by May Sarton
“You’re amazing, Laura, absolutely amazing,” said Ann, then she chuckled, and the chuckle became a laugh. “But you’ve made your point and ‘I hear you,’ as they say.”
“All right, dear. Now there is one thing you can do that would be a real help, and that is to come over today or tomorrow, when convenient, and take Mrs. O’Brien to the shops, show her where to get food, the farm for eggs and an occasional chicken. After that, she says she can drive herself.”
“I’ll come this afternoon,” Ann said cheerfully.
And that was that. But the effort, Laura realized when she put the receiver down, had been immense. Her nightgown was soaking wet, and for the first time in several days she had a fit of coughing.
“Stifling—” she managed to say when Mrs. O’Brien, silent as an Indian, was suddenly there by the bed.
“Let me lift you.” Somehow Mrs. O’Brien managed to get Laura into an upright position, then to stuff pillows behind her.
“Thank you,” Laura breathed. “That’s better.”
“Why don’t you let me answer the phone from now on, Mrs. Spelman? Then you can decide whether you want to receive the call or not.”
“Yes, please.”
So it was that Laura dozed for a while and heard the phone ring twice, thinking with great relief that she did not have to answer. When Mrs. O’Brien came up with a cup of tea at eleven, she said that one call had been from the doctor, who planned to look in early the next morning, the other from Harriet Moors.
“She seemed rather upset when I told her you were ill, but I told her I would give you a message, and I think she was crying.”
“I must get up,” Laura said at once.
“Now take it easy. She left her phone number, and when you’ve had a little rest, you can call her if you want to. Here it is,” and Mrs. O’Brien carefully unfolded a piece of paper from the pocket in her apron.
Laura lay back, breathing shallow breaths. Any deep breath made her cough. How had she managed to forget all about Harriet Moors? In fact it was as though that part of life that had been associated with Houghton Mifflin had already floated away down the stream. Yet from the beginning something in the girl had touched Laura deeply. She had to know what was happening to this almost complete stranger! How to fathom that?
Thinking about it for a few minutes before calling Harriet, Laura found herself wondering about her sister Jo. What would Jo say to this girl? It was perhaps that the unfinished haunts one, and for forty years the ghost of Alicia had haunted. Every deep relationship has pain in it, Laura reminded herself, but for the deviant the risks were higher, the courage demanded to go one’s own way so much greater—Harriet’s friend, older, and with a job perhaps at risk—well, it was understandable perhaps that she had taken an adamant position. And what then? It was an excruciating dilemma for poor Harriet, already strung up over her parents’ reaction. I must call her right away, Laura said to herself, with a tremor of fear. What if she—
She dialed the number and waited while the phone rang and rang, but just before she was about to hang up, a blurred voice answered. Blurred by tears? By drugs?
“Harriet, this is Laura Spelman. I’m sorry I was asleep when you called.”
“They said you were ill.”
“I am, but I’m concerned about you. Are you all right? You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m not, I’m …” a sob prevented further speech.
“You’re upset. Why don’t you just come over right away?”
“But … but—”
“I’m not too ill for an hour’s talk. So come right along. Blow your nose, and we’ll see what we can do to help.”
“Thanks.”
Had Harriet taken on more than she could be expected to handle? Laura tried to remember the name of a psychiatrist, but here was someone very pure and honest, very young too. Tampering with Harriet, forcing a certain kind of analysis—was that what could help? Only, Laura decided, if she was depressed beyond the power to make decisions, only if she was suicidal. But how was one to know? Laura was suddenly so agitated that she put on her socks inside out, but what did that matter? At least she had managed to get dressed, while Sasha wound herself round her legs, getting in the way, in a sudden fit of passionate purrs.
“There, my cat, now we are going downstairs.”
“Good heavens, Mrs. Spelman, I thought you were asleep!” Mrs. O’Brien looked startled.
“I’ve asked Harriet Moors to come over for an hour. She’s in trouble.”
Mrs. O’Brien did not comment; instead she put a match to the freshly laid fire, and when that was done, she said, “Well, you’ll want to talk with her in peace. I’ll go out and get in some food while she’s here. Like that you won’t be left alone.”
“Fine,” Laura said. “Let’s have a tenderloin and some fresh peas.”
“I’ve got some frozen fish chowder melting for your lunch.”
“Perfect.”
Laura put a Haydn concerto on the player—Haydn for strength—and indeed the music poured into her like a shot of strong liquor. She stood back to the fire, looking at Ann’s flowers, still beautiful on the low table by the sofa where she had spent so many hours lately, reading and listening to music. There was her desk, piled high with mail she had not even opened. She really must get at it now Mrs. O’Brien was here. She would take it up to her bedroom and read letters in the morning before she got out of bed.
Harriet should be arriving any minute, and here was Mrs. O’Brien coming downstairs in her coat, ready to go. So it was opportune that at that second the doorbell rang.
“Come in. Mrs. Spelman is in the library,” she heard, and then something whispered—no doubt a warning not to stay too long.
“Well,” Laura said, as Harriet hesitated in the doorway, “come in to the fire. How is it outside?”
“It feels like rain.”
There was a silence after the front door closed. Harriet dropped her bag from her shoulder to the floor and sat down on the sofa. Laura in the wing chair glanced once at the blotched face, behind dark glasses, and looked away. A glance was enough.
“You’ve had a hard blow, haven’t you?”
“No.” said Harriet in a low voice. “I just feel hopeless. I feel like an animal in a cage.”
“That’s bad,” Laura said.
“Oh, Mrs. Spelman, I shouldn’t have come. It’s just …”
“I don’t think what you’re going through is the easiest thing in the world, and that’s why I told you to feel free to call, so don’t worry.” Perhaps it would be a good idea to keep on talking for a while until Harriet pulled herself together. “One good thing about illness is that a lot of nonessentials get eliminated. I can’t work, you see, and lying around gets boring”—a lie, but in a good cause. “So, let’s just talk for a while. Mrs. O’Brien has gone out to do errands.”
But now that she had arrived, Harriet Moors was clearly almost incapable of speech. She took out a kleenex and blew her nose.
Laura hazarded a guess. “You’ve made your decision? You’ve decided not to publish your novel?”
“No, oh, no!” Harriet got up, walked up and down for a bit, then stood at the window, her back to Laura. “That’s the trouble—that’s it. I can’t see anything to do, any way out.”
“Except to jump out the window?”
This brought Harriet back. “How did you know?”
“It doesn’t take exceptional insight to gather that you feel you are at an excruciating impasse, Harriet. Everyone contemplates suicide at some time, just as little children all run away from home at some time.”
Harriet managed a smile, then frowned. “Children run away when their parents won’t let them do what they want to do—at least the only time I did was when my father wouldn’t let me have a bike.”
“Exactly. But what if circumstances are such that the child can’t run away? I had TB of the spine when I was nineteen. For two years I lay flat on my back in a sanatoriu
m.”
“Wow! How did you handle it—the anger, the frustration?” For the first time Harriet sounded like herself.
“By thinking.”
“I think myself round and round in circles, that’s the trouble. How in hell can I break the circle?”
“Talk about it—”
“Well, if I let this book be published under my own name, it means the end of Fern and me. I guess I had accepted that it would make a rift between me and my parents, but that’s already there—but Fern—we haven’t slept for nights. We just wrangle and cry. She looks awful, and it’s all my fault.” Harriet was close to tears again.
“I wonder whether it is all your fault. She is older than you are, I seem to remember. She must have made some kind of decision when you first became lovers. She must have known the risk she was taking, didn’t she?”
“Well, maybe—but she says now that when the book comes out, she might as well wear a placard round her neck with LESBIAN written out on it.” Here Harriet broke down and sobbed. “She says she will lose her job. She says it will kill her.”
“So what are you supposed to do? Tear up your book?”
“I suppose so.”
“It’s interesting that you talk about suicide but apparently not about destroying your work. Is that some sort of clue, maybe?”
Harriet sat down on the floor, and Laura saw that at last she was beginning to examine the problem rather than simply screaming with pain. Laura moved over to the sofa and stretched out.
“You mean it shows that I have sort of made the decision, only I can’t face its consequences.”
“Maybe.”
“But how I can be sure that it’s worth it? That it’s good enough? Fern says I wrote it just to come to terms with my convictions about what we are, and that it’s nobody else’s business. She says maybe I wrote the book instead of going to a psychiatrist to handle my parents’ attitude.”
“If so, it was rather a respectable way of doing that.”
“Then why not tear it up? Oh, I’m so tired,” Harriet groaned.
“What would happen if you did tear it up? Would you feel relieved? I wonder.”
“Like an abortion?” Harriet said bitterly. “It’s my work. It’s myself—the best of me! I won’t destroy it, God damn it!”
Laura wanted to shout “Bravo!” but restrained herself.
“If you did destroy it, wouldn’t the ghost of the book haunt you and Fern? Could you hope to build a stable relationship on such a violent act?”
“I don’t know.”
“And neither do I, of course,” Laura said quickly.
“It’s awfully hard,” Harriet murmured. “I mean, I love Fern.”
Laura waited. It was not the moment to say that Harriet was young, and that there would be other people, eventually another person. Love is an absolute, after all, or seems so when one is in love. What she could talk about was the work.
“You asked me how you could tell that your book was worth such pain, how you can be sure—I never answered that question. I am not a writer, as you know, but I have worked with a lot of writers, and this question comes up often, not in just these particular circumstances. I think every writer sacrifices a good deal for his work. Families pay a high price when they have a writer in their midst! And no writer is ever sure that he is a genius and has a right to whatever he takes from life to do what he feels he must do. I think your book has value—I told you so when we first met—but that doesn’t mean it will be a success. Most first novels sell a few thousand, and the author is lucky if he gets reviewed.”
Harriet was listening intently, but she said nothing. Laura knew she had to go on now, go further on to some ultimate conclusion. “One simply gives what one can and hopes for the best.” It sounded rather lame.
And now she felt an impulse to do something strange. “You know what?” she said, “I feel like listening to the Bach cello suites—so much like a voice, so much like the climbing of a mind.” She got up and searched for the record, wondering as she knelt on the floor why she had had that impulse, for she had not listened to these records for years.
“Do you mind?”
“I’d like that,” Harriet said. “If it’s not too much for you.”
“We’ll listen to two or three of them anyway.”
Harriet sat, leaning against a chair, looking into the fire. She had taken off her dark glasses and was, Laura noted, a great deal more composed than when she had arrived like some battered bird, wild and askew. Perhaps I have given her a respite, Laura thought, but she had no illusions. Harriet was going to suffer, and there was very little one could do to help. Some things have to be gone through. For some difficulties there is no good solution, and they are the agonizing ones.
Little by little such thoughts subsided, and the intricate, thrilling voice of the cello took over. After the first record, Harriet got up and turned it over without a word. And when that stopped, Laura sighed. “It does compose the mind, doesn’t it?”
“Can words ever do that, I wonder?” Harriet asked, running a hand over her forehead as if to smooth out a frown.
“Oh, yes, poetry does—and sometimes novels may, over their long, extended pattern. Your novel may very well do it, although that seems strange. Many, many people are confused about the problem it deals with, and maybe a few will understand it all a little better. I feel proud of you that you will publish,” Laura added and saw the blush of pleasure suffuse Harriet’s round face.
“I have a sister who did not have your courage—I think I have mentioned her?—who did not stand up to our parents, who cut herself off from someone she loved, who would not face the consequences. It’s a matter, after all, of being, isn’t it? She has been immensely successful, but she has always seemed to be a half-person to me, and to my other sister. Maybe that is why I have found myself involved in your book and in your life. It’s all very strange.”
“It’s awfully kind of you,” Harriet said. “I know you haven’t been well—and—oh, dear, I’ve probably stayed too long already!”
“No, no, it’s all right. Bach has revived me!” Laura paused. She was trying to make up her mind whether to take the leap, tell Harriet the truth about herself, or whether to let her find out.
“I hope you feel better soon,” Harriet said, looking uncomfortable. She reached for her bag and got to her feet.
“Stay a moment longer,” Laura said, for it was clearly not possible to let Harriet leave and never see her again without warning. “You see,” she went on as Harriet sat down beside her on the sofa, “I won’t get better.”
“You don’t want to?”
“In a way, yes—the thing is, Harriet, that there is cancer in my lungs and they can’t operate. So—” All she could do now was cover the huge hole she had torn in the space between them with words, Laura felt, let Harriet have time to recover from shock. “I guess we won’t meet again. And that’s why I felt I must tell you.”
“You’re so ill, and yet you read my book and let me come and talk. Why?”
“It’s a question I have asked myself. When I was told what the matter was, all that day I kept thinking that now I could plan my life, maybe for the first time, and the phrase that kept coming back was ‘the real connections.’ I did not need to have anything to do with what was not a real connection. And—I think you’ll understand this—I felt enormously relieved. I felt that the only thing I could do and must do was to try to come to a final reckoning with everything.”
“But—” Harriet looked bewildered, as well she might. Laura smiled. “You appear to be a real connection, I don’t know why myself. Perhaps I have been haunted by my sister Jo’s decision so long ago to run away from her own deep need, and I told you, I think, that my second son, Ben, is a homosexual. So you see, for myself, not the editor, your novel had reverberations. But more than Jo and Ben, I had to face the fact that for me myself one of the real connections, one of the deepest and most nourishing, in some ways more than my
marriage, good as that was, had been a passionate friendship with a woman. I still can’t bring myself to reread her letters, but I must soon. Your book, and then our talks, have been part of something important, revelatory.”
Harriet had covered her face with one hand. Now she reached over and took Laura’s hand and clasped it hard.
“Women’s feeling for one another has been a buried world for so long, a cause of fear and shame,” Laura murmured, holding the warm young hand in hers. “Now at last we are beginning to understand the blessing.”
“Oh, thank you” said Harriet. “Thank you for everything.”
For a second Laura looked her straight in the eyes, then she asked the only question that really mattered: “You are going to be all right?”
Harriet nodded, got up, flung her bag round her shoulder, and gave Laura a dazzling smile. “If I could live the way you are dying!” she said unexpectedly.
“‘Down to hell and up to heaven in an hour’?” Laura laughed. “I must admit that so far—” but then she leaned over in a spasm of coughing, the cough she had managed to keep from happening for an hour. “You’d better go,” she gasped.
Mrs. O’Brien, who at that instant opened the door with her key and came in loaded with packages, was not pleased. Harried fled. “You shouldn’t have seen that girl.”
Laura lay on the sofa, sweat pouring down her face.
“Oh, yes,” she managed to say. “Oh, yes. It was important.”
Chapter XIV
Laura pushed her breakfast tray down to the end of the bed. She had managed three swallows of coffee, but toast, a poached egg were out of the question this morning. Even sitting high up with three pillows behind her, it felt as though she had a balloon in her chest pressing, pressing.