by May Sarton
Finally we all went to sleep, that drugged hopeless sleep that is the only escape at times. When I woke at five it was still raining and pitch dark indoors. I put on my light to read in the Oxford Book and Harriet came in in a fury and turned it off!
“We aren’t millionaires,” she raged. “No lights on in summer before six, do you get that, Miss Spencer?” (Heavy irony in her tone as she said “Miss.”)
“What about a candle?” I asked. “Would that be allowed?”
“And burn the place down! Are you crazy?”
I held my peace. But one day I am going to break out and smash things. That is what I most fear—the anger that Standish also feels, as it burns its way, little by little, to where it cannot be controlled. I cannot afford the punishment. I am punished beyond what I can handle now. So, Caro, hold your peace, and endure, I tell myself. Or God tells me.
Today I saw the sun rise, peaceful burst of light across the misty field. It was a small red globe at first, then it got larger and the light touched everything in long gentle rays. I felt flooded with joy, as if some inner darkness had worked itself out like a poison at last. Perhaps it has been an inch-by-inch taking hold of myself, keeping anger at bay. I suppose at its most negative it is just “getting used” to the limits of my prison. For the first days, the first three weeks until John finally came, I was sick with fear and disgust. And, in a strange way, I still had hope. It was when hope left me after that visit that I began the road back, the road into the central self that no environment can change or poison. I am myself again. I know that I must expect no help from the outside. This is it. Here I stand.
And here I see what is to be seen. Today, now that the deluge is over, there are cows in the field, a great comfort. I often discussed with Alex in the old days why cows are so peace-inducing, the way they walk along, munching, in a slow-moving group, the swing of a tail now and then, the quiet pleasure of creatures leading their own tranquil lives, creatures eating. Soon the cows will lie down in the shade, dear things.
It has been altogether a memorable day as the days go here. At eleven I had not only a letter but the daily newspaper (so Ginny has at least attended to that for me) and it was a treat to read it slowly, every page. I suppose it is possessive to dislike reading a paper that has passed through several hands, that is slightly crumpled. I only wish there were someone I could discuss an article with now and then. I buzz with ideas, but they die away for lack of anything to hang them on, and because I find it hard to think in an abstract sense for very long at a time. It would be a good thing to regard my mind a little as though it were a body out of training, and to force myself each day to use it, to tone up the muscle, so to speak. Today I read at some length about two automobile accidents; one was the cause of death. Beside the copy about that, there was an interview with an officer back from five years in prison in North Vietnam. He said he had been appalled on his return to see how angry we Americans get at the smallest frustration. As he put it, a man gets into his car, and if it doesn’t start on the first or second try, he becomes furiously angry. People held up in traffic for even a short while lose their tempers. Can it be true that everyone is so close to rage all the time that the equivalent of stubbing a toe leads to a tantrum? And how can we handle this state of disequilibrium? For that is what it is. Almost every day one reads about some crazy person who takes a shotgun and shoots several people simply to relieve intolerable pressure. But what has caused the pressure? And why must it be relieved only through murderous violence? Questions, questions I can surely never answer …
I have saved writing about my letter till last, and now I am stupidly exhausted. It is a letter from one of my former students, married now and with children in high school and in college. Of course she has no idea what has happened to me. And she is far away in Indiana. Yet it felt like a breath of air sent to a person buried alive. For Susie I exist, and have existed all these years, maybe thirty-five years, for I was young when she first came to the school, a freckled child with red hair and immense curiosity, nervous, willful, battling her way through school, always in trouble. It was a happy chance for me that math was the one subject she could handle with grace and style—rare gift among girls at that time. So it turned out that I was able to help her with English, at which she was clumsy and inadequate. I’ll always remember the day she chased me out to my car after school, breathless as always, and said, “Look, Miss Spencer! Is it a poem?”
I was so afraid of having to disappoint her. While she scanned my face, I read ten or twelve lines describing a seagull, a poem about freedom, I suppose it was meant to be.
“Yes,” I said, “it’s a poem.”
“Oh boy!” She shouted and jumped up and down with excitement. “Oh, thank you”—and she tore off without waiting for whatever else I might have found to say.
I was touched that she had asked me to read it rather than her English teacher, Miss Flood. Miss Flood was a stickler for grammar and punctuation, but she did not exactly inspire her students. And of course she resented me because I did.
I was a good teacher, as I look back on that self now. The point is that I loved math with a passion. I loved the order, the clarity of it, the absolute in it. And I think my students felt that, for me, something more than mere math was involved, an attitude toward life itself. I liked a straight answer to a straight question, in just the way that I felt the beauty of a perfect equation or, even more, a geometric figure.
“You’re mad about math, aren’t you?” Susie asked me once.
“Am I? Well, maybe. I suppose I see a certain order in the universe and math is one way of making it visible.”
She was twelve or thirteen by then, but I always talked to her as if she were grown up. Her mind was worthy of that treatment. And she has not failed. Even when her children were small she got a job with a law firm as a secretary, then when they were in high school, she went to law school herself. Her husband is a Unitarian minister. She studied law with the idea of helping some of the indigent people he has in his ministry who keep getting rooked by loan companies or dealers who persuade them into things they can’t afford. Apparently they live in a border district of their industrial town, the church still supported by “old families” who have moved elsewhere, the church building itself now in a part of the city that is at least half black. I’m proud of Susie.
How am I to answer? Shall I tell her my plight? How could she believe it? What can she do? I shall have to think about this—it will come up again. What is my stance as far as old friends go? Pride enters in. I want Susie to think of me as the vital influence I have been. Teachers should perhaps never let their students into their own problems. It is to lay an unfair burden, a little as if a psychiatrist allowed former patients into his private dilemmas. A teacher cannot become too human or too vulnerable or he ceases to be the rock every young person needs. But Susie is forty now—perhaps more. She is grown up. Am I not to honor that fact with the hard truth? How usable would that hard truth be for her? How devastating? And what is the truth? Perhaps there is none. People disintegrate and have to be “taken care of.” Why haven’t I had the guts to make an escape, she might well wonder. But it is impossible to describe how isolated we are here. The village is at least five miles away, and there is nothing there, no motel, nothing but a General Store which is the P.O. If I called a taxi—and I have thought of this—and simply left, where would I go? I cannot impose myself for life on some friend from the past. The fact is my friends are scattered and there is really no one in my own town, a hundred miles away, whom I could ask for help. I just about pay my own way here. Are there other better places? Horribly expensive and perhaps, au fond, no more agreeable. I am no longer the person Susie needed and perhaps still needs. I am an old woman, fighting for her sanity against the odds.
But before I rest, I am going to rough out a letter. Then I can change it if necessary when I copy it out and send it. It could be, at least, a test of whether anything at all can get through—whe
ther a letter will be mailed or censored or thrown away. If I write I am sure she will answer, if she gets my letter.
Sometime in September
Dear Susie,
Your letter was a lifeline and I’m afraid I fasten onto it as the only helpful thing that has come to me for a month. I am now stowed away in an old people’s home. My brother, who is eighty and remarried, has done this and cannot really help himself. After a serious heart attack some months ago, I had to give up the little house you remember and go to them. But it did not, and could not, work. So I am here, more or less denuded of everything that might make life livable. I am losing my memory, but otherwise intact. I believe that I have to take this as some final test of my courage and endurance. I want to meet death fully myself.
What is precious is your writing and remembering what I once was, and still am at times. I need your belief that I can make it to the end—not pity, faith. If I were tapping this out to you from a prison cell to a fellow prisoner it could not seem more strange or wonderful to communicate with a real human being. I am proud of you. Please believe in the foxiness of this very old party … I mean to outwit “them” in the only possible way, that is by not being brainwashed and by remaining,
Yours very truly,
Caroline Spencer
P.S. I still believe there is some order in the universe: only man seems to stray from it.
The day when I roughed out that letter that never got sent, and probably never will, was some time ago … I do not know how many days have elapsed. I am back in my own room again, weak and grateful for small favors. What I had been most afraid would happen, happened … it was because of Standish in pain, his face to the wall … I heard him begging them to get the doctor. And when Harriet answered finally in that hard, bright, we-know-better voice, “You’re not in pain. You’re just stubborn, throw your medicine away, won’t eat. If you’re in pain, it’s your own fault—” Well, I went berserk, I guess. All the frustration and anger and pity seized me like a fit. I screamed awful things at Harriet. I think I may have even tried to hit her, but she held me at arm’s length. When she let go, I was blind with rage and tears and hurled a chair across the room and broke it. “You pigs! You horrible pigs!” I remember sobbing. Finally Harriet, Rose, and the woman’s lover pinned me down and got me into a room without windows where I lay in the dark for several days and nights—I do not know how long—heavily sedated, I suppose. During that time Ginny came and left what I had asked for, but was not allowed to see me—for fear I would talk, I suppose. What a relief for her! That awful attack of anger tore me open to grief. Also I think the pills they give me are depressants. I wake up weeping about 3 A.M. and cannot stop. It is happening now, I cannot see to write and must lie down.
But I have to pull myself together. I can’t let them win, not yet. So, Caro, you’ve got to build yourself back from scratch. I have to think ahead of things I can do. Tomorrow, perhaps I can copy the letter and get it off to Susie. Oh dear, I am not strong enough to think of goodness and gentleness, of belief. They shatter me. I am not worthy, a leper—an old woman without control over herself. When I cried so much in the dark it was a small punished child crying, but that is what I have to battle against—the longing to be forgiven, to be accepted again. When they let me out and brought me back, even Harriet was horribly kind, kind as a master is to a slave who has been tortured and will now, presumably, behave herself. I am still in bed, not allowed to get up, but at least I can see the precious light, and the cows, and Pansy comes to purr on my bed. I did not appreciate how lucky I was to have these comforts before. Now I do. Ginny brought lavender water. I can put it behind my ears as my mother used to do when I was feverish. Ginny brought me a light pink summer bedjacket … that was so kind of her. Must I learn that even the wicked mean well, at least at times?
I have been a snob about these people, that is true. I have felt myself superior. It was one way of surviving. I have also allowed myself to hate. That is wrong. That is to be inferior as a human being. It takes so long to learn these things. It takes time and suffering, the worst kind of suffering, admitting that one has been wrong, admitting that one has failed, abysmally. All my life anger has been my undoing, and now I must pay for it. And I must begin the serious work of self-making that will conquer it forever.
What I long for with a deep ache inside me is sacred music. I long for the Fauré Requiem, for the Haydn “Mass in Time of War,” for some pure celestial music that could lift me above myself, into that sphere where great art lives, beyond what man can be in himself, the intimation of the sacred—what cannot be dirtied or smudged by wickedness or by anger, which no threat can touch.
How can I help Standish now? He welcomed me back from the dark place with tears in his eyes and squeezed my hand—how frail his hand is now! I feared to break it with my clasp. But that amount of human trust did us both good. I am so grateful that, wrapped in dignity, and in pain as he is, he found it in him to do that. It was to thank me for fighting in his behalf, clumsy and bad though my fight turned out to be.
Did the doctor come while I was “away?” I hope so much that perhaps they did get him, but I do not dare ask. I would have to shout to ask Standish and I fear punishment. I do not dare ask Harriet or Rose as it will remind them of my tantrum. Would feeble-minded Jack remember? Would he hear a whisper? Do I dare risk it? The old men sit there like miserable caged owls, but they hear and notice everything.
Sometimes I dream that another woman might be sent. I have never wanted a woman around before, but I feel it would help a lot. The place has the reek of old men and old men’s fantasies, sexual of course. I long for a woman with whom to share quite ordinary things, like how I can get my hair washed.
Since my outbreak I feel so unlovable, beyond the pale. And this is childhood again. How many times was I sent to bed without supper because I had a tantrum? And how is it that through all my life I never came to terms with this anger inside me? Yet, Caro, remember that anger is the wicked side of fire—you had fire and that fire made you a good teacher and a brave fighter sometimes. Fire can be purifying. It was purifying when the art teacher, a homosexual, was threatened with dismissal for moral turpitude, and I went to the head of the school first and then to the superintendent and managed to save Bob—he got his tenure. I withered those two affable and bewildered men and it was not by being gentle. So, Caro, try to think now and then that you are a human being, full of unregenerate anger and sometimes inhabited by sacred fire. “Child, you are not all bad!” Who said that?
Or am I thinking of Herbert … let me find it in the Oxford Book … Oh, what a comfort to find it again, The Collar:
But as I rav’d and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thought I heard one crying, Child!
And I reply’d, My Lord.
At least when I come to the very nub, to the place where there is nothing, not even belief in the self, I can still contemplate purity in Euclid, for instance, and in dear George Herbert. Now I can sleep. I have reached an island in the ocean of despair.
I think they want to persuade me that I’m not quite sane. Every now and then Harriet tells me I have done something (broken a glass, burnt a hole in my sheet) or said something (“I won’t stay here another minute”) that I cannot remember at all. There are also things I have done—or believe I have done—like copying out the letter to Susie, that I may not have done. Losing one’s memory is terribly disorienting. The danger is to lose track altogether and begin to be whirled about on time like a leaf in the eddy of a brook—then you begin to wonder what is real and what is not, and where you are, and how long you have been there. And finally it is frightening because I can see that what happens next is a growing distrust of everyone and everything. How can I tell truth from falsehood if I can’t remember anything?
Well, Caro, you do remember that you write things down in this notebook. Today, as a “temporary stay against confusion,” I read it all. Here I have been fo
r at least a month, maybe two—the leaves are beginning to turn. One swamp maple far down the field is scarlet already. Here I have been all that time and I see that this experience is real and that quite a lot has happened. And I am still able to experience it in all its agony and truth. That is something. The old men in the other room have given up or have become totally passive. They are covered over by time like weeds in water, swaying as the currents move, agitated by a change in the atmosphere, but so remote that it is as if they had ceased to live except deep down inside themselves—and what goes on there? A long daydream where food and sex loom large? In an abstract way, hardly real, or attached to reality—it is not a wife they remember but the titillation of watching Harriet’s breasts waggle as she stoops, or Rose’s immense bum. Ice cream brings a clatter of spoons and toothless smiles. They watch TV with the expressions of cattle, in a stupor, mesmerized but untouched. Is that the way it goes, the way it must go with me? As I re-read what I have written I see that I must make a constant effort to keep as alert as possible, not to let go even about small things—my appearance, for one.
I am keeping the tranquilizers concealed in the bottom of a box of Kleenex. I feel much more alert since I decided not to take them. And I still have that ten dollars John gave me. Someday I can pay someone to make a phone call outside, if someone ever comes whom I could ask. I could even get a taxi up here and escape! But if so, where to? No, Caro, there is no escape here. Don’t begin to hope again. That is too dangerous.
I’ll smoke a cigarette and take a rest from this writing. It is an effort to do it, yet it is also a satisfaction. Because it is written down and can be re-read, it is far more substantive than my idle thoughts, or even my most intense thoughts for that matter. It is outside me and because I can see it and read it outside my mind, I know that I exist and am still sane.