The House by the Sea (23 page)

I had two experiences in New York that I want to record. After that heavenly train journey down the Hudson, and once I had registered at the club, I walked down Lexington Avenue to Bloomingdales' to try to find some summer shorts and jackets … as usual, in total despair because I wear a size 18 or 20. I was shunted from floor to floor, on each seeing exactly what I needed, “But, oh no, madam, we only have sizes 8 to 16. Try floor 3 …” Finally I managed to find a pair of very expensive jeans to garden in and a couple of shirts on the unchic, sad floor for half-sizes! Meanwhile, two thirds of the women going up and down the escalators were obviously not size 16! Why do we lie down and allow fashion to dictate our lives and to humiliate us? I think the Fat Panthers (emulating the Gray Panthers) had better launch a crusade—large posters showing gaunt, thin women looking tense and one hundred years old beside round, rosy, happy women might be a first attack.

Friday, April 30th

A
PERFECT SPRING DAY
… cool and bright, and a gentle blue sea, no wind. I must go back to the other experience in New York last week. After my discouraging rove through Bloomingdales' I went to a small French restaurant, Le Veau D'Or, took refuge there during a thunderstorm, having bought a book to read—an ideal one, as it turned out—Helen Bevington's
Journal of the Sixties
. The place was jammed; my table faced the door; I could observe people as they came in while I sipped my drink and waited for my filet of sole. I realized how good it was not to be waiting anxiously for “one person,” to be so free, no entanglements, no little thread pulled taut inside me, so that in an hour there I had the feeling of a whole holiday and enjoyed myself immensely.

Monday, May 3rd

M
Y
sixty-fourth birthday, and a singularly happy one. I woke before five to Bramble's loud purrs and lay there for a while listening to the gentle sigh of the sea. There was dense fog. Tamas licked my hand to suggest that it was time to get up; so I did, in time to catch a vision of gold and purple finches at the feeder. I opened Blue's presents with my breakfast in bed. She has made an emergency sewing kit for my travels, such an imaginative present, and after breakfast I opened Mary's present, she who always spoils me terribly, and she the only person now who thinks of the kind of things family give to family … this time, pale blue sheets and a light blue blanket. Lee, Blue, Laurie, Mary-Leigh and Rene all called before nine. Yet, despite all these friends, I am suddenly in tears, thinking of my mother. In the middle of the night I had a strange and rather awful dream about being born, struggle, and fear. I can't capture it now, but I was aware of Wondelgem, an atmosphere. Joy and pain. Must they always go together?

It is a good birthday because I feel I am coming into my own this year more than ever before. I heard on Saturday that I am to get a third honorary degree, this one from the University of New Hampshire. It's great fun. For one who only graduated from high school there is a slightly malicious pleasure in it: “I did it my way.”

Maybe the most important reason I feel happy is that I am learning not to push quite so hard—“She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs.” I'm calmer and more sure of myself. That doesn't mean that anything is
solved
, only that the conflict is not so destructive. I am thinking of the conflict between art and life, of course … that will never be solved. But I am coming to be more able to do what I can, answer letters when I can, and to have less guilt about what is
not
done. And perhaps I am happy also because the panic that I would never have another idea for a novel is gone, and I do see my way ahead for another two years.

Yesterday I planted bush sweet pea seeds, a mixed packet of radishes that will mature at different times, a box of forget-me-nots, and one of large white Swiss pansies on the terrace. When I look at the expanse of earth ready to be sown I wonder how I shall ever get it done with guests coming almost every other day this month. I'm going to try a few hills of potatoes just for the fun of it.

On Saturday it took most of the day to take Jill out for lunch in Portsmouth. She is twenty-three, full of life and hope. I have great respect for her, for her passionate sense of being a Jew (she went to Israel for a year all on her own). But I also felt how dangerous it is to be brought up in such a close-knit Jewish society because, outside it, one feels alien. She has landed at the University of New Hampshire, where there happen to be almost no Jewish professors or students. At first I think she felt like a stranger in a foreign land. She is such an open, loving girl that the force of goy society hit her with a wham, and perhaps I can be of some use because she can talk openly with me, and knows that I am sympathetic.

I feel a pang when I realize her illusions about writing professionally (she is on a teaching fellowship that provides time for writing). One must believe in one's talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant. At J.'s age it may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender care. And to give it those things means working at it every day. It is no good at twenty-three to produce a story or two in a year. A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used. Closing the gap between expectation and reality can be painful, but it has to be done sooner or later. The fact is that millions of young people would like to write, but what they dream of is the published book, often skipping over the months and years of very hard work necessary to achieve that end—all that, and
luck
too. We tend to forget about luck.

Tuesday, May 4th

T
HE WHOLE DAY
was lovely yesterday in spite of strange weather. Judy and Phyllis arrived in fog and we walked through wet grass to look at the daffodils and down to the sea, which moved Judy to exclamations of joy as the great combers came in and curled over into foam. But suddenly after they had left an icy wind blew in, the whole downstairs chilled by the blast from a slightly open window in my bedroom. It was frightening. Then a violent cold shower with thunder and heavy straight rain, and finally when Heidi arrived with a basketful of bright pink geraniums and alyssum, it had blown over, so we too walked down through wildness and wet to the sea. (Later, on the news, I heard a report that scientists believe we are in for forty years of terrible weather, drought in Europe and Asia, and God knows what everywhere else!)

Anyway, it was a wonderfully peaceful birthday and the happiest I remember … Muriel Rukeyser telephoned, Eugenia (from London!), and Charles Feldstein. I found myself saying to everyone, “Sixty-four is the best age I have ever been.” And that is exactly what I feel.

As I lay in bed after breakfast at around six I was thinking that I forget to note the small delights that make life such heaven here … for instance, the grass is thick with white and blue violets; the wood anemones shine in the woods; I saw a phoebe yesterday, and late in the afternoon what I imagined at first to be a huge sea monster gliding along turned out to be a flock of eider ducks!

Helen Bevington's
Journal of the Sixties
is a perfect book for reading in bits and pieces. In it I found Montaigne's list of the advantages of a bad memory:

1. One cannot be a good liar.

2. One cannot tell long stories.

3. One forgets offenses.

4. One enjoys places and books a second time around.

Thursday, May 6th

T
HE REAL BIRTHDAY
was yesterday when Anne and Barbara came for our yearly celebration of Anne's and my birthday—they come close together—a warm windy day with everything looking absolutely enchanting, the daffodils singing out against the evening light, and lots of tulips out as well. They brought the stone phoenix I had commissioned from Barbara … Bev came over to take photographs, and Raymond turned up too to help us lift it from place to place under a yew tree until we could find a sheltered place where it would still take changing light. This morning early the rising sun tipped its wings in fire … what a thrill! It is exactly what I dreamed, something that would suggest the strong upward wing thrust as the bird rises out of the flames. “My Dream most fabulous and meaningful, / Stand guard, stand guard.”

After we had stood around for a while admiring the phoenix and A. and B. drove in the long steel spikes that will keep it upright, we were able to sit out on the terrace for a drink … the first time it has been warm enough. A wren sang and sang. Suddenly we saw two pairs of tree swallows veering back and forth across the field—so they are back.

Finally we felt the chill and went in to sit by the fire in the library, and talk while the lobsters boiled. But, best of all, a long quiet talk about our lives and where we all are now.

I woke this morning thinking about The Well, my friend (a friend by letter only) who is battling cancer and has been in great pain. She has had a long series of cobalt treatments, can only sit up in a chair for an hour a day. “The world is sharply alive through pain,” she says. I want to find the right words for her, and that is what I must do this morning.

Friday, May 7th

I
SEE THE DAFFODILS
best from this third-floor window … for from here I get the whole design, irregular garlands that make a nearly full circle as they weave around big rocks and clumps of bushes, and at the road gather into thick rich lines of mostly white narcissus … shining on a gray day like this one.

Yesterday I had a lovely slow walk through the woods with Tamas and Bramble, slow because Tamas limps a little (I can't find any thorn or pebble to explain it) and also because so many birds are singing in the treetops, I have to stop to listen and try to discover who it may be. I saw a black-and-white warbler and a wood thrush yesterday and heard wrens and vireos, but didn't catch sight of either. Driving home with the mail two days ago I came to a dead stop without frightening a woodcock, busily eating something in the road. So rare to see this shy bird close and unafraid … funny delightful bird with its no-tail, long beak, and eyes set in the top of its head!

In the afternoon I worked hard in the garden, taking a half-dead rose down to the “hospital,” planting the white rose B. gave me for my birthday in its place. Then I arranged all the birthday plants, the blue marguerites, impatienses that Anne brought, and Heidi's pink geraniums and alyssum in the border along the terrace.

Sunday, May 9th

I
T'S HARD
to settle down there is so much happening all the time. The day began with the oriole singing loudly in the big maple, and I ran down to see him … there is no thrill like that flaming orange and black. Since then I've washed the breakfast dishes, made my bed, shelled peas, set the table, got the cushions out for the terrace chairs, picked chives for the new potatoes, parboiled onions, and put the roast (with them) in the oven, and somewhere along the line made a tiny bunch of blue and white pansies, periwinkles, and primroses for the center of the table. It couldn't be a more perfect day for Anne Thorp and Agnes to be coming for Sunday dinner. Everything shining and perilous, for it will last only a minute. The daffodils are almost over now, the fruit trees just beginning.

Yesterday too, though windy and a little cool, was marvelous … we were able to sit out for a half hour on the terrace. And I felt a great rush of love for Laurie Armstrong, who will not be here forever. She is so valiant and so alive that it is hard to realize that she is entering very old age. Ben, her husband, has been dead twenty years … is that possible? I see his dark eyes and delicate features so clearly, and remember how delightfully he laughed, the laugh of someone thoroughly enjoying his companions. Theirs was a
whole
marriage, a rare one. It was Judy's first time here (Laurie's daughter) and she noticed everything, even the five-pointed star at the center of each primrose (I had never really taken that in till she mentioned it).

Bill had sent money to Foster's for birthday flowers and with it I have bought a white rhododendron. I am hoping it will hide the ugly dead branches of the yew that had been overpowered by the huge one Anne pruned for me last October and now is left, straggly and bare.

Thanking Bill, I unearthed his last letter, written at Easter. He says,

“Once again, just on schedule, the azalea tree you gave me two years ago has come into blossom. I hope I'll blossom soon, or is this the grand illusion? ‘Art' being that carrot on a string in front of the donkey, and on and on we trot. Well, to be a bit more candid, there are minor breakthroughs and temporary elations in the studio to offset the doubts and incipient despair. I do feel as if I were hovering around something that is about to reveal itself. Revelation of course only coming by work, it's never a strip-tease before a spectator for me.”

Bill is a painter but so often we appear to be feeling the same things about our work; it's quite astonishing. His phrase “hovering around something that is about to reveal itself”—that is exactly my state these days. And I have always known, as he does, that revelation rises up slowly if one can give it space, and if one keeps at the work, often with no apparent result.

Monday, May 10th

A
GENTLE HAZE
over the pale blue sea … the field below it looks very green, the birds sound lazy, and it will be a warm May day.

I want to savor Anne Thorp's presence here yesterday. It was such a blessed time, so full of light and the love that goes back so many many years and encompasses my mother and father, as well as hers. Like Judy, she lives almost wholly in the moment, but how rich a moment it is for her! She seemed to see each flower with the eyes of the newborn. We walked down to the ocean, and later, lying on the terrace in the chaise longue she closed her eyes and listened to its gentle roar against the rocks. And while we ate our lunch she forgot food entirely in the enjoyment of the squirrels and little birds at the feeders, in the flowering cherry (its buds all pink now) just outside. Of course, none of this would be possible without Agnes Swift and her care and sensitivity to every possible need. She is the shepherd of a dear old sheep who becomes more and more lamblike now every day.