The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  It was three years after that till the next summer home. Dave had taken the job at Brown, turning down the better-paying one at Indiana. I don’t want to get on a side track, he said, and she agreed, though when they visited Bloomington for his interview her heart had yearned to the place, the high groves of the campus where fireflies flickered in the sweet inland darkness. It remained a dream. Reality was east. But he knew she was homesick.

  “How about that hike around Tillamook Head this summer?”

  “Over it. You can’t go around it, you’d fall in the sea.”

  It was the hike they had kept saying they’d take, the summer of the dissertation.

  “Come on,” he said. “Ora-gahn or bust!” And they drove west from the old cities, all across the prairies and the deserts and through the mountains, west with the sun, in the secondhand Mustang, that good little car. Gran stayed up in her own house, this time, to be visited, cooking magnificent dinners for them, poached salmon with dill mayonnaise, boeuf bourguignon, trout caught in Klatsand Creek one hour and fried the next. “When my husband managed the hotel in San Francisco,” she said, “I learned to cook from the French chef.”—“God, she’s wonderful,” Dave whispered. They slept in the little house on Hemlock Street, in the little room that had been Virginia’s room all her girl-life, where an Indian basket and an ivory-backed mirror and a green glass net-float lay on the marble-topped chiffonier. They walked the beaches and hiked every trail in the Coast Range. Dave studied maps, set goals. No way down that side of Saddle Mountain, they told him, so he found a way. He triumphed, he conquered, he won the West. She followed, Sacagawea.

  “I haven’t seen the elk once this summer,” she said the week before they left.

  “Hunters,” Gran said. “And logging.”

  “Elk?” Dave said. He asked the boys at the service station where the elk were. He drove her all over the back roads they had told him about. He drove over Neahkahnie Mountain and down Nehalem Spit until the road ran out. They walked the long dunes above the marshes between the river and the sea. “There! There!” he cried, exulting, as the crowned shadows rocked away into the shadowy marshes. He had caught the elk, he had given them to her. They drove home in the good little grey Mustang over Neahkahnie Mountain, the road turning above the twilit sea. Her mother had kept supper out for them, cold ham and three-bean salad.

  “Tell me about fireflies,” her mother said to Dave. He treated her as if she were a child, and she spoke to him as a child might, trustingly.

  “We called them glowworms,” he said. “If you got a lot of them in a jar, after a while they used to start going on and off all together.” He spoke of his childhood as if it had been very long ago, as if there were no more glowworms.

  Lily listened with her sweet docility. “I only knew the name,” she said. “Fireflies.”

  “They never made it across the Rockies,” Virginia said, and her mother said, “Yes. That’s in your poem.”

  “‘Sparks,’” Virginia said, startled. She hadn’t known if her mother had read the book, which stood crisp and new on the bookshelf in the parlor. It had been awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize. “Yale, eh,” Dave had said.

  THE SUMMER HOME A COUPLE of years later, the summer when she cried. That was all she had of that summer, tears. Tears wept alone in the little dark bedroom, her room. Tears wept alone on the beach at evening, swallowed while she walked. Tears wept alone as she washed steamer clams at the sink in Gran’s house, tears swallowed, hidden, dried. Invisible tears. Dry tears, evaporated down to crystals of salt, stinging her eyes and tightening her throat to an endless ache. Mouthfuls of salt. Silence. The summer of silence. Every night Dave called from Cambridge to tell her about the apartments he had looked at, the apartment he had found, how his book was going, the book on Robert Lowell. He had insisted that she spend the summer in the West. He had given her Ora-gahn. She needed a rest, cheering up. Summer in Cambridge was terrible, hot, muggy, he said. “Are you writing?” he asked, and she said yes, because he wanted so much to give her her writing, too. Every night he called and talked and she hung up and cried.

  Her mother sat in the little back garden. Between the big rhododendrons under the bedroom window and the paling fence held up by a wild old rambler rose there was a strip of weedy grass, and on it Lily had set two lawn chairs. The evening air was fragrant with the roses. The wind blew warm from the northeast, from the land. Inland it was blistering this week, they said. Even here it was hot inside the house. “Come out and sit,” her mother had said, so when she finished crying in her dark little room she washed her face, washed the salt away, and came outside. Her mother looked like her name, dim white in the dusk between the rosebush and the dark rhododendrons. There were no fireflies, but her mother said, “There used to be angels. Do you remember them, Virginia?”

  She shook her head.

  “In the grass, in the trees. You talked with them. I never could.”

  The land-wind carried the sound of the sea away. Though the tide was in, just over the dunes down Hemlock Street, they could hardly hear the waves tonight.

  “Once you asked them, ‘What Dinya do?’”

  She laughed. Tears started, but freshwater tears, flowing, profuse. She drank them. “Mother,” she said, “I still don’t know.”

  “Oh, well, yes,” Lily said. “Why don’t you stay here in Oregon? Dave could get a job at one of the colleges, I’m sure.”

  “He’s an assistant professor at Harvard now, mama.”

  “Oh, yes. You haven’t called me ‘mama’ for years, have you?”

  “No. I just wanted to. Is it all right?”

  “Oh, yes. I never did feel ‘mother’ was right.”

  “What did you feel was right?”

  “Oh, nothing, I suppose. I never was really a mother, you know. That’s why it was so wonderful that I had you, had a daughter. But I always felt a little uncomfortable when you called me mother, because it wasn’t true.”

  “Yes, it was true, mother, mama. Listen. I lost a baby, I had a miscarriage, early in June. I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to make you sad. But now I want you to know.”

  “Oh, dear,” with a long, long sigh in the dusk. “Oh, dear. Oh, and they never come back. Once they’re gone.”

  “They can’t make it across the Rockies.”

  SUMMER IN VERMONT. THE AIR a warm wet woolen blanket wrapped closed about the body, folded over mouth and nose, soft, suffocatingly soft and wet as sweat. A blanket of sweat. But no tears, wet or dry, salt or sweet.

  “It’s the self-centeredness that troubles me,” Dave said. “I thought we had a partnership, a pretty extraordinary one. Suddenly there seem to be all these things you want that you haven’t had, but I don’t know what they are. What is it you really want, Virginia?”

  “That is what we shall never know,” she quoted unkindly; she had become unkind, unfair. “I want to finish my degree, and teach,” she said.

  “Are you giving up the idea of writing, then?”

  “Can’t I write and teach? You do.”

  “If I could take off time just to write—! It seems that you’re trying to throw away what most writers would kill for. Free time!”

  She nodded.

  “Of course, poetry doesn’t take the kind of time professional writing does. Well, I suppose the thing for you to do would be go over to Wellesley and take some courses.”

  “I want to enroll in a degree program. I’d like to do it,” it was impossible, of course, it was impossible to say it, she said it, “in the West.”

  “A degree program? Out West?”

  She nodded.

  “You mean go to some college out there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Virginia,” he said with a bewildered laugh, “be rational. I teach at Harvard. You don’t expect me to give that up. But you want to go to a graduate school somewhere out West? What happens to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Unkind, unfair. The round
, close hills huddled over the cabin. The damp sky lay on the hills like a wet blanket, an electric blanket. Heat lightning flickered and flared in the clouds. The thunder never spoke.

  “You’re willing to simply throw away my entire career?”

  Unkind, unfair. “Of course not. Anyhow your career doesn’t depend on me any more.”

  “When did it ever depend on you?”

  She stared. “When you were in grad school, when I worked—” He looked blank. “You just said we were a partnership! I worked. I was in the typing pool, I edited theses—”

  “That?” He paused a moment. “You feel that that hasn’t been repaid you?”

  “No! I never thought of it like that. But you finished your degree. And now I want to. Is that unfair?”

  “Pound of flesh, eh? No, it’s not unfair. I just didn’t expect it, I guess. I thought you took your writing more seriously. Well, listen. If this is really so important to you, at this stage, I can look into the chances of getting you into the Radcliffe graduate program. There might be a little static, but so long as I don’t get any danger signals—”

  “What can I say that you can hear?”

  He finished his beer and set the can down on the cabin floor, keeping silence. At last he spoke measuredly, thoughtfully, patiently. “I’m trying to understand what it is you want. What you’ve always said you wanted was time for writing. You have it now. You don’t have to work, we’re past that stage. We certainly don’t need the money you’d make teaching, if you did get a degree. And you won’t get much poetry written in graduate school, you know. But I think I do see why you think you ought to finish. A kind of moral point, a kind of closure. But isn’t it really the suburban housewife syndrome? Women who don’t have anything to do, going back to school for ‘self-improvement’ or, God help us, ‘self-expression.’ All that’s rather beneath your level, you know. And to use the doctorate as a time-filler before having children—” He shrugged. “So, what I suggest is that you take a month this autumn, at the beach, in Maine. Take the whole semester, if you want. Do your writing. I can visit weekends. But don’t just play with graduate work, Virginia! Women keep doing that, and it—I’m sorry, but it degrades the work. Scholarship, the university, isn’t a sandpile, a playground.”

  She looked down at the beer can in her hand. “More like a battleground,” she said. “Red in tooth and claw, the professors.”

  He smiled. “If you see it that way, why do you want to join the fray?”

  “To get my union card.”

  “The Ph.D.? What for?”

  “So I can get a teaching job.”

  “You can teach creative writing without the degree, you know.”

  “You don’t respect creative writing courses. You’ve said so often. Why do you say I could teach them?”

  “Because they’re playschool courses,” he said, and got up to go to the refrigerator in the other room of the cabin. While he spoke he opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, opened it, and came back to sit down in the wicker chair by the screen door. They had not lighted a lamp, and the room was nearly dark. Mosquitoes whined at the screens.

  “If you want to play, fine. But you’re not going to make it on the grown-up side of the fence, Virginia. The rules are different. You’ve had it easy. The Yale prize dropping in your lap. And then, as my wife, certain doors have been opened for you. You may not want to acknowledge just why certain reviewers have taken your work so seriously, why some editors are so receptive. You don’t have to. You can write your poems and fool around with reality; that’s your privilege as an artist. But don’t try to bring that attitude out of the kindergarten. Where I have to live, success isn’t a matter of a prize or two. It’s a lifetime’s hard work. Nothing, nothing is just handed to you. You earn it. So please, don’t start messing around with everything I’ve built up for us, out of some kind of restlessness or feeling ‘unfulfilled.’ I’ve heard your artist friends going on about what they call ‘the Eastern Establishment.’ That’s babytalk, you know. If I weren’t part of the real establishment of letters, do you seriously think you’d have got your last book published where you did? You’re involved in a network of influences. Success depends on it, and to rebel against it, or deny it, is simply childish irresponsibility. Toward me.”

  “My last book,” she said in a low voice, without enough breath, “was a failure. A miscarriage, propped up in a, in a perambulator. I’m not denying anything. I just want to stop going wrong. To go right.”

  “‘R’ or ‘wr’?” he asked gently, quizzically, cocking his head. “You’re all worked up, Virginia. You’re letting dissatisfaction with your work, and this bad luck with the miscarriages, get you down. I don’t like seeing you make yourself so unhappy. Try my idea. Go to Maine, go write, go rest!”

  “I want to work for a degree. On the West Coast.”

  “So you said. I’m trying to understand, but I don’t think I do. The idea is that I’m supposed to quit a tenure-track position in the English Department at Harvard to go teach freshman comp at some junior college out in the cactus, because you’ve got a whim to take a doctorate at Boondock State? How am I supposed to understand that? Have you been talking with your mother lately? This sounds like one of her versions of the real world! Seriously, Virginia, I think I have a right to ask you to consider what you’re asking of me before you put a strain like this on our relationship.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, you have that right.”

  “Well?”

  “It goes both ways, doesn’t it?”

  “What does?”

  “A relationship. I can’t breathe, Dave. You’re getting all the oxygen. I’m not a tree. I tried to breathe nitrogen in and oxygen out, like trees do, I tried to be your elm tree, but I got the Dutch elm blight. I’m going to die if I go on trying to live here. I can’t live on what you breathe out. I can’t make your oxygen any more. I’m sick, I’m afraid of dying, I’m sorry that puts a strain on our relationship!”

  “All right,” he said, like a cleaver falling.

  He stood up, looking out through the screen, filling the doorway.

  “All right. Without the poetic metaphors. What is it you want, Virginia?”

  “I want to take my Ph.D. at a western school, and then teach.”

  “You haven’t heard anything I’ve said.”

  She was silent.

  “Just tell me what it is you want,” he said.

  SUMMERS, PIECES OF SUMMERS, BITS and scraps, when she would come up from Berkeley for a week or two, after summer session and before fall term, and sleep. That was all she had of those weeks, sleep. Sleep on the beach in the sun, in the hammock up on the Head in the shade, in her bed in her room. Sleep, and the sound of the sea.

  And after that the summer, the long, wide, large summer when she stayed with Gran in the house on Breton Head because she was writing her dissertation. “You can’t spread out all your books and papers in that poky little house. You need a place to yourself to work,” Gran said.—“That’s what Virginia said,” Virginia said. But she slept three or four nights a week down with her mother at Hemlock Street. She got up early those mornings and went down to the beach to walk down to Wreck Point and back, walking by the waves thinking about The Waves, walking through the morning thinking about The Years, singing nonsense to the sea. Then she walked or drove up the dirt road to the house on Breton Head, the wide-floored house, the wide oak table under windows that looked over the sea where the sun went down. She wrote her dissertation. She wrote poems in the margins of the notebooks, on the backs of file cards.

  “It’s not Dave’s child, then.”

  “I haven’t seen him for three years, Gran.”

  Gran looked uneasy. She sat hunched in the Morris chair, squirmed, picked at her thumbnail like a teenager.

  “Lafayette and I lived separately for twelve years,” she said at last, sitting up straight and speaking rather formally. “He asked
for a divorce when he wanted to remarry. But I think if there had been another man, I would have asked for the divorce myself. Particularly if there was to be a child.”

  “Dave doesn’t want a divorce. He’s been sleeping with a girl, a student, and I think he thinks if he gets divorced he’d have to marry her. Anyhow, if I’m still married when I have it, the baby is ‘legitimate.’ Unlike its mother. I don’t mean to be flip, Gran.”

  “It makes a difference,” her grandmother said without any particular emotion.

  “I met the . . . the father this spring at Fresno. He lives down there. He’s married. They have one child, she was born damaged, it’s called spina bifida. It’s pretty bad. Taking care of her is full-time for both of them. They don’t want to institutionalize her. She’s emotionally responsive, he says. His name is Jake, Jacob Wasserstein. He teaches modern history. He’s a nice man. Very gentle. He has a lot of guilt about his daughter, and his wife. He’s a guilt specialist. He teaches World War II, the concentration camps, the atomic bomb.”