Inland Passage

by Jane Rule

  At the height of her career, magazine sales tripled while one of her novels was being serialized. Airlines paid her to fly for the use of her name. She had never kept track of foreign translations or even movie rights. To the well over a hundred books credited to her name had to be added as many again which she had written under a pen name or ghosted. Writing was her compulsion. Her first novel had been published when she was seventeen, and, though her work was now suffering the shift of popular taste, her publishers tended to complain about her ability to change with the times rather than about her outdated plots.

  “You can’t have homosexual characters in a book of yours,” they protested. “What will your readers think?”

  “All my readers are dead,” Ella Carr replied.

  In her prime, she had turned out three books in a summer and was paid a hundred thousand dollars apiece for them.

  “In the thirties,” she’d remind you, “that was a lot of money.”

  Now she managed, against failing energy and eyesight, only one book a year and worried about doctor’s bills and taxes, because advances were small, sales a meager ten thousand. People still knew who she was, though more and more often it was expressed in surprise not only that she was still writing but still alive. One young reviewer dealt ungenerously with her latest book as if it were a posthumous work. She sent a postcard which read, “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” and signed it Ella Carr.

  She had had her own television program. The great movie stars had been her friends. Her fan mail hadn’t stopped.

  She could still fall in love, her chief diversion since she could remember. When she was hardly more than a child, Ella had herself written fan letters, love letters not only to actors and actresses, dancers, singers, concert pianists, but to any attractive friend of her parents, to her school teachers. She was rarely ignored, for those who present themselves to the world, even so unlikely a part of it as the classroom, do so to be admired and loved whatever other motive their modesty requires. To be out of love now and then, sometimes for weeks at a time, was for her like a serious illness. Ella had to be in love to get anything done. All the paraphernalia of that, the signed programs and photographs, the notes and letters, had long since gone to university archives waiting for a biographer she hoped would be less impressed than amused at the times beyond number she had offered her heart and other parts to a tasteless range of the accomplished. Though Ella enjoyed her celebrity and treated her own fans with attentive kindness, what inspired her still was other people’s gifts. At the moment she was corresponding with the most promising tenor at the Met, her son’s new law partner, and a young starlet whose fortune was probably in her legs.

  “I’ve never tried to resist a good looking woman,” she was the first to admit now that she was old and the world had begun to catch up with her.

  Those infatuations, though occasionally alarming and inevitably disappointing whether requited or not, went on being as necessary to her as they had been when she was thirteen. Now in her old age they had the quality of those first loves, involving far more ardor than appetite. Recently without the least envy or regret, Ella had seen her thrice-divorced daughter marry a man she was in love with herself. Ella suspected it was a gesture of gallantry toward herself since he knew how she fretted over that child, who, no matter which way she was turned, had never fitted into her mother’s life.

  Children don’t, even the ones who do as you tell them and grow up to correct all your own mistakes. Ella had a daughter like that, too, who loved being a mother and didn’t believe in hiring other people to do your dirty work for you. She was quite a good painter, but it was a hobby, nothing more. Her real name was Rebuke. In fact, she was proud of her mother’s accomplishments and ready to be daily dutiful even through a long dying.

  When her own mother was dying, Ella was taking up nearly a floor at the Savoy in London. She was in China when her father died. She wasn’t at home even when her first born son was killed in an automobile accident. The only one she had been there for was her husband, but, holding him in her arms, they both knew it was years too late.

  “How did we miss it?” he asked.

  He had walked out, for obvious reasons: he couldn’t stand the demands of four children under five years old; he was jealous of her work; he was sexually deprived. She could not stand to have him come into the same room. She began to shake.

  Years later, a doctor said, “There’s nothing abnormal about that. You were exhausted. You had to protect yourself. Four children in five years is too many, particularly now that they all live.”

  If Ella had had the pill, there might never have been children. She might have had her marriage instead. But could he have shared her with her work before he’d established his own place in the world? She doubted it. She wouldn’t have found it easy to give up children, but for him she could have done it. Writing, no. What she gave up as involuntarily as she shook was her husband. Free of his support, writing and motherhood could not be in conflict. She had to support the children.

  “Every writer needs a wife. Sex hasn’t anything to do with it,” Ella Carr had repeated in too many interviews, as if confessing would protect her from judgment.

  No one paid the slightest attention. She was a woman “alone” with four children.

  “I might as well not exist!” Tudy cried.

  In public, yes, but holding Tudy up to private scrutiny revealed her as the essential fact of life. How many successful men felt the same resentful humiliation when they recognized their success depended on the sacrifice of their wives? At least Ella hadn’t sacrificed her husband. Perhaps somewhere he had pensioned off his own guilty discard as she had hers. And bought her silence.

  Ella had supervised the burning of the letters because they would have brought at least ten thousand dollars to the archives since they covered the twenty years of Ella’s life when she had been the most sought after, probably the most highly paid writer in the world. After the first three years, they were love letters only out of duty, but no one could have mistaken the nature of the relationship. Ella, who had never in her life written an explicit love scene, had been graphic in letters home to a woman she no longer desired but could not live without.

  The children never knew. Tudy was for them their caretaker and tyrant, who could also, but incidentally, reduce their mother to tears. They called her Tudy, one of those inexplicable, nearly interchangeable children’s names for people whose power they would like to soften. If she appeared in Ella’s biography, she would be the excellently paid, intermittently resented children’s nurse and sometimes housekeeper who, aside from nervous breakdowns, served faithfully until she was retired with a generous pension to Arizona.

  Once, after her husband died, Ella almost called Tudy back, thinking she would go mad alone with all her losses, but she kept remembering how bitterly difficult it had been to get rid of Tudy, something neither of them could go through again.

  “Oh Mother,” her motherly daughter agreed, “Tudy’s too old now to be any help. If you’re lonely, borrow one of your grandchildren for a while.”

  Instead Ella wrote a novel about an old woman, saintly in her love for her possessive and ill-tempered nurse/jailor. One of the secrets of Ella’s success was to write lives she could not have lived. In the month it took to write, she confirmed that she could work again and be alone. Work had always been her rationalization.

  The guilt, however, was never more than dormant, woke as she increasingly did in the dark hours of the morning and stank like something dead but undisposed of in the house. It was so unlike what she felt for her husband and her son, whom she missed and regretted and tried to call back from the dead. Ella was secretive about the séances except among a small group of like-minded people as unresigned as she was to losing those they loved.

  Her husband and she had been the great loves of each other’s lives. They had not divorced, neither of them having any reason to. Once the shock of separation settled to being the catas
trophe they had not been able to avoid, each reached out to the other across the necessary distance. He never remembered the children’s birthdays; he never forgot hers. She sent him congratulatory notes as his own successes became a matter of public record. When he read she was giving a speech in Chicago, he suggested they have dinner. They met like that a couple of times a year. When she was forty, two months after a hysterectomy, they became lovers again. Tudy had her second nervous breakdown, part of her cure a promise that she would never be betrayed again. That promise was not kept. Meetings between husband and wife became elaborately secret, a week-end stolen from a lecture tour, a fictitious business meeting in New York with agents and publishers. They were far better lovers than they had been, and they were still in love. When the last child left, he said to her, “I want to come home.”

  Ella never explained about Tudy. He was intuitive and tactful. He had to wait two years for Ella to bully and buy Tudy out of the house to make room for him to return. A month after he finally came home, he had a stroke. In a year he was dead.

  Ella could not lay him to rest. She had too recently got him back. Though she believed they would finally be reunited in the eternal marriage only imperfectly managed in this life, she could not wait.

  The child named Rebuke, when she found out about the séances, said, “Well, if it’s any comfort to you, why not?”

  It was, though Ella was never certain she had any direct contact. Trying gave her something to wait for other than death.

  Ella’s first born had been her favorite, perhaps only because she’d been able to pay absolute attention to him for the first year of his life. She knew him as she never knew the others. He was the only one Tudy hadn’t taken over. He was the only one who didn’t fiercely resent Tudy once he was grown. He had married a girl Ella was hardly less in love with herself. Visits to them had to be nearly as clandestine as those with her husband.

  “It’s not unnatural for me to want to see my grandchildren,” Ella argued.

  “It’s not them. It’s her you want to see…and him,” Tudy answered sullenly, accurately.

  “Of course, I do. Why not?”

  “I’ve shared you with four children. I’ve shared you with the world. I put up with your fans. I’ve put up with your infatuations, your lies, your dirty weekends. I’ve given up my own family, my own life…”

  “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “You didn’t have to ask. I gave.”

  “What do you expect? What do you want?”

  “You.”

  “Don’t you have me? Do you have to lock me in a cage as well?”

  “Sometimes I’d like to.”

  Tudy had been a pretty woman, but like so many who spent their days with peanut butter sandwiches, donuts, and chocolate milk, their nights awake with one sick child or another, she was thirty pounds overweight, and her hair was permanently frizzy and limp from all the steaming for croup and asthma. What made her and so many like her unattractive was a face deprived of gratitude.

  Ella was grateful. She could not have lived her life without Tudy. A present for Tudy was more important than presents for the children when Ella came home from a trip. Tudy treated any gift as insufficient and suspect.

  “You haven’t known my size for fifteen years,” about a sweater that didn’t fit. “When would I have time to read?” about a book. The closest she came to being pleased would be when she said something like, “Well, you must have had quite a time!”

  Ella was guilty. She tried to make life easier for Tudy, hired maids Tudy nearly always fired, bought household gadgets Tudy refused to use, sent the children to camp so that she and Tudy could take holidays together, catastrophes because Tudy could be jealous of a palm tree if Ella admired it, and Ella’s fans were everywhere, discovered her even when she traveled under another name.

  “I can’t help having a recognizable face!” she protested.

  “You can’t live without attention.”

  Since Ella couldn’t avoid it, was it such a crime to enjoy it? The cost, Tudy’s hour-long crying jags, from which she recovered enough to continue accusations, was too high. Their only peace was at home when Ella was working twelve hours a day and needed to be guarded against all interruptions, even a child’s broken arm.

  “Don’t whine for your mother. She’s got to pay for it,” Tudy would say, stern and matter-of-fact.

  It was Tudy who left their bed to tend the nightmares and earaches.

  “You need your rest.”

  Ella did spend time with the children, special time, like any loving and normally busy and preoccupied father. She could make that loss up to them but Tudy had to be their mother.

  “She did the best she could,” Rebuke admitted. “It was just that we wanted you, and you always seemed to be away or working.”

  Ella never gave way to the temptation to justify herself to the children. Tudy did that for her as well, of course. She reminded them that their mother paid for the food on the table, the roof over their heads, the clothes on their backs. If they weren’t appreciative then, they grew up to be pleased by cars and trips to Europe. Ella bought them houses when they married, paid their psychiatrist’s bills, paid for their children’s dental hardware, paid and paid and paid.

  It was Tudy they finally learned to understand and forgive. All three of her surviving children still wrote to Tudy, sent her Christmas presents, even sometimes went to visit her.

  “She was there,” Ella’s younger son explained. “We took her too much for granted.”

  Her thrice-divorced and recently married daughter said, “If she’d adored us, we might have forgiven her sooner. She didn’t. Like all the world, she adored you.”

  Alert even now for betrayals, Ella knew Tudy would never discuss her own feelings with the children. She had not even been able to confide in the very sympathetic psychiatrist called in to help her through her second crack-up. It was Ella who told him. He had comforted Ella, but whether he had ever importantly reached Tudy Ella doubted.

  It wasn’t the sex that was wrong but the claims made as a result. Ella, who had decided she was not only frigid but hysterical about any adult body within twenty feet of her, was wonderfully surprised and comforted by Tudy’s love-making, which gave her surer pleasure than she had found in her marriage bed and a new arrogance in the pleasure she could return.

  Ella concluded that she should have been a man. Should she have seen instead that no one should be a woman? It was a question she had made sure her biography would never include the information to pose. For herself, she still hoped she would not be required to answer it.

  Ella wanted to remove Tudy from her life in such a way that there was no hole, or, if Ella had to look at that jagged emptiness, she’d rather have others to blame, the children who had played with the puzzle of her life and lost some of the pieces, Tudy herself who had changed in those years out of all recognition until there simply was no place for her in Ella’s life, which had also changed.

  “People outgrow each other,” Ella said to herself and then revised, as she rarely did in her work, to “one person outgrows another.” Still, the betrayal is basically inadvertent. Ella had not meant to grow away from Tudy any more than she had meant to shrink from her husband. If only she and he had had more than his dying year, their love might have closed over those intervening years, healed the interlude with Tudy until it ached only before occasional thunderstorms. As it was, her marriage could bracket but not bridge either Tudy or the children, who acknowledged their father as he lay dying only out of obedience to Ella. He handed out his blessings in the same spirit.

  “There were always so many of them,” he said, tired and weakened by the thought.

  For Ella there were only three. She had buried their firstborn son two years before his father died, who had not been at her side. Tudy was.

  When Ella saw her at the airport, she understood the Greek custom of murdering the bearer of bad news. Fate and feeling are outside the laws of ju
stice.

  “I don’t want you at the funeral!” Ella shouted. “Gloating!”

  Of course, Tudy went, and if her tears were more for Ella than for the boy, there was no malice in her even for the young widow. She opened her arms to the next generation of fatherless children, grandchildren who had long since abandoned Ella as had their mother for a new husband, but they still saw Tudy without knowing she had ever been a threat to them.

  “Nobody’s abandoned you, darling,” Rebuke reassured her. “Look at all these birthday cards and presents.”

  From fans, from old lovers, from children and grandchildren, but there was none from Tudy.

  “Once I leave this house, don’t expect me to be like him, sending you stupid roses. Once I leave this house it’s over; it’s dead. When you find out you can’t live without me, tough!”

  Tudy also assured Ella there would be no meeting in the next world.

  “It’s bunk!”

  “Maybe it is,” Ella had agreed bitterly. “We’ve had hell enough in this one.”

  Now she badly wanted husband or son to send some message that they were there waiting, would be, when the time came, on her right hand and on her left, to hold and protect her at last from the fiery call if it came. There was, however, no more message from them than from Tudy.

  One day there was no mail. For the next week Ella could not work, waiting for it to happen again. Then her daughter was ill and did not come to see her for ten days. Even the television, which she saw inadequately anyway, flickered and blurred.

  “The world is going out,” she confided in herself. “Surely that isn’t dying.”