On the long afternoons when the last snows melted on the slopes of the mountain and the squirrels foraged over dry, brown grass, the sunlight striking against the white birches, mazes of shadows on the blue rocks, the occasional pheasant absurdly flamboyant in that setting of tree and rock above the city – in the midst of all this, the color returned to Catherine’s wasted face, a little strength to her damaged body, and a flood of joy to her mind. Even while lying in bed she made sketches for pictures she intended to paint the moment she was strong enough to stand. Seed catalogues arrived and she made out lists of vegetables and annuals she wanted to plant as soon as we got down to the country. Shortly after Easter she came home, and we were down in our country place in time to see the irises.
Now began our last phase together. Catherine would never again have the appearance or the life of a well woman. The full curves of her body had faded away, and she looked tiny, frail and so light she seemed like a gossamer. Her heart was much weaker and was beginning to fail in its duty to the other vital organs. That strange sentence of Jerome’s: “She must be allowed to live her own death.” She was doing it now. The tranquillity I used to observe in her face in rare moments now became constant. Her features were, if you looked at them individually, wasted; yet her face had never seemed to me so beautiful as it was then. Like Jerome’s, only much more so, it had become so transparent one almost felt one looked at a spirit. Light was in it. Light came out of it. Light came from her constantly into me.
The beloved movements of everyday living returned, the familiar sharing of sights and sounds and of smells as ordinary as coffee on a summer morning while a kitten played in the sun. Our garden shone in June: poppies, peonies and roses, and then all around us in the country a welter of wildflowers in July. The sword was still over her as the bomb was over the world, but she lived, and that summer was the richest we ever had together. I would watch her sitting at her easel – she sat at it now – and her face was happy and serene, the eyes younger than when she had been a girl, and she moved at last into her own style. Sometimes when I looked at her painting I would feel a pang of agony at the knowledge that she would not have time to leave enough work behind for the world to remember her, but by the summer’s end I did not mind that thought any more. She was beyond ambition. She was painting because she loved it. There was joy in her face, she saw friends, she even gave a few parties for them. Her sense of humor became quietly delicious, there was gratitude in it, as though being able to make a joke was something for which to be grateful. Gratitude – it was the thing she felt most of all that summer.
Omnia exeunt in mysteria.
What we saw in Catherine’s face now that she was visibly dying is something I would not venture to describe. Everyone who knew her then will always remember it. She was so transparent. She seemed to be closer to us than she had ever been, yet to be somewhere else most of the time, somewhere beyond from which she came back to visit. She was alive and yet she was not; she was half-translated and yet she was still here.
The clouds crossed the sky, country rains washed the gardens, moons shone on the lake and the hillsides, cicadas sang in the August grass, boys and girls fell in love. In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence. What else is left but that, in the end? All our lives we had wanted to belong to something larger than ourselves. We belonged consciously to nothing now except to the pattern of our lives and fates. To God, possibly. I am chary of using that much-misused word, but I say honestly that at least I was conscious of His power. Whatever the spirit might be I did not know, but I knew it was there. Life was a gift; I knew that now. And so, much more consciously, did she.
One evening of a towering sunset after rain, Catherine looked at me across the porch and said: “You know, I’ve been so incredibly lucky all my life. I can’t get over it, how lucky I’ve been. And I’ve never felt luckier than I feel now.”
We became quiet with each other. When Sally went away it was as though all the words had been spoken and no more were needed. So much life we had seen and felt. Its purpose? It did not seem to matter that one could not answer that question. Our past was not dead but now the present had flowed over it, as the future would flow over the present until the time came, and we both knew it would come soon – when she would be gone and I would be left. Nobody – this I knew – can ever know in advance how he will feel when he encounters the finality. Often I dreaded it; often I rebelled against this fate of ours. But toward that summer’s end I had almost ceased to think about the future, and she never thought of it at all. Remembering the years when she had wrung life and joy out of pain and perpetual exhaustion, I knew, deep inside, that this struggle was not valueless. Sometimes I tried to imagine what it would be like when she went, and to prepare myself for the shock of solitude. It was impossible to do so. Jerome in his obscure wisdom, Jerome with his obscure power, had made it possible for me to live her death with her, and for that I was tranquilly grateful to him. What if only a handful of people enjoyed her pictures? What if the ocean of time overwhelmed her? It overwhelms us all. The kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his own servants and delivered unto them his goods. And unto the one he gave five talents, and to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his abilities, and straightway he took his journey … And the Lord said, Well done, thou good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many. Enter thou into the joy of the Lord.
So, in the end, did Catherine, and her face showed what I can only describe as the joy of the Lord. I knew its light would remain with me. I believed, though I would not know until the time came, that I would be able to say with a whole heart nunc requiescas in perpetuum. Already the world surrounding me was becoming a shadow. I loved it more than I had ever loved it and so did she, but it was a shadow in which politics, the echoes of which passed into the work which still earned my living, seemed the most unreal of all.
Enough for now. Later, when the time came when I would have to continue alone, later would be the time for the prayer I knew she hoped would be answered: nunc requiesce in me.
Watch that Ends the Night Page 44