And both were young

by Madeleine L'Engle

"What are you doing there, honey?"

And she asked, "Where are mother's clothes?"

And her grandmother said, "I put one or two things aside but most of them I gave away. Come on, lamb, get on your things and we'll go for a little walk in the park."

Paul reached out his hand and touched Flip's foot through the covers. "Don't you want to talk about her? I think I'd like to talk about my mother if I remembered her."

"Yes. I want to talk about her," Flip said. "I was just trying to think what to tell you about her."

"What did she look like?"

"She was very beautiful. I don't mean beautiful like Eunice but really beautiful. You know. From the inside as well as the outside. And she was—well, I knew nothing could go wrong as long as she was there. I mean no matter what happened as long as she was there it would be all right. Once when we were spending the summer in Goshen the nearest house to us burned down in the middle of the night and it was terrible. But before any of the children had time to be frightened or anything mother had them in our kitchen all in their nightclothes and was feeding them cocoa and sandwiches and making them all laugh and they stayed with us the rest of the summer while the house was being rebuilt. I was only five then but I remember the way they all stopped being frightened the night of the fire just because mother was there and they knew she'd make everything all right. And always every night she told me a story before I went to sleep. And in the morning she'd come in to wake me and her hair would be all around her like a cape. Father painted her and painted her. She was about the only grown person he ever painted. He's never painted Eunice. Only sketches. I'll show you a picture of her tomorrow. Mother, I mean. And she used to laugh all the time and everything was fun. Even the times I was sick and had to be in bed. She made that fun, too. And I had a governess but when I remember it seems to me mother was with me most of the time and we used to go to plays together and to La Bohéme and Traviata at the opera."

Paul didn't say anything and Flip looked over in the moonlight and there he was, sound asleep, his mouth a tiny bit open. She crawled out from under the covers and shook him gently. "Paul. Paul. You'd better wake up and go to bed."

He rolled over sleepily and slid off the bed and stood there swaying for a moment as though he were still asleep. "Good night Flip. Thank you," he said softly, and crossed the hall to his room.

Flip clambered back under the covers and put her head down and hardly had time to draw the covers about her and rub her feet against the slippery warmth of the hot water bottle before she, too, was asleep.