Monday, August 9th

A LONG LAPSE because life has been too full to record lately. Now it is raining for the fourth day in a row, and a hurricane warning is out for the New England coast tonight at midnight. I must get candles, lamps, and flashlights ready and take in the furniture from the terrace. Strange to sit and wait … it brings back memories of 1938 in Cambridge when we watched the trees blow down like feathers, and the next day Brattle Street, huge trees lying across it, looked like a gigantic metaphor of war, all those bodies.

From July 29th to August 4th I was at the island with Judy, our yearly pilgrimage. We were unlucky in the three first days of rain … there is no electricity, so the dark weather makes indoors as dark as night. Judy is terribly restless; I could not go to my “workroom” and write a letter in peace, and by the end of the three days and nights I felt desperate. Then on Monday at last the sun came out and we were able to have two great swims in the salt pool—I admired Judy’s courage—she even swam across the pool twice on the second round.

The island is a dying world, at least as we knew it, under Anne’s command for the past twenty years. Now she is senile too, worse off than Judy. To be the witness of this decline in two women who have been rocks in my life, to feel the quicksand under my feet, was not easy.

But if the island is a dying world it is dying in a gentle light, for Anne is all wound round in love. Two college girls attend her, help her dress, wash her hair, tease her, take her for walks, thus relieving Agnes for part of each day and giving her a chance to go about the business of the island. Agnes is an extraordinary person, nearing seventy herself. But she has chosen to devote herself absolutely to making life comfortable for Anne. It is a full-time job, and is possible only because she has actually transferred her own ego to the task, that is, she gets her joys from Anne’s joys. While we were there a lot of trouble was taken, for instance, to bring over from Southwest Harbor a Vassar schoolmate of Anne’s, who stayed several hours. When I came downstairs they were singing college songs and surrounded by books of photographs that Agnes had dug out the night before, some of them of Anne playing Cyrano de Bergerac in a performance still remembered as remarkable by those who attended it. So I had lessons in pure love to ponder those days. It is only possible to do what Agnes does if one can lay aside one’s own life almost completely. I could never do that. I should be too torn by the responsibility of my work as against the human responsibility. Even in those six days the frustration was acute.

Nothing could have been a greater contrast than that experience at Greenings and what happened yesterday, for yesterday Susie and Ed Kenney came for the day with their two small children, Jamie, six years old, a sturdy explorer of everything from this house and all the objects in it to the beach and all the objects to be found there, and Ann Morrow, three years old, a brave, flirtatious, highly intelligent little girl.

The children got out of the car in a rush of delight, to be hugged and kissed and introduced to Tamas, always a little wary of small children, and then immediately made for the grassy path down to the ocean … and off they ran with Tamas and the student-helper who came with them, and were not seen again for more than an hour. They returned with every pocket of their slickers weighed down with smooth stones, bricks worn into rounds like tennis balls, and by then Tamas was in a state of extreme joy, proved by his racing around the library for several minutes after they got back. He only does that when he is ecstatic.

Meanwhile Susie had had a chance to talk about her recent time at the University of Sussex, delving into the Virginia Woolf material there, and Ed to describe what it had been like alone with the children for three weeks. They spoke more than once of the problem, now Susie is home again, of never seeing each other—I had not imagined that small children, the constant presence, prevent any real talk or connection between their parents—it makes for acute frustration. Of course it does.

For me it was delightful to be with these eager, responsive, curious, active beings … I long to see children and feel a particular joy when I can open the house to their needs for a change. Whatever the price now, Ed and Susie are magnificent parents and it shows in the freedom and lovingness with which these children meet adventures. After that long day and another treasure hunt on the beach (Jamie found a splendid cane with a crook, perfect to hold in one’s hand) they insisted on doing “the walk through the woods” in the pouring rain. Ed swung Ann Morrow up onto his shoulders, her head bobbing over his, and Jamie ran on ahead with Tamas—all of us carrying bunches of bracken to beat off the deerflies.