by May Sarton
For once they were going to the country in a mood of happy expectancy, so it did not even seem too hard that Mrs. Fraser was at her house next door and wanted them for Sunday lunch.
“We’ll have Saturday anyway, plant bulbs, maybe have a walk on the beach with Fonzi—now at last it’s October and we can let him off the leash.” Fonzi, sitting between them in the car, wagged his tail. Ned, driving through the Friday traffic, was silent. But Anna felt his silence as companionable. She was at peace.
She was willing to follow Ned’s mood, not to try to talk seriously, just to be. They ended that good day in bed making love and laughing. What made them laugh was Fonzi’s anxiety to get into the act and refusal to stay at the bottom of the bed. “Oh, you foolish little dog …” Anna reached out and stroked his ears.
“It’s hard to be a dog,” Ned said. “He wants so much to be included. Here Fonzi, you can lie on my chest!” But Fonzi, entranced, had to lick Ned’s throat and mouth a little too thoroughly for comfort and finally had to be forced back to his usual place where he was delighted to find Anna’s bare foot to lick. “Ah,” Ned sighed, and reached over to take Anna’s hand and lie there, then, beside her in the dark, hand in hand, until they fell asleep.
When Anna woke and looked out through the crimson leaves of a maple to a blue, blue sky she jumped out of bed. “Let’s walk first!” Anna said at the window, breathing in the sharp morning air and shivering.
“We have to plant 100 bulbs,” Ned answered, yawning.
“No,” Anna turned and blew him a kiss. “Let’s not work, I feel like a walk. It’s low tide. I can smell the salt and seaweed from here.”
“Very well. If you will make blueberry pancakes first. It was rather an athletic night and I’m starving,” he said, smiling his secret smile.
“Athletic! What a typical word!” And Anna disappeared into the bathroom.
It took Ned quite a while to pull himself together. Clearly he felt so unknotted, so relaxed that he didn’t really want to get up and lay there quite a while. When he went down finally the pancakes were ready.
“Hurry up, you lazy man! The first batch is waiting for you!”
“Yum!”
The breakfast room was filled with sunlight, sun dappling the blue and white china and the bunch of fading chrysanthemums from the last time.
“Ned, go and pick some fresh flowers … it’s too beautiful here for those poor things!”
“Pancakes first. Then flowers,” he said, taking the vase off the table and throwing the flowers into the wastebasket.
“I love this house,” Anna said when they had settled down and were drinking a second cup of coffee and waiting for the second batch. “It’s so warm … even on a cold October morning. How marvelous to have the whole day here, alone!”
“Fonzi hasn’t had his pancake,” Ned said. “I’ll get it.” When he came back he looked across at Anna who caught his look and felt observed.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Oh, I was just wondering why it made you so happy when I said all those awful things?”
“You said I was marvelous!”
“Because in the midst of such a storm you made me laugh, made us laugh!”
“Yes,” Anna said, smiling, “it was rather wonderful.” Then she looked back at him, a long hard look. “I was happy because at last you let the storm out … can’t you understand? I don’t suppose I’ll forget some of those ugly things, but at least they’re not buried inside you.”
“Unburying is not necessarily exorcizing.”
“No, but you do feel better, don’t you?”
“Do I?”
“Oh, Ned!”
“Well,” he gave a little cough, “I have to admit that I do.”
“Hurrah! Then let’s go for a walk …”
“Come on, Fonzi!”
“I have to dress, but I won’t be a minute.”
So Ned went out into the wet grass with Fonzi to pick a few late asters and chrysanthemums, and Anna ran upstairs. But, pulling on a turtleneck sweater, she realized that he was right about exorcizing. The glorious fight had left its detritus. And this she would have to deal with in any way she could. “My friends are not sycophants,” she whispered. “Damn it!”
But out on the beach, walking fast, while Fonzi chased gulls and picked up long pieces of seaweed and tossed them around, the sheer space and light, and the long waves coming in gently and shirring into foam, Anna felt that nothing mattered very much, except the hour, the exhilaration, the sharp October air.
“It’s the dark blue sea again … October,” she murmured.
“A little bit of all right, eh?” Ned enjoyed using such expressions just to tease her.
“Nothing seems to matter on a day like this.”
“Even the war between the Frasers?”
Anna stopped for a moment and leaned down to pick up a broken sand dollar. “Too bad it’s broken …” Then she stood for a moment looking out to sea, to the dark line at the horizon. “I know it will sound crazy because outdoors like this the beauty is so immense and tranquil nothing seems to matter, but I think that way down deep, personal relations may have in them the roots of war and peace. I don’t know how to say this … but, Ned, there’s so much anger and frustration everywhere. I think every time two people achieve communion, it helps.”
“Do you really?” Ned was interested and sceptical. “Why?”
“Because we are all members of each other.”
“Tell that to a black in the ghetto!”
“He would say it doesn’t look as if we believed that, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. Ned, the deeper we go the more we are joined to everyone else …” but then she looked up and caught his expression of amused contempt. Contempt?
What he said was, “I can’t follow your metaphysical flights, Anna.” He gave her a piercing look. “Do you think we have achieved communion as you call it? Is that what screaming at each other does?”
“Oh no, we haven’t achieved anything yet,” Anna said passionately. “But can’t you see, we can talk now and we haven’t been able to talk for over a year!”
“Come on, Anna, let’s run!” And Ned ran away with Fonzi, ears flapping in the wind, after him. Anna walked down to the edge of the waves alone.
After a mile or so, Ned turned back. “Come on, Fonzi, we’d better go back. We don’t want her to be cross, not on a day like this.” He had enjoyed running, enjoyed the strength of his physical being, enjoyed getting a little out of breath. He could see that Anna was sitting now, looking out, her head in her hands. But he was not about to yield to a meditative mood, and when he and Fonzi got back to her, he said, “Come on, lazybones, we’ve got work to do,” and he pulled Anna up. “Wow,” he said, “you’re a heavyweight, my fair lady!”
“I guess I am,” Anna answered brushing the sand off. Sometimes she wished she could be as light as air and stop thinking … but she couldn’t and so she was wondering whether she was indeed a heavyweight for Ned to bear through all the tensions and anguish of their marriage, and she asked herself once more whether it was mostly her own fault, conflicted as she was and, she supposed, always would be.
“Poor Fonzi,” she said, “he’s panting terribly …”
“Good for him,” Ned said, leaning down to give the dog a pat. “He doesn’t get enough exercise—and neither do I.”
“But you have very long legs and he has very short ones.”
“He can run like the wind, though, on those short legs! He’ll sleep all day while we are planting bulbs … for it’s got to be done, Anna, you know.”
Done it was, for the rest of the morning, but after a short lunch of fruit and cheese, Anna pleaded for a rest and went upstairs to make the bed and then lie down on it while Ned went back to the garden with Fonzi. She must have fallen asleep, and when she woke thought she was dreaming for she heard Ferrier’s voice singing the Kindertoten lieder … sat up, saw that the clock said four and ran downstairs, standing by
the record player unable to decide whether to hear it through or take the record off. The poignance of that voice! Would she ever learn that ease, that perfect control, that depth? She stayed where she was, listening. She could handle the low notes, but that great crescendo in the upper register? It shouldn’t be difficult, but it was. Oh, it was! Even Ferrier’s voice showed the strain for a second. Anna was so concentrated that she didn’t hear Ned behind her, took the record off and turned to find him there, grinning.
“Why did you do that?”
“You’re going to sing it in Dallas, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Anna was trembling. It was like an attack.
“Well then? I thought you might like to hear it. Ferrier is rather marvelous, isn’t she?”
“You did it on purpose! Gave me the perfect rendition like a slap in the face … it’s not fair!”
“I did it to wake you. It’s nearly four, Anna.” It had not occurred to Ned that she would find it offensive. But of course I can’t win, he thought bitterly. Now she will make a scene.
“Let us say that you are not exactly the soul of tact. I can’t possibly match that … and you know I can’t.” But Anna had now to hear the other side and turned the record over and went and sat down on the sofa. “Come and sit beside me Ned, I need you.”
He sat down awkwardly beside her then, and they listened. Whatever else they could not share, Ned was thinking, they could share music. It was indeed a haunting sequence of songs. He slipped a hand into hers.
When it was over, they were silent. Ned knew that he ought to say something. He ought to say that of course Anna could sing this magnificently, that he knew she could. It was on the tip of his tongue, but somehow he couldn’t utter the necessary words. A donkey in him, a stubborn donkey, balked.
And Anna reacted not with anger, but by moving away. This battle was with herself. And as it sometimes did, what might have been anger turned into exaggerated self-justification. “You may not think so, but I can do it as well as she did. I have the instrument, Ned. And I have a great teacher.”
“What more can you ask?”
“A word of reassurance from you,” she flashed back. “I could do with some outdoor work. Any bulbs left?”
The moment of danger was past.
“I’m sorry if I did the wrong thing,” Ned said then.
“Never mind, let’s work first—and then,” Anna said unexpectedly, “if you feel like accompanying me I’d like to sing. Oh, something easy and fun!”
“I’d like that,” Ned said. Anna was rarely in the mood to sing at home, but occasionally they did play together when she could lay aside her professional self and all its anxieties and sing for pleasure. In college Ned had worked hard at the piano and had been quite surprised to find that he still had some skill. This had not happened for some time, this invitation to share music. He was pleased. So he was careful now to give Anna something easy to do so she would not get overtired and change her mind. They worked away in silence.
After a half-hour, Anna stretched and lay flat on her back for a moment, looking up through the leaves of the maple. “Look at the light … it’s so beautiful,” and then “Why is autumn, when everything is dying, so beautiful?”
“Not dying, going to sleep,” Ned answered, brushing earth off his face. “Maybe you’ve had enough. I’ll just get rid of this small bag of hyacinths and be with you.”
“I’ll put the roast in and have a shower.”
“Good.”
Anna stopped at the steps to the porch and looked back at Ned, kneeling in the grass, totally concentrated, and for a moment watched his deft hands, digging holes with his sharp trowel in a quick efficient rhythm. How could she not love this secret, ungiving, maddening man? In his own peculiar way he gave so much simply by being himself. The struggle with him was giving her a kind of life and self-knowledge she had never known until now. And maybe that was what it was all about.
Chapter XII
Mrs. Fraser did not relax her standards or change her way of life in the country. She came down with Beulah, the Nova Scotian cook who had been with her for over forty years and was now rather crotchety, Maria, a West Indian waitress and general help, and Maria’s husband, Pedro, who chauffeured the Mercedes and occasionally did some odd jobs like bringing in wood though he was, as Maria herself often said, “the laziest man God ever made.”
It was hard these days for Pauline Fraser to come down and face the garden, neglected since the old gardener had died, and hard not to complain too much to Joe, a local gardener who was apt to make egregious mistakes like cutting off the asters in bud, thinking they were in seed.
“I know you can’t help it, Joe, but you are giving me a lot of pain in my old age.”
“Sorry, Ma’am. It won’t happen again.”
“But something else will, Joe. Never mind,” Mrs. Fraser added quickly, for she was afraid Joe would walk off some day. Workmen had pride these days but no standards. And to Pauline Fraser, life had seemed for a long time a matter of dealing with small disappointments and frustrations as best she could.
That Sunday morning in honor of her luncheon guests she decided to wear a blue and white silk dress in spite of the chill in the air, threw a sweater on after breakfast and went out in rubber boots to pick a few late roses. There was mildew on some of the bushes … nothing to be done about that, she supposed. She cut and held up a yellow rose to smell its delicious slightly spicy scent and soon had quite an array of bloom in her basket.
Inside she took one look at Beulah, standing at the kitchen counter beating up egg whites for the lemon meringue pie, and fled to the pantry to arrange the roses. But of course the silverbowl she wanted was tarnished. Maria rarely noticed such things, so Mrs. Fraser got out the cleaning rag and polish and did it herself. And in the end, the centerpiece was really quite lovely, she thought.
Anna and Ned did not come over often, so Mrs. Fraser felt a little excited, if not exactly happy. She remained ill at ease with her daughter-in-law, who seemed a little larger than life, somehow. And she did occasionally wonder how Ned was faring as though, she smiled to herself, he had a tigress on his leash. No doubt the tigress occasionally purred, but Pauline Fraser suspected that she also roared. What an odd marriage it was! Ned was such a self-contained, self-assured man—except for his passion for music, and of course that was what explained it all. He had married music! That, Pauline Fraser, supposed, must have taken a certain audacity. And perhaps, she ruminated, a surprising self-abnegation. Ned could be quite ruthless. Heaven knows she had experienced that often enough. But then she had little loving kindness from her sons. She was kept at a distance. Their attitude was that she had let them down in some way after Angus died. They had never understood what it had been like for her to have her life cut in two, to be left stranded forever on an island of loss and pain.
“But I mustn’t get teary this morning,” she said to herself, and went upstairs to brief Maria on the table setting and to be sure she remembered to dust the glass tables on the porch. By the time the sun was high, it would be warm enough out there.
“I feel so old, Maria,” she said after their little talk. “Look at my face, a mass of wrinkles! I feel a hundred.”
“You’re only seventy, Ma’am, that’s not old.”
“It’s awfully old,” Pauline Fraser felt suddenly cross, “I lost my husband thirty years ago … thirty years without anyone.”
“Now you keep those blues away,” Maria said firmly. “You look so pretty in that dress, and your son’s coming for dinner!” She plumped the bed pillows up just a little impatiently. “Better keep away from Beulah, she’s in a bad mood.”
“I know.”
“High blood pressure,” Maria said. “Some day she’s going to drop dead.”
“No one seems to be very cheerful this morning,” Pauline Fraser sniffed. “What a glum household this is!”
Maria refrained from comment. “I’d better get on with it,” she said. “There’
s a lot to do downstairs.”
“Run along, Maria. You are no comfort this morning.”
At the door, Anna let Ned go in alone and walked down to the rose garden to smell the roses. She wanted to pick one but didn’t dare. No one ever picked in this garden except Mrs. Fraser who was, it had to be faced, excruciatingly possessive about everything she owned. When Anna came back toward the porch, Ned and his mother were standing in the doorway and waved at her.
“Oh, those roses!” she called, “How do you ever do it?”
“So there’s where you were!” Mrs. Fraser kissed her daughter-in-law.
“I couldn’t resist …”
“Well, sit down, Anna. What would you like to drink? Sherry, Dubonnet? Ned, do the honors, please.”
“Dubonnet is rather a treat.”
“I’ll have some myself. A treat?” Pauline Fraser smiled. “I thought everyone drank Dubonnet these days. But of course I don’t move in your circles. It’s champagne in your circles, no doubt.”
“We don’t have a circle, Mama,” Ned said, handing her a glass and then taking Anna hers. “If you don’t mind I’ll go and find the Scotch.”
“Whatever does Ned mean about no circle?” Pauline Fraser asked, as he disappeared.
“He’s just teasing. But actually we don’t go out much anymore. Ned works awfully hard himself and I can’t have late nights when I’m getting ready for a concert.”
“And you are now?”
“I go to Dallas in two weeks.”
“Good heavens! Dallas? It seems so far away …”
“I’m in a panic, so let’s talk about other things. This room is such a pleasure,” Anna said, “I love the flowery cretonne. It’s so summery and cheerful.”