Love Letters

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Just soup and bread and cheese and fruit,” Violet said. “I cannot eat a seven-course meal in the middle of the day and do any practicing in the afternoon.”

  “I haven’t heard you this morning.”

  “No, child, you wouldn’t, from here. I put the guest room at the far end of the house so no one would be disturbed by my noises. Of course I can’t control Orlando Gibbons. He’s enough to waken the dead.” She went to the window and called out to the dog, “Gibb! Be quiet.” So that was his name. He went on barking. “It’s the man with the fish,” Violet said. “Gibb can’t stand him. So I myself am rather on guard. I have great faith in Gibb as a judge of character.”

  “Why haven’t I seen Orlando Gibbons before?” Charlotte asked. “He came to greet me this morning. He’s lovely.”

  “He approves of you, then,” Violet said. “Good. I thought he would. He’s my Beja dog. I can’t travel with him because of the English quarantine rules. Julia’s very fond of him and he’s an excellent watchdog. He also is very fond of music. He’ll lie absolutely quietly underneath the harpsichord for hours, and he never howls no matter how intolerably monotonous my noises.”

  “I like your noises,” Charlotte said, “even when you do two or three notes over and over again for an hour.”

  “Why? There’s no beauty in the struggle to maintain and improve technique. It’s just what makes for beauty later on, one hopes.”

  “That’s why, then,” Charlotte said. “It gives me a sense of foundation.”

  Violet did not reply. They ate their soup in silence, delectable soup; wherever Violet was, she would see to it that she had a good cook. She broke off a crust of bread, cut a morsel of cheese. “Cotty—”

  Charlotte looked at her warily, broke bread in her turn, waited.

  “If you want to talk to me about whatever this is all about—”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No. I’m sorry, Violet. I was all wrong. I acted out of darkness and—and shock. It was thoughtless of me, and stupid. I’ll get up for dinner tonight, and tomorrow I’ll go back to Lisbon.”

  “And then? What then?”

  “I’ll have to trust that when then comes, I’ll know what.”

  “That’s not good enough, not for any of us. I’m back to myself now, but you shook me, child. I was completely unprepared for my own reaction. I was suddenly a lioness and Patrick my cub. It was unthinking and completely—animal—and it staggered me, I who have never in the proper sense of the word been a mother. Nor was this a proper reaction. Let’s start over again. As we were.”

  “But we aren’t as we were,” Charlotte said. “I’m not. You see, Violet—you must have guessed—I came to tell you I was leaving Patrick. And I think that still holds—leaving him. I don’t think—no matter how differently I feel about things now—that I can go back to Patrick.”

  “No. You can’t go back to Patrick. It’s possible that you can go forward to him, but only you can know that. If you tried to go back then you’d only have to leave all over again. Nothing can ever be repeated. Ever.”

  “What about when you play the same fugue over and over again?”

  “It’s never the same. It’s never repeated. It’s better. Or it’s worse. I go forwards or backwards. You don’t want to go backwards with Patrick.”

  “No. But I don’t have any idea what direction either of us is going. That’s why I had to get away.”

  “What did Patrick do to make it so sudden?”

  Charlotte did not answer. She had thought that she could tell Violet, that she could dump it all in Violet’s lap, but she couldn’t, not until she had stood aside and looked at it objectively herself.

  Violet peeled an orange with delicate precision. “You’re stronger than you think you are, Cotty. With all your softness and vagueness you’re stronger than Patrick or I with all our drive. And you have a tremendous sense of identity, with your feeling for names. Don’t you know that’s why you were such a strange little girl about-being called Cotty?”

  “Only you call me Cotty now,” Charlotte said. “My father is dead.”

  “And Patrick?”

  “The last time I saw Patrick he was calling me names other than my own.”

  Did she still think of herself to herself as Cotty? Not so much, not since she had, as it were, grown up. At school her interior monologues with herself had been to Cotty. (Cotty, my girl, there is nothing to be depressed about, you’ll see Father during the spring holidays and he’ll take you to the theater. Straighten the seams in your hideous black school stockings, Cotty, you idiot, pull up your bootstraps and go for a walk.)

  It was her father who first had started calling her Cotty, during one spring vacation in Egypt when Shepherd’s Hotel had still been in existence. He called her Cotty, and Reuben and Essie picked it up, and she only told the loving diminutive to the people she cared most about. At school it was usually Lottie. Ursula, during the period when they both expected, with no work or discipline, to become famous actresses, was allowed to call her Cotty in private. And there had been three nuns, Sister Thomas More in England, and Sister Felicity (who had betrayed the name and all names by disappearing), and Sister Mary Michael in New York. It was this that had made her reluctant to give “Cotty” to Patrick that first night. But she had given it to him, and this kind of gift can never be taken back.

  Nor should it, once accepted, be rejected.

  … “I’ve never rejected you,” Patrick said. “It’s you who have rejected yourself. Over and over.”

  They had just come home from a dinner party. She pulled her dress carefully over her head and hung it up. “If you try to make me into nothing, then I have nothing to reject.”

  “You’re drunk,” Patrick announced.

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and started pulling off her stockings. “In vino veritas.”

  Patrick asked her (now why would he ask her such a question?), “Did you ever think of being a nun?”

  Surprised, she answered him, rubbing her fingers over her toes where her new shoes had pressed. “Yes. Once, when Father couldn’t be with me for a whole summer vacation and I had to stay at school, and there were only three of us there who didn’t go home or at least somewhere. I tried to make myself think I had a vocation. But my reasons were all wrong. I was terribly pious for about a year and then I began to see through myself.” She stopped. “Sorry.” She stood up, stretched, and began to turn down the bed.

  Patrick said, “But I have a vocation, Charlotte.”

  Folding the bedspread she asked, “You mean you want to be a priest?”

  “Idiot. Medicine.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte agreed, rather bitterly. “I’ve heard your white coats, your scalpels, referred to as instruments of your priesthood.”

  “One can be serious about something without being pompous,” Patrick said. “And I’m serious about medicine, Charlotte. It’s part of me. Part of what I am. It’s my relationship to God and to man.”

  “And your relationship to your patients?” Charlotte asked. “Don’t they ever resent being just bodies to you, to be opened up and rearranged and put together again? I’m not a patient, and I resent not being more than a body.”

  “Then stop flaunting your body about as you did at dinner tonight.”

  She sat down on the side of the bed again, her hand rubbing against the soft nap of blanket, shivering a little in her slip. “I dressed for you, Patrick. Not for the others. And so that I would still feel alive.”

  Patrick had turned towards her then. “Work is what keeps me still alive, Charlotte. It’s my safety valve. I order my grief through work. Why don’t you—”

  “I keep busy,” she said, shortly. “I’m going to bed. Good night, Patrick.”

  He did not say good night. Good night, Cotty. Or good night, Charlotte. Or good night, Mrs. Napier. That’s who she was, after all. She had accepted Patrick’s name and she could not reject it.

  No matter

  No matter wh
at

  … “Patrick was no help to you when the baby died, was he?” Violet asked her.

  “Andrew wasn’t a baby, Violet,” Charlotte said, her voice carefully controlled. “He was five years old.”

  “But Patrick didn’t give you the comfort you looked for, did he?” There was no sympathy or compassion in the question, only a cool probing, as Patrick, perhaps, might have used a steel probe on the wound of a patient.

  “Patrick had his own grief. And he was perfectly kind.”

  “But you needed more than that, didn’t you?” The probe dug deeper.

  “If we had been able to share it,” Charlotte said. “But he kept it to himself. He took it to the office with him, and the hospital, and bound his wounds with his care of other people’s hurt. He kept his own pain away from me. He didn’t bring it home with him. And there mine was, naked and raw. And he didn’t want it. I’m not blaming him, Violet. If I’d had anything to contain my pain I’d have used it, too. But I have no vocation. I’m not an artist or a scientist and I couldn’t find God. I still can’t. When Andrew died God went away and anyhow it wasn’t God I needed and wanted, it was Patrick. I wanted the tangible comfort of human arms. At night when Patrick stayed in the hospital I walked in the park where I used to take Andrew to play, and everywhere there seemed to be lovers, and all I felt about me was a cold wind. And Patrick was in the hospital when he didn’t need to be there. And I understand, Violet. I had nothing to clothe my grief in and its nakedness repelled him. But I am—was—am—his wife.”

  There was a heavy silence. Violet put her perfectly peeled orange on her plate, sat holding her fruit knife like a scalpel. “Are you sure you don’t want from him what your father—”

  “I had everything from my father that I needed,” Charlotte said. “The only thing Patrick and Father share in common is a passion for their work. I married Patrick, not a father image. But I wanted some of that, too, I suppose. A marriage isn’t just an isolated emotion. It’s—it’s everything.”

  “When Clement died—” Violet started, and stopped.

  “We shared it,” Charlotte said softly. “You and I. We shared his death. We were with him. We bore his pain together. Patrick was in the hospital operating when Andrew—it was in the middle of the afternoon. He had an emergency operation and I couldn’t even reach him. It was spring and Patrick knew I let Andrew play out on the sidewalk after kindergarten. Where else is there for a city child to play? Most days I took him to the park, but—And he was up on the sidewalk. He was very good about that. He never went near the street. He was up on the sidewalk trying to learn to bounce his ball against the building. He wasn’t very good at catching. But it wasn’t that the ball had gone out into the street and Andrew after it. The superintendent was there, he saw the whole thing, the truck went out of control. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Everybody said it wasn’t anybody’s fault, not even the truck driver’s, because his accelerator jammed. But I always felt that Patrick blamed me, somehow, because I was home, because Andrew was out on the sidewalk, because I wasn’t in the park with him. But I know that’s not fair. I don’t mean to sound Freudian, I don’t know enough about it, but I’m probably wanting Patrick to accuse me of the guilt I feel myself. But we’re not supposed to have senses of guilt, are we? That’s old-fashioned. We can be nasty, but we can’t be sinful.”

  Violet sounded angry. “I should have flown to New York.”

  “No. We didn’t expect you to.”

  “Of course you didn’t expect me to. Violet never does that kind of thing, does she?”

  “No, Violet. No. If you had been with us, if you had been there when it happened, maybe we could have shared it again, the grief. But for you to have come—it wouldn’t have worked.”

  “No,” Violet said. “It wouldn’t. But it’s rather amazing that you know it.”

  Charlotte smiled wryly. “It’s odd. You found early that you couldn’t—that marriage wasn’t possible for you. You’ve always been strong and alone. Like Patrick. And yet this is what I’m turning away from in Patrick, and turning to in you. And why, under the circumstances, I should expect you of all people to be objective about my marriage—I do see how funny this is.”

  Violet got up off the chaise longue and took Charlotte the peeled orange. “Eat it.” She crossed to the fireplace and stood looking at herself in the huge mirror over the mantelpiece. Her body was thin and hard from the disciplines to which she submitted it, but the hardness was not bony nor angular, was instead the firm and supple curve of rhythm. The hair above the light blue eyes was a silvery ash blond so that it was difficult to tell where and how it was turning grey. She wore a suit of English tweed but it had been made by a French dressmaker. She looked at herself with displeasure and turned back to Charlotte.

  “Don’t look to me for any kind of model when it comes to marriage. I dishonored and blasphemed mine. I did what I had to do. But that doesn’t make it right. Clement and I—we used to talk about you and Patrick sometimes, and how the simple fact of your parentage was always going to be a stumbling block for you. But Clement’s lacks as a father were less than mine as a mother.”

  “You said that when you left Patrick’s father you did what you had to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t think I ought to leave Patrick?”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. You’re Patrick’s mother. I’m asking you.”

  “Don’t try to make us alike because Patrick and I have a passion for our work. We’re not alike. On the most superficial level I’m a woman and he’s a man, and that in itself makes a good deal of difference. It is generally accepted that a man ought to care about his work. He is the one to support his wife and in other ways be the head of the family. By the way, he called again last night.”

  “Does he know I’m here?”

  “You didn’t want him going to the police, did you?”

  “Did he tell you—”

  “He told me nothing. He didn’t even ask me. I told him. He didn’t even try to explain a second unlikely transatlantic call. This, for Patrick, is extremely irrational behavior. Patrick may be a successful surgeon but he still has a New England scrounginess about money. If you wanted to upset him, Charlotte, you have.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Simply that you are here. That’s all. Nothing else. Just so that he would know where your physical body is. I think you do owe him that.”

  “I hadn’t expected to keep it a secret.”

  “How seriously do you take your marriage, Charlotte?”

  “Seriously enough for this.” She closed her eyes. “I’ll get up for dinner, Violet,” she said behind the darkness. She felt Violet pick up the tray from the bed, heard her leave the room.

  God.

  I thought the baby was the visible sign of the grace of love. I thought my love of the baby was my offering of love to you. But there was no ram caught by the horns in the thicket for me, God. And I do not understand.

  … “I do not understand,” Mariana said, kneeling at the altar, waiting her turn to go to Father Duarte for confession.

  “I do not understand,” Sister Joaquina said, kneeling in the small dark box. “Abel brought the Lord beasts from his flock as an offering, and the Lord accepted them. But Cain brought the fruit of the ground and the Lord wouldn’t accept it, and he didn’t even seem to understand why Cain was upset at having his offering refused. Why, Father? Why wasn’t Cain’s offering equally acceptable?”

  The big priest in his soiled, browning cassock sighed. “One explanation we are given is that Cain did not bring his offering to the Lord with love, though I myself see little indication of this in the text. But I have never tried to hide from you, my daughter, that there are many things under heaven that we cannot understand with our minds. There are many things that may seem to us in the light of our limited knowledge unreasonable. But isn’t this because it is our reasoning that is inadequate?”

&nb
sp; “Father, I don’t know! I’m asking you!”

  “Perhaps we’ve allowed you to do too much studying.”

  “I’m only seeking to understand.”

  “You must try with your heart, not with your mind.”

  Joaquina’s voice was muffled. “The heart gets bruised with too much rejection.”

  “Who is rejecting your heart?” he asked. “I know your father’s coldness and indifference is distressing to you—”

  She cut in, “I’m not thinking of my earthly father.”

  During Joaquina’s confessions Duarte sat turned away from her, his face hidden, but now his gaze flickered through the small barred opening, rested for a moment on her pinched features, distorted by tension. “My child, explain yourself.”

  “I feel like Cain. I bring the Lord my offerings, and they are not accepted. While Abel—”

  “Who is Abel?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Perhaps I can guess who Abel may be in your mind, but I think you had better tell me yourself.”

  “Everything she does,” Joaquina said, “the sun seems to smile on. If she plants flowers they grow. Whereas my seeds, if they come out of the earth at all, are scorched by the sun or drowned by the rain and wither and die. The children love her. They’ll do anything she wants them to do. Whereas they disobey me, they play tricks on me, they laugh at me—And she never reads, she never studies, she never uses her mind, and she seems to know everything. And I work and work and nothing, nothing—”

  “My child,” the great warm voice could be formidably stern, “your relationship with the Lord is between him and you. It is not in comparison with one of your Sisters.”

  Joaquina held out her hand with the gold wedding band on the third finger. “Sometimes I think he doesn’t care about me, that he’s never wanted me for his bride. While she—”

  “Sister Joaquina, these are evil thoughts.”

  “That is why I confess them.”

  “Go into the chapel and feel God’s love. At first do not attempt to pray. Kneel there and you will feel it as bright upon your shoulders as the rays of the sun coming through the colored glass of the windows, His love for you. His love for Sister Joaquina. You are infinitely precious to him.”