by May Sarton
They gave me salt instead of sugar for my coffee this morning. On purpose? I rather think so. I wept with aggravation, but I pretended it had not happened. I am too vulnerable these days—I have been tossed about on nights of very little sleep. (How wonderful then when the sky lightens over the distant trees at last, and the birds chirp and sing! Reprieve.) Worse than those nights are the ones when I do sleep and have nightmares. In the middle of one of those I got out of bed and fell, but at least nothing was broken. I badly bruised one thigh on a chair. It has a huge purple splotch on it and hurts quite a lot. At the time it was a relief to wake, even though I woke in pain on the floor, terribly frightened. I thought I was on a ship, running down horrible white corridors to try to get to air, but always I came to a locked door. I find it impossible to read. I just can’t pay attention. Whatever it is going on inside me, like troubled ocean, gets in the way. Sometimes, lying here on my bed, I feel I am drowning.
“What’s the matter with you?” Rose asked when she came in yesterday while I was having one of these spells. She felt my forehead. It was clammy with sweat and my hair soaked through. “Let me bring you a hot water bottle,” she said quite kindly. And she actually did so. (I have an idea that Harriet, who certainly has it in for me since the inspectors came, was outside or had gone out.)
“There now,” Rose said as she slipped the hot water bottle in under the covers, “that’ll warm your feet, Miss Spencer. I expect you caught a chill out there yesterday in the yard.”
“I haven’t been in the yard for days.”
She gave me a queer startled look. Perhaps I am now forgetting what happened yesterday or the day before, but I have no memory of going out. Everything here is materialistic and physical. It would never occur to Rose that I am in a spiritual crisis. It’s my mental health that has been affected by Standish’s death. I appear to be in a state of turmoil and even panic.
I wonder whether the Thornhill girl has come and been told that I can’t see anyone at present? Otherwise it seems strange that she has not come. I trusted her. It is strange that I am not weeping at all. Something is locked inside me, too deep to find the ease of tears. At times it feels like a whirlwind and I am drowning. I feel lost, abandoned, as if the whole of my life had been a long betrayal that led me to this.
Why am I being punished? It is a stark question. I ask it many times, but no one will ever answer. I feel that nothing I can do now will ever work. I am like a leper. What I touch is infected, so by trying to help him I deprived Standish of death on his terms, infected his death in some terrible way, so he died in an ambulance. What could be more forlorn? Carried away like a corpse in a hearse.
What is happening to me? When I reread what I have written here, it is clear that, far from making myself whole as I imagined might be done (that was the challenge before me) I am sinking into madness or despair, fragmented, disoriented even when I try to find comfort in the past. Is it possible that a mind can quite suddenly fall to pieces? A sort of explosion as when all the petals of a flower suddenly fall? But if so, would I be aware of it? Does madness know itself as mad?
I must somehow get under this panic to solid ground. Misery lives in me like a cancer. It is the misery of self-hatred and self-doubt. Why did I never marry? Selfishness? Some immaturity that was never ready for that lifetime commitment?
“Brightness falls from the air …”
What do I take with me into the darkness now? What am I? A bundle of fears and guilt, a spoiled child, whose every action reeks of self-involvement … Who can forgive me? Who will listen? To whom can I speak? Poor Richard Thornhill would be horrified by the depth of my depravity. He thinks of me, no doubt, as a poor dear old lady, white as the driven snow. But I am black inside, Mr. Thornhill, if you only knew! What is awful is to hate so much. There are times when I dream only of hitting Harriet hard across her mean, self-indulgent, lying mouth.
If keepers are corrupted by having absolute power, what about those they keep? We learn to ingratiate ourselves, to pretend we do not notice the slights and humiliations. Or we close ourselves off into that terrible place of anger, of rage and despair where Standish died. Is that my way? Is that what is now happening to me?
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” That crucial sentence looms ahead of me now when I say the Lord’s Prayer. I try to believe, in this turmoil, that my only salvation is to think a great deal about where I myself have failed and fail every day.
Trying to assert myself as a child, I took advantage of John, and at least once allowed him to be punished for something I had done. And in those last months, was I generous to Ginny? Did I make any real effort to adapt myself to her needs and to their life together? I did not. When John and I played Scrabble, as we did by the hour, she was pushed aside, and I pretended that I couldn’t play bridge (it has always bored me) so that we would not have to get in a fourth for endless bridge games. I did it out of snobbism. I wanted her to feel that John and I share an intellectual world she cannot enter. Then there were the sharp political arguments, resuming the old wars when we were growing up. She was right when she begged me to lay off. “John gets tired,” she said once. “He’s not up to your fierce tone.” Of course those arguments exhausted me also. At least once I had to lie down because my heart was beating that queer irregular beat. But I paid no attention, blind to her kindness where John is concerned, walled in by arrogance and contempt. The fact is that I have become dreadfully selfish—perhaps I always was. I feel I was fighting for my pride as a human being, that to survive their atmosphere I had to impose mine on them. So if I am punished, I deserve it.
Yet I can never become gentle here—gentle or loving. Standish was the only one I could practice gentleness on, or love. I hold myself together with anger, and perhaps also with a sense of being an outsider and wishing to remain so. What have I to do with such vulgarity, such crude horror? Must I take it in? Is that what is asked of me? … I am too tired to write any more today. Perhaps I can go to sleep now. The nights are so bad, but for some reason my nap in the afternoon is a different, gentler kind of sleep. It is so wonderful to slip slowly into unconsciousness after resting my eyes on the cows and the field, as if I could in some way lie down myself on the sweet grass and be a contented animal for a change—the sleep of exhaustion. Let the mind go, Caro—what use is it to you now? A machine that is running down and can only make an occasional sputter, never really get on the road. Or, as they say (it has always amused me as an expression) “cook with gas.”
I didn’t get a rest after all. Harriet, very affairée, came to tell me she could wash my hair. She is leaving in two days, it appears, off to Florida with her lover. A Mrs. Close, a farmer’s wife, will come to help out. Harriet was rough with me, pushed my head down too hard into the basin and at one point I thought I would suffocate. The true nature of a person is communicated as much, perhaps even more, by touch than by the look in his eyes. That is something I have learned here. I am not sure whether Harriet is so rough because she feels hatred toward me, or whether it is her natural way of being. Her hands have no gentleness in them. She pulled my hair when she was rinsing it, so hard I cried out once.
“You’re hurting!”
“Not grateful, are you? When I took my hour off to do this!” She was suddenly furious and left me to dry it myself with a much too small towel. I finally went out and sat in the sun, shaking with emotion. I felt I had suffered an assault on my person. When I came in Jack made a supreme effort to tell me—I find him so hard to decipher as he gurgles rather than speaks—that my “friend,” the Thornhill girl, had come again and been told to go away while Harriet was washing my hair. He shook his head several times as if to say, “not good, what they did.”
So my worst fears are being realized. The door that had opened a crack is being slammed shut. Only there is the faint hope that Mrs. Close, Harriet’s replacement, will fail to receive this ukase from on high. Rose, with her mother here, would never have
dared let Lisa in. Patience, Caro!
Yet why indulge in hope? Quite possibly the time has passed for me to be helped by anyone from “outside”—even dear Eva, should they manage to get her here. I am beginning to feel beaten down in a new way, as if resilience were slowly leaking away through these petty miseries like salt in the coffee. What I am afraid of is that no one would believe me if I tried to tell what is happening. It sounds crazy to accuse someone of putting salt in one’s coffee! They are building up an image of me for the world at large that will brainwash anyone who tries to come close. That explains my feelings of turmoil and panic—that explains it and not my idea of past guilt that has to be expiated. I feel immense relief to have the clue. Yes, I am afraid of a torture far worse than petty harassments, the torture of not being believed. I am afraid of being driven mad.
What if Lisa is persuaded that it is bad for me and depresses me to have visitors at present? Then if she herself really wants to come—and how do I know?—she will refrain out of kindness. Richard Thornhill said he would believe me and that I could trust him … but for how long? How easy it is to tell half-truths that distort the truth sometimes more dreadfully even than lies. I do get stirred up by any visit. That is true and the half-truth is to extrapolate this into a suggestion that therefore visits must cease, that they are bad for me. The only person who can be called “well” in this establishment is he who is totally passive; anyone who “resists” is mad and dangerous.
And so I am back again, battering my heart against the absence of God, against the terrible need to be comforted by this imaginary Father who knows the fall of a sparrow but who allowed Standish to die in extreme indignity, alone. “For Thine is the power …” God created the cat who devours the sparrow. If He is the power, why do the wicked flourish? Why are the old disposed of in places like this? “Who cares?” is the ceaseless cry of those in Hell. It is absurd to believe for a moment that it is in the divine purpose to prevent the old from ripening toward death in a fruitful way. If we believe in God, then we have to believe equally in a power sometimes stronger than His and in a kingdom other than His, in evil more potent than we have faced before. Of course this is what came to us through the concentration camps. If God was not there, then who was there? Christ Stopped at Eboli, and the village described in the book of that title was depicted as a misery beyond good or evil. Standish’s cry that day when Richard Thornhill was here (how long ago? It seems an eternity) that God never got further than the village store said the same thing, exactly. Are there those beyond the dominion of God, outside it? Am I among them now?
I will write a letter to Richard Thornhill and see if I can persuade Mrs. Close—close to God? Close to the devil?—to see that it gets mailed.
“And what’s all that writing for?” Harriet asked when she came in with my supper, dead-tasting frozen haddock with a congealed cream sauce over it and a boiled potato.
“A game of solitaire,” I answered. “I’ll need some new copybooks soon—decks of cards, you might call them.”
She sniffed and went out. So, to my letter,
Late September
Dear Mr. Thornhill,
I need some copybooks for the journal I am keeping. It is a necessity or I would not ask. They have told your daughter I do better without visitors at present. That is a lie. It is true that I am very depressed. Depression is natural to anyone in my situation. I am being punished for telling you what I did and for the inspectors who came. All I ask now is to be believed.
Yours very sincerely.
But when I reread that letter, it sounded so desperate—even mad—that I shall wait some days before I send it, and probably decide then to hold it back. I am learning that any true cry from the heart of an old person creates too much havoc in a listener, is too disturbing, because nothing can really be done to help us on the downward path. So, mentioning the horror of growing old alone becomes an intolerable burden. There seem to be only a few responses possible. One is the dreadful false comfort of the cliché, “It can’t be as bad as all that” or “Things will surely be better tomorrow, dear.” (I suffer excruciatingly from endearments that are casual and perfunctory, because I am so starved for real feelings, for love itself, I suppose. My mother used to call me “Dear heart” and Alex called me “Lamb of God,” I can’t imagine why. I am and always was very unlike a lamb. My father called me “Kiddo,” I suddenly remember—how old-fashioned that does sound!)
The most cruel response to a cri de coeur is not to believe it, or to pretend that it is a lie. That is Harriet’s weapon, or one of them. “You just imagine you can’t sleep, dear. I heard you snoring at four this morning.” There is also the cajoling response, the one that treats the old person as an infant, the “Now, now, quiet down” sort of thing. “I’ll bring you some tea.”
One could only be answered differently by true caring, and that, I suspect, would show itself in silence, by the quality of listening or some shy gesture of love.
Old age is really a disguise that no one but the old themselves see through. I feel exactly as I always did, as young inside as when I was twenty-one, but the outward shell conceals the real me—sometimes even from itself—and betrays that person deep down inside, under wrinkles and liver spots and all the horrors of decay. I sometimes think that I feel things more intensely than I used to, not less. But I am so afraid of appearing ridiculous. People expect serenity of the old. That is the stereotype, the mask we are expected to put on. But how many old people are serene? I have known one or two. My granny was, but my grandfather, my father’s father, became very violent and irascible. I was terrified of him and my father dreaded going to see him. He was forever going to court about some supposed slight or slander. He was a newspaper man, owner of a small-town newspaper for which he wrote most of the editorials, and by the time he died had squandered half his fortune, never very large, on perfectly absurd lawsuits.
My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a “symptom”? There I go—and I myself have just accused Granddad of becoming violent when he was old! Was he not violent before? Of course I don’t know, as I only knew him when he was past seventy, but I suspect that he always was, only it seemed outrageous in the old man as it had not seemed when he was young and “fiery.”
How expression relieves the mind! I feel quite lively and myself again just because I have managed to write two pages of dissent about old age! Among all the other deprivations here we are deprived of expression. The old men slowly atrophy because no one asks them what they feel or why. Could they speak if someone did? And why haven’t I tried? I look at them from very far away as if they were in the distance, across a wide river. We have nothing in common. Why pretend that we do?
I cannot quite believe in the miracle of Mrs. Close. The miracle has happened since Harriet took off two days ago, and I am stretched out on my bed like a swimmer who, near exhaustion, can lie on a beach and rest at last. The whole atmosphere has changed radically since this angelic person made her appearance in a clean white apron over a blue and white checked dress like some character in a Beatrix Potter book. My fingers tingle with pleasure at the very thought of describing her—her quick silent feet, her work-hardened hands that are so full of wisdom and gentleness when she does the slightest thing, and above all, her round, soft, pink face and her quiet gray eyes, observant, humorous, discreet. At first she simply set silently to work, cleaned the whole house as it has never before been cleaned, even washed the hall floor! There was a pink tray cloth on my tray this morning (where did she ever find it?) and a pink rose in a little glass.
“Anything more I can do for you, Miss Spencer?” she asked, and she did not hurry off without listening.
I would like to have kept her close to me all day, to smell her clean smell, as if some heavenly nurse had come to be with me. But of course she is fearfully busy. Rose follows her around making ac
id comments. “You don’t have to do that, Mrs. Close. They don’t notice.” She pays no attention and does what she wants to do. And I think Rose is daunted by the sheer speed and efficiency at work.
Later in the morning I heard laughter from the old men—amazing! And when she brought in my lunch, we had a little talk. She was pleased because I recognized the rose as a Queen Elizabeth. She had picked it early this morning in her garden, she told me.
“Sit down, Mrs. Close,” I begged her, “just for a minute.”
“Well,” she hesitated. “I will if you want me to.”
“You’ve done a marvelous job here this morning. We’re spic and span.”
We could hear Rose clattering dishes in the kitchen, and Mrs. Close whispered, “It’s a disgrace, Miss Spencer … the dirt …”
“It’s more than the dirt,” I ventured.
“I know,” and we exchanged a look, the look between two women who understand each other. The relief of that! Indescribable relief. I was too moved to speak, but she saw the tears in my eyes, took my hand in both of hers, and gave it a squeeze. It was not a sentimental gesture at all. It affirmed our humanity and regard for each other.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s not the place for you or the likes of you.”
“If someone comes and asks for me, you won’t send them away, will you?” I whispered. There might not be another chance to get this across.
“Of course not. Are you expecting relatives?”
“A friend, Miss Thornhill.”
Then Rose called out in her harsh voice, “Mrs. Close! Mrs. Close! The trays are waiting.”