A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  The next day Laura lay in bed all morning. She had to admit that she felt really ill for the first time. It had been a great effort to let the animals in and out, and she had climbed back into bed, quite glad to know that Mrs. O’Brien would be in the house in a few days, three days she counted off on the calendar. But for the moment it was good to lie still, watching the sunlight through the white curtains dapple the wall, taking a sip of coffee, and having a little think, as she put it to herself. Until now she had been so busy living and getting ready in her mind for whatever was to come that she had not felt fear. Now she was terribly afraid, not of death as much as of dying, of getting more and more ill, of pain. She could feel the beads of sweat on her forehead. But there was nothing to do but wait. Fear, she supposed, was as much a part of all this as a fit of coughing. It will pass, she told herself, look at the light, the blessed light, and dear Grindle on the rug by her bed licking the ice off his paws.

  She closed her eyes then while images of Laurie’s birthday swam up into her consciousness. She would not, perhaps, be able to go through a long family evening again. For the truth was that most of the time, she had been floating somewhere at a little remove from Ann and Brooks and the children. No “real connection” there, she realized. But how could that be? Her own children, her precious grandchildren, not real?

  Or was it simply that the future no longer concerned her? What concerned her deeply, the images that floated up whenever she lay down and listened to music, had to do with childhood, early womanhood, before her marriage, had to do with the past. Perhaps that was because all the deepest questions were asked then. Whatever she was to become had made its irreversible imprint then. That was why Sybille haunted her these days, Sybille the most indelible, yet elusive, imprint of them all. And that was why Ella was so much in her mind, too, because only with Ella had she discussed what it was to be a woman. Only with Ella had she thought about feelings. Later on she was too busy living to think a great deal about what was really happening inside her.

  Laura heard the letters slip through the door and land on the hall floor. Grindle was barking furiously, and Sasha might well be on the other side of the door, silently waiting for it to open. So Laura struggled out of bed and went down. And there was Ella’s letter in a thin blue envelope among a pile of bills.

  She took a glass of orange juice into the library with her while the coffee perked, and lay down on the sofa. Her hands were trembling as she tore open the blue envelope.

  Ella’s hand raced across the page, and for a few seconds Laura drank in the nervous, characteristic flow without deciphering the words. The image of Ella rose up before her vividly, the short, dark hair, the lined brown face and flashing dark eyes.

  “Ella, my darling Snab,” she murmured. And for a moment she lay there with the letter in her hand like some magic substance, not even reading it beyond the salutation, “Dearest Snab …”

  When had they started calling each other that, and why? She hadn’t the slightest idea. The word “snab” was part of their secret language.

  “When I had read your letter my first impulse was to fly over for a few days, though you commanded me not to. The pull was immense. Then I realized that was selfish, and had to do with my frightful sense of coming loss—Oh, Snab!—and that I probably could be of no help, only something more you would have to deal with and respond to when what you need, as you say so well, is to make this tremendous journey alone. You sound incredibly brave, I must say—but then you always had stupendous courage, even in Davos where the odds against you were almost insurmountable and you were the prisoner of your mother. You did get well, how I have never understood, but you did. And now in the same way, you are determined to take mortal illness as some last great experience—it is so characteristic when you say, ‘I want to do it well,’ and also when you say that at last you can shut out everything that is not important. Ah, that’s the true snab speaking!

  “In Paris we used to say that was how we meant to live, cutting out the nonessential. Do you suppose growing up always means diluting that fierce purpose for the sake of others? Only someone with a daimon, a genius maybe, would feel justified in doing so later on, at least if the someone is a woman!

  “But for a year we had the luck to be able to be angelic, anarchic beings. I did work very hard, as you remember, with a kind of passion, unlike you, my Snab, who perhaps wisely chose to enjoy. Thank goodness, for you led me into so many marvelous wild adventures. Do you remember spending a fortune to taxi to Chartres on Christmas Eve, then having to spend the night in the cheapest hotel where we were devoured by bedbugs? Remember the hours we spent with Cézanne at the Orangerie? And your infatuation with the nightclub singer Stroeva, in her tuxedo and diamond studs—a Russian? ‘Tu sais les mots câlins et tendres’—of course you remember!

  “And our long passionate arguments about religion, whether God was really the creation of man or not, whether one could manage to live without God. And how little we wanted to marry because marriage, we felt, implied surrendering—but that is not the word I want—losing our power to command our own lives?

  “Yet we did marry, you more happily than I. I certainly felt after I married Hugh that I had ceased to exist, or almost, as a person in my own right, at least for all the years when the children were growing up. Interesting, isn’t it, that, late in life, we have each come to enjoy a job, and to do it well? Oh, darling Snab, my pen runs across the page, running to meet you, in a kind of desperation to get it all said, to encompass what we experienced together, to come close, and the only way I can do it seems to be remembering our youth.

  “I wish I could imagine just where you are and how you are feeling as you read all this nonsense. Under it you must divine how deeply I am with you as you embark on this last journey, how I shall long for some word when you can. But I also know and accept that writing will become difficult and then impossible. I’ll send messages along the way. Let us stay together in spirit to the end, and beyond the end.”

  Laura let the page fall. Beyond the end? As long as Ella lived she, Laura, would have an existence—they had talked about it often, how little by little, we are more and more peopled by the dead, and how as Ella had put it the last time they met and were sitting under a great oak in her garden, drinking tea, “The dead help the living.” Not in a mystical sense, they had decided, but simply by having existed and through a continuing influence that could at times seem almost uncanny, as some phrase or way of reacting came to the surface just when it was needed. Not distance or time had ever come between her and Ella, and now at this moment, alone in the house, Ella’s presence was so vivid that Laura lay there on the sofa for an hour basking in it.

  Someday soon she would answer the letter, but now she wanted music. She finished her coffee though it was stone-cold, let Sasha in, and put a Mozart concerto on the record player. It is beginning to be a timeless world, she thought, letting herself float on the current of the music. And that is what she must learn to keep, not let go—to be as often and as much as she could wholly alive in the eternal present.

  So when the telephone rang, that brutal, imperious interruption, she did not know what time it was, and answered in a daze.

  “Oh, dear Aunt Minna … yes, I was lying here listening to Mozart.”

  The anxiety in the old voice at the other end of the line was tangible. “I had a wonderful letter from Ella this morning, and last night at Ann and Brooks’ I had to tell them because I had a fit of coughing. Ann will come and walk Grindle later on with Laurie.”

  “I have been thinking,” Aunt Minna announced.

  “That’s no news.” Laura smiled.

  “I mean I have been thinking about what I can do for you, and I wonder whether you would like me to come and read to you for an hour in the afternoon or whenever convenient?”

  For a second Laura hesitated. Was that what she might want or need? But then she realized that it was exactly what she needed. The Wind in the Willows, the old favorites fr
om the Oxford Book of Verse, George Herbert, maybe Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  “But how would you get here, darling?”

  “Take a taxi. Why not?” Aunt Minna lived so frugally that it was hard to remember that she had ample means.

  “I’m already thinking of things we might read.” Then she added quickly, “After this weekend. It’s my last before Mrs. O’Brien comes. Why don’t we say next Tuesday at four? You are an angel, you know.”

  “I don’t know about that. It’s really an underhanded way of being sure I’ll see you without being a bore.”

  When Laura put the receiver down, she looked at her watch and realized that she had had no lunch. It was nearly two. So she made herself a sandwich and then couldn’t eat it, but managed to swallow a glass of milk in small sips. Was it really a good idea to have Aunt Minna come regularly as suggested? How could she know? How could she tell? But God knows they had all been trained to arrange time in consistent ways, not to waste it, and Laura supposed that even for the mortally ill a routine might be a support. She had the absurd vision of herself walking out into a wilderness alone and having to decide right away what to take with her, without really knowing at all what it was going to be like. I can’t make plans, she realized, and that is that.

  Then, at long last, she made up her mind to write the chief editor at Houghton Mifflin and resign her job, with the one proviso that she go on editing for Harriet Moors as long as she could. Her hand holding the pen felt like lead; she said the essential as briefly as possible. It was, she knew, the beginning of the letting go, the letting go of her identity as a person in the world. The job had been a life raft after Charles died, but that was long ago “and in another country.”

  Now she was a listener to music, a watcher of light on the walls, a person who must be more and more concerned with the inner world.

  She must have slept because she woke with a start at the ring of the doorbell and a crescendo of barks. The dark was closing in though it was, she saw, with a glance at her watch, only half-past three. “Be quiet, Grindle,” she said quite crossly as she got up and went to the door. And there was Ann with a florist’s wrapped package in her hands.

  “Come in, come in!”

  “I brought some spring flowers.”

  “Spring flowers?” Laura felt as excited as a child. “Spring now? What a marvelous idea!” and, as Ann stood hesitantly inside the door, “Take off your coat.”

  “Wouldn’t you like me to take Grindle for a walk? That’s really why I came.”

  “Well, it would make him happy. How thoughtful of you, Ann.”

  So while Ann went off wih Grindle, who was barking his joy, Laura went into the kitchen and unwrapped the flowers. She stood for a moment looking down at them, daffodils, blue iris, yellow tulips, two purple anemones, a few branches of freesia, and breathed in their cool sweetness. How crisp, how alive, they were. With the bitter cold outside, the frozen snow, it did seem a miracle that such freshness could appear and be real. Laura stood there in a state of pure joy, just looking and smelling.

  Arranging them in a Venetian glass vase from Sybille’s house proved to be quite difficult. They flopped or stood up too straight. The task was almost beyond her strength, and when Ann came back, Laura lay down on the sofa with the flowers on a low table beside her, and was glad to let Ann make them a cup of tea. Then they talked. No one had been in the house since Laura had her news, except Harriet and Mrs. O’Brien. And she had to admit, now, that she had been lonely, and it was a comfort to look across at Ann, lovely in a pale blue turtle-neck sweater, a corduroy skirt, and elegant high boots, her cheeks pink from the cold and her eyes so bright.

  “The flowers—” Laura sighed her pleasure. “What a dream!”

  “I wanted” Ann said shyly, “I was afraid—I mean, I didn’t want to intrude, but …”

  “It was a very good idea,” Laura said. “I’ve been lonely but I didn’t know it.”

  “It was wonderful of you to come to Laurie’s birthday. The first thing she did this morning was to ask for her necklace. We had put it on the mantelpiece last night, you remember.”

  “It’s much too grown-up, but I hope she’ll wear it happily later on, and I wanted to give it to her myself.” Having said the obvious, Laura felt marooned. She took a sip of tea and laid the cup down. She saw Ann alone so rarely that she didn’t know where to begin. “Brooks seems in good form?”

  “Very. He’s a different person since he has become so involved in conservation. Sometimes I think it’s because he has a legitimate outlet for anger!”

  Laura smiled. For all her rather forced eagerness, Ann had a wry perception of things that often hit the mark.

  “That is certainly a help.”

  “My problem is that I don’t. I envy him.”

  “But you’re not an angry sort of person, are you?” As soon as Laura had uttered the words, she realized how condescending they had sounded.

  Ann laughed her ironic laugh. “I’m hardly a person these days—you know all about it, Laura, two small children and no help. You can’t imagine how exhilarating it was to go off alone, buy flowers, and come and see you! I felt like a tiger escaped from the zoo.”

  They exchanged a smile and then allowed themselves a small silence. Intimacy begins in silence, Laura was thinking. And it’s true that I have almost never had a chance to talk with Ann alone. So I know something about her as a social being but almost nothing about what goes on inside. Shall I, can I make the effort? What I really want is to put on a Mozart record and look at the flowers.

  “But I mustn’t tire you, I’ll be gone in a minute.”

  “Stay,” Laura said gently. She had seen the shadow cross Ann’s face. “I’m not ill, you know. It’s just that I can’t seem to cope with practical things. I’m way off somewhere in a daydream, but I’m very glad to be pulled back into life—Charles and I used to complain when the children were small that we never saw each other. It was very different in Mamma’s day. She was our enchantress who did all the amusing things with us, like going to the opera or the zoo, or inventing plays, but there was always a nurse or a governess to drag us away when it was time for dinner. Someone else did the drudgery, and until those years when I had TB in Switzerland, she and Pa had all the time in the world for what they liked best, entertaining the charming and the great, and being with each other.”

  “They really did seem entranced with each other, at least so I felt the few times I saw them together before your father died. Of course I was terrified of your mother. She was so grand! I felt tongue-tied and at a total loss. She always seemed to be in on some tremendous secret that made her life glorious in ways I couldn’t even imagine. Brooks adored her, and I always felt diminished in his eyes after we had gone there to lunch.”

  “Yes,” Laura sighed, “I expect you did. Mamma was very good at that, though it was not a conscious thing at all.”

  “She didn’t really like women. Am I right?”

  “I don’t know. No doubt she would have preferred three sons to three daughters, but she did have several adoring women friends, you know, long-lasting, real friendships.”

  “But for her—I’m guessing—a lasting friendship had to be based on someone adoring her.”

  “Yes … and no,” Laura said, thinking of poor Cousin Hope. “Maggie Teyte, Edith Wharton were famous by the time mother knew them, and with each of them she wooed, if you will—she could be a marvelous listener. Maggie Teyte always said she never had an audience like Mamma, and Mamma was not acting when those French songs brought tears of something like rapture to her eyes, and no doubt a pang too because of course Mamma should have been an actress. That would have solved everything.”

  “What was it like to be her daughter?” The question had been in the air for some time, Laura sensed, yet it caught her off her guard.

  “Heaven and hell,” she answered. “That’s true,” she said, surprised at her own answer. “That’s really it. It was heaven whe
n we were quite small because Mamma did enclose us in a kind of magic charm, and we didn’t mind then that she was acting the part of an adorable mother because she played it so well.”

  “Oh, dear,” Ann laughed. “It does make our life now seem pretty dreary by comparison. Colds, tantrums, endless meals to be provided, no Edith Wharton coming to dinner—very little heaven around 4 Concord Place!”

  “But it’s real, you see. And somehow Mamma’s life was never quite real.”

  “What was the hell?”

  “The hell? Hard to say it in words, or even to know. I suppose the hell was never landing.”

  “Never landing?”

  Laura laughed. “You see, it’s too complicated—how can I say it?—never landing on earth, hard, dirty, ordinary earth. That’s what we longed for.”

  “May I ask a pointed question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you feel that you had landed when you married Charles, then?”

  “Yes, I did.” Laura lay back with a pillow behind her head. “It was a kind of miracle because under mother’s aegis I might have overlooked Charles—he was neither very rich, nor very brilliant, and only got through law school by the skin of his teeth, but Charles was real, funny, loving, warm. I was literally starving for just that.”

  “You must miss him terribly.”

  “I did. Well, you know, dear Ann, you were such a help when Charles died, but now I am glad I can do this alone. It would have been doubly difficult with Charles agonizing at my side. I couldn’t have borne that.”

  “You are an amazing person,” Ann said, her eyes very bright.

  “Am I?” Laura laughed. “Most of the time I feel too queer for words. We’re all loons, really, my two sisters are quite impossible, each in her own inimitable way, impossible. And I? I suppose I am possible, which was a relief for my children, anyway.” Here she suddenly sat up “But even so—and we did, I think, make a good open and loving world for our children—only Brooks has come through into happiness.”