Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  Several times Hugh has said, “I love our rut.”

  So do I.

  During Hugh’s annual vacation while he was on All My Children we traveled together, and this was a special joy. Our favorite vacations were on freighters, but these became more and more difficult for us as the freighter schedules got more and more erratic. Hugh’s vacations were set months ahead of time, with no flexibility.

  But we always found someplace to go, and after he left the TV show our trips for the USIA were great fun. Perhaps it is because these trips are different from our regular vacations, perhaps it is because we have reached a new phase in our marriage, but we are delighted with each other’s presence, delighted with all the new places we see, the people we meet, delighted with a collaboration in our readings that is, in its own way, as much a joyful method of making love as any other.

  I look at my husband’s beloved body and I am very aware of the mystery of the Word made flesh, his flesh, the flesh of all of us, made potential when that first great Word was spoken that opened the tiny speck from which came all the galaxies, all the solar systems, all of us.

  That great beginning was probably a simpler action of the Word than that Word becoming incarnate, the ultimate unfathomable mystery of the Word made flesh.

  We cannot explain the incarnation. It is understandably referred to as “the scandal of the particular.” It takes every leap of the imagination to accept this amazing impossible gift of the Creator.

  I have long felt that the sacrifice of the mystery of the Word made flesh was a far greater sacrifice than the crucifixion. That was bad, yes. Terrible, yes. But it was three hours on the cross, three hours. This summer I have seen in this hospital people dying in agony and by inches, week after week, month after month. Oh, I do not negate the agony on the cross. The abandonment of Jesus by his closest friends. The seeming failure of all for which he had become flesh. It was terrible.

  But there are worse deaths. And these deaths make no sense at all unless the mystery of the Word made flesh is present in them too; death makes no sense at all if the God who is in it with us is not in the dying body of the young man down the hall; the people killed, burned, in the most recent air crash; in my husband, in me, our children.

  I have come to the hospital this morning just after receiving what my friend Tallis calls “the holy mysteries,” bread and wine which are bread and wine but are also more than bread and wine, since the bread and wine, like the stars, like the snow, like all of us, is made of the original substance of creation, that which Jesus put on as human flesh. It is by these holy mysteries that I live, that I am sustained.

  We ate out on the terrace again last night; there may not be many more nights this late summer when it will be warm enough for us to eat outdoors, and that, too, was a holy mystery. We live surrounded by mystery.

  Carrying my babies was a marvelous mystery, lives growing unseen except by the slow swelling of my belly. Death is an even greater mystery. I don’t want to be afraid to ask the big questions that have no answers. The God I cry out to in anguish or joy can neither be proved nor disproved. The hope I have that death is not the end of all our questions can neither be proved nor disproved. I have a great deal left to learn, and I believe that God’s love will give me continuing opportunities for learning. And in this learning we will become truer to God’s image in us.

  It is said that the subconscious mind cannot conceive of its own extinction. Most of the time the conscious mind cannot, either. We know that we are going to die, but most of the time we don’t believe it.

  There is a theory that people have to finish working out relations until love is perfected. How that is going to be brought about is in the hands of the Maker, and I am willing to leave it in the realm of mystery, in the design of the misterium tremendum et fascinans. Do lovers meet again after death? That, too, is held in the mystery of the Word made flesh. It is a reminder that faith is not for the things we can prove, but for the things we cannot prove; that it is not for the conceivable but for the mysterious.

  Each day in my alphabet of prayer I recite, in faltering Spanish, words attributed to John of the Cross; even the saints, perhaps particularly the saints, grapple with the questions with which we all fumble.

  No me mueve, Señor, para quererte

  El cielo que nos tienes prometido.

  Ni me mueve el infierno tan temido

  Para por eso no ofenderte.

  Tú me mueves, mi Dios; muéveme el verte

  Clavado en una cruz y escarnecido;

  Muéveme el ver tu cuerpo tan herido,

  Muévenme tus afrentas y tu muerte.

  Muéveme al fin tu amor, y de tal manera

  Que aunque no hubiero cielo, yo te amara,

  Y aunque no hubiero infierno, te temiera.

  Ya no tienes que darme porque te quiera,

  Que aunque lo que espero no esperara,

  Lo mismo que te quiero te quisiera.

  My friend Dana translated it for me thus:

  I am not moved, my God, to love you

  By the heaven you have promised me.

  Neither does hell, so feared, move me

  To keep me from offending you.

  You move me, Lord, I am moved seeing you

  Scoffed at and nailed on a cross.

  I am moved seeing your body so wounded.

  Your injuries and your death move me.

  It is your love that moves me, and in such a way

  That even though there were no heaven,

  I would love you,

  And even though there were no hell,

  I would fear you.

  You do not have to give me anything

  so that I love you,

  For even if I didn’t hope for what I hope,

  As I love you now, so would I love you.

  I have always taken these last lines to mean: Even if what I hope for is not what is going to be, no matter what, I would love the one who made me.

  These are not new thoughts for me, nor for most of us, but they are made more poignant by the events of this summer. We still do not know the results of the bone and liver scans, the CAT scan. The doctors still have not made up their minds which route to take. Do nothing more than continue the radiation as a palliative to slow down the kidney failure? Or take the risk of surgery? It would be a big risk—but worth it, if the cancer has not spread into the bones or liver.

  The doctors know how I feel. I want Hugh to live, dearly, dearly do I want him to live, if he can be returned to real life. But I do not want dying (rather than living) to be prolonged for him. Over and over we have promised each other that we will not let this happen.

  Most crucified people took three days to die on the cross; Jesus was given death in six hours.

  The medical profession is at a time of crisis because of the amazing instruments of modern medicine. They save lives. But they also prolong dying horrendously. The Church is at a time of crisis, too, seeming to fall into the same dilemma as the scientists, that of attempting to prolong the life of the body even when the person is gone. God did not do this to Jesus. Shouldn’t we have learned something from that?

  Ten

  Touch. The Mystery of the Word Made Flesh. I sit on the edge of the hospital bed and hold Hugh’s hand. I have to touch him very carefully, very gently, in order not to awaken the pain, and I long to put my arms around him, to have him put his arms around me. I want us to be able to hold each other. But right now the holding can be only that of the spirit.

  Hugh has worked through a lot these past months, all the appropriate steps of fear and anger and rejection and acceptance and into a warm and loving and gallant response to all the indignities. My gratitude to the nurses who help him keep as much modesty and human dignity as possible is unbounded. But neither they nor I can take away from him the inevitable loneliness of gravely serious illness.

  Some of the nurses themselves are going through their own passions. One has a son with leukemia who is waiting for a
bone-marrow transplant. Another has just watched her mother die. Because I am present in the hospital for so many hours each day I have the opportunity to come to know some of these people who hide their own hurts as they work on healing for others.

  It is the fourth of September. Once again this evening I read that anguished cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” The cry of the Word made flesh, the total mystery of the human being.

  Big decisions have been made today. Lung and liver and bone scan, CAT scans show that perhaps the platinum chemotherapy was not wasted. The cancer, aggressive though it is, is contained within the pelvic area. The radiation treatments will be continued to shrink the malignancy where it has spread into the ureters, but this is barely palliative. Hugh is going to die of renal failure if something is not done at once.

  There can be no waiting until he is strong enough. Next week the big surgery will be performed. It is big surgery at the best of times, the remaking of all the body’s internal plumbing, and this is not the best of times. We all know—Hugh, the doctors—that it is a risk, and we are all agreed that it is a risk worth taking.

  When Herb talked with Hugh about it this morning, and asked him what he felt, Hugh said, “I’m all for it.”

  It is Hugh’s own decision. None of us could make it for him. He has made it, firmly, alone with his doctor.

  We have not talked a great deal about it verbally, Hugh and I. But we have talked enough. Better, we have kythed, that silent communion which deepens between two people as they live together for many years. When our fingers are touching, we are communing as well as communicating.

  When I touch the mystery of his flesh, “Word of God, our flesh that fashioned with the fire of life impassioned,” I am touching ultimate mystery.

  There is a mystery to all love. Why does this one man so move me? Why does this small corner of our planet make me feel that I am home?

  We live in an uprooted society. During the long years of my father’s dying my mother was uprooted. When he died she returned to her roots, to a Southern town where almost everybody was kin, where her childhood friends still lived. I used to love to read Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, her story of a wonderfully warm and variegated New England family, and Mother told me that her Southern family was very much like that. Almost all of her friends and playmates were cousins.

  One of the best things about this present, difficult summer is that I have felt rooted. I am in the house that Hugh and I have loved for forty years. During the brief times that Hugh has been at home, rather than in the hospital, I have dug in the garden; sometimes he has been up to sitting in a garden chair watching as I have planted, weeded, plunging my hands into the rich earth. Amazingly, the vegetables have flourished, despite the inevitable neglect.

  The forty years of our marriage are deeply rooted in Crosswicks. In a chest of drawers in the attic are children’s clothes which are still passed around as needed, especially the beautiful little smocked dresses my mother gave to my daughters. Even the pots and pans are part of the rootedness. This double boiler was given to me early in our marriage by my beloved Mrs. O, who loved me without qualification until she died in her mid-nineties, and whose love I believe is still with me. This old-fashioned rice cooker came from my grandmother’s kitchen in the South. This rebound Bible belonged to my great-grand-mother Madeleine L’Engle, after whom I am named; her hands turned and marked the pages I read; her tears spotted them.

  When I walk the dogs at night I walk on land that has been familiar under my feet for forty years. It may be because I was a city child, born and raised on the asphalt island of Manhattan, that the actual feel of grass, of earth, is something of which I am acutely, joyfully aware. Above me the stars are part of the rootedness, stars which are patterned in the sky in a particular way in this corner of the planet.

  I am blessed in being rooted with my family, with Bion and Laurie making their own roots in this house which is well over two hundred years old. Charlotte is with us frequently. Maria and John are coming this weekend, with John’s parents staying with the babies so that the young parents can have one night of sleeping straight through the night; and so that they can have some time with Hugh. Josephine calls her father in the hospital every evening, and is ready to take a plane East at any moment. This kind of love dwindles the miles.

  Food is part of the rootedness, food and water. Our water comes from our own artesian well. We know, as much as can be known nowadays, what we are drinking. Much of what we eat comes from the garden, and the evening meal is a special part of the rootedness, when we linger at the table, lighting candles or oil lamps as the sky darkens. We have consciously eaten well this summer, knowing that this quiet time of relaxation and pleasure is important, for we are weary, the body/spirit worn by all that has been happening. We eat the first young corn, which Hugh planted and now cannot eat. Fix a platter of sliced tomatoes and green peppers, sprinkled with basil and chives.

  At night I go upstairs to a bed that is generations older than my marriage, a high four-poster bed in which Hugh and I have made love, and in which others before us have made love for more than two centuries. There is a good feeling to the bed, as there is to the house. Life has been lived in it fully. There are no residual auras of anger or frustration, but a sense of the ordinary problems of living worked out with love and laughter.

  Each time Hugh has had to go back to the hospital it has been an uprooting wrench for him. He yearns for the familiarity of his own bed, sheets, blankets, his own windows, with their own view. His own bathroom, with his toothbrush in the china holder. Being uprooted is one of the hardest parts of hospitalization. I leave him in the evening and go home and it is as though my roots are restored.

  We talk with him about the new projects in and about the house and land. We tell him that the corn he planted just before this illness struck him is ripe for eating. But we cannot take away his uprootedness.

  When he sleeps, he looks like an El Greco saint, translucent, beautiful. But this is a beauty that makes me ache as I look at it. I want the old rootedness, and I don’t know if that will ever be given again.

  Tonight it is suddenly chilly and damp, and Bion, Laurie, and I eat in front of the big fireplace in the living room. How often we have sat there, eaten there, in comfortable companionableness. I remember Hugh saying that looking at the flames in the fireplace gives one somewhat the same sense of peace as looking at the ocean waves rolling in to the shore.

  A friend came by this afternoon to visit with Hugh and remarked that his unhappiness with the world of the yuppies is that their rootedness is only in money—money not as that which makes it possible for us to buy bread and milk and a roof over the head, but as a symbol of transitory vanities. Was he being too harsh? I’m not sure.

  But it reminded me that my own rootedness must be expressed in and through symbol and sacrament or it is not rootedness at all. When I dig in the garden it is God’s earth, given us to care for and nourish. It is all undergirded by the understanding of what “a goodly heritage” I have, and this gift is one I must honor in all that I do and all that I am. But right now the pattern is clouded with chaos, as still one more thing and still one more thing goes wrong for Hugh.

  It is decided to give him hyperalimentation to prepare him for surgery. This means that a triple lumen must be surgically placed in his upper chest. In this way he will be able to be given much greater nourishment than by the smaller IVs. He is still not able to eat well enough to do without this extra strengthening. The radiation treatment is causing the expected nausea, which of course makes eating all the more painful.

  A general surgeon is called. He tries to put a needle in the left side of the chest and is hindered by Hugh’s old broken collarbone. Even on the right side it takes two tries before the X-ray shows that all is in place. It is a tiring and uncomfortable procedure.

  Late in the afternoon the surgeon returns to the room to tell us that as he was trying to get into the left side of the
chest, the slightly enlarged left lung was nicked, and Hugh has a small pneumothorax—a partially collapsed left lung. The surgeon says there is only a small amount of air in the lung, and he thinks it will absorb by itself. Laurie had warned us of this possibility; it is evidently something which cannot always be avoided in this new procedure.

  But it is one more thing, another echthroid attack on a body which has already endured one indignity after another.

  This morning when I come into Hugh’s hospital room the oncologist is saying, “Hugh, it seems that anything that can go wrong is still going wrong.” This morning’s X-ray shows that the pneumothorax has increased by forty percent, rather than decreased. This is Saturday. Surgery is scheduled for Tuesday. There is not time to wait for the lung to reinflate on its own.

  The young general surgeon comes in. Amazingly, I am allowed to stay in the room, to hold Hugh’s hand. It is explained that a tube will have to be put between the ribs and into the chest so that the invasive air will be sucked out. The tube will have to stay in place until after the surgery.

  The surgeon prepares, donning surgical gloves. A nurse is with him to hand him the local anesthetic, sterile fluid, ultimately the scalpel. I stand at the head of the bed where I can clasp Hugh’s hand and he can hold hard when the pain is bad. He is given several shots of local anesthetic. Then the surgeon takes a small scalpel and makes an incision a little over an inch long just above the ribs. Then he tells Hugh that what is coming next is going to hurt, and he will hear a great whoosh of air. The surgeon puts his fingers in the incision, feeling for the right place; then the tube is thrust in and air does indeed whoosh out and Hugh almost screams with pain. But the tube is in, and then the incision is sewn up. There is a plastic tank hung at the side of the bed. “You will sound like an aquarium,” the surgeon says, and so Hugh does. He is exhausted and in pain.

  For the first time since this last hospitalization he complains, whispering, “This is really one thing too many …” It is, it is. I am grateful only that I was allowed to be with him. I hope it helped to have my hand to hold, my presence to assure him of my love. It was probably easier for me to be there with Hugh than to have to wait out in the hall. But I, too, am exhausted; my body feels as though it has taken some of Hugh’s trauma.