A Reckoning (3 page)

Life had lately sometimes felt interminable, an interminable struggle—the excitement, even relief, she had experienced when Dr. Goodwin told her the truth of her condition stemmed perhaps from the fact that setting a limit gave her a sudden sense of freedom. She did not have to try so hard any longer. In a way she realized this was what she had felt during her pregnancies, that she could let life do it, for a change—and now she could let death do it. She was carrying death inside her as she had once carried life, as the little car she was driving was carrying her—home.

Chapter III

Laura was wakened out of a dream by Grindle’s soft, wet tongue licking her hand. It had been such a beautiful dream, she and Charles lying under pine trees somewhere, such a dream of warmth and communion, that she hated having to come back to the chilly morning. But Grindle was wide-awake and wanted to go out, so Laura got up, staggering, her eyes glued together, put on a wrapper, and went downstairs, the dog thumping down ahead of her.

“Out you go, impatient animal!”

The freezing air hit her like a blow. That pressure in her chest seemed to be settling in. I must get used to it and pay no attention, she thought, and no doubt hot coffee would help. She went back to bed then with a cup and let the day flow in. The gray light was gradually turning to amber on the walls as the sun rose above the trees. Because for the first time she sensed a touch of panic, Laura decided to go into the office and if possible see Harriet Moors. At present she felt strongly that she must be active, do whatever she could, keep the panic away. Not death but dying brought on the panic, the process now beginning its inexorable course inside her lungs. How did one deal with that? Was the whole of her being dying or only one part of it? And could she hold that part of her insulated against all the rest? Mind, heart, whatever she, the person, might be?

For a time she imagined that she could. She went down to her desk, found Harriet Moors’ number, and called, for she seemed to remember that Miss Moors had a job, and she had better get to her before eight if so. Harriet Moors sounded rather frail and frightened at first but seemed delighted to accept a half-past eleven appointment at Houghton Mifflin.

“What about your job?”

“I can take an early lunch hour.”

“I can have a sandwich sent in if that would help.”

Laura did not have the courage to walk Grindle before she left. She was afraid that her little provision of energy would simply melt away in that cold air. After all, she had gone to see Jim Goodwin because she felt very queer and had been losing weight. The diagnosis certainly didn’t make her feel any better, physically, and she had to admit this morning that it was going to be difficult even to pretend to lead her own life pretty soon. So why take in a perfect stranger, why insist on seeing Harriet Moors? Laura thought about it as she drove into Boston, but why analyze? She had felt that this was an interesting novel with an important theme, one not touched on before. And she had felt involved, she didn’t know quite why—Ben, of course, and the fact that he had never discussed his private life with either her or Charles—they had all managed to avoid admitting the truth to one another.

She felt quite strange when she finally reached the office and sat down in her chair by a window looking out on the Common. Had it been only four days since she had called Dr. Goodwin from here? She felt she was returning from a long journey; the familiar Common was suddenly a magic scene, one she had dreamed of—children skating on the frog pond, the elegant outlines of the elms against snow, one old man feeding pigeons from a bench even in this bitter cold.

“How are you?” Dinah, the secretary she shared with Alan Price, looked in, her arms full of the day’s mail. She dumped a pile on the desk.

“Rotten, I feel absurdly weak. You know these viruses, how they hang on.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“To take it easy for several weeks. So I’ll work at home as much as I can.” Laura found it simple to conceal the truth. It had not been a decision, but the casual tone felt right. Time enough to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

“I’d be grateful if you would run through the mail, Dinah. I’m expecting that Harriet Moors in a few minutes. It will be a longish interview, I expect, and I’ll go home after it.”

“You shouldn’t have come in, Laura. For heaven’s sake!”

“Oh, well, that girl is nervous as a witch about her book.”

Dinah shook her head. “And that’s ‘taking it easy’? Let me get you a cup of coffee, anyway.”

Laura found even this modicum of attentive kindness hard to bear. She turned away quickly and took Harriet Moors’ novel out of her briefcase, along with the notes she had jotted down yesterday, some of which she found as usual quite illegible. But this should not, anyway, be a working interview. Laura had learned from experience that a young writer was far too nervous to take in very much at this stage. Later on she must arrange a luncheon with Alan or Sally, whoever could be asked to take over, if …

There was a knock at the door, and Dinah came in with two cups of coffee and a young woman in a round fur hat, a thin, short coat, jeans, and high workman’s boots.

“Miss Moors,” Dinah said.

“Of course, come in. Sit down, Miss Moors.” During the amenities—Harriet Moors refused a cup of coffee—Laura observed the visitor closely. She had a round, pink face, wore glasses, and partly because of her Dutch-cut black hair, looked awfully young. Their eyes met; Laura too was being observed, she realized.

“Well,” Laura smiled. “How old are you, Harriet? May I call you Harriet?”

“I’m twenty-six.”

Laura smiled again. “You look about sixteen, that’s why I asked. And this is, I take it, your first try at a novel?”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to be a good book,” Laura took a quick swallow of coffee and set the cup down. Nothing tasted right today.

“I can’t believe it.” Harriet flushed dark red, took out a kleenex, and wiped her glasses. “It’s been such a struggle, for two years nearly. Do you think it’s bad to be writing about something one is living at the same time? That was the hardest thing—it kept changing, because I changed.”

“Here and there I was troubled by small inconsistencies, but they are easy to fix.”

“If it ever comes out, it will have to be under an assumed name,” Harriet said, frowning now, for she was suddenly confronted, Laura sensed, by having given so much of herself away.

Laura glanced out at the Common, fiddled with a pencil. “That’s something you will have to decide.” Why pull any punches? “But if you are going to be a serious writer, I think you have to accept that you must be absolutely honest—hiding behind another name seems like an evasion.”

“But my parents—they would never forgive me.”

“I know. That’s every writer’s problem. It can be excruciating.”

“I’m not sure I have the courage to come out, Mrs. Spelman.” Harriet was sweating profusely and again wiped off her glasses.

“Maybe you underrate your readers.”

“You weren’t shocked?” Harriet asked intensely.

“Why should I be?”

“I mean, after all—”

“After all, I’m a hundred years old?” At this they both laughed.

“No, but—well, how would you feel if one of your children—”

“My oldest son, a painter, is a homosexual.” It occurred to Laura as she spoke the word that she had never said this outright to anyone before.

“Did he tell you so?”

“We’ve never talked about it, but from the time he was in prep school he always wrote me about great friends he had, lyrical letters about the meaning of love, philosophical letters about passion not lasting.”

“Amazing.”

“That he wrote like that to me, or that we have left it unanalyzed between us?”

“I don’t know.” Harriet looked confused.

“Well, one of the things that troubles me a little about your book is that the parents seem rather too obtuse, like caricatures.”

“But my parents are like that!”

“Are they really? I felt sometimes, as I read, that you had overdone their reaction. Now and then I rebelled. Come, come, I wanted to say, can’t you try to see their dilemma, and their pain, give them a break? For fictional purposes at least, it would make your book more convincing, less of a battle simply between generations—and after all, your parents must be quite young by my standards, in their late forties?”

“My mother is forty-eight and my father fifty-two. They’re not intellectuals, Mrs. Spelman. My father has a grocery business, my mother never went to college, and they just don’t know anything about all this. I might as well have told them I had leprosy!”

“Yes—I see it is going to take a lot of courage to publish this book. But why did you tell them, then? Do you mind my asking you that?” For Harriet blushed and shook her head at the question.

“Let’s get back to the book as fiction. As I said before, I feel it’s an important theme and that it will be publishable, but I also feel that it still needs some work, some thinking about. The parents don’t come through as complex enough human beings to be quite believable. Perhaps there could be more tension between them?”

“Yes,” Harriet nodded. “How do you know all this anyway?”

“I’ve lived a long time, and I’m part of a large family, a large, eccentric family, I suppose one might say. My elder sister, for instance, has never fallen in love with a man and can’t admit even to herself that she has many times been infatuated by women. My mother is responsible for that—she broke up an early love affair rather brutally.”

“A love affair with a woman?”

“Yes.”

“So she
was
like my parents!”

“Not at all. My mother always understood—or so she imagined. She persuaded Jo that the person involved was an exploiter, that was all.”

“And Jo let herself be persuaded?”

“Jo was thoroughly frightened. It was all long ago, in Europe.”

“My book is
now,
and in the U.S.A.,” Harriet said quite aggressively. “I’m not sure I want to make changes.”

“Of course you must think about it, and with your permission I would like one of the young men on the staff to read it, and then perhaps we could have a joint meeting and talk about it again.”

Harriet frowned. “I’m not ready for that yet.”

“I didn’t mean to push you. Perhaps I’ve said too much.”

“No, please tell me the other thing. You said just now, ‘one of the things that troubles me.’”

“It’s that you simply must make the reader appreciate that this relationship between the two young women is real and deep. You walk all around it, give us all the periphery, but never take us to the center.”

“I can’t write about sex.”

“I don’t mean sex. In fact that might not work at all, even if you could. What we need is to believe that this is a possible long-term relationship, important enough so that Perry and Joan have to talk about it with Joan’s parents and with Perry’s mother.”

“Of course. I thought I had made that clear.”

“Young writers are so afraid of being obvious that rather often they simply don’t tell the reader enough.”

“I thought I had … that scene on the beach …”

“Well, would your own parents, for instance, understand what was really happening there, if they read it and it was not your book?”

Harriet laughed. “I guess not!”

Dinah now looked in, protectively.

“It’s all right, Dinah.”

When the door had closed again, Laura explained,

“I’ve got one of those low-grade viruses that hangs on. Dinah is afraid I’ll collapse.”

“I’d better go,” said Harriet—with relief, Laura thought, watching her swing her pouch over her shoulder as she got up.

“It’s my first day back, and I do feel rather shaky. I hope you don’t feel depressed? Have I said too much? That’s always a danger, the danger of trying to write someone else’s book.”

“I’ve got to think,” Harriet said. “I guess I had hoped the work was done—it’s rather awful to have to go back.”

“Why don’t we let Alan read it and see what he says? Maybe I’m all wrong.”

“Alan scares me.”

“He’s really a dear as well as a perspicacious and kind reader. And he’s much younger than I. I have an idea he can help.”

“All right,” Harriet said reluctantly.

The phone on Laura’s desk rang, and she picked up the receiver while Harriet stood rather awkwardly at the door. “Yes, this is Laura Spelman … I’m very sorry, but I’ve been out of the office for a week. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can … a month, you say? I’m terribly sorry, but I’m sure the manuscript only reached my desk ten days ago.… No, I’m not giving you the runaround. Good-by, Mr. Winter.” Laura banged the receiver down. “What a rude young man!”

“I was luckier,” Harriet smiled.

“Yours is not a seven-hundred-page historical romance!” Harriet, obviously cheered by the downing of Winter, said, “Good-by then … and you’ll let me know what Alan says.”

“Good-by, and don’t worry. Let it simmer.”

The door closed. Laura sat there, looking out the window. She did feel tired, but in a not unpleasant way, as though she were floating, suspended above the public gardens in a dream. Would she be able to see Harriet through before—well, that was not her option. She had liked the girl. Harriet Moors had really listened and taken the criticism with grace. None of the screaming and howling about the Great Untouchable Work that Laura had suffered from more than one beginner. Harriet clearly did not think of herself as a genius, and that was a good sign. Too bad I forgot all about ordering sandwiches, Laura thought … but she let that fall, too.

Everything except to sit here for a while seemed too great an effort. And so she floated, unable to fend off the memories of Jo that summer in Genoa, shutting herself up in her room for hours to play jazz records, and their mother, flaming sword of righteousness cutting a life in two—so it had seemed to Jo—without a qualm. Why hadn’t their father intervened? For the simple reason, Laura imagined, that he too had been persuaded by Sybille that the wild Alicia was a “bad influence” that had to be removed for all their sakes. Did she never have any doubt, Laura asked herself, did Sybille ever wonder years later whether she had not really murdered Jo rather than the fatal Alicia? For Alicia, tempestuous, beautiful Alicia, had gone on her way, weeping gallons of tears for weeks, and then no doubt falling in love with someone else. She had finally married after all, married into the Roman aristocracy. Laura had come across a photograph of her years later, looking as seductive as ever at some charity ball, Jo by then one of how many brief episodes in her life? But for Jo it had been like a long illness about which she confided in no one; and when it was over she had apparently decided that passionate love was simply too painful and that she would never allow herself to feel as much again for anyone.