The Love Letters

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “No—” she protested, but he silenced her with an authoritative wave of his hand.

  “And the nuns in those damn schools terrifying you with God so all you could see was an imaginary sinfulness and a needless guilt.”

  “No—” she started again.

  “Drink your wine. You are not inadequate, Charlotte. You are everything I could ever hope for in a woman. Stop trying to compete with that bitch Violet. Be Charlotte. Have some more children. That’s your vocation, you idiot.”

  She looked at him bleakly over her wineglass.

  He met her gaze, said, “I see.” He took the glass from her hand, put it down on the cloth, then turned and kissed her. She felt his teeth against hers, then his tongue forcing itself into her mouth; her body’s response was so violent that she was able to use the wave of passion that shook her to pull away, to stand, to turn from Gus to the door. Her flesh rebelled at the interruption so that she thought she would be sick there in the emptiness of Gus’s room before she could get the door open.

  She wrenched the door open and ran down the corridor to the elevator, leaving Gus there, leaving her coat and bag, and ran out into the black and shocking air. There at the curb a taxi stood, waiting for her, it seemed, and she climbed in and leaned back against the cold leather. When the taxi drew up in front of her apartment she realized that she had no money, but the doorman paid the driver and she hurried upstairs.

  Patrick was sitting up, reading a medical magazine. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “To the ballet with Gus. You knew that.”

  She went past him and into the bathroom where she splashed cold water over and over again on her hot face. She did not know Patrick had followed her in until he said, “You whore.” He grasped her roughly, pulled her into the bedroom and flung her down on the bed, dragging savagely at her clothes.

  Afterwards, when Patrick, rage and passion spent, was asleep, she lay there, wrapped in the cocoon of a strange small miracle. She did not question the miracle, she simply accepted it. It was her love of Patrick. It was quiet and had the peace of after battle.—I want his child, she prayed.—I think I am ready for it now.

  She lay there in the miracle of peace and she lived again the other birth, Andrew’s birth.

  Until she accepted Andrew’s birth, how could she accept his death? And until she had accepted his death, how could there be life?

  She had had a long and hard labor with Andrew. She did not do it well. It took over forty-eight hours. The longer it took the angrier Patrick got. He kept appearing with ill-concealed impatience. When Gus ordered exercise he walked Charlotte up and down. Then, when Gus said she was too tired, when Gus sent her to bed, Patrick kept stalking in and out of the small room where she was knotted with pain. He was furious with her and he made no attempt to hide his rage and contempt. She looked at him in a brief pause between pains and started to ask him to help her, but the pain caught her again.

  Her legs cramped, muscles knotting against the pain. She clenched her fists so tightly through the peaks that her palms were bloody. One of the nurses cleaned her hands with alcohol during a moment of respite and it was a relief to feel the sharp sting, to know that she could feel something through the tight web of agony within which she was bound. The nurse cut her fingernails and gave her the roughness of a towel to clutch. “It doesn’t matter if you tear it, Mrs. Napier.” It was obvious from the concern of the nurses that things were not supposed to happen like this, it was not supposed to hurt this much. Gus had prepared her well, but not for anything like this.

  “Sorry, Charlotte, love,” he said. “This is a rough one.”

  Patrick stood at the foot of the bed and glared at her and at the great drops of sweat that beaded her upper lip as a fresh pain started. “You’re doing it abominably,” he shouted. “Can’t you even have a baby like anybody else?”

  Gus said sharply, “Shut up, Patrick, or get out.” Then he put his hand gently on Charlotte’s belly. “Try to hold on,” he said, his hand firm, tender, somehow by the authority of its touch holding the pain at bay. “If I give you anything against the pain now it will just slow things down even more and be bad for the baby. You’re dilating too slowly, but you are dilating, and once that’s done you’ll start working, pushing pains, and you won’t mind those.”

  She was blinded by pain.

  “Don’t be so bloody brave,” Patrick said. “Go ahead and yell, goddam it, Cotty.”

  She had been trained not to yell. All her life she had been trained not to yell (why had James Clement sent her to those convent schools?), and the pain had become, in any case, beyond yelling.

  There was a consultation. Should they do a Caesarian? How much more could she bear? They kept checking her heart. The heavy grey bandage of the blood-pressure machine was left on her arm. The consulting doctor said something about danger to the baby.

  “I don’t give a goddam about the baby,” Patrick said. “You’ve got to stop this. I can’t stand it.”

  Gus, his hand again gentle on her belly, said, “Charlotte, love, we’ve decided—”

  She interrupted him, gasping, “Gus, I’ve got to push—”

  “No, Charlotte, you haven’t dilated—”

  “Can’t help it—pushing—Gus—”

  There was a rush of activity and suddenly she was at work. Now her voice sounded in a deep “a-a-a-h!” It was, as Gus had explained to her early during her pregnancy, like the work noise sailors make pulling on a rope. One, two, three, heave, a-a-a-h! There was no need to be ashamed of or to fight this noise. There was no need to brace herself against this pain. She could, instead, throw herself into it. One, two, three, push, a-a-a-h!

  A rush, and a ripping, and a splitting, and then there was Gus holding the tiny wet thing up by its heels and a new cry came into the world, Andrew’s first healthy, indignant yell.

  And she was filled with glory.

  Gus had been tender and gentle and strong and Patrick had behaved abominably.

  Can you be tender and comforting as Gus was only if you are not really involved?

  Patrick.

  You cannot behave this abominably to anyone unless you are sharing the pain beyond the point of reason.

  She lay on her side in bed looking at the sleeping shadow of Patrick and her love blotted Gus out so that there was only the miracle of Patrick.

  Towards morning she fell asleep and when the alarm clock wakened them he looked at her with such disgust that the miracle vanished, was forgotten as though it had never happened. She remembered it only when she realized that there was to be another child. She held the miracle to her when she told Patrick, but how could he know what he was slapping out of her hands?

  With cold and bitter calm he said, “It can hardly be my child, can it, Charlotte? We haven’t been sleeping together this winter.”

  “Once,” she said. “Once, Patrick. The night you—”

  “Raped you? A child conceived in hate?”

  “I loved you,” she said. “I loved you, Patrick. I lay there all night and prayed for a baby—”

  “And your indulgent God has answered your prayer? I don’t believe you.” He got up off the side of the bed and tied the cord to his pajamas. His chest with the springing dark hairs was winter-white. She saw that he was very thin. “Why do you think I haven’t slept with you?” he demanded, turning away from the bed and pacing the length of the room.

  “Because you haven’t wanted to, I suppose—”

  He wheeled around, continuing his pacing, up and down, up and down. “Because I couldn’t. Because I’ve been impotent. Because you’ve made me impotent.” His voice was grating, his face, above the paleness of torso, flushed. “Every once in a while I would go to bed with one of the nurses to prove to myself that I could still be a man. I went to somebody who wasn’t looking for anything from me, who didn’t expect anything, who was willing to let me be myself.”

  “But Patrick—” she started.

  “It’s n
ot wholly your fault,” he said. “We are both inadequate, and when two inadequacies meet, nothing can come, they can produce nothing.”

  “We produced Andrew,” she said. “I’m pregnant again.”

  He did not hear. “I’m sick to death of people demanding of me what I can’t give. You’ve demanded a kind of grief of me over Andrew that I can’t—a kind of love that I can’t—” He stood, looking at the drawn blinds at the window. “I cannot remember anything all my life except being eaten alive by demands.” He was crying.

  “Violet—” she started.

  “Violet has done nothing but demand,” he said, not turning, holding himself intolerably erect. “The louder she has shut up the more she has demanded. I had to be special because I was her child, and then what’s more and worse I had to compete with your damned dead father. With both of you. And with my own father’s heroism. May he rot in South America. And my grandmother. I had to be a man. I had to be a doctor like my father. When I wanted to draw and paint she said it was effeminate. She’d picked up enough clinical terms and she dinned them so into me that I became so terrified of being a homosexual I couldn’t have an ordinary masculine friendship. I’ve never been let alone long enough to find out who or what I am.”

  She went to him, tried to put her arms around him as she would have around Andrew.

  But his pain was beyond comfort.

  “You’re Patrick,” she said. “I love you.”

  “You haven’t the faintest idea who I am,” he said. “You’ve never looked beyond your own needs, your own demands. Look at me, Charlotte. Look at me as I am. I am not Violet. I am not James Clement. I am not my sainted father. And I am not a great surgeon. I am an adequate surgeon. Let’s give up the pretense we’ve all been trying to maintain, that surgery is for me what music is for Violet, or—” He brought his hand down in a heavy, angry gesture on the window sill. “I’ve been railroaded into being a success. This phony game was all I could play so I played it. I’m a society doctor because that’s all I’m capable of being. That’s all I am and it’s what I am. Don’t ask anything more of me. I don’t kill my patients but that’s about all that can be said of me. If there’s going to be a complicated operation I call in a specialist out of terror and inadequacy and on Park Avenue this works. The more money I charge the better they think I am. The hell with them. The hell with you. Leave me alone. I’m going to the hospital.”

  He pulled off his pajama bottoms. He dressed. When she tried again to come to him, to stop him, he shoved her with the flat of his hand, still damp from his tears, so that she fell onto the bed. She had never seen Patrick cry before. He went out of the apartment and slammed the door.

  He did not come back the next morning. When she called him during office hours his nurse said that he was not available.

  So she left. She packed her bags and left.

  This was what she had to face now, not Patrick’s words, but her own flight, her refusal to accept, to bear, to endure.

  She had tried to flee from Patrick

  from Andrew

  from the responsibility of being either mother or wife

  from the responsibility of the new life within her

  She looked across the garden table in surprise. She said wonderingly to the doctor, “I came here to reject. But what I have to do is accept, isn’t it?”

  to accept

  to accept Patrick

  Patrick not as I would like him to be, but Patrick as he is

  to accept myself, not as I would like to be but as I am

  to move from the noisiness of my own demands into love

  For Mariana it was a different acceptance, but she must have come to it in the end. In the end she had faced her sin, she had repented, but first there had to be an acceptance of what had happened, as it had happened, that it was what it was and not what Mariana would have liked it to be.

  I have discovered that you yourself were less important to me than my own passion.

  Yes.

  Did she know what she was saying when she wrote this? For this one sentence the letters might have been read. All the things that made their fame, all the scandal, everything else could be forgotten. But that one sentence would stay.

  And in the end Mariana became the abbess.

  But first?

  The unpardonable, as usual.

  The publication of the letters was unpardonable.

  And then, once that was done, once their fame, or infamy, had swept through France, it was inevitable that they would get to Portugal, to Lisbon, to …

  … In Lisbon a fat priest walked up to a small, rather disreputable bookstall. He looked through the books as though searching for something special, picked one out of a pile and was eagerly leafing through it when a plainly dressed woman came up to him.

  “Good morning, Father.”

  Surreptitiously the priest slipped the book back into the pile, took in its stead a religious tract. “Good morning, my daughter.”

  Was it he who had taken the letters to the bishop, who in his turn had …

  In the Convento de Nossa Senhora da Conceição the abbess stood very still in the center of the room, holding a book in her hands, looking at it with a face that was stern and pure in its complete control of visible emotion. She put the book down on the table and walked slowly, heavily, as though the rheumatism that crippled Mother Escolastica had crept into her bones, to her prie-dieu, where she knelt, the look of stern concentration never changing.

  In the Alcoforado villa Francisco Alcoforado, in a beruffled nightshirt, was chasing a giggling chambermaid about his enormous four-poster bed. Sitting on top of one of the carved posts and gibbering excited comment was Pinto, the monkey. The maid fell onto Dom Francisco’s prie-dieu (it was a much more ornate one than the abbess’s) shrieking with laughter. “I’m safe here. You can’t catch me here!”

  The light glinted on the gilded crucifix above the prie-dieu as the door opened simultaneously with a sharp knock, and Baltazar precipitated himself into the room and thrust a book into his father’s hand, then turned to the chambermaid with deadly calm. “Get out.”

  She turned to Dom Francisco, but he was looking at the book, his mouth slightly open in shock, a vein pulsing dangerously at the side of his forehead. Baltazar pulled the girl up off the prie-dieu and she scuttled out of the room, the monkey at her heels looking back in chattering terror.

  “My God,” Francisco said, “what will this do to my position at court?”

  It was inevitable that the abbess would be unable to keep it from the sisters. There was too much going back and forth between the lay sisters in the kitchen and the tradesmen from the town, between the schoolchildren and their parents. The choir sisters themselves were often sent to market where they were given vegetables and eggs.

  Beatriz went with Joaquina, each carrying one of the large convent marketing baskets, moving from stall to stall where the farmers gave them squashes, melons, heavily salted meat and fish. A group of French foot soldiers, drunk, came rolling through the narrow street that ran the length of the market. Two of them broke away from their companions and swaggered after the two nuns. One of the group called after them, “That’s right, good luck to you, a nun’s the tastiest morsel of all.”

  One of the men thrust his reeking face close to Joaquina’s. “How about it, Sister mine? Shall I climb up to the balcony tonight?”

  Blanching, Joaquina tried to shove him away.

  The second soldier thrust a volume of the letters into Beatriz’s basket. “Present for you, sweeting.” He tried to kiss her, but a farmer came out from his booth and grabbed the two soldiers by the collars. “Move along now and leave the sisters alone or I’ll have you turned in.” As the Frenchmen rejoined their companions, laughing noisily and shouting lewd suggestions back at the sisters, the farmer cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Don’t listen to those foreigners, Sisters. They’ve had too much wine. They don’t mean anything by it. Sorry they disturbed you.”
>
  Beatriz bowed her head in acknowledgment. “Thank you for helping us. I will tell the Most Reverend Mother the Abbess Brites of your kindness. Come, Sister.” Moving swiftly she led Joaquina out of the market.

  “It’s insufferable,” Joaquina said.

  Beatriz did not slow her long, swinging stride. “Apparently not, since we seem to be suffering it.”

  They walked on in silence, moving to the side of the road as a carriage with galloping horses came up in a cloud of choking dust and passed them.

  In the carriage was Francisco Alcoforado. He did not see the two nuns. He saw nothing but his own anger and humiliation. When the carriage drew up at the convent gates he leaped out without waiting for his man to open the door for him and rang the bell violently. Mariana opened the gate, and when she saw who it was, she cried out softly, “Papa!”

  He struck her across the mouth, shoved her aside, and strode through the garden and into the convent, unannounced.

  Beatriz took the baskets of food to the kitchen. As she put them down on the table she remembered the book and pulled it out, glancing at the title: Letters of a Portuguese Nun. She caught her breath and opened the book. Yes. There was no evading it. The letters were those Mariana had written to Noël. Turning with quick decision, Beatriz moved to one of the fireplaces where a caldron of soup was stewing and threw the book into the flames. No one had seen. No one must ever see.

  In her study the abbess was praying and did not turn around when her door was banged open. Her brother went up to her and held the book in front of her eyes. When her eyes closed as she attempted to continue her prayer he deliberately pulled open one of her lids. She stood up, stiffly.

  “To what do I owe this most unusual honor?”

  Dom Francisco flung the book down on her desk.

  The abbess glanced at it. “I have already seen it.” Her suffering over Mariana, and her own disciplines, had carried her beyond the point of showing shock.

  His eyes bulging, Dom Francisco shouted, “Am I to be spared no humiliation, no disgrace? When Baltazar was sent a copy of this—this—filth—from France, I thought it could be suppressed, but no, Jesu Christus no, well enough could not be left alone. Can you guess the kind of jokes I’m made the butt of? No, of course you can’t, damn you; and your bishop, the sniveling hypocrite, has the gall to twit me about it. It’s entirely your fault. If you had been more careful this would never have happened.”