The Moment of Tenderness by Madeleine L'Engle

Author:Madeleine L'Engle [L'Engle, Madeleine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
ISBN: 9781538717820
Amazon: 1538717824
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-04-20T23:00:00+00:00

The Foreign Agent

Well, in the first place he didn’t ask me the same silly questions everybody else does. “How do you like living in the city?” “Don’t you miss the country just terribly?” “Do the subways frighten you?” Stuff like that. And anyhow, the others aren’t really interested the way he was. They don’t listen to my answers on the rare occasions that I get a chance to give them.

But the truth is, as I told him, that I love the city. For instance, in the country I couldn’t escape to walk the dog. I mean, there was absolutely no reason for me to walk the dog. We just opened the door and he ran out across the fields and then into the woods. I know that in the country people are supposed to go for long tramps with the dog, but this is when they don’t really live in the country. People who go for long tramps with the dog are people who either live in or really have their roots in the city.

You’ve no idea what it’s like to escape from the country at last! Now I can say, “I’d better take the dog for a walk,” and I can get his leash and off we go. If my mother knew the places we walk! Actually I’m even beginning to pick up Spanish. I mean, I walk across the park to the West Side and I walk up and down the streets there where the people are all assorted and different, black, white, yellow, and the shops are all small and cluttered and fascinating, and you hear more Spanish than English. My mother doesn’t like this, but I enjoy it. It makes me feel that maybe I’m in a European city. I mean New York is really a foreign city as far as I’m concerned. When you’ve never been out of a small village in Vermont in your whole life, New York is really travel. Well, I have been to Brattleboro, but you can’t really count that.

Anyhow, back to the way he didn’t ask me stupid questions like the others.

He’s my mother’s literary agent.

My mother writes cookbooks with comments. Regional stuff. If anyone looks unlike a native Vermonter it’s my mother, though actually she is a native Vermonter, so if she wants to write folksy things with her recipes I guess she has a right to. But she isn’t big and comfortable in an old housedress and clean white apron the way her cookbooks want you to think she is. She’s tiny and has black, black hair, and wears peasant blouses and long dangle earrings and writes poetry. Her poetry doesn’t sell but her cookbooks do. She went back to live in Vermont when my father died a few months before I was born. They lived in Greenwich Village (this is the part of New York where artists and other peculiar people live and that’s where she got the idea for the peasant blouses and gypsy earrings).

Why are

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