Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  I need faith. Oh, I need it.

  The news is bad. The tests have revealed that the cancer has spread outside the bladder and into the ureters. Radiation treatment is being started this afternoon. Was all the suffering caused by the platinum for nothing? Don’t I truly believe that there is nothing which is for nothing?

  I ask the urologist, “What’s the prognosis?”

  He says, “Well, it’s a very aggressive cancer.”

  I say, “I don’t want him nibbled to death. I’ve felt all summer that Hugh is being nibbled to death by sharks. I don’t want that.”

  He says, “I know what you mean.” He understands. And yet what can he do?

  We shake hands. I say, “Thank you, Herb.” Doctors do not like to fail. It is even harder on them because Laurie is their colleague.

  And this is the night we’re having a dozen or more people in for a cookout and a swim, the wonderful young people who have worked on house and terrace all summer. We’ve added a screened porch, with a bedroom above it for Bion and Laurie, who badly need their own space, and we want to thank these young men who are truly artisans in the old-fashioned sense of the word. They have made the addition look as though it’s been part of the old house forever. It does not stick out as new, but belongs.

  What a night to be having a party, when our hearts are heavy, when anxiety has risen again in my throat like gorge. But two of the boys are going back to college; this is Labor Day weekend and some schools have already started. We cannot put it off. For their sakes I have to be composed if not merry.

  As for Hugh, he is good, so good. As our granddaughter Léna said at the time of his birthday, “He’s a trouper.” He is.

  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In just a few days it will be time for that Psalm to come around for the fourth time since the verdict that the cancer was not the expected small and easily controlled one.

  My God, my God, why? People have asked this in times of anguish throughout the centuries, in times of plague, in times of war, in times of personal tragedy. It is all right to ask why.

  Why? I ask, knowing that there are no easy answers, perhaps no answers at all.

  My friend Tallis remarked once that cancer is the result of sin, not the sin of the person suffering from this ugly disease, but the sins of many human beings throughout the ages, making wrong choices, letting greed override wisdom.

  This abuse of free will throughout the millennia does not mean that cancer is a punishment, as some people view it. No, it is a consequence of many actions by many people, often unknowing. Those first factories of the Industrial Revolution fouled the once clean sky, but it was not a conscious fouling. People did not understand what they were doing. When Hugh smoked as a young man, smoking was not yet seen as a threat to health. My grandfather smoked moderately all his life, and he lived to be a hundred and one, but our planet’s air and water were far cleaner than they are now.

  I have become phobic about smoking (I was one of the lucky people who never liked it), and I bitterly resent being made a “passive smoker.” It is particularly bad in airports, but wherever people smoke, those of us who do not are made to suffer from the addiction and discourtesy of those who do. Even in this hospital, there is only one waiting room on all seven floors where smoking is prohibited—the meditation room on the cancer floor. When Hugh has come in as an outpatient for one procedure or another and I am told to wait in the lobby, I reply politely but firmly, “No.” When I get a surprised look I say, “I will not wait where there are smokers. The smoke gets in my contact lenses and irritates my eyes. I will wait in the meditation room on the third floor. If it is occupied I will wait out in the corridor.”

  I am told that soon the hospital will be entirely smoke-free, and the only reason this eminently sensible decision has not already been implemented is that some of the older doctors will not give up their cigarettes.

  Consequences: cancer is a result of consequences. It is not sent as a punishment. I do not have to make the repulsive theological error of feeling that I have to see cancer as God’s will for my husband. I do not want anything to do with that kind of God. Cancer is not God’s will. The death of a child is not God’s will. The deaths from automobile accidents during this long holiday weekend are not God’s will. I would rather have no God at all than that kind of punitive God. Tragedies are consequences of human actions, and the only God worth believing in does not cause the tragedies but lovingly comes into the anguish with us.

  Alas, we human beings have played god throughout the centuries. We do not play god well. Look what we have done.

  What is the difference between playing god and making responsible decisions? That is always a question the doctor must ask. And so must the rest of us. How do we separate self-interest from what is right for others? How do we love without manipulating or wanting to control? Do heads of state ever completely avoid that corruption which Lord Acton warns comes from power?

  Right now the doctors have absolute power over Hugh. I have to trust them to ask the right questions. I have seen some doctors let the vanity of their profession make them prolong dying or, what is even worse, abandon their patient. I trust Hugh’s doctors to listen to Hugh. To listen to me when I talk to them. I trust them to take into account that sometimes death is better than keeping a patient alive just to keep him alive. I trust them not to prolong the dying when it is time for death.

  Of course they see death as failure. I have to trust them to be willing to fail.

  If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure. Marriage is a terrible risk. So is having children. So is giving a performance in the theatre, or the writing of a book. Whenever something is completed successfully, then we must move on, and that is again to risk failure.

  Hugh made a success of the store. We were making a reasonable living. But there was nowhere further to go with the store; it had reached a plateau. If we were not to remain stuck in the place we were in, we had to move on, somewhere, somehow.

  One evening Hugh and I were amazingly alone, the three children all at someone else’s house. This seldom happened, and we were enjoying sitting quietly in front of the fire. I turned to Hugh, asking, “Darling, are you still happy with the store?”

  “No.”

  “Then sell it.”

  It was a major decision. It would totally disrupt our comfortable life. It would turn our security upside down.

  In the autumn we used to take one night away and go farther north into New England to buy cheese, going on back roads to out-of-the-way farms. We returned to the store laden with cheeses, and their sale paid for our little jaunt.

  That autumn of 1958 we had bought a dozen or so cheeses and were relaxing in a comfortable room in an inn. Hugh looked at me and quoted from Milton: “That one Talent which is death to hide.”

  “You have to go back to the theatre.” I reached out for his hand. Acting was his talent. It could not go on being pushed aside. He had proven to himself, to the world, that he could make a living outside the theatre. It was time to go back.

  I was more than ready to return to New York, but the idea of the total disruption of their lives was frightening to our children.

  If Hugh, this summer, is controlled by the decisions of the physicians, so our children were controlled by ours.

  Amazingly, we were able to sell the store, and well. I gave up my jobs of directing the choir, of working with the young people. We knew that moving our children out of a small dairy-farm village and back to the city would be a shocking change for them, so we decided to bridge the two disparate lives by taking them on a real family vacation, a ten-week camping trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. We had a wonderful time, tent camping. I cooked our meals on the fire which Hugh had built. We had an unhurried opportunity to see the greatness and beauty of our native land. Hugh, negative about picnics (“Why eat outdoors with flies and bugs when we get just as good a view from the
dining-room table?”), had suggested and enjoyed a ten-week picnic. (According to our children, he hasn’t been on one since.)

  Before leaving on our trip, we spent a night in New York, talking with old theatre friends. Hugh asked Thelma, the stage manager, “Do you think I’m crazy to think of coming back to the theatre?”

  Thelma replied calmly, “Anybody is crazy to work in the theatre, but if it’s your talent it’s what you have to do.”

  Hugh also made contact with several agents and producers, and we took off, enjoying our amazing vacation and trying not to think of the unknown future with no promise of jobs or assurance of income. In Helena, Montana, which was one of the post-office addresses we’d given, a telegram was waiting for Hugh, a telegram from Maurice Evans, offering him a role in an all-star production of G. B. Shaw’s Heartbreak House.

  I will always have a special affection for Helena, Montana.

  When it became apparent that we were truly moving to New York, there were many smaller decisions to be made. We had seven cats and three dogs. Hugh said to the children, “We will take one cat and one dog.” Our seven-year-old son looked at him anxiously. “And one child, Daddy?”

  Of course the question came up of where we were going to live in New York with three young children. Jean and Walter Kerr urged us to find a house in Larchmont, where they lived. We were told by various other people that we should find a place in the suburbs for the sake of the children.

  One day Hugh said to me, “You don’t like the idea of Larchmont.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Jean can go into New York in the evenings to the theatre with Walter. I can’t come sit in your dressing room. Jean has a full-time, live-in maid. We don’t. You would have one life in the theatre, and the kids and I would have another in the suburbs. They wouldn’t have a father and I wouldn’t have a husband.”

  Hugh understood. We never regretted our decision to live in Manhattan, where Hugh could come home for dinner on matinee days, where we could have what I considered a normal family life. Sometimes in the winter when bad snow storms were forecast Hugh would bring another actor home to spend the night, to ensure that he would be able to get to the theatre the next day for the matinee. I thought to myself that I would much rather be the wife giving the slumber party than the wife getting the phone call.

  When Heartbreak House started rehearsals, Hugh found two rooms in a wonderful old hotel, the Dauphin, now gone to make room for Lincoln Center. There was a beautiful circular living room with large French windows and two pullout couches; a large bedroom with twin beds; a closet kitchenette; an enormous bathroom with mirrored walls—at the turn of the century the Dauphin had been a favorite hotel of opera singers. On Friday afternoons I would pick the children up after school and we would drive to New York for the weekend, the children taking turns with a sleeping bag in the bedroom.

  We had a happy several months at the Dauphin. I even managed Christmas dinner with guests, having cooked almost everything at Crosswicks and bringing it down to the city. During the Christmas holidays we started our search for an apartment. The parts of the city that we knew best—the East Eighties, where I had lived until I was twelve, the Village, where we had started our theatre lives—were now out of our financial range. So, it seemed, was every other part of Manhattan. Vacation ended, and we returned to our weekend schedule. One rainy January Saturday the children and I were out apartment hunting, looking at every ad in The New York Times which seemed at all possible. But anything we liked was too expensive. Two hundred and fifty dollars a month was, in January of 1960, our outside limit. We were cold and bedraggled and I announced to the children that it was time to go back to the Dauphin to cook dinner for Hugh between matinee and evening performances. Josephine pointed to an ad: “Luxury apartment, eight rooms, four baths, fourteen closets.” No price.

  Obviously no point in our even looking at it. But Josephine kept persisting. “Let’s just go see it.”

  “We don’t have time.”

  “But let’s just go look, just for fun.”

  I gave in, and we took the bus and went to look at 924 West End Avenue. And we discovered that it was a rent-controlled building, and while it was hardly a luxury apartment it was big, and it was $128 a month.

  We hurried back to the Dauphin to tell Hugh of our find. At first he was disbelieving, but he went with us the next day to look at the apartment, and in a great leap of faith we signed the lease.

  We moved in on the first day of February 1960. I was hopeful that not only were we back in my beloved city but that the long series of rejection slips would come to an end. The idea for A Wrinkle in Time had come to me during our camping trip, a response to my discovery of Einstein and Planck and the other physicists with their entirely new view of the universe. I had started Wrinkle as soon as we got home, and finished it in a white heat. It was very different from my six earlier published books but I loved it, and I hoped that it would mark a turning point. So the continuing rejection slips were especially painful.

  Heartbreak House was a wonderful way for Hugh to return to Broadway, working with Maurice Evans, Diana Wynyard, Pamela Browne, Alan Webb. We still have the poster with his name listed among the stars, hanging in the kitchen.

  One evening Alan Webb said affectionately, “Hugh, your accent is middle-Atlantic and is fine, though occasionally you come on, announcing, ‘I am Hector Hushabye.’ Your problem is that you walk like a cowboy. The English actor is tight-assed.” True. Hugh always walked with a graceful, long-legged lope.

  Once again we were in the precarious world of the theatre, not knowing what would happen when Heartbreak House closed, how we were going to be able to pay the rent, the school tuition.

  But Hugh got jobs. Television. A couple of movies. He replaced Melvyn Douglas in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. He had a minor role in this play, and one night when Douglas was called to California because of his mother’s illness, Hugh went on in his place. When the announcement was made that Melvyn Douglas’s role would be played by Hugh Franklin there was an audible groan, but few people asked for their money back, and at the end of the evening Hugh received an ovation. So when Douglas left, Hugh moved into the star dressing room and played the role for six months.

  We moved back to New York just in time to experience the sixties, the polarization of the country by the Vietnam War, the concomitant passion for peace, the awakening of the women’s movement, the fight for civil rights, hippies and flower children. Young men wore long hair; fur coats became taboo; odd or ethnic jewelry was fashionable.

  One evening, probably a Sunday, because Hugh was home, we were expecting our younger daughter, Maria, and her current boyfriend. Both were in the middle of their hippie stage. In preparation for their arrival Hugh combed his hair over his forehead, put on jeans and a red turtleneck sweater decorated with several chains of my beads; put an earring in one ear; wore dark glasses; went barefoot. When the doorbell rang he went to open it, expecting Maria and her friend. Instead, it was our son-in-law Alan with a visiting British bishop arriving well before we expected them. Both men were in full clericals, and the bishop had just landed in New York for his first visit to America. I still smile when I think of what he must have felt when the door was opened to him and he saw Hugh. What kind of father-in-law did Alan have? But he took it in stride, with good humor. And Hugh’s own face was a study in shock, as he blurted out, on seeing the black suits and dog collars, “But I thought you were Maria and Jim!”

  We moved back to the city, I thought, just in time. Our girls were starting to go to school dances and we didn’t have to worry about their being driven home from the Regional School by some boy who was drunk or stoned. In the city they walked home or took the bus.

  A fashionable East Side church started a Saturday evening dance for young people and our girls were invited. How splendid, we thought, how safe. Josephine went to the first dance; Maria was spending the weekend with a friend. About ten o’cloc
k the phone rang. Hugh answered. It was Josephine. “Daddy, come get me.” The party had moved to someone’s apartment. Liquor flowed. She went into a bedroom to look for a bathroom and there was a couple in bed. She fled and called home. Hugh took a cab over to the East Side and rescued her. Thank heaven she had the courage to call, “Daddy, come get me!”

  Our return to the city and the theatre meant that I had to re-examine many of my ideas about marriage. I wanted to be up at night when Hugh came home from the theatre, to fix his supper, to talk. This was important. But we were no longer free to put our children to bed at two in the morning, to let them sleep until we arose. I got up in the morning with the children and fed them their breakfast and saw them off to school. I do not burn the candle well at both ends. I got overtired and ill. So we called a family conference.

  I said to the kids, “Your father needs me more in the evening when he comes home from the theatre than you do in the morning before school. We don’t like each other very much in the morning, anyhow. I’ll get everything ready for you the night before, but you’ll have to get yourselves up and dressed and off to school. When you get home in the afternoon I’m yours, all yours. But if you want a living mother this is how we’ll have to manage.”

  It was a difficult decision, but I still think it was the right one. Our children were in on the conference, felt that of course they were old enough to manage on their own. I think it helped them to feel independent. They were seven, ten, and twelve, and competent youngsters, well able to care for themselves in the morning. I had a few pangs of false guilt, largely because I still could not find a publisher for A Wrinkle in Time.