A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  Daughters, Laura thought as she floated down the stream. So much harder than boys to bring up because … here a branch impeded the passage of flowing waters … it is much harder to be a woman than a man.

  So after all that freedom and all the paths open to become whatever she wanted to be, Daisy had ended up living with a boy five years younger than she who was an intern. Laura had not been allowed to meet Saul; “he hates Wasps,” she had been informed by Daisy in the aftermath of Charles’s funeral. “But Charles met him and liked him a lot,” Laura remembered answering, offering her neck to be guillotined. “I know, in New York,” Daisy had answered, “It’s just this whole rich atmosphere of the goyim he couldn’t possibly take. Suburbia,” she had said with her usual contempt.

  And now this grown-up person called Daisy who had once had tantrums and had to be put in a tepid bath in her clothes, was due to arrive by her own wish at the bedside of her dying Wasp mother. At this point all Laura could think of was those slow-moving, hibernating wasps who made their appearance in March from somewhere in the attic and died hanging on to a wicker lampshade, as one had done the other day in her bedroom.

  I do not have to pretend any longer, she told herself. I am permitted to die as I am, what I am. No one can try to change me. It’s too late.

  It was a comfort when Mary O’Brien called, “We’re home!” and Grindle trundled up the stairs, his tail wagging, his pink tongue ready to lick her hand.

  It had been Laura’s experience that things waited for with dread rarely turned out as expected. Everybody looks so old, Laura thought—Daphne, now Daisy, whose face had tautened, whose reddish hair had a touch of gray in it. Daisy, lean and elegant still in tight jeans and a lavender suede jacket, was no longer the sharp, self-assured, brusque person with whom Laura had argued about nearly everything. She had become gentler, and from the first moment when she flung her knapsack down and ran to her mother without a second’s hesitation and kissed her on the cheek, Laura realized that this encounter was not going to be what she had imagined; so that she herself, armed as she had been and prepared to be attacked, found herself newly attentive to this unknown daughter.

  Now Laura was lying on the sofa listening to a Mozart piano concerto while Daisy was busy in the kitchen, heating up Mary O’Brien’s stew for their supper. Laura had made a salad and set out a bottle of burgundy. We managed to get separated, she was thinking, very long ago when Daisy became her father’s rather than her mother’s daughter. Was it that? Or was it simply that Daisy had set her mother and her mother’s life aside as irrelevant, as uninteresting, in her own hunger for life and determination to find out all about it on her very own. She had said as much, but thoughtfully this time, and without animosity. “Your life didn’t seem to have anything to do with my life. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” And she had gone on to talk about Sybille, who had nourished her need for the absolute and the heroic. “Granny seemed really to understand everything—and it was so marvelous that anyone as old as she could blaze away as she did about the war in Vietnam. That was the last time I saw her—she had gone to march in Washington!”

  “I’d forgotten,” Laura murmured. But now she did remember and how angry she had been, for it seemed an absurd risk to take. She had even called Jo, hoping Jo would back her up and make it impossible in some way for their mother to embark on such a crazy expedition. “I was hard on Sybille.” For seeing it all freshly through Daisy’s eyes, Laura winced at how mean-spirited she had been. By then she herself had washed her hands of Sybille and Sybille’s extravagant passions for this or that, a person or a cause. “My sisters and I had learned to protect ourselves, I suppose.”

  “Should I go and see her, Mother—while I’m here?” “She wouldn’t recognize you. Why should you make a gesture that has no meaning? Far better keep your memory of that intensity and passion intact.” “Besides I’m here to take care of you, aren’t I?” “I don’t need care,” Laura had said, “as you can see.” Daisy had frowned and rocked back and forth, her arms clasped round her knees. “You haven’t eaten anything except a mouthful of scrambled egg since I arrived. You’re starving.”

  “Probably. Eating is the one thing that seems rather difficult—so I’m weak—I get tired. Otherwise …” Seeing the strain on Daisy’s face, Laura added quickly, “Jim Goodwin has promised me the spring.”

  “You sound so calm, Mother.”

  “The truth is that dying is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Wow!” Daisy sat up, her eyes very bright. “You’ve got guts, I must say.”

  “No. It’s just that when there are limits, it’s easier to handle some things. The irrelevant can get pushed away. That pile of mail on my desk, for instance. I never think about such things now. I live in the present, Daisy. It’s quite a relief.”

  But the present had also unfortunately contained an exhausting fit of coughing later on in the evening. That could not be glossed over, and Daisy had been shocked. Ever since, she had been careful not to let her mother talk for very long. Now it was Saturday evening, their last evening, for Daisy would go the next day and was asked over to Sunday dinner with Brooks and Ann.

  Laura was hoarding her energy. She had not even lit the fire. She was learning to let other people do things that might bring on sudden exhaustion. Stooping was one of them. She lay, floating on the music, reaching over to stroke Grindle’s soft ears now and then.

  “Now can I open the champagne?” Daisy called from the kitchen. She had brought a bottle of champagne at Saul’s suggestion—apparently he had told her that champagne was good for Laura’s condition.

  “Splendid,” Laura called back. “Oh, just light the fire would you? Then we’ll pop that bubbly, as your father used to say.”

  “Daddy loved festive things, didn’t he?” said Daisy, bending to light the fire. When that was done, she stood up and began what became quite a struggle, to get the champagne open. “Oh, dear, I wish I could do this like Daddy—there—now … now!”

  “That was very satisfactory,” Laura smiled, for the cork had hit the ceiling, making Grindle run away into the kitchen. “Even though Grindle thinks war has been declared.”

  For some reason Grindle’s exit struck them both as very funny, and Daisy laughed so much she could hardly pour.

  Laura lifted her glass, watching the bubbles rise to the surface.

  “There’s so much I want to say, to ask—but I’m so afraid of tiring you.” Daisy, Laura noticed, was for once sitting in a chair rather than on the floor.

  “You look prepared for some fatal interview,” Laura teased. “And what if I do get tired? Does it matter? I want all of life I can have.”

  “All night I was thinking about you and me. Why is it that mothers and daughters appear to have a harder time than mothers and sons?”

  “I’ve wondered, too.” Then Laura plunged deliberately into the turbulent sea. “Did we have a hard time?”

  “Oh, Mother, you were always criticizing me. I felt I could never do anything right! Don’t you remember?”

  But Laura did not remember. What she remembered was Daisy’s stubborn refusal to do anything that was asked of her, from wearing a dress to dinner to not climbing tall trees to the very top. “As I remember,” Laura finally answered, “you were always criticizing me,” and then they laughed.

  “Well,” Daisy said thoughtfully, “when I was sixteen or seventeen, I must say you seemed to represent everything I despised, especially money.”

  “Money?” Laura was startled. “Money?” she repeated. “Daisy, we aren’t rich and never have been. Mamma and Papa gave away huge amounts of money to all those causes—there wasn’t that much left.”

  “But she wore dresses by French couturiers, Mother, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Yes, she did, and they were often handed down from her really rich cousin in Philadelphia.”

  “Maybe, but the whole atmosphere I grew up in was somehow privileged—I guess that is the word. Ther
e were servants, for instance.”

  “Well, I paid for Sarah Page by working at Houghton Mifflin. I earned that, after all.”

  “I’m sorry, Mother. I guess I’ve never thought much about it. But I felt that you and Daddy really didn’t know very much about real life. You’ve been so safe.”

  “If you’ve been brought up in the eye of the storm as I was (you can have no idea of the dramas we had to witness as children), maybe what you long for is something quite simple and normal, like family life in a comfortable suburb. But, if you must know, quite a lot of what you call ‘real life’ comes into a publisher’s office. I’m not entirely beyond the pale.”

  Laura felt nettled and knew that this was not a good idea. Keep calm, she said to herself. “But that isn’t the point, really, is it? About mothers and daughters—I can understand that a mother, these days, is rarely the exemplar a daughter needs.”

  “Because,” Daisy said, “we really don’t know what it is to be a woman, what we want of ourselves—I don’t even know whether I want to marry or not, for instance.”

  “You’ll have to decide pretty soon, if you want children.”

  “Don’t, Mother.”

  “You talk about reality—you might as well face the fact.”

  “I wonder whether I’m capable of that kind of commitment.” Daisy slid down to the floor. “Nothing seems permanent or that solid to me. Maybe marriage asks more than I can give. I’m not even sure Saul and I will ever get married. It would be hard on his family if he married a non-Jew.

  “What sort of people are they? You’ve never told me.”

  “His father’s a dentist; his mother appears to be a rather neurotic, rather ambitious woman who flits in and out of volunteer jobs looking for something she never finds. They play golf on Saturdays and have a huge family Sunday dinner to which various aunts, cousins, heaven knows who, come, and Saul has to go, willy-nilly, so we never have a real weekend together. Saul is the only child, which is hard on him.” All this was blurted out rather mechanically as though Daisy were not really interested.

  “Why didn’t she have another child?”

  “Oh, she always thinks she has some fatal disease—and perhaps she did have an operation and can’t. I’ve never seen her alone, and I’m not exactly welcome at these family gatherings, so …”

  “It doesn’t sound like a happy future from all you say—what is it about Saul? It’s gone on quite a while.”

  “Three years of my life,” Daisy frowned. “My job is o.k., but it isn’t my real life. He is.”

  “But you love him?”

  “Women get caught, that’s the trouble. I seem to have attached myself to Saul like a limpet to a rock, against all reason.” Daisy got up and refilled their glasses, but instead of sitting down again she wandered around for a few moments, picking up various objects and setting them down. Then she said, rather unexpectedly, “We have a lot of fun together—and you have to remember that Saul is at the hospital day and night, so I really can’t be with him very much. It’s tantalizing, and then when we do have a night and a day we just go wild. Sometimes we make love for twenty-four hours and never get up. I suppose that shocks you.”

  “Not at all. But that won’t last. And then what?”

  “Sometimes we spend a whole day at the zoo. Sometimes we see two movies. I can’t explain it, mother, what it is about him, except—” here Daisy turned back from the window and sat down again. “He’s so alive. He’s so full of life he’s like a child let out of school and he pulls me along with him because he charms me. He charms me,” she said again. Laura observed that she was close to tears and wondered why. Daisy had not been a weeper, except when she was in a rage.

  “And if you do get married? It sounds as if maybe you should?”

  “I’d always be an outsider, Mother, wherever we went—even far away from New York. I’d never be taken in, you see, and for Saul being with me is betraying something deep inside him. I know that. He talks about going to Israel—I would love that. But he would be a little uncomfortable, you see. He would always have to be explaining me as though I were a black, and that’s really how I feel, like a stranger.”

  “I just don’t believe that. It seems so old-fashioned. I mean, after all—” and suddenly Laura felt quite cross. It seemed almost unbelievable, like something in a Victorian novel. “After all, love is always taking the stranger in. When Charles died, I felt cut in two, but we were never exactly one, you know.”

  “You mean Daddy was very simple and you were complicated?” At this Laura laughed, because Daisy had a way of reducing things to the bare bones, and perhaps she was right.

  “I’m not complicated,” Laura answered seriously. “The complications came from Mamma, and from my being ill so long before I married. I suppose some part of me had been walled away so I could survive, and only because Charles was such a truly loving, giving person, did it work. I think we did have a good marriage,” she added quickly.

  “I used to envy the way you looked at each other across the table.”

  “Did you?” Laura felt suddenly shy, aware now as she had not been at the time, of Daisy’s eyes observing, being envious. “If you must know I was a little envious of you and your father. When you were born, I knew I had given him what he wanted most in the world.”

  “I just think family life is impossible,” Daisy said. “You can’t win. It’s so damned complicated. Nobody gets what he wants. Or if he does, then someone else in the family doesn’t. And the awful thing is that women have had to be the ones to balance it all and keep it from falling apart! I just don’t think I could do it, Mother.”

  “Since the women’s movement has taken hold, perhaps we are able to be honest at last—so much is coming out into the open that had been buried. That’s why Sybille felt so violently about it.”

  “Did she? She never said so to me.”

  “She felt the sacred was being violated. Things talked about lose their mystery, she felt—and perhaps rightly so. Also there was too much she couldn’t face, it would have been too terrible.”

  “Like what?”

  Laura lay back on the sofa, taking a kind of inward leap. Was this the moment to talk about Sybille? To break her long silence about all that to her children, and especially to Daisy who admired Sybille? “I think I’m a little too tired to try to say it. The great thing, dearie, is that you knew Sybille at her best, and at her best she could be rather wonderful.”

  “I feel you are putting me off. Oh, dear, of course, you’re exhausted. I’m going to get us something to eat and leave you alone for a bit—only—” Daisy turned back at the door, with a look on her face, puzzled but determined, that brought her back vividly as a child, “I hope you’ll talk about it later on.”

  The conversation had taken its toll, though all through it Laura had felt she was being borne on a rising tide, racing with it toward some understanding at last between herself and this subtly rejecting Daisy. I don’t feel rejected now, Laura was thinking. The door has opened between us, and neither of us is quite as much on the defensive. That’s good, she said to herself, even as she sank into a half-doze. “A house of gathering,” someone, maybe Jung, had called death. But exhausted as she was, Laura wondered whether her mother would ever have a place in that house where all could be gathered, all accepted—except her. Would she have to die to be delivered of Sybille?

  “Ella,” she murmured.

  “There,” Daisy was saying, “I made you an eggnog and a tiny portion of Mrs. O’Brien’s delicious stew in case you could taste it.” She laid a small tray beside Laura.

  Laura opened her eyes and made the long journey back from semiconsciousness. “Oh, thanks. Don’t forget to have some salad. I made it for you.”

  They sat opposite each other in a companionable silence. Daisy put a new log on the fire. Laura took a sip of eggnog and managed to swallow it, and in a little while she had taken about a third. To swallow more would be to push her luck, for nausea now wa
s increasingly the enemy. Daisy at least was ravenous. Laura, watching her dive into the stew, remembered Daisy’s fiercely hungry mouth at her breast and how it sometimes hurt.

  “I’ve been thinking about what Granny felt about the women’s movement. In a way I suppose she had it all. I mean, she seems so fulfilled.”

  “Fulfilled?” Laura set her glass down in sheer amazement. It was actually the last word she would have used in regard to Sybille, who went on from height to height and never appeared to be satisfied, her head full of visions of glory.

  “She was so much part of everything important in her time—the arts—all those writers and painters she knew and, through Grandpa, politics. Think of her marching in Washington for peace! She knew so many famous people, yet she talked to me as an absolute equal.”

  “I suppose you could say it was a great life,” Laura said slowly. “But fulfillment …” she hesitated.

  “‘Fulfillment’ means being whole, is that it? And you feel she wasn’t? She stayed hungry and terribly alive, and maybe that’s better.”

  Laura bit back the words, “Not if one has been as destructive to others as Sybille was to us—and to all those people she picked up so fervently and then forgot about when the next hero appeared.” Instead of uttering them she forced herself to get up, and hurried to the kitchen where she vomited the eggnog.

  Daisy was there in an instant, to hold her forehead in a strong hand as the dry convulsions shook Laura.

  “Oh …” she groaned.

  “It’s all right, Mother. I’m here.”

  Laura was weeping now, hot tears streaming down her cheeks, from weakness, she told herself. Something was cracking open inside her, and it was painful. She felt absolutely defenseless before her child, stripped down to this vomiting animal, waiting for the seizure to pass. But at the same time, she was leaning on Daisy’s cool hand, grateful for the strength and the tenderness there.