The wonderful thing when one has known a person as long and intimately as she and I have known each other is that words no longer have the same importance. No explorations are needed of the other. No, it is rather that when we are together the past flows through the present, is, in some strange way, opened up—so often painful we tend to push it back when alone, but when we are together it is there, alive and precious. So it is being together that matters, not any longer what we may say or not say.

I was stupid about the bird feeders. Damn it. Money does make one obtuse. I sometimes feel it has been for me like an extra skin, protective against certain currents of life which I have never experienced just because I was insulated. Ellen spends what she has on foolish things often. I count every penny I spend as taken from some good cause. Money is the only area I cannot discuss with Ellen. She has not known either my guilt or my rage about it. It has never worried Cornelius that we spend a million times what Ellen has to spend, on gardeners, horses, the whole enterprise of the wonderful summers here, not to mention the house in town—the servants, entertaining. For Cornelius this is the way things are. Can’t be changed. He has no wish to be a saint, bless his heart. But I have felt held back, sometimes prevented from being myself by all that he takes for granted. He thought of my painting as a pleasant exercise, a little as he himself felt about court tennis, I suppose. To take it seriously, to be a professional, would have been not done, would have meant losing one’s amateur status. And the same thing about civil liberties—it was all very well to be on the board of the union and to give a certain amount of money (never as much as I wanted to give), but, again, it must not bite into our “real” lives.—Why have I begun to speak of this now? Because that small exchange about the cost of birdseed brought all this old anguish to the surface again. It appears to me that the New England attitude to money (at least in society) is very much like the Victorian attitude to sex. Must tease Cornelius about this!

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2