A Reckoning (18 page)

“What sort of people are they? You’ve never told me.”

“His father’s a dentist; his mother appears to be a rather neurotic, rather ambitious woman who flits in and out of volunteer jobs looking for something she never finds. They play golf on Saturdays and have a huge family Sunday dinner to which various aunts, cousins, heaven knows who, come, and Saul has to go, willy-nilly, so we never have a real weekend together. Saul is the only child, which is hard on him.” All this was blurted out rather mechanically as though Daisy were not really interested.

“Why didn’t she have another child?”

“Oh, she always thinks she has some fatal disease—and perhaps she did have an operation and can’t. I’ve never seen her alone, and I’m not exactly welcome at these family gatherings, so …”

“It doesn’t sound like a happy future from all you say—what is it about Saul? It’s gone on quite a while.”

“Three years of my life,” Daisy frowned. “My job is o.k., but it isn’t my real life. He is.”

“But you love him?”

“Women get caught, that’s the trouble. I seem to have attached myself to Saul like a limpet to a rock, against all reason.” Daisy got up and refilled their glasses, but instead of sitting down again she wandered around for a few moments, picking up various objects and setting them down. Then she said, rather unexpectedly, “We have a lot of fun together—and you have to remember that Saul is at the hospital day and night, so I really can’t be with him very much. It’s tantalizing, and then when we do have a night and a day we just go wild. Sometimes we make love for twenty-four hours and never get up. I suppose that shocks you.”

“Not at all. But that won’t last. And then what?”

“Sometimes we spend a whole day at the zoo. Sometimes we see two movies. I can’t explain it, mother, what it is about him, except—” here Daisy turned back from the window and sat down again. “He’s so alive. He’s so full of life he’s like a child let out of school and he pulls me along with him because he charms me. He charms me,” she said again. Laura observed that she was close to tears and wondered why. Daisy had not been a weeper, except when she was in a rage.

“And if you do get married? It sounds as if maybe you should?”

“I’d always be an outsider, Mother, wherever we went—even far away from New York. I’d never be taken in, you see, and for Saul being with me is betraying something deep inside him. I know that. He talks about going to Israel—I would love that. But he would be a little uncomfortable, you see. He would always have to be explaining me as though I were a black, and that’s really how I feel, like a stranger.”

“I just don’t believe that. It seems so old-fashioned. I mean, after all—” and suddenly Laura felt quite cross. It seemed almost unbelievable, like something in a Victorian novel. “After all, love is always taking the stranger in. When Charles died, I felt cut in two, but we were never exactly one, you know.”

“You mean Daddy was very simple and you were complicated?” At this Laura laughed, because Daisy had a way of reducing things to the bare bones, and perhaps she was right.

“I’m not complicated,” Laura answered seriously. “The complications came from Mamma, and from my being ill so long before I married. I suppose some part of me had been walled away so I could survive, and only because Charles was such a truly loving, giving person, did it work. I think we did have a good marriage,” she added quickly.

“I used to envy the way you looked at each other across the table.”

“Did you?” Laura felt suddenly shy, aware now as she had not been at the time, of Daisy’s eyes observing, being envious. “If you must know I was a little envious of you and your father. When you were born, I knew I had given him what he wanted most in the world.”

“I just think family life is impossible,” Daisy said. “You can’t win. It’s so damned complicated. Nobody gets what he wants. Or if he does, then someone else in the family doesn’t. And the awful thing is that women have had to be the ones to balance it all and keep it from falling apart! I just don’t think I could do it, Mother.”

“Since the women’s movement has taken hold, perhaps we are able to be honest at last—so much is coming out into the open that had been buried. That’s why Sybille felt so violently about it.”

“Did she? She never said so to me.”

“She felt the sacred was being violated. Things talked about lose their mystery, she felt—and perhaps rightly so. Also there was too much she couldn’t face, it would have been too terrible.”

“Like what?”

Laura lay back on the sofa, taking a kind of inward leap. Was this the moment to talk about Sybille? To break her long silence about all that to her children, and especially to Daisy who admired Sybille? “I think I’m a little too tired to try to say it. The great thing, dearie, is that you knew Sybille at her best, and at her best she could be rather wonderful.”

“I feel you are putting me off. Oh, dear, of course, you’re exhausted. I’m going to get us something to eat and leave you alone for a bit—only—” Daisy turned back at the door, with a look on her face, puzzled but determined, that brought her back vividly as a child, “I hope you’ll talk about it later on.”

The conversation had taken its toll, though all through it Laura had felt she was being borne on a rising tide, racing with it toward some understanding at last between herself and this subtly rejecting Daisy. I don’t feel rejected now, Laura was thinking. The door has opened between us, and neither of us is quite as much on the defensive. That’s good, she said to herself, even as she sank into a half-doze. “A house of gathering,” someone, maybe Jung, had called death. But exhausted as she was, Laura wondered whether her mother would ever have a place in that house where all could be gathered, all accepted—except her. Would she have to die to be delivered of Sybille?

“Ella,” she murmured.

“There,” Daisy was saying, “I made you an eggnog and a tiny portion of Mrs. O’Brien’s delicious stew in case you could taste it.” She laid a small tray beside Laura.

Laura opened her eyes and made the long journey back from semiconsciousness. “Oh, thanks. Don’t forget to have some salad. I made it for you.”

They sat opposite each other in a companionable silence. Daisy put a new log on the fire. Laura took a sip of eggnog and managed to swallow it, and in a little while she had taken about a third. To swallow more would be to push her luck, for nausea now was increasingly the enemy. Daisy at least was ravenous. Laura, watching her dive into the stew, remembered Daisy’s fiercely hungry mouth at her breast and how it sometimes hurt.

“I’ve been thinking about what Granny felt about the women’s movement. In a way I suppose she had it all. I mean, she seems so fulfilled.”

“Fulfilled?” Laura set her glass down in sheer amazement. It was actually the last word she would have used in regard to Sybille, who went on from height to height and never appeared to be satisfied, her head full of visions of glory.

“She was so much part of everything important in her time—the arts—all those writers and painters she knew and, through Grandpa, politics. Think of her marching in Washington for peace! She knew so many famous people, yet she talked to me as an absolute equal.”

“I suppose you could say it was a great life,” Laura said slowly. “But fulfillment …” she hesitated.

“‘Fulfillment’ means being whole, is that it? And you feel she wasn’t? She stayed hungry and terribly alive, and maybe that’s better.”

Laura bit back the words, “Not if one has been as destructive to others as Sybille was to us—and to all those people she picked up so fervently and then forgot about when the next hero appeared.” Instead of uttering them she forced herself to get up, and hurried to the kitchen where she vomited the eggnog.

Daisy was there in an instant, to hold her forehead in a strong hand as the dry convulsions shook Laura.

“Oh …” she groaned.

“It’s all right, Mother. I’m here.”

Laura was weeping now, hot tears streaming down her cheeks, from weakness, she told herself. Something was cracking open inside her, and it was painful. She felt absolutely defenseless before her child, stripped down to this vomiting animal, waiting for the seizure to pass. But at the same time, she was leaning on Daisy’s cool hand, grateful for the strength and the tenderness there.

“I think I’d better go to bed now,” she said when she could turn around and lean her head on Daisy’s shoulder, taking short, panting breaths, her face bathed in tears and sweat.

Very quietly, Daisy held her up, held her in her arms like a baby. Neither of them needed to say anything.

Chapter XVI

The dawn came now at half-past five, and Laura, who had been awake for hours trying to find a position in which she would not cough, welcomed the faint light bringing the room alive, little by little. The curtains breathed gently in a light breeze. She felt strangely at peace. When Daisy appeared at six to ask whether she would like a cup of tea, Laura held out her arms, and they hugged silently. She felt so serene she was surprised by Daisy’s anxious face.

“You didn’t sleep, Mother?” Daisy asked.

“Not much, but I am learning to float. I don’t know how to describe it, like being carried on a current. I felt happy.”

“Oh, Mother.” Daisy fled to make the tea.

Later she put on the Mozart clarinet quintet and some Beethoven sonatas for Laura to listen to upstairs. They were in unspoken agreement that Laura would stay in bed, and when she went to the bathroom, she knew she had to, for she felt quite faint just making the small effort of walking across the room twice. Daisy took the animals for a walk later on, and Laura sank into a lovely sleep, bathed in sunlight. She felt it on her face like a gentle hand.

Then—what time was it anyway? Nearly eleven?—she woke to the sound of voices downstairs, Jo’s deep, musical voice and Daisy’s. For a moment Laura thought she couldn’t possibly see Jo, not yet.

“She’s awfully sick, Aunt Jo,” she heard Daisy say. Then they must have closed a door.

Laura pulled a pillow up from the foot of the bed and stuffed it behind her. She sat up straight, suddenly in a sweat, feeling around for a comb in the drawer of the night table, but it wasn’t there. I’ve got to get used to being helpless, she told herself. It is what I have to learn, that—and other things. I don’t want to see them, she thought, as though Jo and everyone else close to her, family, were flying down out of the sky like predatory birds. Only Aunt Minna and Mary O’Brien and Dr. Goodwin could come because they did not ask her full attention, she supposed. Or perhaps each of them had a niche, and everything fitted into their comings and goings. Jo’s arrival today when Laura knew she was close to exhaustion was a trial. Would Daisy be able to shield her—if only Daphne were the one, Laura thought. But why do I need shielding from my sister? And then she heard Jo’s firm step on the stairs.

“I haven’t been able to get here till today,” Jo said. “It’s a week of trustees’ meetings. Darling, why didn’t you tell us?”

“Jo—when I was so ill in Switzerland, I became the prisoner of other people—I need to do this alone. Can’t you understand?”

Jo was standing by the bed. She looked handsome in a dark-green tweed suit and white ruffled blouse, her dark eyes set wide apart in her head, and something impassive in her white marblelike skin. She looked young for her age, though her hair was white, cut short and curled. She’s my sister, Laura thought, this handsome, powerful person, but I don’t know her. She’s a stranger.

“Sit down, Jo, you make me nervous standing there.”

“Don’t be cross,” Jo said, pulling up a low chair so that she could sit at the foot of the bed and lean on its end. “It wouldn’t be quite human if I couldn’t see my own sister … when …”

“I’m dying, but it isn’t bad,” Laura said gently.

Jo swallowed nervously.

“I have a very good nurse-housekeeper and Jim Goodwin comes to drain the lungs—that relieves the pressure. Gosh, Jo, you wouldn’t believe the huge quantities of a dark-orange fluid he gets out, and it doesn’t hurt.” Laura felt that discussing symptoms and the purely physical aspect of things was the only way to handle this unexpected visitation.

When they had talked about all that, Jo asked about Ben, and Laura explained he was finishing a big painting.

“What is the point of his coming here to agonize?”

“He is your son,” Jo said.

“But that’s just what I can’t handle, the burden of what other people are feeling, don’t you see? I want to be left in peace to feel my own feelings.”

“I don’t understand you at all,” said Jo.

“No, I guess not. After all, Jo, you have managed to close off personal feelings as irrelevant.”

“I don’t have time to think a great deal about myself. One of the good things about a college is that it provides young women with something other than feelings to deal with. And for someone nearly sixty-five, I must say, yes, I do believe one should have outgrown what is commonly called love. But family is different,” she added.

“In what way? Besides, Jo, you haven’t been much of a family person, have you?”

Jo smiled. “For someone very ill you can still pack a powerful punch.” Jo always had liked the colloquial, but her usages were often slightly antiquated and made Laura smile. We are smiling antagonists, she thought, watching Jo absent-mindedly pluck the tufts on the white bedspread. Having said what she had said, Laura realized that Jo’s presence was quite simply irrelevant.

“I’m tired today. It makes me irritable.” And she laughed. “Why should families stick together anyway?”

But Jo was perturbed and did not respond. “Laura,” she said, “I’m eaten up by my job, and I honestly don’t think it’s a stupid or ungiving life. The problems we face in any liberal arts college today are simply stunning—I mean there is money, for one thing. The pressure is on to take in less than qualified students, and that’s especially true in a young college. Oh, well,” she looked up at Laura, “why plague you with my problems?”

“You appear to thrive on them. You look awfully well I must say. Not a wrinkle!”

“Don’t be absurd. I’m a fat old woman.”

They had just escaped a passage of some bitterness, and Laura lay back on her pillow and waited.