10

That is one of the good memories. It is typical of many of our breakfast conversations; in the early morning over coffee I am apt to pontificate, which is one reason Hugh and I never eat breakfast together except on vacation, and then I try not to talk until he has had two cups of coffee.

The good memories far outweigh the painful ones. In recent years Mother’s and my morning talks have often stretched until nearly time for lunch, and we talk about everything under the sun—literature, politics, as well as theology. We have often disagreed, and argued excitedly, but never, on these large subjects, angrily.

Now there is no longer the possibility of disagreement. Our long discussions are over. The girls bring her in to the living room and she sits on the little sofa for the hour before dinner. She is no longer interested in sipping her drink, or eating her “blotters,” as she used to call the crackers for hors d’oeuvres. She is humped over; she does not even notice that the stockings are wrinkled on her still shapely legs.

Our conversation wreathes about her like smoke; she notices it only to brush it away. It is only with an effort of will that I can remember the evenings when she joined in all our discussions. Peter is talking about parallel universes, that all possibilities are somewhere, in some galaxy or other, being played out. She does not hear, she who would once have loved to join in the speculation.

In the old days over our morning coffee I enjoyed sharing my science-fiction imaginings; we discussed theories of the creation of the universe, side by side with local politics. We talked about fashions, food, the development of the children. I sounded off, after Grandfather’s death, about funeral practices.

“How can those ghouls blackmail people?” I asked vehemently. “Do you want to buy a coffin that isn’t as nice a coffin as so-and-so bought?—as though the price of a coffin could be a measure of love.”

I considered that family pressure had made her spend too much on Grandfather’s. “Mother, haven’t we lost sight of how to honor people’s bodies?”

She put me right on the spot. “How do we?”

“Not with expensive, cozy coffins, as though Grandfather could feel the quilted silk and the little pillow. He’s dead. He’s lifeless clay and he’s going to turn to dust.” Then, afraid I had hurt her, even though a hundred years had made a travesty of my mother’s father, I said, “Anyhow, I’m glad the funeral service is exactly the same for the Queen of England as for an unknown pauper. Otherwise I haven’t any answer.” I looked across the room at Mother’s chest of drawers, on which stood a small mahogany chest with a swinging mirror; it had gone across the United States with Mado and William L’Engle, her grandparents. It had suffered from exposure to inclement weather, and now from the wet wind from the St. Johns River; some of the beautiful veneer was chipped and buckled. She followed my gaze. I said, “Maybe we honor a human body in somewhat the same way you honor Mado’s little chest. Oh, Mother, I don’t know. I don’t know how we honor Grandfather’s—or anybody else’s—body, except by giving it to God.”

She pushed me further. “How do we do that?”

I drank some tepid coffee and chewed a piece of cold bacon and sighed. “Maybe by accepting that God knows more than we do, and that he really does count the hairs of all our heads. That’s what I want to believe, but all I can do is fumble. I just think the people who know all the answers are all wrong.”

Here my intellect, my above-water self, and my intuitive, below-water self, are in conflict; but I have learned from painful experience that although intuition must not ignore or discard the intellect, it can often take me further; and I am more apt to find the truth of love in the world which 96 and I were searching for with our poppy sandwiches than in the reasonable world of the adults who thought they were in control of it all.

Mother said, “It’s almost eleven o’clock. We ought to get dressed.”

But too much coffee has the effect of making me talk. “You know what, Mother, one place we’ve gone wrong is in thinking of death as failure.”

“As success, then?” she asked dryly.

I shook my head. “When Liz and Arthur died, in worldly terms they failed Maria, failed her totally, didn’t they?” I did not mention Father. Mother didn’t answer, so finally I said, “Oh, Mother, if we aren’t free to admit failure we aren’t free at all. I don’t understand it; it’s a mystery; but I know that unexpected good things have come to me out of what I thought was failure.”

“Like what?”

“Oh—if A Wrinkle in Time had been sold right away instead of going from publisher to publisher all that awful long time, it might have been published and just quietly died.”

Mother agreed. “That’s true. I don’t think I understand anything you’ve been saying, but I think it’s true.” Then we turned our talk back to Grandfather. We were glad the 101-year-old body had finally given up the ghost, but we knew we would miss the brilliant being he once was.

We got up and dressed.

“Who is going with me when I die?” Grandfather had asked. Mother can no longer ask anything. She can voice nothing but fear.

I tell a friend that I hope for Mother’s death, and he is shocked; he sees it as a failure in my love toward her.

Perhaps it is. I don’t know.

When I try to honor her body as it is now, and as it will be when she dies, I can go no further than when I was an adolescent, talking to Yandell, or when I was sounding off to Mother over morning coffee. Intuition holds me in the direction of Gregory of Nyssa’s words to Macrina, and this is enough to keep love alive in my heart.

I love my mother, not as a prisoner of atherosclerosis, but as a person; and I must love her enough to accept her as she is, now, for as long as this dwindling may take; and I must love her enough, when the time comes, to let her go into a new birth, a new life of which I can know nothing, and which I cannot prove; a new life which may not be; but of which I have had enough intimations so that I cannot discount its possibility, no matter how difficult such a possibility is for the intellect.

I will try to share one of these occurrences which I call intimations. I cannot call upon them to come; I have no control of them whatsoever; they usually happen during Emerson’s vulnerable moments between sleeping and waking, or when I am so tired that my conscious mind lets down its barriers.

This past spring, after Mother’s ninetieth-birthday party, I flew back to England with Josephine and Alan and the babies, to spend a week with them in Lincoln, and a few days in London seeing friends. The flight from New York to London seemed unusually long. We were served lunch immediately after departure, and then nothing else at all, not even tea, though we did manage to get some milk for the little ones.

Because of the time gap it was eleven o’clock at night when we arrived in London, and it took us over an hour to pick up the car in which we were to make the five-hour drive to Lincoln. We were very hungry, but all restaurants and coffee shops were closed. Alan said we would try to find an all-night truckers’ café on the way.

I sat in the back of the small car, suitcases piled up beside me, Charlotte on my lap. I was very tired, not because of the trip but because the birthday festivities had been exhausting, emotionally and spiritually even more than physically. Josephine and I began to sing to the little girls, trying to lull them into sleep, taking turns in singing the old nursery and folk songs, many of which had come to us from my mother.

Then, suddenly, the world unfolded, and I moved into an indescribable place of many dimensions where colors were more brilliant and more varied than those of the everyday world. The unfolding continued; everything deepened and opened, and I glimpsed relationships in which the truth of love was fully revealed.

It was ineffably glorious, and then it became frightening because I knew that unless I returned to the self which was still singing to the sleeping baby it would be—at the least—madness, and for Josephine and Alan’s sake I had to come back from the radiance.

Alan pulled the car into the parking lot of an open café. I was able to get out and carry Charlotte in, to sit down at the table, to nod assent as Alan ordered bacon and eggs and tea, but I was still not back. I talked through cold lips in what must have been a normal fashion, because neither Josephine nor Alan asked if anything was wrong, and I drank cup after cup of strong English tea until gradually the vastness of the deeper world faded away, and I was back within myself again, talking to my children and eating bacon and eggs.

Was this no more than hallucination caused by fatigue and hunger? That may have been part of it, but only part. I offer no explanation for this vision of something far more beautiful and strange than any of the great beauties I have seen on earth. I only know that it happened to me, and I am grateful.

But I do not need frequent visions to be fortified by the truth of love, my mother’s love for me, a love which I cannot conceive of as having any end, no matter how much it is trapped within her this summer.

Her concern is something I have automatically assumed, as a matter of fact. It was nearly impossible for me to hide anything from her. When I phoned her when I wasn’t feeling well, or was unhappy about something and chatted, perfectly naturally (I thought), she would say, “What’s the matter? Something’s wrong.” Cool, undemonstrative, reserved, yes, but tender. Gentle and soft but with a core of steel.

Now, during my adult years, if I wake up in the night and am frightened, as occasionally happens, I control my terror by myself. Hugh needs his sleep; I am grown up now and I do not wake him to hold and comfort me—although simply his presence, the rhythmic sound of his breathing, helps push me through the fear.

But when I was a child and we were living on Eighty-second Street I could call for my mother when I woke up and was frightened, and she would come to me and sit on the side of my bed and stroke my forehead until I was quiet and ready to go back to sleep. When I was a little older I would slip out of bed and across the hall and into her room and get in bed with her, knowing she would never reject me. She would put her arms around me and hold me close and say, “It’s all right,” and then I could go to sleep.

I sleep this summer because I am too tired to stay awake. If I wake up during the night my ears strain to hear Mother, although out in the Tower I cannot hear her. Sometimes in the afternoon I go out to the hammock, which is strung between two ancient apple trees halfway to the brook, and out of earshot of the house. Sometimes there, swaying gently, and surrounded by green leaf patterns shifting against the sky, I can relax into peace.