A Reckoning

by May Sarton

Laura heard a faint scratching at her door which Jo had closed as she left. “Sasha!” I must have slept for an hour, she thought as she unwound herself from the sheet and went to let the cat in.

  “Where is everyone, Sasha?” Daisy must have taken a long walk with Grindle. But then Laura noticed a little note on the floor and picked it up as Sasha wound round her legs, purring loudly. “Mother, I have gone over to Brooks and Ann. I didn’t want to wake you. There is an eggnog in the frig if you get hungry. Just stir it up a little. Daisy.”

  “So we’re alone, Sasha.” But not for long, for Grindle was plunging up the stairs now at the sound of Laura’s voice and licked her feet with great enthusiasm before she got back into bed. Then, with Grindle stretched out on the rug beside her and Sasha curled up against her side, Laura lay very still, wide-awake. The room was bathed in gentle morning light, the sun having risen, so it no longer touched Laura’s cheek, but it all blossomed in a golden blur. Overnight the maple she could see against the window had burst into flower, small parasols wide open. So often she had wondered whether she would ever actually see it happening, like a soft explosion. Once more it had taken place at night. Grindle gave a groan in his sleep. There was no sound except, quite far off, the insistent, plaintive notes of a white-throated sparrow.

  Birds, Laura was thinking, have such short lives, short and intense—that savage, ceaseless hunt for food, the constant motion. Were they ever still? Still as she was now, while in her head, in the mysterious infinity of the brain, great constellations of memories came into focus. She was walking up the rue de l’Odéon with Ella on their way to the Luxembourg gardens, books under their arms, for the idea was to study. The chestnuts were in flower, and at the pond children were sailing boats. They would walk first, up and down the wide, sandy allées, and then settle into deck chairs and read for an hour or two. There Laura had read Baudelaire for the first time. “Mon enfant, ma soeur / Songe à la douceur / D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!” She had known hundreds of lines by heart, but only a few floated back now. “Nous avons dit souvent d’impérissables choses / Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon”; poems that would always have for her the background of chestnuts in flower, baby carriages, the sharp cries of children, and Ella looking up for a moment from her book to yawn, stretch out her arms, and smile one of her rare, beatific smiles that expressed everything she would not or could not say.

  In those early days it was Laura who talked, endlessly about Sybille, and about life and death and why we are on earth, and was it possible not to get married and still lead a whole life? Then her fantasies were to hug trees, to feel rough bark against her palms, to swim, to ride furiously on a willing horse through green meadows, to gallop and smell the smell of horse. Now her fantasies were not fantasies but some great reality she could not even imagine, something working its will inside her body, something gathering her up in a struggle that was slowly involving her whole being to each tiny cell, and the blood itself. She was trying to make friends with it, for death must be met as a friend, welcomed even. It was something she was creating, her body creating, and she had to lie very still and let it happen. But not before—

  Before what? Before some final gathering together and sorting out of her life. Jo had not helped in this. The more they talked, the farther away Jo seemed to go. Who could help? If Laura asked her, Ella would come. But how could she tell whether that would be the right thing? How take such a risk for both of them? Implant this dying into a past that had been so rich in living, at such depth and with such intensity? Yet it was Ella who returned after all these visits, the image of Ella. “Families are different,” Jo had said, meaning simply, Laura surmised, that one should visit family when ill, and the ill member ought to wish to be visited. But that was quite absurd, as Laura could prove on her own pulse. Jim Goodwin and his quiet, expert care, his very presence, did more for her than any member of her family could—and Mary O’Brien! Daphne had come closest, but already the time when she could make a journey such as they had made together was past. Laura reminded herself that she wanted to be downstairs and if possible dressed when Daisy came back from Brooks and Ann’s.

  “Just a little longer, Sasha,” she murmured, “just a little snooze—perfect peace—”

  It was finally hunger that exerted enough pressure to get Laura up in a dressing gown. She combed her hair, washed her face and hands, and, accompanied by Grindle, went slowly downstairs, feeling quite dizzy, so she was afraid for a second that she might fall. She found the eggnog and took it into the library and lay there, looking into the cold hearth, which had not been laid. Someone, perhaps Jo, had brought an azalea of a lovely orange-pink, and Laura drank it in. Then she sipped at the eggnog through a straw. She felt sure it was chiefly lack of food that made her feel so weak. If she could keep a little nourishment down, she would feel able to face saying good-by to Daisy. And then in a few hours Mary O’Brien would come back.

  Every now and then she felt for Grindle lying beside her. And when Daisy pushed open the front door and called, “Mother, I’m back!” she did feel ready and held out her arms for this only daughter.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I drank the whole eggnog.”

  “Good.”

  Daisy sat on the edge of the sofa and took one of her mother’s hands in hers. “I have to pack now. Shall I put on a record?” But she was not asking that, she was visibly trying to say something else, and Laura saw the anxiety and pain clouding her eyes. “Mother, must you go through this alone? Is that what you want? Ann and Brooks feel you are warding them off.”

  Laura withdrew her hand and closed her eyes.

  “I know,” she murmured. “You’ll just have to let me do this my way. I have to get ready for something huge and sometimes frightening.”

  “That’s just it, Mother. You must let us help you.”

  “I have, haven’t I?” Laura said quite sharply.

  “Let me come back,” Daisy said. “Please.”

  “We’ll be in touch, darling. I can’t foresee—I have to live each day as it comes.” It was frightful not to have more to give, but Laura felt now as though a heavy stone had been placed on her chest and was bearing down. “You’d better go now and pack, or you’ll miss that plane.” And, as Daisy slowly walked toward the stairs, Laura managed to say it: “Thank you, darling, for coming and for our good talk.”

  “I’m furious with Aunt Jo for coming like that unannounced,” Daisy said from the stairs. “She brought the azalea, you know, and when she left she seemed very upset. For once, I could tell she was bowled over.”

  “Really?”

  “Mother, you don’t know how much people love you!” And Daisy ran up the stairs.

  Yes, Laura thought, it’s like a web. Whatever the secret, the real connections, we are inextricably woven into a huge web together, and detaching the threads, one by one, is hideously painful. As long as one still feels the tug, one is not ready to die. At this moment Laura realized, and it was like some explosion inside her, that she would never know whether Daisy would marry Saul, or what would happen to her. But, she reminded herself, the future is not my concern now. I have to shut it out. Only the present moment can have any real substance—so she looked again at the azalea and noted what unusually large single blossoms it had, and she felt that this looking, this still intense joy in a flower, was her way of praising God. Outside the human web there was another far more complex and yet not binding structure that included Grindle and the azalea and she herself, and in that she could rest.

  Chapter XVIII

  “You’re all tuckered out,” Mary O’Brien said after taking one look at Laura, lying on the sofa where she had been half-asleep since Daisy had left after promising to come back with her guitar and sing. “You can just be in bed upstairs” Daisy had said, “and I’ll sing my songs down here,” and the idea had clearly been of such comfort to Daisy herself that Laura had assented.

  “Tomorrow you’ll stay in bed all day,” M
ary O’Brien said. It was not hard to assent to that. “You’d better get to bed now, and I’ll bring you some hot tea.” Mary knew just how to lift Laura up, and they progressed slowly back to the bedroom, step by step, Laura leaning heavily on Mary’s arm.

  Halfway she began to giggle. It was absurd to feel as weak as she did. After all, she had managed to have long talks with both Daisy and Jo. “It was my sister Jo—she came unexpectedly.”

  “I’m going to stay next weekend,” Mary said firmly.

  “And be my dragon?”

  “There now, just four more steps and we’ve made it.”

  It was wonderful beyond words to find herself in bed, with Mary fluffing up the pillows and helping her sit high enough against them to be comfortable.

  “Perfect peace with loved ones far away,” she murmured and again was suffused with laughter.

  “Would you like me to bring you your book?” Mary asked as she turned to go.

  “No thanks, I’ll just rest.” It occurred to Laura that she didn’t want to read, even Herbert. It seemed years ago when she had looked for him eagerly, when those poems were the food she needed most. Things are changing very fast, she thought. It’s a metamorphosis. I wonder what I am being changed into, a person who does not want to read or see her own family, who wants—what? Silence. A little while when breathing could still be possible and that strange animal so alive inside her—for she could hear her heart’s slow thud—could keep going. “Till spring,” Jim Goodwin had said—and she must hold on for Ben. She could not say “it is finished” yet, not quite yet.

  So when Mary brought the tea she swallowed it in small sips, making an effort to pay attention and so keep it down. And she must have fallen asleep with the empty cup still in her lap, for she had no memory of Mary’s coming to take it. Unfortunately at two, long before light, she was wide-awake. Sasha had woken her by jumping onto the bed.

  The discomfort was such that it took her some time—and these were the times when fear took over—before she achieved floating, but finally as the dawn came and she could distinguish the objects in the room, she rested her eyes on her blue wrapper flung over a chair. The way it lay in folds to the floor seemed quite beautiful. It reminded her of paintings of Piero della Francesca. Strange how it was always a clear, precise image that led her into the floating. From there, she found herself wondering why it was that during all this time of waiting and preparing, she had been haunted chiefly by women, that women inhabited her consciousness as even dear Charles did not—Sybille, Ella, Daphne, Daisy, even Ann and conflict-ridden Harriet. Was it that there was something unfinished here, not whole as her relation with Charles had been? That did not need probing; she could rest in it. But what really was involved? It was way outside her sexuality, this preoccupation. Perhaps indeed it had to do with herself as woman, woman in relation to herself, not to men.

  Why did she think so rarely of Pa? Sometimes he came into her mind with great clarity, usually an image of summer in Maine, Pa getting a boat out, Pa looking immensely handsome in tennis flannels, Pa coming for brief visits to her bedside in Switzerland, smiling and teasing her gently, telling some small joke, embarrassed but so warm. Whereas she had only to evoke Sybille to find herself in a blur. Nothing was clear, not even that beauty Jo had spoken of with such feeling. For there had been too much strain in the beauty, the tendons in Sybille’s neck so taut—no wonder she suffered from arthritis—and her eyes, never hooded, a naked blaze. In the hospital she had not wanted to be looked down at by those amazing eyes that, because she was flat on her back, she could not escape.

  Laura turned her head from side to side on the pillow, trying to turn off the current she was floating on, the dangerous one that brought her to a kind of anguish when she faced the puzzling image of Sybille.

  Perhaps it was that Sybille was so glorious—Laura could see her head bent over a book, sitting at the bedside, the marvelous, haunting voice reading Descartes and Pascal and Péguy—at one time those long cadences of Péguy were what Laura had most enjoyed. Sybille had wanted to read poetry, but Laura couldn’t take it. For those two years she simply could not afford to feel very much. And her mother reading poems made her feel spiritually raped, there was no other word. She had somehow to keep a wall between herself and Sybille. If they had merged at that time, Laura knew she would have drowned, gone mad, actually lost herself. The ever-present presence, the guard—oh, it was not an angel who had guarded her! Any more than it was an angel who had cut Jo off from her passion for Alicia.

  What really motivated Sybille? Why were they never supposed to have what they wanted? What was the taboo? Daphne when she was thirteen had wanted dreadfully to be allowed to go away to school—this had not been allowed. At the very center of Sybille, Laura suspected, there must have been a tight knot of conflict, conflict between her own passionate nature and something that held back at the very moment of giving out. Conscience? Or what? How would she ever, ever know? She and Sybille could never have talked as she and Daisy had, yet Daisy too had felt criticized, had viewed her mother as in some way a censor. Is it partly that mothers fear for their daughters more than for their sons? The risks of being a woman are so much greater, the danger of being caught in a life one did not altogether choose—Daisy and Saul. But that hardly explained the degree of control exerted when she, Daphne, and Jo were children.

  Quite suddenly the room was flooded with light as the sun came up at last, and Laura, feeling it on her face, let go. Soon Mary would bring her a cup of tea and the day, the new day would begin.

  That day brought flowers from Houghton Mifflin, from Dinah, and a warm, admiring letter from George, Laura’s editor, to tell her that they had signed a contract with Harriet Moors and were very pleased with the book and grateful to Laura for working with Harriet. It ended, “Here we at the firm have depended greatly on your wisdom and flair. We are going to miss you more than I can say. I am very reluctant to believe that you will not be back, so we shall wait a while before sending someone over with the things from your desk. I personally believe in phoenixes.”

  Laura laid the letter aside. She didn’t want to think about it, about that finality anyway. Letting work go at the moment seemed harder than letting people go, for she surmised the dissolution of the work was a dissolution at the center of her self, the immensely private self for whom she had undertaken it in the first place. “I have to do something of my own that is not bringing up children, Charles,” she had explained. And of course Charles had understood.

  But also she laid the letter down because the thought of Harriet Moors caused a pang. The contract signed. Good news. But she had some idea what it had cost. So she turned to the slim blue envelope from England and opened it, her hands shaking. It had come from so far and felt so near.

  “Dearest Snab, you are never far from my thoughts these days. It’s not exactly thinking, but rather some attentive being with you. Yet I find it hard to write.

  “It is so strange to know that Sybille still lives—but not as herself. I wonder whether you will able to unravel or come to an end of your preoccupation with her. I feel sure that you think about her. It is awful not to know just what conclusions you are near to arriving at. Mother goes on in her usual compulsive way, expanding the gardens at Fernwood though there aren’t enough gardeners, forgetting what plants she has ordered, amazed when some huge, terribly expensive azaleas arrived the other day. She pays absolutely no attention to anyone else and at the same time needles me subtly whenever I see her. I sometimes long for all my relatives to vanish. Do you suppose some people (they must) manage to operate pretty freely while a parent remains above ground? How do they do it?”

  At this point Laura began to laugh with the sheer pleasure of being completely understood and of completely understanding. Ella, Ella, she wanted to cry out, come! Instead of finishing the letter, she lay and smiled, and it was after lunch when she resumed. “It is taking an enormous amount of strength not to fly over, but I shall await your word,
dearest Snab.”

  After the day in bed, Laura felt restored enough to be downstairs when Aunt Minna arrived at four on the dot.

  “It seems ages, darling—what a weekend!” Laura rested her eyes on Aunt Minna. The dark circles round her eyes only emphasized their brightness, bright as a bird’s eyes and as impersonal. That is what made these visits so restful, Laura was thinking. Aunt Minna, unlike almost anyone else Laura saw these days except Mary, had a definite role, a role she enjoyed playing as anyone would who read aloud so well. “Pour your tea, will you? Mary was inspired to make those little cakes for you.”

  “Delicious,” Aunt Minna said, eating one ravenously, and for a second Laura felt jealous of someone who could eat with pleasure, for whom eating had not become fraught with the risk of violent nausea.

  “Jo descended on us. It really was a bit much with Daisy here as well.”

  “The dutiful sister?”

  “It was clearly such a thing for her to extract herself from the college, the effort so great, that it never occurred to her that she might not be welcome.”

  “Imagination is hardly Jo’s long suit, is it? Oh, well,” Aunt Minna said, brushing Jo aside. “Here we are.”

  “You and Trollope are my best medicine,” Laura said. “Let’s read.”

  Laura did not actually listen some of the time. Some of the time Aunt Minna’s clear, sweet voice simply flowed on like the murmur of turtle doves, but it was becoming increasingly important to have this companionable, undemanding hour in the day, when she could rest in the simple presence of this old woman who for some reason was able to be there in the room without displacing so much atmosphere that Laura was dragged out of herself, out of her own orbit, which was narrowing down. There is only Ben now, she thought—

  Aunt Minna stopped to laugh aloud at something Laura in her reverie had missed. “Isn’t that delicious?” she asked.

  “It’s you who are delicious.” Laura smiled.