by May Sarton
A Reckoning
A Novel
May Sarton
Chapter I
Walking down Marlboro Street in Boston, Laura Spelman saw the low brick houses, the strong blue sky, the delicate shape of the leafless trees, even the dirty lumps of snow along the curb as so piercing in their beauty that she felt a little drunk. She now knew that she was panting not because she was overweight, but because her lungs had been attacked. “I shan’t need to diet, after all.” The two blocks she had to walk from Jim Goodwin’s office seemed long. She stopped twice to catch her breath before she reached her little car. Safely inside, she sat there for a few moments sorting out the jumble of feelings her interview with Dr. Goodwin had set whirling. The overwhelming one was a strange excitement, as though she were more than usually alive, awake, and in command: I am to have my own death. I can play it my own way. He said two years, but they always give you an outside figure, and my guess is at most a year. A year, one more spring, one more summer. … I’ve got to do it well. I’ve got to think.
She needed to get home as fast as possible. She started off, swinging out into the street so quickly a passing taxi nearly hit her. “In your own way, Laura, you idiot!” she said aloud. “Sudden death on Marlboro Street would never do!”
A half hour later she was standing at her own front door in Lincoln, fumbling for the key, and greeted by excited barks from inside. For the first time since Dr. Goodwin’s verdict she froze, immobilized by a sharp pain in her chest, but the barking was hysterical now and she finally found the keyhole, opened the door, and knelt down to hug Grindle, the old sheltie, and to accept his moist tongue licking her face, licking the tears away as he had done when Charles died.
“Oh, Grindle, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?” Leaving Grindle and Sasha, the cat, was going to be the worst.
“Grindle,” she said severely, “I’ve got to get over this right now. Stop licking, and I’ll stop crying.”
Sensing the change of tone, Grindle went and curled up in his bed, the pricked ears following her movements as she stumbled to her feet.
She went to the kitchen, poured herself a glass of claret, and took it into the library where she put a Mozart flute concerto on the player. She lay down on the sofa with her hands behind her head and reasoned it out. Grindle would go to Brooks and Ann, her son and daughter-in-law. Their children loved him. Sasha, shy and intense—what about her?
There were going to be some things so awful she must begin now to learn how to set them aside. One part of her being was going to have to live only in the present, as she did when Sasha jumped up and began to knead her chest. Laura pushed her off to one side where loud purrs vibrated all along her thigh. She felt herself sinking down, down into the music, the flute calling like a celestial bird with a thousand songs instead of only one in its silver throat. While she listened, she absorbed the brilliance of the light, light reflected from snow outside so that the room itself was bathed in a cool fire. Grindle gave a long sigh as he fell asleep in his corner, and Laura felt joy rising, filling her to the brim, yet not overflowing. What had become almost uncontrollable grief at the door seemed now a blessed state. It was not a state she could easily define in words. But it felt like some extraordinary dance, the dance of life itself, of atoms and molecules, that had never been as beautiful or as poignant as at this instant, a dance that must be danced more carefully and with greater fervor to the very end.
Poor Mamma, she thought, sitting up. She has been deprived of this. She is stumbling to her death, only half-conscious, if conscious at all, of what is going on. Her attachments now are only to those who serve her, Mary whom she hates and Annabelle whom she loves—ambivalent to the end.
Laura pulled herself back from those thoughts of her mother, so terribly grand—and so terrible, thoughts that always had mixed her up, made her feel uncentered, at a loss. Lay them aside now, Laura, you’ll never solve that mystery before you die.
I shall have to tell Jo—and Daphne, of course. But Jo, the eldest of the three sisters, was the stumbling block: powerful, blunt Jo, wrapped up in her job; she had late in her life taken over the presidency of a small women’s college. She repeated these facts about Jo, turning them over in her mind. No, she wouldn’t tell Jo for a while. Besides, was there a real connection?
Here the record stopped. Without music, the house, the room where she sat became suddenly empty. I’m not scared exactly, but if there is no real connection with my sister, who is there? What is there? Only now did the full impact of Dr. Goodwin’s verdict reach Laura, and she began to shake. Her hands were ice-cold. Fear had replaced the strange elation she had felt at first, and she rose and paced up and down, then leaned her forehead against the icy window for a moment. I’m not ready, she thought, I can’t do it alone. But I want to do it alone, something deep down answered. And even deeper down she knew that she would have to do it alone. Dying—no one talked about it. We are not prepared. We come to it in absolute ignorance. But even as the tears splashed down on her hands, or perhaps because their flow had dissolved the awful tension of fear, Laura felt relief. After all, she told herself, we meet every great experience in ignorance … being born, falling in love, bearing a first child. … always there is terror first.
In the few seconds of silence it had become clear that she was going to have to reckon with almost everything in a new way. “It is then to be a reckoning.” And Laura realized that at this moment she felt closer to Mozart and Chekov than she did to her own sister. “I shall not pretend that this is not so. There isn’t time. The time I have left is for the real connections.”
The real connections? The question aroused such strange answers, all beating their wings in her mind, that she lay back again and waited for all this to quiet down or sort itself out.
Tell the children? No, not yet. Ben, so far away in California, struggling with his painting; Brooks still taking his father’s death hard, that sudden death only three years ago; Daisy in New York with her lover, working long hours. But Laura knew she would have to tell Brooks and Ann pretty soon—they lived only a mile away. The children—the last thing she wanted or needed was to think about them, though she was leaving them in the lurch, of course. But I just can’t cope with all that today, she thought. Family. I’m not asked to cope with it today.
Disposing of the house, things, money, lawyers—oh, dear, she had thought only of dying with grace, of making a good death, but not of all the affairs involved, the decisions! Tomorrow—not today.
Today, “the real connections.”
Chapter II
What were the real connections? It was startling to see suddenly that in a strange way they had dropped out after her marriage because there appeared to have been no time and little energy for the kind of exploration in depth that she had found in the intense friendships of her youth—especially with Ella, the incomparable Ella of the year in Paris at the Sorbonne. But was it only that Ella was extraordinary, a kind of spiritual twin, or was it that adult life consumes the wide margins of time in which such relationships flourish? For they demand endless hours of talk, and when is there time later on?
When the children were small and she and Charles could snatch a moment together late at night, they had talked about how family life absorbs everything for years. Certain phrases came back to haunt: “We hardly ever see anyone anymore.” “I never have time to write a letter even.” “It’s rather like being on a desert island with three wildly energetic lunatics.” They had laughed about it, sitting by the fire with the ritual night cap before they fell into bed and curled round each other, too tired for another word.
It is the whole inner world, Laura thought, that gets absorbed as life itself pulls us away from contemplation into action. As Laura considered
all this she felt deprived. Yet when the children had left home, she had not chosen to read and think, nor had she even gone to England for a long visit with Ella as she had imagined she might. She had instead gotten herself a job at Houghton Mifflin, first to write jacket material and do odd jobs, then as copy editor, and finally in the last few years as one of the fiction editors. It had been a rewarding job, stretching her mind and her heart, and there had been real connections with her authors, intense while they lasted, while a book was being worked on, but not lasting, not to be built on in a permanent sense. There had, really, been little time for friends. Charles worked hard at the bank and was often away for meetings in New York and Washington. So, even though they were asked out to dinner two or three times a week and had people in, “real connections” in the way she saw them now had been few.
In the last few years Charles had been the only person with whom she shared her life on the deepest level, and—equally important—on the most trivial; but because he was a man there were areas of her being that she could not share with him. He was not good about discussing feelings, for instance.
Only with Ella, when they were young, had Laura been able to discuss why it was so hard to be a woman, their fears and resentments at being caught up in a web of sensuality they didn’t want or understand. Sex at that time in their lives had been too frightening, too much of a muddle—Ella’s word, “muddle”—and the cause sometimes of gusts of laughter when they talked about their fumbling, embarrassed response to any overtures from the men who took them dancing. They had been fighting, Laura supposed, to achieve some sense of identity before being swept up into someone else’s needs and desires. “Why does Ed want to kiss me when he doesn’t even know me as a person?” Ella had cried out. And why did these memories of that painful land of innocence come back now with such force? For they had been almost incredibly innocent, prepared in no way to take pleasure in their own bodies. All bodily functions were treated as faintly disagreeable by Sybille, of course. Anything below the waist one pretended not to notice! But even as Laura smiled, she recognized the aura of sensuality, of passion even, that had surrounded her and Ella, although it was never played out except in those ravishing kisses they pretended were “quite all right.” About that they did not talk. It might have been dangerous.
The sensuality had remained a buried treasure, a secret world, for soon enough Ella had married, and Laura had spent two years in bed in Switzerland with TB. And after that, Charles, dear Charles who had taken her finally out of Sybille’s power, had set her free, given her a body to rejoice in, lifted her out into real life at last.
When Charles died Laura realized—and it had been painful—that a good marriage shuts out a very great deal; she became for months simply what was left of another person, what was left of “two together.” It had been painful to discover that invitations to dinner parties became fewer and fewer, and she herself, without Charles, no longer wanted to make the effort. For months she had been stranded in a limbo of grief and loss, making a desperate struggle to come to terms with what was left of her self. Without the children it would have been absolute desolation—without her sister, Daphne, who came and stayed for a month, without Aunt Minna to whom she could run for shelter whenever she felt the tide of grief rising too high.
At that time Grindle began to sleep on Laura’s bed. He was quite hard to lift, but he was huggable and gave her the physical warmth she needed most of all. Those were the nights she ached in every bone of her body for Charles, tossed and turned in her bed, as though she would never rest again, and patient Grindle got up, turned around, and flopped down again with a groan of pleasure beside her. Sometimes Sasha leaped in through the open window and lay down on the other side. Sometimes then they all three slept till dawn, when Laura woke with lead in her limbs, wondering how to meet another day, turned on the light, and read whatever manuscript Houghton Mifflin had given her to work on.
“What am I going to tell them?” Since Charles’s death Laura found she talked aloud to herself or to Grindle. She was working now on a rather interesting book, a novel by a young woman who was wrestling with a difficult subject, clearly autobiographical, about a young Lesbian facing the problem of how to deal with her parents and their violent opposition to her life-style. Laura had really wished to help this author, to make the book as good as it might be. Harriet Moors was not going to be easy to help, she surmised. There was too much pain, too much conflict, here. And would there be time?
“Do I want to go on working?” Laura asked herself. “How can I know? How can I know what it’s going to be like?”
She supposed she must either withdraw into dying or live her life as well as she could until she had to give up. “Dying is living, and living is dying, Grindle.” Yes, the point was to give up the nonessential, but to hold fast to the essential—and Laura felt sure she could go her way for a few weeks without anyone’s knowing. She had taken a few days off with the excuse that she had some sort of virus, and in fact that was how she had explained to herself the lassitude and strange, stifled feeling in her chest. Next week she would go back to the office.
That decision came easy; on the strength of it she got up and made herself a sandwich and a cup of tea. “It’s all in God’s hands, Grindle,” she said, taking a cheese biscuit out of the box for the dog who had followed her into the kitchen. It’s because our relations with animals are so simple that they are such a comfort, she thought. No neurotic hostilities and angers in Grindle’s eyes; for him cheese biscuits were the be-all and end-all for the moment.
This, Laura decided, was to be a day of just such simple being. After lunch she took Grindle for a walk, delighted as always by the intensity with which he followed his nose, emitting sharp barks as he discovered the scent of a skunk or raccoon and went tearing off, up and down through snowdrifts, and back to her to bark his news.
When they returned it was nearly three, and the light was already fading as the sun dipped behind tall pines at the end of the field. Inside, the house was dark, the winter chill creeping in. Laura lit the fire before going to her desk and pulling out Harriet Moors’ novel.
She had forgotten everything in her absorption in the text before her and was startled when the phone rang. It was Aunt Minna, asking what the doctor had said. Taken by surprise, Laura was unable to answer coherently.
“May I come over, Aunt Minna?” she managed to ask after bumbling along about “nothing serious.”
“Of course, dear. I’ll have tea ready by the time you get here. Dress warmly, won’t you? It’s cold out.”
There was no one else in the world who would remind her to dress warmly, no one else who had known her as a child, Laura thought, as she wrapped a scarf round her throat and put on her duffle. And there was no house now that had remained as it always was except Aunt Minna’s white cottage behind its picket fence. It looked very much like the other houses on the street, and its unpretentious faded velvet Victorian sofas and chairs, its sepia photographs of olive groves in Italy, were probably not unlike those in the other houses; but the spirit that inhabited this house was unique. Minna Hornaday, Laura’s father’s sister, had always been a maverick, the odd one in a solid, conservative family, her brother, a foreign service officer in the State Department, and she a sui generis political force without official position—“a persuasive lunatic” her brother called her when she fought for the League of Nations and later helped organize the League of Women Voters. She ended up as a radical pacifist and antiwar agitator during Vietnam.
But Aunt Minna was more than her activities, more interesting. She had a genius for friendship, for touching people of all ages, for being able to communicate vividly and instantly across the barriers of age, language, class with anyone and everyone. She had a freshness, a zest for life, an expectant innocence that is the province of old maids of authentic genius.
Only since her eightieth birthday had there been the slightest diminution of energy. She wore a hearing aid now, but her g
ray eyes were as penetrating as ever. She still walked to town on good days, carrying a cane which she waved at oncoming cars, delighted to stop the traffic all by herself. She still resisted the idea of any live-in help. An elderly cleaning woman came twice a week and did some laundry as well as dusting around, but Minna declared that the very idea of someone’s lurking about the house all day and fussing at her when she did risky things, like climbing the ladder to get a book from the top shelf of her study, “would induce nervous breakdown or murder in a week.”
Laura had opened the gate and run up the porch steps many times with some problem only Aunt Minna could possibly understand, but this time was different. She stood inside the gate for several moments, totally at sea as to how to tell Aunt Minna, or whether to tell her at all. But then the door opened, and Aunt Minna called out, “Hurry up, Laura, don’t just stand there. You’ll catch your death!”
Laura smiled at the irony of this and closed the gate behind her. Then there was the bustle of getting off coat and boots, admiring the pink cyclamen—“from an admirer,” Aunt Minna said with a twinkle, “that boy who comes to shovel the path. He’s quite a dear, borrows books, and loves to discuss things”—and settling down on the sofa with a cup of hot tea and a cookie beside her on the little table.
“You’re out of breath,” Aunt Minna observed, giving her a sharp look. “What did that young Dr. Goodwin say? He really seems awfully young to me. Do you think he knows his business?”
“Yes,” Laura said, glad to embark on a subject other than her own state of health, “I think he’s a good doctor, and humane.”
“These viruses are devilish. Nothing seems to help but rest and patience. But who can rest these days? Still, you are a lot more patient than I am!”
But Laura could not respond. She felt frozen before the enormity of her news, locked into it, unable to extricate herself. Why had she ever come?
