A Severed Wasp

by Madeleine L'engle

  Utter horror.

  Nanette had snatched away the box and its contents. Manya, hearing the noise, had come running, had held Katherine as though she were a baby, while Justin took Julie to the park so that she would not know what had happened, so that the ugliness would leave no mark on the child.

  ‘You are very much loved,’ Manya had said, pressing Katherine close, ‘and where there is much love, there is, always, hate. But the love is greater, Katya, much greater. Never forget that.’

  Somehow Manya brought back sanity, and the horror receded. ‘There are sick people in the world, but they are to be pitied. And those of us who are able to love must return the sickness with healing; that is the gift of the artist.’

  Manya could not have forgotten those episodes, even in the weakness of her illness. But her urgent warning was about something else, something to come. Thus far, Katherine thought, her old age was being peaceful and pleasant. Her friendship with Mimi, with Felix, her growing friendship with the Davidsons and the Undercrofts, these were keeping things interesting. Heretofore her friends—with the exception of Wolfi—had been professional artists. It was amusing now to meet completely different people, to enlarge her horizons. She could not remember a time when life had not been interesting. Even in the midst of grief it had been interesting.

  Her mind drifted back to the house in Connecticut and to the dying old woman.

  The late afternoon sun slanted through the trees and across the hospital bed, touching Manya’s face, which was still beautiful; the wrinkles seemed to have been smoothed away, and only the purity of the bone structure showed. ‘I have been able to come to you, and to love you, but I cannot protect you from jealousy,’ the old woman had murmured, and then she shifted position, trying to sit up, and Katherine held her, supporting the thin frame. ‘My soul is getting stronger every day.’ Now Manya’s voice was clear. ‘Now I know, now I understand, Kostya, that in our work—in acting or writing—what matters is not fame, not glory, not what I dreamed of, but knowing how to be patient … Do you remember? Nina. Nina in The Sea Gull, my first major role … knowing how to be patient. To bear one’s cross and have faith. I have faith, and it all doesn’t hurt so much. And when I think of my vocation, I am not afraid of life.’ The voice faded out, but the old woman’s arms tightened about Katherine, and they continued to embrace, and love flowed between and through them, stronger than electricity.

  It did not cease abruptly, like a light switch turned off; it faded slowly, gently. And then Manya was heavy in Katherine’s arms.

  6

  For Katherine, the memory of Manya’s death was a memory of love, love tangible as the sunlight that had fallen across the bed. As she pulled herself out of the tub and slipped into her terry robe, all she felt was love, and the echo of Nina’s words. She was in her nightgown and brushing her hair when the phone rang. She reached for it. “Hello?”

  “Madame Vigneras.”

  “Yes, speaking.” And then the doorbell rang. Mimi was in Boston with Iona. Who on earth, at this time of night—

  “Excuse me,” she said to the caller, “while I answer the door. I’ll be right back.” She slipped on a light robe and started toward the living room. “Who is it?” she called through the door.

  “It’s Dorcas—Dorcas Gibson from downstairs. Please let me in.”

  Katherine opened the door and was startled by Dorcas’s ravaged, tearstained face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Dorcas started to say, and began to weep.

  “Sit down, child,” Katherine ordered. “There’s someone on the phone. I’ll be right back to you.” She returned to the bedroom and picked up the phone again. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, but the doorbell—”

  An unfamiliar, grating voice said, “Don’t think you can get away from us like that, Madame Vigneras. We know all about you and your—shall we call it unusual—sex life.”

  She was frozen on the side of the bed, still holding the phone to her ear.

  “Oh, yes, we know all about you and Dr. Oppenheimer. And we know that you were Bishop Bodeway’s mistress …”

  Released from paralysis, she slammed down the phone. For a moment she sat on the edge of the bed, trembling with shock and disbelief. The call could not have caught her at a more sensitive moment. Half of her mind was still with remembered jealousies, with Manya’s warning—

  She remembered Dorcas.

  Walking slowly, because her limbs were trembling, although this phone call was no more than an idiocy, a mere nothing, she returned to the living room. Dorcas was curled up on the sofa. She had stopped her uncontrollable weeping, and held a wet ball of a handkerchief.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.” Katherine’s voice was automatically courteous, but she was not yet completely aware of the child. “What’s the matter?”

  Dorcas hiccuped. “I’m sorry to bother you like this, but your lights were on, and I knew you weren’t asleep, and I had to get away. I walked and walked, and I might have tried just to go to sleep on a bench in the Square, but I was afraid it might not be good for the baby, and I couldn’t go home, and I didn’t know where to go, my parents are dead and my sister lives in California—” She ran out of breath.

  “But what’s the matter?” Katherine reiterated.

  “Terry—my husband—”

  “Yes?”

  “He’s been having an affair.”

  Still caught in the cloud of memories, followed by the unidentified phone caller, Katherine simply looked at the girl.

  “With a man,” Dorcas finished, and began again to cry.

  —Oh, God, I’ve had enough emotion for one evening. “Do you want to tell me about it?” Not wanting to hear, and yet unable to reject the child, whose belly was swollen with the fruit of what had certainly seemed to be the love of two people.

  “Everybody in the company thought we were the ideal couple—and I thought so, too—”

  —Here we go again, Katherine thought,—with that nonexistent ideal couple.

  “He’s a dancer in the company—not Terry, but Ric. He’s one of the tallest men in the company, and he’s beautiful, but I didn’t know—he has a wife, and June’s nice. We all like her. And they have two kids. So it never occurred to me that he—it’s all such a stupid, dirty mess.” She wiped at her face with her tear-drenched handkerchief. Katherine went into the bathroom and returned with a box of tissues.

  “Dorcas, if I sound unsympathetic, or strained, that phone call which came just when you rang the doorbell was what I suppose you might call a poison-pen call, accusing me of abnormal sexual relationships. People seem to want to define others only in terms of their sexual activity, and I find that highly distasteful. I do not wish to be defined by gender or genitals. I am a pianist. You are a dancer. What does your husband do?”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  “Obviously a successful one. I charge you the limit for that garden apartment.”

  Dorcas gave a strangled sound that was half sob, half laugh. “He specializes in marital counseling.”

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Two years.”

  “Have they been good?”

  “Marvelous—mostly. I thought he loved me.”

  Katherine asked, “What makes you think that he doesn’t love you now?”

  “Well—sometimes he’s been terribly late coming home—too often, lately—and now, he and Ric—”

  Katherine closed her eyes. She felt weary in every bone of her body. She had enough to do to come to terms with her own experiences, without being drawn into the grief and shock of this strange child. Perhaps Jean Paul was right and she should not have come to New York; she should have stayed with her own kind of people. “Is this habitual?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Is this the first time?”

  “I don’t know.” The young woman reached for the box of Kleenex and dabbed at a fresh flow of tears.

  “Dorcas, no two people are ever totally faithful to each other, and
physical infidelity is not necessarily the worst kind.” Dear Lord, I sound like a ruddy psychiatrist.

  “What’s worse?” Dorcas looked up.

  “How about alcoholism?”

  “Well, maybe. But with Ric!”

  “Would you have preferred it to be with a woman?”

  “I think maybe it would have been less humiliating.”

  “What about you, right now?” Katherine asked.

  “What about me, what?”

  “You’re pregnant. Is your sex life going on as usual?”—I hate this. It’s waking memories I’m not ready for yet. I want to go to bed.

  “Well, not quite. I had a little show of blood, and my obstetrician told me not to, for a few weeks.”

  “Could that at least partly explain it?”

  “I want to make love, too! The doctor said not to. I miss it as much as Terry does, and it’s his baby as much as mine.”

  “Not right now, it isn’t. The baby’s in your body, not his. It’s an intimacy no man is privileged to know.”

  “Woman’s lib wouldn’t like that.”

  “Do I strike you as being unliberated?”

  “No.”

  “I had two children. I’m not talking out of thin air. After the baby is born, or maybe during the birth, if your husband is with you, as Justin was with me when Julie was born, then it will become his baby as much as yours. But for these months of pregnancy, that’s not so.”

  “Ric’s wife isn’t pregnant.”

  “How does she feel about it?”

  “I don’t suppose she knows.”

  “And you?”

  “I went up to watch the rehearsal of a new ballet this afternoon. I’ll be dancing in it after—but somehow I couldn’t stay. Terry thought I’d be gone all afternoon, but I came home after only an hour, and there they were …”

  “And?”

  “I could have killed them.”

  “That’s a good, healthy reaction.”

  “It’s a lousy way to end a marriage. I never thought I’d say—so soon, and carrying our baby—that the marriage is over.” The girl looked at Katherine, expectantly, waiting.

  At last Katherine sighed and said, “What do you mean, ‘the marriage is over’? There are at least half a dozen times in any good long-term marriage when ‘the marriage is over.’ Marriage, like the rest of life, has stages. At the end of one stage, that part of the marriage is over, and you move on to the next.”

  “Or,” Dorcas said flatly, “you quit. If you think it’s really all over.”

  Katherine spoke impatiently. “Of course it’s all over. It has to be all over before you’re free to move on to the next stage. If you want to.”

  “Why would I want to? What possible kind of next stage can there be for Terry and me?”

  “That you’ll have to find out for yourself. I don’t know Terry. But maybe you can both do some real growing over this. Maybe you can begin to learn what love is all about.”

  Dorcas pushed back her long chestnut hair and looked at Katherine. “How?”

  Katherine dropped her hands in her lap. “Child, a marriage is something that has to be worked at, and too many people give up just at the point where their love could begin to grow.”

  “Your marriage—”

  “It had to be worked at. Hard. Nothing good ever comes free. When you’re dancing you have to go to classes, you have to work every day, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Do you think a marriage should be any easier than dancing?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “The greater the thing we want, the higher the price.”

  Dorcas rubbed one hand absently over her swollen belly. “What I told you about Terry and Ric—you’re not shocked.”

  “Child, I’ve seen enough of human nature so that I’m not easily shocked.”

  “But—you had a perfect marriage, didn’t you?”

  Katherine stirred wearily. “There is no such thing. I don’t know where all these extraordinary expectations of marriage have come from. I think we were more realistic in my day. People always hurt and betray each other. It’s inevitable. It’s what you do with that pain which makes a marriage good or bad. Ours was good.”

  “How—how did you betray each other?”

  —I was whole, and I had the piano career Justin could not have. And he betrayed me by being castrated in one of the ‘medical experiments’ in Auschwitz.

  Aloud, she said, “That is something which should be private between two people.”

  “I’m sorry. And I’ve just dumped all my private junk right in your lap. But now—oh, please—what should I do?”

  Katherine rose stiffly. “Dorcas, you’re a grown woman. You should not expect me, or anyone else, to make decisions for you.”

  “But you have so much experience—”

  “You’re getting experience right now, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “When I was a child my nanny used to tell me to make haste slowly. It was good advice.”

  “Perhaps Terry and I should talk—”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I was thinking of going to see June—Ric’s wife. Now I don’t think it’s such a good idea.” Katherine did not reply, and Dorcas rose, too. “Yes, it would be a shitty, bitchy idea. At least talking it out with you has made me see that much. That would just be dragging June into my hurt and trying to slap back at Terry and Ric.”

  Katherine nodded. “Sorry if I’ve seemed unsympathetic, but that revolting phone call shook me. There are a few ways in which I’m not unshockable after all.”

  “I’m so sorry!” Dorcas cried. “I’ve been thinking only of myself—but oh, Madame, you have helped. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it all, except that I’m not going to do anything tonight. I’m going downstairs now, and if Terry wants to talk, I’ll listen.”

  —I’m not going to be in loco parentis, Katherine thought firmly.—Renting an apartment in my house gives you no special privileges.

  “I do apologize.” Dorcas sounded like a prim little girl. With her long hair, she looked hardly old enough to be a wife, much less a mother. “I had no right to bother you. But you’re an artist, and you were married for a long time, and I thought you’d understand, and I—I couldn’t carry it alone—I apologize—”

  “Never mind, child. There were quite a few times, when I was around your age, when I needed to do some spilling of my own.” And how often Manya had been there to listen, cosset, comfort. But not about Justin, not about—“The only thing I can tell you is that it does help you to grow, and what you do now should be part of that growing.”

  “You’re not condoning—”

  Katherine moved to the piano and leaned against its strong, sustaining curve. “Of course not. But have you—even in your short life—never done anything uncondonable?”

  Dorcas was silent. She went without speaking to the door, then said, “I suppose one shouldn’t make comparisons: if something’s uncondonable it isn’t more or less so than anything else. But that still doesn’t mean—”

  “Of course it doesn’t. But I can’t work it out for you, child. You’ll have to work it out for yourself.”

  “Okay. Yes. I see. And I do thank you—”

  “No,” Katherine said. “Please don’t. Just make haste slowly.”

  7

  When the girl had left, she sat at the piano. Her body was trembling with that fatigue which is beyond sleep; fatigue, and still a certain amount of shock from the phone call. Why, after all these years of enduring far worse shocks, was she still so vulnerable? After a more than full life, how could she retain the naïveté which had always caused her so much grief? Unshockable? Hardly.

  Was it jealousy again, as Manya had warned? But who?

  She closed her eyes. Her mind moved from Manya to Dorcas, to marriage, to betrayal. She had never been able to erase completely from her memory the s
ight of Justin when she had first seen him after his release from Auschwitz, grey of skin and hair, cadaverous, only his caverned eyes showing his fierce pride. He babbled about divorce, annulment, he was not going to allow her to be tied to a cripple, a eunuch …

  Manya and Tom knew only that he looked, and possibly was, close to death. They sent him for a month to a sanatorium, to be brought back to some kind of health.

  ‘He was a mature man when this happened,’ the doctor told Katherine in the privacy of his office. ‘He will be able to be aroused, to have an erection, but there will be no ejaculation, he can have no children …’

  When he returned from the sanatorium to Manya’s farm in Connecticut, he had filled out so that the bones no longer seemed ready to tear through the ivory flesh. His hair, though still grey, was lustrous. His eyes were no longer deep-sunken into the sockets. He still talked about divorce, about annulment, but at least now he listened to her, argued with her rather than throwing statements at her.

  ‘You are young, you need children …’

  ‘That’s nonsense. I’m a musician. I have my music. I have you. That’s all I want. And I need you. You’re my teacher.’ And, ‘I love you. You’re everything I need. We had a week together which was more beautiful than anything I could ever have imagined. I couldn’t be married to anybody else. It’s you I love, because of all of you. We make music together, in every possible way.’

  They had gone, at the doctor’s suggestion, to a psychiatrist, a kindly old man with a beard, laughably like the father figure psychiatrists were supposed to be. And at last Justin had said, ‘I love you, my Katherine. I can’t imagine life without you. If you are willing to be married to me, a—’

  ‘My husband,’ she had said across the words. ‘The man I love.’

  It had not been easy, nor had they expected it to be, though it was harder than their most realistic expectations. There were times when Justin’s pride was wounded, when he would lash out at her, sometimes in public, humiliate her so that she could not control her tears.