Certain Women

by Madeleine L'engle

  “Emma!”

  The camomile tea. She had almost forgotten. The lid of the kettle was gently lifting and falling. She prepared a mug of tea and took it to her father.

  “It was you I wanted, not this hogwash.” He smiled at her as he took the cup.

  “Alice thinks it’s good for you. You need to keep your kidneys flushed out.”

  “I can think of better ways,” he grunted.

  “Emma—” She looked up as Ben came into the cabin.

  He leaned over the chart stretched out on a table which folded down from the wall, and pointed to the upper-left-hand corner. “We’re here. ’Scuse me, Em, I need to get the next chart.” His hair, streaked yellow and white like Alice’s, fell across his face and he shoved it back.

  Under David Wheaton’s bunk were shallow drawers that held dozens of charts of the waters the Portia plied. Emma moved out of Ben’s way so that he could open one of the drawers. He riffled through several charts and selected one.

  “What’s this?” Emma picked up a much folded piece of blue paper from the open chart drawer.

  Her father smiled. “A letter from you while you were at college.”

  Carefully, Emma opened the fragile paper, skimmed, read: The thought that I must, that I ought to write, never leaves me for an instant. Chekhov. She had crossed out write and substituted act.

  “You’ve always had the passion,” her father said softly.

  “Passion alone isn’t enough,” she said. “There has to be the gift.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But neither is the gift alone enough. It must be served, and with passion. Listen, this is Chekhov, too—I think I can quote it accurately: You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, for failures. In work, and in life. I’ve had a few abysmal flops, such as my L’Aiglon. And God knows my life has been full of spectacular mistakes.”

  Emma put her letter back in the chart drawer and saw a manuscript that was slipped in among the charts.

  “Some stuff of Nik’s,” her father said. “I was going over it a while ago.”

  Emma pulled the pages out. They were in Nik’s strong handwriting, on a lined pad, not legal-sized, because Nik liked to have his work fit in a typewriter-paper box. Forgetting her father, Ben, Alice, she sat back on her heels by the bunk, holding the manuscript loosely, letting it drop to her lap.

  Some of the pages were typed, and Emma pulled the first one out, remembering when Nik had first shown it to her, the very beginning of his play about David.

  A PLAY IN THREE ACTS BY NIKLAAS GREEN

  Act I, scene i

  The light comes up slowly. It should be a desert light, so strong as to be almost white. The entire back of the stage is filled with a projection of Goliath, an enormous figure, ‘an helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail … and he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders.’ He is far larger than life-size, ferocious and fearsome.

  In the center of the stage is David, a small figure, holding his slingshot in one hand.

  It was a good opening scene, Emma thought. It would catch the audience’s attention, remind them of the familiar story of young David and Goliath, and lead them into the far less familiar story of the mature king. Nik had spent well over a year on that play, writing individual scenes that were exciting, but bogging down over the historical information. The year had been for Emma one of the happiest in her life, despite the war, the brownout on Broadway, the terrible bombing of England with Hitler ready to invade that small green island.

  Despite Emma’s constant awareness of the war, with two of her brothers overseas, once she met Nik, war was on the periphery of her life. She had a featured role in Niklaas Green’s first Broadway comedy; she was in love, and part of that love was irrevocably connected with Nik’s writing of the King David play.

  Nik admitted candidly that it would be a wonderful boost to his career if he could write a play in which David Wheaton would star, and that it also gave him a chance to pursue Emma. Working on the David play with Nik was, for Emma, not only falling in love with him, but finally believing that he loved her, that he loved Emma the human being, not Emma the actress. The part of the David story that touched her own life she tried to set aside. Most of the time she succeeded. If Nik’s work on the play kept him in her life, that was what mattered. She was in love, and she was willing to pay for that love by encouraging Nik with the play if that was the price.

  If Nik had finished the David play … But ultimately their own complex problems kept slipping into the script. He would tear up whole scenes in a rage when he was angry with himself. With her.

  She did not want to think about Nik’s anger. As Ben left the cabin, she turned back to her father.

  “Papa, remember that English drawing-room comedy we did together?”

  “Anyone for tennis? How could I forget it?” David smiled.

  “Summer stock,” she said. “I was playing a character role.”

  “An eccentric spinster”—her father grinned—“and you had some wonderful business with a cigarette, blowing the ashes off the end.”

  “I hated smoking,” Emma said. “It was one way to have a cigarette and not make my mouth taste vile. It was fun, coming back to the theater after all those years of school and college. And Etienne was stage manager.”

  Etienne was one of her half brothers. That summer they had thought he would be David Wheaton’s stage manager forever. She laughed. “Those ten red raspberry sherberts that never even got eaten! How Etienne hated getting them every evening, melting, making a mess for him to clean up.”

  David laughed, too. “Only Etienne would have thought of replacing them with red tennis balls and not telling us what he’d done.”

  “They looked fine,” Emma said. “I remember noticing them on the tray by Etienne’s table, and thinking how he hated dripping raspberry sherbert.”

  “And then”—David’s face was alight with pleasure—“the actor playing the butler tripped ever so slightly as he entered and—” Laughter stopped him.

  Through her own laughter Emma chortled, “Red tennis balls bouncing all over the stage!”

  Alice turned from the wheel. “I love it when you two reminisce.”

  “I’ve got some good memories,” David said, “and I’m glad that Emma shares some of them.”

  She was smiling. “What about that night when you almost forgot to make an entrance, and you’d started to change costume, and you’d stripped to the skin when Etienne rushed into your dressing room to tell you that you were almost on, and you flung your cloak about yourself, and I couldn’t understand why you kept clutching it to you and didn’t want me to take it off, the way I usually did.”

  “You’re a joy to work with, my daughter,” David Wheaton said. “How I wish we could have done the David play together.”

  Emma did not reply. That was long ago. It was too late. Much too late.

  Her father gave her a long look. “Emma. You’re unhappy.”

  “I’m fine, Papa, fine.”

  But he reached for her left hand. “What’s wrong?” He took her hand, looking at the faint, pale circle. “You’ve taken off your rings.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Emma shook her head. The tears were close.

  David’s voice was gentle. “I haven’t wanted to hurt you by prying, but—Abby is coming; and she’s going to want to know. You’re her godchild. She loves you.” Abby Wheaton was David’s second wife and still a good friend. Abby was coming to say goodbye.

  Much as Emma loved Abby, her coming was a potent reminder that her father was dying.

  “Emma?” David prodded gently.

  Emma bowed her head, spoke in a whisper. “I’ve taken off my wedding ring because I’m no longer married.”

 
; “Take the wheel for a few minutes, Em,” Alice said.

  “But, my darling, you’re not divorced,” David continued as Alice left the cabin.

  “There really hasn’t been time. I don’t know, Papa. I’m not willing to put up with the things your wives have put up with.”

  David grimaced. “Or haven’t put up with.” He reached toward her, then dropped his hand. “I was so happy when you met Nik.” Emma steered the Portia between two islands. “It was such good timing. Getting cast in his play was the best thing that could have happened to you.”

  She kept her hands on the wheel, turning it slightly.

  “Fascinating history,” her father said, “full of confusions and oddities. Does it hurt you if I talk about him—King David?”

  “No, Papa. Go on.” It should have stopped hurting by now. Enough water had gone under the bridge to make a great river.

  “David, King David, of course is the protagonist and the leading role. But King Saul and the prophet Samuel would be featured roles. And then there are the women. Nik’s rendering of the women was extraordinary.” He paused, looking at Emma.

  “Michal,” she counted on her fingers. “King Saul’s daughter and David’s first wife.”

  “Abigail,” her father continued. “He truly loved Abigail.”

  “Bathsheba, too, of course—but she was the last wife, the eighth one.”

  “There were other women besides the wives,” David said. “Zeruiah, for instance, David’s sister. She’d be a featured role.”

  “Zer-u-i-ah,” Emma said thoughtfully.

  “Nik had a terrible time with the Scriptural names.”

  “Not only Nik, Papa. We all did.”

  Just then Ben poked his head into the pilothouse, grinning. “Five keepers.” Five crabs the legal size limit or above. He limped away.

  David had met Ben one year when he had dropped anchor at Whittock Island, where Ben and Alice had grown up. Ben had come out onto the beach to see whose boat was nosing into his small bay, and invited David in for coffee and conversation, and thus began what was to become an enduring friendship, which was cemented the year David arrived at Whittock with an agonizing pain in his belly. Ben had taken one look at David, moved to the wheel of the boat, and had run, as fast as the little craft would go, to Prince Rupert, where Alice had taken out an appendix ready to burst. And David, who had thought never to marry again, and Alice, who had thought never to marry at all, had fallen in love. ‘It was crazy,’ Alice said. ‘I was set in my ways, much too old for romance, and there I was, like a silly schoolgirl.’

  The year after David and Alice were married, and Alice had uprooted herself and moved to New York, Ben shattered his right femur, alone, fishing for salmon. How he got the troller into dock no one ever knew. The leg was set inadequately, and the bone knit slowly, and not well.

  So it was natural for Ben to take over the Portia when David could no longer manage it and Ben, with his lame leg, could not spend weeks alone on his troller, fishing. He kept the house on Whittock Island, but the Portia became his real home. Normally, he slept in the forward cabin, where he had his odd collection of books: Shakespeare, Blake, the Bible, Water Prey and Game Birds, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Thoreau’s The Maine Woods … Emma could see them from her bunk, contained in a high-lipped shelf with an elastic cord.

  Ben’s lack of formal schooling did not bother him. He had an unselfconscious but firm self-esteem. He was a good fisherman. An adequate logger. He was also perforce a navigator, meteorologist, astronomer, electrician, carpenter, mechanic, shipwright—there was nothing Ben could not do, Emma thought. Occasionally he came up with plans for a kelp farm. The Pacific Northwest was in his blood. He was not happy anywhere else. Nor did he feel the need to be anywhere else. He had married when he was in his mid-twenties and within a few years his young wife had died of cancer. After her death, his life had been solitary and, ultimately, contented. He was nearly fifty now, but he looked younger.

  “Emma, Emma,” David said. “I’m glad you’re here, glad we can share memories. I’ve hardly had time to give Alice my memories, my stories, and I want her to have them.”

  Emma looked around at the white salt-washed stones of the shore, the dark green of firs predominating. She looked with loathing at the brown scars, acres of land where the trees had been indiscriminately logged, with only a small fringe of evergreen left at the waterline to disguise the carnage. David was indignant, pointing out ways that logging could bring in a good living and not unbalance the precarious ecology. Some of the scars, Ben had observed calmly, were not man-made, but had come from slides, great roarings of trees and rocks and mud, started by wind and rain. Nature can be as brutal as her creatures, Ben said.

  After dinner they sat in the pilothouse with David, letting the long twilight wash over them like water, listening as David talked about his life in the theater, until he was ready for sleep. Alice could mimic the call of a loon, and sometimes she was answered, the long, lovely sound carrying across the water. David sipped a cup of vervain, watching the shadows of the great Douglas firs on the nearby islands deepen and darken. This was the time when he was most ready to talk, to unburden himself to the two women and Ben.

  “The world changes,” he said. “Behavior which is taken for granted now, in the sixties, which is socially acceptable, would not have been tolerated when I was a young man.”

  Emma sat in the revolving chair by the wheel and swiveled so that she could look at her father.

  “If I’d had affairs, rather than marrying, I’d have been just another immoral actor. Because my wives were legitimate, I get a lot of grief that I could have avoided if I’d merely bedded instead of wedded. Not to excuse myself. I have been an immoral actor.”

  Alice was sitting beside him on the bunk. She put her hand lightly on his knee. “Not an immoral actor, Dave. You have been a most moral actor.”

  He laughed again. “An immoral man, then. Self-indulgent. Living all my fantasies instead of being satisfied with acting them on the stage. If I’d just had affairs, it would have been more practical as well as—in some cases—more honest. Forgive me, my dears, I maunder.”

  Ben folded the chart table to its closed position against the wall. “Tell us more theater stories, Dave. When did you get your big break?”

  “I don’t think I had a big break,” David said. “I worked into my career gradually. My first featured role was in a series of French one-act plays when Existentialism wasn’t even a word. I played a very young Cyrano de Bergerac who didn’t much resemble Rostand’s hero except in the size of his nose. But the plays made a modest splash and so did I. Some critical acclaim but not very good box office. I met Meredith, who was to be the first of my wives, at the opening-night party. She wanted to know what had happened to my nose. I spent a long time explaining makeup to her, not just how I put the putty nose on and off. She was considerably older than I and had that strange kind of assurance that comes with being born very, very rich. She thought I was adorable, and I didn’t understand that she saw me as some kind of exotic animal she could buy and keep on a leash. I loved the clothes she bought me, especially the wildly expensive Chinese robe I still wear in my dressing room. I didn’t realize that the clothes came with the purchase, the way some women buy diamond-studded collars for their poodles.”

  Then he laughed. “But I exaggerate, as usual. We were in love like two animals. No, that’s not fair, either. It is a human tendency to rewrite the past. What is true is that after we were married Meredith wanted me to leave the theater. She had more than enough money for us both, she told me. I could not make her understand that I wasn’t an actor for money. For money I’d have stayed in Seattle and worked in my father’s bank.”

  He handed his empty cup to Alice, who put it on the wide shelf above the bunk, and continued. “If Meredith couldn’t understand why I was an actor, I didn’t understand that, for people in her social class, acting was still unacceptable
work, but she liked to be avant-garde. We were obviously not suited, but Meredith was a stickler for the proprieties, so she took me to the altar. I was young and didn’t know what I was doing. My mother, bless her, your Bahama, Emma, begged me not to marry so hastily, to wait. My father threatened. They were right, but I was impetuous and thought I knew everything. Poor Meredith. She had too much money. Her family was terrified that I was going to try to get some of it when we divorced. She never married again.” He yawned. “I’m tired now, my dears.”

  Emma had asked Alice, “Did you know about all the wives?”

  “Of course. Dave was painfully careful about making sure I knew what an old roué I was marrying. But he’s filling in all kinds of spaces now.”

  It was to Emma alone, however, that David continued to talk about his wives. Alice and Ben had taken the dinghy and gone ashore to pick berries after dinner, and Emma sat in the pilothouse with her father.

  “I’m glad you told us about Meredith,” she said.

  “Ancient history. Dull.”

  “No, Papa. It helps me to understand.”

  “As divorces go, ours was simple. All I wanted was out. Not too much to understand there.”

  “And then you met Abby.”

  “Yes. I met Abby.”

  “She was a painter.”

  “No, not then.” David warmed his hands around the fresh cup of vervain Alice had given him before leaving. “Abby didn’t start to paint until after our babies had died and our marriage was broken to bits. She was a teacher when I met her, quiet and shy, except with her students. She brought a group of sixth-graders to see me in a matinee, and they all came backstage after. She was a born teacher, giving her students wonderful gifts she didn’t even realize were unusual. They wrote, they painted, they acted. They even did a play in Latin, which she wrote for them, and afterwards cooked them a Roman banquet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Go on. Please.”

  “When she brought the kids backstage, all I saw was a quiet mouse of a girl with grey eyes that held secrets like the sea.” He looked out at the gentle light touching the water. “One of the bolder kids told me they were going to the Lafayette for dinner, and asked if I would join them. I hated the Lafayette, and I told them I’d rather go to Joe’s Saloon on Ninth Avenue. It was quieter than the Lafayette. Theater people went there to talk, not to be seen. I took you there a couple of times, didn’t I?”