by May Sarton
“Don’t talk, darling,” Daphne said, bending to kiss her. “I’ll just sit here quietly.”
“Thank you,” Laura whispered.
After a while Laura said, “I want to die.” She realized that she had never uttered those words before.
“You’re so tired,” Daphne said.
“Yes.” Why then couldn’t she let go? The warm afternoon light flooded the room, but she kept her eyes closed. Laura felt relieved of any obligation to recognize people or to respond. A quiet, loving presence was all she needed.
“I feel so well, it’s strange,” she said after a long interval.
Chapter XXIII
Laura was alerted to some event happening downstairs by Grindle’s excited barks and the sound of a car driving away. Mary must have been keeping the dog downstairs today, for Laura had not seen him. She opened her eyes. Daphne whispered, “I’ll go down and see who it is, maybe Daisy took an earlier plane.”
But Laura felt sure it was not Daisy. She was swept by a wave of agitation and wished she had the strength to get up. That she could not do, but she did manage to lift herself into a semisitting position as Daphne ran down the stairs. The front door opened and closed. She heard women’s voices but could not distinguish them one from another.
Is this a dream, Laura wondered? I’m dreaming the end of a journey. It’s not real. So many times in the last weeks she had heard the door open and wondered who was there, whose feet would come up the stairs in a moment—Mary’s or Jim Goodwin’s or Ben’s in the middle of the night. She closed her eyes. Could it be death opening the door at last, death coming up the stairs? Whoever it was on the way, Laura felt an imminence and was seized by a tremor so deep she held the sheet tightly in her hands to keep them from shaking. This waiting was the longest of all, and she silently begged that it not be prolonged.
Then she heard quick, light feet on the stairs.
Laura opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see very well—there was a dim figure standing in the doorway.
“Darling, it’s Ella.”
“Oh, Snab.” And then Ella was holding her cold, trembling hands, locking them into her own warmth. “Oh, Snab,” Laura whispered, “I never thought you would come.”
“I had to. The day before yesterday I simply knew I had to and got on the first flight I could.”
Laura felt the tears pricking her lids and sliding down her cheeks one by one. “Pay no attention, I’m so weak.”
“Don’t try to talk.”
But Laura wanted to explain. She whispered, “It’s been such a long journey, but I couldn’t let go—and I didn’t know what I was waiting for.”
“I’m here.”
“Yes.” Ella found a kleenex and gently wiped Laura’s wet cheeks. “Don’t go.” “I won’t.”
Then she opened her eyes. At first Ella looked very far away—she had white hair and her brown face was wrinkled—so much older than imagined, for Laura realized that in these last months she had thought of Ella as young. At least the dark eyes had not changed. They were deep and shining.
“It’s been such a long time,” Laura said, looking down at her own wasted hands. “But I’ve thought of you, of Paris, of us nearly every day since—since Jim Goodwin told me.”
“I wanted to come when you first wrote, but I didn’t dare.” And Ella smiled her wary, secret smile that Laura remembered perfectly.
“Perfect peace,” Laura whispered.
She didn’t want to talk yet, there was fulfillment, such fulfillment simply in Ella’s being there, sitting on the bed, touchable, real, not thousands of miles away, to be conjured up for comfort during the interminable nights of waiting for the dawn to come. She didn’t want to talk yet, but she knew that she must summon herself back one last time. There were things she needed to say.
“You must be tired,” she whispered. “Why don’t you stretch out on the chaise longue. Later we’ll talk.”
“We don’t have to,” Ella said, lifting one of Laura’s hands and kissing it. “Rest now.”
A quiet flood of happiness lifted Laura as she lay there, not that flowing tide bearing her away, but the tide at full, just before it turns. She rested there.
Was it moments or hours later when Laura opened her eyes, feeling rested, and began to talk? Her breath came in short spasms, but at least there was still breath.
“Ella, can you hear me, Snab?”
“Perfectly,” said Ella from the chaise longue.
“Lately nothing has seemed very real—the children—my sisters—but Sybille still looms, holding me back. Then I thought always of you, and thinking of you—oh, sitting in a deck chair in the Luxembourg gardens—”
“Looking up at the marvelous clouds, everything so alive.”
“I had to go very deep. It’s hard to explain.”
“Take your time.”
Laura rubbed a hand back and forth across her forehead trying to make the elusive connection. “I think this whole journey towards death has been in a way joining myself up with women, with all women.”
“Yet Sybille still looms, holds you back.”
“I have to go beyond her.”
“Beyond being possessed, yes. Snab, since I have known what you were facing, I too have thought a lot about Sybille.”
“Tell me.”
“She was really very much afraid.”
“Mamma?” Laura smiled. In the legend Sybille was fearless.
“Afraid of things she couldn’t face in herself, I mean. So she tried to protect you from all those dangers.”
“What dangers?” Laura asked in a faint voice.
“She carried out a terrible, rending war against her own nature, against passion itself perhaps, and the only way she could do it, maybe, was to play a role, to act what she wanted to be and couldn’t be, a sovereign person in perfect control.”
“She deprived us.”
“Yes, she did, but in such a lavish way that it was hard to detect the real deprivations under all that high talk, and all those noble acts.”
“But what did she deprive us of?”
“Daring to love what you loved and to like what you liked. You had such bloody good taste, you know. It was killing.” Laura heard Ella’s adorable laugh, a kind of chortle in her throat.
“I dared love you,” Laura answered.
“She tried to come between us, you remember. In Switzerland it was made clear to me that it would be kinder if I did not come to see you again, the second time I got through the barrage.”
“Why was she afraid? We were not lovers.”
“No, but what we had was real on a level of reality she couldn’t take, that threatened her in some way. It has lasted our lifetime, Snab.”
“Yes,” Laura said, sighing and lying back on the pillows staring at the ceiling. “Real.”
“What did you mean just now about joining with women?”
There was a pause. Words had begun to be elusive. Laura could not pin the right ones down. They floated around in her head. Finally she managed to say, “Communion. Something women are only beginning to tap, to understand, a kind of tenderness towards each other as women. Just as Sybille was, we have been afraid of it. Snab, you are the only person I wanted to see, no one else—even though I told you not to come.” After a moment she added, “I did talk to Ben because he understands these things. Only for him it has been complicated, harder maybe, because he is living a life still strange to many people.” Laura now felt lifted up on a wave of strength. She could breathe more easily. “He didn’t really want to hear about you, though.”
“I suppose not. Mothers are not supposed to have these feelings, after all.”
A smile floated in the air between them. Out of it Laura said, “Strange that we were not lovers. Why not?”
“My God, Laura, surely you remember the atmosphere of scandal, worse, of sin, around any such relationship at that time! We had been poisoned by the whole ethos, taught to be mortally afraid of what our bodies tried to t
each us. Besides we were the marrying kind. A passionate love would have created terrible conflict. Snab, I truly believe we had the best of it.”
“The best?”
“All that we did share—the way we could talk about everything, no holds barred. It was friendship at a mystical intensity. Every leaf on the trees in spring, every fountain, even the damp pavements under our feet, the sickly sweet smell of the Metro. It’s all there imprinted on the spirit.”
“Mmmm,” Laura assented, but she was listening now also to what Ella’s presence had released inside her, and that was almost beyond her power to put into words. After a while she murmured, “Tenderness. Sybille did not understand it. In a letter sometimes, but never in the flesh could she give it to us.”
“And that, you feel, is what women can give each other, but have held back, and are learning?”
“To share the experience of being a woman. It’s almost undiscovered territory, Snab, do you agree?”
“Yes, but difficult—perhaps impossible—between mothers and daughters.”
“All the years she was growing up, Daisy was my antagonist, you know.”
“Maybe that’s natural. But your mother could never have allowed it. In her inimitable way she tried to be everything for her children—lover, friend, governess, teacher, and above all goddess! No wonder you were snowed under and nearly died of her, every one of you.”
Suddenly Laura was able to sit up, pulled up by revelation. “Yes,” she said in her normal voice, “but she was to be all those things for her friends, both men and women, and that’s why she was great in her strange way!” Laura felt light breaking inside her, reached her hand out toward Ella. “I think I begin to see her. At last.”
The effort had been immense, and now she lay back panting.
“Rest, Snab, rest.”
“I didn’t cough,” Laura whispered. “That’s the miracle.”
“Shhhh.” Ella put a finger to her lips.
There was a long silence. And within it Laura knew the tide had turned and was beginning to ebb. Ella was there, not to be touched again, but strangely Laura did not want her to come closer. It was enough that she was there.
The doorbell rang. Again there were voices in the hall. Daphne, Laura thought she heard, then Daisy whispering, and a little later the guitar being softly strummed.
“It’s Daisy,” she murmured, “to play for me.”
“Do you want her to come up?” Ella asked.
“No.” Then, after a silence, “Only you.”
There was nothing now, no silent thread to hold her back. She had only to let go, let the tide gently bear her away. She felt light, light as a leaf on a strong current.
Some time later—am I still here in my room?—she heard a young voice somewhere far off, singing, “Fais dodo, Colas, mon p’tit frère, Fais dodo.” Sybille’s song.
Daughter singing to a mother, mother singing to a daughter—she could barely hear it now. Then she was floating away. So strange, she could see Ella down there, holding her hand, but she could not feel it. She had let go.
A Biography of May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.
Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.
At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).
On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awardeda scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.
In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.
For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.
While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.
In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book, Punch’s Secret, followed by A Walk Through the Woods in 1976. During the seventies, Sartonwas diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.
In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1978 by May Sarton
Cover design by Mimi Bark
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4748-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
A Biography of May Sarton
Copyright Page