Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  As the years have moved on, our explosions have become far less frequent as we have learned to live with each other, accepting each other’s edges and corners. Sometimes idiosyncrasies which used to be irritating become endearing, part of the complexity of a partner who has become woven deep into our own selves.

  While Hugh and I were in China we wanted to be good cultural representatives of our country. Perhaps the best thing we did was simply to stand still, surrounded by a group of curious people, and let them touch us. Before leaving for China we had read that Chinese culture prohibits demonstrations of affection in public, so we were not prepared for people to pat and pet as they did—and especially Hugh, whose huge blue eyes fascinated the dark-eyed Chinese. They would reach out eager hands, and someone would manage to ask Hugh how old he was, and he would sign, “Sixty-nine,” and then there would be little strokings and murmurings of approval.

  I wanted to buy him a Mao jacket, because I thought he would look gorgeous in one. Our National Guide took us one afternoon to a big Chinese department store, not one of the Friendship Stores designed for tourists, but a real Chinese store, where we would have been completely lost without our guide. She led us to the right department and suddenly Hugh was surrounded by a crowd of Chinese people, all of whom encouraged him to try on various Mao jackets and nodded their approval as he put on the most expensive one in a soft blue wool which brought out the color of his eyes. There was no question that this was the one they wanted him to buy.

  He wore it that night for dinner. We were not sure that this would be approved by the Chinese; maybe they would resent a “round-eyed devil” wearing such a jacket. But he was met with smiles of approbation and appreciation.

  Will he ever wear it again?

  It is nearly dawn and I am still awake.

  The house moves in its sleep, as old houses tend to do. Bion and his wife, Laurie, are, I hope, asleep. Now that they are living full-time at Crosswicks, Hugh and I can be here more often than when we had to close the house for the winter. A house needs to be lived in, and Bion has taken over the heavy work, storm windows, wood chopping. He teaches English at the nearby branch of the University of Connecticut. Laurie is a physician, an internist, with an office in the village, and is on the staff of an excellent hospital in nearby Torrington, Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, where Hugh is this night.

  It is a good hospital. The prognosis for Hugh is good. Why can’t I sleep?

  Immediately after our return from China, I had set off on a spring lecture jaunt. Hugh stayed at Crosswicks. Ever since we have been able to afford to, we have called daily when we are apart. When I called Hugh from New Orleans I sensed something wrong, and his reassurances did not reassure me.

  The night I got back to Crosswicks and we were getting ready for bed, Hugh told me that he’d spoken to Laurie, and that he had an appointment with a urologist. He’d had frequent urination, and Laurie said it seemed like a prostate problem.

  The afternoon of his first visit to the urologist, he was whistling as he came through the garage. There was nothing to indicate malignancy. Hugh was to have an X-ray early the next morning, and then another appointment with the urologist, who would do a cystoscopy. The expectation was that the doctor would scrape the prostate from the inside to widen the opening. Hugh would likely be in the hospital for five days, then be home for two weeks doing nothing—which would knock askew a number of plans, including our week doing readings together at Laity Lodge in Texas. But all I cared about was having Hugh be well.

  We sat and talked that evening, according to our usual pattern, as we prepared for sleep. We were happy, making plans, wondering where our next trip would be. There had been a suggestion by the USIA that we go to Poland and Yugoslavia, and we agreed that this would be fun, even if they decided to send us during the winter.

  It is nearly dawn. The birds are beginning to sing.

  Will there be another trip?

  Three

  How we have enjoyed our travels together! But right now thoughts of a new trip are set aside.

  Hugh saw the urologist for the cystoscopy on the thirtieth of May. He found a growth in the bladder and will not have the results of the biopsy till Monday. So fear, which was lifted for a few days, has fallen on us again.

  Herb, the urologist, told Laurie that the growth in the bladder was completely unexpected. It’s very small, and unrelated to the enlarged prostate. So Hugh’s mild prostate problem may prove to be a blessing in disguise, since it caused the growth to be discovered while it’s still too small to have caused symptoms. The best we can hope for is that it’s not malignant. The next best is that it is small enough just to be scraped out. Hugh is extremely good about it, but it is a terrible blow.

  I call several close friends to ask for prayers.

  That afternoon Hugh and I have to attend the funeral of an actor friend, here in our Congregational Church. As we approach the white-spired church we hear the mournful sound of bagpipes, and in front of the church is a man in kilts, playing a dirge. My skin prickles.

  We go in and I sit beside Hugh, and we hold hands, as the bagpipes continue to drone mournfully outside. I have to clench my teeth to keep from crying.

  And I am praying, praying.

  When I went to New Orleans (so short a time ago), I took a small paperback book a friend gave me over a year ago. When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It is a fine book by one who has gone through the fire. The writer watched his young son die of a dreadful disease in which a child grows into an old man and dies of old age—at fourteen, in the case of Rabbi Kushner’s son. He asks all the hard questions and addresses them honestly. In two places I feel very differently from the way he does. He is a man, and a rabbi. I am a woman, struggling with an incarnational view of the universe.

  I write in my journal: “He writes that if a God of love allows terrible things to happen to innocent people, then God must be powerless. I can’t believe that the power that started the glories of the galaxies ever loses power. But we human beings have free will, and disease is a result of our abuse of that free will throughout the centuries.

  “He also writes that there are prayers that one is not allowed to pray, such as my ‘Please, dear God, don’t let it be cancer.’ Rabbi Kushner says I can’t pray that way, because right now either it is cancer or it is not.

  “But I can’t live with that. I think we can pray. I think the heart overrides the intellect and insists on praying.”

  If we don’t pray according to the needs of the heart, we repress our deepest longings. Our prayers may not be rational, and we may be quite aware of that, but if we repress our needs, then those unsaid prayers will fester.

  The funeral of our friend is painful. In a small, closely knit village, someone always asks, “I wonder who will be the next to go?”

  We come home from the church. Herb has called to say that there is a malignant tumor in the bladder but it is inconclusive whether it is little and easily removed or whether it has spread. Oh, God. Since Hugh has had no blood in his urine we can legitimately hope that the cancer is little and will be easily removed. He is to go into the hospital tomorrow to have surgery on Wednesday.

  I am scheduled to lead a conference at nearby Trinity Conference Center in Cornwall just the days that Hugh is to be in the hospital. It is much too late for a replacement to be found for me, so I make some rather frantic phone calls, explaining that I’ll have to commute between the Conference Center in Cornwall and the hospital in Torrington while Hugh is there. I feel terribly torn, but I know that I can’t be at Hugh’s bedside all the time, and if I’m working when I’m not at the hospital, that will keep me from worrying. No matter how simple we hope the surgery will be—oh, let it be simple—it is still cancer, and I am very frightened.

  I think again of my concern before and during the China trip. But the China trip was a joy and I thought I was wrong.

  And then this comes out of the blue.

  How well I understand the childish
prayer: “Oh, God, make it not to have happened. Take it back.”

  And so I pray as my heart needs to pray. Divide my time between the Conference Center and the hospital. The conference is for a group of a dozen or so clergy wives. I was with them a year ago, warm, wonderful women with a wide range of interests and age. I am close enough to them so that I can talk about prayer in times of stress.

  Hugh’s surgery is on the fourth of June. I spend the morning giving a talk at the Conference Center, since I cannot be with him during surgery or in the recovery room. I spend the afternoon with him. He is only slightly groggy, is very much with me, but snoozes a good deal of the time.

  Bion comes for me, to drive me the half hour back to the Conference Center. He tells me in the car that the surgery wasn’t as simple as we had hoped. The cancer has spread, and Herb thinks he’ll have to remove the bladder. Chemotherapy, too. I am stunned. Laurie says that it is not a death sentence. There is real hope. But I feel a deep interior chill, and try to keep my body from trembling.

  I ask Bion to let me off at the road which leads to the Conference Center, and I walk the mile or so there, pulling myself together. The afternoon sun is hot, but all I feel is cold.

  The Trinity wives are waiting for me, expecting me to bring good news. When it is bad, their arms open.

  At bedtime, in a cold, strange room, I read Evening Prayer. Read the first Psalm for the evening of the fourth day: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

  Exquisitely painful timing. The psalmist’s words. Jesus’ words. I feel anguished. I feel that I have been kicked in the stomach and the wind knocked out of me. My spirit hurts.

  I am grateful that Jesus cried out those words, because it means that I need never fear to cry them out myself. I need never fear, nor feel any sense of guilt, during the inevitable moments of forsakenness. They come to us all. They are part of the soul’s growth.

  In this room at Trinity Conference Center I am part of a community. At home I am surrounded by the community of family. Bion and Laurie are deeply involved in this crisis. Tomorrow my daughter Josephine, her husband, Alan, with their nine-year-old son, Edward, are arriving for the graduations of their daughters, Léna and Charlotte, from high school, one day apart. Charlotte, fourteen months younger than Léna, accelerated herself and is graduating a year early, a day before her older sister.

  When Alan accepted the job of dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco a year ago, the bonus for Hugh and me was that their two girls were finishing school in the East. For much of the school year Léna lived with us, and Charlotte came for frequent weekends.

  When Léna moved in, Hugh said, “There will be rules.”

  Léna blanched.

  I said firmly, “The rules are these. You do not drink up your grandfather’s grapefruit juice so that he has none in the morning. Rule two is that when you are going to be late, you telephone. Those are the rules.”

  She thought she could live with those.

  Later I added a third one: “When you empty an ice tray, you refill it.”

  The two girls will be living together in our apartment this summer, with jobs to help toward college in the autumn. Léna will be going to Barnard, Charlotte to a new four-year liberal-arts college at the New School for Social Research. It is good to have them with us.

  I am close to our younger daughter, Maria, on the phone. She is pregnant, nearly ready to deliver her second baby. I am surrounded by the community of family. Out of this pain there is a strangely sustaining unity.

  By some small marvel it happens that a family very dear to me is visiting in the East. Ed is an oncologist, and has just been at a medical conference with particular emphasis on bladder cancer. He and his wife, Jan, and their little ones come by to see us and to talk with great love and concern about the proposed treatment for Hugh. Ed brings material on the latest, very new treatment for bladder cancer, platinum chemotherapy, which seems to hold out real hope for cure. Ed is relieved to learn that this is exactly what the doctors—Herb, the urologist, and Michael, the oncologist—have planned for Hugh. The treatment is still so new Ed had been concerned that it might not yet be used at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, and he had wondered how to tell us that this is what should be done. He says that he has studied Hugh’s case prayerfully, and if it were his father, this is the treatment he would prescribe.

  The doctors are confident. The cancer has been discovered pre-symptomatically. They, too, tell us of the amazing success of the new treatment. But I am grateful for Ed’s reinforcement of the decision to use platinum, because the treatment is terribly toxic to the rest of the body.

  Hugh is moved from his room on the fifth floor of the hospital, down to the third floor, the cancer floor. He is put in a semi-private room, but there is nobody else in it, so I am able to be with him all day. There is no private bathroom and he has to walk down the hall pushing his IV pole with one hand, carrying his urine bag in the other. He is weak and terribly nauseated.

  There are other patients on the floor far more ill than he. The floor is like an odd T, with a large crossbar, which has the cancer rooms, and a smaller long bar, which is the psychiatric wing, a depressing combination. But the cancer nurses are kind and patient and particularly skilled in giving the chemotherapy IVs.

  Carol, who helps keep Crosswicks clean, begs me, “Keep your faith.” And I reply, “Oh, yes, I will. I am.” And I am. But what do I mean?

  This summer is teaching me what I mean.

  When the urologist told us that Hugh’s cancer was far worse than he had anticipated, he said, “I feel as though I’ve dropped an atom bomb on you.”

  I feel that way, too. Blasted. And stuck with that problem of free will I care so much about.

  As a human parent I have had to allow my children to make their own mistakes, to become free adults. I cannot rush in and correct every error in judgment, fix everything that goes wrong. Parents who attempt to do that usually end up with children who grow into emotional cripples. If we accept that we have at least an iota of free will, we cannot throw it back the moment things go wrong. Like a human parent, God will help us when we ask for help, but in a way that will make us more mature, more real, not in a way that will diminish us. And God does not wave a magic wand and clean up the planet we have abused. Our polluted planet is causing more people to die of cancer than when the skies and seas and earth were clean.

  My head understands this. My heart still cries out. And I remember my seventeen-year-old prayer on the train from Charleston to Jacksonville when my father was dying: “Please, God, do whatever is best for Father. Please do whatever is best for Father.” And that, of course, underlies all our praying. Do what is best, even if at this moment I cannot know what that best may be.

  I sit in the hospital room with Hugh. This is his third room and each room has an original painting on the wall. They vary radically in quality. The first was a still life with apples; the second a beach with ocean waves; here on the cancer floor it is a picture of three golden retriever puppies, not unlike our own two goldens. I sit by the bed, hold Hugh’s hand, try to help him eat when meals are brought in. That is all I can do. Try to affirm with quiet love, a love that has built slowly over forty years.

  Our love has been anything but perfect and anything but static. Inevitably there have been times when one of us has outrun the other and has had to wait patiently for the other to catch up. There have been times when we have misunderstood each other, demanded too much of each other, been insensitive to the other’s needs. I do not believe there is any marriage where this does not happen. The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys. I suspect that in every good marriage there are times when love seems to be over. Sometimes these desert lines are simply the only way to the next oasis, which is far more lush and beautiful after the desert crossing than it could possibly have been without it.

  Not long after our marriage I wrote in my journal: “I read somewhere that one appreciates happ
iness only when one is afraid of losing it. But in the world today one has to accept that fear as a kind of guest in the house and it makes the moments when it is pushed into the background more intense and more wonderful. And what one has had, as long as there is life and reason in one’s body, can never be taken away.”

  After our glamorous night at the Edgewater Beach Hotel bridal suite, we went back to the old Croyden Hotel, where we had a long room with a sofa and a couple of old but comfortable chairs, and a Murphy bed that folded up into the wall in the morning. We had a sizable dressing-room-cum-kitchen, and a bath. In the evenings after the theatre I would bathe and lie in bed, waiting for Hugh, and looking with dazzlement at my rings.

  We rented a radio and found one hour a day of classical music. We had friends from our company, and from others playing in Chicago, in for dinner, which I cooked on two burners—it was not unlike the closet kitchen on Twelfth Street, but it was more fun.

  I wrote stories, and in my journal I wrote a lot, anguishedly, about the world situation. Sometimes it is not a bad idea to remember that it was as bad then as it is now.

  After the play closed in Chicago, Hugh and I bought a very secondhand car. It had a gearshift which kept flipping back into neutral, so that we had to drive through the Ozarks with one hand holding the shift in gear. We were en route to visit Hugh’s family in Tulsa, stopping to see friends and family along the way. While we were in Jacksonville with my mother she gave a large reception for us, and I couldn’t help being pleased as this ex-wallflower’s husband was admired. Tall, handsome, and unfailingly courteous to the old ladies, who adored him, Hugh made a big hit.