Meet the Austins (9 page)

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Authors: Madeleine L'engle

BOOK: Meet the Austins
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The longer I lay there, the worse I felt. And then a man's shadow stood near the door and then turned and came in. But it wasn't Daddy, it was Dr. Harlow. He came in and turned on the little lamp by my bed.
“Well, Vicky,” he said, “how goes it?”
And suddenly I knew I was going to throw up. “I'm going to be sick,” I said, mumbling through the bandages and the tongue depressor.
Quick as a flash he took out a pair of scissors and slashed through my bandages and stuck a pan out and I threw up lots of
blood and stuff and he put his hand against my forehead to hold it till I was through.
“There,” he said, “that was good timing, wasn't it? I'm going to bandage your head all up again to keep those teeth of yours immobilized, but not quite so tight this time. And your father and Dr. Olsen and I've left all kinds of pills for you to take and we want you to go to sleep, and sleep and sleep and sleep.”
“I can't take the pills if you tie me up again,” I mumbled.
“No, but you can take them
before
I tie you up,” and he rang the buzzer on my bed.
A nurse came in and he said, “Bring in Vicky's medication now, if you will, please, Miss Dunne, before I get her all bound up again.”
She brought me some pills in a little glass, and Dr. Harlow helped me to hold the water to swallow them with, because my unbound-up left hand seemed for some reason awfully shaky. Then he put the tongue depressor between my teeth again and tied my head up, turned out the light, and left me.
When he left me I started to cry again. I felt bad about crying because I knew Daddy wanted me to be brave and not give any trouble. Miss Dunne came in and looked down at me with a flashlight and saw the tears creeping down my cheeks, and she put her hand on my forehead, saying, “Try to go to sleep, Vicky, dear, and you'll feel better. You've been a good, brave girl, and your daddy'll be proud of you. Everybody's remarked on how cooperative you've been—Miss Fisher at X-ray, and Dr. Olsen and Dr. Harlow and everybody. So now you just try to go to sleep, and if you feel too miserable you ring your bell and I'll come in to you.”
All I could do was nod, and she went out. I felt worse because she had praised me and it wasn't true, because I hadn't been a brave, good girl at all, I'd been awful to John, and I'd done something Mother would never have allowed me to do, and if I was hurt it was nobody's fault but my own—not Maggy's, not John's, not anybody else's—and the least I could do now was not scream and yell and make Daddy ashamed of me, too.
I closed my eyes tight and tried to pretend I was home in the big bed with Rob in the little bed at my feet, and that nothing hurt, that I was cozy and comfortable, and Mother would have to rout me out of bed in the morning to get ready for school.
I felt a shadow cross my eyelids and I opened them and Daddy was standing by my bed. He put his finger to his lips for silence. He laid Elephant's Child by me on the pillow and I knew Rob had sent his most precious possession down to me. Then Daddy pulled up a chair and sat down and took my left hand in his. He just sat there with me, not talking, holding my hand, until I fell asleep.
 
In the morning I wasn't sure at first where I was. Then I remembered. I'd never been in the hospital before, except to be born, of course, and John and I were both born in New York, though Suzy and Rob were born right here. Outside the windows the snow was coming down, big soft white flakes, tumbling over each other. And my arm ached and my face ached and I was thirsty. One of the nurses spooned a little soupy cream of wheat between my lips for breakfast, but it tasted awful
and after a few bites I kind of gagged on it and she stopped. Dr. Harlow came in and looked at my teeth and bound me up again, but looser, and then Dr. Olsen came in and looked at my arm and said I was to have more X-rays, and I got wheeled down to the X-ray room and I didn't have time to think about home or Mother or Daddy or anything.
Right after I got back to the room, Daddy came in. I couldn't fling my arms around him because of my broken one and I couldn't kiss him because of my teeth, but he managed to give me a hug, and the first thing I asked him was when I could go home.
“Oh, in a few days if you're good,” he said.
“How's John?” I asked. “Is he still sick?”
“He's kind of miserable,” Daddy said, “but I think he's over the worst of his bug. But he's very upset about you, Vicky.”
I looked at Daddy and didn't say anything. Finally I mumbled, “I'm upset about John.”
“Why?” Daddy asked. I didn't say anything again, and Daddy said, “I know you don't feel up to talking much today, Vicky. Would you rather wait and discuss it later?”
I tried to shake my head, but that hurt worse than talking, so I said, “No, I'd rather get it over with.”
“Get what over with?” Daddy asked.
“It was an awful day,” I said. “I did everything wrong. I had a fight with John and it was my fault because John had a fever, and then when the radiator started squirting I got mad at everybody and I hated everybody, John most of all. And when Nanny called, Mother was holding the radiator, so I knew she wouldn't hear me if I left, so I got on my bike and I told Nanny it would
be all right, but we both knew it wasn't, that Mother wouldn't have let me, so when I went to her house we sneaked up the back stairs and Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins never even knew I was there. Then I fell off my bike and I was all that way from home alone and it was dark and awful and when I saw the lights of the house I started to scream and John was the one who heard me and he came running out of the house to me. Did I make him worse, Daddy?”
Daddy never tries to pretend things, so all he said was, “I don't know, Vicky. But he isn't terribly ill; you needn't worry about him too much.”
“Daddy!” I said. “What happened to the radiator when Mother left it to come out to me?”
“Your room and Rob's got pretty soaked, the wallpaper and the floor. Luckily, Mr. Calahan drove up right after Mother and you left for the hospital, so it could have been worse. The living-room ceiling's quite wet in one place, but he thinks it will dry out without leaving a stain. But if he hadn't come when he did and the water had gone on streaming out of the radiator, the whole ceiling might have fallen in. By the way, Vicky, who gave you permission to let the air out of the radiators?”
“I thought I was being helpful.”
“Did you? Honestly?”
“I
thought
I thought I was.”
Daddy said, “You managed to give yourself a punishment that was quite a bit rougher than anything Mother or I would have given you, didn't you? And remember, when you're hurt, Mother and I and the whole family are hurt, too. I've seldom
seen your mother as upset as she was last night. You were a pretty horrible sight staggering down that lane. You scared John half out of his wits.”
“Will you tell John I'm sorry?” I whispered.
“I think John knows that. He asked me to tell the same thing to you.”
“Did Rob pray for me last night?” I asked, hugging Elephant's Child.
“Knowing Rob, can you doubt that he did?”
“What did he say?”
Daddy grinned. “He demanded very severely of God to make you get well quickly and come home and die of old age. Lie back, Vicky, and relax. You're going to need—and want—a good deal of sleep and rest for the next couple of days. Remember when Rob was about two? And we were all out in the orchard, and I was going on about something, a long speech about how the trees should be sprayed and pruned, and all about various kinds of sprays, and I paused to catch my breath, and Rob remarked loudly, ‘Amen'? We all laughed, and it was one of his very first words.”
I smiled, as Daddy had intended me to, though sort of weakly, sort of with my eyes and nose, if you know what I mean, because it hurt so to move my lips.
“Mother'll be down to see you during visiting hours this afternoon,” Daddy said. “I've got to go now, Vic; I have other patients to see. Try to rest. Try to be good.”
“I am trying,” I said.
He held my hand firmly in his. “Yes. The nurses have all said that you've been a good girl, brave and not complaining. I
like to be proud of you, Vicky, and not ashamed.” He bent down and kissed me, and left.
The funny thing was that I went to sleep almost as soon as he left. I woke up when lunch was brought in, and one of the nurses tried to feed me some soup, but I couldn't eat that, either. Some of the other doctors, friends of Daddy's and Mother's, stuck their heads in the door to say hello to me, but I didn't feel much like talking. I felt all kind of knocked out. I closed my eyes and kept going to sleep, not really a proper, good sleep, just kind of a gray doze, but while I was dozing I didn't hurt so much. Then I woke up and found Mother sitting by the bed. She'd brought down a book John had sent me, and cards the little ones had made me, and another book from Nanny, but I didn't want to read or even be read to. I just lay there holding Mother's hand and I kept wanting to cry, but I didn't. And I wanted again, as I'd wanted the night before, to be young and small enough so that Mother could pick me up and hold me in her arms and rock me the way sometimes she still rocks Rob because he enjoys so much being a baby.
She sat there and the snow kept on falling outside the windows, and I knew that as soon as the others came home from school they'd be out with the sled, and John would be furious because he couldn't get out on his skis.
And I was homesick.
After Mother left, it snowed harder. There was a light outdoors and I could see the snow falling against it, whirling and swirling wildly from both poles at once, and every once in a while I could hear a sharp crack as a weakened branch snapped off and fell to the ground. I knew that at home the ground in
front of the house would be littered with twigs and branches from the elms; it always is when there's much wind. And the snow would sift in through the upstairs bathroom window right through the storm window. And in the morning the snow would be swirled into drifts and there would be patches of lawn blown bare. And I wouldn't be there.
One of the nurses brought me in some more soup then, and I thought of everybody getting ready for dinner at home and Suzy helping Mother fix a tray for John and trying to get John to pretend he was in a hospital and she was a doctor. But
I
was in the hospital, and Suzy, being under twelve, couldn't come see me, and it took every ounce of concentration I had not to cry while the nurse was feeding me the soup, but I didn't.
So that was the terrible week. I never want another week like that. And I don't suppose we'll ever know just why it happened, why we were all so awful and not the way we like to think of ourselves at all.
And Suzy still doesn't like to eat pig.
I
n February, Aunt Elena had a break of two weeks in her concert tour, so she came to spend it with us. I still had my arm in a cast, but I'd got so I could manage dressing (except for tying my shoes) and eating and even doing my homework with my left hand. I could eat again, too, everything except very hard or chewy things, not fried chicken to pick up in my fingers or corn on the cob from the freezer. Uncle Douglas spent the first weekend Aunt Elena was here with us, too, and it was one of those weekends that come in February when it's warm and rainy, and you think maybe spring is just around the corner and start looking at the sharp branches of trees against the sky to see if they're beginning to soften with buds—but, of course, it's much too early. All the next week was like that, warm and moist and really unseasonable, and it got so muddy that it wasn't much fun to play outdoors, and the little ones kept coming in and tracking mud all over the kitchen floor.
Toward the end of the week Uncle Douglas called, right around dinnertime, when we were all in the kitchen. John was burning the trash in the fireplace because it was too muddy to go out to the incinerator. Suzy and Maggy were setting their part of the table; Mother was whipping cream; Aunt Elena was at the piano; and Rob was walking around talking to Elephant's Child. Elephant's Child is still his favorite thing in the world, and Mother and Daddy had put a new music box in it for Christmas. I answered the phone and Uncle Douglas said he wanted to come up the following weekend, that he was bringing up someone he wanted us all to meet, and could he speak to Mother, please.
Now, all the grownups are always thinking that Uncle Douglas is going to get married. And at least once or twice a year he brings up some girl or other, which must be awfully hard on the girl because we're all looking her over to see if we think she'd be a good wife for Uncle Douglas. Some of them have been very nice and we wouldn't have minded at all having them for aunts, and some of them have been just awful. Uncle Douglas's range of interest is very wide. But it seemed from the conversation he was having with Mother that this must be an extra-specially special girl, because he seemed to be worried about whether or not she would like us. And Mother said once, rather sharply, that we'd behave exactly as we always do, and if he was that worried about us, not to come up. Then she laughed and said, “I'm sorry, Doug, we'll do our best to be dignified and proper, but you know you yourself have anything but a sobering effect on the children.”
Aunt Elena had come in from the living room and was
listening, too. She's very fond of Uncle Douglas and so Mother asked her if she'd ever met this girl, because Aunt Elena and Uncle Douglas have always seen a good deal of each other whenever Aunt Elena's been in New York.
“I don't think so,” Aunt Elena said. “He seems to have had about half a dozen on the string lately. Does he really sound serious this time, Vic?”
“He's never been really worried about how we were going to behave before,” Mother said.
“Oh, dear,” Aunt Elena said. “If he wants you to be all proper and stuffy, she must be awful. We're all going to detest her.”
Mother said, “Why do we react this way whenever Doug calls to say he's bringing up a girl? After all, we all keep saying how nice it would be if Doug would marry and settle down, and some of the girls he's brought up have been very nice. After all, Doug's twenty-nine.”
“I was five when Daddy was twenty-nine,” John said.
“I was two,” I said.
“Jeepers,” Suzy said, “Rob and I weren't even born yet.”
Aunt Elena kept going on about Uncle Douglas's new girlfriend after Daddy had come home and we were all at the table. “If he's so worried that you won't behave, what on earth can she be like? Sounds like the kind who'd get annoyed when he gets paint all over everything and doesn't want his meals on time if he's in the middle of a picture.”
“No matter what she's like, she can't be much worse than some of them,” Mother said comfortingly.
Later that weekend I heard Mother saying to Daddy, “I'm
glad to have Elena taking as much interest in anything as she is in this new girlfriend of Doug's.”
“Too bad Doug isn't older, or Elena younger,” Daddy said. “They'd be good for each other.”
“I don't suppose that would really matter in the long run,” Mother said. “Anyhow, it's good for them just to be friends the way they are. But what about this girl? Do you suppose she's as bad as she sounds? It would really be pretty frightful if Doug married one of the creatures who've fascinated him momentarily.”
“We'll have to wait and see,” Daddy said.
Aunt Elena was talking about it again at the breakfast table, and suddenly John said, “Hey, Aunt Elena, I have an idea.”
Mother said, “Whatever it is, I don't think I'm going to like it.”
“Let the boy speak,” Aunt Elena said.
“Well, Aunt Elena thinks she sounds so stuffy and as though she didn't have any sense of humor or anything. Let's find out. When we go to the station to meet her, let's all get dressed up in funny sorts of ways. Maybe we can borrow a few other kids so she'll think Mother's like the old woman in the shoe. And Mother can wear one of her old costumes and we can wear all our oldest clothes and look like ragamuffins.”
“That won't be hard,” Mother said.
“And Daddy can wear Mr. Jenkins's old raccoon coat and the big Alaskan fur cap Aunt Elena gave him. Then if she laughs and thinks we're funny she'll be okay, and if she takes it seriously or gets all stuffy about it we'll know she isn't and maybe we'll scare her off.”
I never thought they'd do it. John told me later he never thought they would, either. What maybe did it was that Uncle Douglas called again, twice, to tell us that we must all behave over the weekend. Or maybe it was that Aunt Elena thought it was such a wonderful idea. She decided that she would be the maid, and began practicing a foreign accent for the part. So between Uncle Douglas calling and Aunt Elena taking an interest in something again and all of us teasing to do it, Mother and Daddy were talked into it.
“It really would be very good therapy for Elena,” I heard Mother saying to Daddy.
And Daddy laughed and said, “You know you're just looking for a good excuse.”
 
So Friday night we all got dressed up. We were really glad of the heavy clothes because the warm weather had vanished and the thermometer had plunged back down; from almost spring we were thrust back into winter. The wind blew from the east and sneaked its way in through all kinds of cracks and crevices we didn't even know existed. So warm costumes felt good. The four of us and Maggy made five children, and Daddy said that was plenty without borrowing any more. Mother went up to her costume trunk—and perhaps I'd better explain about Mother and her costumes.
That was how she met Daddy. Not in costumes or anything, but because she used to sing. Just the kinds of songs she sings to us at night, not grand opera or anything. During the war she went around a lot to the hospitals. Where there was a piano she played the piano, and had the men all singing with
her. And where there wasn't, she played her guitar. She still plays it, not only for us, but at various club meetings and things like that, she'll go and sing for people. She met Daddy during the war at one of the hospitals. He was a doctor there, not a patient, but he was going through the ward once when she was singing and he stayed to listen and that's how they got to know each other.
Then, through one of the patients whose brother owned a supper club, she sang at the supper club for a while, and even though she only sang there one winter (because she married Daddy right after that) there was an album made of her songs, and we have it, and we save the records to play as a Special Thing whenever we're sick in bed. The costumes came from the singing, because as well as the pretty songs she used to sing, there were songs that were funny, too. No matter how sick I am or how high my temperature is, and it was a hundred and five once when I had flu, there's one song that makes me almost roll out of bed laughing.
So out of the costume box she got an old moth-eaten fur cape that came almost down to her feet. Underneath it she wore a red lace and sequined dress that only came down to her knees. She wore long earrings and false eyelashes and lots of makeup. Daddy wore a plain dark suit, but he borrowed the raccoon coat from Mr. Jenkins and wore Aunt Elena's enormous fur hat, and said he'd be the chauffeur. Aunt Elena went out and bought a brand-new maid's uniform. She was the only decent-looking one among us all—that is, from the neck down. From the neck up she didn't put on any makeup and she powdered her hair and she found a pair of glasses frames in
Mother's costume trunk and put them on and she really didn't look like Aunt Elena at all. As for us kids, we just looked like ragamuffins, and, as Mother said, that was easy. Rob wore red pajamas with the bottom hanging down, and Suzy and Maggy wore terribly old party dresses that needed ironing and had tears in them that had once been mine, the dresses, I mean, and were now too small for them, too. And John and I wore patched jeans and sweaters that were out at the sleeves. Of course, when we put our school coats on we didn't look quite as bad, but our school coats were all second-year coats this year so we all, except Maggy, looked shabby enough to suit Aunt Elena. Maggy kept jumping up and down and saying, “Oh, what fun! How do I look? Do I look pretty?” And actually she and Suzy both did look awfully pretty, Maggy with her straight shiny black hair and Suzy with her soft light curly hair, and the party dresses way up above their knees. It started to rain just as we left for the station, and Daddy said he hoped the rain wouldn't start to freeze.
The train was late and the rain kept on filming down and we all got terribly impatient. We played the Geography game till we ran completely out of A's, as we usually do, what with America and Asia and Antarctica and Abyssinia, and so forth, and we played I Packed My Grandmother's Suitcase and I Love My Love, and finally Rob cried out, “I hear it! I hear it!” and reached up his arms so Daddy could hold him up to wave at the engineer. The bell at the gate began clanging and then the train came round the bend, with its great eye shining and making a golden path with the rain slanting across it. Rob waved like mad at the engineer and the engineer waved back, and then
Daddy put him down and said, “Remember, Robert, I am just the chauffeur.”
Uncle Douglas and Sally (he'd told us that's what her first name was) got off almost first. Uncle Douglas saw us. He was standing behind Sally and he put his hand to his head as though he were in agony, and then his eyebrows shot way up, and then he just shrugged.
Mother swept forward in her mangy cape and kissed Uncle Douglas on both cheeks, and when she spoke she sounded all la-de-da and not like Mother at all. “Doug,
da-a-h-ling,
we're so
enchanted
that you could make it! Wallace was detained, but perhaps he may be at home when we get there. And this is …” and she paused, archly, and held out her hand.
“Victoria, this is my friend Sally Hough. Sally, my sister-in-law, Victoria Austin. And these are her progeny.”
We all danced around her, leading the way to the car. Maggy nudged Suzy and me. “I know that lady.”
“What do you mean?” we whispered.
“I'm sure I've seen her somewhere. Maybe she was a friend of Mummie's or something.”
“Stay in the background, then,” Suzy whispered. “It would spoil everything if she recognized you.”
Daddy was in the front seat of the car, with Aunt Elena beside him.
Mother said, “Of course you remember Grooves and Olga, Douglas?” She turned to Sally. “We're lucky to have such splendid servants in the back woods here. Grooves is
so
good at both chauffing and butling”—Uncle Douglas's eyebrows went up again, but still he didn't say anything—“and Olga is a perfect
jewel, aside from the fact that she's a
ghastly
cook. But she's
marvelous
at fixing the plumbing.” We all piled into the station wagon, the five of us kids all over each other in back, and Mother and Uncle Douglas and Sally in the middle.
Mother, wrapped in her fur, said, “Grooves, open the window, it's stifling in here.”
After a moment Uncle Douglas said, “I suppose you know it's raining in on Sally and me, Victoria?”
“Oh, is it?” Mother asked graciously. “You may raise the window an inch, then, Grooves.”
Very carefully Daddy raised the window an inch.
Uncle Douglas said, “Grooves, shut the window all the way, please.”
Daddy did not move, and Mother said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Grooves is a deaf-mute, but he gets my vibrations. Are you really chilly, Doug da-a-h-ling?”
“We will shortly be too frozen solid with an inch-thick casing of this rain to move from your car.”
“These soft city people,” Mother said. “But we mustn't forget our hospitality, must we? You may shut the window, Grooves.”

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