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Chapters (28)
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Prologue
  5. Part I
  6. I
  7. II
  8. III
  9. IV
  10. V
  11. VI
  12. VII
  13. VIII
  14. Part II
  15. I
  16. II
  17. III
  18. IV
  19. V
  20. VI
  21. VII
  22. VIII
  23. IX
  24. X
  25. XI
  26. XII
  27. Epilogue: November 1954
  28. A Biography of May Sarton

“I’m afraid I haven’t been much help, darling.” He could feel her quick breathing beside him and locked her hand into his, all the sexual impulse dying away, in the force of his feeling about Cavan.

“Some things, I guess, people go through alone. Talking doesn’t really help. But it’s all right, Pen.” For one second he looked down into her clear, aloof gaze in which there was, after all, no tenderness because she was afraid to let it through.

And then, without even saying good night, he turned and ran down the path, wanting more than anything now to be alone, to be free of her, to smell the autumn night and walk himself into exhaustion.

“Good night,” she called after him. When he turned back to look she was still there, and she waved.

On Garden Street, out of sight, he slowed down and took a deep breath. He was thinking now not of her at all, as if on the stream of his feeling for her, he had been carried out to a new understanding of Cavan. What if this kind of frustration and paralysis were not bound to one person and one’s relation to them, but to everything around one? “These doors that close in one’s face, this trying to get through as if one were a prisoner in a cell knocking patiently on the wall, but nobody answers.…”

Standing on the street where so many people lived, seeing how the light from the street lamp shone gold on the golden maple leaves, hearing the steady pulse of the crickets in the grassy gardens, this peace, this intimacy which was Cambridge enveloped him in its gentleness. The long tension he had held unbroken in himself for forty-eight hours was released. For a moment at least he stood outside his frustrating love for Pen and the confusing painful grief for Edward Cavan and felt consoled by simply being himself. He thought of his students and what he would say to them tomorrow. He felt that his one responsibility now, and it was Cavan who laid it upon him and whose death demanded it, was to get through, was not to be stopped, was to arrive at communion with other people somehow and at communion with a whole self in himself.

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Epilogue: November 1954

EPILOGUE:
NOVEMBER 1954