A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  “Of course you must think about it, and with your permission I would like one of the young men on the staff to read it, and then perhaps we could have a joint meeting and talk about it again.”

  Harriet frowned. “I’m not ready for that yet.”

  “I didn’t mean to push you. Perhaps I’ve said too much.”

  “No, please tell me the other thing. You said just now, ‘one of the things that troubles me.’”

  “It’s that you simply must make the reader appreciate that this relationship between the two young women is real and deep. You walk all around it, give us all the periphery, but never take us to the center.”

  “I can’t write about sex.”

  “I don’t mean sex. In fact that might not work at all, even if you could. What we need is to believe that this is a possible long-term relationship, important enough so that Perry and Joan have to talk about it with Joan’s parents and with Perry’s mother.”

  “Of course. I thought I had made that clear.”

  “Young writers are so afraid of being obvious that rather often they simply don’t tell the reader enough.”

  “I thought I had … that scene on the beach …”

  “Well, would your own parents, for instance, understand what was really happening there, if they read it and it was not your book?”

  Harriet laughed. “I guess not!”

  Dinah now looked in, protectively.

  “It’s all right, Dinah.”

  When the door had closed again, Laura explained,

  “I’ve got one of those low-grade viruses that hangs on. Dinah is afraid I’ll collapse.”

  “I’d better go,” said Harriet—with relief, Laura thought, watching her swing her pouch over her shoulder as she got up.

  “It’s my first day back, and I do feel rather shaky. I hope you don’t feel depressed? Have I said too much? That’s always a danger, the danger of trying to write someone else’s book.”

  “I’ve got to think,” Harriet said. “I guess I had hoped the work was done—it’s rather awful to have to go back.”

  “Why don’t we let Alan read it and see what he says? Maybe I’m all wrong.”

  “Alan scares me.”

  “He’s really a dear as well as a perspicacious and kind reader. And he’s much younger than I. I have an idea he can help.”

  “All right,” Harriet said reluctantly.

  The phone on Laura’s desk rang, and she picked up the receiver while Harriet stood rather awkwardly at the door. “Yes, this is Laura Spelman … I’m very sorry, but I’ve been out of the office for a week. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can … a month, you say? I’m terribly sorry, but I’m sure the manuscript only reached my desk ten days ago.… No, I’m not giving you the runaround. Good-by, Mr. Winter.” Laura banged the receiver down. “What a rude young man!”

  “I was luckier,” Harriet smiled.

  “Yours is not a seven-hundred-page historical romance!” Harriet, obviously cheered by the downing of Winter, said, “Good-by then … and you’ll let me know what Alan says.”

  “Good-by, and don’t worry. Let it simmer.”

  The door closed. Laura sat there, looking out the window. She did feel tired, but in a not unpleasant way, as though she were floating, suspended above the public gardens in a dream. Would she be able to see Harriet through before—well, that was not her option. She had liked the girl. Harriet Moors had really listened and taken the criticism with grace. None of the screaming and howling about the Great Untouchable Work that Laura had suffered from more than one beginner. Harriet clearly did not think of herself as a genius, and that was a good sign. Too bad I forgot all about ordering sandwiches, Laura thought … but she let that fall, too.

  Everything except to sit here for a while seemed too great an effort. And so she floated, unable to fend off the memories of Jo that summer in Genoa, shutting herself up in her room for hours to play jazz records, and their mother, flaming sword of righteousness cutting a life in two—so it had seemed to Jo—without a qualm. Why hadn’t their father intervened? For the simple reason, Laura imagined, that he too had been persuaded by Sybille that the wild Alicia was a “bad influence” that had to be removed for all their sakes. Did she never have any doubt, Laura asked herself, did Sybille ever wonder years later whether she had not really murdered Jo rather than the fatal Alicia? For Alicia, tempestuous, beautiful Alicia, had gone on her way, weeping gallons of tears for weeks, and then no doubt falling in love with someone else. She had finally married after all, married into the Roman aristocracy. Laura had come across a photograph of her years later, looking as seductive as ever at some charity ball, Jo by then one of how many brief episodes in her life? But for Jo it had been like a long illness about which she confided in no one; and when it was over she had apparently decided that passionate love was simply too painful and that she would never allow herself to feel as much again for anyone.

  Sybille called her “my little owl” and shipped her off to Radcliffe where she graduated summa cum laude and went on to get a doctorate, plunged into the academic world with no doubts that it was where she belonged. She took to work like an alcoholic to the bottle, brilliant, effective—and cold. Power had appeared to be a satisfactory substitute for love, in her case. Did Sybille never see that? She seemed so proud of Jo, even to the point of subtly denigrating Laura and her all-too-ordinary marriage and life in the suburbs.

  Mothers and daughters, not the easiest of relationships, Laura reminded herself. For after all, she too had a daughter, single-minded, uncontrollable Daisy! And now in her floating state she set them side by side—Sybille, Laura, Daisy—a puzzling sequence. At least she could say that she had never forced Daisy to give up a love affair, go to college, or do anything except what Daisy wished to do.

  Daisy simply didn’t want to be part of the family at all, had left home with a knapsack in the mid-sixties intending, as she announced, to discover America. She had worked as a waitress in Montana, then found her way to Seattle, and finally back to New York. In ten years she had come home three times, full of marvelous tales of her adventures, her always brief love affairs, and her determination to be free of any commitment. She had come home to be argued with, to be spoiled a little, to be given boots and jeans and a clean jacket, and then she had left again.

  “What is she?” Charles said, “a tramp! Our daughter is a tramp!”

  Laura had always said and believed that Daisy would settle down eventually, and in a way she had done so. She was living now with a man whom she was helping to support through medical school by being a secretary for an architectural firm. It was not exactly Sybille’s idea of a life-style, but curiously enough Sybille and Daisy had some kind of intuitive understanding and acceptance of each other. Daisy had been outraged when the family decided together that Sybille must be in a nursing home. She had come back for a weekend to fight it out with Laura and her sisters and had made a terribly painful scene. “Why can’t you have her here? It’s a big house!” she had shouted. “Why can’t Aunt Jo have her? Aunt Jo isn’t even married!”

  “She doesn’t know where she is,” Jo had answered quietly. “You don’t understand. Your grandmother is no longer sane or herself. What she needs is hospital care.” Would Daisy come home now for her own mother? Of course not, Laura said to herself. I wouldn’t want it.

  It had not been wise to allow herself to float into this particular configuration—Sybille, Laura, Daisy—it was too complicated, too unresolved altogether. If dying was to be a reliving of her entire life, Laura wondered for the first time whether she had the courage.

  “It’s just that I’m tired,” she thought, “and I’d better go home to Grindle and Sasha”—those two creatures, outside memory and outside time, who brought her back to the eternal present, the present of saints and animals. Yes, she would take that young man’s huge tome with her and not move for the rest of the day.

  She stopped at Dinah’s office, her briefcase packed. “Din
ah, I’m going home.”

  “For heaven’s sake, get some rest, Laura. You look awfully pale.”

  “Everything takes it out of me. It’s so stupid.”

  “Maybe you should have some help, someone to take care of you for a week or so.”

  “Oh, no.” Laura said passionately, like a child begging to be allowed to stay downstairs for another hour. “I couldn’t bear that.”

  “Well, let me at least carry that heavy briefcase to your car.”

  “Thanks.” To her surprise Laura was grateful for the offer, and it occurred to her that this was the beginning of something she was going to have to learn, little by little—to accept help, to be dependent.

  Chapter IV

  Laura made herself an eggnog with a teaspoon of brandy in it—shades of Aunt Minna!—and lay down, so tired suddenly that she found it hard to lift the glass. Grindle was outdoors, disappointed that she had not suggested a walk as she would normally have done. He will have to get used to fewer walks, she thought, and then none. If only it were not the dead of winter, she might have asked Laurie, her granddaughter, to bicycle over after school and walk him, but the roads were too dangerous now. Anyway, she had not even told Brooks and Ann that she was ill. Now she would lie here quietly and perhaps later on get at that manuscript.

  Sasha jumped up and woke Laura out of a doze. She was determined to knead thoroughly and then lie on Laura’s chest, but the weight was stifling, so Laura pushed her gently down, took a swallow of eggnog, and looked around at this familiar room, at the bookcases lined with vermilion, at the corner cupboard Charles had given her as a birthday present soon after they moved to Lincoln, where various treasures were stored: blue beads from Greece, a miniature copy of the Swiss chalet Sybille had rented for Christmas holidays when they were in Genoa, some beautiful Chinese plates that had fallen to Laura when the three daughters broke up their mother’s house on Beacon Hill, as had the opulent dark blue Oriental rug. Laura let her eyes rest gratefully on all this beauty and order. Then Grindle barked to be let in; Sasha jumped down, not liking to be disturbed. As she opened the door and Grindle ran in, his tail wagging, his ears bent down in their tender way, she got the full blast of cold air. That, or something else, changed the mood radically.

  For the first time since her visit to Jim Goodwin, she was invaded by panic; she knelt down to hug the dog, torn by the parting—when? How much time did she have? And how could she be ready?

  “Oh, Grindle,” she said, getting up now, “it’s a lonely business, dying.” Dying—the word brought on a flood of tears. “How am I ever going to do it, Grindle?”

  And what if cobalt or chemotherapy could give her a few months’ respite? Laura stood at the windows looking out at tree shadows on the blue snow and shook her head. No—no—no—she admonished herself. It was not death she was afraid of, not death that caused that tremor in her bones, but dying.

  On an impulse she went to the bookcase and looked for George Herbert’s poems. It was years since she had looked at them, years since poetry had been a living part of her life. She opened the battered book she had bought in London long before her marriage.

  I will complain, yet praise;

  I will bewail, approve:

  And all my sour-sweet days

  I will lament, and love.

  The sweetness of it, like pure water from a well! And the pang, too, for Herbert had had such an intimate relation with his God, could carry on these loving arguments, this praise in absolute assurance that someone heard.

  Invention rest;

  Comparisons go play; wit use thy will:

  Less than the least

  Of all God’s mercies, is my posy still.

  Laura lay down with the book open on her lap, reading here and there the familiar poems, familiar and strange. When they were children, their mother had loved to read them poems, had also every evening come to say a prayer with each child. But had Sybille herself really believed? Or was even that intimate prayer a scene she played?

  People of my generation, Laura throught, lived in an empty universe, more and more frightening as it became more huge and the concept of a personal God next to impossible to accept. What took its place, she supposed, was some vague idea that the cosmos was rational, every part of creation from ameoba to man part of a design far beyond our knowledge or imagination. One could believe one was an organic part of the universe, and that was why she felt so strongly that man, attempting to change the flow, to alter the design for his own purposes, missed the point. This, she suddenly saw clearly, was why she had said so passionately to Dr. Goodwin that she wanted her own death. She wanted to be part of a natural process, unimpeded. But was a cancer natural? If only Charles were alive, and we could talk about it! Charles had a way of getting right to the center of things; none of that intellectual embroidery Sybille indulged in. “Your mother is a siren,” he sometimes had said, “a highly imaginative, undisciplined siren … and perhaps rather dangerous, for she believes in her own song while she is singing it.” Charles had treated Sybille with a slightly amused deference, and they had got on very well.

  Laura pulled herself out of these thoughts by opening her briefcase. She took one look at the heavy manuscript and laid it on a chair. In that second of dread and dismay before an effort that she did not want to make, she decided that she would not read it at all. She would make some excuse. For whatever dying of cancer may mean, she thought, it does not mean that I have to do anything now that is done merely for duty’s sake. Lying and looking at the light marbling the white walls had meaning. The talk with Harriet had had meaning—and Laura was glad she had been able to manage it. It had meaning because deep in her own life as well as Jo’s loving a woman had had its part.

  Harriet’s honesty, her troubled, troubling way of dealing with all this in a novel, was relevant. It had brought back vivid memories, so much that must be sorted out. Laura went to her desk and hauled out three big bundles of Ella’s letters, tied up in string; then she sat with them before her and did not untie them. It had to be done, sooner or later, but for today she pushed them aside, just glancing at the lightning hand that wrote as though the pen could never move fast enough for the racing thoughts and feelings. Ella’s slim figure in a pale blue coat her mother had had made for her at Redfern in Paris—how Laura had admired Ella’s style!—was so vividly before her, there was no need to open a single letter. Ella was a born scholar, and that surely I never was, Laura remembered. While Ella worked furiously hard, her light often on after midnight, Laura came back to the pension from the theater or a concert, walking great distances alone through the Paris streets, then running up the strairs to knock at Ella’s door. They poked up the fire. They sat on cushions on the floor and talked sometimes till dawn, talked about their parents, their sisters or brothers (Ella had two brothers at Oxford at that time), about Dostoevsky whom they were just discovering, and Shakespeare versus Racine, about Proust whom Laura was reading with the passion of a drug addict for his drug, about the theater, which was rich in those years of Dullin, Maguérite Jamois, Pierre Renoir, Lugné-Poë at the Oeuvre—and above all talked about what they wanted to be and to do with their lives. “I’ll never marry,” Ella had announced, but it was she who married first after all!—and believed years later that it had been a mistake, that she had been so jealous of her brothers and the secret joys of their lives that she had married one of their friends, partly to get inside a man’s world, to be accepted as a person in her own right, and instead had felt she was merely and forever Hugh’s wife, the wife of an Oxford don.

  Laura still remembered how forlorn she had felt as bridesmaid at the wedding, and how much an outsider in the little church at Fernwall, the family estate in Kent. I’ll never get over it, she had thought, it will never be the same again, now Ella is married. “Has gone and gotten married” was her phrase, as though Ella had left for the moon! Then, standing with the others, watching the car drive off and having perhaps drunk a little too much champagne,
Laura had fled to her room and wept, wishing passionately that she could have taken Ella into her arms and held her as her husband now would, and keep her forever.

  The phone rang, the imperious present summoning her back, and she heard Aunt Minna’s voice.

  “Oh, Aunt Minna, dear—”

  “You sound very far away.”

  “Well,” Laura laughed, “I was in what used to be called a brown study—why ‘brown’ I cannot imagine.”

  “And that means what?”

  “Means I was sitting here at my desk thinking about Ella Worthington. I want her to know what is happening to me—you and she, and no one else for the time being.”

  “I tried to reach you this morning. There was no answer.”

  “I went to the office and had a long talk with a young woman who has written rather a good novel.”

  “I feel depressed,” Aunt Minna announced quite crossly.

  “I upset you, didn’t I? I’m awfully sorry.”

  “Upset me? It was an earthquake. I didn’t sleep a wink.”

  “O, dear! Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”

  “Of course not. I just can’t accept it and I never will.”

  Laura felt incapable of arguing about anything at this point, and, rather cruelly, cut the conversation short by saying that she wanted to write Ella and would call back before supper. Other people were going to be the hardest part of all this, but at least Aunt Minna would come right out with whatever she felt, no holds barred. Laura smiled. “I tell her I’m dying of cancer, and she takes it as a personal affront.”

  But it was healthy. Laura had sometimes felt that the only thing life asks of us is to know what we feel and to come out with it. Exaggerated? Perhaps, but she had come to believe that Sybille’s destructiveness as well as her power had come from not knowing what her real feelings were. When she had been so brutal about Alicia, was it not that she feared the same attraction to a woman in her own past? For Sybille had had passionate friendships all her life, with both men and women—passionate in the mind. The faithful wife personified who nonetheless played dangerous games with “friends,” that series of glamorous, famous men and women whom she attracted, who were, each of them for a year or two, the great person, to be feted, and entertained, and invited for long private talks—quite unaware, too, of the cynical and perhaps jealous eyes of her three daughters, who observed these infatuations and could never be entirely persuaded of the “greatness” thrust upon them.