Daphne had called and was on her way from New York, so Laura’s precious last days before Mrs. O’Brien descended had been seized, preempted by Brooks’s taking things into his own hands. Daphne had called at ten that night, waking Laura to a dreadful fit of coughing, and after the call she had been too angry to sleep. Now it was morning at long last; Grindle was out; she was drinking a cup of black coffee; and in a few hours Daphne would arrive. This was the day Laura had planned to read Ella’s letters and pack them up to be mailed. She had planned the day for that, for music, for reading poetry, for assembling herself before the invasion. To be deprived of it made everything feel disorderly, chaotic, impossible to handle. The wastebaskets should be emptied; she should put on clean sheets and get the laundry ready to go—what would she find to give Daphne for dinner? Or should they simply stagger out in the rain, for of course it was raining, and in a few hours the roads would be soup as the dirty snow melted into mud!
Only Sasha, licking herself at the end of the bed, had her usual air of serenity.
“But I’ve got to move you, Sasha.” Even cat tranquillity must now be disturbed to air the bed and get started.
Making the bed left Laura so weak that she went downstairs and, after opening a can for Sasha and letting her out and Grindle in, lay on the sofa in her wrapper, trembling with weakness and rage. What time was it, anyway? Half-past seven, too early to call Brooks.
“Oh, Grindle,” she groaned. “I’m not fit for anything, not even to get up and fetch you a cheese biscuit. I’m a wreck, Grindle.”
There were the flowers, the anemones still closed back into buds for the night. They had not changed. And for a moment Laura let her eyes rest on them, trying to shut out all the nagging thoughts, “the must-dos,” for their silent beauty. But she felt nauseated, and it is hard to contemplate beauty when you are about to throw up. Laura closed her eyes. Tears slid out from under her lids. It’s hard, she told herself, it’s just plain hard that I am not to have my one last day before it is all taken from me. But somewhere deep down she knew that this kind of self-indulgence was something she could not afford. She must hold onto herself. “Hold onto oneself”; what an odd locution. It meant getting a grip again on that small core of defiant self-assertion that had kept her, so far, from self-pity, she supposed. It meant not giving in, not breaking into a million pieces. It meant forcing herself to get up, take a pill for nausea, and then slowly swallow down a bowl of cornflakes.
By eight o’clock the black mood was fading. She had not thrown up, but she was still angry enough to call Brooks.
“Hi, Mother.”
“I asked you not to tell anyone, Brooks.”
“I know,” there was a slight hesitation, as well there might be. “But, Mother, you have to think of other people, for God’s sake. I only told Daphne, your sister.”
“I told you I wanted my own death my own way, Brooks. What right have you to butt in like this? It simply means that you are not to be trusted. I’m very angry.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. Listen, Ann wants to speak to you.”
“Laura,” Ann’s voice came through, “I realize this is hard for you, but—”
“These were my last two days before Mrs. O’Brien comes. It’s not fair.”
Laura had the strange perception that Ann and Brooks were talking like parents and she like a recalcitrant child. (“It’s not fair,” the cry of childhood!)
“We should have thought of that, shouldn’t we, Brooks?” Ann did seem to have a glimmer of understanding. “How can we help? Would you like us to ask Daphne over for supper?”
“Never mind. What’s done is done. I’ll manage.”
Brooks came back on the phone. “Mother, I just felt it was too great a responsibility for me alone. I’m awfully sorry if I bungled things. Please try to understand.”
“Maybe it’s all right,” Laura said grudgingly. “Daphne can tell Jo, Ben, and Daisy, when I feel it’s time. Daphne, not you, Brooks. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Mother.”
It was all right with Ann yesterday, Laura thought, but she is not family. Why was it that family seemed such a threat, a threat she simply couldn’t handle? People at one remove—Harriet even, a perfect stranger—yes. Family tore the nerve. Yet even as she asked herself the question, Laura knew that she would be glad once Daphne was there. She had better get dressed now and be ready.
Putting on a soft pink shetland sweater and gray slacks and tying a Liberty scarf around her neck, Laura met herself in the mirror several times. Lately she had avoided the mirror. Her appearance was perhaps important to other people—she must not allow herself to look like an old rag bag—but in her own mind appearance was becoming quite irrelevant. Still, it was a shock to see that a veil of wrinkles was taking over her face. I’m becoming an old woman fast, she saw. She slipped a belt around her slacks to hold them up, for she had lost weight.
“Hope lies to mortals
And most believe her
But man’s deceiver
Was never mine.”
She murmured, and that sounded like Housman, but she couldn’t quite remember. Daphne would be shocked by how she looked. Dear old Daff who had been given extraordinary beauty and couldn’t have cared less, or rather actively tried to protect herself against what she believed was a curse, a kind of albatross around her neck. “It’s like being an empty bottle. No one cares about what is inside, men don’t care anyway.” But the fact was that young men had been terrified of Daphne. Dear old Daff was, underneath a highly cultivated crusty exterior, horribly sensitive to what was going on in other people, and even more in animals. Daff would get a shock.
But the meeting, when the doorbell rang an hour earlier than expected, was of course not at all what Laura had imagined. She opened the door and was immediately struck by how awful Daphne looked, in a dirty trench coat, her gray hair tousled and her intense blue eyes surrounded with great dark circles.
“Laura darling!” Laura didn’t have to say anything, she was enfolded in Daphne’s arms. “I couldn’t wait—I took an earlier plane, didn’t sleep a wink.”
“Where’s your bag?” Laura asked, brushing the tears away with an impatient gesture.
“Oh, I left it on the step.”
By the time the bag had been brought in and Daphne had taken off her trench coat, Laura was quite aware that the tears that had taken her by surprise like a fit of coughing had spurted out because she could not get used to Daphne being so old. When she thought of her sister, the person she thought of was twenty or thirty even, but never fifty-five!
“Are you all right, Daff? I must say you look awful. Let me make you some coffee.”
“All right? How can I be all right when I hear from Brooks that you are dreadfully ill. All right? Laura, you are a monster not to have told me yourself.”
They were leaning on the kitchen counter, waiting for the coffee to heat up. Daphne leaned over and laid her hand on Laura’s shoulder, and looked so penetratingly at her sister that Laura felt her eyes as tangibly as her touch and turned away to look out the window at the sturdy row of pines at the end of the field.
“I didn’t mean to tell Brooks, but I had a stupid fit of coughing after dinner, and they made me tell them. He broke a promise when he called you.”
At this cold answer, Daphne suddenly laughed.
“I know I seem quite preposterous. For all I know cancer changes one’s personality. I’m not secretive, but—oh, hell, don’t ask me to explain. I can’t. Let’s drink our coffee in peace. You can light the fire, Daff, if you will. Put on another log. Stooping makes me cough.”
“Anything to oblige, your majesty.”
“You know, I’ve been thinking, one thing illness does is to make one humble. I have no illusions that I can handle this alone. There is a kind Irish woman coming to look after things the day after tomorrow.”
Daphne received this news in silence and drank her coffee.
“You’re thinking, why not family, aren’t you?”
“It did cross my mind that after all I am your sister, and my job is not so important that I can’t leave it. I did that when Charles died, you remember.”
“Darling, you were wonderful.”
“Thanks. My ego was about to disappear from view for good.”
It was quite a help that Grindle made it known that he had been outdoors far too long, and Daphne had to be jumped at with a crescendo of delighted barks and thoroughly licked after she had let him in, Sasha gliding past without recognizing her presence. “Grindle at least is glad to see me,” she called back from the hall. “Yes, adorable creature, you may lick my ears.”
“How is the job?” Laura asked, when Daphne had come back to lie on the floor by the fire, and Grindle had quieted down and settled beside her to be scratched around his ears.
“I’m pretty fed up with the human race,” Daphne said. “The horrible people who maltreat their animals and then bring them in sick or neurotic—a dog who is left alone for hours every day and gets no exercise for instance and so becomes vicious. You should hear Dr. Gordon tell those owners off. It’s all part of the total wreck of civilization, I suppose. But animals are so innocent.”
Watching the clever, sensitive hands stroking Grindle, Laura remembered the time when Daphne was about the most beautiful girl she had ever seen and had wanted so desperately to be a vet. It was treated as an adolescent whim, and she was packed off to Smith College.
“Do you think you should have been allowed to be a vet?” Laura asked.
“Whatever made you remember that?”
“I appear to spend most of the time remembering, trying to understand. Although there’s so little time, in a strange way I feel liberated of all that used to consume the days, the endless papers that fill the wastebaskets every day. I’m through with all that, you see. I’m trying to reckon everything up. I don’t ‘do’ much anymore, but I think a lot.” It was, after all, good to have Daff to talk with, and Laura looked across and smiled. “Tell about being a vet.”
“It’s so long ago.” Daphne lit a cigarette and took a long puff, then laid it down on the hearth. “Does smoke bother you? I can put this filthy thing out.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
But it did bother Grindle, who gave Daphne a queer little look and removed himself to his basket.
Laura watched her sister, sitting there smoking and poking at the fire, a ravaged face, tragic in repose—but then what mature face is not, Laura asked herself? An unravaged face would mean an unlived life.
“What are you thinking, Laura, with that penetrating look of yours?”
“I was thinking that you look like someone who has really lived her life.”
At this Daphne looked up, and they laughed together.
“Meaning that I look, as you said when I came in, awful. Life is such a struggle. I almost envy you.” But shocked at her own statement, Daphne quickly withdrew it. “That’s a sin.”
“I don’t see why. When I see Mamma I know I am lucky not to end it like that. I went the other day and Cousin Hope was there, faithful Hope who goes in every week to worship at the shrine, even though the goddess is no longer there.”
“In your reckoning, what happens about Mamma?” Daphne sat up now, quite straight, leaning one elbow on her crossed legs.
“She haunts.”
“I suppose I have spent most of my life trying to be her opposite, and a lot of sense that made!” Daphne laughed her harsh laugh, so often directed against herself. “It’s possible that I did have a vocation—after all here I am trudging over to the animal hospital every day, paid next to nothing. But how does one know? I allowed myself to be persuaded.”
“You were very young, and then we were all so rootless. It was terribly wrong that you were forced to stay in Switzerland when I was ill.”
“I wonder. I loved skiing passionately, and Mamma was so absorbed in you, I was comparatively free then. What I missed, I guess, was Pa. At sixteen I needed him, and he wasn’t there.” Then she looked across at her sister. “How you ever survived I can’t imagine.”
“Charles helped! I could have become quite unreal if I hadn’t met Charles.”
“Jo has simply fled into her ivory tower where she can run everything in sight and be accountable to no one, except the trustees, who of course think she is a genius. And what did I do? Spent my life trying to achieve independence, I suppose, falling consistently and foolishly in love with one inappropriate man after another.”
“Dear Daff, you always did exaggerate—have there been so many? David surely is a more or less permanent part of your life and has been for twenty years.”
“Good heavens, yes! What seemed impermanent has become permanent, almost in spite of me. I’m just an old cushion he can rest his head on. He’s frightfully overworked, of course, and still has to cope with that arch neurotic wife of his.”
“But you do love him?”
“Do I?” Daphne asked herself. “I suppose I must. He is the one man I have known whom I could accept wholly, as he is, the good with the bad. Maybe that is love. And then he needs me. He really does.”
“How strange our lives have been.”
Daphne got up. “Darling, I’m going to exhaust you. Let me buzz around, make your bed, do the dishes, empty the wastebaskets, whatever, and you put on a record, or have a little rest with Grindle.”
“That sounds lovely.”
“You’re white as a sheet.”
“I want to think about everything, but after a little while I feel too tired … too stupid.”
It was, she realized, much easier to lie comfortably and think about Daphne than to carry on a conversation, for then the flow of memory was stopped and short-circuited. But first, music. Laura got up and found a Haydn cello concerto. The strength, the virility of Haydn was what she craved. And what had she meant when she said their lives had been strange? Strange, she supposed, because they had been insignificant. Was it cruel and obtuse to think of Daphne’s as a failed life? Beauty, intelligence, superior sensitivity, finally put to use to work as a drudge in an animal hospital, and to support and bring aid and comfort to David who, it had to be admitted, was a great man in his way, one of the pioneers in heart surgery—but without any of the structure or social position of a marriage to support. The fact was that Daphne was still living the life of a young woman, not one nearing old age. And she had stayed amazingly young because she was still so vulnerable, so unprotected. If, as Yeats thought, “there’s more enterprise in going naked,” then one had to admire her.
Daisy did. Daisy felt that Daphne was a hero. “She hasn’t compromised, you see,” she had told Laura once. “She hasn’t let herself be caught. She’s absolutely authentic.”
“But she’s failed at everything!” Laura suddenly remembered the whole conversation and how astounded she had been by the passion in Daisy’s voice.
“Except at being a great human being, Mother,” Daisy had said with withering scorn.
“Jo’s never compromised,” Laura had gone on, and the scene had remained so vivid in her memory because that day she had persisted like a balky donkey in rousing her daughter’s anger and contempt. “Jo has done exactly what she wanted to do.”
“Aunt Jo may have done what she wanted, but—oh, can’t you see? What she wanted was to be safe, safe from any really deep human relationships, and to feel justified in fending off anything that might disturb her self-immolation in that college. She’s a workaholic if I ever saw one.”
“Some people might say she’s devoted and selfless.”
“Oh, my God, Mother! Some people won’t pay the price of being a woman, let’s face it. Jo’s just as limited in her way as a woman who lets herself be swallowed up by family life and becomes a drudge—except that that sort of woman is at least human. She is not.”
Laura remembered that she had felt ruffled and cross by the time her intransigent daughter left.
What was it then to be a woman? More complex and far more difficult, she was beginning to realize, than it is to be a man.
Daphne must have heard her sigh, for she came in and sat down. “And what was that sigh all about?”
“Daisy.” Laura waited a second, poised on the question whether it would be wise to open up that subject now. “I was remembering a wild argument we had not long ago about you and Jo. Daisy thinks you are a hero.”
“I fit in with her anarchic views, that’s all.”
Suddenly Laura got up, lifted up by an irresistible idea.
“Daff, would you drive me down to the house in Maine? We could go tomorrow—take a picnic—”
“But, Laura, it’s February! The driveway won’t even have been plowed.”
“Oh, yes, it’s kept plowed because of the risk of fire. And Mrs. Eaton down the road has the key and would light fires for us.”
“It’s possible, of course, and you know I’d do anything for you, Laura. I just wonder whether it could be worth what is bound to be exhausting for you.”
“I have to do what I can and not count the cost. It’s the last chance. Could you stay till Tuesday possibly?” Laura did not know quite why she felt such urgency, but the pull was as strong as the undertow in the cove. “The smell of salt and iodine—the gulls—oh, Daff! The sound of the sea.”
“Very well. But in that case you had better rest all afternoon and not say a word.”
“Angel!”
“I’ll stuff some eggs, and maybe there’s a can of deviled ham somewhere.”
“I think there may be. Look on the top shelf.” Laura felt weak with excitement. “A thermos of consommé—remember the old picnics?”
“Of course. A thermos of consomme and a thermos of martinis. We’ll do it, darling!”
“One last time.”
“But February, Laura! I think it’s an awful risk.”
“I’ll manage. Liquor helps.”
“I didn’t mean your health. I meant—”
“We’ll have to risk that.” And “that,” Laura knew, meant whatever memory had in store for them in a cold February house.