A Reckoning (2 page)

At that time Grindle began to sleep on Laura’s bed. He was quite hard to lift, but he was huggable and gave her the physical warmth she needed most of all. Those were the nights she ached in every bone of her body for Charles, tossed and turned in her bed, as though she would never rest again, and patient Grindle got up, turned around, and flopped down again with a groan of pleasure beside her. Sometimes Sasha leaped in through the open window and lay down on the other side. Sometimes then they all three slept till dawn, when Laura woke with lead in her limbs, wondering how to meet another day, turned on the light, and read whatever manuscript Houghton Mifflin had given her to work on.

“What am I going to tell
them?
” Since Charles’s death Laura found she talked aloud to herself or to Grindle. She was working now on a rather interesting book, a novel by a young woman who was wrestling with a difficult subject, clearly autobiographical, about a young Lesbian facing the problem of how to deal with her parents and their violent opposition to her life-style. Laura had really wished to help this author, to make the book as good as it might be. Harriet Moors was not going to be easy to help, she surmised. There was too much pain, too much conflict, here. And would there be time?

“Do I want to go on working?” Laura asked herself. “How can I know? How can I know what it’s going to be like?”

She supposed she must either withdraw into dying or live her life as well as she could until she had to give up. “Dying is living, and living is dying, Grindle.” Yes, the point was to give up the nonessential, but to hold fast to the essential—and Laura felt sure she could go her way for a few weeks without anyone’s knowing. She had taken a few days off with the excuse that she had some sort of virus, and in fact that was how she had explained to herself the lassitude and strange, stifled feeling in her chest. Next week she would go back to the office.

That decision came easy; on the strength of it she got up and made herself a sandwich and a cup of tea. “It’s all in God’s hands, Grindle,” she said, taking a cheese biscuit out of the box for the dog who had followed her into the kitchen. It’s because our relations with animals are so simple that they are such a comfort, she thought. No neurotic hostilities and angers in Grindle’s eyes; for him cheese biscuits were the be-all and end-all for the moment.

This, Laura decided, was to be a day of just such simple being. After lunch she took Grindle for a walk, delighted as always by the intensity with which he followed his nose, emitting sharp barks as he discovered the scent of a skunk or raccoon and went tearing off, up and down through snowdrifts, and back to her to bark his news.

When they returned it was nearly three, and the light was already fading as the sun dipped behind tall pines at the end of the field. Inside, the house was dark, the winter chill creeping in. Laura lit the fire before going to her desk and pulling out Harriet Moors’ novel.

She had forgotten everything in her absorption in the text before her and was startled when the phone rang. It was Aunt Minna, asking what the doctor had said. Taken by surprise, Laura was unable to answer coherently.

“May I come over, Aunt Minna?” she managed to ask after bumbling along about “nothing serious.”

“Of course, dear. I’ll have tea ready by the time you get here. Dress warmly, won’t you? It’s cold out.”

There was no one else in the world who would remind her to dress warmly, no one else who had known her as a child, Laura thought, as she wrapped a scarf round her throat and put on her duffle. And there was no house now that had remained as it always was except Aunt Minna’s white cottage behind its picket fence. It looked very much like the other houses on the street, and its unpretentious faded velvet Victorian sofas and chairs, its sepia photographs of olive groves in Italy, were probably not unlike those in the other houses; but the spirit that inhabited this house was unique. Minna Hornaday, Laura’s father’s sister, had always been a maverick, the odd one in a solid, conservative family, her brother, a foreign service officer in the State Department, and she a
sui generis
political force without official position—“a persuasive lunatic” her brother called her when she fought for the League of Nations and later helped organize the League of Women Voters. She ended up as a radical pacifist and antiwar agitator during Vietnam.

But Aunt Minna was more than her activities, more interesting. She had a genius for friendship, for touching people of all ages, for being able to communicate vividly and instantly across the barriers of age, language, class with anyone and everyone. She had a freshness, a zest for life, an expectant innocence that is the province of old maids of authentic genius.

Only since her eightieth birthday had there been the slightest diminution of energy. She wore a hearing aid now, but her gray eyes were as penetrating as ever. She still walked to town on good days, carrying a cane which she waved at oncoming cars, delighted to stop the traffic all by herself. She still resisted the idea of any live-in help. An elderly cleaning woman came twice a week and did some laundry as well as dusting around, but Minna declared that the very idea of someone’s lurking about the house all day and fussing at her when she did risky things, like climbing the ladder to get a book from the top shelf of her study, “would induce nervous breakdown or murder in a week.”

Laura had opened the gate and run up the porch steps many times with some problem only Aunt Minna could possibly understand, but this time was different. She stood inside the gate for several moments, totally at sea as to how to tell Aunt Minna, or whether to tell her at all. But then the door opened, and Aunt Minna called out, “Hurry up, Laura, don’t just stand there. You’ll catch your death!”

Laura smiled at the irony of this and closed the gate behind her. Then there was the bustle of getting off coat and boots, admiring the pink cyclamen—“from an admirer,” Aunt Minna said with a twinkle, “that boy who comes to shovel the path. He’s quite a dear, borrows books, and loves to discuss things”—and settling down on the sofa with a cup of hot tea and a cookie beside her on the little table.

“You’re out of breath,” Aunt Minna observed, giving her a sharp look. “What did that young Dr. Goodwin say? He really seems awfully young to me. Do you think he knows his business?”

“Yes,” Laura said, glad to embark on a subject other than her own state of health, “I think he’s a good doctor, and humane.”

“These viruses are devilish. Nothing seems to help but rest and patience. But who can rest these days? Still, you are a lot more patient than I am!”

But Laura could not respond. She felt frozen before the enormity of her news, locked into it, unable to extricate herself. Why had she ever come?

“It’s not a virus?” Aunt Minna asked, putting her own cup down.

“No, it’s cancer of both lungs and it’s too far along for an operation to be of any use. Cobalt treatments, the maximum, might hold things up for a few months. I said no to that.” Laura spoke these words without lifting her eyes, spoke them rapidly and loudly.

“My dear girl—”

“Well, it’s a very strange feeling.”

“You’re not going to let yourself die without a fight, are you? Cobalt can work miracles. Why did you say no to it?”

The sharp attack was unexpected, and Laura reacted with anger. “It’s my death, Aunt Minna, and I shall have it my way, God damn it.” Then she added, “I should have said, God bless it. I believe that people should be allowed their real deaths.”

“‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’” Aunt Minna had flushed with emotion, and her voice cracked a little as she repeated the famous line.

“It’s too big—too important for romantic bluster.”

“Yes, I suppose it is.” There was a long pause. Aunt Minna took a swallow of tea, then, “You shouldn’t be mortally ill. I should be. It’s all wrong. It’s a mistake. You’re only sixty, Laura!”

“Yes, but …”

“But what?”

“I don’t know how to tell you, but when Dr. Goodwin explained things—he did it very well, by the way, I admired his courage and tact—I had a moment of extraordinary excitement. Death must be the other great adventure, the way through somewhere just as birth is. I felt terribly excited, and when I walked down Marlboro Street to my car, every brick and tree looked so beautiful, I could hardly bear it. The blue sky—”

But Aunt Minna had withdrawn. Her eyes were closed. Laura was not sure whether she had heard.

“The trouble is I can’t put it into words.”

“Go on,” Aunt Minna murmured. But then she opened her eyes, very bright. “You can’t have experienced everything. I’m not ready to die. I don’t want to, not a bit. Every day something happens I wouldn’t have missed for anything.”

Laura couldn’t help laughing at the intensity with which these words were spoken. “You’re marvelous, that’s all. And we don’t have to talk about it anymore.”

“Oh, but we must. You appear to be on an express train into infinity—and there’s a great deal I have to say.”

“I’m not going to tell the children for a while. I expect to go on working for a month or two, but,” Laura said quietly, “I also want just to
be.
Just to watch the light on the wall. Play music. Read the things I want to read. Cut out the nonessential.”

“You’re talking about living, not dying.”

“Am I?” Laura was startled. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

“I feel the need for a strong drink,” Aunt Minna announced. “You might fetch the bottle of brandy on the second shelf in the pantry and bring two small glasses.”

While Laura was in the kitchen, she became aware of having been the bearer of evil tidings to a very old woman. She had been thinking of herself, not of Aunt Minna, of the shock for
her
, and now she felt dismayed by what she had done. It was all very well to talk about having one’s own death, but the truth was that this was not possible, for one’s own death is inevitably a burden and a problem for everyone else. We can’t die alone.

“Thanks, dear. Let’s sip a little brandy and talk sensibly. Of course you are absolutely heroically brave.”

“No, no, I’m not. I just have to think of it as a journey, but out there in the kitchen I realized that it’s not a journey anyone can make alone—other people are involved. And that
is
awful.”

“The first thing is to find someone who can live in, cook and so forth. Do it right away so she gets to know you before you are really ill.”

“I don’t want anybody living in. Hovering about.” The very idea brought on panic.

“If you’re going to do it your way, you’ve got to plan
now.
”

“Oh, Aunt Minna, that’s just what you said when I decided to spend a winter in Paris … do you remember? That was forty years ago. You made me see I had to go to the Sorbonne, not just drift around in bookstores. You were right, of course.”

“I don’t think Sybille ever quite got over my intervention.”

“I’ve always wondered—was that what brought on the cool?”

“Maybe. I went right to your father and persuaded him that you were intelligent enough to be trusted with your own life. Nowadays children run all over Europe with knapsacks, but forty years ago, trips to Europe by young girls were chaperoned. Really, it was quite astonishing that Dwight agreed.”

“Mamma was terribly upset. We were on the brink of coming home from all those years of wandering about. She was afraid we would never settle down into tame old Boston. And really only Jo wanted to. She plunged into Radcliffe like a duck into water.” Laura sipped her brandy and looked into the fire. “What was it really about, you and Mamma?”

“I don’t know.”

“There is so much I still have to try to understand. Shall I
ever
understand Mamma?”

“Mothers and daughters—it’s not really a very easy relationship, is it?”

“What was your mother like?”

“Adorable, witty, neurotic I suppose … the most wholly alive person I’ve ever known.”

“Then why do you say it wasn’t an easy relationship?”

“I cared too much. Our father—whom you never knew—was a rigid, rather stupid man, and when I was a child I saw my mother as a caged bird. I felt the wings beating against the bars in
myself
—I overempathized. That is one of the hazards of being a daughter.”

“Why a hazard?”

“The child knows too much in some ways and too little in others—children really have an awfully hard time. You, Jo, and Daphne were no exception.”

“We were lucky to have an aunt.” Laura began to feel very tired, but she couldn’t bear the idea of going home, not just yet. Here was warmth, the safe enclosure, love. She felt Aunt Minna’s presence to be as much a cordial as the brandy.

“Sybille might have been a great actress,” Aunt Minna ruminated. “She had the carriage, the beauty—oh, yes, the glamour! The way she wore her clothes, the theatrical lilt of her voice. But people who act offstage are troubling, troubled people, I fear.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I know so.” Aunt Minna was nothing if not definite.

“She was so beautiful,” Laura said in a faint voice.

“You all three have it, too—those blue eyes. But luckily for you your good looks did not have the fatal glamour, the something larger than life, unattainable, like a goddess. You could be human.”

“Yet I wonder whether we ever really were—or are. So much rage, so much energy went into revolt. It took us so long to grow up—and maybe Daphne never will.” Laura got up and went to the window. It was dark now, and what she saw was the roof reflected, and herself, looking as white and exhausted as she felt. “Here I am sixty and I still haven’t solved the riddle of Sybille, nor shall I ever.” She went and kissed Aunt Minna lightly. “And it’s time I drove home.”

“We haven’t settled anything,” Aunt Minna said, sighing deeply. But she wasn’t going to give up. “Laura, you simply must look for a housekeeper. Promise?”

“I’ll think about it.”

At the gate she turned back to wave and saw Aunt Minna peer out, unsmiling, give a brief wave, then turn away. It was bad to think of her alone now heating up some soup, having to bear the weight of what Laura had had to tell her. It was cold in the car, and Laura shivered. Home seemed eons away across the snow, but in the little cocoon, simply on her way, with nothing to do, nothing in her power to do, in the grip of a process over which she could have no control, except to let it take its course, Laura felt herself slipping down into some great current—and relaxed. Will could have no part to play here.