“You’re all tuckered out,” Mary O’Brien said after taking one look at Laura, lying on the sofa where she had been half-asleep since Daisy had left after promising to come back with her guitar and sing. “You can just be in bed upstairs” Daisy had said, “and I’ll sing my songs down here,” and the idea had clearly been of such comfort to Daisy herself that Laura had assented.
“Tomorrow you’ll stay in bed all day,” Mary O’Brien said. It was not hard to assent to that. “You’d better get to bed now, and I’ll bring you some hot tea.” Mary knew just how to lift Laura up, and they progressed slowly back to the bedroom, step by step, Laura leaning heavily on Mary’s arm.
Halfway she began to giggle. It was absurd to feel as weak as she did. After all, she had managed to have long talks with both Daisy and Jo. “It was my sister Jo—she came unexpectedly.”
“I’m going to stay next weekend,” Mary said firmly.
“And be my dragon?”
“There now, just four more steps and we’ve made it.”
It was wonderful beyond words to find herself in bed, with Mary fluffing up the pillows and helping her sit high enough against them to be comfortable.
“Perfect peace with loved ones far away,” she murmured and again was suffused with laughter.
“Would you like me to bring you your book?” Mary asked as she turned to go.
“No thanks, I’ll just rest.” It occurred to Laura that she didn’t want to read, even Herbert. It seemed years ago when she had looked for him eagerly, when those poems were the food she needed most. Things are changing very fast, she thought. It’s a metamorphosis. I wonder what I am being changed into, a person who does not want to read or see her own family, who wants—what? Silence. A little while when breathing could still be possible and that strange animal so alive inside her—for she could hear her heart’s slow thud—could keep going. “Till spring,” Jim Goodwin had said—and she must hold on for Ben. She could not say “it is finished” yet, not quite yet.
So when Mary brought the tea she swallowed it in small sips, making an effort to pay attention and so keep it down. And she must have fallen asleep with the empty cup still in her lap, for she had no memory of Mary’s coming to take it. Unfortunately at two, long before light, she was wide-awake. Sasha had woken her by jumping onto the bed.
The discomfort was such that it took her some time—and these were the times when fear took over—before she achieved floating, but finally as the dawn came and she could distinguish the objects in the room, she rested her eyes on her blue wrapper flung over a chair. The way it lay in folds to the floor seemed quite beautiful. It reminded her of paintings of Piero della Francesca. Strange how it was always a clear, precise image that led her into the floating. From there, she found herself wondering why it was that during all this time of waiting and preparing, she had been haunted chiefly by women, that women inhabited her consciousness as even dear Charles did not—Sybille, Ella, Daphne, Daisy, even Ann and conflict-ridden Harriet. Was it that there was something unfinished here, not whole as her relation with Charles had been? That did not need probing; she could rest in it. But what really was involved? It was way outside her sexuality, this preoccupation. Perhaps indeed it had to do with herself as woman, woman in relation to herself, not to men.
Why did she think so rarely of Pa? Sometimes he came into her mind with great clarity, usually an image of summer in Maine, Pa getting a boat out, Pa looking immensely handsome in tennis flannels, Pa coming for brief visits to her bedside in Switzerland, smiling and teasing her gently, telling some small joke, embarrassed but so warm. Whereas she had only to evoke Sybille to find herself in a blur. Nothing was clear, not even that beauty Jo had spoken of with such feeling. For there had been too much strain in the beauty, the tendons in Sybille’s neck so taut—no wonder she suffered from arthritis—and her eyes, never hooded, a naked blaze. In the hospital she had not wanted to be looked down at by those amazing eyes that, because she was flat on her back, she could not escape.
Laura turned her head from side to side on the pillow, trying to turn off the current she was floating on, the dangerous one that brought her to a kind of anguish when she faced the puzzling image of Sybille.
Perhaps it was that Sybille was so glorious—Laura could see her head bent over a book, sitting at the bedside, the marvelous, haunting voice reading Descartes and Pascal and Péguy—at one time those long cadences of Péguy were what Laura had most enjoyed. Sybille had wanted to read poetry, but Laura couldn’t take it. For those two years she simply could not afford to feel very much. And her mother reading poems made her feel spiritually raped, there was no other word. She had somehow to keep a wall between herself and Sybille. If they had merged at that time, Laura knew she would have drowned, gone mad, actually lost herself. The ever-present presence, the guard—oh, it was not an angel who had guarded her! Any more than it was an angel who had cut Jo off from her passion for Alicia.
What really motivated Sybille? Why were they never supposed to have what they wanted? What was the taboo? Daphne when she was thirteen had wanted dreadfully to be allowed to go away to school—this had not been allowed. At the very center of Sybille, Laura suspected, there must have been a tight knot of conflict, conflict between her own passionate nature and something that held back at the very moment of giving out. Conscience? Or what? How would she ever, ever know? She and Sybille could never have talked as she and Daisy had, yet Daisy too had felt criticized, had viewed her mother as in some way a censor. Is it partly that mothers fear for their daughters more than for their sons? The risks of being a woman are so much greater, the danger of being caught in a life one did not altogether choose—Daisy and Saul. But that hardly explained the degree of control exerted when she, Daphne, and Jo were children.
Quite suddenly the room was flooded with light as the sun came up at last, and Laura, feeling it on her face, let go. Soon Mary would bring her a cup of tea and the day, the new day would begin.
That day brought flowers from Houghton Mifflin, from Dinah, and a warm, admiring letter from George, Laura’s editor, to tell her that they had signed a contract with Harriet Moors and were very pleased with the book and grateful to Laura for working with Harriet. It ended, “Here we at the firm have depended greatly on your wisdom and flair. We are going to miss you more than I can say. I am very reluctant to believe that you will not be back, so we shall wait a while before sending someone over with the things from your desk. I personally believe in phoenixes.”
Laura laid the letter aside. She didn’t want to think about it, about that finality anyway. Letting work go at the moment seemed harder than letting people go, for she surmised the dissolution of the work was a dissolution at the center of her self, the immensely private self for whom she had undertaken it in the first place. “I have to do something of my own that is not bringing up children, Charles,” she had explained. And of course Charles had understood.
But also she laid the letter down because the thought of Harriet Moors caused a pang. The contract signed. Good news. But she had some idea what it had cost. So she turned to the slim blue envelope from England and opened it, her hands shaking. It had come from so far and felt so near.
“Dearest Snab, you are never far from my thoughts these days. It’s not exactly thinking, but rather some attentive being with you. Yet I find it hard to write.
“It is so strange to know that Sybille still lives—but not as herself. I wonder whether you will able to unravel or come to an end of your preoccupation with her. I feel sure that you think about her. It is awful not to know just what conclusions you are near to arriving at. Mother goes on in her usual compulsive way, expanding the gardens at Fernwood though there aren’t enough gardeners, forgetting what plants she has ordered, amazed when some huge, terribly expensive azaleas arrived the other day. She pays absolutely no attention to anyone else and at the same time needles me subtly whenever I see her. I sometimes long for all my relatives to vanish. Do you suppose some people (they must) manage to operate pretty freely while a parent remains above ground? How do they do it?”
At this point Laura began to laugh with the sheer pleasure of being completely understood and of completely understanding. Ella, Ella, she wanted to cry out, come! Instead of finishing the letter, she lay and smiled, and it was after lunch when she resumed. “It is taking an enormous amount of strength not to fly over, but I shall await your word, dearest Snab.”
After the day in bed, Laura felt restored enough to be downstairs when Aunt Minna arrived at four on the dot.
“It seems ages, darling—what a weekend!” Laura rested her eyes on Aunt Minna. The dark circles round her eyes only emphasized their brightness, bright as a bird’s eyes and as impersonal. That is what made these visits so restful, Laura was thinking. Aunt Minna, unlike almost anyone else Laura saw these days except Mary, had a definite role, a role she enjoyed playing as anyone would who read aloud so well. “Pour your tea, will you? Mary was inspired to make those little cakes for you.”
“Delicious,” Aunt Minna said, eating one ravenously, and for a second Laura felt jealous of someone who could eat with pleasure, for whom eating had not become fraught with the risk of violent nausea.
“Jo descended on us. It really was a bit much with Daisy here as well.”
“The dutiful sister?”
“It was clearly such a thing for her to extract herself from the college, the effort so great, that it never occurred to her that she might not be welcome.”
“Imagination is hardly Jo’s long suit, is it? Oh, well,” Aunt Minna said, brushing Jo aside. “Here we are.”
“You and Trollope are my best medicine,” Laura said. “Let’s read.”
Laura did not actually listen some of the time. Some of the time Aunt Minna’s clear, sweet voice simply flowed on like the murmur of turtle doves, but it was becoming increasingly important to have this companionable, undemanding hour in the day, when she could rest in the simple presence of this old woman who for some reason was able to be there in the room without displacing so much atmosphere that Laura was dragged out of herself, out of her own orbit, which was narrowing down. There is only Ben now, she thought—
Aunt Minna stopped to laugh aloud at something Laura in her reverie had missed. “Isn’t that delicious?” she asked.
“It’s you who are delicious.” Laura smiled.
“Well, I’ve been called a lot of things, but ‘delicious’ is not one of them.” And Aunt Minna chuckled.
“You know one thing about dying,” Laura said, sitting up a little to relieve the weight in her chest, “is that one can say outrageous things—but to whom should one say them? Mary O’Brien seems to enjoy them, and you, dear Aunt Minna, for you are good at saying the outrageous yourself.”
“Am I?” Aunt Minna held the book closed in her hands.
“Yes, you are. So tell me now why it is that the journey I am making is taking me deeper and deeper into what it is to be a woman? Strange, isn’t it? I never thought much about it before.”
“Laura, I know very little about that.”
“Oh, yes, you do.”
“I suppose I have lived my life outside what women’s lives are meant to be.”
Laura lay back, looking at the ceiling, feeling for some word that could link Aunt Minna and what had preoccupied her own mind for days. “I think that however original and powerful a woman may have been—and as you surely are—we have allowed ourselves to be caught in all sorts of stereotypes. What is a woman meant to be, anyway? We don’t think of men as ‘meant to be’ primarily married and fathers, do we?”
“You know, I never thought of it quite like that before!”
“Well, neither did I,” Laura said, surprised at herself. “But I’ve done some thinking lately. I wish I could get it all settled in my mind before …”
“Come to some final reckoning, eh? I wonder if that is possible. In my experience just when one has arrived at what appears to be, momentarily, a final judgment, life throws the whole thing out by some quirk or unexpected insight—like what you just said. I’m elated to have been given a clue just now to what the woman’s movement is really all about. Such a little thing, yet it has really opened my eyes. I have, you see, always regarded myself as an eccentric, a stray fish in some side pool outside the great tides of life—oh, I quite enjoyed myself, you know.”
“I know. You kicked up considerable waves in that pool!”
“But I did feel that a married woman was somehow more—”
“More what?”
Aunt Minna gave her short laugh, self-deprecatory, a little wry. “Is ‘appropriate’ the word?”
At this Laura laughed aloud, then leaned forward to try to control the fit of coughing. Anything but shallow breathing was fatal now. “Oh, dear.”
“Shall I read a little more?” Aunt Minna asked. It was just too bad, Laura thought, not to be able to catch her breath. And too bad to alarm Aunt Minna.
“Oh, damn” she murmured, sweat pouring down her forehead into her eyes. “Damn.”
This time she did manage to achieve control. Finally she was able to lie back on the pillow. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured.
“None of that,” Aunt Minna said sharply. “The Alpine climber is often in an agony for breath—remember that—and we have talked of this as a kind of climb to wherever you are bound, Laura.”
Amazing woman, Laura thought. She’s really the only person I can bear. And why was that? Because Aunt Minna had her feelings under almost perfect control, though Laura could hear her blowing her nose.
“It’s getting worse, of course,” Laura murmured. “But I wanted to say something.”
“Rest a little,” Aunt Minna said, “and I’ll read for a half-hour.”
And so she did while Laura listened and half-listened with her eyes closed. Finally she was able to say what she had wanted to.
“You have given so much to life, Aunt Minna. Isn’t that the thing? I mean not how a woman does it, but whether she does it at all. What I begin to see—Jo’s visit somehow clinched it for me—is that women have been in a queer way locked away from one another in a man’s world. The perspective has been from there. Jo thinks of herself as a man. All that is changing and perhaps women will be able to give one another a great deal more than ever before.”
Aunt Minna was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You have reached quite a high cliff, haven’t you?”
“All that tenderness held back out of fear—”
“You really do astonish me, Laura.” Aunt Minna was sitting up straight in her chair and seemed a little tense suddenly. “Of course I wouldn’t know,” she added defensively. “I never could stand the whole emotional thing. When I was in college, a girl called Alice had quite a crush on me—that’s what it was called in those days. I didn’t like it at all,” she said crisply. “It made me wildly uncomfortable. Sappy, I thought it.”
Laura smiled. “I expect you did.”
“All that is quite outside my sphere.”
“But I’m not talking about ‘all that,’” Laura said, amused now by the violence of Aunt Minna’s rejection.
After Aunt Minna left, she had quite a think. Her mother, Jo, Daphne, Daisy—all women stopped somehow, somewhere—in some way, she supposed, “unfulfilled.” But how to find the all-encompassing reason was quite beyond her power—when Mary O’Brien came in with an eggnog for supper, Laura was asleep.