A Prologue To Love (87 page)

She heard a rustle near her and started. The Reverend Mother was seating herself beside Caroline. She looked into Caroline’s eyes and smiled gently. “I thought I’d come and wait with you,” she said.

Caroline did not reply. She looked at her hands clenched over her purse. The Reverend Mother followed her glance, and she was full of pity. “Forgive me,” she said, “but I must tell you something. When you came here last Christmas, Mrs. Sheldon, you would not let us help you. However, you suddenly opened your purse and poured out all you had at that time for us. Then it was like a revelation to me: your gesture, the way you looked at us. I don’t know how I knew or why, but all at once I knew you were our unknown benefactor who has done so much for us over all these years. I thought of your young daughter, who had run to us instinctively when she was taken so ill. She was in charge of all your affairs to a great extent. Did she know, that poor child, even if you hadn’t told her? And then Father Bellamy told us about your gift to him.”

Caroline lifted her eyes and looked dumbly at the Reverend Mother.

“We knew you didn’t want your identity known, so we never made any inquiries. But all through those years I prayed that somehow I’d know, so that if you needed me I could go to you and comfort you. Or wait with you in an extremity.”

She put her long white fingers over Caroline’s cold hand. “You aren’t alone,” she said. “God is with you.” Caroline shook her head over and over.

She said, “It is easy for you to say that, for you are young, but I’ve lived longer than you have.” She looked at the Reverend Mother’s calm alabaster face, as smooth as marble and as unwrinkled, at the quiet forehead without furrows, at the full young eyes, clearly brown and serene, at the beautiful and faintly colored mouth.

“I am old enough,” said the Reverend Mother, “to be your own mother. I am seventy-six.”

Caroline stared at her incredulously, and in her mind’s eye she could see herself, prematurely old, haggard, gray of face and white of hair, flesh plowed with living, body heavy and weary, clothing dusty and wrinkled, hands withered.

“I have been a nun for fifty-six years,” said the Reverend Mother. “I have worked very hard in God’s service, and I am grateful. In return, He has given me His peace and His joy. I am in the world, but not of it.”

“I have always been in the world, but I was never of it,” said Caroline, able to speak now. “So we are the same, it seems.”

The hand on hers remained, firm and comforting.

“My son,” Caroline said. “I’m afraid for my son, and it’s not only about whether or not he’ll live. I can’t explain about Ames. It’s all the years — ”

“Would you like to go into the chapel and pray with me for your son?”

“No,” said Caroline. “I feel I must stay here. I feel I must just sit here and wait.” She became agitated. “I feel that if I leave here something will happen.”

“I will wait with you,” said the Reverend Mother. She took her rosary in her hands. Caroline watched the tranquil face; this praying woman was indeed old enough to be her mother, and yet it was hard to believe. What gave her this eternal youthfulness and vitality? Peace, said Caroline to herself. Peace and faith. Then she saw that the Reverend Mother’s face was full of quiet shadows which could have come only from suffering in the past but which had been overcome steadfastly.

Caroline looked at the door. She said, “You believe, don’t you?”

“I know,” said the Reverend Mother. She hesitated. “I hope I haven’t offended you by guessing you are our benefactor. Would you like to tell me why?”

She spoke with the gentle authority of a mother. Caroline said, “It happened a long time ago in Switzerland, when I was twenty-three years old.” She paused. “Do you think my son will live?” And she turned her eyes to the door again.

“It’s in God’s hands,” said the Reverend Mother. “You’ve done all you could for him, as his mother.”

“No,” said Caroline, “I’ve done nothing for Ames, for any of my children.”

“It’s much easier for God to forgive us than for us to forgive ourselves, Mrs. Sheldon. We repent and are forgiven. But we hug our guilt to our breasts, forgetting that we alone are not the only guilty.”

A nurse came in with a lunch tray. Caroline shook her head. “We’ll have tea together,” said the Reverend Mother with her authoritative calm. “I’ve often thought that those who can drink tea and eat a little in a crisis must have great faith.”

Caroline filled the cups; her big hand trembled. The October sunshine lay on the polished floor and furniture. Then Caroline, who had never had a confidante, began to speak, her voice uncertain and sometimes incoherent, rusty and faltering. It was as if some abscess had opened and was draining in her. The Reverend Mother listened to the broken words; she heard the torment and the agony in the wavering sentences, the loneliness and pain, the bewilderment and despair. She saw Caroline’s face, shattered and gray and helpless, and the shaking lips. The nurse came and removed the tray; the sunlight slanted lower in the room. A great bell rang somewhere. Feet hurried in the corridor; there was a cry, a soft laugh, the sound of rubber wheels, the opening and shutting of doors, a quick murmur of voices. The sunlight became more and more level.

“You see,” said Caroline finally, “there isn’t much to be told, after all. Nothing has happened to me that hasn’t happened to everyone else at my age.”

The Reverend Mother gazed at her earnestly, and her face was full of compassion.

“There was never anything to wait for,” said Caroline, staring at the door.

“There is an end to waiting,” said the Reverend Mother. “I think you have come to that end, my child.”

The door opened and Dr. Manz, still in his white coat and cap, came into the room, his face exhausted and drained. Caroline stood up speechlessly, her mouth dropping open. He went to her and took her hands and held them tightly. He looked up into her eyes and said firmly, “It was benign. It is removed. Your son will live. He will not be blind, thanks be to God.”

Caroline became aware that someone was holding her strongly and that her head had fallen on a womanly shoulder, and she wept like a child.

And I am waiting again, thought Caroline as she sat in her son’s suite. The door between the living room and his bedroom stood open now, as it always did. She slept in another room, for three days had gone by and Ames was still unconscious. She would not leave him. The whole world had stopped for her. John had come to Lyme. He came to the hospital every afternoon and evening. He spoke to his mother, but she hardly answered him. At least every ten minutes or so she would go into Ames’ room, where he lay as if dead, his nurses beside him. Caroline would look at him without speaking, and then at the nurses, who always smiled at her encouragingly. She would touch the thick white bandages on Ames’ head; somewhere deep in that hurt skull he lived and had his being, though the white sheet on his chest barely lifted with his shallow breath. Sometimes he groaned, but his face never changed; it lay ashen on his pillows, the eyes bruised and shut. Don’t go away, my son, Caroline would speak to him in her mind. Sometimes she would take his hand, thin and flaccid and as gray as his face, and very chill. What was he suffering, crouched in the shell of his skull, the frail cave that held his life? Did he dream? Was he frightened?

Dr. Manz had promised to wait until his patient recovered consciousness. He was almost always there, gently examining, sitting and watching. “When will he wake up?” Caroline asked. “It’s three days.”

“Sometimes, dear lady, it is longer. We must wait.”

“We are always waiting,” Caroline would say, and would return to her chair in the living room, where John, uneasy about his young wife, who was now with her mother, and uneasy about his affairs in New York, would attempt to show proper gravity and solicitude. On the third day Caroline said wearily, “Don’t pretend any longer, John. You don’t care very much about your brother. I am not condemning you; I’m merely stating fact, It will be easier for us both if you don’t pretend.”

His florid face flushed a deeper red. His mother looked at him sadly. “I know,” she said. “You’d honestly like to feel more about Ames. I think it’s upsetting you because you can’t. Mary has taught you what a lack there has always been in your life, and I’m glad that you know. If you hadn’t come to know that, I’d be afraid that there would never be any hope for you.”

He looked away from her, his full mouth sullen yet uncertain. He almost jumped when his mother leaned toward him and put her hand on his arm. He turned to her in astonishment, and he saw that she was smiling a little.

“You’ll soon be a father,” Caroline said. “I hope you’ll love your son or daughter very much. I won’t ask you to try to make the child happy, for happiness is something that doesn’t really exist, except for a flash of it occasionally. But if you love your child he will remember it all his life, and life won’t ever be too hard to endure when he remembers.”

She folded her hands on her knee and looked at them. “When no one has really cared about you when you were a child and accepted you as you were and given you strength and self-respect through love, then life becomes progressively intolerable as the years pass. You are — unarmed. Anything can reach you and shatter you. You haven’t any resources. Each day just brings a new despair and new betrayals and losses.”

He had never heard his mother talk like this before, quietly and steadily and freely. Why, the old girl seemed to be actually human! He wondered how he should respond to this. Gravely? Understandingly? Earnestly? Or with an expression of sober humility?

Caroline said, “You still don’t know what to say, do you, John? You’re so afraid of people, as I was, but in another way. You think you must always cajole and placate and please them. It may help you to remember that in their own way they are just as frightened as you are, no matter how they bluster or pretend.”

John’s face felt hot. “I don’t think Mimi is afraid of anything,” he muttered.

“Yes. She is. She’s afraid that you won’t ever understand how much she loves you, and that you won’t realize you’ll always be first in her life. She’s afraid of your fear.”

John lit a cigarette. “If she thought that, she’d forget her damned art.”

“You are wrong. Her painting is as much a part of her as her eyes. Perhaps you won’t ever understand it or what it means to her. That doesn’t matter to Mary. You are only distressing her by not understanding that you are first, before everything.”

“How do you know?” asked John suddenly.

“She hasn’t told me, so don’t suspect you are being betrayed again, John. But she’s very like I was, for a year or two, perhaps, and she is as I’d have been if — ”

“Was anyone ever first with you?” asked John with sincere curiosity.

“Yes. My father.”

John nodded. “But not my father?”

Caroline hesitated. “I don’t know how to answer that. Yes, I think he was. But I didn’t trust him.” She looked into John’s bold hazel eyes, and all at once they shifted away from her. She said, “I didn’t trust his love for me. I thought he was capable of betraying me, not for his own gain, but because of his attitude toward life. No, I didn’t trust him, though I loved him.” She paused.

John was silent.

“I finally believed he didn’t love me at all,” said Caroline. “I made his life so terrible that he stopped loving me. That is the worst faithlessness: to make someone stop loving you when once he had. Don’t make Mary stop loving you, John.”

John smoked in silence. She saw his burly profile, and it was vulnerable now.

“Mary didn’t marry you for anything but yourself, as your father married me for myself. What had either of us to give them? Except ourselves? I didn’t give myself, because I was so frightened of living. Don’t be afraid, John. That’s the greatest crime we can commit, not only against ourselves, but against others. We destroy each other in our fear. You want Mary to give herself completely to you, as you’ve done to her, and she has, and you haven’t believed it. But you must, or one day you’ll be sitting alone as I’m sitting, and it will be too late.”

John had never asked himself before: Why is my mother so concerned about Ames? Does he actually mean something to her? Do I?

“Yes,” said Caroline, “it’s too late. I didn’t love any of you when you were children. I suppose you all knew it. I was concerned about you because of my money. I needed heirs. Otherwise Melinda would have inherited it. And so my three children grew to maturity without ever having had any love in their lives, except from their father, and I made them despise him, made them incapable of accepting his affection. You don’t love what you despise.”

John cleared his throat. Some remark was called for, but he did not know what to say. Caroline said, “But I want you to know this, John: I now love my sons because I know how I’ve injured them. It’s too late for Elizabeth.”

It came to John that he must say something, and he felt elated. So the old girl was softening, was she? Like Old Brundage? Senility, perhaps?

“You can’t possibly love me,” said Caroline. “I’ll never ask you even to try, for it would be impossible. How could you love me? But perhaps someday when you sit waiting for someone to live or die, like this, you’ll remember that I did come to love you and to understand, and it might comfort you.”

John had a sudden vision of Mimi lying in a room like that one in which his brother lay, and he was sick with fear and helplessness.

“I know,” said Caroline, watching him, “that you are thinking of Mary. Just remember that perhaps she often thinks that of you too. There’s so little love in the world that we must try to hold it to us, for there is nothing else, John. Nothing else at all.”

She stood up and went into Ames’ room again, and John was alone. He felt confused, and he was still afraid. He lifted the telephone and called Melinda’s house, for he wanted, more than anything else, to speak to his young wife.

“Of course I’m all right, dear,” she said laughingly. “But how is Aunt Caroline?” Her voice dropped. “And — Ames?”

He felt his old familiar anger that she should be concerned with anyone but himself. But at the very moment of anger it vanished, and he felt the first shame of his life. He stopped to consider it. Then he said, “Mother is — I don’t know, darling. But she’s changed in some way. I’ll tell you about it later. I’m coming back early tonight.”

“No,” said Mimi. “You must stay with your mother until the last train home. She needs you.”

John paused. Then he said, and more than half meant it: “You’re right. She’s pleased with your flowers too. And you and your mother may come just as soon as visitors are permitted.”

He went to the door of Ames’ room and saw his mother stooping over the bed. Funny about Ames, he thought. They’d never had anything in common; Ames had always been able to find the weak spots in anyone, then press on them. It amused him. There was something hellish about Ames, thought John, something laughingly cruel and disgusting. He had had a marriage that hadn’t been a marriage — that silly little girl. But perhaps he never could care about anyone, not even someone like Mimi. Now that, he said to himself, is a kind of deformity or a crippling.

John turned. A young woman had entered the living room, dressed in black, carrying her slender body proudly, even nobly. Her black hat was far down on her forehead, and its wide shadow almost hid her face, which was further concealed by a black veil. But her dark eyes gleamed through the mesh, and she was smiling a little at him.