April 3, 1935

To my family:

I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I am not afraid now to pay it. I do it willingly. I do it without complaint. I do it gladly. Here is my body: take it and do with it what you will.

There was a time when I trembled at the darkness gathering ahead of me. There was a time when it frightened me to realize that I had passed the last place on the road where I could turn back safely, without anyone knowing. It was like traveling at night on the highway south of town to Cuthbert, when you pass the Lambert farm and head under the arching oaks and the road bends left into the pines, the twilit pines, and suddenly the light is gone, and you are in the deepest, darkest countryside. I looked back and saw the lights from the last houses flashing at me, beckoning me home, calling, come back, come back. I looked back and saw the light on the courthouse tower, flashing at me like a beacon: this way, this way. But I kept going. I kept going. And once I had gone so far that it was impossible to turn back the fear left me. It has never returned. And now that I have almost come to the end of my journey, the place you have prepared for me, I know that I shall not lack the strength and the courage to walk the last few steps.

Because you see I know that it was all inevitable now; I had no choice. Everyone has wished this on me. Though you may not have realized it, you all have wished me to die. You have wanted it, every hour, every minute--always. As I was putting on your stockings in the mornings, holding your little kicking legs firm so that I could draw them on right. As I was passing the sugar dish at breakfast, smiling at you, asking if you had slept well. As I glanced up at you through the windows of the front parlor where I was outside cutting flowers, and you two ducked your heads to the side to laugh at some joke. As I was coming back in the evening from helping Miss DuBose write a letter to her daughters, holding my skirt to the side as I ran to get back in time to see to your father's supper. You all wished it. Everyone has wished it. Except one person. Only one.

My mother wished it. I see that now. I laughed too much. I cried too easily. I felt everything too passionately, I had sick headaches, I trembled at the slightest whisper. The faintest apprehension caused my heart to pound. My mother shut me in the bedroom with the camphor handkerchief at my temples and chamomile tea. She said, do not cry, for it will disturb your father, and your sisters. She said, do not laugh, it will make them misbehave. She said, do not stare so, they will think you are a lunatic. She set me to sewing tiny red flowers on the rims of the sofa cushions. She set me to making a hooked rug for Aunt Lillian. The red flowers burned themselves into my eyesight, into my brain, a searing red band slashing across whatever I saw. The red flowers started the terrible throbbing in my head. My mother said, do not move until you have finished that row. Do not set your needle down.

My husband wished it. He said, do not talk so loud and so merrily. He said, do not sleep past dawn. He said, I want you seated across from me each morning at the breakfast table, do not take your coffee on the porch. He said do not play that song at the piano, it is vulgar and coarse. He said, you are thickening around the middle, you will need a girdle soon, you must reduce. Meanwhile his wide belly swelled, his body grew white and thick and flaccid, and he pressed himself upon me at night, and I lay with my teeth clenched and my eyes shut tight so that I would not see, so that I would not scream, so that I would not cough up what was rising in my throat.

He said, you are ill, even though I was not. You are hysterical. And he put me in the white room with the door locked, and the doctors came, and a nurse with a shiny blood-colored mole on her upper lip and a crushed finger. She said it was an iron, an iron fell on it when she was a baby. I was sickened by it, I could not bear for it to touch me. I would not allow her to touch me.

I tried to die but they would not have it that way, the way I wanted it. They wished for me to die slowly, in small fractions. A scrape here. A pinprick there. A small burn on the arm, an incision on my breast. A scab that is peeled open every morning, that is never allowed to heal, that runs puss and blood constantly, secretly, under white clean cloth.

My children wished it. They suffocated me, pushing their hot trembling bodies against me, groping at me with their wet warm sticky hands, touching my cheeks, my abdomen, my hair, my breasts. They disgusted me with their smells, whether sweet or rank, with the spit that came from their mouths, the urine that came from between their legs, their excrement. I saw my face in theirs and turned away in horror. For at one time there was just one of me, just one to do away with, and now there were three: three errors, three blights, three running sores. I had propagated, and now the wrong could never be righted, the slate never wiped clean.

Unless I took it upon myself to do it. I considered doing it. I stood above their beds night after night, listening to their snuffling, the soft hissing of their breathing, and thought of how best to do it, and when. It would have been so easy. I loved them then. I felt the deepest tenderness for them on such nights. Pity and tenderness and love. It was not their fault that they had been born. It was not their fault that I had not put a stop to the horror inside me in time, and that it was now inside them--was them.

I did not do it. As soon as I put my hands to their throats and felt the blood rushing there I found I could not. And so they lived, though they should not have. And took revenge on me for letting them live by wishing me dead. More than wishing. Killing me.

They grew older and apart and distant from me, the eldest especially. They laughed at me, at how I could not pour the coffee straight and drew faces on the edges of the church program and wheeled Miss Dubose out into the country to see the sunflowers and crouched in the garden in an old sunhat. They whirled about me, moving quickly through the rooms, while I stood against the wall watching them, my palms pressed close to the plaster. Their laughter and energy and movement drew the life from me. My face became gray and drawn; two lines descended from my eyes to my jaw, marking the places where my tears travel. A flecking of coffee-colored marks appeared on my hands, the bridge of my cheeks, my forehead, like the spots mold and dampness make on old wallpaper. My husband took to sleeping in another room. No one touched me now--only the faintest fluttering of hands about my shoulders sometimes, a mouth approaching but never quite meeting my cheek.

A boy loved me. That is the miracle. He helped me up from where I had fallen among some Queen Anne's Lace while I was taking old Mrs. Waldrop some sweet fresh butter and a sack of tomatoes. He put his arms around my shoulders, he touched the scraped place on my cheek. He had eyelashes lighter than his skin, and sun-bleached hair so pale it was almost white. His face was smooth, his kiss was like a child's. He always had ovals of dirt under his fingernails, because he was a worker. But I did not mind. Because he touched me as if there were no shame in it. Because he opened my dress and looked upon my body with wonder and without surprise, as if there were nothing wrong with it. Because he sang to me, softly, with his lips pushed up against my ear: The waltz you saved for me. Because he waited for me night after night, even when I could not come. Because he gave me things--an old brass ring, a porcelain dish, a cake of sweet-smelling soap. Maybe they were stolen, that is what some have have said. I do not know or care. They are the only things anyone has given to me of any worth. The only things.

A boy loved me. That was the miracle. But it is also why I must die. For I knew even as he held me in his arms that such bliss as this was not permitted in this life. I knew even as he kissed me that I should have to pay for it, for every kiss and touch and meeting of hands, when it was discovered. I have known since childhood that to love, to truly live, is the worst crime of all, and that one must pay for it with one's life. I have known this, and so I am not afraid or grieved that I must die now.

I knew that I would have to die in the end when this began; I knew that it was the price that everyone, most of all my family, would ask of me. I do it gladly. I do it willingly. It is what you all have wanted.

Most of all you, Lavinia.

Bury me in my white dress, the one torn at the hem, with the lace collar. Put my white brooch at my neck.

Follow the provisions of my will exactly, especially what I have said regarding Essie. You will find it in the top drawer of my vanity, next to my handkerchiefs.

Burn this letter.

Burn all of my letters.

Mother

February 12, 1984

Dear Mother,

No, I don't think it is a good time for you to visit. It is too cold, and this house, as I have told you before many times, has no central heat, none whatsoever. We have a wood stove in the kitchen and another in the big front room, and I have a little space heater that I use in the little corner where I have my piano. It doesn't work well--only one of the coils lights up--and I have to wear gloves when I play, with the fingers cut off so I can feel the keys. Sometimes my fingers ache so from the cold that I can barely move them.

The other thing is that we have no indoor plumbing, which means you would have to go out the back door to the outhouse when nature calls. That is not such an unpleasant thing when it is spring, or summer--in fact it is quite lovely to sit there on a summer night, with the crickets going, and the owls calling (actually that is more early fall). But in winter it is miserable; you really learn to develop an iron bladder holding your pee so that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night. Yes I know you are used to roughing it but you would not like this. Wait until spring and then we will see. We will see, but I can't guarantee anything.

Actually Stig isn't terribly well just now. It isn't his hip so much. That is actually improving a bit, with the help of the cortisone injections a doctor in town is giving him in exchange for some of his photographs. He is doing--was doing--a series on animal footprints, deer and bear and whatnot, in the soft mud near the river bank, and the doctor, who fancies himself an eccentric mountain man type, really took a shine to them, lucky for us. The trouble now is with these terrible panic attacks, or attacks of fear. I don't really know what to call them, but they are terrifying for him and for me. Sometimes he will wake up in the night and call out in a voice that is almost unrecognizable to me, an awful frightened old woman's voice, reedy and plaintive and yet angry all at the same time. He tells me that when it happens he feels, or dreams, that someone has just thrown a dark burlap-like material over him that smells of death and dirt, like a funeral shroud, and suddenly he cannot breathe. Then he feels the touch of cold hands on him through the fabric--rough, indifferent, business-like hands, like the hands of an undertaker, pushing and kneading at him. It is at this point that he begins to scream. I have been sleeping in the front room by the stove this week because it has been happening so often. Last night, thank God, he slept the whole night through. Let us hope that this is the beginning of a trend.

The doctor says that these attacks may have something to do with the car accident, which happened five years ago this week. A deer hit them, as I believe I told you. His daughter was seriously injured, and is now paralyzed from the neck down. Sometimes we get hand-painted greeting cards from her. She paints with her mouth, actually, holding the brush between her teeth, and this woman who runs a gift shop in the town where she lives with her mother sells them, apparently in large quantities. Sometimes I tell Stig she ought to send us a little of the money instead of the cards, which we could really do without. Frankly they're hideous, ghastly--angels and birds and smiling suns and the like. I actually think that the cards are part of some perverse, twisted scheme of the mother to exact revenge from Stig, whom she naturally holds responsible for the wreck, though it wasn't his fault. She's a very disturbed person and I wouldn't at all put it past her. She works at a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant and wastes all her money on a psychic in some feckless attempt to determine if her first husband, a truck driver who was in big trouble with drug dealers, is still alive. She has the hair-brained idea that she is somehow going to have him declared legally dead and get money from some insurance policy he had, I'm not sure how and I don't think she does either. She has an IQ of about 60, I should think. The only time I saw her she was skipping down the street in a pink rain poncho with a gardenia behind one ear, and wild red hair done up in a crown of braids, like someone out of Willa Cather. Stig sends her and the daughter, whose name is Cora, money whenever he can, though I know she blows it on the psychic or on drugs. What can I do? He loves his daughter, though he hasn't been able to see her lately because it brings on more of the attacks.

No, we do not need any money, but thank you very much just the same. We are managing quite nicely, all things considered. The potatoes and corn and tomatoes I put up in the fall have seen us through most of the winter, and the doctor sometimes gives us some venison from deer he has shot in the mountains. Then we have lots of canned things. I have some piano students in town too. There is a girl there, the daughter of rich back-to-nature NYC escapees who are remodeling a big craftsman-style house close to downtown, who is quite talented, but lately she has decided that she is more interested in being a poet with a capital P, very much on the Edna St. Vincent Millay model--cigarettes and wispy gestures and boozy mournful promiscuity and rhymed couplets. Which is a pity, because she's a much better piano player than she is a poet. The other students are some elderly retirees who need something to do and a soccer-playing teenage boy with a tin ear who wants to play Scott Joplin rags of all things. He's absolutely hopeless but works harder than the girl so I keep on trying. I'm also doing some faux-painting of marble and wood for this rich lady who lives a couple of miles up the road. I do some housekeeping for her too--a bit of dusting and laundry. She has MS and can't get around well. Somehow we manage.

Yes I heard about Dan's marriage to that Margot woman from Maury, who evidently keeps in regular contact with him, though I don't remember any particular rapport or closeness between them in the past. I haven't heard from him in ages, no doubt because of what I said to him at Patricia's memorial service. No, it wasn't tactful or kind of me, but I think it needed to be said, after everything Patricia had to put up with from him. What a disgraceful abasement this marriage is for Dan, but in a way I feel that it is a proper and fitting fate for someone of his low, vain, cravenly narcissistic character. Margot is the perfect mate for him, really--obsequious and flattering, and absolutely ruthless to anyone who expresses doubts about his supposed genius, and the value of his pitiful handful of dry scholarly monographs on Pater and Symons or somebody. God how boring. I pity the children, Mary Renfroe most of all, who saw through Margot quite young. I'll never forget meeting them at a restaurant and Mary Renfroe crying to me in the coat room over something Margot has said. But then at the table she and Margot were both joking about how the waiter poured the wine ineptly just when Dan was raising his glass, sloshing wine on his sleeve, so evidently there is some understanding between them. Poor kid--that's all I can say. Sid is a more hardy, sturdy, self-enclosed type; I don't think Margot can do much damage there, thank God, though she will try her damnedest.

As for Patricia, she seems much more distant to me lately, much more remote. There was a time after her death when her presence was, I don't know, so vivid, so alive for me. I was always looking up from wherever I was sitting and expecting her to come bustling through the door at any second, newspapers and galley proofs under her arms, flinging her scarf carelessly aside and shaking out her hair in that peculiar shivery, cat-like way she had, and telling me about some idiot at the press, mimicking them with scary accuracy. And I was always hearing her singing. She really had the loveliest untrained lyric soprano--she could have been an excellent Susanna or maybe even a Countess. But now she is taking her place among the other dead I have known, joining their sepia-colored ranks, fading into an anonymous grayness, like the groups of bystanders that you see in old photographs of people in city streets. I suppose it is because I am getting older, and she died so young, really. That is what happens to the dead, especially those who have died young--we leave them behind; we are distracted and consumed by the aches and pains and worries of middle and then old age; the new experiences that we have, and that the dead did not live long enough to have, fall upon them like a soft layer of new dirt, covering them up further, obliterating them from our view.

Maury has a new young man--has he told you? Probably not; he is always so cagey about his private life, especially with you. It would have been nice had he waited longer after Paul's death, I think. It has only been a year and a half, after all, and this young man, this boy--honestly--is terribly young. He was doing some cloisonné for the people in the apartment across the hall and burned his hand, and Maury ran over and bandaged him up, and I suppose fell for his faun-eyed long-lashed dark good looks and flowing locks, which he is quite vain about (the day they visited here he was constantly glancing at his reflection in my big china cabinet's glass). He is awkward and shy and yet cockily self-confident and has all the ruthless self-involved heartlessness of the young--and a shrewd awareness of the fluttering of hearts he sets off in those around him. There's something of the sleek, devious petted animal about him. This will not end well, I am sure (for one thing Maury is 42, and this child can't be more than 23), but Maury is smitten--and in some mistaken way thinks he deserves this, after all he endured with Paul. Poor Paul.

Mother, I worry about you in that God-forsaken town, with no one but poor dim Evie to keep you company. Have you made friends? Have you surrendered your scruples and pride and started playing bridge, for God's sake? I'm still amazed that you could pull up all your roots and head back south, after all these years up above the Mason Dixon. I can't understand it, but then I've never lived down there, and don't hear the call of ancestral voices beckoning me back home. Carry me back to old Virginny--Jesus, I'd rather die. But you were born and bred there, so I suppose it's different for you. Take care of yourself, and do me a favor, please: watch the evening cocktails, will you. The last time I was down there I must say I was a little taken aback by the imbibing that was going on after six. Doubtless you'll say it's none of my business, and you'd be right, but you're my mother, and anyway I've always been matter-of-fact and tactless with those I truly care about. Among whom I do number you, believe it or not.

Lately I have been playing hymns from the Cokesbury hymnal--can you imagine? It's because they are simple, and don't tax my hands too much when they're cold and stiff (which is most of the time), and because they console me, oddly enough, though they mean nothing to me in a religious way. "O God our help in ages past" is my favorite: the last verses about time are quite lovely, don't you think?

A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone;
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while troubles last,
and our eternal home!

Peculiarly, though, the last lines don't touch me deeply. Despite (or perhaps because of?) all the uprootings and dislocations I knew as a child--the constant moving from place to place, the endless sequence of squalid tenements and shared houses (do you remember Maia, the tarot card reader who tried to take over our bedroom?)--I don't feel any real longing for an eternal home, for some fixed unchanging abode in the sky. This messy, dilapidated temporary home is enough for me. For now, at least.

Love,

Dorothea

July 23, 1975

Dear Aunt Vinnie,

We're here at the beach until early next week, Dan and the children and I. That may perhaps surprise you a little; no doubt you've heard about the troubles we've been having via Evie, who despite being dense about so much has the most uncanny ability to sense marital discord in her midst (maybe because she's experienced so much of it herself!). Well, to her lasting disappointment, I'm sure (she never could stand Dan, as you know), but probably not to yours, we're back together again. For how long I can't say--after all the upheavals of the past few months I'm hesitant to say that the storm, if that's what it was, is past. We're trying it out--living together again, that is--and taking it a day at a time. So far it seems to be working, but I'm not holding my breath.

For the past few days it hasn't been any figurative marital storm I've been worried about, in any case, but rather this monster out in the Atlantic, which fortuitously switched direction at the last moment and headed towards Canada. The couple we were sharing this house with got antsy and left, but we foolishly took a chance--and the happy result is half a week more of blissful solitude. Not that we didn't get on with the couple, an older professor and his Dutch wife: both of them are very charming people. She has a kind of abrupt European peremptoriness that generally annoys me, but her plainspoken bluntness was actually kind of tonic after several weeks of walking on eggshells with Dan, who tends toward the elliptical and the cryptic. Nevertheless I did grow a bit weary of her relentless criticism of my fitness as a mother! She thinks me an awful one, neglectful and too indulgent by turns, all because I let Sid sleep with us one night and accompanied Mary Renfroe to the outdoor shower, which scares her (evidently I was supposed to let her soldier it out alone), and then let the children play with some bones they had found on the beach (possibly poisonous). But I took it all in stride, reminding myself that she's no great shakes in the mother department either, with her drug-addict son.

At any rate, Dan. To tell the truth my feelings towards him at this point are more of pity and disappointment than of anger, though that flares up quite frequently. It's rather sad to see him limp back home, all tongue-tied and deflated and abashed, having come to the realization that he doesn't perhaps have what it takes to make a clean break with me and start a new life with someone else. I feel for him, truly--in some perverse way I would have liked to see him succeed, though it would of course have been devastating to me personally. But I knew this thing with that girl was never going to amount to anything; really I think it was all some sort of grandiose fantasy he had cooked up in his head, spurred on by her obligingness and passivity and endless willingness to please. Who is she? Why, a little shy, feline, petite, cat-faced yankee girl from upstate New York or some such place, one of his students (I know--it all sounds so banal), with a tiny little whirring voice like a wind-up doll's. An art major. There was a period when she was over at the house a good deal, babysitting and helping with the children. Actually I rather liked her--she's witty and very observant, and good with the children, honestly. But also simultaneously morbidly sensitive and harshly critical of others--not such a surprising combination, really. Some of the things she would say to me about Dan's colleagues and fellow graduate students truly took my breath away with their viciousness. Anyway, something about her cloying precocious little-girl unforgivingness and prim rectitude appealed to Dan, who likes to think of himself as someone who doesn't suffer fools gladly. And off he went and promptly made a fool of himself, and a fool of me too. That's the thing about marriage--if one person does something dishonorable and foolish, then the other is automatically compromised, dragged down to that same level of stupidity and banality.

Well, I'm not having it; I'm not going to be the "wronged wife." I'm happy he's back--honestly I am--but now that he is I'm not going to listen to his endless apologies and self-flagellating talk, or respond in kind with recriminations and wifely aspersions. The proof, I say, is in the pudding. In some ways my willingness to start over with him seems terribly corrupt and old-world; maybe I should have instantly filed for divorce when he walked out, and slammed the door firmly shut when he started making noises about coming back. But who am I to be so lofty and imperiously virtuous when it comes to marriage--with my family's history?

So he's back. And the children are certainly glad to see him, particularly Mary Renfroe, who I think believes this whole debacle was somehow my doing. Such a daddy's girl, she is. I fear for her, I really do; she's really too observant for her own good, too sensitive and alert to adult emotions and conflicts swirling about just over her head. "Are you still mad at Daddy?" she asked me the other night when we were out at the shower. I don't want her to be morbidly attuned to that kind of thing, like I was--like I had to be, for my own survival--as a girl; I want her to be free and sloppy and self-centered and messy, and live the life of a child, not the life of some wizened, prematurely sagacious miniature adult. But I don't know what to do about it.

Right now I'm sitting in the semi-dark kitchen, whose sole bulb as burned out, doing this index for a friend of mine by the daylight coming in through the open windows. Dan's taken the children out for a long walk so I can finish it: thoughtful of him. But obviously I'm not making much progress, since I put it aside to write to you! But this is much more enjoyable, I assure you. And calming. It's low tide; the big booming surf of earlier this morning has quieted to a limp plashing. Someone has a transistor radio going on in the next house, playing a song I hate, something about love will keep us together. I feel quite sleepy actually. Perhaps I'll sneak in a nap before they come back.

Last night I woke up when the tide was in and the surf was roaring, and I sensed that Dan was too, and we lay very close together, our hands clasped together, not speaking. And do you know I felt blissfully happy. Blissfully. And that seems to be enough, lately.

Let me know when your moving date is so that I can come up and help you. Though my married life is a mess, I'm quite good at bringing some order to domestic chaos. But of course you're far more accomplished at that than I.

Love,

Patricia

P.S. You may not get this until after we get home--I don't know if we'll get down to the village post office again before we leave.

June 30, 1979

P

It's almost dark. The kids are gone to Aunt Vinnie's. I'm sitting at the little table in the front hall, the thing you used to call the escritoire, the writing desk you inherited from your mother. Through the windows on either side of the door I'm watching the last of the day go. There's a little gray left, a little sulfurous orange, around the rims of the trees. But the night is almost upon us. I can hear the cicadas, that torrent of summer insect noise, through the shut door. Once upon a time we'd be sitting out on the front porch drinking a salty dog in the tumblers with the coin pattern, on a summer Saturday night such as this. But you're gone now.

You're gone. I know that. Every cell, capillary, every inch of skin on my body hums with that knowledge, howls with it. It's as if a knife has gone through this house and through me, slicing your presence away, gouging it out, then coming back to scrape away any little lingering trace of you that remains. Scraping and cutting and gouging and tearing.

There are moments when the fact of your absence is so obscenely, piercingly vivid that tears wouldn't do justice to it, screams would be banal. I was standing in our bedroom yesterday morning, looking at the plastic cup with the long straw on your bedside table that you'd been drinking out of near the end, and a pair of those long support stockings you had to wear draped over a chair. Your blue terrycloth slippers were on the floor next to it, the ones with the roses on the toes. And I simply stood there and took it in, and the horror of your absence, coupled with the awful vividness of your remembered presence, crescendoed, thrummed in my ears until it seemed that my heart must stop, my eyes must stop seeing, the light must go out. But none of that happened. I continued to see. My heart continued to lope along. The light continued to come through the window. I heard birds from outside. I picked up a belt I'd let fall on the floor the night before and hung it on the doorknob of the closet. I left the room. So evidently you don't die of this. Not the way you'd think you would, not the way you want to.

And then there are moments, half hours, whole hours, when your death is a numb sad abstraction, both real and unreal, felt but somehow kept at a distance. During those times I fill out the paperwork, begin the cleaning out of your things. During those times I see and talk to people. Sometimes I even laugh. I laughed today when I rode with Peter to school to get a folder from the office and we saw that hippie Jesus man, the philosophy grad student that crazy elderly lady in the cafeteria used to call a "sissy." He was pedal-pushing his way across the quad, standing up on his bicycle, his hair streaming behind him, with that embroidered bag slung over one shoulder. And Peter said something that reminded me of how you climbed in that second floor window at Dorcas's when she was locked out and how you came out the front door and mistakenly let it shut behind you, and had to climb in again. I laughed then too. Do I need to say that it felt in some sense like a betrayal. And yet I was glad to laugh.

And then the choking vividness of it comes back. Then it recedes. Then it comes back. Anything can start it; its comings and goings occur according to no perceptible schedule, are brought on by no clear stimulus. Turning on the faucet in the bathroom can start it. So can seeing your things in the cabinet, your bottle of Witch Hazel, for instance. So can anything--the sun on the metal rim of the garage door in the morning. Your geraniums. Your handwriting on the calendar by the refrigerator, the one with the sunflowers. You were penciling in dates well into the fall: Laura's opening, the beach. "Start Peggy's route." That's what you wrote on September 16. I have no idea what it means but it meant something to you and now I shall never know. None of us shall.

And of course I'm remembering you when I sleep, which isn't much. Then it almost seems that I forget what has happened and have to remember again when I wake up. And I'm remembering you when I'm awake. I'm remembering awful things, the last weeks, the last days, when you couldn't stay at home anymore though you wanted to. Because we couldn't keep up with keeping you clean. And keeping the sheets clean. And the bleeding. And how you swatted at one of the children when they were sitting on the edge of the bed, how you made a feeble motion with one of your hands, a gesture of barely sentient anger, impatience, blind rage, and the children and I looked at each other and began to cry. And how you looked at me when they took you. I don't know whether you could really see me or not by then, I don't know whether you saw anything during the last few days. You had your eyes open at the last, and when you died. I remember that: how quickly it came in the end, after all those months of slow decline, bumpy downward progress. A ragged breath, then silence. Then silence. One second you're there with me, the next you're gone, gone with a completeness I never could have imagined, though I did try to imagine it beforehand. I could never have really imagined it beforehand.

And I'm remembering things about you I don't even remember ever remembering, things that never had even the status of memories in my mind. And yet here they are, vivid and precise, released from some dark corner of my brain, rushing forwards into consciousness along some synapse that has begun, for whatever reason, transmitting signals after a long period of dormancy. They're like messages from outer space, in a way: inexplicable, uncanny, without precedent. A day in summer, soon after we met, for instance. In the grass below the willows behind the dorms, at college. I was braiding your hair, badly but I was braiding it, because my sisters used to let me braid their hair. It surprised you and amused you that I could do this. Your head was on my knee, turned to the side; you were reading The Education of Henry Adams, the part about the Virgin and the dynamo, which annoyed you. And as I was braiding I saw your face from an angle I hadn't seen it from before. I saw a fullness underneath the chin I hadn't noticed before, I saw a mist of nearly vanished freckles on the bridge of your cheeks, a residue from childhood. I saw the whitened strip of skin where the red of your lips merged into your cheek. I saw that your eyes, making a succession of tiny jerks as they followed the print across the page, were a darker blue than I had thought, a lustrous cerulean. And I thought, with that startled wonderment that comes over you when the unexpected reality of some other person's presence strikes you, truly makes itself felt: I don't know her, and yet I do. I don't know her. Who is she? Who is she? I don't really know.

Did I ever? Did I ever know you? Sometimes it seems to me that I never did, not wholly--I only knew a tiny quadrant, like the small part of the moon that is edged with light. And now we shall not know each other anymore, we shall not know each other any better. The time of knowing what we had not known before about each other, the time of discovery, of seeing what we had not seen, is over. For you and for me.

Those years we had: what were they? What are they now? Now that they are over, they are a single long moment to me, something that can flash before my eyes in a single instant. All those years, all those apparently endless random moments of sudden glances at each other over coffee in the morning and bickering and seeing the shadow of your head on the pillow when I woke in the night and catching sight of your face in the kitchen window over the sink as I backed out of the driveway and the lovemaking and the sound of you running water in the bathroom and nursing the children and looking for the leash for the dog in the hall closet and picking up a fork that dropped on the floor while you are washing dishes--all of that broad swath of time that was our life together is now reduced to a sequence of memories that can be compassed in a single moment. All done. All over. All memory now. All nothing, really. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

And yet everything to me. Everything.

Everything.

Farewell, Patricia, goodbye. Goodbye.

D

October 16, 1934

C--

Why you aint come like you said you would last night. Why you aint come. I waited in the barn til way past midnite up in the hayloft, there wont enough light to see my watch by but it was after 3 when I clumb down the ladder and left be cause I heard the courthouse bell in town ring. I waited even tho I was cold, be cause I knew once you came and I was holding you close we would be warm enouf to stand the chill. Frost might come and we would not pay it no mind. With us lieing so close together. With our bodies pushed together close. With our hands in one anothers. With our breath on each others skins. I knew we would warm each other but you aint come and the chill got to me in that cold damp hay and so I lef. Must of been 2 I thout I heard footsteps and I thout it was you but it wont nobody, old Mr. Shelton maybe or a deer. But not you. Not you.

And then to day you pass me strate by on Main Street without so much as look at me. You walk strate by me into Aubreys like I wont even there. Your eyes that are customed to laugh and dance when we are with one another like stone, and your town hat on your head and your bag held close and your hands that have touched the most secret place in white gloves. Walk strate by and the glass door of the store swung shut behind you. But your dauter looked at me as she was going in behind you. Yes she did. I seen how her eyes looked me over, up and down, up and down. She has the fast eye. And I thout if one wont another will. If one wont another will. Maybe since you wont come your dauter will and how would you like that. All I have to do is look at her the right way and she will come to me, that I know. And how would you like that.

But I dont want your dauter I wont you come tonight promise you will or else I dont know what Ill do. Tonight. Dont say no. Dont be late. Come up the later and wear your stockings so I can hear the sound they make as they come off the ssss as they peel down your leg. Just come. Just come

T

Tues. July 28, 1992

Dear Jean,

Dan and I are up at the lake house until mid-August: bliss! No phone, no television, no radio, even, though Dan did bring along some ancient tape recorder to listen to Telemann and Bach cassettes in the mornings while he's working (very tinny and staticky--I don't know how he can stand it). No unwanted interruptions from Saskia stopping by to narrate the latest Herman saga and then invite herself to dinner (and get unpleasantly drunk on our box wine--she's gotten in the habit of refilling her glass without asking); no hectoring letters from Dan's mother about Aunt MaeMae, who is in a period of religious mania just now (but when hasn't she been?). Just cool mountain air, morning swims in the lake followed by a few hours in my studio, a nap in the afternoon, drinks at five on the deck, dinner, early to bed. A walk sometimes to Talbot's General Store down at the other end of the lake, sometimes a meal with this peculiar couple who lives a mile down or so (the woman with the crow--I've told you about her). What can I call it but bliss?

It hasn't been all enchantment, I'm afraid. Mary Renfroe rumbled in last week as she had threatened to do in the company of her boyfriend, a shaggy near-illiterate ruffian of a boy with frizzy dreadlocks and body odor so intense my temples would start throbbing when I got within eight feet of him. Tattoo of a spider web on his back and several gold teeth. Called me ma'am fifty times a day, evidence of his fine upbringing in Moultrie or Cusseta or some such delightful place in South Georgia. To tell you the truth that got on my nerves more that the _smell_--I have never gotten use to southern folderol and smiling laying-it-on-thick mama's boy mannerliness: so tiresome. At any rate he's a a delightful catch, and absolutely par for the course for Mary Renfroe, who has, shall we say, unconventional taste in men. Did I ever tell you about Kevin, the religious studies major who took a vow of silence during Lent one year and then came up with Mary Renfroe to visit us one weekend? Actually it made things wonderfully simple--conversation was limited to do you want me to pass the salt and the like. Can you imagine if he hadn't been mute and treated us to disquisitions on Bonhoeffer and Barth, as he apparently was liable to at the drop of a hat? That would have been agony. But at least he was mildly attractive, in a clerky sort of way. This present fellow--Dalton, I think--has no physical charms to speak of, just a kind of simian animality. I can't imagine what Mary Renfroe sees in him. To me this fling or whatever it is is simply an exercise in sheer perversity, sheer willfulness, sheer self-defeating cutting-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face determination to saddle herself with the most unsuitable boy imaginable. Well, maybe the sex is hot.

But actually their visit didn't turn out to be quite the nightmare it promised to be when they first roared up in his station wagon, a backfiring horror of a vehicle that they are proposing to drive up up to the Blue Ridge mountains to camp out with some friends of Mary Renfroe's from that ritzy school she attended. I don't think they'll ever make it, but if they do maybe the friends can talk some sense into her: someone must, and I never have been able to. The first night, true, they treated us to a session of noisy lovemaking in the guest bedroom that literally had me blushing--I could feel my face burning in the dark! It felt positively indecent, vaguely incestuous, even, to have to listen to it. (Dan claims to have slept through it--liar.) This is how it must have been when we all lived in grass huts and caves: listening to the grunting and groaning and intimate keening of your nearest and dearest in the next bed, or next hammock or animal fur pile or whatever. But then the next morning Dalton did help out Dan clean out his boat, which has been needing it forever, and he even managed to get the lawnmower in the shed out back working and volunteered to mow the grass by the dock. And while he was doing manly things with Dan outside Mary Renfroe helped me make lentil soup.

At first things were quite icy and tense--the girl can sulk like nobody's business, and she was in a state of glum, dolorous Weltschmerz that day due to some quarrel with Dalton (maybe just post-coital tristesse)--but once we got to chopping vegetables she warmed up and suddenly we were laughing with that gleeful, totally out-of-the-blue silliness that sometimes used to overtake us in the midst of our worst quarrels years ago. She was telling me about Dalton's odd sexual proclivities (apparently he actually likes to be spanked, which seems so quaint and old-fashioned nowadays, doesn't it?) and how he doesn't know his multiplication tables or who the vice president is and thinks Ireland is in Russia or something. But very smart with mechanical things. She knows it won't last. Then why are you with him? I had to ask. Because he's nice to me: that was her response, can you believe it? She said she'd never had a boy be so courteous, so gentle, so nice to her. I said sure he's nice--they're always perfectly _nice_, that type, even when they're beating you black and blue and lynching blacks and burning crosses and whatever else they do. Perfectly impeccable down-home manners all the while. Not the most politic thing to say, I'm afraid; it brought back her sulkiness with a vengeance. Margot, you know he's not like that, she said frostily. And when she turned to put some chopped carrots in the pot--her face was sort of turned to the side--she looked so much like Patricia it nearly took my breath away. Patricia could get terribly lofty on you in the same way Mary Renfroe can, insufferably aloof in a kind of martyred, nun-like, reproachful, wounded way, as if you'd insulted a saint. But mainly it was her looks--with her hair cropped short and with all the weight she's lost she looked startlingly like Patricia did during her last spate of illness, a gaunt Maria Falconetti with henna-colored hair, if you can imagine that. And of course instantly I began wondering, as I always have, whether she knew about Dan and me when her mother was sick. You know this now; it won't be a shock to you, I'm sure, but the marriage was falling apart, and Dan was about to leave her when Patricia got sick. And then he stayed with her until the end. Few people know that about Dan, and what he went through for her--his children, I think, least of all.

At any rate all's well that ends well. They left the next morning after a midnight swim in the lake--very imprudent, with those rednecky people across the lake getting drunk and zooming back and forth in their motorboat, and then Mary Renfroe and Dalton were both pretty tipsy too on this godawful Everclear stuff they brought. But breakfast was cordial--I made blueberry pancakes--and our farewells were sincere and heartfelt: I think they did enjoy their stay, and Mary Renfroe actually kissed me before getting in the car, something she hasn't done since she was twelve, I think. And Dalton did improve a little on acquaintance, or maybe it's simply that one inevitably succumbs to that leaping puppy-dog gregariousness and eagerness to please, no matter how much one tries to resist it. And he has a lovely complexion--I hadn't noticed that before. Just the smoothest, most flawless, babyish skin underneath all that dirt and tattoos. When he was bending over to put his knapsack in the trunk I could see how downy and soft it was on the back of his neck.

Since they've been gone, the bliss has returned, but it's been a tremulous haunted bliss, shot through with sudden troubling memories and occasional shadows. I'm doing watercolors again--something about this milky mountain mid-summer light always makes me reach for them. It's an eerie, gauzy light, especially in the early mornings; you always think the haze is about to part and reveal to you something, something epiphantic and final, and you're not sure whether you want to see it or not. But you keep looking for it. You do.

An unforgivably solipsistic letter, obviously--I won't ask for pardon. Just write me an equally solipsistic and self-centered letter in return, please, telling me all about the Baltic trip--I'm eager to hear. Oh and Elizabeth's recital, and the orchids; I'm so envious of you, for mine invariably die. Did you bring me back a fragment of amber perchance? I shall be eternally grateful.

Dan, who's doing just fine, fifty-two and fit as a fiddle after his angioplasty last April, sends his love and regards.

Love,

Margot