Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
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“But they didn’t work!”
“Of course they worked. Not the way you wanted them to, but your godfather died a good and holy death.”
A friend calls, reaching out via the phone, and tells me that she has just come from running an Elderhostel weekend. She had this group of older men and women go outdoors to try to find a symbol in nature that would be meaningful for them. One woman came to her with an empty nutshell, saying, “My husband died a year ago, and I am like this nutshell, empty.”
I know that my nutshell is not empty. It is full of memory, memory of all my life, memory of the forty years of Hugh’s and my marriage. It is the foundation of this memory which helps me keep on with my work, and that is what Hugh would want me to do. I go to a university campus to give a lecture, and it is hard, because the last two times I was there I was with Hugh, giving readings with him. But this year’s students do not know the past. The lecture goes well. I am exhausted, but the step has been taken.
Someone tells me a story of a bishop who lost his wife and child in a tragic accident. And he said to his people, “I have been all the way to the bottom. And it is solid.”
Yes.
A couple of years ago a friend called me from her hospital bed, demanding, “Madeleine, do you believe everything that you have written in your books?”
I said yes then. It is still yes today.
But grief still has to be worked through. It is like walking through water. Sometimes there are little waves lapping about my feet. Sometimes there is an enormous breaker that knocks me down. Sometimes there is a sudden and fierce squall. But I know that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.
We are not good about admitting grief, we Americans. It is embarrassing. We turn away, afraid that it might happen to us. But it is part of life, and it has to be gone through.
I think of the character Mado (modeled after my great-grand-mother Madeleine L’Engle) in The Other Side of the Sun. She lost home, husband, children, and she made the journey through the burning flames of the sun. It cannot be gone around; it has to be gone through. But my grief is a clean grief. I loved my husband for forty years. That love has not and does not end, and that is good.
I think again of that evening after I had come home from a speaking trip and said to Hugh, “Wherever I go, you are with me.” Surely that is still true.
Does a marriage end with the death of one of the partners? In a way, yes. I made my promises to Hugh “till death us do part,” and that has happened. But the marriage contract is not the love that builds up over many years, and which never ends, as the circle of our wedding band never ends. Hugh will always be part of me, go with me wherever I go, and that is good because, despite our faults and flaws and failures, what we gave each other was good. I am who I am because of our years together, freed by his acceptance and love of me.
Bion and Laurie are at Crosswicks. That is indeed a blessing. And so are my granddaughters a blessing. Charlotte and one of her college friends are living with me in the apartment in New York. Léna is just up the street in a Barnard dorm and comes to us frequently. One evening I want to have some friends in for dinner. So do my granddaughters. So we have a combination dinner party, and to my amazement and joy the girls love the chronological mix.
Every other week or so, Charlotte will say, “Gran, it’s time we had another party.” We have anywhere from a dozen to two dozen guests. I do the cooking, the girls do the cleaning up. We usually represent six decades. Last Sunday evening the youngest was six months old; there were two ten-year-olds, half a dozen teenagers, several in their twenties, thirties, forties. I’m not sure about the fifties. And then all the way up to me, in my late sixties. Conversation is general, with no sense of chronological alienation, and this is how it should be. Some evenings there are performers among the guests, and then we have music. Chronology swirled for me as Léna and Charlotte belted out some of the songs from Broadway musicals their mother had sung when she was their age.
One evening I sit in my quiet place in my room, to read evening prayer, write in my journal, have some quiet being time. The sky over the Hudson is heavy with snow. Léna and Charlotte are downtown at a Chelsea coffeehouse with friends; they will have to take the subway home. I write in my journal that the more people I love, the more vulnerable I am.
Vulnerable—the moment we are born we are vulnerable, and a human infant is the most vulnerable of all creatures. The very nature of our being leads us to risk.
When I married I opened myself to the possibility of great joy and great pain and I have known both. Hugh’s death is like an amputation. But would I be willing to protect myself by having rejected marriage? By having rejected love? No. I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it, not any of it.
The girls and I have acquired two kittens. They are vying for my attention. One of them starts diligently grooming me. The other bats at my pen. This is less an invitation to play than an announcement that it is time for bed. Even with the kittens I am vulnerable as they curl up trustingly beside me and hum their contented purrs.
I get to Crosswicks whenever I can, to relax in the deep rhythm of the house, filled with the living of over two centuries. That richness of experience permeates the rooms, life lived to the utmost, birth and death, joy and grief, laughter and tears.
It is good to be part of the laughter as we sit around the table by candlelight. A wood fire both lightens and warms the room. None of the fullness of life in this old house is lost. The forty years of Hugh’s and my marriage is part of the rhythm.
Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Yes. And always will be.
A Biography of Madeleine L’Engle
Madeleine L’Engle was the award-winning author of more than sixty books encompassing children’s and adult fiction, poetry, plays, memoirs, and books on prayer. Her best-known work is the classic children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal for distinguished children’s literature and has sold fourteen million copies worldwide. The Washington Post called the science fantasy tale of an adolescent girl and her telepathic brother’s journey through space and time “one of the most enigmatic works of fiction ever created.”
L’Engle was born on November 29, 1918, in New York City, where both of her parents were artists—her mother a pianist and her father a novelist, journalist, and music and drama critic for the New York Sun. Although she wrote her first story at the age of five and devoted her time to her journals, short stories, and poetry, L’Engle struggled in school and often felt disliked by her teachers and peers. She recalled one of her elementary school teachers calling her stupid and another accusing her of plagiarism when she won a writing contest.
At twelve, L’Engle and her family moved to France for her father’s health (he had been a soldier during World War I and suffered lung damage), and she was sent to boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Two of her novels, A Winter’s Love and The Small Rain, drew on her experiences in Europe. She returned to the United States three years later to attend another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. L’Engle flourished during these years and went on to graduate from Smith College with honors in English.
After college, she moved back to New York City and started work as a stage actress while devoting her free time to writing. During this time, she published her first two novels, The Small Rain and Ilsa, and wrote many plays that were produced in regional theaters. While touring in a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard as an understudy, she met actor Hugh Franklin, and they married in 1946. After the birth of their daughter Josephine the following year, they bought an old farmhouse, which they called Crosswicks, in Goshen, a small town in rural Connecticut, planning on weekends in the country. When she became pregnant with their second child, Bion, they moved to Crosswicks permanently and ran the local general store. Their family grew with an adopted daughter, Maria. After nearly a decade in Connecticut, they mo
ved back to New York so her husband, who would go on to star in All My Children, could focus on his acting career. She was happy to return and hoped that she would find success as an author again. Indeed, A Wrinkle in Time was published in 1962.
The family often returned to Crosswicks over the years and these visits inspired L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journals, including Two-Part Invention, which tells the story of her marriage, and A Circle of Quiet, in which she explores her role as a woman, mother, wife, and writer.
Back in Manhattan, L’Engle worked as a librarian and writer-in-residence at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a position she held for more than three decades. Her lifelong fascination with theology and philosophy, and her personal faith, largely influenced her work. A Wrinkle in Time hints at many Christian themes, yet religious conservative groups have spoken out against the book, accusing L’Engle of misrepresenting God in a dangerous world of witchcraft, myth, and fantasy. It has been one of the most banned books in the United States. Apart from her religious influences, she said that Einstein’s theory of relativity and other theories in physics also served as inspiration. The novel’s combined use of both science fiction and philosophy established it as a sophisticated work of fiction, proving L’Engle’s belief that children’s literature deserves a place in the literary canon.
However, L’Engle initially struggled to achieve success and recognition for her work, and she almost quit writing at forty. She finally broke out onto the literary scene in 1960 with Meet the Austins, the first in her popular young adult series about the Austin family, which includes Newbery Honor Book A Ring of Endless Light. Even A Wrinkle in Time was rejected by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Although it was an instant commercial and critical sensation and has never gone out of print, the book’s strong female protagonist and intellectual themes were unusual in children’s fiction at the time.
L’Engle’s long literary career expanded far beyond the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. Among her many books are adult novels dealing with relationships, faith, and identity, including Certain Women, A Live Coal in the Sea, and A Severed Wasp; several books of poetry; and more overtly religious works like her Genesis Trilogy of biblical reflections. She won countless accolades, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, the National Religious Book Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention. In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal. L’Engle lived out her final years in Litchfield, Connecticut, and passed away at the age of eighty-eight on September 6, 2007.
A portrait of L’Engle in her first years of life.*
L’Engle ice-skating in Brittany, France, circa 1926.*
L’Engle with her dog, Sputzi, circa 1934.*
From July to September 1943, the Repertory Players at Straight Wharf Theatre produced two of L’Engle’s plays, The Christmas Tree and Phelia. She acted in both plays, among others.
L’Engle with her husband, actor Hugh Franklin, in 1946.*
L’Engle and her husband renovated and ran a general store in the late 1940s.
L’Engle always illustrated her family’s Christmas cards, including this one from 1952.
L’Engle with her granddaughters Charlotte Jones Voiklis and Lena Roy at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Cathedral Library, circa 1975.
L’Engle in the library of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1977.
L’Engle at a Manhattanville College commencement ceremony, where she received an honorary degree in 1989.*
L’Engle with her granddaughter Charlotte Jones Voiklis the night before the young woman’s wedding on August 30, 1996.
L’Engle speaking at a church in 1997.
L’Engle at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, circa 1997.*
*Photograph courtesy of the Madeleine L’Engle Papers (SC-3), Special Collections, Buswell Library, Wheaton, Illinois.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This work is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of her experiences over a period of years. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed in order to protect the identity of certain individuals. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 1988 by Crosswicks, Ltd.
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4128-7
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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