A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  “It’s so hard to breathe,” she whispered when Mary O’Brien came for the tray.

  “Dr. Goodwin will be here in a few minutes. He’ll know how to help you, dear.” It was the first time Mary O’Brien had used an endearment, and Laura wasn’t quite sure that was what she wanted, though in just a few days Mrs. O’Brien had become indispensable. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t work because then she was even more enclosed in her body, so she picked up the pile of mail that had been accumulating and went through it listlessly, three-quarters of it being, as usual, requests for money from every conceivable organization from Defenders of Wild Life to Amnesty International. These Laura dropped on the floor. But there was a letter from Amy Preston, whom she considered a real friend, and just because she was a real friend, it seemed impossible to face. Finally Laura did open it. “Isn’t it about time we met? What about lunch some time next week when you’re in town at the office?” Laura let the note fall.

  At first it had seemed the easiest thing in the world to shed relationships, as easy as taking off one’s clothes before an operation. She had not even thought about Amy since she had begun this ultimate reckoning. And now she felt it quite impossible to see Amy, and next to impossible to tell her what had been happening. Someone else—Ann perhaps—would have to begin letting people know. Laura had the sensation of lying in a thicket, unable to see the sky for the mass of little branches and twigs. It felt like years since she had seen Amy, so much had happened, and now she was far far away, and there would never be time to catch up.

  How had she ever managed to talk to Harriet? Yesterday was eons away, and Laura realized that very possibly she would never again be able to engage in a real conversation with anyone. I’ll just have to hobble along with Brother Ass and Mary O’Brien, she thought, managing to make herself smile at the image. Then she half-dozed until the doorbell rang, and in a few seconds she heard Dr. Goodwin’s quick, firm, step on the stair. Amazing how much character one could sense in the way someone climbed stairs! Mrs. O’Brien’s tread was so light, Laura often did not hear her coming.

  “You sound like an army with banners,” she managed to say, as Jim Goodwin came in.

  “My goodness, I hope not!” he answered. “Can I just wash my hands?”

  “Of course, that door.”

  He left the door open and talked as he opened the tap and washed and dried his hands. “Mrs. O’Brien says you didn’t eat your breakfast. Pressure on your stomach builds up as the lungs fill. I think I can do something to ease that for you.”

  “Good.”

  When he came back, he sat on the bed, took her wrist, and looked away as he found the pulse.

  Laura liked his face, the narrow gray eyes and taut mouth. She had always liked it, but now it occurred to her that she was absolutely in this man’s hands, so it had become newly important that she trust him.

  “Would you just sit up—slowly—and lift your nightgown up, so I can get an idea what’s going on? That’s it—that’s good,” he said, running the stethescope up and down her back and listening, listening.

  “O.K. Mrs. Spelman, now lie back.”

  This she gladly did. Sitting up had been tiring.

  “Since when have you found it hard to breathe?”

  “Every day this week, but sometimes for an hour or so I feel better. Sometimes I can eat a little.”

  “It’s probably worse in the morning, isn’t it? Now I am going to drain some fluid out of your lungs. It won’t hurt, and I’m sure you’ll feel a lot better.”

  It took a little while to get everything ready, and while he got out his instruments and what looked like huge plastic bottles—could there be that much fluid?—Jim Goodwin talked reassuringly in just the way, Laura suddenly remembered, that her father had talked when he was totally absorbed in fastening a fly to his fishing line. “It looks like an early spring,” Jim Goodwin said. “There are crocuses coming up in our garden—about two weeks early, I figure. The brooks are in flood. That’s the sound of spring, all right, in New England at any rate, isn’t it?” He gave a little cough. “Well, I guess we’re ready. Let me help you sit up again. I’m first going to anesthetize a little place on your back so you won’t feel the needle go in. O.K.?”

  It didn’t hurt, but it was nerve-racking and seemed to go on forever as Jim Goodwin asked, “O.K., Mrs. Spelman?” every few minutes. Laura couldn’t see what was going on, but the tension of sitting up so long took its toll. Sweat poured down her face. And when at last he told her, “That’s fine,” and she could lie down, it took self-control not to cry.

  “Would you like to see?” he asked, cheerfully holding up a bottle half-filled with dark-orange fluid. “I think you’re going to feel a lot more comfortable today.”

  For a moment Laura waited for the shock of that dark-orange color to be absorbed. She felt like a whole world, a world of many countries, and in one country a frightful war was in progress although in another country, her mind, for example, everything was going on as usual—and she wondered how long it would be before the war spread and perhaps engulfed the world.

  Dr. Goodwin was sitting now in a low armchair, jotting something down on a card.

  “Did you expect—” she couldn’t phrase it—“is this normal? I mean, am I worse than you thought?” Laura could hear the phone ringing far away as Jim Goodwin carefully put the cap on his pen and tucked the card into a note case. She was watching him closely and was surprised to see that his hands shook, as they certainly had not done during the small operation.

  “You are not quite like any other patient I have had. From what Mrs. O’Brien, said, you have been about certain errands of mercy—in your condition, that is highly unusual and very brave, I must say.”

  “That young woman was suicidal—I mean I was afraid she might be—but,” said Laura with a smile, “I think it’s the last time. Besides,” she added, “why not spend what I have?”

  Jim Goodwin sighed and passed a hand over his forehead before giving her a penetrating look. “I would very much like to get you to hospital for about three days.”

  “I am worse then?” she was not going to let him off.

  “Not worse than I expected,” he answered slowly. “Both lungs are affected, and when I first saw you, as you know, we had to face that there was not very much we could do at that stage.”

  What Laura wanted to ask was, “How long?” But she couldn’t quite bring herself to utter the question. She closed her eyes.

  “Why the hospital?”

  “I would like to get more X-rays and then confer with a colleague about possible cobalt treatment.”

  “No,” Laura said unexpectedly loudly. Then she saw Mrs. O’Brien in the doorway. “What is it, Mrs. O’Brien?”

  “Your daughter, Daisy, is on the telephone. She was quite insistent that she must talk to you.”

  “I can’t,” Laura murmured, even as she tried to sit up.

  “Why don’t I have a word with her?” Jim Goodwin had leapt to his feet. “Is there a phone downstairs?”

  “Come with me,” Mrs. O’Brien said. “It’s longdistance.”

  Laura lay still. I just can’t cope with everything at once, she thought. Her whole being at that moment of Mrs. O’Brien’s appearance had been gathered up in fierce determination not to be carted off to the hospital. After a while she could hear low voices in the hall. Well, let them make the decisions, all except the hospital. For a little while still she was in command of her body, her dying body—dying in this strange war in one part of it. Laura lifted up one of her hands and looked at it. It was perfectly itself, even the liver spots and the slight swelling in the knuckle of her little finger were exactly as they had been two months ago. It had been a useful hand, she thought, good at holding a trowel, able to type very fast. But the war in her lungs was draining the strength of all the rest of her, and if she couldn’t eat? Somewhere she had read that patients with cancer of the lung die of starvation.

  Her eyes were close
d, and this time she did not hear Jim Goodwin’s firm step. She heard his voice and found it wonderfully reassuring. He had taken her hand in his and was holding it in a firm clasp.

  “I had a talk with Daisy,” he said. “She wants to come this weekend, and since Mrs. O’Brien will be off for two days, I thought perhaps that would be a good idea.”

  “You took it right out of my hands, didn’t you, Jim?” Laura had never called him Jim before. She opened her eyes then and caught his anxious look.

  “No,” he said, “I told her I would confer with you and call her back immediately if you didn’t feel up to it. My thought was that you might prefer to have her here than our sending over a nurse.”

  Laura nodded. He was right, of course. He was trying to help her.

  He released her hand now and got up. For a moment he walked up and down, then went to the window and stood there looking out. “As for the hospital, we can put that off for a couple of weeks anyway.”

  “I want to see the spring.” It occurred to Laura as soon as she said it that this was the first time she had looked forward. She had been trying so deliberately to let go, but she had said, “I want to see the spring.”

  “I think you will,” Jim Goodwin said gently. “I think I can promise you that.” And that meant, Laura calculated, that she had a month.

  She bit her lip, but that didn’t stop the tears flowing.

  “Rest all you can. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  And he was gone.

  It was not going to be as easy as she had imagined to let go.

  Chapter XV

  During the next few days Laura kept very quiet. Mrs. O’Brien persuaded her to stay in bed till teatime when Aunt Minna came to read aloud. Ann was commandeered for one morning, to help Laura decide what letters must be written to inform old friends that she would be hors de combat for a month or more, and under doctor’s orders must lead a restricted life and not have visitors.

  Draining the lung had certainly helped; she had slept better ever since Jim Goodwin’s visit, but eating was getting harder every day. Even a cup of tea sometimes brought on nausea. The only thing she had been able to swallow was oysters, tried at Mrs. O’Brien’s suggestion. But Laura was determined now to live till the spring, till the trees wore their gauzy early green, till the first daffodils. She wanted to see them, needed to see them more than any person, and that was strange. Or was it? Flowers, trees were silent presences and asked nothing. And perhaps the contemplation of beauty was the last resource. “Look thy last on all things lovely. Every hour. …” Yes, she would do that as long as she could.

  Ben had telephoned, luckily in the late afternoon one day when Laura felt more energy then usual and could communicate something. “Darling Ben,” she said, “I listen to records, especially Mozart and Haydn, and I look at things, and talk to Grindle and Sasha.” Here she had laughed. “I expect I sound feeble-minded.”

  “Mother!”

  “Don’t sound anguished. I’m trying to tell you that all is well. I’m learning a lot.”

  “But I want to come—as soon as this big painting is finished.”

  He could not possibly know how relieved she was to learn that this visit at least could be put off.

  “Of course you must finish it. What I wanted to tell you—” (but how to say it?)

  “Is that people are no help. Is that it?” Trust Ben to catch her meaning even from three thousand miles away.

  “Thanks for saying it for me. Oh, Ben, people drain me—it’s that—can you understand? When I talk I get a fit of coughing. But Aunt Minna comes every afternoon and reads. We have finished Hammarskjöld and now we are reading Trollope—so soothing.”

  There was now a silence. A silence on the telephone with the interlocutor so far away opens up a huge hole.

  “Are you all right?” Laura asked after a moment.

  “I guess so.”

  “Come when you finish that painting.”

  Another silence, then a strangled voice unlike Ben’s, “You’re not dying, are you, Mother? You’ve got to tell me.”

  “Maybe I am, darling. Everyone must sooner or later.”

  “But—but you sound so casual about it—Christ, Mother, how can I stay here and paint? I’m coming back tomorrow.”

  “No,” Laura said firmly. “You are not. Finish what you are doing. Please, Ben.”

  “Very well, I’ll try.”

  “I guess I’d better say good-by for now.”

  “Good-by for now.”

  She set the receiver down and lay back on the sofa.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have talked to him,” Mary O’Brien said after one look at her. “You’re all tuckered out.”

  “No, I’m glad I could. Ben is a very understanding person, Mary, but he wouldn’t have understood. I had to explain things myself.”

  For the past few days, Laura had found herself calling Mrs. O’Brien “Mary.” It was the beginning of a new phase in their relationship. Nothing had to be explained, thank goodness, between Mary and herself, for Mary was the person who really knew about this illness, the one person Laura allowed to see her weakness, allowed to take over, without a protest. It had begun, this new phase, one morning when Mary had come for the breakfast tray, only tea and dry toast now and the toast rarely consumed, and Laura had asked her to sit down for a moment.

  “No one wants to talk about death. It frightens people, doesn’t it?”

  “Well—” Mary hesitated, “yes.”

  “You have seen it, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mary, it would help me to know a little more about it, if you could tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you a strange thing. It seems as though a person dies when he is ready, when he wants to go, and not before.”

  “Really? Is that true?”

  Mary’s eyes when she was moved became very dark blue, and now she looked at Laura with a strange little smile and said, “I’ve never told anybody this, they don’t ask. But I can tell you, Laura Spelman, that the ones I’ve seen looked—” she clasped her hands in the struggle for the words, “They looked—”

  “Not afraid?”

  “Oh, no, they looked as though they could see things we can’t see, and the kingdom of heaven was within them.”

  “It’s hard to imagine.”

  “Old Mrs. Cotter, she was really a difficult woman, if I say so myself. Once she said to me, ‘The trouble with me is I don’t wear well’—she fought with all her friends, and her children for that matter. God was not with her that I ever saw,” said Mary with a chuckle. “But when she died, that old woman looked beatified. I’ll never forget her look at the end. Never.”

  Then they had changed the subject and talked about making a stew for the weekend so Daisy would have something easy to heat up for herself.

  There was something ironic about Daisy’s coming now that Laura was critically ill, and ironic, too, Laura thought, that she had to accept such a visitation because she needed the help over the weekend. Everyone took it for granted—even Mary O’Brien, who was sometimes so perspicacious—that Laura wanted Daisy to come. In a way, perhaps she did, though she had no illusions that they would at the eleventh hour reach some kind of accord, after so many years when whatever contact there had been had ended in recriminations. What do I hope for then? Laura wondered. A moment outside time, outside the past, when we might begin to be friends? And could it be that that might be possible only now because only now was Laura herself in a position of weakness? Perhaps.

  These thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of flowers from Amy, a delightful glass bowl filled with bright pink roses and forget-me-nots. “Be good and get well soon,” the card said in Amy’s bold hand. Laura let it fall.

  “Thanks, Mary. Pretty, aren’t they?”

  “Will it be all right if I take Grindle for a walk? It seems like a good time.”

  At the word “walk” Grindle, who had been asleep on the rug by her bed, leaped up and beg
an to bark.

  “Oh, Grindle, be quiet!” Laura said crossly. The barks fell on her ears like a blow.

  “Come on,” Mary said firmly. She turned at the door with a questioning look.

  “By all means, Mary, take him out.”

  Strange, the relief, even excitement she felt knowing she would be all alone in the house for a half-hour. Mary’s presence was discreet, and she managed to do the housekeeping with a minimum of noise or fuss, doing up Laura’s bedroom when Aunt Minna came in the afternoon—but being quite alone was something entirely different, as if when anyone was around, Laura did not feel entirely free inside herself to think her own often outrageous thoughts, to float on that deep current again, to let things happen in the psyche without even the mild censorship of another presence. Every relationship pulled, even with a very slight thread such as that joining her and Mary. When the phone rang and rang, Laura did not answer it. It is not a moment when I wish to respond, she said to herself.

  Instead she went back into the current and floated. She was remembering Charles’s look of pure happiness when he came into her room at the hospital after Daisy was born. “Darling, it’s a girl.” He had so wanted a girl! And Daisy, from the beginning, had been an ultra feminine person, though in her own ineffable way. She, the youngest, with two brothers, had wanted to do everything they did a little better than they, from climbing trees to playing baseball. Her hair cut like a boy’s, wearing blue jeans and jerseys, she looked like an androgynous boy and crowed with delight when she succeeded in pinning Ben’s shoulders to the ground, which was not difficult; he was always so gentle with her. Laura had to admit that she sometimes resented Daisy who appeared to have the best of both worlds, applauded as a wonder when she did well at boys’ games, but demanding and getting the attention of Charles as his beloved daughter who flirted with him, Laura thought, outrageously, and with all the wiles of a woman. So she got a boy’s bicycle when whe was twelve and her first lipstick when she was fifteen, both from her father. In return she taught her father to smoke pot when she was in college. But that was before she took off on her own with a knapsack to “see the country” after she graduated.