A Severed Wasp

by Madeleine L'engle

  “You’re very brave,” Katherine said.—What would I have done if I had had to accept that I wasn’t quite first-class as a musician? My entire life has been predicated on the fact that I am.

  “Not brave. Just realistic. About time I dropped my dreams of being a great dancer and having a beautiful marriage.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s good to set your sights high.”

  Dorcas pushed back her long, Alice-in-Wonderland hair. “The thing is, in New York, people all have to do or be something. Something with a name, like doctor or dancer or director. Mother and wife don’t count.”

  “If feminism means anything, it means that you’re free to be a mother or a dancer, or both, whichever you choose.”

  “Not in New York City. And I can’t go back to Cedar Rapids.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “No. My parents are dead. I haven’t anyone or anything to go back to. But there was a reality, growing up there, that I seem to have lost, and it was a good reality.”

  “Your reality is largely within you,” Katherine said, “and that’s where you are going to have to find it.”

  15

  The doorbell rang, and Katherine was glad she’d already prepared lunch.

  “I almost forgot,” she said. “Llew Owen, the organist at the Cathedral, is coming to take me uptown to practice. I’m giving a benefit—”

  “Yes, I know.” Dorcas rose cumbersomely. “We already have tickets.” She looked down, murmuring, “Thank you,” as Katherine went to the door.

  Katherine introduced the two young people, and Dorcas left immediately.

  “Something wrong?” Llew asked.

  “Everything. You know, Llew, there are worse things in the termination of a marriage than death. I will always miss Justin, but no one can take our marriage away. We had it. And you had yours. But hers has just been smashed to bits.”

  “Irreparably?”

  “I’d guess so.”

  “And she’s pregnant—”

  “Yes. There’s no good time for a marriage to fall apart, but this is about the worst time I can think of.”

  His mind was not on Dorcas. “The other day—when you were practicing in St. Ansgar’s—will I ever play like that, with that much wisdom?”

  She pushed his words aside with her hand. “It took a great deal of painful experience to give me any wisdom at all, and my music is much wiser than I.”

  He nodded. “I’ve learned that. It is healing me, whether I want to be healed or not.”

  She moved to the kitchen. “Being alive hurts. I have found it best not to rush for the aspirin bottle.” She took the plate of sandwiches out of the refrigerator, lifting off the damp tea towel which protected them. “Sit down, Llew, lunch is simple.” She set the sandwiches on the table, brought out two bowls of soup.

  “You’re very kind to have gone to all this trouble for me.”

  “Nonsense. I haven’t had much chance to do any cooking in the past years, and I’m enjoying making mud pies.”

  “Mud pies, nothing. This soup is fabulous. What is it?”

  “A French way of using up lettuce when it starts to bolt. Lettuce and chicken stock, basically. Most of these sandwiches are for you. They’re only a bite each.”

  Llew ate hungrily, giving full attention to the food, accepting two more bowls of soup. Then he looked around appreciatively. “What a beautiful picture!” He indicated the portrait over the mantelpiece. “Is it you?”

  “Yes, and my son, Michou. I love it. It’s probably my greatest treasure.”

  “I can see why. Dee and I—our apartment’s in Diocesan House, up at the very top. We fixed a room for the baby and I don’t—I don’t know what to do about it—the crib, the wallpaper Dee put on. Every time I go in I see the bear and the lion in the crib—what should I do?”

  She answered crisply. “Why don’t you give the baby’s things to Dorcas? I don’t think she’s bought anything yet, and with her marriage breaking up, she’s not likely to. Then change the paper. How big a room is it?”

  “Not very big. Big enough for a baby. I’m not sure I could get rid of anything there—it seems—”

  “It seems like accepting that your wife and baby are dead? They are. Don’t hold them back. Don’t let them hold you back. Your love isn’t going to change with the wallpaper.”

  He looked at her across the table. “Your son died when he was young, didn’t he?”

  How long ago was it? And it still hurt. No wonder this young man found it difficult to give away his baby’s crib, the toys his wife had bought.

  “Llew, I understand grief. You must know that it will never leave you entirely. There will be odd moments when it will wash over you like a wave. But you must leave it.” She picked up the soup bowls. “You’ve had enough?”

  “More than enough. Thanks. Now I won’t have to worry about dinner.”

  “Don’t start skipping meals,” she warned. “It’s all too easy when you live alone. I know.” She returned for the sandwich plates. “Just let me rinse these off.”

  “I’ll do it,” he offered eagerly. “That was my job, doing the dishes.”

  She glanced at him, then stepped aside to let him take her place at the sink.

  He worked briskly and efficiently. “The car’s right outside. I was lucky. A car drove off and I grabbed the place. I don’t have air-conditioning—” He suddenly sounded anxious.

  “Don’t worry. I’m beginning to get acclimated.”

  “It’s never too bad in the Cathedral itself.”

  He drove well, and although the car was somewhat shabby, the springs were still good. “You and Bishop Bodeway are old friends, aren’t you?”

  “I knew him, long, long ago. And then we completely lost track of each other until recently. We’ve both done considerable changing.”

  “He’s very special, Bishop Bodeway. After Dee died he never once said any of the silly things that people say. He didn’t even say any of the good things. He cried, and so I cried, too. And he talked about Dee and the baby instead of avoiding it, like most people. I wish I’d been around when he was Diocesan, and I’m more than grateful he’s about the Close as much as he is.”

  Felix was surely a good example of the ability of the human being to change or, if not change, to develop in directions which might not have been suspected. And she had come far from the introverted adolescent who had known Felix so long ago and who had thought that the only way to live with hurt was to put a hard shell around it. That was the danger for Llew, but perhaps his music would keep him from it as, she believed, it had made her shed her protective carapace and move into love.

  And once the shell is gone, it is gone. She was as vulnerable now as she had been when she first met Felix.

  Parents and Children

  1

  The afternoon in St. Ansgar’s chapel, slightly to her surprise, was without untoward incident. No one, as far as she knew, for she was deep in concentration, came in. When she was tired and needed to stretch, she walked around the ambulatory; once she walked to the end, down two steps, and saw an elderly woman dropping change into the large chest for donations. She smiled, thinking that this was perhaps one of Felix’s old women with her widow’s mite.

  As she passed St. Martin’s chapel, which Felix had said was always open for prayer, she paused, sensing a sound. Huddled in one of the chairs was Topaze, his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking with sobs. She hesitated, wondering if she should go in to him, then decided that whatever caused it, his grief was private. He could hear her at the piano; if he wanted her he could, and probably would, come to her. She returned to the Bösendorfer.

  When she played the Hammerklavier Sonata she could always hear Justin’s voice, sometimes gentle, sometimes shouting at her in excitement, crying out that a single note could be, all by itself, a crescendo. ‘You are part of the piano,’ he often said. ‘Each movement of your head, of your body, is as much a part of what you are playin
g as your hands on the keys. You never saw Rachmaninoff play. He counteracted the most erotically emotional of his work by sitting at the piano as still as marble, no movement of torso, or head. That balance was part of his playing, part of the music.’

  He took her to the ballet. ‘Your movements must be one millionth of a millimeter of what you are seeing, but it must be indicated. Every slightest movement of your head, your neck, says something.’

  For a while he had her take ballet lessons. ‘You are not comfortable with your body, and the things I had hoped to teach you I cannot teach you.’ She studied with a friend of Justin’s at the Ballet Russe and learned quickly to take delight in the disciplines given her body. The ballet lessons stood her in good stead. She was not slumped.

  They made friends with many of the dancers in the company and Justin began to compose music for the ballet. He made a quick success with a ballet to Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, but comedy was not his forte, and both he and the company were happier with the music he composed for Sophocles’s Antigone.

  The study of ballet was reflected in Katherine’s playing. She acquired a new understanding of cross-rhythms with syncopations and sudden sforzando, but the old problem with her hip caused the actual dance lessons to cease.

  ‘You have learned what you needed to know,’ Justin said with no sympathy. ‘You are comfortable with your body; you are beginning to understand it. Stop being sorry for yourself. You were born to be a pianist, not a ballet dancer. Now pay attention to this crescendo. You are not listening, you are not understanding. Where are your ears? Don’t you hear that the crescendo doesn’t lead to a fortissimo but to a pianissimo? Play it, and let me hear.’

  He never stopped teaching her, she thought, sitting in the shadows of St. Ansgar’s chapel, striving to push her as close to perfection as the human musician can get.

  A movement disturbed her and she looked toward the pews to see Emily Davidson, eyes tightly closed, her expression one of intense concentration. When the music did not continue, she opened her eyes. Katherine fluttered her fingers in the child’s direction. “How long have you been here, little mouse?”

  “Oh, a while. When I used to watch ballet—especially the prima ballerinas—I saw what they were doing, and why, and how. I think I hear what you’re playing, but I’m not sure why or how. When a ballet dancer does something unexpected, I expect it. I understand that it has to be that way. But you do things and I don’t expect them. I know they’re right, but I don’t expect them.” She spoke with unselfconscious intensity.

  “How do you know they’re right?” Katherine asked with curiosity.

  “Because they are right. Do you know anything about ballet?”

  “A little.”

  “Sometimes you’ll see a dancer move up into the air so slowly you wouldn’t think anything that slow could be up; and then the coming down is even slower. You do that with your music. Especially in—I think it was Le Tombeau de Couperin.”

  “Close,” Katherine said. “It was some of the original music Ravel used in Le Tombeau.”

  “Oh. But then you’ll do something I don’t understand at all, and I wonder if I’m just fooling myself when I think I can give up being a dancer, just like that, and be a pianist instead.”

  It was not just living in New York, as Dorcas had suggested, that made Emily need to be something. The child had not only exotic beauty but extraordinary determination and drive. Katherine said, “Talent in any one of the arts usually indicates understanding and talent in other branches. You’ve just shown that you have real understanding of music. Why don’t you play for me now?”

  The color drained from Emily’s bronze skin. In the odd lighting of St. Ansgar’s, her face took on a greenish hue. She murmured, “Maybe it’s better this way, before I have time to work up a panic.”

  Katherine rose from the piano and Emily took her place. She played with technical competence a fairly simple Handel minuet. Then a Beethoven sonatina. She played well, as she had played when she accompanied the family. She listened to the music. Her wrists and her fingers were well placed. But the quality which John displayed when he merely picked up the violin was missing.

  Katherine’s heart sank as she stood by the piano. She could not lie to the child. Neither could she destroy her. What could she say?

  Emily began a new piece, something Katherine did not recognize. It started out sounding like a piano rendition of one of the songs Yolande had sung, but then, instead of going into fear and sadness, it became lilting, merry, then dropped into wistfulness, and ended suddenly with a major arpeggio which flew all the way up and off the keyboard.

  “What was that?” Katherine asked sharply.

  Now color flooded Emily’s cheeks. “Oh. It’s one of Mrs. Undercroft’s songs. Tory has a tape of it and plays it till I could scream. I like the beginning, but then it does things that give me the heebie-jeebies, so I changed it around so it says something I like to hear, and then I let it dance off the piano.”

  “You mean it’s your own composition?”

  “Well, it starts off with something Mrs. Undercroft—”

  “Have you composed anything else?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Play me something, then.”

  Emily hovered her hands over the keyboard as though thinking through her fingers, very differently from when she was about to start something from the classical repertoire, and then played what began as a derivative seventeenth-century minuet and suddenly changed rhythm and dashed into extraordinary leaps up and down the keyboard as she modulated from one key to another and finally dropped back into the prim little minuet.

  Emily’s playing of her own compositions had a freedom it totally lacked in the pieces she had obviously studied with a piano teacher.

  Trying to hold down, for a moment, her enthusiasm and relief at Emily’s talent as a composer, Katherine asked, “Does your teacher encourage you to write your own music?”

  “Oh, no, he doesn’t like it. But I thought maybe you would.”

  “And your parents?”

  “Oh, they like it, all right, but they’re both so busy they don’t have much time for—”

  “First of all,” Katherine said in her most authoritative voice, “you will change piano teachers. Whoever you have is all wrong for you. Then you will learn harmony and counterpoint. The more you know of the old disciplines, the freer you will be to go off on your own. I’m not sure about you as a pianist, Emily. Your teacher has taught you some dreadful habits. Thank God you break them when you play your own music. But you are a composer. On the other hand, you need exposure to every kind of music possible. When I think of what you did with Yolande’s—”

  Emily interrupted. “You think I have talent?”

  “I know you have talent.” Katherine looked at her watch. “It’s time for Llew or somebody to come and take me home. Are your parents going to be in this evening?”

  “I think so. Unless one of them has an emergency.”

  “I’ll call them. As for the piano lessons themselves—would you like to study with me?”

  Emily’s voice was small. “I’m already sitting down.”

  Katherine made a conscious effort to keep her tone level. “I’m a hard taskmaster.”

  “Madame Vigneras, I’m not afraid of work.”

  “I know you’re not. But you have a lot to unlearn, and that will be very hard work.”

  “Do you really mean it?”

  “Hard work? Yes.”

  “That you will teach me?”

  “I’ll speak to your parents and if they can arrange transportation for you to come to me, we’ll start at once.”

  “Madame Vigneras—” There were no dramatics in Emily’s voice. “This was life-and-death for me.”

  Katherine spoke softly. “I know, my child.”

  “I could have been dead, and you’ve made me alive.”

  “It’s your own talent, Emily. All I can do is help it grow.”

&
nbsp; “I can’t say thank you. It’s too—”

  “You’ll thank me by working.” It was too intense. Katherine turned in relief as someone said, “Madame Vigneras,” and she saw Mother Cat coming in. Emily gave a small curtsy, and Katherine marveled that she made so little concession to her artificial leg.

  The nun smiled at them in greeting. “Madame Vigneras, a special chapter meeting has been called, something to do with Bishop Juxon’s death, so Llew can’t drive you home—the organist is part of the chapter. But Sister Isobel is waiting outside with the car. Are you planning to come to us on Sunday?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “One of us—I hope I’ll be the one, but I’m not positive—will be down for you around four-thirty. I hope that will be convenient.”

  “Fine.”

  “And we’ll get you home at a reasonable hour. We need our sleep, too. Will you be all right on your own, now?”

  “Of course.”

  “The steps don’t bother you? I should get back to the meeting, but—”

  “I’ll help her down the steps,” Emily said.

  The nun nodded. “Thanks, Emily. And then go on home, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Emily bobbed again. Perhaps manners were coming back at last.

  2

  Katherine was, she had to admit, curious about Sister Isobel, who once upon a time had been Allie Undercroft’s wife, and who had gone through the agony of losing a child, and who was now a nun. Katherine did not know much about the religious life; in European cities she had often seen nuns, but fewer each year as more and more of them left their Orders or stopped wearing habits, or wore uniforms which made them indistinguishable from airline hostesses. She liked the habit worn by Mother Cat and the Sisters, simple, loose, light blue for summer; all of it, from wimple to scapular (as Mimi had told her), easily washable and drip-dryable. Sister Isobel, waiting by the car, looked cool and comfortable. Katherine knew that she must not be much younger than Mimi, but there was an open youthfulness about her face which made her seem far younger. And the habit helped. A wimple is a most becoming article of clothing for an older woman. Nuns, she thought, should never have relinquished it.