by May Sarton
“Oh, she is silent as the grave,” Ned smiled, “can’t get a word out of her. And it’s best to keep away, as I have learned.”
“I’m really a monster,” Anna announced, “not fit for human consumption.”
“A monstre sacré then,” Paul mused. “I’ve always believed it is a mistake to want to know a performer. Distance makes the magic, or would you disagree, old Ned?”
“Sometimes I would agree,” Ned said, smiling at Anna. She knew he was only teasing.
“You have a very good effect on Ned,” Anna said, lifting her glass.”
“He’s a brave man. He married the magic.”
“I married a woman, not a piece of magic,” Ned said.
“Thank goodness,” Anna was laughing, “I have wondered …”
“What were you talking about?” Hilda asked then. “I could hear laughter.”
“Oh, we were reminiscing. Paul says I treated him very badly when we were kids. He had an awful temper, you know. I used to tease him on purpose to make him flare up. But I taught him to sail … you have to admit that was kind of me, Paul.”
“You needed a slave on that boat of yours.”
“Come,” Hilda said, “we really must eat or the roast will be overdone.”
But somehow the atmosphere had warmed and the rest of the evening was comparatively painless, especially since they found themselves in total agreement about the incredible new Secretary of the Interior and for once Paul’s negative comments seemed appropriate. Anna enjoyed the discussion, enjoyed not talking or thinking about music, enjoyed seeing Ned show passionate commitment. This he could do, she was aware, because forests, the water level in the Southwest, the dangers of oil drilling offshore could be approached intellectually.
Besides, tonight she sensed that they were emerging from battle into some kind of peace, however temporary. On the drive back to town, they talked for once. Anna was on a high beam of pleasure and relief that she had taken Paul’s insults without reacting. For once she was not in the wrong. For once Paul had not succeeded in making her feel inferior, as they so often did without even knowing what they were doing, members of a secret society to which she could never belong, however well she behaved.
“Why is Paul such a rude man?” she asked. “What makes him tick?”
“I don’t know …”
“You must have some idea … after all you grew up together. I was fascinated that he let you teach him to sail, it seemed unlike him, somehow. And you were younger.”
“As a matter of fact he was emerging from a kind of breakdown after our father died. It was the psychiatrist’s idea that he needed something physical to do, something to take his mind off himself.” Ned absent-mindedly took her hand in his right one. “Do we have to talk about Paul?”
“No.”
There was a silence then. Anna leaned her head on the seat back.
“You were marvelous, Anna, I must say.”
“It isn’t worth the battle with him … just a waste of energy and emotion.”
“Well!” Ned squeezed her hand and let it go, as he was passing a truck. “Since when have you been afraid to waste emotion?”
“I don’t waste it on people I don’t love, Ned,” she said quietly. But for once she did not want to pursue what could end in pain. And it was she this time who changed the subject.
“It must be hell to be married to him,” she said.
“In a way, you know, I think Paul was relieved to be with me on the boat and not to have to make any decisions.”
“He seems so decisive, so sure he is right. Are you suggesting that Hilda captains their boat?”
“I wasn’t thinking about that. Paul and I fought a lot always … you see, he was older than I, but I was brighter, and he was in a perpetual state of fury because I could do most things better than he could. Except write or say things in words … he was always very good at that.”
“And you, my preposterous darling, were very bad at that.”
“Yes, I was. Words seemed always disorderly to me, not to be trusted … not like a mathematical equation where you had the answer or you didn’t. On the boat I had the right answers and Paul had to accept that I did.”
“But didn’t he mind being ordered about?”
“Well,” Ned paused for a few seconds, “I suppose he did. But he had been ill, really suicidal … I guess he needed something quite simple like being a sailor. It was a kind of pact between us, not to fight on the boat. So it was restful.”
“What did your father’s death do to you?”
“Locked me in. We became the prisoners of mother’s grief. And her grief was so awful that we were made to feel we had no right to ours. She never admitted it, but she was furious with Paul for trying to commit suicide. And she never forgave him. For years I was the buffer between them. Between her silent disapproval and his outbursts of anger. By the time he was twenty Paul hated everybody, you see.”
“Poor Paul. And poor you.”
“Then much to everyone’s amazement Paul married—am I boring you?” Ned asked suddenly.
“Of course not. At last we are talking about something important, don’t you see?”
“You didn’t know you were marrying into such a family of eccentrics, did you? Why did you marry me anyway?”
“Because I liked your nose.”
“Not likely.”
“Likely.” After a moment’s pause Anna began to think out loud. It was something that could be done when they were sitting side by side in the car, she had discovered. It permitted silences without tension. Then they were not facing each other, but looking out at the world moving past, the lights, a man on a bicycle, a truck to be passed. Thinking aloud, she said, “I felt we were equals. You see, often the people who fell in love with me were somehow not my equals … that sounds arrogant. But I have achieved something and it frightens people. Everyone told me how powerful you are in your world … and that was reassuring. But now I have the feeling that in your mind there is no equality. You make me feel inferior. It’s like living with a governess. I can never be myself with you.”
“What I don’t understand is why being a screaming hysteric is ‘being yourself’. I am alienated by your tantrums. I can’t help it.”
“I feel like a tigress in too small a cage, can’t you see?” But even as she said this Anna knew it was hopeless, and as always, a little beside the point, an evasion on her part, because she had not come to terms with her anger, herself. And it caused her acute shame. And as Ned made no answer she leaned for a moment against his shoulder.
“I think you were conditioned never to allow yourself anger. Was it considered a crime in your mother’s house?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Why?”
“We were brought up to believe that the surfaces must be kept pleasant.”
“And if they were, then everything was presumed to be all right? So your brother tried to commit suicide and you bury your feelings so deep you can’t behave like a human being!”
“It’s a matter of ethos, Anna, can’t you see?”
“Oh yes, I see all right,” Anna said bitterly. “But you married someone with quite a different ethos.”
“Unbuttoned ego, my mother calls it.”
“I think it’s much healthier to let anger out than to bury it so deep you don’t even know it is there.”
“It may be better for oneself but it’s hard on other people.”
“Oh Ned, do you think it’s easy on me when you freeze up against me? Can’t you see that that is just as punishing as you feel I am when I attack you? And it’s worse, maybe, because you refuse to have it out. You refuse to talk. And every time you do that and bury your own anger, we get further apart.”
“Yes, we do,” Ned said stiffly.
The moment when the door might have opened had closed again, Anna knew.
“Maybe we’ll have good weather on the weekend.”
“I hope so … it’s the last chance
to get bulbs in … I’ll be in Pittsburgh the following weekend, you know.”
“Well, let’s try to have a calm country time,” Ned said. “I could do with a little peace.”
Anna refrained from answering that. All it needs for peace is for you to give a little, be a little loving for a change. She did not say it. A tiny triumph of will over impulse. When she censored herself in this way she won. But what did she win? she asked herself. A small respite in a war that would not change, and at a high cost. For every time she buried her impulse the seed of resentment got planted.
There was no love-making that night. Fonzi slept between them.
Chapter III
Anna had often asked herself why she felt so comfortable in the cottage, and she always had from their first weekend there together. It had no view of the ocean and had become over the years a repository for odds and ends of furniture, some wicker-arm chairs and a chaise lounge on the screened-in porch, a mixture of modern Danish and early American set incongruously on a blue Chinese rug in the rather small living room. But all this and even the Sargent water colors discarded from the big house, gave it an atmosphere at once casual and lively. It had what Anna had always longed for, the air of places much lived in by a single family, “background” was the word that sprang to mind. At any rate she felt at ease in it and had from the beginning. The happiest times she and Ned shared had always been here.
Ned had no need to analyze it, it was simply home to him, full of childhood memories, for when they were in college Paul and he had shared it for several summers of sailing and playing tennis and giving small house parties.
But the chief thing for both Anna and Ned was that here they could each shed their public personalities, wear old blue jeans, and above all work outdoors.
And on this October morning they were hard at it, planting tulips, while Fonzi barked at squirrels, then unburied an old bone which he was now happily chewing under a bush. It had come as a surprise to Anna that one of Ned’s passions was gardening. It was he who had staked out quite a large garden at the back of the house and had it walled-in with brick like an English garden, cutting trees ruthlessly to do it. But all that was before Anna. And it had been for him a new pleasure to work with her. It was not a thing he had imagined when he proposed marriage.
“Hey, we forgot the bone meal,” he called out from his end of the border they were planting.
“There must be some in the garage,” she answered, “I’ll go see.”
It always amused Ned to see Anna in her work clothes and he watched her walk away with a twinkle in his eye. The statuesque Anna of the concert stage metamorphosed into a rather stout boy, her surprisingly plump legs shown off to great effect today by her short shorts. She’s a damned attractive woman, he was thinking, as he carefully dug a circle of holes with neat quick expertise.
“I found it,” she called and laid the bag of bone meal at his feet.
“You do it so well,” she said, watching him pour a little bone meal in each hole, then set the tulips in. He didn’t stop but talked for a moment as he filled in the holes and patted the earth hard around each.
“I learned from my Uncle Henry, that silent man. I learned from watching him—and from being solemnly told off by him, too. I can still hear him saying ‘gardening does not take much intelligence, but it does take a little. You are planting those anemones upside down.’”
“Oh dear,” Anna was laughing, “how awful! What did you do then?”
“Dug them up and started again.”
Anna went off, still amused, to go on setting in a square of iris reticulata. But Ned’s story stuck in her mind as she turned one wrinkled flat bulb in her hand and could not decide which was right side up. “A little intelligence is necessary,” she reminded herself, glancing over at the totally absorbed Ned. What if?
“You’re having trouble, old girl.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, that rather ominous silence, I expect. Look for a tiny thread—that would be a root—that will tell you which side up.”
“But sometimes there is no tiny thread to be seen,” she protested.
“In that case, say a short prayer.”
Anna was kneeling, and before she had finished, her knees as well as her hands and face, were black. “I might as well be making mud pies,” she said, “and I can hardly move I’m so stiff.
Ned stood up then, his hands on his hips to stretch his back, took one look at her and burst out laughing.
“I know,” she said, laughing too, “it’s not fair. You dig and dig and look perfectly clean after hours of it!”
“I wish your ardent public could see you now!”
“They would get a shock, wouldn’t they? Oh Ned, I’m out of breath.”
He looked at his watch, “Well, in a half-hour we’ll take a break. Did you put the beer in the fridge?”
“Natch.”
“We’ve got to get fifty in today, come hell or high water.”
“Well, what next?”
Next was a bag of peony tulips to be set in behind the iris and Ned suggested a few here and there in between them. Anna whistled an aria from Carmen while she worked. Why couldn’t it always be like this? Companionable. Silent. Happy.
Now they were working side by side, but the trouble was that their real lives were so far apart there seemed to be no communication possible any longer. This was not their real life, after all, it was Marie Antoinette’s imitation farm where she and her ladies could disport themselves and pretend to be peasants, could get their hands dirty and play at planting potatoes.
“Why isn’t this real?” she asked aloud.
“It is.”
“Is it?” Anna stood up and stretched, “Ned, I’m exhausted. I’ve got to stop.”
“Just let me finish—just ten more and this lot will be in the ground.”
“I’m going in.”
Anna had learned not to go beyond a certain point in fatigue. She would need exceptional physical as well as psychic energy in the week ahead, to get ready for the B-Minor Mass in Pittsburgh. And as she showered and washed the earth from her hands and face and arms and legs she already felt the change in her, the change toward a performance that would demand all she had to give. Already she could feel her nerves tensing up, a little like an athlete getting ready for a race, that summoning of all her powers to a single end. She was shivering as she dried herself off, for exactly as though a cloud had moved across the sun, the poison of that review was moving across her, a dark shadow she had to contain, and push aside a thousand times, surmount.
When Ned came in, cheerful and relaxed, she had sandwiches ready and glasses on a tray. But she felt unrelated, out of touch.
“I’m hungry,” he announced, “I think I’ll just wash my hands and shower later.” And in a few minutes he was sitting beside her, where she had stretched out on the chaise lounge.
“The leaves are falling—look Ned, they are like thin gold pieces falling.”
“Mmmm,” he said, munching his sandwich. “It’s been too dry, an early fall, it looks like.” For a moment they ate in silence.
“That’s a hell of a good sandwich, Anna.”
“I’m glad you approve.”
“But you’ve hardly touched yours.”
“Not hungry,” she said, taking a sip of beer.
“You worked too hard,” he sounded quite solicitous.
“I can’t keep up with you, my friend, but I enjoyed myself. I felt like a good animal.”
“Whatever do you mean by that?”
“Oh I don’t know, physically alive, comfortable in my body … you know, Ned. Surely you know.”
“Well, yes. I feel good, if that’s what you mean,” and he added, “Do we have to analyze it?”
“No. Do you want some apple pie? Coffee?”
“I’ll get it. You stay here and rest.”
On the surface he could be so gentle and polite, and that’s what he wanted, a smooth untroubled, untro
ubling surface. He wanted to enjoy life without trying to probe. “Why analyze it?” Anna asked herself. Because for me living is finding out what is really happening to me, and that’s the last thing Ned wants. He could never admit the shadow. It was too frightening, perhaps. He too in his way was like an athlete, one for whom everything could be measured in terms of achievement. So even love-making was a matter simply of orgasm, a purely physical release. As often happened when Anna had made a physical effort, the release for her, came with a rush of feelings and thoughts. He rested by not being. She rested by being.
Anna had gone for a little walk around the garden, picked a small bunch of dahlias and chrysanthemums, crimson and orange, a dissonance that pleased her, when Ned came out to the porch with a tray.
“Hey,” Ned said, “I call that a riot of color.”
“I like it,” Anna said, prickling as she always did when Ned punctured her balloons with irony.
“I would add a touch of white … there’s that achillea somewhere.”
“No,” Anna said, “The whole point is that clash of primary color—not that it matters,” she added.
“But it does seem to matter,” Ned said, suddenly irritated himself. Anna couldn’t take the slightest criticism, he was thinking, even about a bunch of flowers. And he was damned if he was to be a sycophant like most of her friends. “Come on, let’s eat our pie while it’s hot.”
“I suppose people could go to war about a matter of taste,” Anna said, trying to get away from her own irritation, and accepting her plate and a fork.
“No doubt about it. If I had known you would put crimson and orange together, I would never have married you,” he teased.
“That’s almost too true,” Anna said, thinking of the hundred ways in which she irritated Ned these days, so no subject, not even a bunch of flowers was safe any longer. Leaving her pie half-eaten, she went in to find a vase …” or they will die, poor things, while we are discussing them.”
She had trouble finding the right one—Ned had such definite ideas about things in this house. But finally she decided on a small Venetian glass flecked with gold.