Two-Part Invention

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when the good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.

  Yet even here I live with contradiction. Whenever anyone in the family is driving, I pray for a safe journey. And when I hear the car door slam and know that whoever it is is safely home, I breathe out, “Oh, God, thank you.”

  But I think there is a difference between offering a deep sigh of thanks and assuming that “the Lord was surely with me.”

  We need to say “Thank you” whenever possible, even if we are not able to reconcile the human creature’s free will with the Maker’s working out of the pattern. Thanks and praise are, I believe, some of the threads with which the pattern is woven.

  There are many times when the idea that there is indeed a pattern seems absurd wishful thinking. Random events abound. There is much in life that seems meaningless. And then, when I can see no evidence of meaning, some glimpse is given which reveals the strange weaving of purposefulness and beauty.

  The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

  After a month in the hospital Hugh comes home, as thin as though he’d just been released from concentration camp.

  He is unable to eat, barely able to walk, he is still so weak. But he is happy to be home, among familiar things, looking out the windows to the peace of the view across the freshly hayed fields—it looks as though we have ten acres of lawn! Beyond the fields are the woods, and beyond the woods the Litchfield hills. Hugh sits in the big chair in the kitchen and turns from the view to the birds crowding around the feeder—the purple and house finches, the downy woodpecker, the brilliant cardinals, all putting on a show for him. Usually in the summer we move the feeders off the terrace and into the trees, filling them only occasionally, but this summer they are there for Hugh’s pleasure. Simply watching them takes all his energy, though sometimes he manages to knock on the window with his cane to scare away the greedy mourning doves so that they won’t take the food away from the smaller birds.

  One day he shows us a letter from Texas with the address on Morning Dove Drive, managing a smile as he shows us the changed spelling. On rainy days he points out the bedraggledness of the female cardinals, their elegant crested “hats” floppily askew. We rejoice at each small sign of interest, for nothing more can be done to treat him, either by chemotherapy or by surgery, until he has regained some appetite and a little strength. At this moment anything more would kill him outright.

  The oncologist goes away with his family for a week’s vacation. When he sees Hugh on his return he says openly, “He looks terrible.” He does. It is hard for me to understand that it is still possible that all this is reversible. I show the doctor a snapshot of Hugh taken not long ago, saying, “In case you’ve forgotten, this is what he really looks like. This is the man I want back.”

  Even at home the fungus on the esophagus and the three ulcers make it almost impossible for him to eat. He lives on a fortified drink three times a day which we make palatable by putting it in the blender with ice cream. Hugh has not had ice cream in nearly two decades. “Forget the diabetic diet,” we are told. “Give him anything he can eat. He has got to have some nourishment.”

  These are rough days. We know that Hugh has to eat, to walk, to gain strength. But he cannot eat. He has absolutely no appetite. Nothing tastes as it should. It is possible that yet another side effect of the platinum is that it has done something to his taste buds.

  Meals are horrors. We know that we must try to live—for ourselves, for Hugh—as normally as possible. Bion and Laurie and I promise each other that we won’t push Hugh to eat, that if he doesn’t want food we won’t say anything. But we can’t keep our promise. We can’t keep from urging Hugh to eat, in our longing to help. We struggle to create meals of what we call “slippery” food, and nothing seems to work.

  One day when Carol is here, helping me clean the house, I urge Hugh to come with me for his morning walk, and he refuses. When I keep on urging, he shouts, “No!”

  Later Carol told me that Hugh said to her, “You’re upset because I yelled at Madeleine, aren’t you?”

  She replied, “Yes. It’s only because she loves you that she wants you to walk.”

  And Hugh says, “I know.” Oh, I know that he knows.

  With my head I know that he has to work out anger, and that I am the “safe” person to take it out on. Head and heart do not always work together.

  Not for any of us. We get impatient. We think Hugh could be trying harder. We do not understand the magnitude of all that he is working through, nor that the inability to eat is in no way his “fault,” is not in his control.

  This is a bad, bad time, with no one, not even the doctors, aware of just how badly Hugh’s body is betraying him.

  We must not run into false guilt over all this. In our own fumbling, totally human ways we are doing the best that we can. It is not good enough. But we are not saints or angels, but ordinary people fumbling to love, falling over our own helplessness and frustration.

  And Hugh is trying—trying to eat, and not succeeding. Going with me, now, for a walk each day. Trying to swim. He works up to ten laps in the small pool, diligently, bravely. Friends send me a tape of charming French-Canadian music, Mes quatre saisons, and Hugh and I love it, and swim to it.

  It is not good to indulge in hindsight. If we had known how sheerly physical Hugh’s eating problem was, we would not have pushed so hard. How could we know? Even the gastroenterologist had no idea of what a terrible state the esophagus was in.

  Hugh has to work through all the anguish and frustration and denial and acceptance himself. The lonely valley is just that: lonely. Jesus walked that lonesome valley. He had to walk it by himself. Sooner or later we all do. There are no shortcuts through the place of excrement.

  The constant strain is wearing on us all. We are tired. I admit that I am stressed—no difficult admission. And it occurs to me that if stressed means all strung out, tense, worn, then distressed should mean the opposite. But it doesn’t. I am both stressed and distressed. Held together by the love of family and friends.

  A letter comes which tells of a time when someone in the writer’s family was desperately ill, and she found that during this time of terrible anxiety she noticed small, lovely things far more than when life went on in its more ordinary way. And that is true, a strange gift born of pain. I am poignantly aware of the glory of the fair-weather clouds constantly moving in the blue summer sky; of the deliciousness of food, especially the fresh vegetables as we bring them in from the garden; the softness of newly washed sheets.

  But anxiety is never far below the surface. Once he has taken a short walk or had his swim, Hugh does little except read the paper and do the puzzle. He seems to be far away from us. Every once in a while he returns with a smile or a quick and witty remark and for a moment he is back with us; he is himself.

  Once I sit at his feet, perching on his footstool. I say, “Darling, we’ve always promised to be absolutely honest with each other, and I don’t think we are, right now. I’m very angry at everything that has happened. It isn’t fair. It shouldn’t have happened. You’ve got to be angry, too.”

  He acknowledges this, and we hold each other. Cry.

  To accept that we are angry is a healthy and appropriate response as long as we don’t get
stuck in it. Acknowledging it is one way of going through it. Hugh has to go through it his own way.

  It is hard to have him so far away.

  Six

  Sometimes Hugh’s farawayness has been literal; physical, not spiritual.

  If my childhood and young womanhood were not typical of the usual pattern of growing up in America, neither was my marriage. Hugh had to take jobs as they came. Sometimes he would go out of town with the tryout of a play that never made it to Broadway. Even if it did, we never knew how long it was going to run. When he got an out-of-town job he had to take it. Separation is a normal part of a theatrical marriage.

  My second novel had been published to distinguished reviews but very modest sales, and I was running out of The Small Rain money. And we now had a baby to support, blessed in having a child who was healthy and happy and full of fun. Hugh would hold out his forefingers and she would clasp them and he would swing her, lifting her high, to my mother’s terror when she came to visit.

  Television was in its early days, all live, and often exhausting. When Hugh played the John Barrymore role in The Royal Family he had to carry Florence Reed, a hefty actress, up a flight of stairs. On the day of the performance, rehearsals started in the early morning, and before the show went on the air that evening he had carried Florence Reed up those stairs twenty times. When he came home, he was so worn out that he threw up. Such was the glamorous world of the theatre.

  But it was our life and I married Hugh with no illusions of stability. We managed and we were happy.

  Happy with our child. Josephine had her first birthday at Crosswicks, took her first steps, began running all over in delight. Eva Le Gallienne sent her the little nursery chair that had been used in The Cherry Orchard and she carried it everywhere, using it as a stepladder. It took the place of the more usual blanket or stuffed toy.

  We spent nearly six months in our run-down house, scrubbing, cleaning, painting. In those days of frequent trains I could drive Hugh down to the early-morning train at West Cornwall, and he could easily get to the city. After the train had pulled out I drove along a dirt road by the Housatonic River to Don Cameron’s for breakfast and talk. Don was an older actor from the Civic Repertory who had been introduced to me by Thelma. He was friend, father-figure, mentor. I never heard him say a mean or sarcastic word about anybody. He was realistic enough in his expectations of human relations to understand betrayal, and the complexities of human behavior, without judgment. Quietly, patiently, he taught me. Our breakfasts were a treasured part of that summer.

  Hugh was away a good deal at various summer-stock theatres, so I spent much of the time alone with our little one. And I wrote. That was the summer I wrote And Both Were Young. And I learned something else about art: I knew that if the book was accepted by the publisher, if it was “good,” then I would always remember the summer as a “good” summer. If it was not accepted, if it did not work, then I would remember the summer as a “bad” summer. Illogical, but true. The book was accepted with enthusiasm, and so it was a “good” summer despite Hugh’s many long absences.

  We bought one of the early power mowers, and it was my job to mow the lawn. During the years, as mowers were refined and did the job more easily, our lawn grew bigger until it took Hugh nearly three hours sitting on his tractor to mow what is now a couple of acres.

  One afternoon during that first summer the blades struck something solid, so I pulled the mower away, stopped it, bent down, and picked up a silver napkin ring, an ancient, tarnished silver napkin ring, inscribed Jacob. It has been my napkin ring ever since.

  One July day my journal entry was headed: “Social Note: Last night about one o’clock I was in bed reading when I heard a low whistle outside my window. When I heard the whistle again, I got up and looked out the window. I saw a man standing there. The man said, ‘Magda!’ Only my friends from The Cherry Orchard call me Magda. I was baffled, and called out in a whisper, ‘Who is it?’ ‘Bob.’ Of course I then went dashing downstairs in my nightclothes to let him in. ‘What are you doing here!’ I cried. ‘We came over to see the show at Litchfield,’ he told me. Then I saw that there were some people out in a car, so I said, ‘Bring ’em in and I’ll dash up and put some clothes on.’ So we had a pleasant social half hour before they set off.”

  I noticed small things alone that I might not have if Hugh had not been away with a show. “The shadow of a moth as it flies about at night can look as though it came from a huge bat or bird. Quite terrifying sometimes.”

  When Hugh got home at the end of the summer season at Holyoke, we threw a big party for all of the company, and the ingenue (one of those “little blondes” Pepé was reputed to like) very overtly threw herself at Hugh. He was amused, not interested, and it was not the last time I watched women who were perhaps younger and certainly more beautiful than I making a play for my husband. I didn’t like it, having never completely thrown off my insecurity, but Hugh had taken the marriage vows as seriously as I had, and I had no cause for worry. I never understood why a woman felt she was free to attract another woman’s husband, but I did understand that I needn’t be concerned. In the nature of Hugh’s business, he was more often thrown with beautiful women than I, a solitary writer, was thrown with handsome men, but together we learned the meaning of faithfulness.

  Hugh and I wanted more children but it did not seem wise to have a new baby when our livelihood was so totally precarious. Crosswicks, while not large, was still a farmhouse, with four bedrooms upstairs, but much of the year we had to be in New York, with one bedroom. We loved our Tenth Street apartment but it was too small for us with even one child. Apartment hunting was discouraging; apartments were few, and those we could find with two bedrooms were too expensive for us. Leonard Bernstein lived on the top floor of our building, with two small bedrooms, and we talked of switching apartments, because he didn’t like the climb, but we felt that four flights of stairs wouldn’t be really practical with two children, so nothing came of that idea. I wondered if our incomes would ever stabilize. We had enough money to live on, but not enough to save on, even with subletting the apartment during the summer.

  Very few families yet had television sets, and some evenings when Hugh was going to be on a show in a particularly good role I would take the baby, walk up to the nearest bar, order a glass of ginger ale, and ask if I could please watch my husband. It was amazing how gently I was treated by the masculine clientele watching football or baseball. Immediately the channel would be changed, and everybody watched with me and admired Hugh.

  In the spring we sublet our apartment and moved up to Crosswicks, planted our vegetable garden. I started a new novel, Camilla, and enjoyed writing it.

  I was happy with our little girl and our house and the peace of the view across the fields to the north, and the gentle ancient shoulders of the Litchfield hills. But the world kept breaking in. On the fifteenth of June 1950, I wrote: “Today the communists marched into Korea and Harry McLeod died. To Mrs. McLeod the agony of the Koreans is as nothing compared to the witnessed agony of a frail man coughing his life out in a blank hospital room. To the world the passing of Harry McLeod is nothing; only in Goshen is anyone aware of this upright man’s life and death. He ran the little grocery store in West Goshen and he gave fair measure, and running over. Harry McLeod was and now he is not. Yesterday the communists were not in Korea and now they are there, and if the passing of Harry McLeod has in the long run no profound effect on mankind, what will the occupation of Korea have? How does it affect the small, good people in Korea, the Harry McLeods? And how are we to judge it and what are we to do and how will this action, this attempt to strangle freedom, affect us and our children and our children’s children?”

  The effects were violent and continuous, but ordinary daily life went on, cooking meals, making beds, rocking and singing my little one to sleep.

  The world broke in on me in another way, in late September. Hugh was in New York doing a Dumont television broadcast and al
l of our special Goshen friends wanted to see it. Eunice and Burt, old Goshen people, arranged for us to go over to one of the few houses which had a television set. Burt was a farmer, and Hugh helped him hay, driving the tractor while Burt picked up the hay. Eunice, with infinite patience, taught this city girl how to can and freeze.

  I was a little nervous about the evening Eunice and Burt had set up so that we could watch Hugh. Our host was the head of the American Legion in Goshen and the leader of a group of men who were out looking for communists, immediately labeling anyone interested in the United Nations, or peace, as “Red! Red!” I was well aware that the communists were doing their best to infiltrate and destroy, but I did not believe that the people concerned about peace were the ones who were dangerous. I realized, with a feeling of terror in the pit of my stomach, that our host could actually ruin Hugh if he wanted to, by accusing him of communism, because I had seen it being done to other actors.

  “Where am I living?” I wrote. “Is this a town in Germany under Hitler, or Russia under Stalin, or is it a town in the democratic country of the United States of America?”

  The evening of the Dumont show came and went, but extraordinary events were happening because of the blind terror of communism. Don sent me a clipping from the The New York Times with the headline: “HIAWATHA MAY AID REDS, SAYS STUDIO. Indian chief immortalized by Longfellow sought peace, so Monogram shelves film.” This was as skewed in the opposite direction as that New Year’s Eve party where I learned that communism was not for me.

  I was working on my novel, and certainly my reaction to the blind terror of communism I had just witnessed was reflected as I wrote about Camilla’s friend, Frank, with his passion for peace. I finished the book, and I was happy with it. Hugh, too, loved and believed in it. But Vanguard, which had published my first two novels, rejected it. I sent it off again: another rejection, but for diametrically opposite reasons. I wrote: “How do you reconcile such diverse opinions? I’m always much too close to my work to be able to judge it myself until several years have elapsed.”