When we returned to the United States after several years abroad, we went to spend the summer at the beach with Dearma. What I am going to tell happened at summer’s end. It was Sunday night. During the day it had been hot and sunny, and friends and relations dropped by to see us and Dearma; we sat on the veranda and rocked, fanned ourselves with palm-leaf fans, and drank cool drinks. It was quiet, and typical of a Southern Sunday. We went early to bed.
While I was getting undressed I had the strange, almost asthmatic feeling of pressure that sometimes comes before a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are frequent at the beach, but I knew that this oppression did not come from storm. It was a presage of something terrible.
It never occurred to me to tell my parents. I did tell God. My faith was still a child’s faith, and still very much my own. My school was Anglican, with chapel morning and evening; I never felt the presence of God very strongly there; I did feel him at night in bed when at last I could be alone in dark and silence. So I prayed to him now: Please, don’t let anything terrible happen. Please.
The answer was very clear; not in words, though I am going to have to set it down in words, but in certainty:
Not only was something terrible going to happen, but I now knew what that something was to be: my grandmother would die that night.
Dearma was in her seventies; her heart was not very good; but there was nothing to indicate imminent death. I was too young to have heard about second sight or pre-vision. I am not at all sure what my parents would have said had I gone in to them. I did not. I prayed and prayed that the answer would be changed, but it was not.
I didn’t do much sleeping. I would slide in and out of the shallows of sleep, always on the edge of wakefulness, always listening, waiting. Sometime in the very early hours of the morning I sat up, completely awake, as though I had heard a sudden noise, though I had not. I listened. Nothing. But I knew that this was the time to get my parents. I went to their, room and woke them, saying, “Please go in to Dearma.”
We went in and she was breathing strangely, her last breaths. She was not conscious; she went to bed and to sleep and died. The doctor came and pronounced her dead. The breathing had stopped; she was very still.
There was no wind. The ocean seemed to be holding its breath.
Coffee, as usual in times of stress, was brewed by somebody. At dawn my mother and I went swimming. I think Father stayed with Dearma.
I remember putting on my bathing suit and walking across the beach with my mother in the strange cool of dawn, totally in communion with her, walking silently into the shallow ocean, into the waves, and into a sunrise more beautiful than any I remember before or since. It was the sunrise which made everything bearable, which helped me to accept that death is a part of life.
There are more things, Horatio. We will never understand them all, not now, not here. But we are foolish to underestimate them, explain them away, pretend they do not exist.
16
So Einstein’s calling on the necessity for mystery in the scientist’s life did not surprise me. I was rather more startled to discover Freud saying that the two groups of people who defy psychological knowledge are the artists and the saints. None of the rules of psychology hold for them. Thornton Wilder also classed artists and saints together in Our Town. After Emily dies she is allowed to come back to earth to relive a day, and she is torn apart by her awareness of all that she has always taken for granted. She asks the stage manager, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” And he answers, “No. The saints and poets, maybe—they do, some.”
Tallis once told me that a great mathematician said, “Mathematics is the conscious setting aside of facts until we have found a conclusion.” Einstein’s own work demonstrates his words on the mysterious; he did not come to his theories by working them out consciously; rather, he took enormous leaps, like Nureyev defying gravity, and there were his conclusions waiting for him, out in the realm of the mysterious. After that he had to go back and get it all worked out mathematically.
Copernicus discovered that the earth revolves around the sun in the same mysterious way the great artist works. Mathematically, it can be proved that the sun, the planets, the stars, all revolve around our earth, that we are the center of the universe. But this was not an artistically beautiful equation, and this bothered Copernicus. He didn’t have any idea that he was going to discover that we revolve around a middle-sized sun in a backwash of our particular galaxy; what he was interested in was making a mathematically elegant equation. He did, and as a result the entire theory of the universe changed; it shook some people’s belief in God—it’s rather nice to think that the universe was created entirely for the benefit of mankind. For others this discovery, and all the discoveries of science, strengthens faith in God’s glory and mystery.
The great astronomer, Tycho Brahe, put on his court robes before going to his telescope. The artist should have the same reverence in approaching his work. Something happens in his life, in the world around him, which is the equivalent of an ignoble mathematical equation. So he “puts on his court robes” and sometimes, as a result, we get a House of Atreus, or a Dr. Faustus, or a Wuthering Heights; or, I venture to say, a Wind in the Willows, or a Sleeping Beauty, or an Alice Through the Looking Glass.
Why do we try to cut down the forests and remove the brambles and thorny roses of this radiant land?
One of my English aunts now lives in an ancient, rheumatism-producing castle in Scotland, because it has been in her husband’s family since before the Norman Conquest. But she lived for many years in Kenya, where, after her first husband’s death, she managed his vast estate singlehanded. On one of her rare trips to the United States she was staying in New York, at the Hotel Plaza. And she was puzzled because she was wakened, every morning, by the roaring of the lions, exactly as though she were still in Kenya. Lions on the island of Manhattan? It seemed most unlikely, and she mentioned it to a friend. The friend became most agitated over my Aunt Alexandra’s mental health, and insisted on setting up an appointment with a well-known psychiatrist who, when Alexandra’s symptom was described, felt that it was urgent that she see him at once. Fortunately, before the appointment, Alexandra mentioned hearing lions at dawn to another friend, who laughed and said, “Of course. You’re hearing the lions in the Central Park Zoo. It’s just across from the Plaza.”
I wish we didn’t try to turn real lions into imaginary ones. The lions are not imaginary. They are real. I have experienced a lot of lions in my lifetime, and these encounters are what I write about, and why I write as a storyteller: it’s the best way to make the lions visible. But the lions must be those of my own experience. Our projecting from the tangible present into the “what if” of the imagination must be within the boundaries of our own journeying.
17
When I do something wrong I tend to alibi, to make excuses, blame someone else. Until I can accept whatever it is that I have done, I am only widening the gap between my real and my ontological self, and I am thus excluding myself so that I begin to think that I am unforgivable.
We need to be forgiven:
to be forgiven in this time when fish are dying in our rivers; in this time of poison gas dumped on the ocean floor and in the less and less breathable air of our cities, of children starving; being burned to death in wars which stumble on; being attacked by rats in their cribs …
we need to be forgiven in this grey atmosphere which clogs the lungs so that we cannot breathe, and breathless, spiritless, can no longer discern what is right and what is wrong, what is our right hand and what is our left, what is justice and what tyranny, what is life and what is death.
I heard a man of brilliance cry out that God has withdrawn from nations when they have turned from Him, and surely we are a stiff-necked people; why should He not withdraw?
But then I remember Jonah accusing God of overlenience, of foolishness, mercy, and compassion.
We desperately need
the foolishness of God.
18
During my last year in boarding school I had attained the elevated position of Head of School; I was editor of the yearbook and literary magazine, played leading roles in the school plays. I had finally made it. I also had all the answers, theologically speaking. I went, with all the other Episcopalians in the school, to the Episcopal church on Sunday; it bored me totally, and it was then that I picked up the habit of writing poetry during sermons. When it came to the General Confession in Morning Prayer I was, with proper humility, willing to concede that I occasionally left undone a few things which I ought to have done (I was, after all, very busy), and I occasionally did a few things which I ought not to have done (I was, after all, not “pi”); but I was not willing to say that I was a miserable offender and that there was no health in me.
It’s a stage we all go through; it takes a certain amount of living to strike the strange balance between the two errors either of regarding ourselves as unforgivable or as not needing forgiveness.
During the Crosswicks years when the children were little, a new hymnal was put out for the Congregational church. In the back is a section of prayers, and it includes the General Confession from the Book of Common Prayer. It is an interesting commentary on human nature in this confused century that precisely those words which I could not, would not say as an adolescent were deleted from the Congregational prayers.
By that time, in the midst of my fumbling agnosticism, it had become very clear to me that I was a miserable offender, and that there was very little health in me. I wasn’t falling into that peculiar trap of hubris which tempts one into thinking that one is sinfuler than thou. If I never got through a day when I didn’t do at least one thing I regretted, this was assuredly true of everybody else I knew. Perhaps my friends were not tempted, as I was, to do a Gauguin, but they had their own major temptations. Perhaps their sins of omission were less in the housewifely area than mine, but surely they had their own equivalent. I was rather upset by the mutilation of the Confession.
“It’s all right to think you can be virtuous if you try just a little harder when you’re an adolescent,” I told Quinn, “but I don’t like having the church behave like an adolescent.”
When we moved back to New York a series of those non-coincidences started me back into the church in which I was born, the church of John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, Shakespeare. A friend of Alan’s, doing his Ph.D. in seventeenth-century English literature, became an Anglican, saying that one can hardly spend so much time with all these people without sharing their beliefs. When, shortly after our return, the Episcopal church put out a trial liturgy, I was unhappy with it for two major reasons: it was not worded in the best language of which we are capable; and it made the confession before receiving communion optional.
We haven’t done a very good job of righting the wrongs of our parents or our peers, my generation. We can’t say to our children, here is a green and peaceful world we have prepared for you and your children: enjoy it. We can offer them only war and pollution and senility. And this is the time we decide, in our churches, that we’re so virtuous we don’t need to be forgiven: symbolically, iconically forgiven.
If the Lord’s table is the prototype of the family table, then, if I think in terms of the family table, I know that I cannot sit down to bread and wine until I’ve said I’m sorry, until reparations have been made, relations restored. When one of our children had done something particularly unworthy, if it had come out into the open before dinner, if there had been an “I’m sorry,” and there had been acceptance, and love, then would follow the happiest dinner possible, full of laughter and fun. If there was something still hidden; if one child, or as sometimes happens, one parent, was out of joint with the family and the world, that would destroy the atmosphere of the whole meal.
What is true of the family table is, in another sense, true of the conjugal bed. Twin beds make no sense to me. I can understand an occasional need for a separate room, but not separate beds. If a man and wife get into bed together it is very difficult to stay mad. Both Hugh and I have tried, and it hasn’t worked. The touch of a hand is enough to dissolve me into tenderness; the touch of a cold foot enough to dissolve me into laughter. One way or another, reparation is made, relations restored, love returned.
Only a human being can say I’m sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.
19
I’ve mentioned Dana, Dana Catherine de Ruiz, who has been a member of the Crosswicks family for so long that I cannot remember a time when she has not been a bright and beautiful part of it. We knew her first as a girl in the grade above Josephine at school. The two of them were pleasant acquaintances but became real friends one summer when they were both on the same job, were both overworked, and fled together to sit in an ancient cemetery for a small respite. If you will think about it, there are not many people with whom you can sit on a tombstone and be at peace.
One day as we were walking home down the lane, Dana said, “I don’t think of you as my godmother. I think of you as my godfriend.” Surely that is the right description of our relationship. Dana may be young enough to be my daughter in chronology; in eternity she is considerably older than I am. There is nothing we don’t talk about, and we share a great many friends—but since our friends range in age from one year to ninety, that’s not as odd as it may sound.
Dana knows that the idea of a Little Gidding, that community of people in England three and a half centuries ago, working together, suffering together, rejoicing together, never losing an awareness of their responsibility to the entire world, is immensely appealing to me. I certainly understand, in my blood and bones, the need young people today have to group together in “communes,” to try to bind up in community the wounds of our present fragmentation. This is what I am groping towards myself, and what I find tangible in the summer in our Crosswicks family, and in the winter in the family of the Cathedral Close.
Walking down the lane through the shifting shadows of the trees, I mentioned longingly to Dana my desire to live, eventually, in a Little Gidding kind of community, and she said calmly, “You do.”
Yes. Wherever there is unity in diversity, then we are free to be ourselves; it cannot be done in isolation; we need each other.
Before we eat dinner at night we all join hands around the table, and, for me, this circle of love is the visible symbol of all I hope for, and all that Dana meant.
20
One of the things I am most grateful for is my very lack of ability as a pastry cook. A decade ago when we first moved back to New York from Crosswicks, we put our children in a nearby school, St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s. We did some soul-searching over this, because we feel strongly about the value of the American public-school system and we wanted to be part of it. My husband went through the Tulsa public schools. I, growing up in New York and Europe, went only to private or independent schools. I hope it’s because I was for so long in school abroad that I know so little about American geography. When Hugh and I were in a play in Chicago, the stage manager came in to the theatre with her dog, saying that they had had such a lovely walk by the lake. “Oh, did you walk around it?” I asked.
I was given a geography book for Christmas.
Hugh and I were married in Chicago during the run of another play—we met in The Cherry Orchard and married in The Joyous Season, and after the play closed we bought a very second-hand car and set off to see his family in Oklahoma, and mine in the South. I remember two things about the car: the license plates for Illinois in 1946 were made of soybeans; and there was something wrong with the gearshift; it kept slipping back into neutral. We drove through the Ozarks with one hand holding the recalcitrant gearshift in high.
I had never been west of Chicago, and I knew nothing about Oklahoma. I blush to report that I asked Hugh if the streets of Tulsa were paved. Granted, he was leading me on. It was when he told me tha
t his mother put on shoes to go to church that I realized that I was being had.
But it isn’t fair to blame independent school education. And the public school in our neighborhood when we returned to the city was one of the worst in New York. We were, and are, more than grateful for St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s—and of course, with a name like St. Hugh, it was obviously the place for us.
One day the children came home with the usual mimeographed petition for a cake for the bazaar. They were new at the school and they wanted their mother to do the right thing. “Please, Mother.” So I baked a cake.
I’m as bad at cakes as I am at cherry pies. The last cherry pie I made was shortly after we were married and Hugh had some people from the Theatre Guild in for dinner, and I was determined to impress them with my wifely virtues. When it was time for dessert I didn’t think the pie crust was brown enough, so I put it under the broiler. We had to get the fire extinguisher.
So I made a cake for my children’s sake. It tasted delicious. But it didn’t look the way it tasted. It was lopsided: a mess. I wrote the headmistress a note which ran more or less like this: “I tried. I baked a cake. Because my family loves me, they will eat it. But it is obvious that this is not the way in which I can be of use to the school. Is there anything else I could do, more in line with my talents? Is there a play we could help with, or anything like that?”
Within a few days Hugh and I found that we were directing the Christmas pageant, with the entire Cathedral of St. John the Divine as our stage: Mr. and Mrs. Max Reinhardt. It’s quite something to see the three kings march in their glorious costumes the length of two city blocks.
If I had been able to bake that cake for the school cake sale I might still be in darkness. Father Anthony (I speak of him so casually: he is Metropolitan of Surozh and Exarch of the Russian Patriarchal in Western Europe) said last spring that it is good to have turned to God as he did, as I did, after a time of darkness, because then one truly knows what it is like to be dead, and now to be alive.
A Circle of Quiet Page 21