The End of the Point (18 page)
The first longing offers a joy that is closer to my physical being, my animal nature, the other perhaps a more permanent, solid satisfaction. This weekend I can forget for hours my intellectual self; sometimes the mere attempt to move toward my comprehensive exams seems absurd and without purpose. The only common motive that I find in these two selves is the desire to be completely absorbed, to be so preoccupied with life that time becomes unimportant, the moment itself everything because so
full
.
Oct. 15. We are staying home this weekend. I’ve got so much reading to do for my courses already and cannot spend hours in the car going to and from Ashaunt. The children are protesting, but I will not change my mind. Anyway, no cousins are there, so they would be bored. Jane is pregnant again! Ellie and the new baby will be little more than a year apart, like Charlie and Will, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Jane came over quite upset earlier, seeking my advice. There had been a drama, because Bea has already offered quite enthusiastically to move in for a time and be the nurse. Jane feels utterly determined to raise her children herself and in her own style, and that also Bea is too much like a mother to her and would stifle her. I told her she must simply say no, as nicely and firmly as she can (she will change her mind about a nurse once she sees how different two babies is from one, but regardless, the nurse should not be Bea). I realize now that leaving Caroline with Bea when we went to Japan was a mistake, though at the time I had no choice if I was to preserve my marriage. Janie credits Bea with her happy childhood (was it really all that happy?), which makes her feel torn up about saying no. Mummy will simply have to tell Bea that she can’t manage without her, as tending the grandchildren is a full-time job. How glad I am not to be in the middle of it all!
Oct. 22. I stayed up too late last night reading Grandmother P.’s memoir, thinking that the parts on Teddy Roosevelt might point me toward a subject for my thesis, which I’m already panicking about. I’d skimmed the memoir before but never read all the way through. It’s filled with name-dropping about Kipling and the Roosevelts, along with bits about her own work with women’s suffrage and the Republican Party and the occasional fascinating, beautiful or historically important scene, as well as lots of boring ones. There is a quite amazing letter from Teddy Roosevelt to Daddy, sent to him when he started at Harvard, all about Daddy’s father and what noble work he did as a private man and public servant before he died. TR says Daddy’s father was literally one of the two or three finest men he had ever met, because of his extraordinary character, courage and mental capacity. I can’t bear to think of Daddy losing him when he was just a little boy, but the letter must have been an inspiration. Of Daddy’s baby sister who died, Grandmother includes almost nothing, nor does she say much about the books she wrote or even her love of nature, a strange omission. She dedicates the book to me, Dossy and Jane but barely mentions us in it, and then only in passing. She led such an impressive life, but the overall tone is not one of happiness exactly, even though I remember her as full of enthusiasms. I wonder if her personal diaries said more, but she ordered them burned when she died. Her nature books are where her brilliance lay, and it is no wonder that unlike them, this reminiscence was privately printed. Charlie has been reading
Plants and Their Children
and going out to look for “seed sailboats”—asters, milkweed, clematis, goldenrod and the like. To me, the best thing about that book is not the facts it imparts, though they are marvelous, but the way it connects each thing to the other and requires that the children learn to
see
.
Nov. 10. I cannot
believe
what has happened, just as I was finally getting back to myself. I don’t want another one, but if I have it, I’ll have to love it, not just because it’s my duty, but because I’ll be unable to help myself, couldn’t with the others—they just come in. I don’t have the energy or desire to start over again, not now. I’ll swear off sex altogether after this, or get my tubes tied. I’ve told no one, not even André, and have never felt so alone in all my life. I thought we were careful, and we did use a sponge and foam, but Dr. Elliot says the blood test never lies. Anyway I’d know from how I feel, a machine forced into production, despite its every fiber saying no. I called Dr. H., but no one answered and I don’t see him until Tuesday, and as soon as I hung up the phone it occurred to me that I don’t even have to tell him, I could just take care of it, if I could figure out how. It is no one’s business but my own.
Nov. 11. I’m going completely mad with my secret, but if I tell André he’ll think I’m cold-blooded and want me to have it—at least I think so, as another child is not so big a thing to him, one way or the other. It will not devour his soul. And Mummy and Daddy would never understand, nor Jane. Which leaves Doss or Suky, but Suky is so far away with her Englishman and only one child, having wanted more, and Dos is still so up and down. The children know something is wrong, and I swear Belle does too from how she looks at me, as if I’m emitting a new scent. Twice today I’ve not been able to breathe, drawn into an acute panic state. The first time I thought it might be the start of bleeding, which is all I can wish for now. To think back on when I learned I was pregnant with Charlie—how full of joy I was, how proud, the start of a great journey. Now I feel pressed into service, blindsided. I must burn this page.
Nov. 13. I did not sleep last night. Today I dragged myself into the city and to class, then to Dr. Hoffman, who spoke more in this one session than in all the rest of them combined. I’m still not entirely sure what transpired between us, but I believe he is giving me the devil’s choice of either ending my psychoanalysis or ending the baby. First he asked me to try to imagine coming to see him three to four times a week when I was pregnant and had a newborn and was still in school (I told him I won’t drop school no matter what). Then, when I said I’d find a way to manage it, he said that patients are highly discouraged from making major life changes during a course of analysis and that pregnancy, in particular, is discouraged, as the rigors of the analysis are thought to potentially harm the developing baby. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! He claims that he informed me of the No Major Change rule when I began, and that he has been flexible in many ways (sleeping pills, my master’s, blah blah), but I’m sure he never told me about this despotic dictum, as I’d not have agreed to it.
Then he said, in that hideously neutral tone of his, “I’d be interested in hearing you explore why you got pregnant.” My blood was boiling, but I kept my voice level, and said I am married and have conjugal relations and the birth control failed. End of story.
Fin.
But then I begged him, really begged him, to give me his honest opinion, knowing me as he does, my past and present and my innermost private thoughts. I said I wanted to do the best thing for myself and the children and André and my career, but I simply couldn’t figure it out on my own, nor turn to anyone but him for advice. He said he couldn’t tell me one way or another, nor did he think I’d want him to, as that would be him playing God, but that he’d meet with me for a few more sessions to help me come to a sense of what I wanted. “And then what?” I asked, but he wouldn’t say. We were nearly out of time by then, and someone else was waiting. Write me a letter and I can go to one of those places, I told him, but he said he couldn’t, not in his position as my analyst. Will you continue to see me if I go ahead with the baby? I asked, but he refused to tell me. I was nearly blind with fury and panic by the time I left. I vomited on the stairs—I only wish I’d done it on the couch.
Nov. 14. I told Dossy, I had to. She was remarkably calm and seemed not the least bit shocked, and I am truly the luckiest person in the world to have her for a sister, for she is the best friend in the world. She had the brilliant idea of calling Dr. Wendall. Besides being an old friend of Mummy and Daddy’s, he’s an esteemed psychiatrist and has seen Dossy before, and he is known to help women in my condition. Dr. Wendall agreed to write a letter in total confidence to a doctor who performs the operation, saying that having a child would pose a grave danger to my health and the health of my entire family, which it would, as I have never before felt such despair. For the first time in days I can breathe again, so relieved to have a plan, if I can only follow through on it. Dr. Wendall gave me the name of a doctor, and I called and made an appointment for next week. I’ll of course tell André someday, just not now. He wouldn’t understand how this threatens my very core, for though he loves the children, he does not feel charged with shaping them, drawing out their potential and being their mother
all the time
, even when I’m not physically with them. André got home late, and I avoided having to talk to him except to say good night. If he had so much as kissed me or taken me in his arms, I think I would have broken down and told him, but he did not, and it is partly because of these wide gulfs between us that I cannot think of this as anything but a disaster. Now I’m in my study, exhausted but far from sleep.
Nov 17. I went to do it but could not. I don’t understand what happened, only that the city seemed suddenly tiny, my courses, my books, my desires, all so tiny and vain and
in vain
, and instead, this life inside my every cell, not even a life separate from myself but my own life, was how it felt. I could not stop it, I wanted to but could not, which does
not
mean I want another child, as I do not. The place was so well appointed and discreet in a funeral-parlor way, drawn curtains and the smell of furniture polish in the anteroom.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
was on the bookshelf, which, if intentional, is the sickest joke and made me and Dossy break into a sort of hysterical laughter—thank God we were the only ones there. I was called in and put on a gown and got on a table, but I was shaking horribly from head to toe, and then I vomited violently and left. It all still feels entirely unreal. In the taxi Dos started crying, telling me how relieved she was, that she’d been afraid it would hurt dreadfully, or I’d regret it later, or die in a pool of my own blood. So then we were crying together, and soon enough I was back to calming
her
down and things felt almost normal. Today I wanted to go to my classes but was simply too drained. I’ll go on Thursday if it kills me, but I will never see Dr. Hoffman again (nor pay my outstanding bill).
1961
May 28. We arrived on Thursday evening to find the herbs and the roses in the garden mostly gone. This has been the coldest winter in many years, and the harbor was frozen beyond the breakwater in Padanaram. The roots of the plants froze too long in the ground to live. It has been a warm, quiet, misty day, changing from fog to pale sunlight. I bought lilies, lantana, pink and blue petunias to plant, but I am too fat to bend, so André put them in with “help” from Caroline. The honeysuckle is still in bud, and the pink bushes outside the door are the only ones fully blooming. Charlie saw a ruby-crowned kinglet out of his window. He can name scores and scores of birds now. Ellie has started running, and Jane must chase her everywhere, a comic sight as Jane is huge. Put her on a leash, I told her—the way Bea kept Jane close when she was young. Jane didn’t remember and was shocked. She’s obsessed with the Dr. Spock book, which is about kissing your baby all day long and letting him roll in mud and never taking a moment for yourself.
To return here is always a reminder of time’s passage. This has been a difficult year, with Dossy’s troubles and Daddy’s fall, and Caroline not saying a word, not one word, in school all year, and of course my situation, which I’ve come to accept but still cannot welcome, and to lose my analysis. I must remind myself that I have nearly completed a full year of my master’s, which is no small accomplishment, especially toward the end, as people at Columbia looked at me as if I’d grown horns. Mummy and André both want me to take the fall semester off after the baby comes, but I shall not, as the risk of losing momentum is too—one might leave and never return.
Once all this was before me, the children pure, unformed innocents, and before that, my own life waiting, or not even waiting, just living itself. This morning I woke before everyone and walked the paths. The warblers flit from bush to bush and are easy to find, flashes of blue and gold and an endless piping of song. Yellow star-grass carpets the path from the Stricklands’ to Teal Rock. I watched the most amazing tree-swallow courting behavior today, the male swooping and circling overhead with a large blue jay feather, showing it off to his mate. Then he would drop it from very high, and as it floated down, she’d collect it in midair. They did this several times, until finally the feather was placed in the hole in the tree where they must have their nest. I tried to see but was dive-bombed. I brought Charlie later, but we could not find them. Tomorrow we must leave until June. I have two twenty-page papers to hand in between now and then, but the course meetings are over so I need not go into the city, which is a good thing, as my ankles are swollen and my bladder has a mind of its own.
June 9. I turned my papers in and took the children out of school two weeks early and do not regret it, especially as this is the last year I can do it. Charlie’s schooling is becoming more serious, and Will has already learned how to charm his teacher without doing a lick of work, and I’ll have comprehensive exams next spring, if I can keep on schedule. Jane and Elinor are here too, and will stay until Jane needs to go back to have the baby. It’s cozy both being pregnant. I’m as large as she is, though due a month later. She knit a sweater set. I tried a cap but have no aptitude, so she undid it and took it over. I know I should want another girl, so it’s two and two and Caroline can have a sister. Either would be fine, but I find myself hoping for a boy.
