June 12. I spoke to Professor Sheridan on the telephone today, and he thought my new idea about the French attitude toward FDR’s New Deal promising, but he also seems skeptical of me lately, dismissive (because of the baby coming? because I postponed the first set of exams? Or has he read my paper and decided I’m a dolt?). André says it’s mostly in my head, but he was not on the phone and tone is everything. He thinks I exaggerate and so doesn’t take me seriously when he should, a source of immense frustration to me. Everyone loves André. I love him too and believe he loves me, but does he
like
me, which is not the same as love? Or understand me? Perhaps it’s too much to ask of anyone, as people are almost entirely mysterious to each other. Still, I want to think and talk about things that matter, to have conversations I return from changed. I might have done well as a missionary. I’d have gone somewhere strange and beautiful and talked to people about God, and seen astonishing things every day. Of course there is the problem of belief.
June 14. My birthday. 35. I celebrated it at the Big House with everyone on Sunday, but today, with just us, was happier. The wind swept through the house. André made a fire in the living room and gave me several books I’ve wanted and a gold bracelet with an inscribed charm for each child and a new blank one for the baby (surely Jane or Mummy picked that out). The children each made me a card. Suky did not call or write, which is a disappointment, as she always has, but she is so far away. We ate lobsters for dinner, and now the fog and the wind have blended together in a strange, unearthly mix. The Swiss chard and lettuce in my garden are two inches high. The radishes are already bulging and ripe. Some beets have pushed above the ground, along with the rows of feathery carrot tops. My vegetable garden is surrounded by wild roses, daisies and the sea. I wonder if there is another garden like it in the world, a neat, cultivated rectangle of soil and vegetables in rows cut out of the wilderness of cedar, pines, blackberries and grass.
I would like to stay just where I am or go backwards. I still cannot seem to embrace or even grasp this new adventure we are headed toward, though the baby will be here so soon. I think of the past with longing, of the future with worry. Only nature can hold me, in its obliviousness to all that consumes me. So I love the Maryland yellowthroat that comes each day to bathe in my garden pool, the birds that whistle in the thickets and flash past me, green and yellow over the grass and sea. I love the rabbits that hop in the garden, and above all, the sea that gives us the illusion, at least, of timelessness. On these things, I must fix my gaze.
June 17. I got more plants for the garden today—asters, alyssum, marigolds, petunias. A lovely evening—watered the garden and filled the birdbath. I want it all to be in bloom for Mummy when she arrives on July 4th. I thought with horror tonight, not of the baby but of all that is coming, especially the nurse—and it seemed to me that the more I thought, the louder the TV grew in Belle’s room—and the more I longed for solitude. In September, somehow I must arrange to go off by myself, if only for a few nights. Charlie was so sweet tonight. He is utterly removed from any such thoughts as mine and yet so curious about them. “Don’t you ever hear the television at night?” I asked him. “Sure, but I shut the door and think about something else,” he said, and when I said I didn’t have such fortitude, he said, “But why not, Mummy? You’ve got the most interesting thoughts in the world!” He is a darling and companionable child, and I think he admires me most for what he has been able to achieve, feeling somehow that I’ve pushed him to distinguish himself, but also recognizing that he finds attainment and recognition pleasing. I think he feels too that we both recognize the importance of this, and I know he is grateful for my guidance. Someday he may feel the opposite—but he will never, I hope, stop wanting to learn and accomplish unusual things.
July 3. Fog and honeysuckle at the dock. A heavy sweet smell. Caroline and I walked back home after watching Will and Charlie sail off into the fog with Kenneth, the Padanaram boy we’ve hired to tutor and teach them sailing. We went and admired the roses on Dossy’s wall. I just hope she can come before they are gone. Will and Charlie’s fairy garden is enchanted. Everything grows quietly, untouched by weeds, blight or rabbits. We don’t know why. It is the most exquisite little spot; an opening in the woods lets the sun through the shadows. The earth is quite black, and each separate flower almost glows in the darkness. Charlie told me his friend Rusty peed on it as a supposed joke, but Charlie didn’t find it funny. I don’t think a best friend should pee on your garden, he said very seriously, and I told him I thoroughly agreed. Tomorrow is Mummy’s clambake. After, André will take the children to New Bedford for fireworks. I am tired but more peaceful than before. Jane and Paul leave tomorrow, as their baby will arrive any day.
July 4. I’m terribly upset. I was with Charlie and Daddy and Daddy’s friend Bert Adams and his wife on the porch. Charlie was reciting poems he had memorized, and Daddy told me I should be careful about not turning my son into a performing monkey. It was so humiliating, especially in front of other people! To have poems stored in one’s brain is a great gift, and who taught me that but Daddy, who used to make us memorize not only poems but
bad
poems, while Charlie knows Frost and Yeats and some wonderful funny ones by Kipling and Edward Lear? What’s worse is that Charlie disappeared afterward—he must have run off. I looked for a little while but couldn’t find him. I’ve sent Will and Phillip off to try. Perhaps there is a grain of truth in what Daddy says, but it seems entirely unfair coming from him. I work so hard to engage the children and teach them things and cultivate a love of learning. What he did feels like an old humiliation, one I am helpless against.
July 6. Tonight the children and I went swimming after dinner. The tide was a foot over the tide rock. The water was a pale green-gray in the evening fog. To plunge into it felt like immersing oneself in another substance, more buoyant than water, more tingling than winter air. I am so glad everyone else is gone. We plunged many times into the pure, deep surface and drifted below it, and then ran back to the house and the fire, feeling as if we had changed our shapes and were part of the night sea air. In the water, I don’t feel pregnant at all. The ocean was so lovely in its gray depth that I was afraid to leave.
July 8. The little playhouse Mummy had built for the boys is finished! It’s set in the low woods between the Big and Red Houses, like a rustic birdcage in the green. There is no place where one can really see it. It is almost hidden away in the bushes, and I think the children will love to watch the birds flit in and out of nests where only they can see them. I would like one for myself and am more than a little jealous. Tonight the boys are sleeping there, and I haven’t seen them quite so excited for a long time. It began to rain as I was reading
Mary Poppins
out loud, and Charlie began to whisper to Will, “How snug it will be to watch the rain from our cabin.” He is terribly happy today. I think he feels released from his friendship with Rusty, who has gone to Europe for two weeks. Charlie plunged down to the dock ready for his sailing lesson and later came to me, his eyes rolling with anticipation, and suggested that he and Will spend the night in their sleeping bags in the cabin. He accused me of not watching the Maryland yellowthroat long enough from the bathroom window. “It almost seems as if you were getting
used
to it, Mummy.” “Well, aren’t you?” I answered. “Of course not,” he replied. He is happy and childlike and I wonder if he wouldn’t be more at ease with Will and Phillip than with the enervating kind of companionship he seems to have with Rusty—the difference, perhaps, between a “best friend” and blood relations. Mummy only had two beds built in the cabin, so it is a bit unclear if it is meant for just my two or also for Dossy’s children, though I do think Holly would be afraid sleeping there, and Charlie and Will are already calling it their own, though I have told them they must share. Charlie said to me that he will live there when he grows up.
July 10. Jane had her baby! A boy, Stephen, nearly eight pounds. They will be here as soon as they can and stay through August. She sounded entirely herself on the phone and so happy. Mummy offered Bea for a few weeks, mostly to chase after Ellie, and Jane accepted. Talking to her, I felt the stirring of something like hope, for how can it not be a miracle, a whole new life? The cousins will be nearly the same age, like twins, which pleases Jane immensely after a life of trying to catch up. I am myself enormous and uncomfortable and I must go home next week, as the hospital in New Bedford is subpar. I’ve set myself a page count of things to read each day and am so far managing it. If I can take even one course in the fall, I won’t be too far off track.
July 12. Charlie ended up at the hospital today after attempting to make gunpowder bombs from old shotgun shells and having one blow up in his face! I was in Newport and did not even know until it was over. He is all right, with only minor burns, but could have been blinded or even killed. I am furious. What a stupid, stupid boy! At ten, he should know better. I was going to leave the children here when the baby comes, but now I must bring Charlie back and leave him in Grace Park, where I’ll instruct everyone to be extremely strict with him. I can see him getting ruined before my eyes, ruining himself, and I must stop it before it happens. He’s been given too much freedom, and he is lacking in judgment and also hypersensitive, girlish even, and weak, though he tries to hide it with his bullish antics. What was he thinking, building bombs? Janie said, Well, you were wild too, when you were young, but I told her never like that—I did not self-destruct or do violent or dangerous things. He found the shells in the Big House, in a closet in Charlie’s room, where he was rummaging around.
I must bear in mind that my own brother might have done such a thing and would, if alive, have forgiven Charlie for doing it, as I must try to do. Charlie’s face is covered with bandages, his beautiful eyelashes are gone, his hand is all bandaged up. The truth is that for weeks and maybe longer, he has often seemed sullen and unreachable, and that worries me even more than this particular incident. André brought him to the hospital but is otherwise of little help and sets a weak example, as if, being foreign, he has no idea how American boys should behave. Will was very worried, and I saw in him a kind of pure sweetness that does not show itself often—he spends so much time trying to keep up with Charlie or clowning around. He could tell how upset I was and set out to comfort me by singing little songs and telling jokes, such a dear boy. I am again regretting the baby coming. I’m just so tired and do not welcome the responsibility of another child.
July 15. Waiting for the baby at Grace Park, my due date tomorrow. I’m actually glad to have brought Charlie back with me, as we’ve found some of our old ways together, and I’m teaching him early colonial history as a way to pass the time and engage his mind. Something has happened to him this summer—a distance or lethargy or restlessness—that worries me, as he is too young for it. He says he made the bombs—or “firecrackers”—as a science experiment, and because Rusty had bottle rockets and he had none, and the boys are all obsessed with astronauts. This does not excuse what he did, but I think he is sorry and also glad to have time with me and be able to act himself and not like some delinquent in a movie. André is being very attentive, and Mummy too, and except for not being able to swim in the sea, I am happy enough to be here. The agency sent two baby nurses for me to interview. One was Scots with glowing references, but she got hired away before I could make a decision, and I’m not sure I want to start up with a Scots again—even the accent makes me feel like a child. The other one seemed humorless but capable and will probably have to do. Belle we will keep on, though it is not ideal; it’s simply too much trouble to find someone else. It’s horribly hot and humid here, and I’m about to burst. Even so, I have the feeling of wanting to suspend time. Tomorrow, or the next day or soon after, I will be a mother of four, an incomprehensible fact.
July 30. Back to Ashaunt with the baby, Percy Russell Benoit. But I knew nothing at all about this baby until he came—that he would be a new star, a new existence, that I would love already so deeply and imagine him in the years ahead, see him running around the garden, loving the birds and flowers, counting morning glories. It is a great happiness, and I think of what has happened with gratefulness, and of my state over the past months with disbelief and no small amount of guilt. Tonight the wind is blowing at sixty miles an hour, and the dock almost down. Uncle Barney, the new Beetle Cat, blew loose from its mooring this afternoon and washed ashore. All day, Charlie, Will and Rusty have been watching the waves, some twenty feet high, from Gaga’s dock. Paul found a lobster pot blown up on the rocks with two live lobsters in it and put them in a pail and brought them home for him and Jane to eat. The boys have gone through the wind to their little cabin to spend the night, and the baby is sleeping by the garden window, and Caroline, when I checked on her, was peacefully asleep, and André is here beside me reading, my little fur family, all I could ever want.
Aug. 7. I found out I have been given permission to go on to the PhD program! This is of course fantastic news, and I will accept and just hope I have the willpower and stamina to see it through. It could mean a great many things in the long run, like going on the job market and having to consider moving (people move to all kinds of godforsaken places for tenure-track jobs). For now, it is a great boost of confidence and means I can go much further with my studies. Also, I must have been wrong about them thinking the baby was a problem. I will paste the letter in here as a memento. I called André at work, and he was sweet about it and even told his secretary, who got on the phone to congratulate me. He is quite lacking in ego and competitiveness, which is mostly a good quality, though it may help explain his lack of ambition. It’s not that he’s not successful, but he does not seek out recognition, nor does he even seem to want it much. It may have something to do with his not being American and also with his family, as his father was the same way. I’d always thought I’d marry a powerful man, but I suppose the downside of that is I’d have to be a powerful man’s wife. Dossy did not answer when I called, which of course leads me to worry. I will bike down to Jane’s now to share my news (I’m so glad finally to be back on my bike!).