The Love Letters Read online

  Now Mariana looked directly at Peregrina and smiled. “But it was what I wanted.”

  “You were one of the lucky ones, then. What about me?”

  Mariana said gently, “Don’t worry about it so much. Whatever’s best for you is what will be.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish I did.”

  The carriage stopped in front of the convent gates. The coachman stepped down and rang the bell, and old Sister Portress, half blind, half deaf, completely toothless, doddered out and gestured, with smiles and nods, for them to drive in.

  “Back to embroidering dove’s feet,” Peregrina said. “And codfish for dinner.”

  “Is it so terrible?”

  “Yes. It’s part of being in oblivion. When we go through the convent gates we’re lost from the world. It’s as though we’d never been. We’re forgotten.”

  As Patrick had forgotten Charlotte?

  … He had called her, perfectly courteously, to cancel their date, the one that was to follow that strange, first evening. He had a load of studying he couldn’t get out from under, he said, and he’d call again soon.

  And that, it seemed, was the end of Patrick. For a long time the telephone was a dark, malignant personality. At first she ran to it when it rang. Then she refused to answer, waiting for Essie or Reuben, because if she didn’t run to pick up the receiver then it would be Patrick. But it never was. She learned from Jane that he had left New York, was in Boston, where he had some kind of grant from his father’s old hospital.

  So Charlotte tried to put him out of her mind, to forget that all that remained in her memory of their evening together was the humiliation of too many martinis, of being sick, of being whistled at in the bath …

  She spent her time on schoolwork, in museums, going to concerts, at first deliberately anesthetizing herself with “culture,” then getting caught up in painting, in music, for its own sake. What had started as a narcotic became a catalyst. She saw more of Sister Mary Michael and less of Ursula. She graduated, to her own rather startled pleasure, at the top of her class and went to college, not a convent college, but a female institution: her own choice: was it because she was afraid?

  She knew what to expect from females, even those who did not wear long habits or navy-blue uniforms, and in a sense she did well in college, was on the dean’s list, was a class officer, was active in clubs, was busy, busy, busy, laughed a great deal, was popular …

  Several times her friends arranged blind dates for her for the proms. Each time she swore never again, and each time they talked her into it. “But you must, Lottie, how are you ever going to get any experience with men?” The nuns had supposedly taught her to dance (nuns?) and her friends gave added instruction, but invariably she trod on her partners’ toes or fell over their—or her own—feet. She learned every legitimate excuse to go to the ladies’ room and to stay there. She could spend half an hour taking off and putting on makeup; she could rip a garter or a hem or a shoulder strap and have to sew it back on; she knew exactly how long it was permissible to stay in the water closet. It was a moot question as to where she was most unhappy, on the dance floor or in the ladies’ room. The morning after a prom she would hurry to her classes or to her stall in the library with the gasping relief of a swimmer grasping a spar. She stopped listening when her friends told her that she was beautiful, that all she needed was self-confidence. On weekends and prom nights she managed to have a meeting to attend or to find another dateless girl willing to go to the movies.

  On a Friday afternoon during the Christmas holidays of her junior year in college the telephone rang. She went to answer it; the phone was no longer a demon; neither did she expect anything from it. She didn’t even recognize Patrick’s voice. He had to tell her who he was, that he was back in New York, had done his internship in Boston, was now resident at Columbia Presbyterian, was going to be a surgeon. Did she happen by any chance to be free? He knew it was the last moment but he had an unexpected evening off …

  Why did she go with him?

  Her heart was jolting so that her ears rang. But Patrick, thank God, did not know this. He took her to a small French restaurant where he offered her champagne. She refused, going back to her childhood drink of lemonade sweetened with grenadine. Patrick had an extra-dry vodka martini, “with a twist of lemon, please.” He offered her a cigarette.

  She sat upright and rigid next to him on the banquette of the restaurant; perhaps it was because her nervousness was so intense, so different from the prom kind of nervousness, that she didn’t care what she said.

  “No, thanks. But it’s no virtue in me. I choke. I guess I’ll survive without smoking.”

  “And drinking?” he asked.

  “Oh, I drink,” she said. “Just not tonight.”

  “Why not tonight?”

  She lied quickly. “Too much last night.”

  He laughed and turned on the banquette so that he could look directly at her. “I don’t believe you. And you’re still incredibly young. What would you like to eat?”

  “Oh—you order for me, please. I’ve never been allowed to have a mind of my own when it comes to food.”

  He studied the menu, asking, “Can you cook?”

  “I’ve never cooked anything,” she said. “I’ve never even boiled water.”

  “Are you proud of this?”

  “It isn’t something to feel either proud or guilty about. It’s just a fact.”

  “It could be remedied.”

  “You think cooking’s a remedy? Okay, doc, when I’m out of college I’ll try it and see.”

  There was no trouble talking; her posture became less tense; she went with him happily to his apartment for more coffee. She felt slightly drunk, as though she had not refused the champagne. Patrick was living uptown now, in a pleasant studio apartment on Riverside Drive. It had somewhat the flavor of the room on Bleeker Street; it was definitely Patrick’s apartment, but the bookshelves were better built, the coffee cups matched. As she sat curled up in a black leather chair, quite different from the canvas slings, he curved down on his knees before her, leaning towards her until his lips touched gently against hers. Then he sat back on his heels. “Cotty—”

  She was not called Cotty at college.

  “You’re really staggering. You’re marvelous. I don’t know what I expected from you tonight. But not that you would be this way. Is is that you’ve grown up?”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t, very much.”

  “I’m glad I got you tonight,” he said. “I didn’t know whether you’d even be in town. Violet—my mother—is about to do her first American performances in ten years, and I think she’d like to meet your father. All right?”

  So it was for James Clement and Violet Napier that Patrick had called, and not for Charlotte at all. She sat rigid again, her fingers closed tightly about her empty cup.

  “She doesn’t know,” he said, “what a favor she’s done me. More coffee?”

  She rose. “No. I think I’d better go home now.”

  Without question he took her. On the bus. He announced that he would pick her up at the same time the following week. When she did not respond he said nothing, merely smiled. He did not, as she had half expected him to, attempt to kiss her good night, but simply waved as she ran up the brownstone steps and let herself in.

  She went to the library but her father had already gone upstairs. She turned on the light and stood there a moment before going up, looking at the skull that sat grinning like a monkey from the top of the bookcase. The skull shone whitely in the darkness

  … then, dangling below the thrust of lower jaw, the rest of the skeleton gleamed out

  “Love,” Antonio said from the cleanness of his bones, “must be enfleshed—”

  But the doctor had been alone with her in his strange and stuffy library. Antonio had not been allowed in the room during the examination, so who was it who had once enfleshed those bones? The doct
or had stood over her as she lay there, looking quietly down at her, and he was not angry with her.

  “Oh, Father,” she said. “Father.”

  … “It is not so extraordinary,” Father Duarte said, “that we seek to understand divine love in terms of human love. It is our only means of understanding it because we are human. It is never God but only we who make a travesty of human love.”

  “I wasn’t looking for it,” Mariana whispered. “I didn’t expect it. I didn’t understand it. I don’t understand anything any more.” The walls of the confessional seemed to close in on her.

  He said, “You are asked to renounce human love not because it is wrong but because it is so marvelous a thing that it is a fitting gift. And possibly—though of this I am not sure—that you may feel the thrust of God more deeply.”

  He had not understood, then, what she had started to tell him. Perhaps she could put it off.

  … “I am cold,” she said. “My bones hurt.”

  They put her to bed.

  Where was she? She did not know.

  The doctor sat by her, his fingers lightly against her wrist, and for a moment her mind stopped reeling. She turned towards him, her words slightly blurred from fever. “I suppose it’s arrogance or selfishness or something to care so much about being loved that I could feel that no one loved me. It was only with Andrew in all the world that I knew I was loved, that I was worth loving. Not because of me, Charlotte, but because I was his mother. Not because I was a good mother, but because simply, biologically, I was his. No matter what I was like, no matter how much I was lacking, I was still his mother, there was this basic, primary fact that was there and that nothing could ever change, not anything I did or didn’t do. So I believed that he loved me. And so I was—I was freed. With everybody else in the world I haven’t believed it, and so I haven’t been free.” She had never put this into words before; it hurt to hear it, but it was true; it was Charlotte. “And if anybody is for a moment gentle with me, then I am—I can’t explain, I dissolve, I’m completely undone.”

  “What about Patrick?”

  “I love him. But I can’t—” she gasped.

  “Never mind, Charlotte. You’ve said it. But if the fact that you are Andrew’s mother is unalterable, what about the fact that you are Patrick’s wife?”

  “Patrick only came back to me because he wanted to introduce Violet to my father. It wasn’t for me at all.”

  “But you love Patrick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then does it matter why he came back to you? Isn’t the important thing that he came?”

  “But did he?” she asked. “Did he really?”

  If he answered she did not hear. His hand was placed briefly, gently, on her burning forehead. She lay still, obedient to his touch, to his command to sleep.

  An English setter with a soft, sad face put his moist nose against her cheek and breathed anxiously. In the strangeness of her waking she thought it was the doctor, that she was still wrapped in the rug in his library. Then the concerned face became unblurred as her eyes focused; she broke into an actual peal of laughter as she realized that it was not the doctor but a dog, standing on his hind legs, his feathery elbows on the coverlet, gazing up her inquiringly.

  She was not in the doctor’s library but she had no idea where she was. Her eyes had cleared but her mind still whirred. She moved one hand gropingly across the bed, then one leg, but encountered nothing.

  Patrick, then, was already up, eating breakfast, or at the hospital—

  No.

  This was not their low bed in New York, extra-length to accommodate Patrick’s long legs. Carved posts at each corner of this bed loomed up to the ceiling. This bed was high, and the dog (where did the dog come from?) continued to stand there leaning against the bed.

  Violet’s villa.

  She was in bed in Violet’s enormous place in Beja.

  Nothing had gone as planned. Charlotte let out a shuddering sigh, and the dog matched it, then began to pant, his breath warm on her face, and waved his plumed tail in an eager demand for love. She caressed one of his ears, murmuring thoughtlessly, “Yes, you’re beautiful, you’re sweet, yes, you’re a gorgeous beast, absolutely, I quite agree …”

  At this lack of proper attention the dog removed his forepaws from the bed, thudded to the floor, and left the room with great dignity. After all she had not even asked his name.

  Charlotte sat up. At the long windows heavy ivory damask curtains were drawn. In the fireplace were the ashes of the fire she now remembered the doctor ordering the night before. She put her hand to her cheeks; they were hot, but not burning as they had been; the penicillin was working. Her limbs still ached, but no longer intolerably; her mind was clearing; if she was still inadequate to the situation it was because of the situation itself and not because of fever.

  She got out of bed and her feet met the comforting warmth of a rug. Her legs were surprisingly unsteady. She crossed to one of the windows and pulled back the drapery so that she could look out. Rain was pelting in cold and angry gusts against the glass; the comfort of the room had nothing to do with a change in the weather. She looked at the poplars on either side of the long drive writhing in the wind.

  Yes. She had come up that drive the night before with the doctor, and an elderly maid had undressed her and put her to bed, a maid named Julia with a cross mouth and infinitely kind hands. An old man in a brown leather apron had come in with piles of firewood and built the fire. Violet had kept stalking in and out, making suggestions which the doctor vetoed. He had sent everybody from the room and put his hand on her forehead and then she had gone to sleep …

  She was waking now as though to a new world, as though she had been swimming all night and come at last to land, to a strange shore, exhausted but cleansed.

  She climbed back into bed and turned on the lights on either side. They were soft, but powerful, not isolating the bed in a small pool, but spreading their rays across the room. She sat in the center of the bed like a small child, her hands locked across her knees, unwilling to leave, even in her mind, the safety of this bed, this room. She looked warily about. It was an intensely feminine room, white and gold, but there was nothing precious about it, or cluttered. The furnishings, though beautiful, were sparse, so that there was a feeling of strength. Like Violet.

  —I hope I behaved well last night, Charlotte thought.—It would be incongruous to play any kind of an ugly scene in here.

  But life was full of incongruities. Patrick himself was one; only his surgeon’s knife was congruous in his long, strong hands.

  There was a light knock on the door and Julia, her mouth still fierce and disapproving, entered. Enter the maid. As she saw that Charlotte was awake she spoke very rapidly and in full voice in Portuguese, as though by sheer volume she could make Charlotte understand. Then, still speaking loudly, she disappeared, shutting the door firmly on her words.

  Why did Charlotte feel rejected and angry because Julia had looked cross and had shut the door against her?

  On the right-hand bed table were three books; always, in Beja, things seemed to be in threes. An English murder mystery: good. An ancient Tauchnitz edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost with an occasional marginal comment in Violet’s angular, distinctive handwriting. Paradise Lost always reminded Charlotte of a small but shattering experience from her schooldays. There had been a nun, little and pretty and gay, always friendly and open, a favorite of students and parents: Sister Felicity. Charlotte, searching after school for a forgotten book, had come across her in the deserted classroom, weeping wildly. She had looked up at Charlotte, controlling her sobs, and said, “Which way shall I fly wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.”

  Charlotte had not recognized those dark words as being from Paradise Lost then, but she had never forgotten them. The next day Sister Felicity had not been in school, nor the day after, nor ever again. There was the usual gossip and speculation among the students,
the usual silence from the sisters. And a priest, giving the girls a meditation on the uses of silence and the necessity for silence in the life of a Religious, had mentioned that a popular nun may be a very poor Religious.

  So no Paradise Lost this morning, thank you.

  In any event Charlotte did not need to be reminded that she had been expelled forever from the Garden of Eden.

  —What is forever? It cannot be in time, because time can be measured, and forever cannot. Time is inextricably tangled up with place, and can be measured only against place (dark of night in New York; grey of morning in Beja). Time has meaning only in relation to its position in space, the movement of a planet about a sun, of a night through stars.

  Time for Charlotte had been measured against Patrick and Andrew. Patrick was still in time, in night that would turn to day, to sunlight, and she, despite the clock, in night and darkness. Andrew was, presumably, in forever, whatever and wherever forever is.

  The third book, the bottom book on the table by Violet’s bed, was the French edition of The Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Was this Violet’s? Did people in Beja read nothing else? More likely Charlotte had brought it with her from the pensão. She had a vague memory of asking Antonio for it.

  Another knock, this time peremptory, and Violet came in, followed by Julia bringing a breakfast tray.

  “You are to eat,” Violet said without preamble, “and then I am to take your temperature and report to João. You seem to have had your usual effect on him.”

  “That then,” Charlotte said, putting her head down on her knees and moving her fingers across the blanket as though trailing them through water, “would be no effect at all.”

  Violet sat on the white brocade of the chaise longue. “It is not clever to underestimate yourself.”

  “I’m not clever.” Julia brought the tray to her. “And I don’t mean to underestimate myself. I know I have acquired a certain flair with men. But it’s on the surface. It doesn’t count.”