Certain Women

by Madeleine L'engle

  David was propped high on pillows, with a hospital table swung across the bunk for his dinner tray.

  While they ate, Ben kept the conversation going. They were anchored across from one of the many small islands in the inlet, islands which were green circles of trees ringed at the base with a crown of white rock. On the ground of the nearest island were weathered boxes, and Ben explained that the island was sacred, an Indian burial ground, not to be profaned by those who did not belong to the tribe. “Those boxes are coffins which originally were placed high up in the trees, with the lower branches cut away so that wolves or other animals couldn’t climb up and get at the bodies.”

  “Birds?” David suggested.

  “Yes,” Alice agreed, “but birds were thought to be better than animals.”

  David put down his plate. “When I was in Bombay I saw the vultures sitting on pilings by the Temple of Silence. After the funeral service—quite beautiful—it would take the vultures about an hour to strip a body clean. The theory was that the dead body should go back to the planet as ecologically pure as possible. I’ve never quite understood why that’s more pure than the funeral pyre. After all, vultures have to shit.”

  Emma turned away. Ben helped himself to more stuffed flounder. Alice buttered a slice of bread Emma had baked that morning. Death was a daily neighbor in this harsh part of the world where a meager living had to be eked out of the forests, pulled from the sea. In large cities, death is less visible, less accepted, is rushed off to the anonymity of hospitals, where it somehow seems less contagious.

  “Cremation for me,” David said, “and my ashes here in these waters I’ve loved for so long.”

  —Not yet, Emma pleaded silently,—please, not yet.

  ‘Ben and I were born on Whittock Island,’ Alice had told Emma one night in New York when the two women had sat up talking, sharing intimacies, becoming friends, long after David had gone to bed. ‘Whittock’s a desolate and lonely place. It was once a thriving community, but at the time of the First World War two hundred men went off to war together, as a group. Nine came back.’

  Emma let out a long breath. ‘How terrible.’

  Alice nodded. ‘My father and mother stayed, but everybody else drifted off. When Ben and I were children, we lived there alone with Papa. He loved us.’

  ‘What happened to your mother?’

  ‘She died when Ben was a baby and I was nearly twelve. There’s over ten years between us, and after Mom died I was Ben’s mother. Dad was a dreamer, full of projects which never came to anything. But we were happy, running wild, living off the land and with what Dad made from logging and fishing.’

  Alice’s story fascinated Emma.

  ‘I’ve never talked about myself this way before,’ Alice said. ‘I took my life for granted. As a child, and after I became a doctor.’

  ‘When your mother died—you were so young for all that responsibility—’

  ‘Kids tend to accept what happens. Your mother didn’t die, but didn’t she—’

  Emma, too, smiled. ‘Abandon me? More or less. But I had Bahama.’ Saying this to Alice made the almost unacknowledged pain over her mother’s indifference easier to acknowledge, and to forgive.

  ‘Do you go see her movies?’

  ‘Yes. Sometimes.’

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘When I was a kid it felt awful, seeing this stranger. Papa and Bahama didn’t want me to go, so I sneaked off to the movies when I was staying with school friends. Sophie understood that I needed to go see my mother on the screen, see Elizabeth Bowman and respect her as an actress, but not expect more of her than she could give.’

  ‘You accepted what was.’

  ‘I guess so. Kids do. You did.’

  Alice nodded. ‘We were alone on the island, so there were no comparisons to be made. Dad built our house, but he never quite finished it. He did put in bookshelves, and it was full of books. Whatever else he didn’t give us, he gave us books. I don’t remember learning to read or write, but Dad must have taught me. Whenever a pleasure craft pulled into the cove, the way Dave first came to see Ben, dropping anchor and rowing in, Dad would come through the woods to meet it and he always asked for books. One family came with their yacht almost every summer. I think they were intrigued by Dad, the strange, blue-eyed dreamer, and his two wild kids. I was an innocent then,’ Alice said. ‘But I was bright, and the people with the yacht said I was brilliant—’

  ‘They were right.’

  ‘They—the Browns, the family with the yacht—saw to it that I took a high-school equivalency test, and then they sent me to college in Vancouver, and from there to medical school. I got scholarships, good ones, but they paid for everything else, and never made me feel in debt.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘They were. Wonderful. But I felt like an alien life form from another planet.’

  ‘How did you manage?’ Emma asked.

  ‘I didn’t. I was awed by a world of people, but I didn’t have any idea what to say to anybody, out of class. One of my professors called me “our wild little savage,” and flattered me, and seduced me in his office. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I felt that I was being treated—oh, not as a person, but as a thing.’

  Emma sighed. ‘Oh, God.’

  They were in the big living room, curled up on the huge couch, which Sophie had filled with bright pillows made from colorful molas from the San Blas Islands. Alice had brought in an eiderdown from the guest room and it was tucked around them. The wind was blowing shrilly across the river, battering against the windows so that it sounded like waves of water hitting the glass. Emma clutched the quilt more closely around her, shuddering.

  Alice looked at her sharply. ‘Emma. What’s the matter?’

  Emma let out her breath in a long, slow sigh. ‘There’s no reason it needs to go on being a deep, dark secret, at least from you. When it happened, I didn’t want it talked about.’

  Alice reached under the quilt for Emma’s hand, clasped it firmly. ‘Dave told me.’

  Emma walked home, grateful for the deepening friendship. It freed her to talk to Alice as she had never talked to another woman, not even Sophie. Emma often felt older than Sophie. But Alice was old enough to have been Emma’s mother, and Emma trusted her as—perhaps—Marical’s children trusted her. Emma went to the Riverside Drive apartment at least once a week, as winter deepened, snows came and went, and the harsh winds of March whipped across the river.

  ‘Well. It happened.’ Emma’s voice was flat and dead. ‘It happened to you. It happened to me. We survive.’

  ‘Emma …’

  ‘It’s degrading and humiliating and dehumanizing. You stop being real. You lose your reality and it shatters your faith in other people’s reality. Rape is a kind of murder.’

  ‘Yes, rape is murder, spiritual murder. Except that your spirit can’t be killed, Em. No one can kill it except you.’

  Emma pulled her hand away. ‘I know that. But I let it be killed.’

  ‘For a while …’

  ‘For a while. I had help—Chantal and Adair—Grandpa Bowman and Norma. And I survived.’

  Alice said, ‘We need to do more than that. It’s obvious we’re both survivors. But we need to—to be reborn. That’s what happened to me when I married David. Rebirth.’

  Emma rubbed her fingers over the flesh of her forearm. ‘Alice, it must have taken a lot of courage for you to marry Papa—a man who’d married so often and made such a mess of his marriages.’

  Alice laughed. ‘David was, to put it mildly, forthright. He told me he’d married for lust, committed adultery, run away from problems instead of trying to solve them. He told me that women were dazzled by the public man and said yes to him, and forgot there was a private man underneath the glitter.’

  Emma sighed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I didn’t see the public man till long after I’d fallen in love with the private one. And when I knew he loved me, Alice, grey-haired
spinster, it was rebirth. Truly.’

  Emma said, ‘I heard somewhere that after seven years every single cell in our bodies has changed, been renewed. Does it happen to spiritual cells, too?’

  ‘Perhaps. But I don’t think you can put a chronological limit to that kind of renewal. Did it help, when you married Nik?’

  ‘It helped. It helped a lot. But maybe not enough water had gone under the bridge. A lot of those spiritual cells hadn’t been renewed, and that was hard on Nik, put demands on him I didn’t even realize.’

  ‘Was he sensitive to the demands?’

  ‘Far more than I gave him credit for. We had wonderful times together. We laughed, we played, we enjoyed each other. But we were so different; we came from completely different worlds. My life has been theater, but Bahama and Grandpa helped form me. Bahama was an Episcopalian; Grandpa was a Georgia cracker; and Nik was half Dutch Catholic and half Russian Jew, but he and Grandpa liked each other because they both loved to talk about God. Nik’s mother was deeply devout. His father was equally devout, though an atheist. One morning Nik overheard his father while he was shaving, raising his razor aloft and shouting into the mirror, “I thank you, God, Lord of the Universe, that I do not believe in you.” Nik was often a battleground for the two of them, and he found my grandfather’s robust theology refreshing.’

  ‘Did you like them? Nik’s parents?’

  ‘I didn’t know them. They died in an accident a few months before I met Nik. They were odd and possessive. If Nik wanted to do something unscheduled after high school, he had to call and get permission. Even after college, when he moved into his own apartment, they still wanted to know where he was at all times. Once he was spending the weekend with friends, and when he hadn’t called home by dinnertime, they tracked him down to make sure he was okay.’

  Alice laughed. ‘I can’t even imagine parents with that kind of concern.’

  Emma frowned. ‘I don’t think it was concern. It was obsession. They were immigrants. They didn’t speak English very well. They evidently had all kinds of fears. I think I’m glad I never knew them.’

  ‘Different worlds, indeed,’ Alice said thoughtfully.

  ‘When I met Nik, I was going through the actions of life, and on the surface I was happy, but my scars were still healing.’

  Often Emma urged Alice to talk about her slow emergence from the solitary child on Whittock Island. She was almost like a child saying, ‘Tell me a story about when you were growing up.’

  ‘When I finished college,’ Alice said, ‘I got a scholarship to Johns Hopkins for medical school. The Browns gave me whatever else I needed—respectable clothes, for instance, some tweed skirts and warm cardigans and a string of cultured pearls. Medical school wasn’t really that much different from college. I was always at the top of my class, but I felt devalued, that nobody saw me as real. So I was isolated. I didn’t know how to talk to anyone. I was just a brain.’

  Emma asked carefully, gently, ‘Did it go back to that professor in college who seduced you?’

  Alice was silent for a moment. Then, ‘Probably. I can’t blame the professor entirely. I was part of it. I let it happen. It wasn’t the ugly violence that happened to you.’

  ‘Maybe it was even uglier,’ Emma suggested, ‘because it masqueraded as something else. The intent for violence was there.’

  ‘I suppose. Yes. Using people for your own lusts is always violent. We may be different generations, you and I, but that hasn’t changed. I saw a lot of it when I did my internship and residency, a lot of the result of that violence, I mean. It was shocking to me, more shocking than it should have been. Whittock and isolation had kept me incredibly innocent.’

  ‘Was that all bad—the innocence?’

  ‘No, Emma. You have it, too.’

  Emma frowned. ‘Even after—how can there be any innocence?’

  ‘There is, Emma, I promise you. I recognize some of myself in you when I was your age. That’s why we can be so honest with each other.’

  ‘Yes. It’s amazing and marvelous. How was the residency? In Washington, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, at NIH. I knew that once I came back to Whittock and the islands I’d need to be able to do anything, emergency surgery, for instance. In some weather a specialist can be flown in, but often the islands are isolated by snow and fog.’

  The wind had dropped, and small tendrils of fog further softened the trees in the park. The horizon was a pinkish grey from city lights that were never extinguished, shading from the pink up into a dull grey. If there were any stars, they were not visible.

  Emma touched Alice’s hand. ‘What an unexpected gift Papa brought to me when he came home with you!’

  Alice’s smile lit the pale blue of her eyes. ‘I was the one who received the gift. I was a good physician and that was all I knew about myself. Until I took out your father’s appendix.’ The smile deepened with remembrance.

  In the pale light of the long evening that came in through the Portia’s portholes, Emma looked at Alice and breathed a sigh of relief that Alice was a doctor, and a good one. She looked at Alice’s tired face, and marveled at her ability to care so tenderly for a husband she was going to have to lose, and wondered how she had come to be as sane and centered as she was.

  Alice reached up as though to turn on her small reading lamp, then dropped her hand and stared out the porthole; the northern sky would not become dark enough for stars for another couple of hours. “Dave is obsessed by King David. And Nik’s play. Is it because it’s too late and he can never play King David now? I knew Nik had written a rough draft of a play about David years ago, but Dave has never—” She broke off, sighing. “Isn’t it hard on you, the way he keeps bringing it up?”

  Emma, too, sighed. “But that doesn’t matter. At least I try not to let it matter. If it helps Papa—if his mind is on King David, then it’s not on pain. Or fear. Alice, is Papa afraid?”

  Alice shook her head. “It’s not fear of dying, not more than the normal fear of letting go. I think it’s fear of dying with his life unresolved. Despite his age, Dave has always thought in terms of the future, as though he had all the time in the world. While Lear was running, he was reading new plays, he was looking ahead to his next show, never turning back. Until this summer, he seemed immortal.”

  Emma nodded. Agreed. The idea that the vitality that was David Wheaton could be snuffed out had always seemed absurd.

  “King Lear.” Alice smiled. “We had such fun talking about it before and during rehearsals.”

  “We had the best of Papa—of David Wheaton,” Emma agreed.

  Alice was propped up on one elbow in her bunk, her sleeping bag not yet zipped up. “Being David’s wife opened an entirely new world for me. I’ve been the doctor, and that’s isolating. Too often in my life, I’ve had to let the masculine side dominate. Or men who have seen me as a woman have seen me only as a sex object. But you know something about that.”

  Emma laughed and sighed. “People do tend to place actresses in some kind of special category, as though we’re not quite real, either. Doctors are supposed to be gods, curing all illnesses. And actresses are all Liliths. I’m exaggerating a little, but not a lot.”

  “David sees me. He treasures me. What he’s given me can’t ever be taken away. I have a sense of my own value, and that is a priceless gift.”

  “Dear Alice, you seem to me so totally valuable I can’t imagine you not valuing yourself.”

  “I didn’t. Not until Dave. Ben was afraid David was too old to—well, make love.”

  Emma burst into laughter. “Papa!”

  Alice, too, laughed. Then said, soberly, “David is a birth-giver.” She put her fingers to her cheeks, and even though Alice’s light was not on, Emma could see the deep, slow flush. Then she said, “Last winter in New York was difficult. I was worried about Dave, and knowing you were there for him, for me, made all the difference. Dave has been so present that I’ve not spent much time thinking about the rest o
f the family, but this summer I’m going to have to. Abby’s coming is the beginning. Dave knows it’s a long distance from the East Coast, but he wants to see everybody who can come. It’s part of his reconciling leftover pain and misunderstanding, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Emma agreed, “I think it is. At first it seemed sort of Victorian and theatrical, deathbed scenes. But I think you’re right. He needs to try to—well, as you said—reconcile.”

  “And—” Alice sighed. “I suppose I ought to know more about David—the Biblical one—if he’s that important to Dave. I’ll check him out in Ben’s Bible. Do you know where the King David stuff is?”

  “Samuel I and II, mostly. I remember a good bit because of Nik’s play and Grandpa Bowman. I’m sorry you never had a chance to know my grandpa.”

  “I’m sorry, too. We haven’t talked enough about your family, Em, have we?”

  Emma moved her hand in a dismissing gesture. “After—after Adair and Etienne were killed we didn’t get together, the whole family, the way we used to when Sophie was with Papa.”

  “The war changed everything, didn’t it?”

  The Second World War that killed Adair and Etienne. And a great deal that had nothing to do with the war. “Papa’s older. He doesn’t like big gatherings anymore. And you make him happy. Happier than I’ve ever known him.”

  Alice smiled gratefully. “Thanks. Dave and I do our duty; we go to parties Jarvis thinks he ought to go to, and to openings. Jarvis insists that Dave be seen, and I suppose he’s right. But we’re happiest alone, or with you and Nik. And maybe that’s how I wanted it. I knew things weren’t going well with you and Nik during the run of Lear, and I didn’t know what to say, and I knew Dave didn’t want to talk about it—or know about it, for that matter. I’m sorry. I did know, but—well, I was remiss.”

  “Forget it,” Emma said. “There wasn’t anything to say or do. You were there, and that’s what mattered.”

  “But I wasn’t,” Alice said. “I was worried about Dave, and that was foremost in my mind. I was pulling myself into a tight little shell with just room for—”