A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  “I’m an editor, not a psychiatrist. You are asking me questions I can’t possibly answer.” Then Laura, seeing the dismay she had caused, added quickly, “But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand. I think you’re in a horribly painful dilemma. I don’t know what to say about it. I can understand better, though, why you thought of an assumed name. Maybe that is the solution, after all.”

  “Now it seems to me cowardly. Sooner or later I’ve got to face myself and not be ashamed. Besides, people find out.” And she murmured half to herself, “Even if I did use another name, Fern would be terrified.”

  “It sounds to me as though Fern has some problems of her own. People pay a high price, I think, for leading a life they are not willing to live publicly.”

  “But it hasn’t been possible. I mean, you lose your job. You are treated as a pariah. What I can’t stand is the whole sexual bit, the way people look at you. And you know all they are interested in is what you do in bed. It’s horrible!”

  “You are very good about that in your novel. The reader is aware that the relation between the two women is real, not a matter of experimenting or of mere sexual adventure, or whatever. One reason I felt that we would want to publish is that the time has come for works of art that will deal with all this naturally and without sensationalism. If I may say so, the classics in the field—I am thinking of Nightwood—make the homosexual unsavory to put it mildly.”

  “So you really believe my book has value.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Oh, dear …” Harriet sighed again. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then took a swallow of wine.

  Laura laughed. “Maybe it would have been more helpful to say the book was not very good, after all!”

  “Then I could throw it away?” Harriet frowned. “I guess I couldn’t whatever you said or thought. I don’t think I’m a genius, but I know I have to write the way a fish has to swim.”

  “I think you are a real writer. I’ve been in rather a crisis myself lately, but your book has stayed with me. I go back to it in my mind. That’s one test for me of whether a work of art is truly alive. Does it take on a life of its own in the reader’s imagination? The atmosphere—you are very good at creating psychological atmosphere. The choking reality of the parents’ house, you do that very well.”

  “Oh, God, my parents!”

  At that cri de coeur, Laura and Harriet burst into laughter. It was a shared laughter, and it had to do with how ludicrous and horrible life could be, at times beyond coping with.

  Then Harriet got up and stood by the fireplace, obviously feeling at ease. “How lucky your son is to have you!”

  “And his father,” Laura said. “My husband was amazingly wise in dealing with Ben—of course it helped that Brooks, our eldest, was all a father could wish.”

  “Can’t people just be people? You say ‘dealing with’?”—

  “Yes—well, it’s going to take a long time to get over our ideas of what ought to be. It’s the same thing with women. I was happily married, but when Charles died I became aware that other people really had thought of me as Charles’s wife. That’s why the job at Houghton Mifflin was such a help. There, at least, I was Laura Spelman, a person in my own right.”

  “Was it hard—at first, I mean—hard to be a person all by yourself?”

  “I felt cut in two. For months I really had no identity. Getting a meal was next to impossible, I lived on egg-nogs.” What am I doing, talking to this girl like this? Laura thought. Is that what one martini does now?

  “Please go on …”

  “Well, frankly, I think I’d better call it a day, Harriet.”

  “Yes, of course. I know you’ve been ill—I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”

  “It’s just, I do get rather weak in the knees.”

  Grindle now emerged from the kitchen where Laura feared he had eaten the cat’s dinner, but at least he, eager to be caressed, barking his welcome to Harriet, made her departure easier than it might have been.

  “We haven’t settled anything,” Laura said, helping Harriet on with her coat.

  “No, but it’s been a great help to talk to you. I’ll have to go home now and think about it.”

  “Don’t hesitate to call if you get into a tizzy.”

  Laura nodded her head reassuringly.

  “Good-by, Harriet, and good luck.”

  Laura watched the girl walk slowly down the path. She waved, but Harriet started the engine and drove off without looking back.

  “Where’s your cat?” Laura asked Grindle, who barked and wanted to go out. “Very well, out you go—and bring Sasha back with you if you can.”

  She went back to her chair and the empty glass. It would not be a bad idea to put another log on the fire, but she did not have quite the energy to do it. She sat for a while looking into the crimson, dying flame. She sat there until the fire died and the chill forced her to do something about dinner. The aftereffect of Harriet’s visit was a huge emptiness that she did not know how to fill.

  Chapter VIII

  Next morning Laura woke at six out of a bad dream. She was being smothered under a quilt and couldn’t extricate herself. “Oh, Grindle,” she murmured, reaching out to find his soft ears, “oh …” She was afraid if she moved quickly she would have a coughing spell, but she had to sit up to breathe. And Grindle, whom she had waked out of a sound sleep, now of course wanted to go out. Sasha was sitting on the window sill. God knows the animals asked little enough, yet how long would she be able to take care of them? Then she remembered Mary O’Brien. It was a relief to know there would be someone soon. Meanwhile she got up, struggled into a dressing gown, and stumbled downstairs with Grindle trying to get past her.

  “There,” she said, “out you go!”

  So far, no coughing spell. She got some juice and went back to bed, sitting up now, with three pillows behind her. It was a gray dawn and the air had smelled of snow when she opened the door. She would just lie here for a while, she thought, and do what came most easily these days, drift off down the long, winding rivers of consciousness that always seemed to bring her finally to the house of their childhood summers by the sea. “I must go down once more,” she thought. But alone? The very image of the icy-cold, closed house made her shiver. Why isn’t it spring? This winter had been interminable, with unrelenting cold to sap energy and numb the senses. Would she be given one more spring? It would be good to live to see the leaves once more.

  When the phone rang, she hesitated a second. Not answer? No, it might be Aunt Minna.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s Ann. Are you all right?”

  “Why?”

  “Your voice sounded so far away. Maybe I woke you.”

  “I was awake. Good heavens, it’s after eight!”

  “We want you to come over for supper tonight if you can. It’s Laurie’s birthday, you know.”

  “I really am in a bad way … I’d clean forgotten. Of course I’ll come. What time?”

  “Six? Are you feeling better, Laura? Did the doctor give you an antibiotic? I’ve been meaning to call, but we’ve all had colds. You know what that’s like—everyone home. Chaos!”

  “Grindle is barking to get in—I forgot all about him. See you at six.” At least she hadn’t had to answer about her health, and in the happy confusion of a birthday supper for Laurie no one would notice. But what to give Laurie? Laura got out her jewel case and laid it on the bed. There was the diamond star, Charles’s present on their twenty-fifth anniversary, and the lapis lazuli necklace her mother had given her when she was twenty-one. Laura took it out, feeling the smooth stones slip through her fingers. There was an exquisite necklace of crystal balls, strung on a thin silver chain that Ella had given her as a wedding present. There was her grandmother’s engagement ring, a sapphire circled in brilliants—The thought of giving any of these away, even to Laurie, caused her a brief but acute pang. So she left the jewels there on her bed and went downstairs, for
Grindle’s barks had become quite cross. She had left him out in the cold far too long.

  “Come in, doggo, I’m sorry I forgot you. You shall have a cheese biscuit, and I shall have some breakfast.”

  While the coffee perked, she considered what precious little thing she might give Laurie—Laurie just ten years old today. It seemed a great blessing that she had known this wild little granddaughter at least for ten years, and the pang she had felt for a moment had been subtly translated now into a special kind of joy, quite new to Laura, the joy of divesting herself of a treasure. It had to be her mother’s lapis necklace, passed on to her great-granddaughter. Sybille would like that. But would Laurie? She never wore a dress if she could help it and would probably much prefer a pair of cross-country skis! Nevertheless Laura ended by wrapping the necklace and wrote a card to accompany it: “a treasure for my treasure on her 10th birthday.” It was, she suddenly realized, exactly what her mother had written forty years before except that Sybille’s card had read, “for my treasure on her 21st birthday.”

  Was I her treasure, Laura asked herself? And she knew that the answer was yes. Sybille had exalted her children in a special pantheon reserved for them. We were not exactly told, but we somehow got the idea that we were more beautiful, more intelligent, and gooder than any other children. But what barriers that idea had set up between them and their contemporaries!

  Still, it had been intoxicating, Laura had to admit. The family temperature ran so high, they lived on the edge of a perpetual drama, the great and famous coming and going, and those wonderful balls in Genoa when they danced all night with Italian officers and young men on the staff, or leaned over the banisters to see their mother’s newest conquest taking off his coat in the hall, and deciding that whoever it was was far too ugly, not tall enough, or just plain too queer to be really the “great man” their mother searched for all her life as though for the holy grail.

  Poor Pa, Laura thought, but had he suffered? Sybille’s marriage had been wrapped in such a gauze of illusions and self-deception on her part that it was impossible to extricate the truth from the play. There was the privately published book of passionate love poems that Sybille had written Dwight when he was in the air force in World War I and they had been separated for two years. There was really no doubt in anyone’s mind that they loved each other. They flirted outrageously across the dinner table, walked up and down the terrace before dinner talking so intently that the gong had sometimes to be sounded twice before they heard it, and wrote immense letters when they were apart. Yet Sybille had left her husband for two years to nurse Laura, an act that appeared to Cousin Hope and to their friends in general one of absolute, self-immolating heroism, and to Laura herself an imprisonment not only by illness but by something she dreaded even to think about, a kind of complete possession by her mother, as though she were a small infant. And what had Pa really thought about this? He drove to Davos whenever he could get away for a day or two, bringing them every luxury he could imagine—elegant bed jackets for Laura, gold slippers for Sybille, marrons glacés, a case of champagne once. But he never seemed quite at ease in their intensely feminine world, or for that matter, in the concentrated atmosphere of illness, the gossip about doctors, the implacable routines. Laura suspected that however much he had looked forward to seeing them, he was rather glad to get away again and to go back to his own world of diplomats and economic crises, and the sub rosa attempts to help the intellectuals and radicals whom Mussolini was relentlessly imprisoning when they could not be silenced. Laura suspected that her father, with her mother’s complete accord, took some risks.

  But why had Sybille insisted on changing her whole life around this illness? That remained a mystery. Guilt, perhaps. Did she think she had neglected a beloved child? Or after the painful episode of Jo’s infatuation with Alicia, had she experienced a surge of over protectiveness? Must I always be critical of Sybille? Laura asked herself. If she turned to George Herbert now, it was because Sybille had read so much poetry aloud to her in those years, as well as Virginia Woolf, and, curiously enough, Trollope. She could hear at this instant her mother’s husky yet musical laugh. How they had laughed sometimes, laughed till tears streamed down their cheeks!

  Her mother’s taste and acuity, passions and dreams were stamped on her consciousness. There was no denying that. A great “personality” as Jim Goodwin had called her did this to her children. Laura’s own children, at least, had not had to fit themselves into a heroic mold.

  What she hoped she and Charles had done, what they had tried to do, was to create a safe, warm world in which their children could grow rather freely—but what parent ever succeeds? The very safety and usualness had created revolt.

  Laura, invaded as she was these days by memory and a need to reckon with everything before it was too late, found these ruminations tiring. It was really a good idea to be pulled out of them into the immediate present of little Laurie and a tenth birthday.

  She drove up to the brightly lit house that evening full of joy and expectation.

  Ann opened the door. “Come in, come in, dear Laura,” she said and kissed her. “It’s ages since we’ve seen you!”

  Laurie flung her arms around Laura’s waist and hugged her so hard Laura nearly lost her balance.

  “Happy birthday, my treasure! This is a happy day!”

  “Guess what?” Laurie said, pulling her into the living room where they were attacked by the two golden retrievers. Laura, to escape their attentions, sat down quickly. “I got a real goose-down jacket—and snow-shoes—and look, Grammie, a parakeet! His name is Aucassin.” The parakeet was in a cage on a small table. “Daddy’s going to make me a hanger in my room, right at the window.”

  “May I interrupt?” Brooks said, coming in from the kitchen. “What will you have to drink, Mother? How about a glass of champagne? I have some good and cold.”

  “Darling, that would be lovely.”

  “Someone gave it to us for Christmas,” Ann explained.

  “How does it feel to be ten, Laurie?”

  Laurie had sat down on the floor with the two dogs. She was looking into the fire and stroking one big dog-head with her right hand.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I guess.”

  “You don’t sound overenthusiastic.”

  “I’m still not allowed to do anything I really want to do.”

  “Where’s Charley?” Laura asked.

  “I sent him up to put on a clean shirt,” Ann said.

  “He got very dirty painting my birthday present. See!” Laurie pointed to the mantel, where a large red and blue whale—was it a whale?—on a large piece of paper had been tacked up.

  “It’s the story of Jonah only you can’t tell very well because Jonah is inside the whale.”

  “He seems to have decided on a present rather late in the day.” Laura smiled.

  “He didn’t want to give me anything. He only did it because I told him I wouldn’t give him anything for his birthday unless he did.”

  There was a loud pop from the kitchen, and Laurie sprang to her feet. “What’s that? A gun?”

  “Just your father,” Brooks’s voice called from the kitchen, “opening a bottle of champagne. Come and watch it fizz.”

  “I’m going to sit down for five minutes even if dinner is late,” Ann announced, and dropped down beside Laura on the tattered sofa. “Charley’s been a handful. He really doesn’t feel well. He’s had an awful cold.”

  And there was Charley, flushed and bright-eyed under his shock of fair hair, floundering about with one arm in the air, his shirt half on and half off. “Help me, Mummy. I’m all mixed up in this shirt.”

  “There, darling.” Ann thrust the lost arm into the sleeve where it belonged and buttoned up the shirt. “Now say good evening to Grammie.”

  Brooks came in with a tray of glasses. “Here you are, Mother.”

  “May I have one? It’s my birthday,” Laurie begged.

  “Of course, this o
ne is just for you.” And Brooks bowed gravely to his daughter as he handed her a half-filled glass. They really did look amazingly alike, each with the very dark eyes and straight black eye brows they had inherited from Charles. It occurred to Laura, and she was entertained by the idea, that Laurie in her tight jeans and turtle neck might as well have been a boy, whereas fair little Charley sitting on the floor with his teddy bear might have been a girl. Of course, as the eldest, Laurie had always done things with her father: skied with him since she was eight, always insisted on shoveling snow when Brooks shoveled.

  “Where’s mine?” Charley demanded, frowning.

  “As soon as I’ve given your mother hers I’ll get yours—we must have a toast!”

  “There,” said Brooks, handing his son a juice glass with, Laura presumed, ginger ale in it. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, I want to propose a toast to Laurie. May it be a very good year in every way, lots of snow to ski on, 100 on her math papers every time, no quarrels with her brother, and—what else?” he looked down smiling at Laurie, who was drinking in every word.

  “That’s impossible. The last is impossible,” she said. “You could say, an improved brother, I suppose. I’m awfully tired of Charley,” she told Laura.

  “I’m tired of you,” said Charley, not to be outdone.

  “Quiet, children. Grammie has a present for Laurie. Let’s call a truce and open it.”

  Laurie sat down on the floor at Laura’s feet and turned the little box in her hands, listening to what might be inside. “I can’t think what it is,” she said. Then she tore off the paper and gold string and opened it.

  “Oh, it’s a necklace—” for a moment she held it in her hands, feeling the smooth blue stones. “It’s blue.” She looked up at her father, as though for help.