After a week with Mother we headed North. We stopped off in Washington with Walter and Jean Kerr. Forty years later Jean was to write me: “I remember well the first night we met you. The two of you seemed to tumble into our little house with happiness. Hugh in love was a different Hugh, boyish and buoyant. He was so enchanted with you. And we were so enchanted with both of you. And we talked and talked (I guess we always did do that). And the two of you slept (or did not sleep) on that tiny fold-down couch that wouldn’t really fit one tall person.
“I remember being startled when you told me that you used Johnson and Johnson’s baby powder—because Hugh liked it. And when you both left the next day Walter and I were still in the afterglow of Hugh’s happiness, your happiness, and our joy that Hugh had met and married such a marvelous girl THAT WE LIKED! How young we all were …”
We made our way back to New York, caught up with city friends, and bought a double bed which was also extra-length, a necessity for two such tall people. We took off for northwestern Connecticut, where I had to be “shown” to old friends of Hugh’s. They were theatre people who had inherited some money and retired, very young, to the country, to have children and live a simpler life than that of city and theatre. Hugh had often spent weekends with them, usually invited to meet a young woman they had picked out for him. And lo and behold, he called to say he was coming with his wife, someone they had never even heard of.
That was the weekend we bought Crosswicks, surely a rash act, but one we have never regretted. Herb and Martha were so friendly that I felt quickly at home. I told them that I’d spent many childhood summers at camp in Norfolk, just fourteen miles away, and that I loved this particular corner of the planet. Suddenly Herb said, “I think we’ve found a house for you,” and we got in the car and drove a few miles to a back road which met a dirt road. On the corner was an old white farmhouse that looked as though it was about to fall down, largely because of a decrepit porch which had been tacked on. Herb knew enough about houses to reassure us that the basic house underneath all the disrepair was solid.
We returned to New York, and then set off for a summer of stock. Hugh was the leading man, and after the first couple of shows I was given the opportunity for some rich character roles. We stayed with friends of the producers, who had extra rooms because their three children were off at summer camp. I remember two things particularly. Our hostess said, “The telephone is for one purpose only, to let your family know if you’re going to be late.” Good advice, still taken to heart when I told Léna the “rules.”
The other thing I remember is my first shower. It was hard to believe that I had never before in my life taken a shower! But I had always lived in places with tubs. Crosswicks had a tub, not a shower. So I washed my hair under the shower, not realizing that shower curtains must be tucked inside, until our hostess rushed up the stairs to tell me I was causing a flood.
Hugh left before the last two weeks of the season to go to the prestigious East Hampton Theatre to star in Dangerous Corner. I stayed on for two of my best roles of the summer. I wrote in my journal how much I missed him, adding: “But the wonderful thing, whether we are together or apart, is to know that he is in the world, and that we belong together. And what I must learn is to love with all of me, giving all of me, and yet remain whole in myself. Any other kind of love is too demanding of the other; it takes, rather than gives. To love so completely that you lose yourself in another person is not good. You are giving a weight, not the sense of lightness and light that loving someone should give. To love wholly, generously, and yet retain the core that makes you you.”
Hugh stayed on an extra week at East Hampton to play the doctor in Our Town, while Thornton Wilder himself played the stage manager. I was able to join Hugh there and after the show we would go out to supper with Thornton Wilder, who talked about existentialism. Sometimes we were joined by Philip Barry, and producer Joshua Logan, and I learned more about the theatre as well as existentialism.
And I copied out these unidentified words: “In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith, and the only reality. They are what we find when the ruins are cleared away. And even the smallest and most incomplete offering at this time can be a proud act in defense of that faith.”
In all ways I was struggling to articulate reality.
Our surroundings were not yet as unreal as they were to become. In the world of the theatre we touched on reality itself, and were shocked as the world around us seemed to reach out for the unreal. Planned obsolescence was just coming in, objects made with less than excellence, built to destroy themselves or to wear out. Plastic and synthetics were just becoming available to the public. The word synthetics is enough: unreal.
Today we live in a society that seems to be less and less concerned with reality. We drink instant coffee and reconstituted orange juice. We buy our vegetables on cardboard trays covered with plastic. But perhaps the most dehumanizing thing of all is that we have allowed the media to call us consumers—ugly. No! I don’t want to be a consumer. Anger consumes. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes.
Four
The doctors and nurses in the hospital where my husband is being cared for are fighting a disease which would consume him without their skill. They are not consumers; they are trying to be nourishers, healers. We are very fortunate that there is such an excellent small hospital less than a dozen miles from Crosswicks, a well-endowed hospital which has attracted fine physicians. This northwest corner of our state, in the Litchfield hills, is a beautiful place in which to bring up a family. We have excellent medical care close at hand. My doctor daughter-in-law has hand-picked Hugh’s team. We know that he is getting the best care possible.
Even so, I am grateful to have had my friend Ed’s reinforcement that Hugh is receiving the state-of-the-art treatment, because the platinum chemotherapy is terribly hard on him. He is having every toxic reaction imaginable, and a few nobody thought of. First is the distressing but expected nausea.
When this lets up we bring him home to recuperate before the next round of platinum. He is terribly weak. Bion and Laurie almost have to carry him up the three steps into the kitchen. We sit him in the big comfortable chair where he can watch the bird feeder. And he sits there, staring at something we cannot see. But our hope is that the home environment will help, that home-cooked food will encourage the appetite which the platinum has destroyed.
In the evening Bion helps him up the stairs and we put him to bed, and he sighs with thankfulness to be in his own room, his own bed.
But I am uneasy about him all night, uneasy about him the next day. Again he sits in the big chair in the kitchen, looking across the fields to the woods and then the hills. His great blue eyes have a strange, unfamiliar expression. My anxiety deepens, but there is nothing specific to pin it on, just a feeling of wrongness. And surely the cancer itself is wrong enough.
In the afternoon I cross the big north field to the far corner where we are planting twenty-eight small white pines. Someone has bought the six-tenths of an acre just beyond this field, and all its trees, which have been a wildlife corridor, have been cut down to make room for a house. We have already planted poplars (they grow quickly), willows, maples, to make another wooded place for the deer and pheasant and other friendly wild creatures—and to protect our view. Last weekend, young friends came and helped dig twenty-eight holes, and three of the pines were properly planted. All the rest have to be released from the canvas ball, and then have the dirt tamped in around them. I g
o to work, ending up covered with mud. Because of the heavy spring rains, the ground is still very wet. I would like to cry, but only a few tears come.
At dinner Hugh barely nibbles at his food. We sit at the table for a while, talking by candlelight. Then Hugh says that he is ready for bed. He stands up, takes three steps, and drops like a felled oak.
It happens shockingly suddenly. “Oh, God,” I say, and try to break his fall, but cannot. “Oh, God,” the eternal cry in time of trouble.
Our doctor daughter-in-law is quick with her stethoscope, her sure fingers on his thready and irregular pulse. Hugh is conscious now, but very weak. Our son calls the fire department for the ambulance. The weekly meeting of the volunteer fire-department members is just ending, and within minutes the ambulance and four of the volunteers are at our house.
It is good to be part of a small community. Hugh is given a quick cardiogram, then put in the ambulance, and those who go with him are gentle, and ease his fear at this unexpected blow. Laurie and I follow by car, while Bion stays home to hold the fort, to answer the telephone. We do not speak much during the drive. We don’t need to. I pray, the words a deep, interior rhythm.
Michael, Hugh’s oncologist, is at the emergency room to meet us. The cardiologist is called in. There is genuine concern by doctors and nurses as well as immediate competence. Michael presses my shoulder in compassion.
We are allowed to stay with Hugh until all the tests are finished. He whispers, “I don’t want to stay in the hospital.” But there is no choice. Laurie and I wait beside the stretcher and walk with him to the elevator as he is wheeled to the cardiac care unit.
After a few days in CCU, Hugh’s heart steadies, and he is moved to a private room (yet another picture), seems to be doing well, hopes to be released from the hospital. And then internal bleeding is discovered. Despite medication to prevent this very thing, he has developed three bleeding peptic ulcers and needs two transfusions. There is a heavy candida fungus on the esophagus, making it difficult for him to swallow. He is near tears. So am I.
Yet the times of emergency, of acute anxiety, are in a way easier than the long days when nothing changes, while Hugh remains desperately ill, unable to eat, barely able to stand without a nurse on either side.
Everything is being done for him that can be done. Daily I need to remind myself that Ed said this is what he would do for his own father; it is not unrealistic to hope for a cure. Otherwise, I might not be able to hang on to the belief that this is what is best for Hugh.
There is nothing that I, personally, can do, except be there. At my family’s suggestion I begin taking my little six-pound electronic typewriter with me so that I can write while Hugh is napping. This helps. For, like most of us, I feel frustrated when a situation arises where I am totally helpless, where there is nothing I can do to make anything better. I can, I hope, help Hugh a little by my presence, by the touch of my hand. But there is nothing specifically for me to do. And I think of a friend who has a coffee mug with the inscription: DON’T JUST DO SOMETHING. STAND THERE.
It is no small feat for me this summer just to stand there. To treasure the moments of beauty. Bion, Laurie, and I took the dogs last night after dinner and walked the mile-long dirt road on which Crosswicks faces. Never have I seen the sunset more glorious, the sunset at eight-thirty as June moves toward the longest days of the year. I look at my son and daughter-in-law with a deep surging of gratitude as they are walking through this summer with us.
Sometimes I walk the lane alone. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I pray like a child and that is all right. Jesus called us to be children. Mostly I hold on to the ancient Jesus prayer, like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to the rope that keeps him from sinking into the deep.
I have to watch out for echthroid projections, those horrible temptations to the imagination to project terrible things, nasty little temptations which buzz around like mosquitoes.
Take it day by day. Don’t project. Stand there.
One of my experiences in standing there came after our return from summer theatre—that first year of our marriage. I had talked about wanting to wait two years before thinking about a baby, but Hugh’s impetuousness infected me. And once again I was reminded of the precariousness of our lives.
Hugh and Don, an actor friend, were driving back to New York after the closing of the East Hampton season. They were both eager to get home, and were driving along considerably above the speed limit. It was still warm, and the windows were open, and suddenly a large bee flew in and started buzzing at them. They tried to shoo it out, and it outwitted them. Hugh, who was driving, slowed the car down, and further down, as the bee kept buzzing. Just as he had the car slowed to perhaps twenty miles an hour, the right front tire blew.
Had they been going faster, it is quite likely they would have been killed. Don, who was a Scotsman, believed firmly that the bee had been sent to save their lives.
Hugh got safely home, and this near-brush with death made postponements of any part of our life undesirable. Soon after that, I became pregnant, and we were delighted. It never occurred to me that I would have any problem with pregnancy, but I was, it seemed, allergic to my own little one, and the eminent obstetrician, overburdened with a multitude of postwar pregnancies, was not particularly interested. I went to Dr. Baumstone, the gentle physician who had been so helpful to Hugh after the albumin had been discovered in his urine. He noticed a slight redness in my eyes, and sent me to an ophthalmologist, Dr. Townley Paton, who was to start the Eye Bank. He immediately put me in the hospital and may well have kept me from losing the baby.
The treatment for iritis in those days included completely resting the eyes: no reading, no writing. When I was a child the most terrible punishment my mother could give me was to forbid me to read or write for twenty-four hours, and I would beg her to spank me instead. So this was a terrible deprivation. I could play the piano for a little while. But mostly, after I was out of the hospital, I lay on the couch. And my young new husband was patient and tender and gentle. He went out on a nasty, rainy day and came back with a small basket of strawberries. Pregnant women are supposed to have a craving for strawberries. Not I. Much as I wanted to eat them in appreciation of his thoughtfulness, I couldn’t. But Hugh stood there with me for the first five months of misery.
Mother sent us this poem from a newspaper and I copied it in my journal—I did cheat a little on resting the eyes by writing for a few minutes each day:
To keep one sacred flame
Through life, unchilled, unmoved,
To love in wintry age the same
As first in youth we loved,
To feel that we adore
Even to fond excess,
That though the heart would break with more
It could not live with less.
I understand that poem better this summer of Hugh’s illness than forty years earlier when I copied it out.
But already I was beginning to glimpse that kind of love.
If the first five months of my pregnancy tested all of Hugh’s patience and love, the remainder of the time was happy. The baby was an active little thing; all I needed to do in bed at night was curl around Hugh and she would start kicking him, emphasizing that this new life belonged to both of us.
My energy returned as all the various side effects of the pregnancy left me. I was allowed to use my eyes to read and write. We went out to dinner, had friends in. One evening it was the people from the Theatre Guild, Very Important People, and I was determined to do Hugh proud. I cooked a good dinner, because I am a good cook—up to dessert. For dessert I had made one of Hugh’s favorites, a deep-dish cherry pie. When it came time to serve it, the crust did not look brown enough, so I put it under the broiler.
Hugh had to get the fire extinguisher to put out the blaze.
Despite my total discomfiture, I doubt if it did his career any harm.
One morning he received a phone call from Margaret Webster, asking if he could sing.
&
nbsp; Peggy was directing a new production of Alice in Wonderland, with herself playing the Red Queen, and Eva Le Gallienne the White. The man playing the White Knight had broken his arm, and they needed a replacement.
But Hugh told Peggy he couldn’t sing, and hung up.
I had very carefully observed a policy of non-interference. Hugh had recently closed in Pirandello’s Henry V. Nothing else was on the horizon. I knew that he had a lovely voice. I called Peggy Webster. “If you mean can Hugh sing in the Metropolitan Opera, no. But if you mean can he put over a song, yes.”
So he auditioned and was hired. Worked with the pianist on the White Knight’s solo, which was syncopated, modulated, and difficult, and had to be sung after he had fallen off a horse three times. The horse was two tall men standing upright under the frame. Hugh was taught to fall correctly, warned against breaking his arm. On the evening when he went on as the White Knight he was singing with the orchestra for the first time. Of course I was in the audience, visibly pregnant, and all our friends in the company were rather nervous that I might have the baby that night.
I didn’t, and Hugh was good, if a little breathless. His costume was countless pieces of armor, not light in weight, and included a half face mask with a long, drooping nose to match the drooping mustache. As the weeks turned toward spring, and then summer, and the heat increased, he began to perspire in the heavy armor, and drops of sweat fell off his own aristocratic nose into the false one and began to back up. Holes had to be made in the White Knight’s nose so that Hugh didn’t drown in his own sweat.
It was a lovely production and I thought slightly wistfully that had I not been pregnant I might well have played one of the minor roles. An album of the show was made, on the old breakable 78 rpm records, and is a great treasure.
One night after the show we met an agent for supper and her guest was John Gielgud. I wrote in my journal that a few years earlier I would have been overwhelmed with awe to the point of speechlessness. While I was honored to meet this famous actor, I was amazingly comfortable and relaxed enough to enjoy his conversation, and relieved that in person he was as delightful as he was onstage.
Two-Part Invention Page 9
