In the end, it surprised me. We were walking one afternoon. It was Wednesday, the turn in the week. Mentally I had counted the days left before we had to leave. Kyra asked what I was afraid to ask. What would happen then? My first impulse was to say I didn’t know, but then I thought that might register with her as an evasion. Which it was. Maybe I didn’t want to know. The thought of returning to our lives was shattering in a way that took me aback. I had my company, we were planning now to do Wozzeck, an opera that would challenge us, edging up to the contemporary in a way I had avoided. But now it was time. And then there was Jesse, my father. A life filled with a dailiness in which I found solace. Yet now it stretched like a desert.
“I want to be with you,” I said, thinking as I said it how difficult it would be to arrange. And then I started to weep.
Dear Greta,
I’m sitting on the daybed in the small living room of Nant, our cottage on Bardsey. Outside, soft, steady rain. It’s Thursday afternoon. Andreas has gone to have tea with a painter who has lived on the island for many years, something of a recluse and also an expert of sorts on old Celtic legends. I didn’t think Andreas could be in the Irish Sea without thinking about Tristan, a stark reminder of how things can go wrong.
So you see, I still brood about that. And maybe especially after this week, which has been such a quiet alone time for the two of us. Here in this remote outpost of Europe, always a sanctuary from horror of one sort or another, I find myself settling into the cadences of morning and evening, the light, the latitude different from Cyprus or Nashawena, everything starker, more sharply etched, closer to the pole. Which is how it’s been for us as well.
I had a dream last night, people gathering, as if from the corners of the earth, bringing with them tokens, symbols of what they’d been through, an old woman with broken sticks, seated cross-legged on the ground at one end of a circle. Except a circle has no end. Which makes me wonder if the dream was expressing the hope that there could be an end. The mementos in the dream, the stories the people had come to tell were all about war.
This house is so silent. No hum of electricity, no phone to interrupt. I lean against the milky wall, pillows against my back, a throw over my knees. Across the room a row of windows, small panes framing squares of yellow-green fields, in the distance a shimmer of sea. The shearwaters have returned, making their nests in burrows, the nights loud with their calls, each bird guided by the distinctive sound of its mate. One of the local bird experts told us they breed on islands to secure their nests from rats and other ground predators. And we too have found a kind of safety here, making it possible to trust what is between us.
I did not think I could do this. I did not think A. would be this naked. I watch myself move to cover it, as if to restore a shield that would protect me as well. And then I catch myself. His face, shorn of accretion, so beautiful in this watery light.
So why the dream? Why the old woman and the group assembled on grass that resembles the fields here, an expanse of flatness? Last night we fought, a serious fight. It was the first time we didn’t make love. We had been talking about Abe and the way ours is a different generation. I’ve always found Abe’s sweetness with Jesse touching, the way he plays with him or holds him when Jesse is sad or upset. As though living through such treacherous times had reduced life to its essence. I said I wanted to do that, to live an uncluttered life.
Then why don’t you come back to Budapest with me, Andreas said, and I said because it would be going back. And then I couldn’t quite explain what I meant. He said if we want to be together somebody has to make a sacrifice, and I said I thought he had come to question the whole notion of sacrifice, that both of us had been ready to sacrifice our lives for the sake of a loyalty that was also a reach for security, the safety of not risking loss again. And then he said that with any choice you have to give up something, and I said I knew that but it was not the point. I felt I was being trapped in a kind of logic box, like a house with halls and passageways dead-ending in small, isolated rooms. I said we had to imagine something more open and he said did I mean an open relationship, and I said I wasn’t talking about sex. Then what are you talking about, he said, and it suddenly seemed hopeless.
I got up and filled the kettle to heat water for the dishes. He cleared the table and got out his score. What are you thinking about, what are you feeling, my questions pelting like rain. He looked at me. Kyra, I need to study now, just give me some space. He adjusted the lamp, turning up the flame. I wasn’t the one who brought this up, I said, trying to remember how we had reached this impasse. There were two days left before we would leave. The house felt dark and small.
I took a flashlight and went out into the garden, the ruins of the abbey tower jagged against the night sky.
The woman in the dream—she reminds me of my grandmother, my father’s mother. I don’t think we talked about her. She was the one who taught us to play cards, but she irritated my mother because she always wanted to win. “They’re children, Mother,” my mother would say pointedly, “can’t you let them win sometimes?” “It’s not up to me,” she would say. “It’s in the cards, and they have to learn to pay attention and not make mistakes.” She had a sharp eye, she was the one who saw what was coming, who insisted they leave Hamburg. She had a cousin in Cyprus. She took my father and his brother with her. Her husband, my grandfather, said he would follow once he had settled his business, but then he was arrested by the Gestapo and couldn’t get out.
So what’s she doing in the dream? I remember a story she told me one day. I must have been ten because that was the year I had measles and then chicken pox and I was home for weeks. My mother set up a card table next to my bed, and in the afternoons when she had to go out, my grandmother would sit with me, playing cards or Parcheesi. I remember the light, the sun edging around the corner of the house, slanting across the board. I was waiting for my mother to come back.
She said that when my father was a boy, he had a red wagon he loved. They lived on a street with a hill, and he and his friends would pull the wagon to the top and ride it down. He was about my age, she said. One day, they went down too fast. Another boy was steering and the wagon went out of control. My father reached for the handle to keep them from going into the street, and the wagon turned over. A sharp edge of metal cut into his arm. The cut got infected. It was before antibiotics. Every night they bathed the wound. The doctors said he might lose the arm. Then slowly the wound began to heal. It was a miracle, they said. You have to believe in miracles, my grandmother said. Sometimes things look hopeless, but it’s important not to give up.
I told Andreas the story. When we were children, we would look at the scar on my father’s arm, the skin shiny, the edges ragged. He was lucky, Andreas said.
We were lucky too. The hardest thing for us still is to talk about sadness. To let each other into a place we had guarded. Not to move away or bury ourselves in our work, which is something we’ve both done. You always said I’ve taken risks, but this seems like the greatest risk.
This morning, we made love and made up, and then at breakfast I remembered another dream.
We were in the country and we were building a house. It was different from the one Anna and I built, more experimental in design. You need a lot of light, Andreas said in the dream, and I was surprised that he knew this about me. What’s always said about my work is that I saturate my buildings with natural light. I think of Louis Kahn, “the shadow belongs to the light.”
Yesterday afternoon, we talked about leaving this island. I want to be with you, he said, and then wept. Not choked crying but simple weeping because the wanting now is so raw. We both feel it. It’s as though something has been washed clean by this astringent northern air.
We were standing on the beach, the wind blowing in from the sea, tears streaming down our faces. And then we looked up and started to laugh. It was low tide and seals had climbed onto the rocks, their whiskered faces looking bemused, watching us.
I wonder what you’re dreaming. I hope you can read this writing. Needless to say, there’s no typewriter here.
Love,
Kyra
Dear Kyra,
I want to write you this dream before I forget it. It’s from last night. I’m driving through my neighborhood and I see a house I’d never seen before. It is made entirely of glass. I get out of the car and walk around it. The angles are striking. I can’t see how they’ve managed to do it or what is holding the panes. It’s very beautiful and daring. That’s all I remember now. There was something about a book.
I’ll just jot down a few associations: people who live in glass houses, etc., transparency, something I like in music, living in a way that is transparent. I looked up the word in the dictionary (the book in the dream?). It means allowing light to pass through with little or no interruption or distortion so that objects on the other side can be clearly seen, to be completely open and frank about things.
I thought you’d like this.
I really must go now. I’ll write more next week.
Love,
Greta
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While most places in this novel are real, the story and characters are fiction, imagined events and lives. My ability to envision these lives was enhanced by the generosity of Linda Pollak, who invited me to sit in on her urban design studio at Harvard, and Joel Revzen, who invited me into his rehearsals for Tosca. I also want to thank Kristin Linklater and Tina Packer for encouraging me to take the Shakespeare & Company intensive actor training workshop, where I learned the Linklater voice work and the text exercise called “dropping in.” My guide into the world of the Akha was Deborah Tooker, then a graduate student in anthropology at Harvard, who asked me to serve on her thesis committee. My thanks to Martin Richards and Sarah Smalley for inviting me to spend a week with them on Bardsey and to Alexia Panayioutou for introducing me to Cyprus.
I would like to acknowledge information drawn from Peter Brook: A Theatrical Casebook (compiled by David Williams) and especially from the rehearsal log of Carmen kept by Michel Rostain, which opened the rehearsal process to me. I have directly quoted Peter Brook in Andreas’s talk to the cast following the opening of Tosca, and Frank Rich’s review of Mr. Brook’s Carmen inspired the line attributed to the Globe review of Tosca. Similarly, The End of Architecture?, edited by Peter Noever and reporting the proceedings of a conference held in 1992 at the MAK in Vienna, allowed me to listen for the way architects talk with one another about their work. I have woven some of Mr. Noever’s memorable phrases into the opening remarks at the conference Kyra attends and borrowed a question and some observations from Frank Gehry’s preface for the discussion following her talk. Elizabeth Grossman, formerly of the Rhode Island School of Design, introduced me to the metaphor of weave as used by architects and was most generous in helping me to think about Kyra’s project. She also directed me to the work of Toshiko Mori. My descriptions of the Akha village and their way of life are drawn from Deborah Ellen Tooker’s dissertation, “Inside and Outside: Schematic Replication at the Levels of Village, Household, and Person among the Akha of Northern Thailand.”
Other books that were especially helpful to me were Tide Race by Brenda Chamberlain for her evocative descriptions of Bardsey; Three Islands by Alice Forbes Howland for her descriptions of Nashawena; Louis Kahn: Essential Texts for his reflections on light; The Gothic Cathedral by Otto von Simson; Deconstruction, edited by Andreas Papadakis, Catherine Cooke, and Andrew Benjamin; The Shifting Point by Peter Brook; Divided Cyprus, edited by Yiannis Papadakis, Nicos Peristianis, and Gisela Weiss; Hungary and the Soviet Bloc by Charles Gati; and Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Budapest Diary. I was also inspired by performances of Jonathan Miller’s semi-staged L’Orfeo and Peter Brook’s Pelleas et Melisande, by Normi Noel’s direction of Hamlet (which I drew on for Kyra’s part in the game of changing the ending), and by Zaha Hadid’s exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.
The lines in italics on Part 2: Chapter 1 are from Jorie Graham’s poem, “Act III, Sc. 2” the passage Kyra copies into her journal on Part 2: Chapter 4 is from Lebbeus Woods’s “Manifesto 1992,” a wall text displayed at the MAK in Vienna. Her quotation (slightly rephrased) of Peter Eisenman on Part 2: Chapter 4 is from “Peter Eisenman: An Architectural Design Interview by Charles Jencks” (Deconstruction, Part 2: Chapter 2). The book on memory Andreas is reading is Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Crises of Memory and the Second World War, and the line he underscores is on Back Matter. The English translations of Tosca are from the libretto provided with the EMI recording (#56304).
Thanks to the School of Law and the Steinhardt School at New York University and to the Chilmark Public Library. I am grateful to Kristin Maloney, who found books for me on the Elizabeth Islands and let me keep them for a long time.
My deepest thanks to my editor, Kate Medina, who joined me at a level I had not imagined and brought her extraordinary ear and eye to this project with a generosity that always inspired me to go further. Her knowledge of literature and her wisdom as an editor were a writer’s dream. I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to Rachel Kadish, my writing pal and an experienced novelist, who taught me a lot about writing. The precision of her ear was a great gift. Diana de Vegh’s ear was also invaluable to me, and in her own way, she too was a writer’s dream.
I also wish to thank the many people who were helpful to me at various stages of this work. I am especially grateful to the late Jean Baker Miller for her encouragement when I first started writing fiction; to Irene Orgel, Mary Hamer, and Normi Noel for their responses to early drafts of this book; and to Emily Hass for her exceptional help. My gratitude also to Helaine Blumenfeld, Nicole Dabernat, Eve Ensler, Peter Friedman, Jonathan Gilligan, Helga Kaiser, Julia Leonard, Bob Levine, Rob and Karen Loomis, Golnoush Niknejad, Carole Obedin, Tina Packer, Linda Pollak, David Richards, Cora Roth, Niobe Way, and Kate Wenner. A special thanks to Adrian Nicole LeBlanc for crucial swims at the final stages.
Finally, my thanks to the outstanding editorial and design staff at Random House: Steve Meyers, Beth Pearson, Abby Plesser, Robin Role-wicz, and Katie Shaw.
I have dedicated this book to my husband, Jim Gilligan, without whom I would never have written a novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAROL GILLIGAN is a writer best known for her book In a Different Voice. She was a member of the Harvard faculty for thirty-four years and held the university’s first chair in gender studies. She is currently University Professor of the Humanities and Applied Psychology at New York University, and she lives with her husband in New York City and the Berkshires. Kyra is her first novel.
ALSO BY CAROL GILLIGAN
The Birth of Pleasure
In a Different Voice
Between Voice and Silence
(with Jill McLean Taylor and Amy M. Sullivan)
Meeting at the Crossroads
(with Lyn Mikel Brown)
EDITED BY CAROL GILLIGAN
Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy
(with Annie G. Rogers and Deborah L. Tolman)
Making Connections
(with Nona P. Lyons and Trudy J. Hanmer)
Mapping the Moral Domain
(with Janie Victoria Ward, Jill McLean Taylor, and Betty Bardige)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Carol Gilligan.
All rights reserved.
Published in the Un
ited States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
HarperCollins Publishers: Excerpt from “Act IV, Sc. 1” from The Dream of the Unified Field: Poems 1974–1994 by Jorie Graham, copyright © 1995 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from “Fields of Gold,” music and lyrics by Sting, copyright © 1993 by Steerpike Ltd. Administered by EMI Music Publishing Limited. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gilligan, Carol.
Kyra: a novel / Carol Gilligan.
p. cm.
1. Women designers—Fiction. 2. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Psychotherapist and patient—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.I4445K97 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007022205
www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-1-58836-681-8
Kyra Page 24