by May Sarton
“He’s president,” Anna intervened. “You know how Bostonians talk!”
“I really must go, Anna …” Ned was uncomfortable, out of place, and fled, leaving her to the tender mercies of the ladies. He wanted to keep what he had come for, Anna Lindstrom singing, keep it safe from the social amenities, keep it for himself alone.
Chapter XVII
At last, after the longest day, for it had seemed to Anna through the interminable luncheon and the interminable flight that she would never get home, at last she was in bed, lying in the crook of Ned’s arm, like an exhausted swimmer back on earth.
“It’s after midnight. We must get some sleep,” she murmured.
“Let’s talk,” Ned said. Had he ever said any such thing before? “It’s going to take a while for the buzz to die down, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Having expressed the wish to talk, Ned was silent, as though waiting for something to come to the surface. He slid his hand into hers and held it tightly.
“I’ll never never get over seeing you there in that audience—seeing your face.”
“Still crazy after all these years!” He laughed. “I was afraid for a moment I had thrown you off.”
“Only for a second.”
“Anna,” Ned was looking up at the ceiling, his eyes wide open. “On the plane I was with my father.”
“How do you mean?”
“Something helpless that needs help, the terrible in us … was that what you said?”
“I said it about anger … it’s something Rilke said, actually.”
“Never mind. On the plane I let my father in. I thought about him, not myself. Oh Anna …” it was wrenched out and Anna held very still. “I mourned my father.”
“Something helpless,” she turned it over in her mind.
“Somehow I got in touch with the person he never could let out … you did it, Anna. You made it happen.”
“If only he could have done it—while he was alive.”
“Oh no, the vulnerability was too great. He couldn’t.” Was Ned aware as Anna was that he was so connected with his father that he was now actually talking about himself? “If he once let the woe in he would not have been able to stop it …”
“But you’ve let the woe in,” Anna whispered. “Thank God.”
“Have I? Is that what this is all about?” Ned sat up and turned to look at Anna, a straight long look.
“Don’t look at me like that, it makes me cry.”
He lay down again and Anna asked, “Why did you come to Dallas, Ned? It was so strange—you could have thought about your father here, after all? Did it need a plane to Dallas?”
“I don’t know. It was all connected in some way, you, my father—I had to hear you sing the Kindertoten lieder … I wasn’t in a very rational state, I have to admit.”
“Something happened when we had that talk—to me, too. I felt released. I went to Dallas free of my usual panic.”
“What did happen, Anna?”
“My enemy had become my friend,” the words jumped out. She had not realized the immensity of the change, but now she knew, and so she was able to say, “You were there and I wanted so much to be marvelous, to sweep you off your feet, and then I went and ruined it.”
“You recovered, you did, Anna.”
“I carried on, but you see I had let myself get in the way of the music. The recovery was only a kind of assault. I forced those last songs.”
“You’re so honest, Anna.” Ned realized as she said it, that she was right. It had been a triumph of will, of a kind of force in her, determined to win. “You did stun them, though, in the end.”
“I got the applause, but no one was really moved. And that was my fault.”
“Well, that flash-bulb carrying woman could be blamed, too.”
“If you hadn’t been there, maybe I could have handled it. I wanted something too much. I wanted to dazzle you, so I lost my balance when something beyond my control went wrong. That’s bad,” she said, smiting now, “But, oh Ned, it’s such a comfort that I can talk like this to you now, without any defenses.”
Fonzi, at the foot of the bed, groaned in his sleep, then gave a muffled bark.
“He’s chasing a rabbit,” Ned said, “the dear old dog.”
Anna suddenly sat up, and for a second Ned wondered whether she was suffering one of those inexplicable changes of mood and was about to attack him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked sharply.
“Darling, don’t be afraid. I’ve just thought of something.”
“You forgot to send the laundry out?” he teased, and sat up so they were face to face.
“No. I’ve got hold of something that has haunted me for ages. It was always there after a fight—something lost I could not lay my hands on.”
“What was it?”
“Jacob and the angel—every time we fought, it was so painful because what we fought about was deeper than we could understand. I always knew that, but I didn’t know how to come to grips with it”
“I’m at sea,” Ned said, trying to read her face.
“Jacob didn’t know who he was fighting or why … all I remember is that they fought till daybreak and the angel had wounded Jacob near the end. Then Jacob said, ‘I will not let thee go, unless thou bless me.’”
“There didn’t seem to be a blessing in those terrible fights. Only pain.”
“Yes, pain, because the anger was a war to break through, a rage for withheld truth. Ned, Ned, can’t you see? My anger was outrage at being shut out and yours was the fear of being found out, of being vulnerable. We had to get to the bottom of it—and we did when you talked about your father and cried, and the anger and the grief were all wrapped up together. I can’t explain it,” Anna said, lying down, her eyes closed. “But I felt the blessing. It has changed everything.”
Ned thought this over. He was amazed at Anna’s ability to say things in words. He was almost convinced. “But,” he had to be clear, “do you really believe you’ll never be furious with me again, or I with you for that matter?”
“I guess there may be some pretty thick fights ahead,” she said quite calmly, as though they would not matter. “We’re not going to change completely, Ned, but something has changed. There is understanding now. That’s all I know.”
Ned looked down at her face, her mouth so gentle and vulnerable, one arm relaxed over her head and the hand lying open on her hair. Had he ever seen Anna at peace? It was a little scary, she seemed so far away now, so he leaned over and put his arms under her and kissed her very gently, then long and deeply until he ran out of breath, and she opened her eyes.
“That,” she said, running a finger along his mouth, “was a metaphysical kiss.”
“Oh,” Ned was smiling, “was that what it was? Let’s do it again, a thousand times.”
And they did. And the light was left on.
Yet the next morning at breakfast while Ned was calmly reading The Wall Street News as usual, Anna observed him, and wondered whether the exaltation she had felt had been all her imagination, whether radical change had taken place, or whether, as so often before, she had accomplished some inward journey alone and only imagined that Ned was there. She could not resist asking, “After last night, after all we experienced last night, do you suppose you could manage to say it, Ned?”
“Say what?” he laid the paper down and looked at her over his Benjamin Franklin glasses in a totally impersonal way.
“Say you love me.”
“Oh Anna, must you?” He picked up the paper again and disappeared behind it.
And she, who had been so at peace, she who knew she should not have asked the question yet so needed to hear the words, felt in that instant as though she had been struck by lightning, stunned, furious, black with rage so intense and helpless that for a second she wanted to throw herself out of the window. Anything to escape the violence of her feelings. Instead she rushed out into the kitchen and burst into tear
s.
Only much later after Ned had left and she had been lying on the unmade bed for some time, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, did she begin as she had done so many times before to unravel the tapestry and weave it together again. She would never never understand why Ned could not give what every lover gives and wants to give. So she was bound to be affronted and hurt again and again. Why stay? Why stay knowing there would always be violence, tears, pain and—yes—outrage to be dealt with? Why stay knowing that Ned would not and could not accept her as she was and would always be? Why stay, unwilling to compromise and unable to yield?
Because the very thing that tears us apart binds us together, she told herself. We are locked into an unremitting struggle each to defend and preserve authentic being.
Yet last night … for an hour or more, the struggle came out into light, and they had rested in each other at last. And as long as that had happened, there was the possibility of growth. If we could only not each feel so threatened by the other, Anna sighed, If only …
But whoever thought love was easy? Or that people change? No, the tapestry gets torn again and again and then rewoven in the same pattern and perhaps as time goes on our skill at reweaving becomes a little wiser and more compassionate: pride and fidelity and love.
Anna realized finally that what had happened in the night was real and could not be denied. To deny it because of what had happened in the morning, the insoluble clash of temperaments, was childish.
When she took Fonzi out into the Public Gardens she had made peace with herself.
A Biography of May Sarton
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born Eleanore Marie Sarton on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of the science historian George Sarton and the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. Barely two years later, Sarton’s European childhood was interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.
Fleeing the advancing Germans, the family moved briefly to Ipswich, England, and then in 1915 to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father had accepted a position at Harvard University. Sarton’s love for poetry was first kindled at the progressive Shady Hill School, a period she wrote about extensively in I Knew a Phoenix, published in 1959.
At the age of twelve, Sarton traveled to Belgium for a year to live with friends of the family and study at the Institut Belge de Culture Française. There, she met the school’s founder, Marie Closset, who grew to be Sarton’s close friend and mentor, and who was the inspiration for her first novel, The Single Hound (1938).
On returning to the States, Sarton graduated from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. Although she was awarded a scholarship to Vassar College, Sarton joined actress Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York instead, much to the dismay of her father. However, while learning the basics of theater, Sarton continued to develop her poems, and in 1930, when she was just eighteen, a series of her sonnets was published in Poetry magazine.
In 1931, Sarton returned to Europe and lived in Paris for a year while her parents were in Lebanon. In large part, Europe provided the backdrop for her encounters with the great thinkers of the age, including the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the famed biologist Julian Huxley, and of course, Virginia Woolf. After Sarton’s own theater company failed during the Great Depression, she turned her full attention to writing and published her first poetry collection, entitled Encounter in April, in 1937.
For the next decade, Sarton continued to write and publish novels and poetry. In 1945, she met Judy Matlack in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the two became partners for the next thirteen years, during which she would suffer the deaths of several loved ones: her mother in 1950, Marie Closset in 1952, and her father in 1956. Following this last loss, Sarton’s relationship fell apart, and she moved to New Hampshire to start over. She was, however, to remain attached to Matlack for the rest of her life, and Matlack’s death in 1983 affected her keenly. Honey in the Hive, published in 1988, is about their relationship.
While the 1950s were a time of great personal upheaval for Sarton, they were a time of success in equal measure. In 1956, her novel Faithful Are the Wounds was nominated for a National Book Award, followed by nominations in 1958 for The Birth of a Grandfather and a volume of poetry, In Time Like Air; some consider the latter to be one of Sarton’s best books of poetry. In 1965, she published Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, which is frequently referred to as her coming-out novel. From then on, her work became a key point of reference in the fields of feminist and LGBT literature. Strongly opposed to being categorized as a lesbian writer, Sarton constantly strove to ensure that her portraits of humanity were relatable to a universal audience, regardless of readers’ sexual identities.
In 1974, Sarton published her first children’s book, Punch’s Secret, followed by A Walk Through the Woods in 1976. During the seventies, Sarton was diagnosed with breast cancer—the beginning of a long and arduous illness. However, she continued to work during this difficult period and received a spate of critical acclaim for her literary contributions.
In 1990, she suffered a severe stroke that reduced her concentration span and her ability to write, although she did continue to dictate her journals when she could. Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. She is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author᾿s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by May Sarton
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8546-8
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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