The place was a mess. It had been a two-family house for fifteen years, though nothing had been done to divide it. Upstairs a sink had been put in one of the four bedrooms, and there was a bathroom. Downstairs was the original kitchen and, in one of the old pantries, a chemical toilet. One family lived upstairs; the other, down. Outdoors, a mess of weeds and bushes had grown up. Power mowers were just coming in, so a lawn larger than a pocket handkerchief was hard to keep up. Few people had washing machines and dryers and freezers and all the kitchen equipment we take for granted today.
The fact that Crosswicks had a bathroom was unusual. Most of the old farmhouses in our neck of the woods had outhouses; many had no indoor plumbing, just a pump in the yard. It was, horrible irony, the Second World War which put an end to the Depression, and slowly the outhouses and pumps were replaced with flush toilets, and hot and cold running water.
Sixty-three hundred dollars was more than Hugh and I could manage. Three thousand dollars was already in a mortgage. My mother, also hungry for a house, loaned us three thousand; three hundred we had. Mother loved the house almost as much as we did, spent every summer there, and named it: Crosswicks. Where the two roads meet. My father’s childhood was spent in a small village called Crosswicks; his home was a wonderful old house with a wing that was pre-Revolutionary, and a secret room from which you could look out through the eyes of the portraits hanging in the next room. Everybody in the family loved the place, but nobody wanted or could afford to keep it up, so it was sold early in the Depression.
The name Crosswicks sounded felicitous to us, and Hugh and I were happy to accept my mother’s suggestion. I was dazzled by marriage and by the glory of having a house, a real house.
But we learned quickly that the wonders of owning a house are sometimes compounded by unexpected frustrations. My mother used to say that a house is a constant beggar. In an apartment, you call the super or the handyman. At Crosswicks during forty years of marriage, we have done as much of the work ourselves as possible. Wallpapering was not difficult to learn, and we soaked off layers of ugly wallpaper, revealing patches of lovely colonial paper beneath. It was too torn and fragile to save, so we put on new wallpaper copied from the patterns of two centuries earlier. Because of the settling of the house, each strip of paper had to be aligned with a homemade plumb line. But the results were spectacular. Our original bedroom still has the very first paper we ever hung. The guest room, which used to be the baby’s room, still has the considerably more expensive paper we hung when I was pregnant with our son, Bion.
We attempted nothing electrical. The first major project was having the house rewired, because we were afraid of faulty wiring in a house built and clapboarded with wood. Neither of us is much in the way of plumbing, though we did do things for which in New York we’d have called the super.
One summer early in our living at Crosswicks, a stage-designer friend came with his wife for the weekend. One morning he broke an ashtray and tried to flush it down the toilet. The result was total blockage. Hugh and I watched in awe as neighboring friends showed us how to drain the toilet, unscrew it from the floor, lift it, retrieve the china pieces of the broken ashtray, and put the toilet back together again.
For a while we had a sign warning, PLEASE DO NOT PUT ASHTRAYS DOWN THE TOILET, but it was not a frequently made mistake.
Hugh learned the hard way that sanding ancient, rippling floors covered with layers of paint is best done by a professional. I spent a week with my mother in Florida, and Hugh came up to the country and rented a sander, planning to sand all the floors. By the end of the week he had barely managed to do one room, and his hands were a mess of blisters.
Crosswicks is not a perfect house. It has suffered from wear and tear and years of neglect. The walls and floors are crooked. There is no way to weatherproof it so that in the winter moles and field mice do not seek and find entrance. So throughout the years we have had cats, varying in number, because it is in the nature of cats to keep rodents out of their house.
Some of the rooms need a second wallpapering, some a third. About a quarter of a century ago we reupholstered the living-room furniture—I still think of it as new. Babies and animals have stained the rugs. But Crosswicks is comfortable, warm, welcoming. Friends coming in for the first time have frequently remarked, “What a loving house!”
And so, I hope, are Hugh and I, in our own human and fallible way. We were not a latter-day Héloïse and Abelard, Pelléas and Mélisande when we married. For one thing, the Héloïses and Abelards, the Pelléases and Mélisandes, do not get married and stay married for forty years. A love which depends solely on romance, on the combustion of two attracting chemistries, tends to fizzle out. The famous lovers usually end up dead. A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.
We have both, throughout the forty years of our marriage, continued to respond with excitement to the same beauty—for instance, to certain pieces of music. I remember driving up to Crosswicks one early spring day when we heard, over the car radio, the beautiful flute solo from Gluck’s Orfeo, and our response of delight was such that it has always been special music for us. On a cold and dank day we walked along a beach in southern Portugal, arm in arm, gazing with awe at the great eyes painted on the prows of the fishermen’s boats. One night we stood by the railing of a freighter and were dazzled by the glory of the Southern Cross against the blackness of an unpolluted sky. If this kind of simultaneous recognition of wonder diminishes, it is a sign of trouble. Thank God it has been a constant for us.
Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of this universe—these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.
Periodically during my life I have needed times of assessment, of stepping back from my life, our life, and contemplating. When I was twenty-nine I wrote in my journal that I did not expect to die soon, but if I did, at least I would know that I had lived.
That was at twenty-nine, when I had been married for two years. It is far more true today when thirty-eight more years of marriage have been added. This is a summer for reviewing and reassessing. My husband is ill and I do not know how it is all going to end.
Of course we never do.
II
TWO-PART INVENTION
One
While The Joyous Season was still in Washington, D.C., the understudy discovered that she was pregnant and asked to leave the show. Eagerly I applied for the job, and read for Arthur Hopkins. Hugh said earnestly, “Don’t give her the job just because of me.”
I replied, slightly huffily, “I think I can get it on my own merit,” and was accepted, after my reading, by this great director.
I joined the company right after the first of the year, and I don’t remember in what city we were playing, just my introduction to Miss Barrymore. She smiled at me warmly and shook hands. “What have I seen you in, dear?”
“Oh, nothing, Miss Barrymore. I’m always an understudy and nobody ever misses a performance.”
“But I know your name, dear!”
Hugh said, “She had a book published last year, The Small Rain.”
Miss Barrymore bathed me with the graciousness of her smile. “That’s it! I liked it so much that I bought it for my personal library.”
So, before Hugh and I were married, I had had my first novel published, and the second was in galleys. When Hugh asked me to marry him, he knew that I was a writer, that I was not going to give up writing in order to become the perfect housewife. That was important—that Hugh knew who I was. He was as pleased as I at Miss Barrymore’s approval of The Small Rain.
In mid-January we reached Chicago. This time I was getting ten dollars more than Equity minimum, and stayed at the same hotel as
Hugh. I roomed with Liz, one of the women in the company, sharing a bed, as usual, to save money. Hugh shared a bed with one of the men in the show and we (of course) wanted to share a bed together. In those days one didn’t just shack up, one got married.
So on the first Sunday in Chicago, when our theatre was dark, we wandered around the Near North looking for an Episcopal church. It was a cold and beautiful day, and we walked until we came to a church with the name of St. Chrysostom’s. We went into the beautifully ordered grounds, and met two well-dressed men coming toward us down the path. When they saw us they stopped, and one of them said to Hugh, “I beg your pardon, but aren’t you Martin?”
Yes, Martin was the role he was playing in The Joyous Season. We went with them to a lovely apartment on Lake Shore Drive, and the rector was called, and an appointment made for us to see him the next day.
He greeted us and had us sit down, and we told him that we’d like to be married. He asked us our names, our ages. I was twenty-seven, Hugh twenty-nine. He asked us if we’d ever been married before. Or divorced. When we said no, he went ahead with the plans for the next Saturday. The brief encounter with the rector was the extent of our marriage counseling. Would we have heard if we’d been given what is now the customary instruction? I’m not sure.
What I am sure of is that we took our marriage vows seriously.
Hugh and I were married at St. Chrysostom’s Church on January 26, 1946. It was eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning. Standing up with us was a college friend of Hugh’s who had sent us a telegram, MARCIE TOO BIG FOR SMALL WEDDING. Marcie was due to deliver their second baby, but Bill was there, and Liz, with whom I had been rooming.
There in the chapel of the church, Hugh and I made promises, promises which for forty years we have, by some grace, been able to keep. We promised to take each other as “wedded husband and wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part.”
Rings were placed on our fingers, Hugh’s grandmother’s broad gold ring on mine. Platinum wedding rings were in fashion in the forties, so we had to go to a shop which I remember as a pawnshop to find a matching gold ring for Hugh. These rings were the symbol of the mighty promises we had just made.
After the marriage service there was a luncheon at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where we were to have the bridal suite for one night. Neither Hugh nor I could eat much. Afterwards we went back to the theatre for a matinee and an evening performance. We must have eaten dinner somewhere, somehow, between the two shows, but my memory doesn’t pick up again until the bridal suite, which had a sitting room with soft couches and elegant lamps and a deep-pile carpet. Hugh had ordered champagne and sandwiches. I went into the bathroom, which was full of white tile and which had a large tub and many fluffy white towels, and bathed slowly, luxuriously.
It was a good wedding night.
Two
Now at night I am alone. Hugh is in the hospital. I kiss him good night, and go on home to Crosswicks without him. It is very different going to bed alone now rather than because one of us is away for a show or a speaking engagement. In the middle of the night, those strange early hours, one, two, three in the morning, what the Scots call “the wee smas,” I tend to worry.
I project into the unknown future, give in to fear, and that is never a good thing to do. I try to turn my mind away from panic and toward hope for the future. We have recently started a new career, a wonderful one which came about because I was asked to give a talk at the Library of Congress; while in Washington I made a tape for the Voice of America. Shortly after I got home I received a letter from the U.S. Information Agency asking if I would like to do some traveling for them, as a cultural representative. Of course!
But then, a few weeks before I was scheduled to go to Egypt, I fell on the ice while I was walking in the woods, and broke my shoulder.
A broken shoulder not only incapacitates your arm (my right arm, in this case, and I am right-handed), but all of you. I could not do my usual leap up onto our high four-poster bed (where now I toss and turn) but had to use a stool. Try getting up off a low seat with a broken shoulder. Try pulling on panty hose. Try fastening a bra. And there was Egypt coming up!
There was no way I could possibly travel alone, and Hugh was free to go with me. The Embassy in Cairo had asked for a writer, but they really didn’t know what they wanted me to do, and were delighted with the idea of an actor and a writer working together. After our first “performance” there was no question that we were to be billed as a team. It is much easier for an audience whose English may well be rudimentary to respond to two people whose body movements and facial expressions add meaning to the words, much easier than to listen to one voice, and our readings were wondrously successful. We were good together, not only as actors, but in what we put across as human beings. It is good for the audience to see husband and wife communicating, working together in easy camaraderie. What we were hoping to do with the readings was to make connections, in the belief that what connects us human beings is far more central than that which separates us, and the response was marvelously affirming.
I turn now in the big bed, from one side to another, my mind still tense. Where will we go next? Will we go?
We are just back from China, a wonderful trip for most of April, returning home in early May.
Egypt. Portugal. China. What jet-setters we sound like. But we had been married for twenty-five years before we had more than two nights away together. When Hugh started to play Dr. Charles Tyler on television in All My Children, we began to get real vacations. When a play closes you don’t go on vacation, you’re out of work. So our holidays have been a special pleasure, since we’ve waited so long for them.
We’ve been back from China less than a month. Our last stop on this trip was Hong Kong, where we gave a reading at the Embassy Library.
The whole trip was a special joy, but even before we left for Beijing I was worried about Hugh. He seemed thin and frail and I was filled with anxiety that something might happen to him while we were far from home. I did not voice my fears or write about them in my journal, because that would have given them a reality I desperately desired to avoid.
But we had a beautiful trip, happy and comfortable together, happy and comfortable with our group, though there was for me a steady undercurrent of concern. Hugh, however, was at his most relaxed, at his most charming and witty. And the undercurrent of concern was conjoined by a flowing river of love, love for each other after forty years, a richness of love which we both felt.
Occasionally we would drop out of the activities for a few hours, just to enjoy quiet time together, walking in the cool spring air, holding hands. Mostly it was an active trip, mixed with study and sightseeing. It happened that we were in Xian at the time of the bombing of Libya, and we were very aware of the strong anti-American reaction. I stood in the lobby of the Golden Flower Hotel in Xian with a copy of China Today and read with a sinking heart what it told about the United States, my country, dropping bombs, and shook my head in dismay. Our beautiful National Guide looked at me, asking, “You do not like this war?”
“No. I think it’s terrible. You do not cure terrorism by terrorism.” And then I added, “Not all Americans feel the same way, you know.”
Thank God. In the United States we are still allowed to have radically varying opinions and still remain fellow Americans.
A few days later this young Chinese woman and I happened to be alone for a few minutes outside an ancient temple. We sat on a stone wall and she stated, “You have a very happy marriage.”
“Yes.”
(Our river of love must have been visible to her.)
“How long?”
“Forty years.”
And she made little murmurings of awe and approval.
The bombing of Tripoli, breaking into the peace of our China trip, was a potent reminder that this has been a century of war, one
war after another, and that seems to have been the way of this planet, as my childhood fears of war keep coming true.
During the Peloponnesian Wars, which lasted from 431 to 404 B.C., Aristophanes wrote: “O thou that makest wars to cease in all the world in accordance wtih thine ancient Name: we beseech thee to make war and tumult now to cease. From the murmur and subtlety of suspicion with which we vex one another give us rest. Make a new beginning, and mingle again the kindred of nations in the alchemy of love, and with some finer essence of forbearance and forgiveness, temper our minds.”
That prayer is as apt now as it was then. Why can we not heed it?
The Chinese understand hot blood better than cold blood, and so do I. We were told by our guide about a domestic Chinese plane that had been hijacked. The passengers overwhelmed the hijackers and beat them up. They were taken off at the next stop and executed. There have been no more internal hijackings in China.
Hugh and I saw this hot-bloodedness in a department store in Shanghai where a man tried to snatch a woman’s purse. The other shoppers jumped on the man and took the purse and hit him. Immediate retribution.
In the French legal system a distinction is made between a murder committed in hot blood and one in cold blood.
Coldness of heart has never been (or should never have been) a Christian attribute. It was coldness and hardness of heart that angered Jesus.
Not that I am advocating violence, or excusing it. But I remember George MacDonald’s writing that it may be infinitely worse to refuse to forgive than to murder, because the latter may be the impulse of a moment of heat, whereas lack of forgiveness is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart. Not that I’m excusing murder, either! But all this made me do some thinking about marriage (rather than war), making me remember some households where I was intensely uncomfortable because the husband and wife chipped at each other. When Hugh and I get angry at each other we tend to be explosive, both of us being volatile. But we never nibble or chip. And our anger never lasts beyond bedtime. When it happens, and I suspect there’s no marriage where it doesn’t, it’s a good, clean anger, clearing the air. The explosions are not physical, but they are volatilely vocal. And I am reminded of one woman who, when asked if she had ever contemplated divorcing her husband, replied, Divorce, never! Murder, yes!
Two-Part Invention Page 7