A Winter's Love

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  They went into the bar and sat down at one of the small tables. “If I followed my inclination and there was no morning after I’d get drunk every night,” Gertrude said. “What is it? A sort of death wish? An urge for oblivion? But I’m scared of death, Em, I get into a cold sweat when I think of it. And yet I can’t wait to get to sleep at night. Half the time I take a pill so I’ll go to sleep quickly, so I won’t stay awake after Kaarlo. I can’t wait to get out of myself into sleep—and that’s after all a simulation of death. So why the hell am I so afraid to die? Are you afraid to die, Emily?”

  “Yes,” Emily said. “Of course I am.”

  “Is Courtney?”

  Sitting at the small round table Emily shivered in the sudden uncontrollable way that the superstitious say means someone has walked over the place where your grave is to be. “I don’t know.”

  “Kaarlo’s not. He doesn’t want to, but he’s not afraid of it. And he doesn’t like me to talk about it. I suppose it’s the Finn in him, this reticence. He gets almost angry with me. Could be it is morbid. But after all dying’s a part of living, isn’t it, and it’s something we all have to do sooner or later, so I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a certain interest in it.”

  “I guess we all do.…” Emily said, but she was not listening. She was looking around the crowded, stuffy room, cold and damp under foot where snow and ice had melted off boots and the chill came up from the cellars and the frozen earth below; and yet the air was hot and dry from steam heat so that one felt almost feverish with icy feet and burning cheeks. She looked intently at the faces about her, some animated, some brooding, some drunken, looking for the face of happiness, the face that would be as a revelation so that she would know what to do.…

  “I spoke passable Spanish for a while,” Gertrude said, “and to me the most beautiful phrase in the whole language is jornada de la muerte. I suppose that’s Freud’s death wish speaking in me in spite of my fear of death.… Why are you afraid of death, Emily?”

  “I’m not sure,” Emily said. “I think if I could understand the meaning of life I wouldn’t be afraid.”

  “That’s it!” Gertrude exclaimed. “In the days when life had a point I wasn’t afraid.… One day Kaarlo was three hours late coming down the mountain. I’d heard that horrible, low thunder sound of avalanches in the afternoon and I was sure he was dead. I worry about him now much more than I ever did during the war—or about Henri—or any of them. One had to learn to accept the fact of death, then, and I did, as I can’t seem to now. I don’t think you’re really afraid of things, Emily. Not the way I am. Don’t be. Don’t ever let yourself be. Don’t be afraid of life even when it knocks you down. Get me! You’d think I went in for Sunday School teaching and psychiatric interviews as a regular thing.” She stopped, realizing that Emily’s attention was no longer on her words.

  She looked up and there was Abe walking towards them. He came casually into the bar of the casino, walking with an easy grace, walking as a mountaineer did, as Kaarlo did. Emily had never noticed before the extraordinary suppleness of Abe’s movements, but now that she saw it consciously for the first time she realized in retrospect that all of his movements had the controlled and powerful rhythm of all people who move very close to nature: it had taken the eyes of love to make her see this.

  Gertrude beckoned to him. “Come and join us.”

  He came over, smiling, quite casual, his greeting to both of them warm, Emily’s not a shade warmer than Gertrude’s.

  “What’ll it be?” Gertrude asked him.

  “Beer.”

  “Nothing stronger?”

  “Not now, thanks.”

  “Going up the mountain tomorrow with Kaarlo?”

  “Yes.”

  —Gertrude knows what he’s doing tomorrow and I don’t, Emily thought. But of course he’d have to make plans with Kaarlo in advance and Gertrude’d know about them.…

  “What the devil do you see in mountain climbing?” Gertrude demanded.

  Abe was silent for a moment. His beer was put in front of him and he picked it up and looked at it absently. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment, and all of a sudden Emily felt that his words were for her and not for Gertrude at all, that he was trying to communicate to her something that was an integral part of his life. “I’ve never been a particularly articulate person so I can’t explain very well.…”

  “But I want to know,” Gertrude said. “Kaarlo can’t tell me. He says it’s just part of him. But he can’t tell me why. So please try.”

  “I don’t know,” Abe said again. “Just for the sake of the sport, to start out with. And then it becomes man against nature. The mountain is almost like a person. Tall and stern and adamant. But I am stronger. That’s what I have to prove. And then something above and beyond all this. A sudden conception of size. A realization that size, like time, is only faintly grasped by our minds. The mountain is greater than I am, and I am greater than the mountain, and in the universe the mountain is smaller than a single flake of snow, and in that soft moist flake there is all infinity … I’m putting all this very badly.”

  “No you’re not,” Emily said.

  “Hey,” Gertrude said, hardly listening, thinking of something else, “Kaarlo tells me you used to play football.”

  For a moment Abe looked entirely blank, as though her words had no meaning. Then he said, “Only in college.”

  “So you were a football hero.”

  He seemed a little annoyed. “What brought that up?”

  “Oh—curiosity,” Gertrude said. “And you played some professional golf, too, didn’t you?”

  “Some,” Abe said. “Would you like a complete biography?”

  “I’d be charmed,” Gertrude said, unrebuffed. She looked around as a gray-haired man stopped behind her chair, putting his hands on her shoulders. It was Michel Clément, her doctor.

  “Oh, hello, Clément,” Gertrude said. “Come join us.”

  Clément sat down, speaking to Emily, and Gertrude introduced him to Abe. They talked for a while of mountain climbing, then Clément said to Gertrude, “When I said that it wouldn’t hurt you to come in to the village occasionally for a drink I didn’t mean every night. Did I, Gertrude?” He, like Kaarlo, added music and gentleness to her name.

  “Come now, Clément,” Gertrude said. “This is the casino, not the hospital; you’re not on duty here. It’s Christmas vacation anyhow, isn’t it?”

  “Not for you, yet. Where’s Kaarlo?”

  “Hadn’t got home when I left. He said he’d be late.”

  “And when he gets home and finds you not there?”

  “I left him a note, mother hen, saying I was going to stop for Emily and come to the casino. And I’m better, much better, so do stop nagging at me.”

  “One of the reasons you’re better,” Clément said gently, “is exactly because I do keep nagging at you.”

  “Okay, okay,” Gertrude said. “Let’s stop going on about it and have another drink.” She turned to Abe who was talking to Emily about mountain climbing again. “So you were a football hero,” she said, “and I was a fashion writer. Were you as serious when you played football as you are now?”

  “Am I so terribly serious?” Abe asked, smiling.

  “In a nice sort of way. I’d have died rather than be serious in the old days. A much more sensible way of life than the one I’ve fallen into now. Start the day at three or four in the afternoon with cocktails and never to bed before three or four in the morning. Shopping for clothes, going to an opening, laughing at how stupid other people were—Clément, where’s that drink you promised me?”

  “I promised you no drink,” Clément said, “but I’ll get you one.”

  “Oh, God, that was the life,” Gertrude said. “Never having to think of anything more taxing than the latest shade of stockings or the length of a skirt. And could that ever be important!”

  “If that is such an ideal life why don’t you go back to it?” Clé
ment suggested.

  “You know perfectly well that I did,” Gertrude said. “And you know perfectly well that it was a fiasco.”

  “Why was it a fiasco, Gert?” Abe asked gently.

  A waiter put a fresh drink in front of Gertrude and she picked up her glass and downed half of it. “I tried New York first,” she said. “I got my old job back, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. I bought clothes and went to parties.” She looked angrily at Abe. “At one party I went to a woman came up to me and—I do not excuse her because she was high-looked at my concentration camp number branded on my arm and said, ‘Oh, how cute, you have your telephone number on your arm.’” Gertrude hit her hand angrily against the veined marble top of the table. “I found myself hating my own countrymen. It had amused me before, people’s stupidity; I made a damn good living out of it; but all of a sudden it seemed like treason. So I tried going home. To the dear darling family in Watson Falls. I was invited to speak at the Women’s Club. Never never never accept an invitation to speak at a Women’s Club. I tried to tell them about some of my experiences in Ravensbrück—because this, of course, was what they had come for, a vicarious thrill—and how when I was ready to escape I asked some of the other women to go with me, saying: it’s either wait here and die slowly or take a chance of dying quickly and at once. Well. They’re dead now. That’s not the point. What I mean is all those flat, flabby women, those obese ghouls, sat there with their mouths hanging open and I thought that given the same situation they’d all be dead, too. Soft and stupid. All of them.”

  “Is it that bad, Mrs. Bowen?” Clément asked.

  Emily shook her head. “Gertrude’s been hurt and so she’s generalizing. It’s a pretty good country on the whole, and the people in it, too. We have our faults and they may be glaring, and we have individuals we may not be very proud of, but take us by and large we’ll stick our necks out for something we believe in, and that in itself may be a fault, but it’s one I like.”

  “Bravo,” Abe said.

  Gertrude finished her drink. “Emily’s a bluestocking. She reads history for fun. I read anything—except maybe a fashion magazine—because I’m bored with doing nothing and Clément won’t let me do anything that’s fun. After I get well I’ll never read another book.”

  “She underestimates herself,” Clément said in a low voice to Abe as Gertrude began looking around for a waiter to bring her a fresh drink. “One of the greatest excitements of the war for her must have been discovering and utilizing for the first time a really good brain.…”

  “Don’t mumble, Clément,” Gertrude said. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

  “I didn’t intend you to. Shall I walk you home now?”

  “I think I’ll have another drink first.”

  “But I must go now,” Clément said. “I have to stop in at the hospital.”

  “I didn’t think you were on call tonight.”

  “I’m not, technically, but there’s a girl I’d like to look in on.”

  “A girl! Of course it would be a girl!” Gertrude jeered.

  Ignoring her, Clément called for the bill. “Put your coat on,” he said, and held out to Gertrude her white parka.

  “And so I may take you home,” Abe said to Emily.

  She nodded, smiling. “If you would be so kind.”

  “A good doctor, this Clément?”

  “He’s supposed to be one of the best.”

  “I can imagine he might be. Have another drink, darling?”

  “No, thanks. Clément had my glass filled the same time as Gert’s.”

  “Sit with me while I have another beer?”

  “I shouldn’t. The family will be wondering where I am and getting hungrier and hungrier.”

  “Must you go?” Abe asked, only half joking. “Can’t they get their own dinner?”

  She shook her head, laughing. “They’d all starve. In fact they’re probably starving right now. I really must go, Abe.”

  “Just say to hell with them,” Abe suggested. “Say to hell with them and come with me.” She looked at him despairingly, and he said, “But you wouldn’t be my Emily if you did, would you? All right, my darling, if I must wait I must—or lose you entirely isn’t that it? But not much longer. I can’t stand it much longer.” Still she said nothing, and at last he pushed back his chair. “I’ll walk you home.”

  They left the casino and went out into the darkness. They walked without talking and the silence was too important and Emily felt that she must break it. She looked up at the sky and it seemed that Abe had cleared away the clouds because again it was an open night, the mountains like ivory, and the stars crusted thickly over the high black of sky. When she and Courtney had come to the village in the autumn the leaves were still on the trees and the grass was green but they didn’t see the mountains for two weeks. When it wasn’t actually raining the fog was thick about everything and the doors and windows stuck with the damp and the stove smoked and Emily was filled with a blind, frustrated hate for the house, the village, the situation that had plunged them into this place and this winter. And then one morning when she wakened, everything was shining and the mountains were so bright that she couldn’t look at them for more than a second without black streaks dancing wildly against her eyeballs. The trees were still wet from the rain and all the small drops of water glistened. She walked out of the house with Courtney and they stood looking around them and it was as though they had been enclosed inside a shell and the shell had opened, and Courtney, suddenly quiet, had said, “See, this is where we live, the mountains, not the house,” and she had been ashamed. But the shell had closed down about them again and it was only now, searching wildly for something to say to Abe to break the silence, that she remembered that morning and her exaltation and release at the beauty of it, and she tried clumsily to describe it to him.

  But he took her hand and his grip was angry as he said, “Emily, Sam and I are going on Sunday.”

  She fell into silence as abruptly as though she had fallen off a precipice, and Abe went on, “But it’s not the end of this, Emily. There isn’t any point in either of us trying to run away from it. You must stop trying.”

  She could no longer look up at the mountains and the stars. She looked down at her feet as they moved blindly across the snow.

  “I want you so terribly,” Abe said.

  “I want you, too,” she said.

  They kept on holding hands, tighter and tighter, and an American couple passed them, the woman in a mink coat and perfume, and both of them talking and laughing and happy and in a funny, overdone way quite beautiful.

  “I want to be able to walk anywhere with you like that,” Abe said. “I want to tell people that we’re in love. I want to shout it out from the tops of the mountains. I don’t want to have to be casual about you in front of Gertrude de Croisenois or Kaarlo or Michel Clément or anyone.”

  Emily walked along beside him and she could not speak for joy at his words. She forgot that she was walking home to her husband and her children; it was as though she were living a schizophrenic life, part of her completely for Courtney and the children, part of her never torn from them for a moment, part of her wife and mother as she had always been; and part of her with Abe, soaring wildly and ecstatically with Abe.

  “I ought to feel guilty about you,” she said at last. “I ought to feel that all this is wrong.”

  “It is not wrong,” Abe said.

  “No. I know.” And then: “Oh, Abe, what we think we are and what we are are often two completely different people and it’s impossible for us to see where one leaves off and the other begins. When I think about myself I don’t feel as though I were a—a sinful woman. And yet I—if someone were telling me about me I wouldn’t like me very much. I wouldn’t be very tolerant. I’ve never thought much of wives who’ve played around with other men. Or even people who for one reason or another have simply flouted conventions. I haven’t been—I haven’t been very tolerant in
my thoughts about Gertrude.”

  “But you are not Gertrude,” Abe said. “You must never make the mistake of confusing yourself with Gertrude, Emily.”

  “I don’t think it’s a mistake,” she said slowly. “It’s just that we don’t like to look in mirrors and see ourselves the way we really are. Have you ever been walking down a street and suddenly caught a glimpse of your reflection in a store window and not recognized yourself at first? And then you think, oh, no, that can’t be me—that’s sort of what happens when I’m talking or thinking about Gert and suddenly it’s myself I’m catching a reflection of in the glass.”

  “No, Emily,” Abe said sternly. “You and Gertrude might have come from two different planets; your codes of behavior bear no resemblance whatsoever to each other. Don’t let your feelings about Gertrude’s code confuse or influence you. You are making up your own mind about this, not Gertrude’s.”

  “If it were Gert’s mind it would be a lot easier,” Emily said.

  “Yes, and not nearly as important. And it is important, darling, isn’t it?”

  She nodded mutely.

  Now they had passed the lights of the village and the snow about them gleamed in the starlight. Up ahead of them the lights from the villa fell across the snow. Abe stopped and put his hands on Emily’s shoulders and looked down at her and she knew that nobody had ever looked at her that way before and that there were no words to express it.

  They stood there and then they started walking again, very slowly, and Abe said, “All I know is that this is good. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me. I have fallen in love with you and I am happy. At this moment that is all that matters.” He drew her into the shelter of the shadows and kissed her.

  Virginia walked through the lighted streets with Mimi and when Mimi spoke she did not hear. She clutched the bag of pistachio ice cream to her and stepped carefully into the warm splash of light spilled from the windows of the charcuterie, throwing comfort out against the cold dark of night. She was not with Mimi, she was not bringing ice cream home for dinner, she was not a schoolgirl. It was winter in another time and her coat and hat were of fur and her eyes dark ringed and shadowed and beside her walked someone: who? Not Mimi. Someone shadowy and strong. And they were together for the last night—for how long? They did not know. Perhaps forever. Tomorrow she would enter the sanatorium, but she would leave with him the manuscript of her latest book, her greatest book, and he would publish it, yes, that was it, he was her publisher—so that if she died young, if this was farewell forever, at least she would have left her mark, she would be in the company of how many others? Keats, of course, his splendor falling from castle walls. (But that was Tennyson, wasn’t it?) And Chekhov. Chekhov drank champagne on his deathbed and they would drink champagne tonight, and she would remind him about Chekhov and they would laugh because never would she allow anything to destroy the gaiety of her beauty. And there was Katherine Mansfield coughing blood alone in small sad hotels and London flats. And Mozart with his music fluid and gay as lighted fountains.