Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  I spend a week going back and forth to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, a little over an hour from Crosswicks. When I accepted the job of teaching one of the workshops at this excellent writers’ conference I had expected to be there for the full five days, but with Hugh’s illness this is impossible. I feel that I must honor my commitment, however, and kind friends are arranging daily transportation so that I can commute.

  Even the day I leave, there is yet another setback, a massive increase in what was a slight diabetic neuropathy in Hugh’s feet and lower legs, but which now makes him walk tentatively, like an old man—another side effect of the platinum chemotherapy.

  My workshop is full of talented writers, but it is physically a rough week, with the commuting back and forth. As well as teaching my daily workshop, I have to give half-hour conferences to twenty-five people, which I couldn’t possibly have managed on my own. With the help of my friend Jane, they are scheduled, fitted in catch-as-catch-can.

  During one conference someone said, “We’ve been talking about your amazing optimism.”

  The men and women in my workshop had been told the reason for my commuting, why I could not be at the conference full-time, but this student was referring not so much to Hugh’s illness as to a general attitude toward life.

  And I heard myself saying, “I do not believe that true optimism can come about except through tragedy.” Sometimes so casually is revelation given.

  It has been a rough year (I still think of the year in terms of the academic year), starting in January with the death of publisher and friend Harold Shaw. It was not an unexpected death. He had been struggling valiantly with cancer for eighteen months. But it was grievous, and death when it finally comes is always unexpected. It came at what was for Hugh and me a time of joy. As our fortieth anniversary approached, our children began talking about a party for us. One evening I said to Hugh, “I know you don’t want a party. Why don’t you take me someplace warm for a few days?”

  So he arranged a trip on a small ship puttering about the Virgin Islands. We didn’t escape the party entirely; our dozen or so godchildren in New York had a surprise dinner party for us the night before we left. Not totally “surprise.” I was asked to make the salad.

  The next day, the twenty-sixth, the day of the anniversary, we flew to St. Thomas and boarded our little ship. The other passengers were pleasant, the food excellent, and what I liked best of all was that almost every day the ship would drop anchor, the swimming platform would be put out, and we could drop off it right into the ocean.

  One morning I was sitting out on deck writing in my journal and I was suddenly assailed by a wave of passionate grief. Hugh came out and looked at me, asking, “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look as though you’re about to burst into tears.”

  “I know.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  When we got home we learned that this wave of grief had come about at the time of Harold’s death.

  Not long after that, there was the shocking and unexpected and ambiguous death of one of our godsons at the age of twenty-nine. He had lived with us for nearly a year, during which time we had given him his twenty-first birthday party. Hugh bought him a brown corduroy suit, of which he was enormously proud. We had talked deeply with this young artist about the dark side of human nature, our own shadow selves, as real and important to us as the more visible self. We talked of the terror anticus which besets the human being, particularly one who has chosen to work in theatre, music, literature. We told him that the word panic comes from the ancient Pan, who, when the terror anticus came upon him, would pull out his pipes and try to play himself back into peace.

  We had seen our godson only a few days before his death, laughing, radiant, having done a good job and knowing he had done it well. So why did he, like Orson, go out a window to his death? I thought of Orson swimming back to Sconset, desperately fighting the tide as the urge for life overtook the urge for death. And then doing the irrevocable. Did our godson, at the moment of descent, want to stop the fall, to return to life? Too late, too late. This death was irrational and inexplicable and unnecessary, and we were angry as well as grieved.

  Another friend called after a double mastectomy. One thing after another, one thing after another, as so often happens. And now Hugh’s cancer. But when I told Carol, earlier in the summer, that I was keeping my faith, part of what I meant was that my attitude toward the universe, and the ultimate working out of pattern and purpose, had not changed. Terrible things happen, and God does not prevent them. But the purpose of a universe created by a loving Maker is to be trusted.

  The student who remarked on my optimism and I talk a little further about my belief that God is not going to fail with Creation, no matter how abominably we human beings abuse free will, no matter how we keep our own self-interest in mind rather than the working out of a Grand Unified Theory. We talk about how God can come into “the flame of incandescent terror” and purify even the most terrible anguish.

  It is not an easy conversation for me under the circumstances, but I learn from it.

  Teaching a course in techniques of fiction involves sharing, no matter how indirectly, one’s attitude toward the human endeavor. Maritain wrote that “fiction differs from every other art in one respect: it concerns the conduct of life itself.” Thus any discussion of the writing of fiction is theological, even if God is never mentioned.

  It is good for me to teach because it draws me out of myself and the limiting aspects of Hugh’s illness. Severe illness isolates those in close contact with it, because it inevitably narrows the focus of concern. To a certain extent this can lead to healing, but not if the circle of concern is so tight that it cannot be broken into, or out of. Our circle widens with each phone call, each visitor. The workshop at Wesleyan helps me focus on the true concerns of the human endeavor. It does not lessen my love for my husband, or the deep interior prayer which goes on all the time. Rather it strengthens it, as I am forced to articulate ideas and hopes which are often latent.

  I get home one afternoon and go out into the garden to pick lettuce, and hear a small sound and turn. There, caught in the net trellis which holds up the snap peas, is a small bird, a female finch. She stays very still, one wing outspread. I have brought a kitchen knife with me, and cut away the twine of the trellis until she is able to fly away, soaring, free.

  Where is someone to cut us out of the net?

  One thing goes wrong for Hugh after another. He still cannot swallow anything solid. Finally the gastroenterologist takes him as an outpatient to the operating room in the hospital to look down his esophagus and into his stomach and cannot look, because there is a stricture in the esophagus, almost closing it completely just at the entrance to the stomach. No wonder Hugh has not been able to eat! The doctor opens the esophagus, a very painful procedure. The peptic ulcers are healing, but the fungus is still on the esophagus and has caused the scarring which has almost closed it.

  The cure seems worse than the disease.

  If I feel caught in the net like that little bird, what must it be like for Hugh, with his body betraying him over and over again?

  Hugh is an actor. For the actor, as for the dancer, the body is the instrument. I can walk away from the typewriter or the piano; although they seem to be part of me, in actuality they are not. But Hugh’s instrument is his body, his beautiful body. He has always been tall and lean. He has felt legitimate pride in his body, and has kept it well.

  When the urologist first talked to us about the procedure for Hugh’s kind of cancer, and explained that it included the removal of the bladder, and the consequent use of a bag, I talked to him about this, saying that anything that changes the body is more painful and humiliating to an actor or dancer than it would be for the rest of us. I don’t know whether or not he understood. He is a doctor, interested in curing disease. But curing disease is inextri
cably intertwined with the psyche. We are not body alone.

  I wish I could take the kitchen knife and cut away the cords that are binding Hugh and free him.

  My friend Dana and I talk about how we want to make everything all right for those we love, and cannot. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer only a few months ago. We say to each other that if we were God we would make everything all right, and then we stop. Look at each other. Because we suddenly see that making everything all right would not make everything all right. We would not be human beings. We would then be no more than puppets obeying the strings of the master puppeteer. We agree sadly that it is a good thing that we are not God; we do not have to understand God’s ways, or the suffering and brokenness and pain that sooner or later come to us all.

  But we do have to know in the very depths of our being that the ultimate end of the story, no matter how many aeons it takes, is going to be all right.

  We try to keep things as normal for Hugh as possible, have friends in for dinner. One of Laurie’s colleagues, a cardiac specialist, comes on a gentle summer evening with his wife and young son. The family has been friends of Hugh’s through watching him as Dr. Tyler on ABC’s All My Children. The night Hugh had to return to the hospital with his heart galloping arrhythmically, and this gentle doctor was brought in, he greeted Hugh with affection, “Why, Dr. Tyler!”

  Our tree-planting godchildren come again and of course more trees must be planted. One of our summer projects has been expanding our little terrace so that it is more functional, and Hugh has been able to watch the progress from the kitchen windows. We buy seven small hemlocks to make a tiny border, and Hugh calls instructions through the windows as we dig and plant, naming each little tree for one of the seven seas. I mostly stand and encourage while the young people do the hard work. When they come in, grubby and tired, Hugh says, “You’ve done a fine job. Now just move them all three inches to the right.”

  Laughter heals, heals those who ache for what Hugh is enduring.

  Another evening Scott and Lily Peck and their son, Christopher, come for dinner. It is a beautiful evening and both before and after dinner we relax out on the expanded terrace, and Hugh is suddenly and beautifully fully there, his most real self. We are all aware that it is a special evening. Later Scotty wrote to me: “… but that evening in early August was quite extraordinary, as you yourself recognized. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am not one of those people given to seeing auras or whatnot. But Hugh just glowed. He glowed all over. It was one of the most extraordinary phenomenons which I have ever been privileged to witness. There were two things about it. One was the light. His whole being, despite being physically wasted, seemed to have become a being of light. The other was his absolutely extraordinary alertness. Despite his illness and disease, despite his age, despite his deafness, I have never seen any human being for a period of several hours so alert. It manifested itself in a hundred different ways. He spontaneously asked about the Foundation and how it was doing. I wouldn’t even have believed that he would have remembered. He not only allowed Christopher and me to go out into the garden to have a smoke, but even wondered for us whether it wasn’t time for us to do so. Et cetera, et cetera. I could go on and on, but I have never been in the presence of any human being who was, in fact, so present.”

  Being present is part of the actor’s training. It is also Hugh’s special gift. The most terrible time in our marriage came when, for one reason or other, he was not present for me.

  The near-decade we lived year-round in Crosswicks was a rough one. A lonely decade. We were constantly exhausted, as young working parents often are. Bringing a dead store back to life was a draining job. Hugh often came home so tired that he was anything but present.

  Four of our closest friends died within two years of each other, and that is a lot of bereavement for a couple in their thirties to go through. On the eighth of January 1955, I wrote: “Arthur Farmer is dead. This is something I haven’t realized yet. I was, as usual, to have dinner with him when I went to New York.” Such New York trips were rare, usually to see editor or agent. I often stayed with Liz, who had stood up with me at our wedding, and her husband, also Arthur. They often visited us at Crosswicks and we were warm, deep friends. The two Arthurs were very different in temperament and looks, but two men we trusted implicitly.

  That January afternoon I checked in with Liz and Arthur, told them I wouldn’t be late, and went to meet Arthur Farmer. He was about to leave for a vacation with the John Steinbecks, but as soon as I got to his apartment it was obvious that he was ill and in pain. He insisted on going out to a nearby restaurant, but he couldn’t eat, and I took him home and called his doctor, and it was decided that I should take him to the hospital in a taxi. Even though he was weak and in pain his voice was perfectly strong and steady and his pulse, which I had taken several times during the evening, was, though a little rapid, not terribly so. I don’t think it occurred to Arthur that he was dying, and it didn’t to me.

  In the morning when I called the hospital, he was dead. His doctor had wanted to reach me, but had no idea where I was staying.

  I had a husband and little ones to go home to, and Hugh could share in my grief. But we seemed inundated by death. A year later the other Arthur, Liz’s husband, was dead of a heart attack, and eleven months later Liz was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. That was how our daughter Maria came to us, a legacy from Liz and Arthur, a seven-year-old little girl, suddenly and unexpectedly orphaned. Don, my breakfast companion and mentor, was found dead in his garden. We seemed surrounded by death, the death of those close to us, the death of neighbors. In a small village it is evident that no man is an island. The white-pillared church was across from our store, and when there was a death the bell tolled.

  Financially we were close to the edge. We could not afford to heat the water for daily baths for everybody, so twice a week I filled the tub with hot water and put the children in with me. Eventually the store did well enough so that we could afford private baths.

  How we managed as well as we did I’m not sure. We were certainly naïve in all country ways. One day a farmer came into the store and asked Hugh if he had a church key. The church was right across the street from the store, so Hugh said he didn’t have one, but he’d go see if he could get one. That was how he learned that “church key” was a name for a can opener in those days when soda and beer cans didn’t have automatic tabs. Less amusing was bringing home the wilted produce, the dented cans.

  I spent three hours or more a day in the store. I was struggling to write, to keep house, help in the store, be a good mother, and yet improve my skills as a storyteller. And that decade was one of rejection slips. I would mutter as I cleaned house, “Emily Brontë didn’t have to run the vacuum cleaner. Jane Austen didn’t do the cooking.” Often when Hugh came home from the store in the evening he was too exhausted to be affectionate, or to understand how wounded I was from all the rejection slips for work I believed in. Failure itself is exhausting.

  I loved my children, but I hungered for adult conversation. One day after a rare evening alone I wrote: “I keep thinking about the evening we had together last night, my darling husband, alone by candlelight and firelight, and the way we were able to talk. We are practically never alone together and this is a bad thing. No matter how much we love our children there are many things we cannot talk about in front of them, things that we need from time to time to say. Let us try to remember for their sakes as well as ours that every once in a while for our development we must be alone.”

  As soon as Bion, our baby, was in nursery school, I dropped out of the group of mothers who occasionally gathered together to drink coffee and gossip. This was writing time. Nobody else needed writing time. And I felt that I was looked at askance because I spent so much time at the typewriter and yet couldn’t sell what I wrote. I certainly wasn’t pulling my weight financially.

  In my journal I wrote: “There is a gap in understanding between me and our friends
and acquaintances. I can’t quite understand a life without books and study and music and pictures and a driving passion. And they, on the other hand, can’t understand why I have to write, why I am a writer. When, for instance, I say to someone that I have to get home to work, the assumption is that I mean housecleaning or ironing, not writing a book. I’m very kindly permitted to be a writer but not to take time in pursuing my trade. Nor can they understand the importance of music, or why an hour with a Mozart sonata at the piano is not wasted time but time spent on a real value. Or really listening, without talking, to music. Or going for a walk simply to see the beauty around one, or the real importance of a view from a window.”

  The people I felt easiest with during my hours in the store were the carnival men who wintered at the nearby fairgrounds, going over the merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels, maintaining the equipment. They said what they felt, even if it included rough language. But I had already heard all the rough language from the stagehands. It didn’t shock me. Often I had to translate what our regular customers said into what they actually meant. The carnival men were far more direct. In early November I asked them how they were going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. They laughed and said they’d open some cans of hash or beans to cook over their Sterno. So I roasted their Thanksgiving turkey for them.

  One of Hugh’s favorite stories is of the day when two of the carnival men were in the store just before noon. One of them asked him, “Where’s the boss?”

  “What do you mean?” he demanded. “I’m the boss.”

  “Oh, come on, we know who the boss is.”

  Hugh was behind the meat counter slicing cold cuts and at that moment I walked in. “Madeleine!” he called. “Down on your knees!”

  Of course I immediately dropped to my knees.

  The carnival men thought that this was wonderful, and after that they treated me like a princess. On Wednesdays, my day to close the store in the evening, a couple of them would wander in just before closing time, to buy a packet of gum or a candy bar, and wait while I closed the cash register, put the day’s take in a canvas bag and then in my pocket. They would wait while I closed and locked the building; wait till I had the car started, not always easy in winter. Nothing was ever said, but I felt completely protected by their concern.