As We Are Now

by May Sarton

  “How can I help you? I would like to.”

  I think that is what he said. I was agitated. I was trying not to weep. I focused on his kind, innocent face, so perturbed and helpless, poor young man. I think I answered, “The worst thing that happens to us here is that we cease to trust. We are lied to about a lot of things—when the doctor will come, what medicines we are taking. The only thing you could do for me would be, I guess, if I could trust you, and even more important, that you did not go away thinking, ‘Well, the poor old creature is slightly touched of course, so can I believe her?’”

  “You don’t seem at all ‘touched’ to me, Miss Spencer, I assure you.”

  “I might be by the time you come back.” That is the awful thing, that I cannot know how far I have slipped.

  “I’ll come back soon,” he said and got up. “Could I bring some books?”

  “That would be marvelous—a good rich juicy long novel, I would be grateful for that!”

  He shook my hand warmly and we smiled at each other, an open human smile. It is a long time since I have received a present such as that from a stranger. In fact the whole conversation, short as it was, gave me a tremendous shot in the arm.

  For three days after Richard Thornhill’s visit I felt better than I have since I got here. I have sat outdoors every morning. Two days ago I woke and looked out and the whole field was silvered over, and that means the leaves are changing fast. It’s a blazing world. Going out and sitting in the natural air is a relief from the stifling smells and atmosphere inside. For a little while I forget Standish’s misery. For a little while I feel quite alive and myself. The jar comes and eats bread out of my hand. Pansy sometimes appears, a black panther in miniature, threading her way through the long grasses. The sunlight on my hand is a pleasure. I feel warmed somewhere down at that ice at the bone. I take deep breaths, and my heart, that testy animal, beats with a good steady beat.

  Yesterday I went for a little walk, but I was scolded when I got back (I guess they feared I might have run away!) and told to tell someone if and when I did such a thing again. My walk was not a success, as I fell on a sharp stone and scraped my knee. This, too, was treated as a misdemeanor, just as it used to be when I was a child. Mother’s attitude was that I had somehow been careless or hurt myself to get attention! Probably I think so much about childhood here, not because I am in my second childhood (What a myth that is—children have hope!) but because the humiliations are the same as the humiliations children suffer, like being treated as if they knew nothing or were incapable of adult emotions. I asked Harriet yesterday whether I had ever given her a letter to mail. (I am haunted by whether that letter to Susie ever got mailed.)

  “You must be dreaming, dear. You never wrote a letter,” she said with her sweet betrayer’s smile.

  And I am not sure I ever did copy it out, you see. I have the letter as I wrote it and have re-read it several times, but I simply cannot remember copying it or sealing the envelope. I have discovered that one way to remember things is to associate them with an action. Years ago an actress told me that it was not hard to remember a part because each line was associated with motion or some physiological event—the body remembers for the mind.

  I would like now to write a note to dear old Eva, who worked for me for years. I believe she might make the effort to come and see me. The trouble is that my town is fifty miles from where John lives and a hundred miles from here, so it would be an expedition. Her husband would have to drive her and he is terribly busy as he has two jobs, his own farming, and he works on the roads as well. I’m sitting outside now. It is easier to try to reach over the barriers and to wave my hand when I am not a prisoner in my room. So I’ll do it now.

  What is the date, I wonder? Sometime in September—fifteenth or sixteenth—that’s close enough.

  September 16th

  Dear Eva,

  I wish you could manage to pay me a visit here at Twin Elms home … I am not sure of the name of the village but you can get it from my brother, John, and directions as to how to get here. It would do me a world of good to see your face. It seems years, though I guess it is only six months since I left home. I am all right. Only it gets lonely.

  Sincerely your friend,

  Caroline Spencer.

  Even if Harriet reads this, surely she will send it. It does not criticize or complain. And I think I have stamps that Ginny sent with some note paper back in my room.

  Well, what an adventure! As I was sitting there in the late morning a small car drove up, and out got a pretty girl with a mane of soft reddish hair and very blue eyes, in jeans and some sort of blue sailor shirt, and in sandals. I wondered whose visitor she might be. I had never seen her before and for a moment I had the wild hope she might be a grandchild coming to see Standish. She looked so alive, getting out of the car with a bunch of garden flowers in her hands. She saw me just as the jar saw her and advanced, his neck thrust out, hissing at her.

  “Is he dangerous?” she called out to me, half laughing.

  He is rather formidable at a first encounter, and her laugh was a little shaky.

  “Just showing off before his wives,” I called back. “Pay no attention. He’s more scared than you are.”

  (What astonished me was to hear my own voice, as it used to be, quite loud and cheerful for a change! I realized that we speak in whispers indoors. I have not heard myself for weeks.)

  She ran over to where I was sitting then.

  “I’m Lisa Thornhill. My father sent me over because he can’t come till next week. You are Miss Spencer?” she asked, and when I nodded, “I felt sure it must be you. My mother sent these from our garden—the very end, but she hopes you’ll enjoy them.”

  Impossible to tell the girl how deeply touched I was, not only by the kindness, but the flowers themselves, manna from Heaven.

  I sent her in to put them in water, the sun out here would wilt them. When she came back, she went first to the car and picked up three books, two thick English novels (Heaven!) and an anthology of poems I had not seen before. Then she came and sat in the other wicker chair and for a half hour I was in the real human world again. How wonderful that I could see her outdoors, that I did not feel someone was listening. And how wonderful that I was poised, did not weep, and managed to be almost my old self with this charming girl. I did not talk about myself at all. I was eager to hear about her and the whole family.

  She is in her last year at high school, the public school in the town, and will go off to Smith next year. What she likes best in school is biology and, next, photography. The family is one boy and one girl, like mine. But her brother is two years younger than she; entirely absorbed in baseball, she says. He also plays clarinet in the school orchestra. They have been here only two years. Before that her father had a parish in a small town in Connecticut … It is tiring to try to remember it all. That is what I shall do before I go to sleep, turn it all over in my mind, fresh food for thought for a change.

  But what seems so extraordinary, even miraculous, is that at last I am being sent some help. The only thing I asked Lisa to do was to mail my letter to Eva. She waited while I went indoors for notepaper and copied it out. Harriet, of course, followed me like a bloodhound into my room and asked me what I was doing.

  “I’m writing a letter,” I said. “Would you like to read it?”

  That floored her for the moment. She sniffed and went away to badger poor Standish with more medicine he will try to dispose of, then came back to say, “Too bad to keep that nice girl waiting …”

  But I have learned to keep silent when curses rise to my lips. I let that pass.

  Anyway I got the letter safely into Lisa’s hands, a small triumph, but there have been few such lately. It gave me an immense sense of accomplishment, of self-assertion against all the odds here. And Lisa offered to go and fetch Eva if she finds she can’t get away otherwise.

  “I love exploring the country,” she said. “I just got my license, you see, and
it’s exciting to drive all by myself. It’s mother’s car, but she lets me have it.” Then she looked at me candidly and asked, “Could I come and take you for a little drive one day?”

  I had the queerest reaction to that. It frightened me, I don’t know why. I hesitated and she sensed the hesitation.

  “I have a bad heart,” I said, but it was a lie. It wasn’t my heart at all. I think I was afraid that such an expedition would rouse despair.

  She was tactful about changing the subject.

  “I’d like to come back and talk some more.”

  “Would you really?” It is beyond my ken to imagine that a charming young girl could want to see me, and I suppose there was a challenge in my tone.

  “Yes,” she said, blushing in a delightful way.

  “All right. As long as we have a pact to tell each other the truth. Is that agreed?”

  “I thought people always did.”

  That made me laugh—I’m afraid, a rather harsh laugh. “The truth does not exist in this place. It has become so rare that I can hardly remember what it is to believe what anyone says.” But as I saw this hurt her, I added quickly, “I liked your father. It isn’t easy to come here and not utter any platitudes or false comfort. I liked him because he was not out to tell me anything. He listened.”

  “And I’ve done nothing but talk about myself!”

  “This time you talked and I wanted to hear. Come again, and I’ll bend your ears back!”

  “It’s a deal,” she said, and then it was time to go.

  I am writing this in my room. I moved the flowers to the bed table so I could smell the two deep red roses and also the faint bitter smell of chrysanthemums. How starved I am! I realized in the presence of these flowers that every sense except my eyes is starved here—I do have the long field and the cows and hills to look at. But the smells are so awful that I sometimes hold my nose for a few seconds to be relieved of them. The food is not too bad, but everything is plastic, even the tray cloth (so it never needs to be sent to the laundry), the dishes, and even the glass! And I am very sick of mashed potatoes and colorless meat covered with thick brown gravy out of a can. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to feel a tender caress—my skin is parched like a desert for lack of touch. Of course Pansy, dear Puss, licks my hand and when I stroke her soft thick fur, it is an exquisite pleasure. What I am getting at is that in a place like this where we are deprived of so much already, the small things that delight the senses—food, a soft blanket, a percale sheet and pillow case, a bottle of lavender cologne, a linen handkerchief seem necessities if one is to survive. We are slowly being turned into passive, maltreated animals. I wonder whether memory itself might not be kept alive partly through the senses—a mad idea, no doubt. But I know that I felt physically refreshed by that lovely girl. And even animals respond to the environment. Pigs, I hear, are not naturally unclean, but so often kept in filthy pens that they become dirty and perhaps are more miserable than we know.

  These days I take my book into Standish’s room and sit with him. I am not sure whether he is unconscious a lot of the time or simply too depressed to communicate. He lies with his hands clasped over the coverlet, a way of keeping hold of himself I think. When he wakes or stirs he groans. Twice I have imagined that he was actually dying. Once I ran out to the kitchen and asked Harriet to come and see. She straightened his pillow, took his pulse, and then asked me into the kitchen for a “little talk.” “It’s a terminal case,” she explained, “cancer, and there is nothing the doctor can do.” That, she told me, is why she has not insisted that he come out. She was quite matter-of-fact about it all.

  “But surely they could help him with drugs for the pain? Shouldn’t he die in a hospital?”

  The family have been notified that he can’t last much longer and have promised to come next week.

  It is such a lonely death. I feel someone must keep the vigil, one human being be at his side. So I am there. It is all I can do. I put lavender on a handkerchief and wipe his forehead now and then. I was horrified the other day to see his nails are black. But if I complain, they will simply beat me down. With his eyes closed, as they are almost all the time, he looks like a figure on a tomb. I pray that he may slip away each night, slip away … be allowed out.

  When an infant is born, it would die if no one slapped its behind and elicited the wail that will help it to take the cruel cold air into its lungs. What rite of passage is there for the dying? I must ask Richard Thornhill about this …

  Especially where there is no faith in God, what can one do except be there, to wipe the cold sweat from a brow or hold a hand (Standish’s are ice cold) and try to warm it? I have been in a hospital only once, years ago, for an appendectomy. It was sudden and I had to be put in a room with two other women, one dying of cirrhosis of the liver. There was a curtain between us, but I could not but be present when a very young priest (he couldn’t have been more than twenty) came to give her extreme unction. I was moved by his simplicity. When she tried to make a confession, he said, “All that doesn’t matter now. God forgives you.” How comforting to believe that! But what comfort is there for Standish? Or for me, for that matter? I long for his death for his sake, but when he goes I shall have lost my only friend here. I have needed the illusion that I could still be useful, be needed by someone. The bond between us was very fragile because of his deafness, yet it was real. I shall never forget his handclasp when I came out of the dark. We didn’t need words. I did defend him in the only way I could. And he knew it.

  It’s very hard to write today, yet I must. This document is becoming in a very real sense my stay against confusion of mind. When I feel my mind slipping, I go back and rediscover what really happened. It must be true, I wrote it myself. If it were taken away from me I would be in serious trouble. This is my one worst fear. But so far, thank God, Harriet and Rose have not realized that it is dynamite and consider it the maunderings of a senile old woman, like a game of solitaire. I sleep with it under my pillow, and during the day they haven’t time to try to read any of it.

  Richard Thornhill acted quickly, bless him. But what has happened only shows that we are in Hell and anyone who tries to help may make matters worse. Two days after I wrote about Standish dying, state medical inspectors came. I presume they always come without warning and it had been a humdinger of a morning. One old man had a slight stroke; Jack, who is usually cheerful, had a fit of weeping; and Standish (perhaps fortunately) was lucid for the first time in days. The inspectors looked into everything, the unemptied bedpans in the hall, the dirty sheets on Standish’s bed. (“We would have to change him every ten or twelve hours and we can’t afford that,” I heard Harriet say.) They tried to talk to me, but I was careful. After all, they will be gone and I shall be here forever. I was foxy as could be, praised Harriet and Rose, told how hard they worked, and whatever I communicated otherwise was done with a single wink at a crucial question that I answered loudly in the affirmative, “Oh yes, they are very kind here.”

  The result of this visitation was that Standish was put in an ambulance to be taken to the hospital. “Don’t bother,” he implored, “don’t take me away!” At the stage he was at, any move was a threat, his only desire to be “let be,” to die where he lay. He was not permitted that, and he died in the ambulance among total strangers.

  I have to write this very factually, because it is so hard.

  His family never came in time. His battle to die with dignity in his own way was lost. And I was not with him at the end. This, I feel sure, meant nothing to him, but to me it has been hard to bear.

  Apparently the place is not going to be closed, the need is too great, and there is nowhere else available to send us. But I got it from the horse’s mouth, Harriet, that they will no longer be allowed to take people as physically ill as Standish was.

  “It’s done us only good,” she said to me with an air of triumph. “We won’t have to take in the moribund any longer.” Then she gave me a long har
d look. “So whatever you tried to do, Miss Spencer, has worked only to our advantage. After this, mind your own business.”

  “But what have I done?” I asked miserably.

  “Never mind. We know,” she said. And I am sure I shall be punished, but it remains to be seen just how.

  Without the Thornhills—Oh, I do hope he comes to see me soon!—I would feel very much threatened. Reprisals are inevitable. At present I am ostentatiously ignored, not asked to the kitchen for coffee, treated like an imbecile.

  “Poor Miss Spencer,” I heard Harriet say to some visiting relative, “she means well, but she is quite cuckoo. We have to warn people against anything her deluded mind makes her invent against us.”

  To get away from this sordid business, let me think for a moment, now that I am outdoors and a little more free in my mind, about the effect of Standish’s death on the other inmates. It took me completely by surprise. Of course they had little or no contact with him in the big room where the old men and Jack are. To them, he was hardly a person, as he was to me.

  Well, when they heard he had died, there was quite a stir, not of compassion or grief, but of sheer exhilaration that they—Roger Thompson who has no teeth, Fred Smith who never speaks, Mr. Coughlin (he is always called Mr., I know not why) who is diabetic and comatose most of the time, and Sam Martin who reads the newspaper line by line—are alive and Standish is dead! The outer room has never been more lively. They got together and demanded ice cream. They had fits of laughter at obscene jokes Fred told. Since I came here they have seemed like the living dead. But apparently they are intoxicated by the thought that someone dies but they are still here, more or less alive (far less alive than Stan-dish even when he was dying—his frail hands spoke so poignantly of a soul!) They have reached the stage almost of amoebas—open mouths and a digestive tract, what more? Yet life, even that primeval life they still hang onto, means this—triumph when someone else goes under! They have become incapable of pity.