The Small Room

by May Sarton

  “Don’t break the thread,” Lucy murmured.

  “It is a very long fine-spun thread,” Jennifer smiled, “but I am coming to the end. Carryl, you did, I think, withhold from Jane Seaman one element in your discourse, and it was crucial.”

  “What element?” Carryl asked, on the defensive.

  “We are speaking of something withheld which is essential. How could you imagine that you were withholding what you perhaps felt deeply? Yet failed to communicate, though you gave Seaman the run of your library …” “What in hell did I withhold then?” Carryl was close to anger now, a lion caught in a very fine-spun web. “What more am I supposed to give? Time is the most precious thing I have and I gave Jane endless time, time I could not afford, time that should have gone into that long overdue essay for the Seaton Festschrift, for instance.”

  Perhaps they all felt as Lucy did that they should not really be present while these two fought it out.

  “You withheld love.” Jennifer finished her web.

  Carryl did not react at once, either with anger or with recognition. Then she clasped her hands between her knees and smiled her faint ironic smile. “Yes, that was the one thing I was afraid to give. You may be right at that, Jennifer. You usually are.”

  It was handsome. It flashed through Lucy’s mind that if Carryl had been more detached she would not have been afraid. It was, she considered, not so much a failure of love as a failure of detachment, but enough had been spoken.

  “And you wonder why Henry finds Appleton intoxicating.” Jack moved in to break the tension. “After infinite gyrations, we sometimes manage to reach the simple truth.”

  “No,” Maria broke in. “No, Jack. No irony, please. We are all afraid, aren’t we?” she said, and now everyone was rising to his feet. Maria’s arm slipped through Jack’s. “Aren’t we, my fierce withholding tiger?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, and yes was clearly a very big word.

  “Good heavens, Jackie, it is nearly eight! The children will be starved and burning up the furniture in the fireplace or some such thing!” Then—for all was now a chaos of departure—Maria moved across to Carryl and threw her arms around her. “Darling, you are not a saint, thank God! But you are wonderful and we love you. Don’t we, Jack?”

  “We honor you, Carryl,” he said with a queer little bow.

  Carryl extricated herself from Maria’s embrace and was, Lucy was delighted to observe, blushing for once in her life. “Oh, what a funny evening,” she said, crossing the room to say goodbye to Hallie. “Thank you, Hallie.” Then she turned back to the others. “Well, you Atwoods and Lucy, perhaps now your initiation is complete. As usual, it turns out to be an anticlimax: we have certainly taken our hair down in this small room.”

  Dear room, Lucy thought, dear room, and dear, tormented, great people. Her thoughts were interrupted by Carryl’s commanding, “I’ll take you home, Lucy!”

  CHAPTER 18

  They sat in the car, where Carryl had drawn up, at the Faculty Club entrance. It was one of those timeless moments when ease and intimacy are possible; Lucy sensed that it was not inappropriate to take out a cigarette and light it, as if the gesture were an unspoken ‘yes, let’s talk.’ She had been wondering, as they drove along, what it had cost Carryl Cope to expose herself and to be exposed in the last hour. It had not seemed quite in character, somehow, had seemed rather a deliberate act of the will, a kind of penance. Why?

  “Why did you do it?” she uttered when she had drawn a long puff on her cigarette.

  “Self-punishment, no doubt. Also, I have discovered lately that I care rather more than I had supposed about what my colleagues think of me. Also pride,” and Lucy saw the pride flash out, as she struck a match to light her cigarette. “I did not want to be judged without being present at the judgment.”

  “Jane is going to be all right,” Lucy said.

  “Is she? I suppose she is now paying a psychiatrist to give her the love that I withheld.” The tired bitterness of the tone did not escape Lucy.

  “She is going to a psychiatrist because of love given or not given long before she met you, Carryl.”

  “Yes, no doubt—infantile deprivations or guilt. Why do we feel so guilty, all of us?”

  “It’s the human condition.”

  “For once you sound pious,” Carryl said impatiently. Lucy clasped her hands together miserably. “No. It’s only because I feel inadequate … and,” she hesitated before the word, “lonely, I guess. It looked two days ago as if Jack and Maria were through, but they have made it.”

  “You wouldn’t have been happy with that stiff-necked young man,” Carryl pronounced.

  “I expect not. But I miss him.” She changed the subject because she was afraid she would begin to cry, and this she imagined was the one thing Carryl Cope would find intolerable. “Oh dear, people’s strengths are so inextricably woven into their weaknesses. What about Olive Hunt?” she asked.

  “Olive is punishing herself, God knows for what. She has cut herself off from me, from the college. She too withholds …”

  There was a silence while each, Lucy surmised, was thinking of the other’s problem.

  “Come along!” Carryl roused herself, “Come along home with me. Ill make you scrambled eggs and coffee—it’s all I know how to cook, but it’s better than going back into that dismal hole.” And she started the engine.

  “Much better,” Lucy murmured.

  An hour later they were sitting opposite each other by the fire having a second cup of coffee. “I have the strangest sensation,” Lucy said, “as if I were coming back all the time.”

  “Back where?”

  “Well, at Hallie’s for instance, it was coming back to the room where I first met you all, feeling so new and strange. Here I am coming back, too. I’ve never told you what it meant to be invited up here when you asked me that first time.”

  Lucy looked hard at the wall of books, at Carryl’s great desk piled high with papers, as usual, at the Constable clouds over the mantel. “Those clouds …” she murmured.

  “Ah yes, the clouds.” Carryl glanced up at them coldly. “Olive will no doubt come and recapture them one of these days.” She drank down the end of her coffee with relish. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking.

  “It’s a very grand room,” Lucy said. Lucy was acutely aware at the moment of the intensity of the life lived here; of its stature; of its continual self-creation, and of its essential solitude—and by contrast, she saw herself as naked, homeless and vulnerable as a newborn mouse.

  “Grand?” Carryl shrugged. “Olive’s grandeur then, not mine.”

  “No, yours. It’s the life lived here. It’s what you are.”

  “Oh well,” Carryl shrugged again as if she were shrugging off all the accretions of time and position, “when one is old, as old as I am …” She reached for a cigarette and went on talking without taking it out of her mouth. “I don’t really care a hoot about all this. What I care about is doing some work at last. And I might do that better in a cell.” Then she lit up and drew a long puff. “One of my fantasies is to be locked up in jail for a year, with a table, a chair, a bed.”

  “And a good many books surely?”

  “Yes, I suppose jails have rather poor libraries on mediaeval trade routes, so that’s out.”

  “But you will be going to Europe this summer?”

  “Yes … no … I don’t know,” and she puffed furiously at her cigarette again. “Did it ever occur to you, Lucy, that the machinery of feeling can wear out? They call it metal fatigue, I hear, when a plane suddenly blows up in the air. This business of Jane has taken something out of me for good. Olive …” She let the name rest on the air between them. “One comes to the end.”

  Lucy felt unable to speak. What could one say?

  “I really do have work to do,” Carryl repeated half to herself. “Have some more coffee.”

  “Don’t move. I’ll get it!” Lucy was glad of the chance to escape the unw
avering yet impersonal gaze, for Carryl had been staring through rather than at her, and it was unnerving.

  “Still,” she went on thinking aloud, “it is strange to unweave the strands of so many years. The silence,” she said. “Olive used to interrupt me a dozen times a day. The phone sometimes rang every five minutes …”

  “Yes, the silence,” Lucy said in a small voice. Desolation filled her. It seemed an eternity since she had heard an intimate voice. Carryl’s absent gaze suddenly focussed.

  “Poor child,” she said quite briskly. “But you know of course that there will be other voices, other people. You will not be lonely forever, whatever you may think now. I, on the other hand, am glad to be rid of it all, to know that there will never be another voice pulling me away from one self into another. I feel lighter … free …” But as she spoke, she looked older than Lucy had ever seen her, old and tired. Her eyelids drooped over the keen eyes. For an instant Lucy wondered if she were falling asleep … wondered too if when the vital energy is gone, and one is free, the imagined work ever gets done.

  “Freedom could be frightening.”

  “Not to me!” And Carryl sat up, fiercely awake. “I’ve wasted too much time. I have five books in me still … at least.” Lucy caught the hint of bravado.

  “What makes you so sure Olive won’t change her mind?”

  “She may, but I shan’t. I have said, so be it, ainsi soit-il: when you have said that, and mean it, you’re through. You’ve gone.”

  “I wish I could say it,” Lucy said miserably.

  “Cheer up,” Carryl said with a return to her old tone of light mockery. “Tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse, as the French are fond of reminding us. Even grief … though that may be the hardest thing to accept.” Then she gave Lucy a long friendly look, so intent that Lucy found herself shielding her eyes with one hand. “I suspect that this tragic affair has helped you to grow up. The unswaddling of the ego, if I may put it that way, is exceedingly painful, of course.” Then she got up and took a different tone. “Will you stay on here? I suppose you are aware that you have made an impression. I have an idea that promotion is in the air … just an idea, mind you.”

  But instead of relief, Lucy felt only disturbance, fear. “I don’t know,” she said, “I never told you that I only got my Doctor’s degree so as to be able to stay in Cambridge while John was at Medical School … I don’t know,” she said, prickling all over with anxiety at what this confession might provoke, “I guess total commitment to teaching, when I feel so unsettled in every other way, scares me.”

  Carryl did not smile. And Lucy sensed the something pitiless, like steel, in the small definite woman standing across the room against a wall of books. “Extraordinary,” she murmured, “a Harvard degree, and for such an odd reason.”

  “Love does not seem odd to a woman,” Lucy bristled. “It did not seem odd then,” she corrected herself.

  “And now?” The hawk pounced.

  “I don’t know. It would seem the logical thing to stay.”

  “People do not stay at Appleton to teach because it is logical,” Carryl Cope said coldly.

  “Why do they?”

  “Because a fire burns in their heads,” Carryl said with a snort. “Why else? It- would have been logical for me to go to Columbia, but I am here.”

  Lucy got up and stood facing Carryl across the room. In this position, at least she felt less dominated.

  “And why?” Carryl asked and answered her own question. “Because I felt challenged. Teaching women is a special kind of challenge. Most of the cards are stacked against one.”

  “Yes,” Lucy said. “I have seen that. I do understand what you mean.” But she still held herself back.

  “All this talk about the price of excellence has a grain of truth in it as well as a grain of salt, Lucy.”

  Lucy forced herself to stand her ground, as if this were some sort of final examination she could not afford to fail. To fail what? To fail whom? My life, my self, she thought. “I was with Maria when she shouted Joy, Fulfillment against you all. I’m not sure I would find absolute joy and fulfillment in teaching.”

  “Absolute joy?” Carryl hooted. “You are young, Doctor Winter! Partial joys, partial fulfillments, we are lucky to get them in this world.”

  “Oh hell,” Lucy capitulated. “You know very well I love teaching here. But it’s my whole life I can’t imagine without … without …” She could not finish. But at least she could hold the tears back.

  Carryl came right across the room and laid a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and cocked her head. “Well, nobody wants you to dwindle into teaching as Millamant dwindled into marriage. Of course it’s not to be your whole life, you silly fool!” She gave Lucy’s cheek a tap and threw herself down in the red armchair. “People who are rooted in work are rooted in life,” she said, “you know that as well as I do. But that doesn’t mean those roots never flower.”

  “I want to belong somewhere, to be someone,” Lucy said, amazed at her own violence.

  “You belong at Appleton if you want to. And you are certainly someone. Why do you suppose we’ve all talked to you the way we have? Of course, the trouble with women is that they’re all of a piece. Just because that odious doctor doesn’t want to marry you, you’ve forgotten who you are.”

  “A little white house like Hallie’s, a garden …” Lucy laughed harshly.

  “And a hundred Pippas and Jane Seamans to plague you and challenge you and make you grow up, willy nilly.”

  “I can’t see it yet, Carryl, but I’m on the way. Give me time,” Lucy said.

  “I have time. You do not,” Carryl answered relentlessly. “Moments of decision pass like beauty itself … and you are beautiful, you know, beautifully undecided, beautifully needed, beautifully yourself. I am drunk,” Carryl veered, “and it is time I took you back.”

  Lucy was grateful that she had not said “home.” “You have been very kind.”

  “I am very old.”

  “No, very complete.”

  “God forbid!”

  “It is good about the Beveridges,” Lucy said, as she got into her coat.

  “Yes.”

  “Jane is going to be all right, Carryl.”

  “Yes, I expect she will.”

  “And Olive?”

  “Olive is suffering. It is her climate. In another week she will begin to learn Russian or Chinese. Olive is alive.”

  “And you … and I?”

  “You and I?” Carryl thrust her hands into the pockets of her old leather coat. A cigarette dangled from her mouth. She looked faintly raffish. “You and I? Well, we may not be all right, but we’ll survive.”

  “Yes,” Lucy smiled, “we’ll survive.” Though all she felt at the moment was exhaustion, she said again, “We will survive, you and I,” and then she found herself kissing Carryl Cope like a very old friend. “If I stay,” she added, as they started down the stairs, “it will be for love.”

  “All right,” Carryl laughed, “you win!”

  “I think you have made me fall in love with a profession.”

  “Because a fire burns in my head?”

  “Because a fire burns in your head.”

  A Biography of May Sarton

  May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

  Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.

  At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at
the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).

  On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.

  In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.

  For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.

  While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.