A Reckoning

by May Sarton

  Finally she was back in her room, back where she could see the pigeons whirling up from the roof below, and one tree in leaf. And sky.

  They came with the bottles and she was attached to that lifeline again, but she didn’t mind. She would do everything asked, and she would not complain as long as Jim allowed her to go home soon. She even managed to swallow a little orange juice through a straw; her mouth had felt so dry.

  A new nurse came and washed her and brought the bedpan, which was excruciatingly uncomfortable. Laura felt now completely detached from her body. It was, she considered, simply a piece of machinery that was running down. But how could the separation be made? How could she find herself without this machine that labored for breath and rejected food and sent her into misery with the coughing? It could not be tamed. It could not be cajoled. It had, she felt, to be quite simply rejected as irrelevant.

  When Jim finally came in and held her hand, she was able to say quite calmly, “I’m getting through with my carcass, Jim. It’s not much use anymore, is it?”

  “The X-rays do show some deterioration. I expected that,” he said in his firm, gentle voice, the voice she recognized as one that had been trained not to show emotion and to be wary of frightening a patient.

  “I’m going to need help,” she then heard herself saying. “I see that some part of this journey I can’t do alone, after all.”

  Tears slid down her cheeks. Things were out of control. “I want to go home. Don’t let me die here, Jim, please.”

  “Just try to trust me, Laura. The only thing we still have to do is drain the lungs. You’ll feel more comfortable and cough less then. I think we’ll be able to get you home late this afternoon.”

  “Mary—” she said with a sob. “She’ll help.”

  “She’s the best medicine you could have,” Jim said with a smile. He was holding her hand very tight, and after a moment she could feel it. She had been too upset before.

  “Sorry I’m such a baby,” she murmured. “It’s the hospital.”

  “I know. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  Laura had closed her eyes. When she opened them she saw the naked compassion and grief on his face. He really cares, she thought. How strange. I’m leaving caring now—but this doctor, almost a stranger, he cares. She felt bathed in the radiance of it. It was an intimation of something larger, something she could not think about yet. But even the rejected body felt the power of it like an injection. Laura smiled.

  “Laura,” Jim said quietly, “Ben is downstairs. If you would like to see him, he could come up, but he can perfectly well wait till you’re home again, and come tomorrow to the house—so—”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said after a moment of taking in the news. “He’ll be upset, seeing me with these bottles.”

  “You look beautiful,” Jim Goodwin said and coughed as he did when he was embarrassed, Laura remembered. “You’ve changed.”

  “Have I?”

  “In the last few minutes.”

  He didn’t know what had happened, but Laura did.

  “Thanks, Jim. I never knew what it meant before that we are all members of each other.”

  And as Jim looked slightly bewildered, Laura added, “Yes, send Ben up.”

  She rang for a nurse and for once someone came imediately. Laura asked her to roll the bed up so she was sitting suddenly quite high up in the air.

  “My son’s coming, and he hasn’t seen me since—since—could you help me comb my hair? I must look pretty awful.”

  This nurse looked very Irish, and fresh as a daisy. She was quick to see what was needed, even found the bottle of lavender and put some behind Laura’s ears.

  “That’s what my mother used to do,” Laura said. “How did you guess?”

  “It feels good behind the ears, doesn’t it?”

  “Thanks. I guess I’ll have to settle for myself as is—do you think it will be an awful shock?”

  “Oh, no—why he’ll be so glad to see his mum he won’t notice nothing.”

  The trouble was that in this upright position Laura felt a little dizzy. Her head felt like a flower on a long, frail stem.

  “Just one more thing. Could you put a pillow behind my head?”

  “There, now you just take it easy.”

  Laura’s heart was beating in an absurd way. She realized that some deep part of her had been waiting for Ben for weeks. Something had been held taut by his coming, and now the suspense was hard. But by some miracle she found herself floating. She had not until now been able to achieve it in the hospital. She was this time floating down a river in a canoe with Ben, about ten years old, trailing his fingers in the water ahead of her in the bow while she steered with a paddle. Summer stillness …

  And then he was there, standing in the door, smiling. “I’m here,” he said.

  “So I see,” said Laura, smiling too. There he was with his long El Greco face, the dark eyes darting a tender look at her then away, as he came in and kissed her on the cheek, then pulled up the armchair so he could be quite near the bed.

  “Oh, Ben,” she sighed, “I’m glad to see you. It’s been rather a long journey, this illness, long and exhausting.” Then, as she saw the shadow cross his face and the familiar frown, she added, “long but interesting.”

  “Can you tell me about it?” he asked. It was so much the right question, and no one had asked it before.

  “I’ll try to tell you, but first, did you finish the painting?

  “I did. You’ll find it in your bedroom when you go home.” He clasped his hands tightly together as he had always done when he was trying to say something important. “I think it’s good—it’s a sequence. It’s anemones, the way they appear almost to be dancing at first, and then the way the petals change color, and finally fall. I wanted it to be like music—oh, I don’t know! You’ll probably think it’s awfully abstract. I couldn’t do it straight—to get the motion, you see, the way they die, so beautifully.”

  “Dear Ben,” Laura murmured. “You’re just the same. I’m so glad to see you, you can’t imagine.”

  “Oh, Mother.” He lifted his head and looked out the window away from her, then got up, walked over, and stood there looking out.

  “The pigeons,” she said, “the only thing I could look at in this machine of a hospital.”

  “Tell me about the journey,” he said quietly, still standing.

  “Come back. If I talk too loudly I’ll cough.”

  “Of course.” He sat down, one hand palm down on the sheet as though he were really caressing her, smoothing it, back and forth, his head bowed.

  For a moment there was silence. Laura lifted her head and lay back on the pillow. Very rarely had anyone except Jim permitted silence, she realized. People hurried in to fill it with words, because they were afraid, perhaps, of being overwhelmed by emotion.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “For what, Mother?” He gave her a startled look.

  “For the silence. Most people have to talk so they won’t hear, so they won’t have to face whatever it is I am doing.”

  “I know,” Ben said gently. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “You see, I wanted to do it alone,” she began. It felt as though she were about to unroll a long Chinese scroll such as one sees under glass in museums, with one scene after another painted, women playing a game, men hunting, a party, falconers on horseback, but as she prepared to unroll the scroll, she realized that it would take strength she did not have. “Oh, Ben, I’m not sure I can. Dying is turning out to be harder than I supposed, and longer. I do not believe that we wish to leave our bodies, perhaps it is that. Mine is of very little use to me now, but—”

  “Absent thee from felicity awhile.” In school Ben had played Hamlet.

  “What a good Hamlet you were,” she said.

  “I felt I was in my own skin—nearly twenty years ago. Sometimes I get there when I’m painting. But not often, that feeling that I’m wholly myself, th
at everything is functioning together.” He sighed.

  “And sometimes in love?” Laura asked. She had never asked Ben things like this before, but now it was possible. Dying opened doors.

  “Very rarely,” he said, biting his lower lip. “My love affairs have been disasters on the whole. I want too much, I suppose.”

  “I had imagined that dying might be like that—coming into a wholeness, but the trouble is one has no strength. It leaks away.”

  “I don’t want to tire you.”

  “Oh, well,” Laura smiled to reassure him, “everything tires me so I might as well enjoy all I can. I decided that weeks ago, to spend what I have. Besides, you are the one I wanted to see most.” Then she turned her head away. “You and Ella,” she whispered.

  “Ella? Who’s that?”

  “My English friend. She goes back almost to childhood with me. We were at the Sorbonne together that winter in Paris—surely you know who she is.”

  “Vaguely.”

  Ben seemed uncomfortable, and Laura wondered whether he was longing for a cigarette.

  “Ben, when they told me—when I knew I had a limited time ahead—the strange thing was that I didn’t want to see family at all, not even you. I wanted to disappear into my shell like a snail and close the door. Dying seemed such a huge adventure—for a time I was lifted up by the very idea. I wanted to do it alone, you see.”

  “Yes, I can understand that.”

  “People disturb the deep current. But then I hadn’t reckoned with the weakness, the nausea, the poor old body that keeps getting in the way.”

  “I suppose that is the journey you spoke of. Do you feel it is a journey toward something, Mother, or only away?”

  “Toward,” she said, “but I don’t know toward what.” There he sat, her son, thirty-five years old now, a man, not looking at her, his hand absent-mindedly stroking the sheet, and with him she was experiencing a continuation of the radiance she had found with Jim Goodwin an hour or so earlier. Ben had always had an exceptional capacity to feel with others, especially animals, when he was a boy. A dead cat in the road caused him real pain. But he was giving himself, his full attention, to her, so quietly, with such control now, that he had apparently been able to shut out or keep at bay whatever her dying meant to him—he was truly with her.

  “At first it was easy to detach myself—a kind of freedom, I suppose. But—” she swallowed and found it hard to go on.

  “Take it easy, Mother. Maybe I should go away for a half an hour and let you rest?”

  “Not unless you want to—a cigarette?”

  “Good Christ, mother! I’m not thinking of cigarettes!” This time he got up and went to the window. His hands were clenched in his pockets, Laura could see, in the tight jeans he insisted on wearing. She resisted the impulse to beg him to stand straighter. He was quite stooped, she noticed.

  There was a long silence because Laura was unable to say what she wanted to say. It would, she feared, bring on an unstoppable flood of tears. It was Ben who broke it finally.

  “I tried to detach myself. I felt the only salvation for me was to move right away from people. It didn’t work. Somehow we are in our bodies.”

  “Brother Ass,” Laura said, feeling better.

  “Brother Ass and Brother Angel, who knows which. Both, I guess.”

  “As I got weaker, I learned that I couldn’t do it alone, Ben.”

  “I should have come sooner.”

  “I didn’t want you. Aunt Minna, and the wonderful woman Jim Goodwin got to live in, Jim himself—Daphne came, Daisy came, Jo came, but they exhausted me. Only those three—Aunt Minna, Mary O’Brien, and Jim. The hardest thing for me, Ben, has been to become dependent, but I am.” A short, dry sob could not be quelled.

  “Oh, Mother—”

  “It’s all right,” she said in a queer, high voice, for she was not going to weep. This was too important. “It’s been a kind of revelation. When I gave up trying to do it alone, a lot of light flowed in.”

  “I don’t understand, but I’m glad,” Ben said.

  “Now maybe let’s have a little rest,” Laura said. “Go and get a cup of coffee and have a cigarette. In half an hour I’ll be rested. There’s so much I want to hear about you.”

  Ben bent down and kissed the top of her head. It had great sweetness in it, that gesture, fatherly in a way and protective. Then she was alone again in her cell with the pigeons circling outside.

  When Ben came back, Laura was surrounded by Jim, an intern, and a nurse and they were busy draining the lungs and making the cheerful noises of experts involved in a delicate task.

  “I’m sorry, Ben.” Laura managed to say, between clamped teeth, for this time the operation seemed unbearably long, and she was entirely absorbed in trying to stay in position, sitting up, and leaning forward with her head down, trying to hold out. Heaven, for the moment, would be being allowed to lie down.

  “You can stay, Ben,” Jim was saying. “The worst is getting the needle in, and that’s done now.”

  “Easy there,” the intern said as Laura began to pant from sheer nervous strain. The nurse bent over to wipe her forehead with a damp cloth.

  “Just a few minutes more, Laura.” That was Jim’s reassuring voice. Laura couldn’t tell whether Ben was still in the room. In a way she hoped he had fled. It would be an awful shock for him to see those bottles filling up with the dark-orange fluid—she dreaded it herself, the visible sign of corruption.

  “As soon as you’ve had a rest, an hour or two, we’ll get you home. Ben and I will go with you, Laura, so don’t be anxious about anything. Now take it easy,” for he must have seen that she was trembling uncontrollably. “There—there—” and at last Laura could lie down, her eyes closed. At last she could rest.

  Somewhere very far off, perhaps in the corridor outside, she could hear the murmur of Jim’s and Ben’s voices. But she didn’t want to hear the words, or to be conscious of anything, except a greater ease in breathing, and to rest in that ease.

  Chapter XXI

  Laura had longed to be home, but now that she was safely in her own bed with a bunch of daffodils and poeticus in a glass by her bed (Ann’s thought, that), and Ben’s big painting leaning against the bureau, and the afternoon light making the walls glow softly, and Grindie lying on the floor beside her, she recognized that in the hospital a subtle change in her whole chemistry must have taken place. With her eyes open she saw all this, recognized it, and listened to Grindle’s little groans of pleasure as he slept, but the outer world no longer held her attention as it had. With her inner self she observed it all as if from very far away, through the wrong end of a telescope. “It has become irrelevant, all this,” she thought.

  Yet she still wanted to feel Grindle’s ears, so silky soft, and leaned down, but she felt so dizzy that she had to give up trying to reach him.

  “You’re just tuckered out,” Mary said, coming in then with something on a tray. “Maybe a sip of this, it’s eggnog with a teaspoonful of brandy in it—doctor’s orders.”

  “I don’t want it,” Laura said.

  “Just a sip, dear. It’ll do your heart good, after all you’ve been through.”

  And like an obedient child, Laura lifted herself a little and took a sip. And then another.

  A third would have been to tempt fate and a coughing spell. And she shook her head. She wanted to tell Mary that what did her heart good was to look up into those kind, calm eyes, but she found it impossible to utter the words. Instead she smiled and closed her eyes. “Thanks.”

  She heard the door closing softly, and the last thing she remembered for a long time was Grindle licking her hand, which must have dropped down within his reach as she went off into a doze.

  When she awakened it was dark, and she didn’t know where she was. She fumbled for the light and managed finally to turn it on, wincing at the brightness and for a moment closing her eyes against it, trying to rest in the crimson place behind her lids.

 
; “Are you all right, Mother?” asked Ben’s voice in a whisper.

  Where had he come from? Laura felt bewildered. “Ben,” she said in quite a loud voice that surprised her.

  “I’m across the hall. When I saw your light go on, I thought you might need help to the bathroom.”

  The whole scene was so bizarre, Ben suddenly appearing in the middle of the night and that wild jumble of purple and red and white anemones blazing out at her from the painting near the floor, that Laura began to giggle. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I’m in a whirl of your colors.

  “It’s too violent, isn’t it?” he said anxiously. “It’s a kind of dance, you see—the petals are so still, but they are really falling, falling already. Can you see what I mean?”

  “I do see.”

  “It’s awfully crude.”

  “No—” Laura had hesitated to turn to where Ben was standing, to see his face. When she did she saw his tousled hair, and that elongated face, those deep-set eyes staring at his painting with such intensity that she had ceased to exist. It was a moment of acute awareness for Laura, one of the few she had experienced lately. “I do see, Ben,” but what she was seeing was not the painting, but her son coming into his own. Being himself.

  “If you can lift me up,” she said, “maybe it’s not a bad idea to go to the bathroom.”

  He took her hand in a firm grip and with his other arm around and under her shoulder lifted her so easily that Laura, without an effort, found herself standing, while Grindle, in an ecstasy at all these goings on, was busily licking one foot.

  At this she and Ben exchanged a smile.

  “Now, Grindle,” Ben said, “get out of the way.”

  The few steps to the bathroom were more like floating than walking because she was actually being carried. “Just call, when you’re ready,” he said, closing the door.

  And in a short time Laura was back in her bed and had not coughed even once, although the effort made it hard to catch her breath.

  “Now will you and Grindle sleep peacefully?” Ben leaned over and kissed her softly on the cheek.