AT this time of secret confusion it was lucky for me that I found my brother Warren. He acted as if he did not even see my disguise. He never mentioned it, he never explained how he felt. He merely treated me as if he saw in me the growing-up proud person that I felt myself to be.
In spite of my new fierceness I was shy and inarticulate, which he was not. He was a Harvard undergraduate then, and he had just found for himself the exhilaration and joy of intellectual exercise. He loved argument and discussion, and he loved also his own uninterrupted discourse. He could talk brilliantly and he loved to arouse and excite an admiring listener with his talk. He had the intellectual young man’s favorite passion for influencing and molding another mind, especially a young docile feminine mind, since that was the sort of mind which lent itself most willingly to be molded. He gave me such a strong impression that he was always right in his opinions that I never doubted that he was, and I felt lucky and proud to be molded and influenced by him.
He never showed off to me as he did to some of his other feminine listeners. After my father died we lived in a small countrified town outside of Salem, called Danvers, where there was almost no conversation and no intellectual life, and the only appreciative audience he could find were his former high school teachers and their sisters and friends, all women. He chose this audience first because there wasn’t any other, but for some reason he seemed to get some sort of very necessary nourishment and satisfaction from their uncritical worship of him. He used to love to dazzle and astonish those intelligent yet easily dazzled ladies, and he let me see that sometimes half the fun he got out of it was to start an intellectual discussion going and then laugh up his sleeve at his former teachers as they innocently fell into the trap of his arguments, and never guessed that he was amusing himself at their expense. Their generous, radiant admiration of his ability was not enough. He had to make them a little ridiculous in order to enjoy himself fully. I did not understand this need of his, but I noticed how, in great contrast, he always treated me with a humility and quiet comradeship and a cherishing in which there was never anything but the utmost deference, as if he had singled me out of all the world as the only one whom he could love simply and completely. After one of the sessions of talk and argument in a spinster schoolteacher’s New England salon—which might be her back porch covered with a thick green curtain of Dutchman’s-pipe or her kitchen where we sat around the kitchen table and ate doughnuts—he and I would walk home together and a sudden silence would fall on us while he held my arm caressingly with his rough blunt hand. Among the women he knew, the intellectual spinsters and their admiring sisters and friends, I understood that I was his favorite. For a long time I knew that I was the only one who really mattered to him.
Yet I never could learn to talk easily with him. I do not know why it was. A fear and shyness as hard as iron barred my most important ideas and feelings out of all conversation in spite of my will and my enormous need to share them. Whenever I tried to talk I was always embarrassed, and what I said was painfully clumsy and ineffective compared with what I felt within me. Every time after we had been together I suffered unbearably from my pent-up feelings and thoughts which his companionship had excited and roused to such a pitch and which my shyness had prevented me from expressing. In order to relieve this feeling I began to write to him every week as soon as he had gone back to Cambridge. For I was always at ease in writing. On paper nothing embarrassed me, nothing was too difficult or too emotional for me to try and express. But as soon as I had mailed the letter I would begin to grow hot and cold because of the things I had written. I hungered for emotional intimacy and yet when I had invited it and felt it coming toward me I was panic-stricken. I remember the real agony I felt after the first time I had written to him, whenever the postman rang, and the almost unbearable feeling when his letter actually came, and I took in my hand the heavy, fat, cream-white envelope with the crimson seal of Harvard on the flap. Opening that letter and reading it gave me a pleasure that seems strange indeed as I remember it now, because of the intensity which made it two-thirds pain. My first experience in grown-up friendship was like an awful miracle, an expansion of myself that had something of the pain of birth in it.
His letters, so cherishing, so responsive, seemed to me almost like love letters, and our meetings almost like lovers’ meetings. Every Friday or Saturday he came home and, after we had begun to write to each other, he always called my name as soon as he got inside the door, as if the only thing that mattered about coming home was to know that I was there. Thus I knew then how it felt to have my company very much desired by an eager young man. And I knew the pleasure of adoring and worshiping him in return. I thought to myself very solemnly: nobody will ever love me or marry me, and so it is all right for me to feel as if this were a love affair, as it almost seems to be.
On those week-end evenings we sometimes borrowed Betty, my sister’s horse, and her open buggy that had rubber tires and square kerosene lamps attached to the sides. With these dim and elegant little lights bobbing on each side of us, we drove along pitch-dark roads, out into the wide and fragrant night, out under the stars, moving slowly and, compared to the way we move now, almost imperceptibly.
Being young, we had just discovered the wonderful charm of night, night away from houses, night moving along country roads, noiseless silken wood roads, black bumpy roads of pastures and farms, and the soft, misty, sweet-smelling roads with old wooden bridges where we stopped to listen to the gentle Ipswich River. Night was a new element that we had marvelously discovered. Yet curiously it was the same element that had been only a year or two ago nothing else than a tall policeman to us, the negative tiresome dark that put an end to all our pleasures, and which my revengeful imagination had filled with insane horrors. Now we were grown up, and by the magic of transformation the great welcoming night had become our partner and our friend, the only element that was really congenial to our new selves and our new emotions.
The country round us was benign and safe for our night wanderings. It was a country of small towns and quiet villages where nobody sat up late except when there was a meeting of the local historical society or the grange. We drove past the sleeping barns and farmhouses of North Beverly and the yellow-lighted houses of Putnamville, and out onto our favorite and lonely Valley Road to Topsfield where the street lights stopped and there was nothing but the vague dark shape of trees moving slowly past us on either hand and Betty’s ears bobbing up and down ahead of us, sometimes dimly visible and sometimes vanishing altogether in the darkness. With only Betty’s light footsteps and the spindly wheels of our little ambling carriage to disturb the silence we were nearer to the slow clouds and the stars then in those roads than we ever have been since on any other roads. We could hear every rustle of leaves along the roadside and even the soft sound of wind in ferns. Betty carried us along with a dreamy motion and a pace that was very nourishing and kind to our mood of intimate companionship. In that dreamy silence my own stillness and shyness were no longer a handicap. We both were still, both feeling the night and listening to the night, each aware of the other’s awareness and happiness as if we were two parts of the same person. Once, after such a silence, I heard my brother say, “Sometimes I wish you were not my sister.”
Five or six times since I was born I have heard a sentence spoken that sounded as if it were made out of an entirely different substance from the substance of ordinary sentences, as if it were carved out of a piece of strange foreign wood. These sentences had no visible connection with what had been said before or with anything that came after them. They were undecipherable fragments, like meteorites from another world. For, as I think I have already said, I grew up in a family where a certain kind of intimate personal emotion was all so carefully hidden that it sounded to me when I heard it like a foreign language, while at the same time that it shocked and frightened me it sounded more familiar and more real than anything I had ever heard before. Those sentences were made of what George Meredith, on one crucial page of The Amazing Marriage, called “arterial words.” They spurted out of the body involuntarily, coming from some hidden and much deeper source than ordinary speech. In our family those arterial sentences were instantly treated as if they had not been spoken. They were not answered, never repeated, and never referred to again. They were something not wanted, and something terrifyingly alive. They were foundling sentences, left on a doorstep in mid-air. We all looked the other way, we pretended we hadn’t heard, and those parentless sentences were left to starve and perish, because, picked up and warmed and fed, they might have had the power to change our whole lives.
When I was young I blindly imitated the family tradition of ignoring those bursts of intimacy—I caught the contagion of our family’s fear and disapproval of them. But even without the fear and the disapproval, since I was utterly inexperienced and untaught in the language of intimacy, although I felt a great hungering for the emotion and experience of it, I never in the world would have known what to do or to say in response to them.
So, when my brother said to me, after a long silence, that night when we were driving across a dark starlit place somewhere between the woods and the sea along the Beverly shore, “Sometimes I wish that you were not my sister,” I recognized it for one of those strange sentences. It fell at my feet out of an unknown sky.
And I did not know how to stoop and pick it up and hold it in my hands. This strange thing was meant for me, and for no one else, but I had absolutely no skill or grace to receive it. It was like a letter sent to a person who hadn’t any name, or any street and number. I was powerless to claim it even though I knew it was mine. It set up such a commotion inside me that I could scarcely breathe.
At the first impact of it I thought he meant he hated me, and wished he never had known me. Swiftly I thought that must be because he had found at last that, although he had tried very hard, the truth was that he could not enjoy being with a deformed person, and he wished he did not have a deformed little sister to go out driving with.
“Sometimes I wish that you were not my sister.” I turned it over and over in my mind, terribly wounded and dumb, and then slowly another interpretation came flooding into me. Another meaning, and if it was the true meaning these were arterial words. For if my second guess was right then what he had said to me was a very amazing thing. It was a confession that had spurted out of his body. It was not a cruel repudiation of me, but the very opposite.
Then I hastily remembered that this was something I could not let myself believe. I could secretly pretend that I had a lover in him, but I could never risk showing that I thought such a thing was possible for me, with him or any other man. Because of my repeated encounters with the mirror and my irrepressible tendency to forget what I had seen, I had begun to force myself to believe and to remember, and especially to remember, that I would never be chosen for what I imagined to be the supreme and most intimate of all experience. I thought of sexual love as an honor that was too great for me—not too great for my understanding and my feeling, but much too great and too beautiful for the body in which I was doomed to live. I had heard people laugh and talk about grotesquely unbeautiful women who had the absurd effrontery to imagine that men were in love with them. Even the kindest people seemed to feel that for that mistake there should be no mercy, and that such silly women deserved all the ridicule they got. In my secret meditations I pitied them because I understood, what nobody else could have guessed, how easily they could forget the cruel discrepancy between their desirous hearts and their own undesirableness. There was a curious and baffling law of nature or human nature which was very hard on them and on me. If a girl or woman was pretty her function of loving and being loved was treated seriously and sympathetically by everyone. But if she was awkward and homely and nevertheless eager for love that function seemed to be changed into something mysteriously comic and shameful. I had sworn that I never for one instant would forget the fearful discrepancy in my own case. I never would for one instant be off my guard. I never would be caught either pathetically or ridiculously imagining that anyone was or ever could be in love with me.
But I was very suspicious of my own amorousness. It was an unknown quantity in all human beings and I knew, although I had not heard of Freud then, that unknown quantity, from being forever repressed and denied, would be always waiting to trick me and betray me and make me behave without even realizing it like one of those poor creatures. So now I sharply told myself that my sudden conviction that my brother meant he wished he could be in love with me was only one of those tricks of my own amorousness, and that I must have nothing to do with it.
With all this wild confusion packed inside my head I sat very still beside my brother in the little carriage. We were drawn slowly forward side by side in the starlight, all alone by ourselves in the sweet, lonely night. But after he had spoken we were as far apart as if I had been a wild animal whose distrust and fear of men even the love and good will of a kind master cannot cure.
In my sudden isolation I felt as if it were all unreal. Had he said that extraordinary thing, or had I imagined it? There was nothing in our silence to tell me. Everything seemed the same as before he had spoken. I waited, half expecting him to say a little more, so that I could be sure. But that was the end, he never said it again. He never told me what he was thinking and feeling that night, or what he thought my silence meant, that it kept him from saying any more. Perhaps he thought he had shocked me, or perhaps he decided merely that I was too immature to understand him. That foundling sentence of his died of my neglect, an atom of naked truth that was not wanted. But it never died in my mind. It never even grew misty or vague. Whenever I thought of it, even long afterward, I heard it again, as clear and startling and as incomprehensible as the first time. For it is that kind of an unanswered sentence that never does die. It stays always in our minds, ready to be remembered on the slightest provocation. It stays there always, even though it may turn into something altogether incongruous and irrelevant as our life grows and changes, a queer outlandish memento, like a piece of lava from Vesuvius lying on the parlor table.
It was a long time before that particular sentence changed into a petrified souvenir in my mind. That night when we had come in and I was alone in my room I felt a smug satisfaction because I had escaped the pitfall of making myself ridiculous or pathetic, as I was sure I would have done if I had spoken. But later on I began to be troubled by a more generous openhearted feeling. A faint, faint, persistent surmise kept coming over me that he might really have meant the grave and tragic thing that my instinct had told me he did mean. What then? Then my shameful caution and ineptitude had killed his crucial impulse to take me fully into his confidence and to tell me all about his feeling for me, whatever it was. Perhaps I had failed him in what I painfully suspected then and surely believe now is the worst way in which one person can fail another.
If I did he took it without a word or a sign, and ever afterward it was as though our usual understanding of each other had never been interrupted. Perhaps he had offered me something that was too potent and too strong for me, considering how deeply moved I was just by the ordinary tenor of our relationship. That was anything but ordinary to me. Just to be out alone with him in the night, to feel myself his unspoken favorite, was as thrilling a thing as I could bear perhaps. Our love of Nature and of the night was such a newly discovered love that it alone seemed, for me at least, to constitute a passionate intimacy between us. But whatever the real meaning of it was, that evening’s episode was a turning point at which I took the wrong turn. At that moment, when my brother reached out to me and wanted perhaps to tell me the miraculous, the unbelievable thing, that I could be desired if only I would believe it—I missed the way. By my miserable silence I elected to keep on carrying the secret burden of my ignorance and despair which was to grow with time to such terrible proportions. In that moment I let my body’s injury begin to infect and cripple my life.