Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

by Madeleine L'engle

  Hugh is in bad pain. “What has happened to my voice?” His beautiful, strong voice is a hoarse whisper. The nurse thinks it is from the shock of the procedure. A pill for pain has been prescribed, but it is apparent that the ulcerated esophagus is too sore and too strictured for him to be able to swallow a pill and keep it down. The charge nurse and I confer and she calls the oncologist, who prescribes a hypodermic, which Hugh is finally given, so that he can relax enough to nap. He looks like death.

  He wakes and whispers, “This begins to be funny,” and indeed an accumulation of tragedy begins to break down into comedy.

  But this is too much, too much. I feel that Hugh is being pursued by the Eumenides. Or that we ought to call a priest to come in with bell, book, and candle to exorcise him. What echthroid devil is breaking through all the prayers of love and light?

  I remember Luci Shaw saying to me when my eye was injured, “Madeleine, I think this is demonic interference.” Surely we are naïve if we do not believe that there are fallen angels, echthroi, nephilim, or by whatever name they are called, who are attacking the light. I must hold firm to the faith that the light can be neither comprehended by them nor extinguished.

  On the phone last night I told Maria how much better her father looked, that she needn’t be afraid to see him. Now I am afraid that she and John are going to be terribly shocked, and this weekend at Crosswicks was planned for their relaxation.

  They are already there, helping Bion and Laurie make apple cider. It is good for the young parents to have a day when they don’t have to watch their toddler every second; to have a night when they don’t have to get up every few hours to feed the baby, who is two months old today. They, too, are exhausted. They will come down around six o’clock to pick me up and visit, but Hugh is in too much pain and too worn out to be able to enjoy it.

  Last night Josephine called again from San Francisco, wanting to come East for the surgery, but I was dubious; she has just been here, less than two weeks ago, for her father’s seventieth birthday; she is an entire continent away. But after we had hung up I called back. “Please come. I need you.” She had already bought her ticket for the next day.

  Gretchen, one of our godchildren, comes in this afternoon. Her own father, our long-term friend who had first shown us Crosswicks and assured us the well-built old house was sound under all the disrepair, has to have back surgery next week. While Hugh is sleeping, Gretchen and I sit and talk, and she almost undoes me by saying that Hugh and I are her role models for marriage. Gretchen lived with us during her junior year at college, so she is not talking out of thin air.

  Two other godchildren are coming tomorrow. One of the doctors remarked that Hugh seems surprised he is so much loved.

  The pain shot has let Hugh’s body relax enough so that he is sleeping quietly. The newspaper is on his bed table. A few days ago there was another terrible plane disaster. Yesterday another ghastly hijacking, with “at least seventeen dead.” The eight-month-old granddaughter of a friend has died of a sudden high fever. What is happening? The echthroi are stalking.

  The punctured lung is statistically beyond bounds. In the morning I call my friend Tallis in New York. “I have a strange but completely serious request. Can you do an exorcism in absentia?” We talk a little about all that has been happening. I say, “Whenever people do terrible and violent things, more powers of darkness are unleashed.” Terrible and violent things have been happening in the world around us, and he agrees with me. “I will do what I can,” he promises.

  He is an Episcopal priest, a canon of a great cathedral, a totally orthodox Christian theologian, orthodox enough to see nothing strange in my request. If we are all made of the stuff of stars, and if the stuff of stars is the stuff of Jesus, then distance should make no difference to the efficacy of prayer, prayer that the powers of darkness will leave my husband so that God’s light of love can bathe him, body, mind, spirit. And it does.

  The next morning when Maria and John drive me down to the hospital, Hugh is better, does not look like death as he did the night before. His own vibrant voice has returned. I am grateful beyond words that they will be able to return to New Jersey with a better picture of Hugh in their mind’s eye. We hug goodbye.

  At Trinity Episcopal Church in Torrington, where I go for the Wednesday morning communion service with my friend Gillian, there is a brand-new rector. He has just come: I see him on the Wednesday after his first Sunday. It turns out (oh, wonderfully small world!) that he is a friend of Josephine and Alan’s, that he knows the family. Immediately he goes to the hospital to see Hugh, and there is instant rapport between the two men. Faithfully Joe comes daily, often in the evening after visiting hours are over and I have gone home, and the two men talk and talk. Hugh is from Oklahoma, Joe from Kansas; they have many bonds in common; Joe’s father was a doctor, Hugh’s a lawyer; Hugh can talk to Joe as he cannot to those of us who are too close to him.

  The church has been good to us this summer. The Congregational minister visits faithfully; on Sundays, prays for Hugh with the congregation, most sensitively and lovingly.

  Now that September has come and school and autumn activities have started, after twenty-five years I am once again singing with the choir, my heart eased by the warmth of my reception and the loveliness of the music.

  My daughter Josephine arrives. It is more good even than I knew it would be to see her again. We talk together at night in the four-poster bed, that bed where there have been so many deep and loving conversations. We talk too late, but it is worth it. The day before the surgery we spend with Hugh at the hospital. He is in acute pain from the chest tube, but he manages to smile, to joke.

  The next morning I come down to the hospital early with Laurie. I am dressed in an outfit Hugh particularly likes, and he remarks on it. Smiles for the nurses. An orderly comes in with a stretcher. I look at the nurses, who have been taking such good care of him. “It’s going to hurt him a lot to be moved onto the stretcher …”

  “Hold on,” one of them says. “I’ll call the OR.”

  In a few moments the phone rings and she answers it and says, smiling, “You’re going up in your bed.”

  “We don’t do this for everybody,” the orderly says. “You’re getting very special treatment.”

  It is obvious that they are pleased. I am encouraged to walk along beside the bed to the elevator. To kiss my husband.

  He has gone up to the OR half an hour before schedule, so Bion and Josephine, stepping out of the elevator, have just missed him. We go on home. Bion goes to work. Josephine and I go up to the library to go over some business that can’t wait.

  Hugh was taken up to surgery at nine-thirty. It is a four-hour procedure. “They won’t have started exactly at ten,” we tell ourselves. “We can’t possibly hear before two.”

  Two. Two-thirty. Three. We look at each other. Work a little harder. Three-thirty. Finally the phone rings. It is the urologist. Hugh is in the recovery room. The surgery was even more complicated than anticipated, took nearly six hours rather than four, but Hugh has come through it. By early evening he will be in the intensive care unit and we will be able to visit with him for a few minutes.

  Herb thinks he has removed all of the cancer out of the ureters, so that the kidneys can function again. There is some nodal involvement. He is not at all sure what they will do about that. Radiation? More chemotherapy, despite Hugh’s intolerance to it? Right now, no such decisions will be made. The important thing is to get Hugh through the post-op period.

  We visit him briefly in ICU. He is hooked up to a respirator, which is doing his breathing for him. He is attached to tubes and monitors. He is aware enough of our presence to smile with those vivid blue eyes, to give a small pressure of his fingers, but that is all. We go on home.

  Sit on the terrace quietly for dinner. Early in the day Bion made one of his famous spaghetti sauces so we wouldn’t have to do more than put together a salad from the garden. The stars come out while we sit ther
e, clear, bright. A young moon is setting.

  As evening darkens, the Milky Way sweeps across the sky.

  Hugh made it through the surgery. We were not at all sure that he would, and he did.

  “I am cautiously optimistic,” Herb says.

  Nevertheless, the future is still very uncertain.

  But I am not called to project into this still-unknown future; rather, I am called to be fully in the moment. I am sitting with three people I love, and we are surrounded with loveliness. The breeze is gentle. The autumn insects are singing. There is an incredible reality to this moment because of my intense awareness of it, my intense awareness that I still have a husband. This is how we should be all the time and seldom are, as we get caught in the overbusyness of life. But now, at this moment, I am caught in the wonder of the misterium tremendum et fascinans.

  Eleven

  It does not matter that we cannot fathom this mystery. The only real problem comes when we think that we have. We glimpse it in poetry and song, in revelation and marvel, but it is not to be greedily or arrogantly grasped.

  Lady Julian of Norwich wrote: “He said not ‘Thou shalt not be troubled, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed,’ but He said, ‘Thou shalt not be overcome.’ It is God’s will that we take heed to these words, that we may be ever mighty in faithful trust in weal and woe.”

  Faithful in the small things as well as the great. Last night an early frost threatened. We harvested what we could in the garden, which has borne plentifully despite the fact that there has been little time to weed or take care of what we have planted. Then we covered the still-ripening plants with ancient shower curtains and sheets to protect them, something we have to do every early autumn on cold nights when there is not enough wind to blow the frost away. On our windy hill we are often spared the early frosts that hit the valleys.

  Autumn? Internally I am still waiting for summer.

  But Labor Day has come and gone. The trees and fields are still green and sometimes I don’t see the color that is painting the trees. Wednesday is my ecumenical day: Gillian comes for me in the morning to take me to the eucharist at Trinity Church. Afterwards Joe is ready to hug me, to tell me some of the things he and Hugh have talked about. In the evening a friend comes to pick me up for choir practice in the Congregational Church. But my life is largely focused on Hugh’s hospital room.

  Right now we must wait. The urologist is pleased with the results of surgery, pleased with Hugh’s recovery, repeats that he is cautiously optimistic. Every day brings improvement. But we do not know whether or not the sharks are still waiting to attack.

  They are.

  September is moving toward its close. The spindlewood tree as I look out my bedroom window this morning is flame. I swim my ritual laps, have breakfast, do a few chores, and then Bion drives me to the hospital.

  The morning nurse and I are chatting as she bathes Hugh, and suddenly she sees blood, calls me, and we both look; his wound has opened and is spilling out blood. The nurses on the floor are competent, compassionate, quick. The wound is held together and pressure applied. But it continues to rip apart, until two rosy coils of intestine slip out. An emergency call is put in to the urologist. Meanwhile, the nurses keep the open wound and the intestines moist with sterile saline solution. They are calm and reassuring.

  “Are you all right?” I am asked.

  Yes, I am all right. I have faith in these nurses, these nourishers.

  Herb comes and Hugh is quickly taken up to the OR. This is going to require general anesthesia, which means that another chest tube will have to be put in to protect the fragile lung. The entire wound will have to be reopened and resutured.

  After a long, cold hour Herb calls to say that Hugh is awake and alert, and will be down soon.

  I don’t want this to have happened. I don’t want my beloved to have had one setback after another, to go on suffering. I don’t know what is going to happen next.

  But I am beyond anger, I am in a dark place where I simply exist in the pain of this moment.

  Before he went up to surgery Hugh whispered, “I don’t know why, but this has made me teary.”

  “Darling, I know why. It’s too much. It’s not fair.” It’s beyond not being fair. It’s statistically excessive.

  But on Saturday he seems to be doing well, to be again on the road to recovery. Bion and Laurie and I talked about the possibility of renting a hospital bed when Hugh comes home so that he can be on the screened porch with its lovely views, so that we will not have to worry about stairs.

  I am urged not to cancel a long-made plan for a brief trip to New York on Tuesday. It’s the publication date of my new book, Many Waters, and my publishers have planned a dinner party. It would be a very brief trip, a meeting of the Authors Guild executive council and the dinner, and I am more than willing to admit that I need a break. We are no longer thinking in terms of a complete cure as we were earlier in the summer, but there is still the hope that the surgery was successful enough so that Hugh will have some good months, if not years, as long as nothing else goes wrong in the post-operative weeks.

  Joe, the Episcopal priest who has so quickly become a friend, plans to bring in books and papers and spend most of the day with Hugh. Friends will drop by, and of course Bion and Laurie will be there.

  On Sunday morning I go for an early swim, walk the dogs, and set out to church for nine o’clock choir rehearsal. Church is at ten. At the time of the “Concerns of the Church,” we pray for Hugh. He is wrapped in prayer.

  One of the soloists is the granddaughter of the soprano who was the chief soloist in the days when I directed the choir. The soprano is an alto now, still singing. I feel a wonderful sense of continuity.

  As soon as we have sung the final Amen I hurry out of my choir robe and out of the church, eager to get down to the hospital.

  And I see Bion and Laurie waiting for me.

  While I was in church Michael, the oncologist, called. Hugh is not doing well. He has vomited blood. He is having a hard time breathing. It may be a pulmonary embolism, which Michael cannot treat because Hugh is already bleeding. Or it could be pneumonia, which is treatable. He told them not to get me out of church, but to be there waiting for me to get me down to the hospital as quickly as possible.

  I feel cold and stunned on the drive. We hurry up to his floor. Hugh has on the oxygen face cone and is breathing with difficulty. I stand and hold his hand until Laurie moves a chair so that I can sit and still hold his hand. The nurse who has been taking care of him this morning whispers, “I’m sorry.” She cares.

  After a while I tell Bion and Laurie to go on home. I spend the day sitting by Hugh’s bed, mostly just holding his hand. One of the nurses asks, “No typewriter today?”

  “Not today.” Even when Hugh is sleeping my focus is entirely on him.

  Then, in the afternoon, he rallies. His breathing eases. He asks for the paper. Michael comes in. Says he does not know why this episode has happened. Says he will be back later in the evening.

  It seems to me that the splitting of the wound, the extra surgery and anesthesia are enough trauma to have produced this. Who knows?

  Two of our godchildren, Bion’s and Laurie’s age, had planned to come for a visit, have dinner, and then drive on back to New York. They go to the house first, and Bion and Laurie alert them to what is going on. They will be married in less than a month. Their emotions are close to the surface and this is a blow to them.

  About seven-thirty, when the nurses are working on Hugh’s IVs, I see them standing in the doorway and go out to them, and am wrapped in love and hugs. It is compassion that has undone me all day. One of the morning nurses came to me, saying, “You need a hug,” and put her arms around me. Another made a great effort to get me a cup of hot coffee. When the afternoon shift came on, a lovely young nurse who has taken wonderful care of Hugh said, “Oh, it isn’t fair! It shouldn’t have happened to him!” And she, too, put her arms around me. It w
as hard not to spill tears. Well, they did spill, but then I got them back under control, not wanting Hugh to see me and be frightened—not for himself, but for me.

  “How should we pray?” our godson asks.

  “Pray for whatever is best for Hugh.”

  They go in to him, talk to him about their forthcoming wedding. Even now he pulls himself up to joke lovingly with them, tells them not to expect him to make it to the wedding, and then advises them not to use the hospital caterer.

  I go home with them, reluctantly. I want to stay, but I know that I must have food and rest. We do not know how long this vigil is going to last.

  Bion has called his sisters, Hugh’s sister. The doctors, the nurses, all of us, thought that this was it, that Hugh was going to die this morning. And he didn’t.

  We have a quiet dinner, the five of us, and then the lovers drive back to the city.

  Is this a reprieve? Oh, let it be a reprieve.

  Monday morning, early, Laurie calls the hospital. The nurses report that Hugh is better, breathing more easily. She will look in on him as she makes her morning rounds. At nine, as soon as the switchboard opens, I call my publishers to tell them that I can’t leave Hugh right now, and could we please reschedule the party? Of course.

  How blessed we are in our godchildren. Gretchen, living over an hour away in Hartford, drives all the way over to Goshen to take me to the hospital, since this is a day when Bion has to be at the university by eight. Gretchen is married now, busy with teenaged children. We talk, deeply, about God and love and marriage, in the same totally real way we have been able to talk all these years.

  Hugh is better, is rallying. I spend the day with him. When he naps I pull out my little Typestar and write. He is not up to reading. But his breathing is easier. They have taken off the big face mask, which he said made him feel claustrophobic, and he has only the two small nose prongs for oxygen. I come home for dinner and bed. Wake around three-thirty and pad down to the kitchen to make hot milk with nutmeg. Read for a while. Sleep again. Wake. Sleep.