A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  “Well, I’ve been called a lot of things, but ‘delicious’ is not one of them.” And Aunt Minna chuckled.

  “You know one thing about dying,” Laura said, sitting up a little to relieve the weight in her chest, “is that one can say outrageous things—but to whom should one say them? Mary O’Brien seems to enjoy them, and you, dear Aunt Minna, for you are good at saying the outrageous yourself.”

  “Am I?” Aunt Minna held the book closed in her hands.

  “Yes, you are. So tell me now why it is that the journey I am making is taking me deeper and deeper into what it is to be a woman? Strange, isn’t it? I never thought much about it before.”

  “Laura, I know very little about that.”

  “Oh, yes, you do.”

  “I suppose I have lived my life outside what women’s lives are meant to be.”

  Laura lay back, looking at the ceiling, feeling for some word that could link Aunt Minna and what had preoccupied her own mind for days. “I think that however original and powerful a woman may have been—and as you surely are—we have allowed ourselves to be caught in all sorts of stereotypes. What is a woman meant to be, anyway? We don’t think of men as ‘meant to be’ primarily married and fathers, do we?”

  “You know, I never thought of it quite like that before!”

  “Well, neither did I,” Laura said, surprised at herself. “But I’ve done some thinking lately. I wish I could get it all settled in my mind before …”

  “Come to some final reckoning, eh? I wonder if that is possible. In my experience just when one has arrived at what appears to be, momentarily, a final judgment, life throws the whole thing out by some quirk or unexpected insight—like what you just said. I’m elated to have been given a clue just now to what the woman’s movement is really all about. Such a little thing, yet it has really opened my eyes. I have, you see, always regarded myself as an eccentric, a stray fish in some side pool outside the great tides of life—oh, I quite enjoyed myself, you know.”

  “I know. You kicked up considerable waves in that pool!”

  “But I did feel that a married woman was somehow more—”

  “More what?”

  Aunt Minna gave her short laugh, self-deprecatory, a little wry. “Is ‘appropriate’ the word?”

  At this Laura laughed aloud, then leaned forward to try to control the fit of coughing. Anything but shallow breathing was fatal now. “Oh, dear.”

  “Shall I read a little more?” Aunt Minna asked. It was just too bad, Laura thought, not to be able to catch her breath. And too bad to alarm Aunt Minna.

  “Oh, damn” she murmured, sweat pouring down her forehead into her eyes. “Damn.”

  This time she did manage to achieve control. Finally she was able to lie back on the pillow. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured.

  “None of that,” Aunt Minna said sharply. “The Alpine climber is often in an agony for breath—remember that—and we have talked of this as a kind of climb to wherever you are bound, Laura.”

  Amazing woman, Laura thought. She’s really the only person I can bear. And why was that? Because Aunt Minna had her feelings under almost perfect control, though Laura could hear her blowing her nose.

  “It’s getting worse, of course,” Laura murmured. “But I wanted to say something.”

  “Rest a little,” Aunt Minna said, “and I’ll read for a half-hour.”

  And so she did while Laura listened and half-listened with her eyes closed. Finally she was able to say what she had wanted to.

  “You have given so much to life, Aunt Minna. Isn’t that the thing? I mean not how a woman does it, but whether she does it at all. What I begin to see—Jo’s visit somehow clinched it for me—is that women have been in a queer way locked away from one another in a man’s world. The perspective has been from there. Jo thinks of herself as a man. All that is changing and perhaps women will be able to give one another a great deal more than ever before.”

  Aunt Minna was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You have reached quite a high cliff, haven’t you?”

  “All that tenderness held back out of fear—”

  “You really do astonish me, Laura.” Aunt Minna was sitting up straight in her chair and seemed a little tense suddenly. “Of course I wouldn’t know,” she added defensively. “I never could stand the whole emotional thing. When I was in college, a girl called Alice had quite a crush on me—that’s what it was called in those days. I didn’t like it at all,” she said crisply. “It made me wildly uncomfortable. Sappy, I thought it.”

  Laura smiled. “I expect you did.”

  “All that is quite outside my sphere.”

  “But I’m not talking about ‘all that,’” Laura said, amused now by the violence of Aunt Minna’s rejection.

  After Aunt Minna left, she had quite a think. Her mother, Jo, Daphne, Daisy—all women stopped somehow, somewhere—in some way, she supposed, “unfulfilled.” But how to find the all-encompassing reason was quite beyond her power—when Mary O’Brien came in with an eggnog for supper, Laura was asleep.

  Chapter XIX

  The next days were a limbo. Jim Goodwin came and drained the lungs again, this time drawing out even more of the appalling fluid. For twenty-four hours or so that meant that Laura could lie down comfortably and sleep until four in the morning. Aunt Minna had caught a cold and so couldn’t come to read. During those days there was no music in the house, and only Grindle’s feet tumbling up and down the stairs interrupted a blessed silence. Laura felt sure she had heard Ann’s voice murmuring with Mary O’Brien, in the hall. The phone rang several times, but Laura let it be answered for her. She was not in pain, but she felt obscured, as though a light inside her were being dimmed, as though sleep were her only real climate, and she sank down into it as into deep water, hardly breathing.

  Meanwhile spring had come, for Mary set a glass with three daffodils in it beside her bed, and the shadow on the wall danced with maple flowers. Once just at dawn Laura heard an oriole. The oriole had always set its seal, that thrilling song, on the coming of spring, marking a rebirth not only of a season but of Laura herself. This time she murmured, “You’ll come back, but this is my last chance to hear you, bird.”

  She looked forward to Mary’s presence, so quiet and protective, but she had no wish to see anyone else at all. It was no surprise when Jim Goodwin came back to sit on her bed, holding her hand with a warm, comforting clasp, and announced that he would feel better if she could have a few days in the hospital.

  What for? In her subdued state Laura did not ask. She supposed that he himself needed some reassurance, that X-rays would give him some idea where things were at, that he might change the medicines he had prescribed to see that she was not in pain. It was somehow understood that people fight for life, and she wondered why. She was now halfway or more down the long tunnel—turning back, learning to live again, seemed next to impossible. What was possible, even acceptable, was dying.

  “All right, Jim, if you say so.”

  “You were doing so well, it’s a little surprise that we have had a sudden drop. Mary thinks it’s because you had too many visits, so I think we’ll allow no visitors in the hospital.”

  “Ben,” Laura said, sitting up a little. “When Ben comes, I must see him.”

  “Maybe he won’t get here till you are home again.”

  “You won’t let me die in the hospital, will you?”

  “I promised you the spring, didn’t I?” Jim said with a return of his smiling, bantering way. Until now he had appeared too anxious to smile.

  When he let her hand go she felt as though a transfusion of blood, some life-giving fluid, were leaving her.

  “I’m going to see if there is a room, and if there is, we’ll have an ambulance here early this afternoon.”

  “Can you go with me?”

  Jim frowned. “I don’t see how I can. I have appointments at the office. Do you think Ann and Brooks might be able to take you in?”

  L
aura’s resistance to this possibility was so great that she couldn’t answer. Now it was coming, what she had feared most all along, what she had to learn to accept, total dependence. Anger at the slide of a tear down her cheek, at her weakness, made her sit up.

  “Laura,” Jim said quietly and firmly, “I think you have to let the family in now.” But before she could react, he sat down again and held her hand. “I’ll come in on my way home around seven and see that you are comfortable. And we’ll set up X-rays for tomorrow. O.K.?”

  But without Mary, without Jim, in that strange world, how could she manage? Would she be able to “float” there? It was Mary who saved her from these fears. She came in, took one look at Laura, and said, “You’ll be home in three days, dearie. It won’t be long.”

  “Oh, Mary, I don’t want to go.”

  Mary lifted Laura so she could pull the pillows up behind her, and at that familiar, expert touch Laura closed her eyes and sank back.

  “There, that’s better, isn’t it?”

  “Thank you. You’re the only one who really knows.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Mary said with one of her shy smiles. “But I’m here, so I notice.”

  Laura opened her eyes and met Mary’s. Neither of them had intended that open look to take place, but Laura could not avoid the depth of compassion flowing out like an angelic balm. She had closed herself off from feeling for days now. To have it come back was hard to handle.

  “Why am I so much worse, Mary?”

  “You’re not coughing as much, that’s one good thing.”

  “Yes, but—I feel so weak.”

  “I’m going to bring you some consomme and see if maybe you could take a few swallows. Brooks is coming to go with you, Brooks and Ann. You’ll need strength.”

  “I don’t want them to see me like this,” Laura swallowed to try to stop the tears she felt rising. “My hair—”

  “Now, now,” Mary said briskly, “you look fine considering you’re starved. Your skin’s like a baby’s. If you ask me, you’re a beautiful woman.”

  “Hardly,” Laura said with a wan smile. “But then I never wanted to be one, strangely enough. My mother—she was the real beauty.”

  “I noticed the photograph. She looks like a queen.”

  “I didn’t want that, that glittering kind of beauty.”

  “Now don’t you tire yourself out with talking. Tell me what you want me to pack for the hospital.”

  “Oh, whatever you think—my blue wrapper, slippers, a clean nightgown, brush and comb, toothbrush. There’s a small suitcase on the shelf in the closet.”

  Laura watched Mary pack in silence. It was a restful sight, as she did it so quietly, folding things with care.

  “Now then,” she said, “you’ll want a photograph or two from the dresser maybe.”

  Laura shook her head. No photographs.

  “A book? That little transistor radio by your bed?”

  “Yes—and George Herbert’s poems, though I doubt if I can read, but the idea of Herbert is a help.”

  Mary found the book on the bedside table and held it for a moment in her hands. “He’s a poet, is he?”

  “A religious poet,” Laura said.

  “Oh, well,” Mary laid it on top of the suitcase. Then she asked something that had perhaps been on her mind for some time. “Your minister hasn’t come to see you—I wondered.”

  “Yes.” Laura lay back looking up at the ceiling as though, she thought, smiling to herself, a divine message might be written there. “But I don’t really believe, you know. For me God has always been absence.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so brave without Him,” Mary said, then she closed the suitcase and stood looking out the window. “I’m sure I couldn’t.”

  “I try to feel part of something—something greater than myself, to go with it, Mary.”

  “If that’s not believing!” Mary said as she left. “I’ll come back in a little while. You sleep.”

  Laura did not sleep, but without the slightest change in her position—she was still looking at the ceiling—she found herself floating, and that had not happened lately. What she heard very distinctly in her head was the fourth part of Brahms’s Requiem, which they had used to sing in school before she became ill. “How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.” She remembered how at that time it had seemed the most beautiful music she had ever sung, though her mother, when she said so, had of course put it down. “Brahms,” she had said, “never quite first-rate, is he?” But it had to be admitted that it was Sybille’s reading of Herbert when they were quite small that had created such reverberations lately. How does one extricate one thread from such a complicated web?

  For the moment Laura let it rest and remembered singing, remembered being lifted up on such sweet music. It had smitten her like love, with a poignant ache in all her being. She turned her head so she could see the light shining through the daffodils and watched it turning the petal’s flesh to a transparency, more alive than stained glass. Brahms and the daffodils—life—life.

  First, life as pure contemplation, and then life in the shape of a cup of consomme, something she had to throw up!

  “Oh, dear, Mary.”

  “Here, hold this against your forehead,” Mary was saying as Laura retched over the basin in her bathroom. “You’re all upset over going away,” she murmured. “Don’t worry. The spring will be waiting when you come back.”

  At last, after retching, the sheer relief of being back in bed was such that Laura fell asleep, and when she woke there was just time for Mary to help her into a clean nightgown and a light wool dressing gown and slippers. She had meant to be downstairs when the ambulance came, but Mary was adamant.

  Brooks and Ann were at the door.

  “Hi,” Brooks said. He gave her a quick, hunted look. Ann came right in and kissed her and then the men were there with the stretcher, and she was being lifted into it like a baby and strapped down.

  “Is that comfortable, ma’am, not too tight?” Laura looked up at a very young, serious face, dark eyes.

  “Thank you, yes, I’m fine.” Then she added, teasing, “I guess I won’t be able to escape, will I?”

  “I guess not,” he said solemnly. The joke, if it had been a joke, fell flat.

  “All right, let’s go,” the older man said. Laura couldn’t see him very well as he had his back to her, lifting the other end. And it was really amazing how cleverly they maneuvered her round the banister and down the stairs, the descent just slightly vertiginous for a few seconds, then straight out the open door into delicious spring air.

  “Oh, please wait a second,” Laura said impulsively, “The apple tree’s in flower!”

  She saw it fleetingly, a rosy mass, a bower of pink and white, and then she was being gently slid into the ambulance.

  “Shall I come with you, and Brooks follow us in the car?”

  “All right.”

  Mary was standing in the doorway and gave a brief wave. And there Laura was with Ann on a low chair at her feet, and the shades left up so she could see out of this curious conveyance, gliding along like a flying gondola.

  “Everything’s so beautiful,” she said as they passed an apple orchard, then flowering cherry, then woods, the greens still so fresh and brilliant; it all seemed like a stained-glass world. “This is fun,” she murmured.

  “Look, the crews are out!” Ann said, as they swung out along the river, and sure enough, there were two shells, their long oars sweeping them up the river.

  “Why does it always seem so Greek?” Laura asked. “I don’t suppose the Greeks had shells?”

  “‘The young men, all so beautiful,’ is that it?”

  “If only we could turn back now and go home,” Laura said with a smile. “This has been quite a treat so far.”

  Then they were silent as the ambulance turned off the drive, proceeded through dirty city streets, and drew up at the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital. Laura closed her
eyes. The very look of it was appalling, cold, a jail for the sick. “Ann, stay with me,” she said.

  “Of course. That’s why we’re here. We’re not going to abandon you, dear Laura.”

  With the knife thrust of fear Laura realized that she wanted their help. She had to admit that. In this dreadful impersonal place. She hated the thought that the young man would leave her now. Already she was being lifted from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital one on wheels. “Good-by,” she called, and the young man turned and waved. “Good luck,” he said with a smile. As he went through the door Brooks came in.

  “Take it easy, Mother. You know what hospitals are like. It may be a while before we know where you’re going.” Ann was standing by the stretcher holding Laura’s hand.

  “It’s good of you to do this,” Laura said. Then she closed her eyes. A voice came over the public address system, “Dr. Warner. Dr. Warner.” Feet shuffled past, subdued voices, the sound of a typewriter. Laura felt she was in the middle of a huge, empty world, a center of loneliness among strange, busy sounds. And she was terribly tired.

  “Ann, is my suitcase there?”

  “Right here, Laura.”

  “Mother, we’ll need your Blue Cross number.” Brooks had returned from somewhere, very businesslike and calm.

  “Look in my purse, Ann. I think it must be there, somewhere among the credit cards.”

  Laura had broken out into a sweat—papers, things one had to have! She had not put her mind on all this. She had let herself be bundled away to a hospital without even thinking of these necessary preparations.

  “Here, I’ve got it,” Ann said in triumph.

  “Thanks. I’ll be right back.”

  “And indeed in a very short time Brooks was there with an orderly to wheel the stretcher to room 103 on the fifth floor. She was wheeled into a huge elevator, Brooks and Ann on either side of her. Brooks had the suitcase now.

  There were two nurses and an intern in the elevator. They talked in loud voices and laughed about the food in the cafeteria. It was as though Laura on her stretcher simply did not exist. The voices hurt her ears. “After all,” she thought, “I might be dying.”