And both were young

by Madeleine L'Engle

"Oh, no, Erna," Flip protested. "Your mother wouldn't feel like that."

"She does," Erna said. "If my father would be home and be all funny and nice the way he used to be before the war when I was tiny it would be all right. But he's always at the hospital. He says the only thing he can do to help people's souls is to try to give them strong, well bodies for the souls to grow in, and most of the time he sleeps in the hospital. I think he likes me and I think he's glad because I want to be a doctor, too, but mutti doesn't like me to be around because I laugh or sing or make noise and that disturbs her unhappiness."

"Oh, Erna," Flip whispered again.

"I don't want to go home," Erna said. "I thought it was going to be so wonderful to be with Jackie. Her mother tells wonderful stories and she wrote me the most wonderful letter saying how much she would love to have me for the holidays and she wrote my mother and the Dragon saying she'd take good care of me and everything and we were going to go to the theatre to see a play and to the opera, but my mother wrote the Dragon and said I couldn't and the Dragon called me to her living room after breakfast and told me. I don't want to go home."

The night before Flip had heard Maggie Campbell talking to Solvei Krogstad in the Common Room and almost crying because she was going to have to stay at the school during the holidays, but Erna was continuing, "If I could stay at school it wouldn't be so bad, it would be all right. Lots of girls stay at school. Gloria's going to stay, and Sally, because her parents have gone back to the United States, and lots of them are going to stay. The Dragon takes a chalet at Gstaad for the holidays and Sally stayed last year and said it was wonderful. I love school. I just love it. I wish I could stay here always."

Flip sat quietly on her desk and let Erna talk. This miserable girl was very unlike the brash gamin she was used to, and she ached with sympathy. "I'm sorry, Erna, I'm awful sorry," she said softly.

Erna took a tight ball of a handkerchief out of her blazer pocket and dabbed at her eyes. "Don't tell Jackie I almost cried."

"I won't."

"Sometimes I dream my mother is like Jackie's mother," Erna said, "and comes in and looks at me after I'm in bed to see that I'm covered, and comes in and kisses me in the morning to wake me up. Was your mother like that, Flip?"

Flip nodded.