Laura made herself an eggnog with a teaspoon of brandy in it—shades of Aunt Minna!—and lay down, so tired suddenly that she found it hard to lift the glass. Grindle was outdoors, disappointed that she had not suggested a walk as she would normally have done. He will have to get used to fewer walks, she thought, and then none. If only it were not the dead of winter, she might have asked Laurie, her granddaughter, to bicycle over after school and walk him, but the roads were too dangerous now. Anyway, she had not even told Brooks and Ann that she was ill. Now she would lie here quietly and perhaps later on get at that manuscript.
Sasha jumped up and woke Laura out of a doze. She was determined to knead thoroughly and then lie on Laura’s chest, but the weight was stifling, so Laura pushed her gently down, took a swallow of eggnog, and looked around at this familiar room, at the bookcases lined with vermilion, at the corner cupboard Charles had given her as a birthday present soon after they moved to Lincoln, where various treasures were stored: blue beads from Greece, a miniature copy of the Swiss chalet Sybille had rented for Christmas holidays when they were in Genoa, some beautiful Chinese plates that had fallen to Laura when the three daughters broke up their mother’s house on Beacon Hill, as had the opulent dark blue Oriental rug. Laura let her eyes rest gratefully on all this beauty and order. Then Grindle barked to be let in; Sasha jumped down, not liking to be disturbed. As she opened the door and Grindle ran in, his tail wagging, his ears bent down in their tender way, she got the full blast of cold air. That, or something else, changed the mood radically.
For the first time since her visit to Jim Goodwin, she was invaded by panic; she knelt down to hug the dog, torn by the parting—when? How much time did she have? And how could she be ready?
“Oh, Grindle,” she said, getting up now, “it’s a lonely business, dying.” Dying—the word brought on a flood of tears. “How am I ever going to do it, Grindle?”
And what if cobalt or chemotherapy could give her a few months’ respite? Laura stood at the windows looking out at tree shadows on the blue snow and shook her head. No—no—no—she admonished herself. It was not death she was afraid of, not death that caused that tremor in her bones, but dying.
On an impulse she went to the bookcase and looked for George Herbert’s poems. It was years since she had looked at them, years since poetry had been a living part of her life. She opened the battered book she had bought in London long before her marriage.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.
The sweetness of it, like pure water from a well! And the pang, too, for Herbert had had such an intimate relation with his God, could carry on these loving arguments, this praise in absolute assurance that someone heard.
Invention rest;
Comparisons go play; wit use thy will:
Less than the least
Of all God’s mercies, is my posy still.
Laura lay down with the book open on her lap, reading here and there the familiar poems, familiar and strange. When they were children, their mother had loved to read them poems, had also every evening come to say a prayer with each child. But had Sybille herself really believed? Or was even that intimate prayer a scene she played?
People of my generation, Laura throught, lived in an empty universe, more and more frightening as it became more huge and the concept of a personal God next to impossible to accept. What took its place, she supposed, was some vague idea that the cosmos was rational, every part of creation from ameoba to man part of a design far beyond our knowledge or imagination. One could believe one was an organic part of the universe, and that was why she felt so strongly that man, attempting to change the flow, to alter the design for his own purposes, missed the point. This, she suddenly saw clearly, was why she had said so passionately to Dr. Goodwin that she wanted her own death. She wanted to be part of a natural process, unimpeded. But was a cancer natural? If only Charles were alive, and we could talk about it! Charles had a way of getting right to the center of things; none of that intellectual embroidery Sybille indulged in. “Your mother is a siren,” he sometimes had said, “a highly imaginative, undisciplined siren … and perhaps rather dangerous, for she believes in her own song while she is singing it.” Charles had treated Sybille with a slightly amused deference, and they had got on very well.
Laura pulled herself out of these thoughts by opening her briefcase. She took one look at the heavy manuscript and laid it on a chair. In that second of dread and dismay before an effort that she did not want to make, she decided that she would not read it at all. She would make some excuse. For whatever dying of cancer may mean, she thought, it does not mean that I have to do anything now that is done merely for duty’s sake. Lying and looking at the light marbling the white walls had meaning. The talk with Harriet had had meaning—and Laura was glad she had been able to manage it. It had meaning because deep in her own life as well as Jo’s loving a woman had had its part.
Harriet’s honesty, her troubled, troubling way of dealing with all this in a novel, was relevant. It had brought back vivid memories, so much that must be sorted out. Laura went to her desk and hauled out three big bundles of Ella’s letters, tied up in string; then she sat with them before her and did not untie them. It had to be done, sooner or later, but for today she pushed them aside, just glancing at the lightning hand that wrote as though the pen could never move fast enough for the racing thoughts and feelings. Ella’s slim figure in a pale blue coat her mother had had made for her at Redfern in Paris—how Laura had admired Ella’s style!—was so vividly before her, there was no need to open a single letter. Ella was a born scholar, and that surely I never was, Laura remembered. While Ella worked furiously hard, her light often on after midnight, Laura came back to the pension from the theater or a concert, walking great distances alone through the Paris streets, then running up the strairs to knock at Ella’s door. They poked up the fire. They sat on cushions on the floor and talked sometimes till dawn, talked about their parents, their sisters or brothers (Ella had two brothers at Oxford at that time), about Dostoevsky whom they were just discovering, and Shakespeare versus Racine, about Proust whom Laura was reading with the passion of a drug addict for his drug, about the theater, which was rich in those years of Dullin, Maguérite Jamois, Pierre Renoir, Lugné-Poë at the Oeuvre—and above all talked about what they wanted to be and to do with their lives. “I’ll never marry,” Ella had announced, but it was she who married first after all!—and believed years later that it had been a mistake, that she had been so jealous of her brothers and the secret joys of their lives that she had married one of their friends, partly to get inside a man’s world, to be accepted as a person in her own right, and instead had felt she was merely and forever Hugh’s wife, the wife of an Oxford don.
Laura still remembered how forlorn she had felt as bridesmaid at the wedding, and how much an outsider in the little church at Fernwall, the family estate in Kent. I’ll never get over it, she had thought, it will never be the same again, now Ella is married. “Has gone and gotten married” was her phrase, as though Ella had left for the moon! Then, standing with the others, watching the car drive off and having perhaps drunk a little too much champagne, Laura had fled to her room and wept, wishing passionately that she could have taken Ella into her arms and held her as her husband now would, and keep her forever.
The phone rang, the imperious present summoning her back, and she heard Aunt Minna’s voice.
“Oh, Aunt Minna, dear—”
“You sound very far away.”
“Well,” Laura laughed, “I was in what used to be called a brown study—why ‘brown’ I cannot imagine.”
“And that means what?”
“Means I was sitting here at my desk thinking about Ella Worthington. I want her to know what is happening to me—you and she, and no one else for the time being.”
“I tried to reach you this morning. There was no answer.”
“I went to the office and had a long talk with a young woman who has written rather a good novel.”
“I feel depressed,” Aunt Minna announced quite crossly.
“I upset you, didn’t I? I’m awfully sorry.”
“Upset me? It was an earthquake. I didn’t sleep a wink.”
“O, dear! Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”
“Of course not. I just can’t accept it and I never will.”
Laura felt incapable of arguing about anything at this point, and, rather cruelly, cut the conversation short by saying that she wanted to write Ella and would call back before supper. Other people were going to be the hardest part of all this, but at least Aunt Minna would come right out with whatever she felt, no holds barred. Laura smiled. “I tell her I’m dying of cancer, and she takes it as a personal affront.”
But it was healthy. Laura had sometimes felt that the only thing life asks of us is to know what we feel and to come out with it. Exaggerated? Perhaps, but she had come to believe that Sybille’s destructiveness as well as her power had come from not knowing what her real feelings were. When she had been so brutal about Alicia, was it not that she feared the same attraction to a woman in her own past? For Sybille had had passionate friendships all her life, with both men and women—passionate in the mind. The faithful wife personified who nonetheless played dangerous games with “friends,” that series of glamorous, famous men and women whom she attracted, who were, each of them for a year or two, the great person, to be feted, and entertained, and invited for long private talks—quite unaware, too, of the cynical and perhaps jealous eyes of her three daughters, who observed these infatuations and could never be entirely persuaded of the “greatness” thrust upon them.
The room had become a dark cave while Laura sat at her desk in the fading light. Now she turned on the lamp and pulled out a sheet of paper, determined to accomplish something before she went to bed. She wrote intently, stopping to think, then scribbling fast. There had always been this elan when she and Ella communicated, as though there would never be time to say it all.
“Darling Snab,” she wrote, “it’s a cold winter here and I have strange news. You are the only person I am telling except Aunt Minna—and it may have been a mistake to tell her. I have cancer in both lungs, too advanced, the doctor thinks, to be operable. And in a way I am glad because it means, perhaps, that I can have my own death in my own way, not artifically prolonged by all the medical horrors. So far Dr. Goodwin has agreed not to try cobalt or chemotherapy.
“Do you remember in Paris how impressed we were with Rilke’s feeling that death must be allowed to have its way, as an important part of a life? I feel that now with my whole being, and I know you will understand. This time I’m not going to be ‘taken over’ as mother took me over in Davos. I pray I’ll have the courage to stick to this to the end.
“It’s good that Charles is not here to agonize. The children are. Can you understand, Snab, that I don’t want them around? Oh, how good it is to be able to write to you, say even what sounds awful, and know that it will be understood! Maybe only when one is young, without responsibilities except to oneself, or when one is dying, is one allowed to be ruthless? But is ‘ruthless’ the right word? What I mean is that only then is one allowed to shut out the nonessential. At the times when one is growing at great intensity and speed, one is allowed to look inward, one must look inward. Later on, life and all the web of human relations intangle the authentic inner person, don’t they? Entangle and nourish at the same time. We can’t live alone. But later on so much that ‘has to be done,’ gets in the way.
“All this has made me go back to you, to what we experienced together in that miraculous year. I have been living over those Paris days all afternoon with a package of your letters before me, yet not able to read them. I don’t need to, it is all so vivid.
“Would you like me to send them back? I can’t bring myself to destroy them. They are the record of an intensely satisfying experience, the record of growth. For years after Paris we wrote often, as though we could only fully understand what was happening—my illness, your marriage—in the light of each other’s eyes. And what was it really all about? In some strange way our friendship seems the most important thing that ever happened to me. Don’t laugh, dear Snab, when I say that the other most important thing seems to be dying. I want to do it well. It sounds crazy, but when I first heard I was lifted up on a wave of wild excitement, of joy.
“I wish I could explain it, but I must lie down now for a while. I am not in pain, but I have awfully little energy, and my chest feels as though a huge pillow were on it, and stifling me. The hardest thing so far is to know that death is there alive inside me. I have had a few moments of bad panic partly because I have no idea how long dying will take, when I shall have to have help here, a thing I dread.
“This is hard to say, Snab, darling Snab, but please don’t think of coming over. I feel too naked in a queer way to be able to take emotion. But I remember everything.”
Laura stopped there, for she felt rather ill, and took a cup of soup up to bed, after letting Grindle out and Sasha in. She woke at nine, suddenly remembering that she had promised to call Aunt Minna back, turned on the light, and picked up the phone from the bed table.
“I’m so sorry, dear, I went to sleep, just woke up and knew there was something I had forgotten. Please forgive.”
Aunt Minna laughed. “I’ve been listening to the symphony, Mahler’s Fifth. Ozawa is transcendent, I must say. It’s taken me a lifetime to get to Mahler, but now I’m really with it.” She laughed again, at herself, for the slang expression. Evidently her mood had changed.
“Go right back,” Laura said, “sorry I interrupted.”
“And you, sleep well. Is Grindle there?”
“Right here beside me.”
“Good night, dear.”
“Good night.”
Infinitely comforting, that “good night.” And sleep among all the joys of life came to Laura like a walk through a gentle field, as she gave Grindle a last rub on his tummy and turned over. “The dead are not asleep” was her last conscious thought, “for sleep is in the domain of the living.”