Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  One night after the show we met an agent for supper and her guest was John Gielgud. I wrote in my journal that a few years earlier I would have been overwhelmed with awe to the point of speechlessness. While I was honored to meet this famous actor, I was amazingly comfortable and relaxed enough to enjoy his conversation, and relieved that in person he was as delightful as he was onstage.

  We enjoyed intimate groups far more than we did the enormous bashes we were sometimes expected to attend, where we had the feeling that whoever was talking to us was looking past our shoulders to see if there was someone more important across the room, and the decibel level rose so high that real conversation was not possible. Our idea of a pleasant evening was a small group of people eating a well-cooked meal together, and talking about art and the world and life and the theatre and what it was to try to be human and all the many topics of conversation that make for a creative and stimulating evening.

  The cutthroat theatre world that I have read about in novels was probably there, but it is a world that has to be chosen, and one we did not wish to choose.

  We saw old friends, made new ones, such as Arthur and Ruth Farmer, with whom we “clicked” immediately. Arthur was a copyright lawyer and knew everyone in publishing, so we had a good many friends in common. He was also an amateur violinist, and he and Ruth had an outstanding collection of records, and we spent many evenings talking and listening and talking.

  We watched Anne Jackson’s romance and ultimate marriage to Eli Wallach, reliving, in a way, our own days of courtship. We saw Walter and Jean Kerr, and I’ll never forget Jean saying, “I’ve just discovered cake mixes! It makes me feel rather wicked, sort of like artificial insemination.” And of course we continued to see Thelma, who was stage manager for Alice, and Cavada and others from the Cherry Orchard company.

  We were living life as fully as possible. No postponements.

  Josephine was born on the twenty-eighth of June, the same day as the last performance of Alice in Wonderland. Thelma remarked, “We can always remember the day that Alice closed, because it was the day that Madeleine opened.”

  It was not an easy birth. Hugh, of course, had to be at the theatre. He brought me to the hospital in the small hours of the morning on Saturday, a matinee day. Even had it not been, he would not have been allowed to be with me. Nor was my mother, who had come North for the big event. I spent hours alone, during a long labor, in a hospital full of that first postwar crop of babies. The obstetrician, who had not seemed particularly interested during my pregnancy, did not seem interested in the delivery. Every once in a while a nurse would come in and say, “Push.”

  Ultimately I was wheeled into the delivery room, a cone of ether slapped on my face, and the baby removed with forceps. Fortunately there were no ill effects. Josephine was a beautiful baby. But the treatment by nurses and doctor had been humiliating. I looked at this tiny, perfect creature and felt nothing other than an aesthetic pleasure that Hugh’s and my collaboration had been so successful. I am grateful indeed that I insisted on nursing my baby, and I had to insist, to make a fuss. I was urged not to. Women didn’t nurse in those days; it wasn’t scientific; a bottle of formula every four hours was what was recommended. Something stubborn in me made me fight for the right to do what seemed to me to be natural.

  So Josephine was brought in, put to my breast, and it was as though a light switch had been turned on. A great rush of love, mother love, flooded out of me as my child, my very own infant, began to suck.

  At one feeding time the baby was brought in to me and I started to put her to my breast and felt something wrong. The ears weren’t right. I looked at the blue-and-white bracelet and rang the bell. “This isn’t my baby!” A good thing that immediate identification of babies was now standard.

  Josephine thrived on my milk and the head nurse on the floor told me that one feeding was going to be cut out, the 2 a.m. feeding.

  I said firmly, “My husband is an actor. We’re up at 2 a.m. We’ll cut the 6 a.m. feeding.”

  This was neither hospital procedure nor policy. But I had won the battle to nurse my baby in the first place. I was going to win the battle to nurse her on Hugh’s and my hours, not the hospital’s. “It’s my milk,” I announced, “and my baby. If you bring her in to me at 6 a.m. I’m turning my breasts to the wall.”

  This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. As my policy was to get decently dressed as soon as I got up in the morning, so it seemed to me only good sense to put the baby on our hours. I had seen other theatre wives doing what was then customary: getting up to feed the baby at six in the morning and then either being asleep when their husbands got home from the theatre or being exhausted and bedraggled. Why should a husband come home to a sleeping wife? Why not go out and have supper with someone else? I wanted Hugh home with the baby and me.

  In the South it is the custom for the grandmother to provide a baby nurse for the first six weeks, and my mother wanted to follow this custom. She was not strong enough to do much herself, and she wanted to make sure I didn’t get too exhausted. We had made friends with a practical nurse who walked her dog at the same time we walked Touché. She had a friend who was a baby nurse, and who would be free a week after we brought Josephine home from the hospital. That worked out well. Mother returned to the South. Hugh went off for three weeks to do a play—Hedda Gabler—at a good theatre in Maine. And Johanna moved in.

  Johanna wore a white nurse’s uniform and cap and was forceful and competent. She was concerned about me. Despite the fact that I was nursing the baby, I was bleeding more than she thought normal. My energy level was low. She called the obstetrician, who was busy and disinterested. Johanna had a friend, a doctor, whom she called by his last name—Nedelsohn. Nedelsohn, too, was concerned: he gave me a shot of Ergotrate, of vitamins.

  There was something about Nedelsohn that made me want to draw back. But what was I to do? My mother was in Florida, my husband in Maine. I was alone with the baby and Johanna and Nedelsohn. I had to trust them. And it was true. I had no energy. I was still bleeding profusely. Johanna made thick egg-nogs for me, but I was not hungry. The weeks of Hugh’s absence dragged on and I did not improve. Johanna felt that when he returned, when he was beside me in bed at night, I would be better. She called the doctor twice more. She was a registered nurse but he did not take her seriously.

  Later I was to write: “Monday morning Hugh came back. I was still half asleep as he came rushing into the bedroom and we tumbled into each other’s arms. I was so happy to have him home and we spent a beautiful morning admiring the baby and just being happy until Hugh and Johanna decided I had to have a nap.

  “While I was sleeping Arthur Farmer called. They had an explosion at their place in the country and Ruth was burned and died. Of course we were terribly depressed by that, and so terribly sorry for Arthur—he and Ruth were so happy together and so right for each other and it was such a ghastly painful way for Ruth to die.”

  Johanna talked us into going out for dinner and we went down the street to Enrico and Paglieri’s. Then we went home and Johanna went out with Nedelsohn. She didn’t get home till almost midnight, by which time we were just about ready for bed. Hugh went into the bathroom to wash, and I stayed in the living room talking to Johanna about Hugh—how he had lost weight and what I should do to make him gain. He called out in a sleepy voice that he was through in the bathroom. I said I’d be there in a minute. I felt that I was bleeding a bit and was just about to say, “Good Lord, haven’t I finished bleeding yet!” when all of a sudden the blood began to gush out of me, all over my nightgown, my robe, the chair, the floor, pouring out of me in great spurts. I cried, “I’m bleeding like mad!” Johanna looked, and went whipping into the bedroom for cotton, which she stuffed between my legs, telling me not to move.

  I was terrified. I had never seen so much blood before and it was horribly frightening to see it flooding out of me. Johanna called the obstetrician and gave him quick hell and got his permission to
give me a shot of Ergotrate, which she fortunately had. She said she did not dare move me from the chair until something slowed the blood down. Thank God she was there when it happened. She was wonderful about reassuring me. She gave me the Ergotrate, then pulled out the couch and got me down on that. The blood was still coming out but no longer so violently. She called Nedelsohn to see if she should give me more Ergotrate, but he said not so soon. He said he would be down with more in case my doctor didn’t bring any. He didn’t.

  There wasn’t time to wait for an ambulance, so I was driven to the hospital in a car, Nedelsohn’s or the obstetrician’s—I’m not sure which. It wasn’t the hospital where Josephine was born (“He was ashamed to go back there,” Johanna said of the obstetrician), but uptown, Women’s Hospital. Hugh came with me. Johanna stayed with the baby. In the car on the way up the West Side I kept thinking of Ruth Farmer—Ruth, who wasn’t much older than I, and who was dead.

  I was barely allowed to tell Hugh I loved him, have him say he loved me, kiss me, before I was whisked off to the operating room. The obstetrician had left inside me a goodly portion of placenta. No wonder I was bleeding too much. No wonder I had no energy.

  The result of this—what I can only call carelessness—was that I had childbed fever. Antibiotics were just coming in. My chills and fever were treated with penicillin, which was then being used only when it was a matter of life and death.

  I don’t remember how long I was in the hospital, separated from my baby. A month or more. My milk dried up. The obstetrician now came every day. So did Nedelsohn. The obstetrician said I needed one thing, Nedelsohn the opposite. Hugh and I felt caught in a trap. We were dependent on Johanna to take care of the baby, which she did with love and skill. But with Johanna came Nedelsohn. She had brought him in because of her concern for me, but we felt that his continuing presence was not appropriate. Johanna did not try to conceal the fact that they were lovers. She had absolute faith in his skill as a doctor, and none in the obstetrician’s—with a certain amount of justice.

  Hugh paid a visit to Dr. Baumstone to tell him of our predicament. Whom were we to trust?

  Dr. Baumstone listened with concern as Hugh told him what the obstetrician advised, what Nedelsohn advised, shook his head and finally said that he thought Nedelsohn was right.

  The problem was that we did not trust him. There was something about him that made us terribly uncomfortable. He seemed obsessed with sex to the point of perversity. One time he went into the bathroom of my hospital room and I confided to Hugh later that I thought he was using my toothbrush, and Hugh took that suspicion seriously, so weird did Nedelsohn seem to us.

  Ultimately I was released from the hospital. Johanna was not only willing to stay on to help with the baby, she insisted. And I felt too weak and exhausted and depressed to say no. Not only was I devoid of energy, but the childbed fever or the antibiotic or both had left me with a profound depression. I felt as though I were imprisoned behind a sheet of frozen glass with everybody else on the other side; I could not thaw it enough to get through.

  Finally I felt well enough to tell Johanna that it was time for her to go, that Hugh and I needed our own lives with our baby. I was grateful to her; she had probably saved my life with her quick action and her Ergotrate when I hemorrhaged. If we could have had Johanna for a few more weeks without Nedelsohn, we might have considered it. But Nedelsohn, despite the fact that he was probably a very good physician, gave us the creeps.

  As for the obstetrician, I did not see him again. Hugh and I are not litigious people, but surely we had a case against this expensive specialist. I wrote him a letter, which Arthur Farmer, our lawyer as well as friend, checked and passed. I told the doctor that I was sending him a check for one-third of his bill. He had not cared for me properly during my pregnancy, or during the postpartum days, despite Johanna’s warnings. But I had a beautiful baby, so I was sending him a third of what he charged. He accepted the check.

  A few months later we learned that our suspicions of Nedelsohn were not unfounded. From our dog-walking nurse friend we learned that Nedelsohn had killed himself because he had been exposed as part of a drug ring. That same day Johanna called to tell us that Nedelsohn had had a heart attack and died. We were shocked but somehow not surprised and what we felt was mostly terrible pity for Johanna.

  At last I had pushed through the frozen glass between the world and me, and was able to rejoice in our child, in my husband and our love. I wrote, “This winter for the first time I have felt beautiful. It is a good feeling and I am glad for Hugh’s sake and also (and most important) because it frees me to think less about myself and more about other people. I am surer of myself. I know that I look well, so I don’t have to worry about it, or feel self-conscious, and I can give more to other people.

  “At last, at last I have thrown off the shadow of the illness after Jo’s birth. The wounds have all healed and only the neat scar remains and it is endurable. And at last I am in love with life again—just the simple, ordinary things that can suddenly seem so beautiful and so exciting—seeing a small curve of moon between the buildings, pouring out a glass of milk, seeing Jo smile, pulling a book out of the bookcase, saying hello to the butcher and having him smile at me, just smiling at anyone in the street, feeling Jo’s arms go about my neck, feeling Hugh’s arms go about me in his sleep.”

  The pattern of our lives once again became ours. Hugh worked in a number of early television shows, such as the Pulitzer Prize Playhouse. When he got a good role in another play and left for the theatre in the evening, I would put Josephine in her crib and go to the typewriter. When Hugh came home, we woke the baby and brought her into the living room with us, so that we could have our evening together as a family. When we went to bed around 2 a.m., we put her back in her crib, and when we woke up in the morning we reached into the crib and pulled her out and into bed with us. The touch of her small and perfect body against ours was a wonderful affirmation.

  Five

  We need affirmation this summer. I spend much of the day at the hospital, trying to be there before lunch is brought in, to stay until after supper, in order to encourage Hugh to eat. He is going through a bad time in all ways. It is hard to keep a sense of proportion, a sense of humor, and yet I know that laughter is most necessary when things are difficult. Life on this planet in general is not very humorous. There is nothing funny about the disaster of the Challenger, or about Chernobyl, or the cutting down of the rain forests. There is nothing funny about cancer. But despite all the horror and tragedy there is still the possibility of genuine laughter. One of Hugh’s favorite stories of the summer is that of a friend anxiously calling Bion when Hugh was first in the hospital and asking, “Have you got the results of the autopsy yet?” and then catching himself and saying, “Oh, that’s not what I meant …”

  Or a nurse saying to Hugh, “You mean you look like the man who played Dr. Tyler on television?”

  “No, I am the man who played Dr. Tyler.”

  At which the overcome nurse could only gasp, “Oh, wow, I don’t believe it!”

  Or watching the puppies (golden retrievers are still puppies at nearly three) tear across the field to the haying machine, which had been left as our neighboring farmer broke for lunch, come to a sudden halt as they think better of the red monster, and gallop back to us and safety.

  Or seeing an eighteen-month-old grandson (when Maria and John come for a quick visit before the new baby is born) wave a hand and call out, “Hiya!”

  I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.

  In the midst of what we are going through this summer I have to hold on to this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable. Could we be fascinated by a Maker who was comp
letely explained and understood? The mystery is tremendous, and the fascination that keeps me returning to the questions affirms that they are worth asking, and that any God worth believing in is the God not only of the immensities of the galaxies I rejoice in at night when I walk the dogs, but also the God of love who cares about the sufferings of us human beings and is here, with us, for us, in our pain and in our joy.

  I come across four lines of Yeats and copy them down:

  But Love has pitched her mansion in

  The place of excrement;

  For nothing can be sole or whole

  That has not been rent.

  The place of excrement. That is where we are this summer. How do we walk through excrement and keep clean in the heart? How do we become whole by being rent?

  This summer is not the first time I have walked through the place of excrement and found love’s mansion there. Indeed, we are more likely to find it in the place of excrement than in the sterile places. God comes where there is pain and brokenness, waiting to heal, even if the healing is not the physical one we hope for.

  Hugh has one setback after another. He cannot eat. He loses forty pounds and he was thin to start with. Just as he begins to try walking up and down the hospital corridor, he is hit with an acute attack of gout in his left foot, and even though this is not an uncommon response of the body to the indignity of surgery, I am outraged.

  I leave him for two days to keep my promise to be with my friend Luci Shaw at a convention of Christian booksellers. During my brief time at the Convention Center in Washington I hear different people tell of some good or lucky event and then say, “Surely the Lord was with me.” And my hackles rise. My husband is desperately ill, so where is the Lord? What about that place of excrement? Isn’t that where Love’s mansion is pitched? Isn’t that where God is?

  Doesn’t such an attitude trivialize the activities and concerns of the Maker? Doesn’t it imply that God is with us only during the good and fortuitous times and withdraws or abandons us when things go wrong?