I don’t think she realized quite how agonizing these dances were to me, the stranger in a tightly knit group of young people who had known each other all their lives, and who were fluent in an agreed-upon set of social mores which were completely unfamiliar to me. Dates were arranged for me, and I’m sure the young men whose parents had coerced them into calling for me dreaded the evenings as much as I did. I was as tall as an adolescent as I am now, and most of my dancing partners seemed to be at least a foot shorter, and leaned their heads against my breast as we danced—or as I tripped over their feet. I was hopeless in the social world, and had none of the highly cultivated charm of my Southern cousins.
One cousin, trying to be helpful, drew up a list of ten questions for me to ask my dancing partners. I was always extremely myopic, contact lenses had not yet become general, and pride forbade me to wear my glasses on a date or at a dance. But there was one dance where I had more partners than usual, and spent less time in the ladies’ room pretending to put on make-up, desperately thinking up excuses to keep me off the dance floor, and I was feeling quite pleased with myself, and was prepared to tell my cousin how well her questions were working, when my partner said, “Hey, honey, what’s your line? You’ve already asked me these questions three times before.”
I couldn’t very well tell him that I was so shortsighted that I hadn’t recognized him, so I said, “You haven’t really answered them properly.”
“You really want to know?”
“Of course, or I wouldn’t have kept asking.”
We became friends after a fashion, and talked about the primitive pubic rites of the coming-out parties, and felt sophisticated and above it all.
And I learned that when a boy talked to me about God, and death, he was likely to give me a good-night kiss, even if I put on my glasses at the movies.
Through my partner at that dance I met a brilliant, unhappy young man who later became a physicist, and I remember one conversation we had, a conversation which I reproduced, almost verbatim, in a different setting, in my first novel, where I struggled to write the ousia of Father’s death in depicting the death of the protagonist’s mother.
The original conversation was held at the beach, at night. Instead of taking me to the movies as planned, Yandell (named, in the Southern manner, after his mother’s family name) said, “I feel like talking,” and then drove in complete silence the forty-five miles to the beach. We climbed up onto a high dune and listened to the grave rolling of the waves, and the gentle hishing of the tall sea oats, and Yandell told me that he had a heart murmur and probably wouldn’t live for more than a few years. He asked, “How old was your father?”
“Fifty-seven.”
“That’s a lifetime. At least he had a lifetime.”
“It’s not very old.” I come from a long-lived family.
He shrugged, and we lay back on the dune and looked at the stars. “Did you see him after he was dead?”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t ever seen a dead body. What did he look like?”
“He looked—he didn’t look real. He wasn’t there.”
“Where do you think he was, then?”
Something in his tone of voice made me sit up. “You don’t think he’s anywhere, do you?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But do you? Do you believe that my father is, now—himself, somewhere, actively living, himself?”
He picked a long sea oat and began slowly stripping it and dropping the little pieces on the sand, sea oat and sand blending together. “What you believe about things like that is just your own personal opinion, isn’t it?”
“You don’t think he is. You think he’s just nothing, don’t you?”
“You’re grown up enough to see through all this coming-out zug. But if you want to go on with the tribal superstition thinking your father’s more than worm fodder, that’s up to you.”
I was both angry and frightened. I stood up, and sand slid under my feet. “Yandell, I saw him when he was dead. I saw Father, and it just wasn’t Father. It’s like looking at a photograph; it looks like the person, but the person isn’t there. Father wasn’t there, not what’s really Father. And if he wasn’t there, he’s got to be somewhere.”
The caustic note had gone from Yandell’s voice, and he spoke slowly and calmly. “But what’s a soul without a body, without senses? Can you imagine existing, being yourself, if you couldn’t see? Or hear? Or feel? And after all, we think with our brains. How could you be you without your cerebral cortex?”
I was so angry that I nearly burst into tears, but they wouldn’t have been the right kind of tears. “It’s idiotic,” I said, “it’s crazy. If you die and then you’re just nothing, there isn’t any point to anything. Why do we live at all if we die and stop being? Father wasn’t ready to be stopped. Nobody’s ready to be stopped. We don’t have time to be ready to be stopped. It’s all crazy.”
“Don’t think the idea of extinction appeals to me,” Yandell drawled.
I had put on my glasses so that I could see the stars. Now I took them off and the sky became nothing but a dark curtain. I waved my glasses at him. “Look at my glasses. I can’t even see that there are any stars in the sky without them, but it’s not the glasses that are doing the seeing, it’s me, Madeleine. I don’t think Father’s eyes are seeing now, but he is. And maybe his brain isn’t thinking, but a brain’s just something to think through, the way my glasses are something to see through.”
“Calm down,” Yandell said. “Let’s go walk on the beach and go wading.”
One cold winter’s night in Crosswicks, many years later, while I was putting the children to bed, my daughter Maria turned to me and said, “Grandma says my mother got all burned up.” True: Liz was cremated. But to the seven-year-old child this insensitive sentence from Liz’s mother meant the entire loss of Liz. That day I had given away some of Maria’s outgrown dresses, and I reminded her of it, and that we had bought her some new clothes. And I said, “You’d outgrown those old clothes, and you don’t need them any more. And now you have clothes which fit you better. Well, if a human parent can get new clothes for you when you outgrow your old ones, God can provide us with new bodies when we outgrow the ones we have now.”
I can’t begin to guess with what kind of body he may have outfitted Liz or my father, or will outfit my mother. However, I have a feeling that it would be completely unrecognizable to our human eyes. At least the analogy I used for the seven-year-old child was one step away from the thinking of the Middle Ages, where there are records of the burial of a Crusader home from the wars with only one leg; at his death a leg was cut off one of his peasants, on the theory that the Crusader would have more need of two legs in heaven than the peasant.
That medieval horror would have pleased Yandell—who outgrew his heart murmur and is alive and flourishing. And I admit that my thinking isn’t a great deal less primitive than that of the Middle Ages. The main progress is that I do not attempt to give an answer to an unanswerable question, but I do ask the question. And it does not upset me unduly that Paul’s vision of a “spiritual body” is a scientific impossibility, and can be glimpsed only in poetry and paradox.
When I got back to boarding school after the holidays, Yandell’s words obviously remained in my underwater mind, and I worked out a scheme of things which still seems valid to me. It was a logical analogy for one who had spent so many years in boarding schools, because it included thinking of our present lives as being something like nursery school, and to complete the growth of our souls we would need to go all the way through school and college and a great deal further.
I sat, during a free weekend afternoon, out in my favorite live oak tree, and thought of the stars over the ocean during my painful conversation with Yandell, and that all of those stars were suns, and that many of these suns had planets, and that surely the planet earth is not the only planet in the universe to have sentient life. And then I thought that perhaps there
might be a planet where nobody has eyes; everybody would get on perfectly well; other senses would take over. But nobody on that planet could possibly conceive of what sight could be like, even if they were told about it. Something as important and glorious as sight couldn’t be understood at all.
So then I thought that maybe when we die we might go to another planet, and there we might have a new sense, one just as important as sight, or even more important, but which we couldn’t conceive of now any more than we could conceive of sight if we didn’t know about it. And then when we’d finished on that planet we’d go on to another planet and develop and grow and learn even more, and it might well take millions of planets before we’d have been taught enough to be ready for heaven.
I haven’t gone much further than that adolescent analogy, and even then I knew that it was no more than analogy. But I did feel, and passionately, that it wasn’t fair of God to give us brains enough to ask the ultimate questions if he didn’t intend to teach us the answers.
8
It would have been easy, after my father’s death, for Mother’s love to become grasping and demanding. The environment in which she lived encouraged it. But Mother deliberately opened her hands and let me go. Many of my Southern relatives expected me to stay home and take care of my delicate mother; however, during vacation times Mother carefully pointed out shriveled female cousins who had spent most of a lifetime caring for an aged parent “while life passed by, so now that Cousin Isabella has finally shuffled off her mortal coil, her daughter has been sucked dry and it’s too late for living.”
Some of my shriveled female cousins had just cause to think of “Mother”—or “Father”—as devourer. But I worry about people who assume that all mothers are bloodsuckers. The womb is a place of dark, warm protection only for a term; as soon as the baby is able to bear the light of day the womb contracts and expels him, loosens him, frees him.
A friend of mine spoke of college freshmen as people wandering around with the umbilical cord in one hand, looking for some place to plug it in. Often the mother has cut the umbilical cord long before the child is willing to let go, and yet the child blames the mother.
When I was sent, so abruptly, to boarding school, the umbilical cord got cut, ready or not, and Mother had no intention of reattaching it. Thanks to her clarity of vision, I was able to go to college free of guilt.
We had spent a happy summer in England and France, visiting relatives. We came back to New York just a few days before college, and then off I went on the train, heading north into New England, and Mother returned to the South.
I did not abandon or forget Mother. I did not understand consciously that she was sacrificing something in sending me away, but I think I must have instinctively felt more than I knew, because from the time of Father’s death and on, until she could no longer read letters, I wrote her at least a postcard every day. It became a simple part of the day’s routine and took only a few minutes.
I had a good four years of college, by which I mean that I did a great deal of growing up, and a lot of this growing was extremely painful. I cut far too many classes, wrote dozens of short stories, and managed to get an excellent education despite myself.
After college I did not even consider yielding to family pressure and returning South to “take care of your mother,” but went to New York to live my own life and work in the theatre, which I considered the best possible school for a writer. The daily epistles, and weekly (collect) phone calls continued, but I was free to become my own Madeleine.
My mother was birth-giver, not devourer, and I hope I have learned from her.
What is time like for Léna and Charlotte? It is longer than for the rest of the household. It is so long that it comes close to breaking time and becoming part of eternity. But it is not that way for the very old. Time unravels, rather than knits up. It is as erratic as nightmare.
My mother’s senility has drawn her through the keyhole of reality and into the world of nightmare on the other side. Her fears are nightmare fears, like those of one who has just woken out of a bad dream and cannot get back into the “real” world. Her real world is gone. She is trapped in nightmare and all our loving cannot get her out.
The pressures of time can sometimes weigh very heavily, but this weight is bearable. One of the greatest deprivations of senility is the loss of a sense of time. Time is indeed out of joint. An old man or woman in a “home” or hospital may say tearfully to a visitor, “My children haven’t been to see me. They’ve forgotten me. They brought me here and abandoned me. They don’t care any more.” The children’s last visit may have been the day before, but to the old man or woman it was so long ago that it has been forgotten. Times stretches like old, worn-out elastic. What happens if it is stretched till it breaks?
Two years ago when it became clear that reading my daily epistles was burden, rather than pleasure, to Mother, the phone calls increased from once a week to twice a week, and finally to almost every day. Last winter I was frequently rebuked for not having called for so long. “I called day before yesterday, Mother.” “You didn’t. You haven’t called for at least two weeks” Occasionally I would get a call or a letter from a friend or relative in the South: “Why haven’t you called your mother?”
It is thin-skinned of me to be upset. For several years I have known that when Mother returns South after the summer she will tell everybody who will listen that I haven’t fed her properly. Sometimes I will have this reported to me with an understanding smile. “She looks absolutely marvelous. The summer did her a world of good.” Sometimes her complaints will be accepted at their face value, and I am a cruel daughter.
It’s a very American trait, this wanting people to think well of us. It’s a young want, and I am ashamed of it in myself. I am not always a good daughter, even though my lacks are in areas different from her complaints. Haven’t I learned yet that the desire to be perfect is always disastrous and, at the least, loses me in the mire of false guilt?
Perfectionism is imprisoning. As long as I demand it, in myself or anybody else, I am not free, and all my life—fifty-two this summer—I’ve believed that freedom is important, that, despite all our misuse and abuse of it, freedom is what makes us a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor, according to the psalmist; how like a god, according to Shakespeare; freedom to remember, to share, to dream, to accept irrationality and paradox is what makes us human animals.
Where is my freedom this summer? I can go no farther from the house than I can walk, because chancy vision no longer allows me to drive. The responsibility of my mother, of the large household, of the kitchen stove, would seem to deny me a great deal of freedom, and yet my freedom is still up to me. Because I have entered willingly into this time, I do not feel that my freedom has been taken away.
But there are times in life when human freedom is denied us, and not only in prisons and concentration camps. I was once in an extremity of pain and knew that I was close to death. I was fighting hard to live, for my husband, our small children, for myself and all that I still wanted to do and be, for all the books I hoped to write. And then I knew that unless the pain was relieved I was not alive, that death was better than the body continuing in this kind of impossible pain which had me in its brutal control. When they took me to the operating room I barely had strength to move my lips, “I love you,” to Hugh. As for prayer, I could do no more than say, “Please,” over and over, “please,” to the doctors, to Hugh, to God …
My freedom was entirely out of my hands.
Once I heard a “good” woman ask if the victims of concentration camps did not find consolation in prayer, and I was shocked by the question. It was directed to me, and I answered, fumblingly, that they were probably in that dark realm which is beyond the comfort of conscious prayer, and I likened it to extreme physical pain. There have been times when I have given way to the heart’s pain, too, and again have been outside freedom. We can be unmade, un-personed, all freedom taken aw
ay. That we do this to each other is one of the great shames of our civilization. It is not people, but atherosclerosis, which is taking freedom away from my mother.
But I still have some freedom, even when I go alone in the starlight down the lane to weep, with the dogs pressing anxiously about my legs; not much freedom, but some, that little luminous pearl which is daily misunderstood and misused, but which makes life worth living instead of a dirty cosmic joke.
9
Once when Mother and I were in New York, during a college vacation, we had lunch together in a pleasant downtown restaurant before going to the theatre, and I remember, with the same clarity with which I remember the little embroidered dress, that I leaned across the table and said, “Oh, Mother, it’s such fun to be with you!” And it was. We enjoyed things together, the theatre, museums, music, food, conversation.
When I was pregnant with Josephine I told Mother, “All I could possibly hope for with my children is that they love me as much as I love you.”
Josephine, when she was five or six years old, lightened my heart one evening when she flung her arms around me and said, “Oh, Mama, you’re so exciting!” What more glorious compliment could a child give a parent? My parents were exciting to me, but their lives were far more glamorous than mine. When Jo made that lovely, spontaneous remark I felt anything but exciting; I was in the midst of a difficult decade of literary rejection, of struggling with small children and a large house; and that remark of Jo’s restored my faith in myself, both as a writer and as a mother. Even though I knew I might never again be published; even though I could not see any end to the physical struggle and perpetual fatigue, Josephine helped heal doubt. It is a risky business to hope, but my daughter gave me the courage to take the risk.
I wonder if I ever, unknowingly, gave my mother like courage? I am well aware of all the things I have done which have distressed her, but perhaps simply the fact that I have always loved her may sometimes have helped.
The Summer of the Great-Grandmother Page 10