A Reckoning (12 page)

“I didn’t mean to tell Brooks, but I had a stupid fit of coughing after dinner, and they made me tell them. He broke a promise when he called you.”

At this cold answer, Daphne suddenly laughed.

“I know I seem quite preposterous. For all I know cancer changes one’s personality. I’m not secretive, but—oh, hell, don’t ask me to explain. I can’t. Let’s drink our coffee in peace. You can light the fire, Daff, if you will. Put on another log. Stooping makes me cough.”

“Anything to oblige, your majesty.”

“You know, I’ve been thinking, one thing illness does is to make one humble. I have no illusions that I can handle this alone. There is a kind Irish woman coming to look after things the day after tomorrow.”

Daphne received this news in silence and drank her coffee.

“You’re thinking, why not family, aren’t you?”

“It did cross my mind that after all I am your sister, and my job is not so important that I can’t leave it. I did that when Charles died, you remember.”

“Darling, you were wonderful.”

“Thanks. My ego was about to disappear from view for good.”

It was quite a help that Grindle made it known that he had been outdoors far too long, and Daphne had to be jumped at with a crescendo of delighted barks and thoroughly licked after she had let him in, Sasha gliding past without recognizing her presence. “Grindle at least is glad to see me,” she called back from the hall. “Yes, adorable creature, you may lick my ears.”

“How is the job?” Laura asked, when Daphne had come back to lie on the floor by the fire, and Grindle had quieted down and settled beside her to be scratched around his ears.

“I’m pretty fed up with the human race,” Daphne said. “The horrible people who maltreat their animals and then bring them in sick or neurotic—a dog who is left alone for hours every day and gets no exercise for instance and so becomes vicious. You should hear Dr. Gordon tell those owners off. It’s all part of the total wreck of civilization, I suppose. But animals are so
innocent.”

Watching the clever, sensitive hands stroking Grindle, Laura remembered the time when Daphne was about the most beautiful girl she had ever seen and had wanted so desperately to be a vet. It was treated as an adolescent whim, and she was packed off to Smith College.

“Do you think you should have been allowed to be a vet?” Laura asked.

“Whatever made you remember that?”

“I appear to spend most of the time remembering, trying to understand. Although there’s so little time, in a strange way I feel liberated of all that used to consume the days, the endless papers that fill the wastebaskets every day. I’m through with all that, you see. I’m trying to reckon everything up. I don’t ‘do’ much anymore, but I think a lot.” It was, after all, good to have Daff to talk with, and Laura looked across and smiled. “Tell about being a vet.”

“It’s so long ago.” Daphne lit a cigarette and took a long puff, then laid it down on the hearth. “Does smoke bother you? I can put this filthy thing out.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

But it did bother Grindle, who gave Daphne a queer little look and removed himself to his basket.

Laura watched her sister, sitting there smoking and poking at the fire, a ravaged face, tragic in repose—but then what mature face is not, Laura asked herself? An unravaged face would mean an unlived life.

“What are you thinking, Laura, with that penetrating look of yours?”

“I was thinking that you look like someone who has really lived her life.”

At this Daphne looked up, and they laughed together.

“Meaning that I look, as you said when I came in, awful. Life is such a struggle. I almost envy you.” But shocked at her own statement, Daphne quickly withdrew it. “That’s a sin.”

“I don’t see why. When I see Mamma I know I am lucky not to end it like that. I went the other day and Cousin Hope was there, faithful Hope who goes in every week to worship at the shrine, even though the goddess is no longer there.”

“In your reckoning, what happens about Mamma?” Daphne sat up now, quite straight, leaning one elbow on her crossed legs.

“She haunts.”

“I suppose I have spent most of my life trying to be her opposite, and a lot of sense that made!” Daphne laughed her harsh laugh, so often directed against herself. “It’s possible that I did have a vocation—after all here I am trudging over to the animal hospital every day, paid next to nothing. But how does one know? I allowed myself to be persuaded.”

“You were very young, and then we were all so rootless. It was terribly wrong that you were forced to stay in Switzerland when I was ill.”

“I wonder. I loved skiing passionately, and Mamma was so absorbed in you, I was comparatively free then. What I missed, I guess, was Pa. At sixteen I needed him, and he wasn’t there.” Then she looked across at her sister. “How you ever survived I can’t imagine.”

“Charles helped! I could have become quite unreal if I hadn’t met Charles.”

“Jo has simply fled into her ivory tower where she can run everything in sight and be accountable to no one, except the trustees, who of course think she is a genius. And what did I do? Spent my life trying to achieve independence, I suppose, falling consistently and foolishly in love with one inappropriate man after another.”

“Dear Daff, you always did exaggerate—have there been so many? David surely is a more or less permanent part of your life and has been for twenty years.”

“Good heavens, yes! What seemed impermanent has become permanent, almost in spite of me. I’m just an old cushion he can rest his head on. He’s frightfully overworked, of course, and still has to cope with that arch neurotic wife of his.”

“But you do love him?”

“Do I?” Daphne asked herself. “I suppose I must. He is the one man I have known whom I could accept wholly, as he is, the good with the bad. Maybe that is love. And then he needs me. He really does.”

“How strange our lives have been.”

Daphne got up. “Darling, I’m going to exhaust you. Let me buzz around, make your bed, do the dishes, empty the wastebaskets, whatever, and you put on a record, or have a little rest with Grindle.”

“That sounds lovely.”

“You’re white as a sheet.”

“I want to think about everything, but after a little while I feel too tired … too stupid.”

It was, she realized, much easier to lie comfortably and think about Daphne than to carry on a conversation, for then the flow of memory was stopped and short-circuited. But first, music. Laura got up and found a Haydn cello concerto. The strength, the virility of Haydn was what she craved. And what had she meant when she said their lives had been strange? Strange, she supposed, because they had been insignificant. Was it cruel and obtuse to think of Daphne’s as a failed life? Beauty, intelligence, superior sensitivity, finally put to use to work as a drudge in an animal hospital, and to support and bring aid and comfort to David who, it had to be admitted, was a great man in his way, one of the pioneers in heart surgery—but without any of the structure or social position of a marriage to support. The fact was that Daphne was still living the life of a young woman, not one nearing old age. And she had stayed amazingly young because she was still so vulnerable, so unprotected. If, as Yeats thought, “there’s more enterprise in going naked,” then one had to admire her.

Daisy did. Daisy felt that Daphne was a hero. “She hasn’t compromised, you see,” she had told Laura once. “She hasn’t let herself be caught. She’s absolutely authentic.”

“But she’s failed at everything!” Laura suddenly remembered the whole conversation and how astounded she had been by the passion in Daisy’s voice.

“Except at being a great human being, Mother,” Daisy had said with withering scorn.

“Jo’s never compromised,” Laura had gone on, and the scene had remained so vivid in her memory because that day she had persisted like a balky donkey in rousing her daughter’s anger and contempt. “Jo has done exactly what she wanted to do.”

“Aunt Jo may have done what she wanted, but—oh, can’t you see? What she wanted was to be safe, safe from any really deep human relationships, and to feel justified in fending off anything that might disturb her self-immolation in that college. She’s a workaholic if I ever saw one.”

“Some people might say she’s devoted and selfless.”

“Oh, my God, Mother! Some people won’t pay the price of being a woman, let’s face it. Jo’s just as limited in her way as a woman who lets herself be swallowed up by family life and becomes a drudge—except that that sort of woman is at least
human.
She is not.”

Laura remembered that she had felt ruffled and cross by the time her intransigent daughter left.

What was it then to be a woman? More complex and far more difficult, she was beginning to realize, than it is to be a man.

Daphne must have heard her sigh, for she came in and sat down. “And what was that sigh all about?”

“Daisy.” Laura waited a second, poised on the question whether it would be wise to open up that subject now. “I was remembering a wild argument we had not long ago about you and Jo. Daisy thinks you are a hero.”

“I fit in with her anarchic views, that’s all.”

Suddenly Laura got up, lifted up by an irresistible idea.

“Daff, would you drive me down to the house in Maine? We could go tomorrow—take a picnic—”

“But, Laura, it’s February! The driveway won’t even have been plowed.”

“Oh, yes, it’s kept plowed because of the risk of fire. And Mrs. Eaton down the road has the key and would light fires for us.”

“It’s possible, of course, and you know I’d do anything for you, Laura. I just wonder whether it could be worth what is bound to be exhausting for you.”

“I have to do what I can and not count the cost. It’s the last chance. Could you stay till Tuesday possibly?” Laura did not know quite why she felt such urgency, but the pull was as strong as the undertow in the cove. “The smell of salt and iodine—the gulls—oh, Daff! The sound of the sea.”

“Very well. But in that case you had better rest all afternoon and not say a word.”

“Angel!”

“I’ll stuff some eggs, and maybe there’s a can of deviled ham somewhere.”

“I think there may be. Look on the top shelf.” Laura felt weak with excitement. “A thermos of consommé—remember the old picnics?”

“Of course. A thermos of consomme and a thermos of martinis. We’ll do it, darling!”

“One last time.”

“But February, Laura! I think it’s an awful risk.”

“I’ll manage. Liquor helps.”

“I didn’t mean your health. I meant—”

“We’ll have to risk that.” And “that,” Laura knew, meant whatever memory had in store for them in a cold February house.

Chapter XI

“Here we are,” Laura murmured, as Daphne drew up in front of the long flight of steps to the front door. Here it was, the childhood fortress, the house of all the summers, green trim, weathered shingles, many-paned windows sparkling in the sun, standing there like an ark surrounded by its porches. “How the trees have grown, Daff!” For in the fifty or sixty years since they had been planted, Norway spruce and hemlock, arbor vitae had enclosed the space around it. By common accord they sat for a moment, after Daphne had turned off the ignition, just taking it in. The piles of snow made no difference. It all looked like itself.

Then Mrs. Eaton opened the door, hugging herself in an old gray sweater. “Well, you made it!”

Laura got out and went ahead. “We just had a yen to see the old place—and Daphne was up from New York. How are you? I’m afraid it was a nuisance shoveling the steps and all.”

“Not a bit. Silas did the shoveling. Brought in wood enough to last you a week!”

“Where is Silas?” Daphne asked, as she arrived carrying the picnic in a basket. “I want to see that boy.”

“Well, he had to go back to the store. The Rundletts are down in Florida, and Silas is tending the store for a while. It’s a change from lobstering, and he takes to it. Seems like he’d rather stay on shore these days, and I don’t blame him. Fishing’s not what it used to be.”

Laura had gone into the big living room and was sitting on the little bench, warming her hands at the fire and looking around at the Japanese prints on the wall, the white wicker furniture and its blue and white chintz cushions, the blue Chinese rug.

“Sit down, Mrs. Eaton,” Daphne was saying.

“I’d like to, but I have to get back to heat up some chowder for Silas. I would have brought you some, but of course the water is turned off, and I thought it might be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“It’s a lovely fire. Thank you,” Laura said.

“And thank Silas, if we don’t see him,” Daphne added.

“Don’t you worry about anything. I’ll come back tomorrow, roll up the rug again, and put the cushions away.”

Daphne went to the door with Mrs. Eaton and then pulled two chairs up close to the fire. “It’s cold,” she shivered. “We can’t stay long.”

They listened to the pick-up trundle down the road, and then Daphne opened the thermos and poured two martinis into paper cups.

“Listen,” Laura said before she took a swallow, “the sea.”

“Tide’s rising,” Daphne said. “You can hear it. Even on a calm day remember how there’s a little roar as the tide pulls the waves in?”

For a long moment they listened to the immemorial sound.

“What did we used to do first?” Laura asked.

“Race down to the shore and take off our sneakers and go in wading. Remember how cold the water was and how the stones hurt, and how hard it was to keep one’s footing!”

“Then we had to be sure everything was still there, the tree house, the old rowboat, the mossy dell, the lady slippers—in that small clearing among the firs. Oh, the smell of it all! The pine, the salt—”

“The wild roses. On some days when the wind came from the sea all you could smell was roses.” Daphne looked ten years younger, her cheeks flushed in the firelight. She looked happy, Laura thought.

“Aren’t you glad we came?”

“I am.” Daphne got up and stood back to the fire. “And now we must think of a toast. Pa always liked toasts.”

“And was very good at them.”