The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by L'Engle Madeleine;

Author:L'Engle, Madeleine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-08-29T16:00:00+00:00

III

The Mother I Did Not Know

1

“Tell me a story, Mother,” I used to demand in the very early morning in the days on Eighty-second Street when I climbed into bed with her before breakfast.

Often she would reply,

“I’ll tell you a story

About Jack a Minory,

And now my story’s begun:

I’ll tell you another

About Jack and his brother,

And now my story’s done.”

“No, no, Mother! A real story!”

“What kind of a story?”

“A story about you when you were a little girl.”

She was born in 1881, my mother, just after the end of the Civil War, with the memory of it still fresh, and she said, “with the memory bitter indeed.” Carpetbaggers had arrived in full force, and the old Southern families, most of whom had lost fathers and brothers and homes and money, resented what she termed the “Northern interlopers.”

She called her paternal grandparents Amma and Ampa. “They came from the West, and although they came from real Southern stock, they were Western in their speech and mannerisms.” She loved them dearly, particularly Ampa, with whom she often used to spend the night, sleeping with him in a great four-poster bed.

All this talk of being in bed with parents and grandparents: it reminds me that while I was in college I wrote a story about a very small girl who woke up on the morning of her birthday and ran joyfully into her parents’ room to climb into bed with them and open her presents there in the warmth and safety of their presence. The professor announced to me that the reason the child wanted to get into bed with her mother and father was that she wanted to sleep with them sexually, a sort of combination Oedipus-Electra complex. I dropped the course without credit. But the remark has obviously left its mark in that I think of it each time I write about getting into bed with Mother, or Mother sleeping with Ampa. Such a thing could—and should—be spontaneous and completely innocent of Freudian connotation, and it is a sad commentary on today’s climate that I hesitate in the telling.

Amma and Ampa came to the South from Kansas not long after the war, because Amma’s migraine headaches were relieved in the more temperate climate. In Kansas they “had lived the life of pioneers and had no time for social graces. But when they came South, the fact that they were of Southern ancestry was in their favor with the Southerners.” And my grandfather, Mother’s Papa, was an attractive young man, and a skilled athlete. “He met a good many of the young men around town and was soon taken into their crowd.”

Because I grew up in another time and another world, all that she told me was as strange as a fairy tale, and I never tired hearing about it. In an apartment in the city of New York, Mother showed me the vast plains of Kansas. On a hot summer city night she told me of the far greater heat of the Kansas plains at a time when few trees had been planted.

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