We both had chosen ways of life where failure and success often intermingled. We learned to understand that failure can be creative, can lead to a maturity which is far better than success. For the human being to live is to live with the open risk of failure.
Being parents is a risk.
A friend said to me, “You and Hugh are not typical parents, you know.”
I replied defensively, “We try to be good parents. When the kids came home from school with a request to bake a cake, I baked a cake, and it was terrible, and that’s how we came to direct the pageant.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“But we love our kids. We’re good parents.”
“You’re marvelous parents. But you aren’t typical.”
Are anybody’s parents typical? Obviously mine weren’t, but I loved them dearly and wouldn’t have traded them in for anybody else’s. I came to know my mother better after my father’s death and my move into adulthood and independence than I had before, and she was my friend and confidante all through her long life.
Were Hugh’s parents typical? More so, certainly. His father was a respected lawyer. His mother was, to my mind, the perfect housekeeper, and I had to accept, to my rue, that I would never win a merit badge for housekeeping.
Why am I worried about being typical? I don’t think I am. One time after I had given a talk to a large library-association annual meeting, one of the librarians asked me, “What do you think you and Hugh do that is best for your children?”
And I answered off the top of my head, “We love each other.”
And I’m sure that is the best thing we could possibly have given them. But in being lovers, in being parents, we have had to take risks. We have had to be open to crisis.
Hugh is going into renal failure because of the spread of cancer into the ureters. When I say my alphabet of verses as I swim in the morning, it is hard to keep from sobbing; so many of them are intertwined with my life with Hugh.
Charlotte is with us for the weekend, and at night while we are sitting in the four-poster bed sipping cocoa and talking, I say, “Chá, I don’t know whether or not Gum is going to make it, but if he doesn’t, we’ve had forty years together, good years, of loving each other, and that’s a lot more than many people have.”
I know that this is true, but it is hard to accept the spread of the cancer. We learn about the renal failure on the morning of the day when I have promised my friend Dana that I will be with her when she buries her mother’s ashes. This gallant woman, full of joie de vivre, died of pancreatic cancer in the spring. Dana says, “She’s been sitting on Canon Tallis’s desk for three months,” and it is not meant to be particularly amusing. The ashes of many friends have rested on that capacious desk off and on until the moment comes for burial, either in the Cathedral Columbarium or elsewhere.
Dana has been part of our larger family since she was in high school; she helped take care of my mother during her last summers. When she and Bion were younger they used to have water-pistol fights during the Crosswicks summers (I still have two confiscated water pistols on a shelf in my closet). Now Dana’s sons are Bion and Laurie’s godsons.
For the burial of Dana’s mother’s ashes, Bion will drive me to the cemetery in Washington, Connecticut, about half an hour away. It is a tender day, warm, but not hot. There is a gentle breeze. The cemetery is an old one, and peaceful. Dana’s mother is to be buried in a wooded corner, beside her own mother. Dana has a basket over her arm, which contains her mother’s ashes, and a spray of wildflowers. We are a small group. We each place flowers in the dark hole that has already been dug. Then the urn with the ashes goes in. Then more flowers. Tallis has had typed out a small, traditional burial service which Dana and I take turns reading. The strong words hold us up. We wait until the sexton fills in the hole with dirt. Tamps it down. Replaces the sod. Then we place more flowers on the small grave. Dana’s boys are solemn, holding deep inside their grief. We hug, hold hands, touch, reach out for one another.
Then Bion takes me back to the hospital. We do not speak much in the car. There is no need to.
Charlotte is with us again. Bion cooks out, and we sit on the terrace, lingering long past sunset, until the stars come out. Charlotte and I again go up to the four-poster with mugs of cocoa and talk and talk. She will be starting college in New York, staying in our apartment. It is good to know that she will be there, not only to forward the mail, but to keep the apartment warm and lived-in. I have been extraordinarily blessed in being close to my granddaughters for all of their seventeen and eighteen years.
So many people are alone when they have to face the death of the one closest to them. The night we know that the cancer has metastasized, three friends just “happen” to call. “I had you on my mind.” I was supposed to go out to dinner that night, but Laurie called and made my excuses. Bion said, “You need to be with your family.” I did. Not to moan and wail. Not even to talk much about it all. Just to be there together.
At bedtime Charlotte gives me especially loving hugs. She is now earning some money by helping me with my mail, and she is quick and amazingly professional for one who has just turned seventeen. I am not surprised. I am grateful that my helpers are people to whom I do not mind revealing myself. Whoever works with me, taking dictation, learns all about me.
Right now my vulnerability is on the outside of my skin. Small things bring sobs up to my throat, but thus far only when it has been all right, appropriate, to cry. I have slowly learned a lot about grief, and the right and proper expression of it. Wearing mourning in the old days was not such a bad idea, because it took into visible account the fact of death, which we now try to hide, so that it won’t embarrass others. A friend told me that three hours after his wife had been killed in an accident he was told roughly, by his minister, to pull himself together.
We pull ourselves together when we need to. We do the things that have to be done. But we need to give ourselves times and places in which to mourn. This is strength, not weakness. (Yesterday a doctor asked me, standing in the corridor outside Hugh’s room, “Do you feel weak or strong?” I replied truthfully, “I feel weak and I feel strong.”)
I go to my lonely bed, thinking of Hugh alone in his hospital room, grateful for the nurses who are so good to him. During the night I reach out with my foot through force of habit to touch his sleeping body. And he is not there. Nevertheless, we have been making love during this time in a profound way. He is making love with me in the pressure of his fingers. I am making love when I do simple little bodily services for him. How many times he has taken care of me! And that is intercourse as much as the more usual ways of expressing our sexuality.
Intercourse between two people who are totally committed to each other is a beautiful thing for both. Hugh and I have been true to each other in this day and age of casual affairs, and I’m grateful that we have. I believe that fidelity increases the joy, the actual physical pleasure of lovemaking, and that in a casual affair or a one-night stand, love is not made, only sex. I never want to stop making love.
In Hugh’s hospital room, where I spend seven or more hours a day, I am always on the alert toward my husband, even when he is sleeping. My quiet time comes in the evening, when we sit out on the terrace and wait for the stars. Most evenings I go upstairs early, at nine o’clock, to read, to think, to be quiet for a couple of hours. To unwind enough for sleep, which I need if I am to keep up my strength.
Piano time is very slim. I don’t get home from the hospital in time to have that treasured hour at the piano before dinner. Writing, too, has been difficult. I have been drafting a novel, but the work has gone slowly. Although I am encouraged to use my little six-pound electronic typewriter in the hospital, I am constantly yearning toward Hugh in inner prayer. Not demanding prayer. Just a small giving of love flowing steadily to him. Most of what I have written this summer is this journal, and it, too, is a form of prayer and a source of strength.
Prayer. What about pray
er? A friend wrote to me in genuine concern about Hugh, saying that she didn’t understand much about intercessory prayer. I don’t, either. Perhaps the greatest saints do. Most of us don’t, and that is all right. We don’t have to understand to know that prayer is love, and love is never wasted.
Ellis Peters, in A Morbid Taste for Bones, one of her delightful medieval whodunits, gives a beautiful description of what I believe to be intercessory prayer: “He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding in his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands, all those people who were in stress or grief.”
And George MacDonald asks, “And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only reply, Why should my love be powerless to help another?”
I do not believe that our love is powerless, though I am less and less specific in my prayers, simply holding out to God those for whom I am praying.
For a long time I have been praying for my friend whose husband has Alzheimer’s disease, visualizing him in the woodworking shop in which he used to take such pride; seeing him make a beautiful table or cabinet, bathed in a lovely light. But he has not gone near the workshop for a long time. He has taken to wandering about the house at night, dangerous in his tottery condition. I am not the only one who has prayed. And his deterioration has accelerated rather than decreased.
Hugh has been surrounded by literally hundreds of prayers, good prayers of light and love.
What happens to all those prayers when not only are they not “answered” but things get far worse than anyone ever anticipated? What about prayer?
We do not know. We will not know in this life. Some prayers are magnificently answered. More than once this has been the case in my own life, glorious miracles of prayer.
But this summer the answers have all been negative. The doctors say, “Everything has gone wrong.” One thing after another.
What about prayer?
Surely the prayers have sustained me, are sustaining me. Perhaps there will be unexpected answers to these prayers, answers I may not even be aware of for years. But they are not wasted. They are not lost. I do not know where they have gone, but I believe that God holds them, hand outstretched to receive them like precious pearls.
Nine
What about prayer? To ask is to be human. To know that answers are not going to be given, and yet be willing to continue to ask, is to move into maturity.
Our life in New York, in Hugh’s world of theatre, mine of writing, was as full of questions as ever, good questions, deep questions. Only where there are questions can there be acceptance. Perhaps acceptance is the only answer we are given. Our questions of each other, new discoveries, were part of the joy of deepening marriage. Hugh was always an atypical actor, not prone to mirror-gazing, shunning having his picture taken, not seeking publicity, private about his feelings. But he was a professional in the truest sense of the word.
In John Whiting’s play, The Devils, Hugh played D’Artagnan, and had a gorgeous costume of soft blue velvet, plumed hat, suede boots. After seeing the show one night a friend remarked, “Hugh, when you stand in the spotlight that way, it really brings out the blue of your eyes.”
Hugh replied quietly, “I am aware of it.”
His deep humility was accompanied by a totally professional understanding of his rich qualities as an actor.
Again there were choices to be made, but they were not difficult ones. Most of our friends were serious artists, not wanting to spend evening after evening at the right clubs, being seen. We did go to a nightclub to hear Edith Piaf sing, but we went to see and hear, not to be seen or heard. We developed an aversion to enormous cocktail parties, where a rock band made it necessary for a mob of people to scream at the top of their lungs in order to be heard. Sometimes after the theatre we would go to an opening of a movie, put on at midnight for players. We went to places like Sardi’s on occasion, to meet friends, since it was a convenient location. But we did not live, nor want to live, the life of celebrities. Perhaps our years in a small dairy-farm village had made their mark. We were not interested in being seen in the chic places, and our apartment was in a part of the city that was anything but fashionable.
But Hugh worked, and I wrote, and we watched our children grow up, and we were content.
When Hugh opened in Brecht’s Arturo Ui we expected a Broadway hit and a long run. To everybody’s surprise and chagrin, it was panned by the critics, including Walter Kerr, and was to close after the first week. On Saturday I went downtown to have dinner with Hugh between shows. Walter came into the restaurant where we were eating, saw us, walked over to our table, and said, “When can we get together?”
Hugh smiled. “Any time, thanks to you.”
Some plays ran longer. Shortly after the untimely demise of Arturo Ui, Hugh was playing Cardinal Cajetan in John Osgood’s Luther. He was a good actor and I was proud of him.
Our children left the nest all in the same year, Josephine to marry Alan, Maria to go to college, Bion to boarding school. Hugh moaned, “We’re too young to have them all leave home so soon.” But it took him only twenty-four hours to adjust. He would ask, half amused, “They were all home last weekend. Why are they coming home this weekend?” It wasn’t that we didn’t love or want our children, but that we were enjoying being fully together.
Once again Hugh’s work with Walter Kerr at Catholic University made a marked difference in his career. His agent called him to ask if he was free to be submitted for a television role in a new soap opera. Hugh told him yes, the part he was playing was going to be finished at the end of the year. The new show was going to be called All My Children and the agent wanted to put him up for the part of Dr. Charles Tyler, the doctor who was the head of the hospital and the head of the family. Shortly he called back. “You’ve got it!”
“Fine,” Hugh said, “but why do you sound so surprised?”
“You don’t have to audition. They’re auditioning everybody else, but they want you.”
“Fine,” Hugh repeated. “Get me as much money as possible.”
The show was to begin on the first of January. In December, ABC gave a party for the new company. I was out of town on a speaking job, so Hugh went alone. During the party a woman came up to him. “Hugh, you probably don’t remember me. I was a lowly freshman at Catholic University when you were there in Hotel Universe and I’ve never forgotten you.” She remembered him partly because he was superb in the play and partly because his innate courtesy had made him treat the shy young girl with consideration. “I’m Agnes Nixon,” she said. Agnes Nixon was the creator of All My Children.
Dr. Charles Tyler was rich, privileged, sophisticated. Hugh felt that the character was square, not realizing how much of his own personal warmth and integrity he put into the role.
When we rode the subway, almost inevitably someone would come up to him: “Dr. Tyler, what are you doing on the subway?”
One summer evening we were walking along Broadway on our way to see a play. Suddenly we were surrounded by a group of a dozen or so leather-jacketed youths. In today’s world this is a bit startling. But what they wanted was Dr. Tyler’s signature on dollar bills—and they provided the dollar bills. One young man obligingly turned his back so that Hugh could use his jacket as a desk.
He is recognized everywhere. In airports we are often escorted to first-class lounges because, of course, that is where Dr. Tyler belongs. If I am traveling alone, all I have to do is slip into the conversation that I am married to Dr. Tyler, and then the hostesses give me special service, and want to know all kinds of little details about Dr. Tyler and the show.
Hugh has become, for millions of reasons, a cherished father-figure, a man to be trusted at all times, who is also beautiful to behold, with his white hair, patrician features, and those extraordinary blue eyes.
In the early years of our marriage it was Hugh who was frequently out of town with plays. Now it is my turn to travel, to go off on speaking engagem
ents. But this is far more the normal pattern of our marriage than were the nine years of living daily together at Crosswicks. When we are apart, we are in touch by phone.
“It’s snowing,” Hugh said one day when I called him the afternoon before I was to fly home from a lecture trip. “In fact, it’s blizzarding. I hope things will be better for you when you get home tomorrow.”
The next afternoon when I got to the airport the plane was posted as being on time, so I relaxed. Then, just as we should have been boarding, the loudspeaker came on and we were told that because of traffic problems in New York caused by the snow there would be a three-hour delay.
So I arrived in New York long after midnight instead of shortly after nine, and it was indeed a snowy city. When the taxi pulled up in front of our apartment building the street had been plowed, with the result that between the street and the entrance to the building was a six-foot wall of snow.
And there in the lobby, peering anxiously through the glass, was Hugh, who came hurrying out to help me with my bags (always heavy with manuscript), and to give me a much-needed hand over the snowbank. He had called the airport to check on my flight; even so, he had been waiting in the lobby for well over an hour.
When we are together we enjoy each other’s company fully. Our routine is simple and pleasurable. In the late afternoon I read the mail, then play the piano for an hour. At seven Hugh comes in to me, clinking a glass, while our dog barks with joy, and we repair to the kitchen to cook dinner and talk over the day’s events, in our lives, in the world. At dinner we light the candles and sit in the dining room, often quietly, kything, rather than talking. Then we take the dog for a walk in Riverside Park, come home, and prepare for bed.
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