A Reckoning (27 page)

When the dawn came, Ben was still there fast asleep on the chaise longue, his mouth slightly open, looking like a young boy. For a long moment Laura looked at him and then turned away, for people asleep are too exposed. She saw what a long way he still had to go to grow up. How vulnerable he was. But she saw it from a great distance. As though her son lay there in a painting.

The morning turned out to be clear, bright, cool, and for the first time in days Laura drank a cup of tea without nausea. After so long a time without nourishment she felt revived by its warmth, a true cordial, and from the chaise longue she watched Mary changing the sheets, her silent presence and the way she patted the pillows a cordial in itself.

“Where’s Ben?”

“Downstairs having his breakfast.”

“We had quite a talk in the middle of the night.”

“Tired you out, I expect.”

“No, I feel better.”

“Dr. Goodwin will be looking in on his way to the hospital—and—” Laura felt Mary’s hesitation, “perhaps I should tell you that your sister Daphne and Daisy are coming this afternoon. I explained that you were very tired and couldn’t talk. It was Miss Daphne I talked to, and she said they would come and take turns sitting with you, or do whatever they could.”

“It’s good when someone sits here and doesn’t talk.” Laura sighed. “I didn’t think I would ever need that but I do.”

“Daisy told me she had promised to sing you some songs,” said Mary with a fleeting ironic look in Laura’s direction, “She’s bringing her guitar.”

“Oh.” Laura closed her eyes. They mustn’t ask her to respond to anything. “Downstairs,” she said, “ask her to sing downstairs.”

“Yes, dear.” Laura was so weak that she nearly fell over while Mary was getting her into a clean nightgown, and the clumsiness of it made them both fall into a fit of laughter.

“Oh, Mary, thank you,” Laura murmured as she sank back into bed.

“There’s the doctor now.” Mary ran down to answer the doorbell.

“Well,” said Jim as he came in and looked around, “everything is in apple-pie order here, I see.” He sat on the bed and laid his hand on hers gently.

“I’m like a Venetian glass,” Laura said, smiling at him. “Touch me and I might break.”

“I’m so sorry my little scheme about getting you down yesterday was such a dismal failure, Laura. I came to apologize.”

“You were keeping a promise.”

“Sometimes that can be a stupid thing to do.”

“But,” Laura said. It was something she had been planning to say ever since the hospital. “But you kept the important promise.”

“Did I? What was that?”

“To let me have my own death. We managed to keep science out of it as much as possible, didn’t we, Jim? I was so afraid you would feel you had to try chemotherapy or—something.”

His hand closed on hers and pressed it.

“You never thought you were God.”

Jim laughed. “No, I never did, that’s a fact.”

“Well, some doctors do, don’t they?”

Jim didn’t answer because he was busy taking her pulse. When he laid her wrist down he said, “I’ve learned a lot from you, Laura.”

“I can’t imagine what!”

For a moment he was silent, and Laura saw that he looked tired. His face was drawn. For all she knew he had been up half the night. “It’s hard to put into words. I really can’t. But all I can say is that it seems you have been living your death, living instead of dying it, I mean. It has been a meaningful journey, hasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Then Laura smiled. “Jim, today I feel well, better than I have in ages. I wonder why.”

“It’s called a remission,” Jim said quietly.

“It won’t last?”

“It might.” He was standing now. “I must run along, Laura.”

“Thanks for coming—and Jim, for everything.”

He gave her a quick, intent look. And somehow, though there was no reason since she felt so much better, Laura knew that this was good-bye. There was no struggle to breathe this morning, yet Laura sensed that she was being borne away, borne on some great tide, and she was not afraid anymore. She was happy to lie there alone, on the cool, clean pillow, in the morning light and let herself go on the tide.

There was only a slight thread that still held her to the shore, and no doubt that would break soon.

She was dozing when Ben came in to kiss her good morning.

“I’ll just sleep a little, Ben.”

“I’ll be next door in my room if you need anything.” Later Mary came with chicken broth, but Laura didn’t want it.

“I’d like to rinse my mouth, it’s so dry,” she said, “but I’m not hungry.”

She was not floating; no images rose up from the past. But she was in some obscure, distant place in herself, waiting for something, she did not know for what. Not, she knew, for Daphne, though when later on Daphne was there beside her when she opened her eyes after a long sleep, she smiled and held Daphne’s hand for a moment.

“Don’t talk, darling,” Daphne said, bending to kiss her. “I’ll just sit here quietly.”

“Thank you,” Laura whispered.

After a while Laura said, “I want to die.” She realized that she had never uttered those words before.

“You’re so tired,” Daphne said.

“Yes.” Why then couldn’t she let go? The warm afternoon light flooded the room, but she kept her eyes closed. Laura felt relieved of any obligation to recognize people or to respond. A quiet, loving presence was all she needed.

“I feel so well, it’s strange,” she said after a long interval.

Chapter XXIII

Laura was alerted to some event happening downstairs by Grindle’s excited barks and the sound of a car driving away. Mary must have been keeping the dog downstairs today, for Laura had not seen him. She opened her eyes. Daphne whispered, “I’ll go down and see who it is, maybe Daisy took an earlier plane.”

But Laura felt sure it was not Daisy. She was swept by a wave of agitation and wished she had the strength to get up. That she could not do, but she did manage to lift herself into a semisitting position as Daphne ran down the stairs. The front door opened and closed. She heard women’s voices but could not distinguish them one from another.

Is this a dream, Laura wondered? I’m dreaming the end of a journey. It’s not real. So many times in the last weeks she had heard the door open and wondered who was there, whose feet would come up the stairs in a moment—Mary’s or Jim Goodwin’s or Ben’s in the middle of the night. She closed her eyes. Could it be death opening the door at last, death coming up the stairs? Whoever it was on the way, Laura felt an imminence and was seized by a tremor so deep she held the sheet tightly in her hands to keep them from shaking. This waiting was the longest of all, and she silently begged that it not be prolonged.

Then she heard quick, light feet on the stairs.

Laura opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see very well—there was a dim figure standing in the doorway.

“Darling, it’s Ella.”

“Oh, Snab.” And then Ella was holding her cold, trembling hands, locking them into her own warmth. “Oh, Snab,” Laura whispered, “I never thought you would come.”

“I had to. The day before yesterday I simply knew I had to and got on the first flight I could.”

Laura felt the tears pricking her lids and sliding down her cheeks one by one. “Pay no attention, I’m so weak.”

“Don’t try to talk.”

But Laura wanted to explain. She whispered, “It’s been such a long journey, but I couldn’t let go—and I didn’t know what I was waiting for.”

“I’m here.”

“Yes.” Ella found a kleenex and gently wiped Laura’s wet cheeks. “Don’t go.” “I won’t.”

Then she opened her eyes. At first Ella looked very far away—she had white hair and her brown face was wrinkled—so much older than imagined, for Laura realized that in these last months she had thought of Ella as young. At least the dark eyes had not changed. They were deep and shining.

“It’s been such a long time,” Laura said, looking down at her own wasted hands. “But I’ve thought of you, of Paris, of us nearly every day since—since Jim Goodwin told me.”

“I wanted to come when you first wrote, but I didn’t dare.” And Ella smiled her wary, secret smile that Laura remembered perfectly.

“Perfect peace,” Laura whispered.

She didn’t want to talk yet, there was fulfillment, such fulfillment simply in Ella’s being there, sitting on the bed, touchable, real, not thousands of miles away, to be conjured up for comfort during the interminable nights of waiting for the dawn to come. She didn’t want to talk yet, but she knew that she must summon herself back one last time. There were things she needed to say.

“You must be tired,” she whispered. “Why don’t you stretch out on the chaise longue. Later we’ll talk.”

“We don’t have to,” Ella said, lifting one of Laura’s hands and kissing it. “Rest now.”

A quiet flood of happiness lifted Laura as she lay there, not that flowing tide bearing her away, but the tide at full, just before it turns. She rested there.

Was it moments or hours later when Laura opened her eyes, feeling rested, and began to talk? Her breath came in short spasms, but at least there was still breath.

“Ella, can you hear me, Snab?”

“Perfectly,” said Ella from the chaise longue.

“Lately nothing has seemed very real—the children—my sisters—but Sybille still looms, holding me back. Then I thought always of you, and thinking of you—oh, sitting in a deck chair in the Luxembourg gardens—”

“Looking up at the marvelous clouds, everything so alive.”

“I had to go very deep. It’s hard to explain.”

“Take your time.”

Laura rubbed a hand back and forth across her forehead trying to make the elusive connection. “I think this whole journey towards death has been in a way joining myself up with women, with all women.”

“Yet Sybille still looms, holds you back.”

“I have to go beyond her.”

“Beyond being possessed, yes. Snab, since I have known what you were facing, I too have thought a lot about Sybille.”

“Tell me.”

“She was really very much afraid.”

“Mamma?” Laura smiled. In the legend Sybille was fearless.

“Afraid of things she couldn’t face in herself, I mean. So she tried to protect you from all those dangers.”

“What dangers?” Laura asked in a faint voice.

“She carried out a terrible, rending war against her own nature, against passion itself perhaps, and the only way she could do it, maybe, was to play a role, to act what she wanted to be and couldn’t be, a sovereign person in perfect control.”

“She deprived us.”

“Yes, she did, but in such a lavish way that it was hard to detect the real deprivations under all that high talk, and all those noble acts.”

“But what did she deprive us of?”

“Daring to love what you loved and to like what you liked. You had such bloody good taste, you know. It was killing.” Laura heard Ella’s adorable laugh, a kind of chortle in her throat.

“I dared love you,” Laura answered.

“She tried to come between us, you remember. In Switzerland it was made clear to me that it would be kinder if I did not come to see you again, the second time I got through the barrage.”

“Why was she afraid? We were not lovers.”

“No, but what we had was real on a level of reality she couldn’t take, that threatened her in some way. It has lasted our lifetime, Snab.”

“Yes,” Laura said, sighing and lying back on the pillows staring at the ceiling. “Real.”

“What did you mean just now about joining with women?”

There was a pause. Words had begun to be elusive. Laura could not pin the right ones down. They floated around in her head. Finally she managed to say, “Communion. Something women are only beginning to tap, to understand, a kind of tenderness towards each other as women. Just as Sybille was, we have been afraid of it. Snab, you are the only person I wanted to see, no one else—even though I told you not to come.” After a moment she added, “I did talk to Ben because he understands these things. Only for him it has been complicated, harder maybe, because he is living a life still strange to many people.” Laura now felt lifted up on a wave of strength. She could breathe more easily. “He didn’t really want to hear about you, though.”

“I suppose not. Mothers are not supposed to have these feelings, after all.”

A smile floated in the air between them. Out of it Laura said, “Strange that we were not lovers. Why not?”

“My God, Laura, surely you remember the atmosphere of scandal, worse, of sin, around any such relationship at that time! We had been poisoned by the whole ethos, taught to be mortally afraid of what our bodies tried to teach us. Besides we were the marrying kind. A passionate love would have created terrible conflict. Snab, I truly believe we had the best of it.”

“The best?”

“All that we did share—the way we could talk about everything, no holds barred. It was friendship at a mystical intensity. Every leaf on the trees in spring, every fountain, even the damp pavements under our feet, the sickly sweet smell of the Metro. It’s all there imprinted on the spirit.”

“Mmmm,” Laura assented, but she was listening now also to what Ella’s presence had released inside her, and that was almost beyond her power to put into words. After a while she murmured, “Tenderness. Sybille did not understand it. In a letter sometimes, but never in the flesh could she give it to us.”

“And that, you feel, is what women can give each other, but have held back, and are learning?”

“To share the experience of being a woman. It’s almost undiscovered territory, Snab, do you agree?”

“Yes, but difficult—perhaps impossible—between mothers and daughters.”

“All the years she was growing up, Daisy was my antagonist, you know.”

“Maybe that’s natural. But your mother could never have allowed it. In her inimitable way she tried to be everything for her children—lover, friend, governess, teacher, and above all goddess! No wonder you were snowed under and nearly died of her, every one of you.”

Suddenly Laura was able to sit up, pulled up by revelation. “Yes,” she said in her normal voice, “but she was to be all those things for her friends, both men and women, and that’s why she was great in her strange way!” Laura felt light breaking inside her, reached her hand out toward Ella. “I think I begin to see her. At last.”