother, you can’t understand the Creed like your Baedecker guide to Athens. It’s in the language of poetry. It’s trying to talk about things that can’t be pinned down by words, and it has to try to break words apart and thrust beyond them.”

  “But I’m supposed to believe—”

  “No, you’re not,” I say firmly, holding her hand. “It’s all right.” Dimly I realize that she is caught in the pre-World War I philosophy, that same philosophy 96 and I rebelled against, that world of human perfectibility and control.

  She says, “I can’t take Communion because I’m not worthy.”

  “Oh, Mother, if we had to wait till we were worthy, no one could ever take Communion.”

  I certainly could not. But Mother isn’t the only one to talk to me like this, nor is it only her generation. Students have talked to me in the same words. Someone is still teaching theological hogwash. What is this restrictive thing they feel they have to conform to or be hypocritical? If I have to conform to provable literalism I
not only rebel, I propose immediate revolution. How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day? If I “believe” for two minutes once every month or so, I’m doing well.

  The only God worth believing in is neither my pal in the house next door nor an old gentleman shut up cozily in a coffin where he can’t hurt me. I can try to be simple with him, but not vulgar. He is the mysterium tremendens et fascinans; he is free, and he understands the ousia of this frightened old child of his. No wonder I can’t believe in him very often!

  That morning, sitting with Mother over coffee, I read the Collect for the day and made a beautiful mistake, reading, “Almighty and merciful God, of whose only gift it cometh that thy faithful people do unto thee true and laughable service.” Surely laughable is a more appropriate word than laudable, for even with the prodding and companionship of the Holy Spirit the best we can do must provoke much merriment among the angels.

  I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don’t have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus?

  Mother sips her coffee and says, “I know you were born for something special.” Ouch. “I’m glad you go to church.”

  I sigh. On Sunday I had gone to Mother’s church, and I was not happy there. I went mostly for her sake, and my mind kept turning off, turning away from the service, worrying about the upcoming operation which I knew might well be fatal; worrying about the family at home; being anything but worshipful and prayerful. But I did have one creative kind of thought which I tried to share with Mother.

  “You know what, Mother, lots of people, ages varying from fifteenish to seventyish, talk to me about the books they could write, if only … The reason they don’t ever get around to writing the books is usually, in the young, that they have to wait for inspiration, and you know perfectly well that if an artist of any kind sits around waiting for inspiration he’ll have a very small body of work. Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it. With people around my age the excuse is usually that they don’t have time, and you know perfectly well that if a writer waited until there was time, nothing would ever get written.”

  She nods. “Yes, but what does that have to do with the Creed?”

  “Wait. I’ve talked with a lot of people who think that any kind of formal prayer, like that gorgeous Collect we just read, is wrong, that we should wait for inspiration to pray.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t think it works that way. I prayed very badly in church yesterday. I often pray badly when I try to say my prayers at home. But if I stop going to church, no matter how mad church makes me, if I stop praying at home, no matter how futile it sometimes seems, then ‘real’ prayer is never going to come. It’s—well, it’s something like playing the piano. You know what happens when I don’t have the time to play the piano for a week or so—my technique falls apart.”

  “It certainly does. It’s never very good.”

  “Okay, but at least the very small amount of technique I have is needed when I try to play the C minor Toccata and Fugue.”

  She nods. “You’re beginning to play it quite nicely.”

  “Well, then, do you think prayer is any easier than the fugue? If I don’t struggle to pray regularly, both privately and corporately, if I insist on waiting for inspiration on the dry days, or making sure I have the time, then prayer will be as impossible to me as the C minor Fugue without work.”

  “Where on earth do you think of these things?”

  “But does it make any sense to you, Mother?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, I think it does, a little. I knew you were born for a reason.”

  “Writing. And just to be your daughter. More coffee?”

  10

  That is one of the good memories. It is typical of many of our breakfast conversations; in the early morning over coffee I am apt to pontificate, which is one reason Hugh and I never eat breakfast together except on vacation, and then I try not to talk until he has had two cups of coffee.

  The good memories far outweigh the painful ones. In recent years Mother’s and my morning talks have often stretched until nearly time for lunch, and we talk about everything under the sun—literature, politics, as well as theology. We have often disagreed, and argued excitedly, but never, on these large subjects, angrily.

  Now there is no longer the possibility of disagreement. Our long discussions are over. The girls bring her in to the living room and she sits on the little sofa for the hour before dinner. She is no longer interested in sipping her drink, or eating her “blotters,” as she used to call the crackers for hors d’oeuvres. She is humped over; she does not even notice that the stockings are wrinkled on her still shapely legs.

  Our conversation wreathes about her like smoke; she notices it only to brush it away. It is only with an effort of will that I can remember the evenings when she joined in all our discussions. Peter is talking about parallel universes, that all possibilities are somewhere, in some galaxy or other, being played out. She does not hear, she who would once have loved to join in the speculation.

  In the old days over our morning coffee I enjoyed sharing my science-fiction imaginings; we discussed theories of the creation of the universe, side by side with local politics. We talked about fashions, food, the development of the children. I sounded off, after Grandfather’s death, about funeral practices.

  “How can those ghouls blackmail people?” I asked vehemently. “Do you want to buy a coffin that isn’t as nice a coffin as so-and-so bought?—as though the price of a coffin could be a measure of love.”

  I considered that family pressure had made her spend too much on Grandfather’s. “Mother, haven’t we lost sight of how to honor people’s bodies?”

  She put me right on the spot. “How do we?”

  “Not with expensive, cozy coffins, as though Grandfather could feel the quilted silk and the little pillow. He’s dead. He’s lifeless clay and he’s going to turn to dust.” Then, afraid I had hurt her, even though a hundred years had made a travesty of my mother’s father, I said, “Anyhow, I’m glad the funeral service is exactly the same for the Queen of England as for an unknown pauper. Otherwise I haven’t any answer.” I looked across the room at Mother’s chest of drawers, on which stood a small mahogany chest with a swinging mirror; it had gone across the United States with Mado and William L’Engle, her grandparents. It had suffered from exposure to inclement weather, and now from the wet wind from the St. Johns River; some of the beautiful veneer was chipped and buckled. She followed my gaze. I said, “Maybe we honor a human body in somewhat the same way you honor Mado’s little chest. Oh, Mother, I don’t know. I don’t know how we honor Grandfather’s—or anybody else’s—body, except by giving it to God.”

  She pushed me further. “How do we do that?”

  I drank some tepid coffee and chewed a piece of cold bacon and sighed. “Maybe by accepting that God knows more than we do, and that he really does count the hairs of all our heads. That’s what I want to believe, but all I can do is fumble. I just think the people who know all the answers are all wrong.”

  Here my intellect, my above-water self, and my intuitive, below-water self, are in conflict; but I have learned from painful experience that although intuition must not ignore or discard the intellect, it can often take me further; and I am more apt to find the truth of love in the world which 96 and I were searching for with our poppy sandwiches than in the reasonable world of the adults who thought they were in control of it all.

  Mother said, “It’s almost eleven o’clock. We ought to get dressed.”

  But too much coffee has the effect of making me talk. “You know what, Mother, one place we’ve gone wrong is in thinking of death as failure.”

  “As success, then?” she aske
d dryly.

  I shook my head. “When Liz and Arthur died, in worldly terms they failed Maria, failed her totally, didn’t they?” I did not mention Father. Mother didn’t answer, so finally I said, “Oh, Mother, if we aren’t free to admit failure we aren’t free at all. I don’t understand it; it’s a mystery; but I know that unexpected good things have come to me out of what I thought was failure.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh—if A Wrinkle in Time had been sold right away instead of going from publisher to publisher all that awful long time, it might have been published and just quietly died.”

  Mother agreed. “That’s true. I don’t think I understand anything you’ve been saying, but I think it’s true.” Then we turned our talk back to Grandfather. We were glad the 101-year-old body had finally given up the ghost, but we knew we would miss the brilliant being he once was.

  We got up and dressed.

  “Who is going with me when I die?” Grandfather had asked. Mother can no longer ask anything. She can voice nothing but fear.

  I tell a friend that I hope for Mother’s death, and he is shocked; he sees it as a failure in my love toward her.

  Perhaps it is. I don’t know.

  When I try to honor her body as it is now, and as it will be when she dies, I can go no further than when I was an adolescent, talking to Yandell, or when I was sounding off to Mother over morning coffee. Intuition holds me in the direction of Gregory of Nyssa’s words to Macrina, and this is enough to keep love alive in my heart.

  I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take; and I must love her enough, when the time comes, to let her go into a new birth, a new life of which I can know nothing, and which I cannot prove; a new life which may not be; but of which I have had enough intimations so that I cannot discount its possibility, no matter how difficult such a possibility is for the intellect.