A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  “I think I’d better go to bed now,” she said when she could turn around and lean her head on Daisy’s shoulder, taking short, panting breaths, her face bathed in tears and sweat.

  Very quietly, Daisy held her up, held her in her arms like a baby. Neither of them needed to say anything.

  Chapter XVI

  The dawn came now at half-past five, and Laura, who had been awake for hours trying to find a position in which she would not cough, welcomed the faint light bringing the room alive, little by little. The curtains breathed gently in a light breeze. She felt strangely at peace. When Daisy appeared at six to ask whether she would like a cup of tea, Laura held out her arms, and they hugged silently. She felt so serene she was surprised by Daisy’s anxious face.

  “You didn’t sleep, Mother?” Daisy asked.

  “Not much, but I am learning to float. I don’t know how to describe it, like being carried on a current. I felt happy.”

  “Oh, Mother.” Daisy fled to make the tea.

  Later she put on the Mozart clarinet quintet and some Beethoven sonatas for Laura to listen to upstairs. They were in unspoken agreement that Laura would stay in bed, and when she went to the bathroom, she knew she had to, for she felt quite faint just making the small effort of walking across the room twice. Daisy took the animals for a walk later on, and Laura sank into a lovely sleep, bathed in sunlight. She felt it on her face like a gentle hand.

  Then—what time was it anyway? Nearly eleven?—she woke to the sound of voices downstairs, Jo’s deep, musical voice and Daisy’s. For a moment Laura thought she couldn’t possibly see Jo, not yet.

  “She’s awfully sick, Aunt Jo,” she heard Daisy say. Then they must have closed a door.

  Laura pulled a pillow up from the foot of the bed and stuffed it behind her. She sat up straight, suddenly in a sweat, feeling around for a comb in the drawer of the night table, but it wasn’t there. I’ve got to get used to being helpless, she told herself. It is what I have to learn, that—and other things. I don’t want to see them, she thought, as though Jo and everyone else close to her, family, were flying down out of the sky like predatory birds. Only Aunt Minna and Mary O’Brien and Dr. Goodwin could come because they did not ask her full attention, she supposed. Or perhaps each of them had a niche, and everything fitted into their comings and goings. Jo’s arrival today when Laura knew she was close to exhaustion was a trial. Would Daisy be able to shield her—if only Daphne were the one, Laura thought. But why do I need shielding from my sister? And then she heard Jo’s firm step on the stairs.

  “I haven’t been able to get here till today,” Jo said. “It’s a week of trustees’ meetings. Darling, why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Jo—when I was so ill in Switzerland, I became the prisoner of other people—I need to do this alone. Can’t you understand?”

  Jo was standing by the bed. She looked handsome in a dark-green tweed suit and white ruffled blouse, her dark eyes set wide apart in her head, and something impassive in her white marblelike skin. She looked young for her age, though her hair was white, cut short and curled. She’s my sister, Laura thought, this handsome, powerful person, but I don’t know her. She’s a stranger.

  “Sit down, Jo, you make me nervous standing there.”

  “Don’t be cross,” Jo said, pulling up a low chair so that she could sit at the foot of the bed and lean on its end. “It wouldn’t be quite human if I couldn’t see my own sister … when …”

  “I’m dying, but it isn’t bad,” Laura said gently.

  Jo swallowed nervously.

  “I have a very good nurse-housekeeper and Jim Goodwin comes to drain the lungs—that relieves the pressure. Gosh, Jo, you wouldn’t believe the huge quantities of a dark-orange fluid he gets out, and it doesn’t hurt.” Laura felt that discussing symptoms and the purely physical aspect of things was the only way to handle this unexpected visitation.

  When they had talked about all that, Jo asked about Ben, and Laura explained he was finishing a big painting.

  “What is the point of his coming here to agonize?”

  “He is your son,” Jo said.

  “But that’s just what I can’t handle, the burden of what other people are feeling, don’t you see? I want to be left in peace to feel my own feelings.”

  “I don’t understand you at all,” said Jo.

  “No, I guess not. After all, Jo, you have managed to close off personal feelings as irrelevant.”

  “I don’t have time to think a great deal about myself. One of the good things about a college is that it provides young women with something other than feelings to deal with. And for someone nearly sixty-five, I must say, yes, I do believe one should have outgrown what is commonly called love. But family is different,” she added.

  “In what way? Besides, Jo, you haven’t been much of a family person, have you?”

  Jo smiled. “For someone very ill you can still pack a powerful punch.” Jo always had liked the colloquial, but her usages were often slightly antiquated and made Laura smile. We are smiling antagonists, she thought, watching Jo absent-mindedly pluck the tufts on the white bedspread. Having said what she had said, Laura realized that Jo’s presence was quite simply irrelevant.

  “I’m tired today. It makes me irritable.” And she laughed. “Why should families stick together anyway?”

  But Jo was perturbed and did not respond. “Laura,” she said, “I’m eaten up by my job, and I honestly don’t think it’s a stupid or ungiving life. The problems we face in any liberal arts college today are simply stunning—I mean there is money, for one thing. The pressure is on to take in less than qualified students, and that’s especially true in a young college. Oh, well,” she looked up at Laura, “why plague you with my problems?”

  “You appear to thrive on them. You look awfully well I must say. Not a wrinkle!”

  “Don’t be absurd. I’m a fat old woman.”

  They had just escaped a passage of some bitterness, and Laura lay back on her pillow and waited.

  “I mustn’t tire you.”

  “The person who is dying is really very young. Have you ever thought how little, deep down inside, one is aware of aging? Only the body knows it, and God knows it is there to remind us. The things that happened to me long ago are what seem most real to me now. It’s strange,” Laura said, looking up at the ceiling. She was thinking aloud and had almost forgotten that Jo was there. “I think a great deal about Ella—you remember, my English friend?”

  “Vaguely—she married a don, didn’t she? You met her in Paris.”

  “Yes. I’ll tell you something, Jo. I loved my husband. Sometimes I think we had an almost perfect marriage. But what haunts me now is Ella, and it is to Ella I talk in my dreams. Why is that, I wonder?” Laura turned her head so she could catch Jo’s eye. “Do you ever dream about Alicia?”

  There was not a tremor. “Good heavens, no!”

  “You have been able to forgive Mamma for what she did?” This was the question that Laura had wanted forever to ask.

  “I never think about it,” Jo said.

  “Oublieuse mémoire,” Laura murmured. “But I have not forgotten, strangely enough. I guess it was the first time I had ever dared to admit that Mamma was not perfect. It was so cruel, Jo! You went around looking ill for months. I felt it was a murder, and I still do.”

  “I appear to have survived,” Jo said ironically, “unless you think I am a ghost!”

  “You survived but as a somehow mutilated person. Oh, dear, that sounds awful. But Jo, you have to admit that it has a grain of truth in it.”

  Jo half-closed her eyes. Laura now had her real attention for the first time since Jo had come into the room. And that was visible in her face, for Laura caught the tremor in her cheek.

  “Mutilated? That’s a strong word. I decided that loving a woman was more than I could handle ever again, too intense, and too painful,” and she added with a sigh, “and in my world too dangerous.” But having said so much she qui
ckly closed the door. “Besides, I don’t really like all that.”

  “‘All that,’ meaning loving someone?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. And I suppose I mean sex. I feel it muddies everything. In that respect perhaps you are right that I have shut out a lot deliberately. Were you and Ella lovers?”

  “No, but I wish we had been. For me, sex has been a form of communion. I suppose we are both old-fashioned, each in our own way. For that is not the way it is looked at now—now it is a game in which the body in all its intricacy is simply used as a mechanism to be cleverly handled.” But this, Laura felt, was a digression, and she could not afford to digress. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it because the last book I worked on for my publisher was by a lesbian. She is so much more honest and aware and responsible than we were, or could be, perhaps. The book has to do in part with telling her parents of her life-style and their violent reaction to it. She has come here twice close to despair. You see, if she publishes, she will probably lose her lover, a teacher who fears exposure.”

  “And quite rightly, my girl. Surely you advised this person not to publish?”

  “I didn’t advise, I listened.”

  “And if she goes ahead and publishes, what is so different from me with Alicia? I could have run away and followed her, I suppose. Instead I went to college and did brilliantly. I do not consider that contemptible. If your young writer gives up her love for her work, isn’t that the same thing, and won’t she too be ‘mutilated,’ to use your word?”

  Laura sat up, crossing her arms around her knees.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “But self-revelation in the cause of truth, or of art if you prefer, does seem in a different category to the pursuit of power.”

  “That’s not fair, Laura. I did not want power. I wanted to do something in the world of education.”

  Without ever coming to terms with what drove you to it, Laura thought, but she did not speak the words. Harriet Moors would suffer but she was coming to terms with her own life, and fundamentally so.

  “I have so much to think about,” Laura murmured. “I would so much like to get it all clear in my mind.”

  “I wonder if we ever do.”

  “For me that is what dying is all about. Jo, I went to see Sybille after Jim Goodwin told me what I could expect. I told her I was dying—I wonder why. Of course there was no reaction.”

  “None?”

  “None. She looks quite beautiful, but she is not there.”

  “I haven’t seen her for months.”

  “The strange thing is I did not feel liberated. Shall we ever be liberated from that devastating influence, I wonder?”

  Jo got up and walked to the bureau where she picked up and set down various small objects.

  “What was it, really?” she asked after a moment.

  “Control, the need to control everything, and that meant also herself. Because if she could not control, chaos would take place—the dam would break, if you will—and that was too terrifying.”

  “Nothing was very relaxed, as I remember. It was all rather tense, wasn’t it? Is that why we were ill so much, I have sometimes wondered? I mean then Mamma exerted all her charm and concentrated on one, for a change. It was lovely to lie in bed and be brought junket and eggnogs.”

  “Being a nurse was one of her best roles,” Laura said, and sighed. “But years of that kind of attention—by the time it was over and I was well, after Davos, I felt quite unreal to myself, and to everyone else.”

  “I remember your smile,” Jo said, “as though you smiled all the time at something no one else knew about. What was it?”

  “Oh, I expect I learned to smile in order not to scream.” After all, to whom except Jo could she say such things? Jo and Daphne, her fellow cripples? “Ella saved my reason then, and of course Mamma was frightfully jealous of her. While we talked and Ella held my hand, Mamma always had to come in for one reason or another and supervise as it were. And just when we had got to the point of any real exchange, Ella would be reminded that I must not be tired. She came only four times in the two years, but each visit managed to reanimate the emotional idiot I was becoming. Has it ever occurred to you,” Laura said, hunching herself up so she could look at Jo again, “that people can become emotionally stupid? Infants, for instance, who are never fondled do not develop. For a long time, for months I existed by shutting most things out.”

  “I suppose you think I am emotionally stupid.” Jo had evidently been thinking her own thoughts.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Laura said. “How can I know?”

  “Marriage and children aren’t the only possible fulfillment for a woman, after all.”

  “Indeed not. That’s not what I am talking about.”

  “Laura, I ought to go downstairs. I didn’t come here to take your last ounce of strength.”

  “You sound like Mamma. Why shouldn’t I spend it?” Laura was suddenly cross. “Why shouldn’t I, for God’s sake?” Then she added, lying back on her pillows, “Jo, go down and see if there’s a little champagne left in the bottle Daisy brought. I may be able to keep that down. Put a piece of ice in it and make yourself a drink or something and then come back. Meanwhile I’ll breathe a little, quietly.”

  There were so many things she suddenly wanted to ask Jo—why, for instance, she didn’t have an animal. I really know her so little, Laura thought. I read about her in the newspapers—she has just been given another honorary doctorate or is present at the investiture of a president somewhere in the academic world, or she is embattled (as she was some years ago) over quotas.

  Jo came back after a while—minutes or half-hours glided into each other for Laura—and Laura took several sips of champagne. It was not as flat as she had feared it might be. Jo had brought a cup of coffee for herself.

  “Why did you come, Jo?”

  “After all, you are ill.”

  “‘Families are different,’ you said, earlier. And yet—forgive me for being blunt—you must have intimate friends who are far closer to you now than I. We haven’t talked like this for years.”

  Jo took a swallow of coffee and put the cup down.

  “Daisy told me you and Daff went down to the old house.”

  “Yes, I wanted to remember Mamma as she was during those happy summers. I really have to make up a reckoning about Mamma before I die, but,” Laura smiled, “it appears to be very hard to do.”

  “Do you really think Daff’s life—she is some sort of worker at an animal shelter, she told me—is less inhuman than mine, Laura? I must confess I feel attacked, and I don’t understand why. Some people would say I’d made a valid contribution to society.”

  “In her peculiar way Daff has become rather a person,” Laura said, seeing vividly Daphne’s lined face, so much older-looking than Jo’s, yet moving in a way that Jo’s would never be.

  “She looks a wreck,” Jo said. “Of the three of us you’re the one who has made a go of it as a human being.”

  “I’ve been a success at the commonplace, rather odd for a daughter of Sybille’s. You at least have reached a little touch of glory—Mamma was apt to show me a clipping about your latest degree or something when she was still able to read.”

  “Did she?” Jo was visibly pleased. “Somehow when we were growing up we felt starved for praise, at least I did. She was always holding up some super example against whatever we achieved in school—Daff, you remember, wrote poems at one time. Mamma was quite patronizing about them. Of course she didn’t mean to be. She didn’t know what those words of relative praise could do to wither one.”

  “She wrote poems herself,” Laura reminded Jo. I wonder why she never published, or only that one book she had privately printed for Pa. Let’s face it, they just weren’t that good.”

  “You say Daff has become ‘rather a person.’ But after all, you have to admit that Mamma was a far greater one than any of us. We are all dwarfs beside her.”

  “I don’t believe that
.” Laura felt hot and prickly before this outrageous untruth.

  “That we’re dwarfs, or that she was a giant?”

  “I don’t know. Can destructive people be giants?”

  “On your terms maybe not. But she did loom rather large—and I wonder whether she was really destructive, except to her own children. So many people of all ages, Laura—you have to admit that!—adored her. And she was a real beauty. My God, was she not!”

  “Yes,” Laura said meditatively, “she was.”

  “She was simply on a larger scale than most women are. It can’t have been easy, can it? She needed a large stage, and Pa, dear man, never got onto the big stage, an ambassadorship, for instance. Think what Mamma would have done with the Paris ambassadorship!”

  Here they burst into laughter—and for the first time since Jo had come into the room an hour ago, Laura recognized her as her sister.

  “We would have rolled our hoops in the Luxembourg gardens, gone to lycées—”

  “And you would have married a Frenchman, Laura.”

  “No one but Charles, thank you very much.”

  “You and your Charles,” Jo teased. Then she looked at her watch. “I have to get back, Laura!”

  “Yes.”

  Jo was standing now. The sisters exchanged a long look that Laura held because she hoped for something, some sign perhaps. Who knows what the naked ask of the clothed?

  Jo bent down and took one of Laura’s hands in a firm clasp. “Courage, mon enfant.” It had been a phrase of their father’s. Laura pulled her hand away.

  “It’s not courage I need,” she whispered, “not really. Good-by, Jo.”

  When the door had closed, the tears flowed down Laura’s cheeks. Not courage, she thought, but communion. There had been so little. And now she was left to sink back into weakness, a gathering weakness, weakness like a tide. I must keep family away from now on, she told herself. I can’t do it anymore.

  Chapter XVII