by May Sarton
“Nothing seems relevant,” Laura said.
“Yes—well—shall we just sit here a little while together?” The tone was anxious, not comforting.
“Yes.”
But Aunt Minna fidgeted in her chair, and out of the corner of an eye Laura took in her wild look about her, as though sitting still was the one thing this wondrously alive, active, imperious old woman could not bring herself to do. She drank her tea in loud swallows, then set the cup down.
“Such a beautiful day. Do you remember, ‘Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour’?”
“It’s hard to look now,” Laura said. She had gone beyond protecting Aunt Minna. She closed her eyes. It was better not seeing. In that enclosed state, she confronted the fact that she had somehow to try to meet Aunt Minna for the last time, not pretend any longer. But how to speak? It seemed so hard to do that Laura imagined that perhaps she had lost her voice.
Aunt Minna was getting hold of silence; she was no longer shifting around in her chair. That made it easier, and Laura rested on the silence, waiting.
“It’s been a long journey,” she said finally, “and you have helped me make it. Dear old Trollope too.”
“What was that?” Aunt Minna said. “I didn’t catch the last thing you said, Laura.”
“Dear old Trollope,” Laura repeated as loudly as she dared, but that extra effort was fatal, and she was suddenly seized by such a fit of coughing, she couldn’t stop. The cough wrenched and wrenched at her. She could hear Aunt Minna getting up and calling frantically, “Mary! Brooks! Please come!” Then muttering to herself, “Damn my deaf ears! This is my fault.”
It seemed minutes, but at last Laura felt Mary’s arm around her shoulders, that strong arm supporting her. “Oh, thank you,” she said. She was panting now, and the terrible cough had quieted. She leaned her head against Mary’s breast. “Hold me, Mary.”
“It’s all right, Laura. It’s over,” Mary whispered, and Laura’s cheek rested on the gentle breathing against which she found herself like a drowning man upon a calm shore. There were so many people now—Ben, Brooks, Ann, Aunt Minna. She was exposed to such a crowd, all standing there to witness the tears sliding down her cheeks.
“Please take me back to my room,” she managed to utter.
“I’m here, Mother.” Brooks was instantly at her side.
“Hadn’t you better wait a moment?” Ben’s voice.
“I think she wants to go.” Ann’s controlled voice.
“Yes,” Laura whispered, “please.”
Ben and Brooks lifted her very gently until she was again carried on her son’s shoulder and slowly taken across the lawn and up the stairs, but she couldn’t stop crying, and poor Brook’s shoulder was wet when she was laid down on her bed at last.
“I’m so sorry, Mother,” Brooks was saying, “it was all a mistake, but we didn’t know, and Jim thought—”
“It’s all right,” Laura managed a smile. “Lovely to be back here. It’s just I’m so weak—I mean, the tears. So stupid, but …”
“Here’s one of Dad’s handkerchiefs I found for you,” Ben said, and Laura blew her nose on the soft linen, gratefully.
“I think she’d better have a rest,” Mary said. “You all come down and have a good cup of tea with Miss Hornaday. I’m afraid she’s upset.”
“Thanks, Mary.”
Then they were all gone, all except Grindle who was lying by the bed, his nose on his paws, his eyes not leaving Laura’s face. He had a rather absurd and saintly look. Laura took it in, then turned her face away. I can’t take the love, she thought. It’s too much for me. I can’t give or take it anymore. Poor Grindle.
It was getting easier to let go. What she felt was an immense pity for the living with the journey still before them. But it was not a pity she could communicate. Only, strangely enough, she didn’t want to be left alone. When would somebody come?
Downstairs she could hear the murmur of voices, Aunt Minna’s so pure, so young, clearer than the blur of the others. It was good to know they were there, not far away after all. She could lie and listen to them and after a while someone would come.
Chapter XXII
When Laura came back to consciousness, it was late afternoon, she guessed, because the room, flooded with sunlight in the morning, felt dark. Dark and empty. Grindie was not by her bed, nor Sasha on it. And she did not hear a sound downstairs. She lay there wide-awake and listening, not for outside sounds but for the sensation of being inside a dying body, for the minute stirring in her chest, the breath still holding her alive, in and out, in and out, a slight, wheezy sound.
When Mary came in on tiptoe to smooth her pillow and put some lavender water behind her ears, Laura whispered, “I really don’t want to go on … breathing.”
Mary didn’t answer, just laid her hand on Laura’s forehead. It felt wonderfully cool, that smooth hand.
“What can I do to make you more comfortable?” she asked after a moment, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Nothing, thank you.”
I’m beginning to lose the way to make a connection, Laura thought. She felt remote, too remote for words.
“It’s nice and peaceful anyway,” Mary said gently. “Ben has gone over to Brooks and Ann for supper. So you rest awhile.”
“I’ve been resting,” Laura whispered. “Maybe you would stay with me, Mary.”
“I’ll get a bit of sewing and be right back.”
In the interval before Mary came back, Laura found herself floating. She was floating along with Brother Ass, thinking that soon they would be parted, and she smiled at the impossible thought, for how could one be separated? Where, without breath, would Laura be? There were so many people she would never see again, but this caused no grief. She felt ready to leave them all.
What then was she waiting for? What still held her in the empty house, in the empty world, what tiny, delicate thread still held her back from what she had imagined as an adventure when she still felt well but was only some trailing away, some letting go into nowhere. All flesh is grass, Brother Ass.
When Mary had come back and had settled on the chaise with her sewing basket, Laura breathed a deep sigh.
“What am I still waiting for, Mary?”
“The blessed dark, maybe, and another dawn.”
“I don’t know.”
When Laura opened her eyes, she asked Mary to turn Ben’s painting to the wall. “It’s too much now,” she said, “too alive for me now.”
And a little later, “My mother, she’s still alive. It seems so strange.”
Then there was a long silence. Laura turned her head away as if to shut out those pictures of a floating world that the word “mother” had summoned beyond her will to keep away. No one had ever loomed so large, no one so to be reckoned with, beautiful and terrible. Terrible as Medusa, she had frozen her children into people somehow diminished themselves by her extraordinary power. “Oh, let me be,” Laura murmured. “Let me go.”
But there were those blazing blue eyes looking down on little Laura in her sick bed in Switzerland, totally possessing her, making her unable to escape.
“Now don’t you fret,” Mary said soothingly. She had come to the bedside, because Laura was restlessly turning her head one way and another in a torment of memory. Again she laid her quiet hand on Laura’s forehead.
“No, Mother, don’t touch me,” Laura said, frowning.
“It’s Mary.”
“Oh.” Laura opened her eyes. “Oh, I guess I was dreaming.”
Ella had said it would never be solved, and she was right. If only—but, Laura reminded herself cruelly, the dying cannot indulge in such hopes. Ella was three thousand miles away. Yet it was not clear whether that single thread that still held Laura alive and waiting might be Ella. Some message from Ella.
“Was there a letter from England in that pile?” Laura asked quite loudly. She had been slipping away when her mother came into the room, and now she was coming back.
“I’ll look through them.” Mary picked the pile up from the bedside table. “No, I don’t see an English stamp.”
“Oh.” The disappointment was acute. She felt it as an actual pain, she who had been quite beyond pain a moment before. “It’s so dark, Mary. Please turn on a light.”
Mary had long since said good night, leaving the door open so Laura could see the light in the hall, when she heard the front door open and close and Ben’s footsteps creeping up the stairs.
“I’m awake, Ben,” she said.
“Is there something I can bring you, Mother?”
“No—but maybe you could come and sit here for a while in the dark. If you’re not too tired.”
“I’d like to do that,” he said, coming close to kiss her cheek. Then he felt his way to the chaise and stretched out.
A bird somewhere outside gave a tentative cheep, then subsided. The headlights of a passing car lit up the far wall for a second, and Ben must have seen that the painting had been turned to the wall. But Laura felt incapable of explaining. She was very busy coming back from a long tunnel, forcing herself back.
“Ben?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Talk to me about your friends, about your life—in the hospital we had only begun.”
“It must all seem pretty irrelevant,” he said.
“No, one of the strangest things about this journey—” Laura lifted herself up a few inches so she could talk. “I have understood some things about—your androgynous world. I tried to talk to you about Ella. It’s she who has accompanied me all these months, the only person I wanted to see. Why?”
“I don’t know, Mother. Something unfinished maybe?”
“No. Nothing unfinished.”
“There is no one I would want to see,” Ben said after a short silence.
“No one?”
“Well,” she seemed to hear some inner door opening in Ben, “maybe Pierre.”
“Tell me …”
Ben gave a deep sigh, then there was silence.
“He was older than I, and I treated him badly in the end.”
“Some good things can’t last,” Laura offered.
“He was really too much for me, too much of a person. I was such an unlicked cub then, so violent, so full of myself, so insecure about the painting, having to justify what could hardly be called a successful career.”
“What did Pierre do?”
“Stage designs, mostly for opera—and he is a genius at that. I suppose I was jealous of all that fame and money.”
“Yes.”
“But he taught me a lot about love in his own peculiar way. He really cared. But he pushed me too hard, you see. I felt finally like a prisoner of his will … as far as the painting was concerned.” Then Ben said quite firmly, “Yes, if I were dying I would want to see Pierre.”
“Do you suppose he would know and come?” Laura whispered. She was thinking of Ella.
“Who knows? There have been plenty of people for each of us in ten years.”
“Yes, but time and other people don’t really matter,” Laura said. “After all, I married Charles.”
“Mother!”
It was not going to be possible, after all. Mothers and sons. Mothers and daughters. Ben was shocked.
“There are so many kinds of love, Ben. Marrying Charles was the best thing I ever did. He broke the spell of my overwhelming mother. He bore me away into the natural world, and it was high time.”
She could hear the intent breathing on the chaise longue. But Laura was beginning to feel the effort of bridging so much, of explanations beyond her strength.
“You mean your feeling for Ella was not natural?”
“Oh, heavens, no. I meant mother’s world was not natural.”
“I don’t quite understand.”
Laura fell silent. She wanted to go back into the tunnel and not try to connect. It was too difficult, too intricate to put into words now. But she had started something, and she was acutely aware of the strain on Ben lying there in the dark, being asked to take in things that were hard for a son to take in about his mother.
“One thing about this journey has been an entirely new understanding about what women can mean for one another, and men for one another. I don’t know why, but I have thought a lot about it, how the world is opening up, how separated we have all been, by fear and by taboos. How deprived.”
“I suppose,” Ben said, “when a whole life gets reckoned up, strange truths may be clear, may become clear, a new awareness of where the strong threads in the pattern began to be woven in.”
“Yes, yes, that’s it. You’ve said it for me, Ben.”
“You were young when you and Ella met. Did she marry too?”
“Oh, yes.” And then in a last burst of vision and recognition, Laura managed to bring it all into focus. “We were very different, and yet whenever we met it was as though we became one person in two bodies—we were never lovers, Ben—but there was a kind of understanding, of shared response to everything from art to landscapes, to food, to people. Being with her I became fully myself.”
That was all Laura had strength for, and now she felt herself sinking away.
When the dawn came, Ben was still there fast asleep on the chaise longue, his mouth slightly open, looking like a young boy. For a long moment Laura looked at him and then turned away, for people asleep are too exposed. She saw what a long way he still had to go to grow up. How vulnerable he was. But she saw it from a great distance. As though her son lay there in a painting.
The morning turned out to be clear, bright, cool, and for the first time in days Laura drank a cup of tea without nausea. After so long a time without nourishment she felt revived by its warmth, a true cordial, and from the chaise longue she watched Mary changing the sheets, her silent presence and the way she patted the pillows a cordial in itself.
“Where’s Ben?”
“Downstairs having his breakfast.”
“We had quite a talk in the middle of the night.”
“Tired you out, I expect.”
“No, I feel better.”
“Dr. Goodwin will be looking in on his way to the hospital—and—” Laura felt Mary’s hesitation, “perhaps I should tell you that your sister Daphne and Daisy are coming this afternoon. I explained that you were very tired and couldn’t talk. It was Miss Daphne I talked to, and she said they would come and take turns sitting with you, or do whatever they could.”
“It’s good when someone sits here and doesn’t talk.” Laura sighed. “I didn’t think I would ever need that but I do.”
“Daisy told me she had promised to sing you some songs,” said Mary with a fleeting ironic look in Laura’s direction, “She’s bringing her guitar.”
“Oh.” Laura closed her eyes. They mustn’t ask her to respond to anything. “Downstairs,” she said, “ask her to sing downstairs.”
“Yes, dear.” Laura was so weak that she nearly fell over while Mary was getting her into a clean nightgown, and the clumsiness of it made them both fall into a fit of laughter.
“Oh, Mary, thank you,” Laura murmured as she sank back into bed.
“There’s the doctor now.” Mary ran down to answer the doorbell.
“Well,” said Jim as he came in and looked around, “everything is in apple-pie order here, I see.” He sat on the bed and laid his hand on hers gently.
“I’m like a Venetian glass,” Laura said, smiling at him. “Touch me and I might break.”
“I’m so sorry my little scheme about getting you down yesterday was such a dismal failure, Laura. I came to apologize.”
“You were keeping a promise.”
“Sometimes that can be a stupid thing to do.”
“But,” Laura said. It was something she had been planning to say ever since the hospital. “But you kept the important promise.”
“Did I? What was that?”
“To let me have my own death. We managed to keep science out of it as much
as possible, didn’t we, Jim? I was so afraid you would feel you had to try chemotherapy or—something.”
His hand closed on hers and pressed it.
“You never thought you were God.”
Jim laughed. “No, I never did, that’s a fact.”
“Well, some doctors do, don’t they?”
Jim didn’t answer because he was busy taking her pulse. When he laid her wrist down he said, “I’ve learned a lot from you, Laura.”
“I can’t imagine what!”
For a moment he was silent, and Laura saw that he looked tired. His face was drawn. For all she knew he had been up half the night. “It’s hard to put into words. I really can’t. But all I can say is that it seems you have been living your death, living instead of dying it, I mean. It has been a meaningful journey, hasn’t it?”
“Yes.” Then Laura smiled. “Jim, today I feel well, better than I have in ages. I wonder why.”
“It’s called a remission,” Jim said quietly.
“It won’t last?”
“It might.” He was standing now. “I must run along, Laura.”
“Thanks for coming—and Jim, for everything.”
He gave her a quick, intent look. And somehow, though there was no reason since she felt so much better, Laura knew that this was good-bye. There was no struggle to breathe this morning, yet Laura sensed that she was being borne away, borne on some great tide, and she was not afraid anymore. She was happy to lie there alone, on the cool, clean pillow, in the morning light and let herself go on the tide.
There was only a slight thread that still held her to the shore, and no doubt that would break soon.
She was dozing when Ben came in to kiss her good morning.
“I’ll just sleep a little, Ben.”
“I’ll be next door in my room if you need anything.” Later Mary came with chicken broth, but Laura didn’t want it.
“I’d like to rinse my mouth, it’s so dry,” she said, “but I’m not hungry.”
She was not floating; no images rose up from the past. But she was in some obscure, distant place in herself, waiting for something, she did not know for what. Not, she knew, for Daphne, though when later on Daphne was there beside her when she opened her eyes after a long sleep, she smiled and held Daphne’s hand for a moment.
