‘And then that day I’ll remember all my life, when I said: “It is over now,” she was asleep and I struck her awake. I saw her come awake and turn befouled before me, she who had managed in that sleep to keep whole. Matthew, for God’s sake, say something, you are awful enough to say it, say something! I didn’t know, I didn’t know that it was to be me who was to do the terrible thing! No rot had touched her until then, and there before my eyes I saw her corrupt all at once and withering, because I had struck her sleep away, and I went mad and I’ve been mad ever since; and there’s nothing to do; nothing! You must say something, oh God, say something!’
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ he cried. ‘Stop screaming! Put your hands down! Stop it! You were a “good woman", and so a bitch on a high plane, the only one able to kill yourself and Robin! Robin was outside the “human type"—a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain; like the paralysed man in Coney Island—(take away a man’s conformity and you take away his remedy)—who had to lie on his back in a box, but the box was lined with velvet, his fingers jewelled with stones, and suspended over him where he could never take his eyes off, a sky-blue mounted mirror, for he wanted to enjoy his own “difference". Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you’ll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her “escape” again. That’s why she can’t “put herself in another’s place", she herself is the only “position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can’t do anything in relation to any one but herself. You almost caught hold of her, but she put you cleverly away by making you the Madonna. What was your patience and terror worth all these years if you couldn’t keep them for her sake? Did you have to learn wisdom on her knees?
‘Oh, for God’s sweet sake, couldn’t you stand not learning your lesson? Because the lesson we learn is always by giving death and a sword to our lover. You are full to the brim with pride, but I am an empty pot going forward, saying my prayers in a dark place; because I know no one loves, I, least of all, and that no one loves me, that’s what makes most people so passionate and bright, because they want to love and be loved, when there is only a bit of lying in the ear to make the ear forget what time is compiling. So I, Dr. O’Connor, say, creep by, softly, softly, and don’t learn anything, because it’s always learned of another person’s body; take action in your heart and be careful whom you love—for a lover who dies, no matter how forgotten, will take somewhat of you to the grave. Be humble like the dust, as God intended, and crawl, and finally you’ll crawl to the end of the gutter and not be missed and not much remembered.’
‘Sometimes’, Nora said, ‘she would sit at home all day, looking out of the window or playing with her toys, trains, and animals and cars to wind up, and dolls and marbles and soldiers. But all the time she was watching me, to see that no one called, that the bell did not ring, that I got no mail, nor anyone hallooing in the court, though she knew that none of these things could happen. My life was hers.
‘Sometimes, if she got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room, in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—"our child"—high above her head, as if she would cast it down, a look of fury on her face. And one time, about three in the morning when she came in, she was angry because for once I had not been there all the time, waiting. She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it; and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor, its blue bow now over, now under.’
The doctor brought his palms together. ‘If you, who are blood-thirsty with love, had left her alone, what? Would a lost girl in Dante’s time have been a lost girl still, and he had turned his eyes on her? She would have been remembered, and the remembered put on the dress of immunity. Do you think that Robin had no right to fight you with her only weapon? She saw in you that fearful eye that would make her a target forever. Have not girls done as much for the doll?—the doll—yes, target of things past and to come? The last doll, given to age, is the girl who should have been a boy, and the boy who should have been a girl! The love of that last doll was foreshadowed in that love of the first. The doll and the immature have something right about them, the doll, because it resembles, but does not contain life, and the third sex, because it contains life but resembles the doll. The blessed face! It should be seen only in profile, otherwise it is observed to be the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves of sexless misgiving! Their kingdom is without precedent. Why do you think I have spent near fifty years weeping over bars but because I am one of them! The uninhabited angel! That is what you have always been hunting!’
‘Perhaps, Matthew, there are devils? Who knows if there are devils? Perhaps they have set foot in the uninhabited. Was I her devil trying to bring her comfort? I enter my dead and bring no comfort, not even in my dreams. There in my sleep was my grandmother, who I loved more than anyone, tangled in the grave grass, and flowers blowing about and between her; lying there in the grave, in the forest, in a coffin of glass, and flying low, my father who is still living; low going and into the grave beside her, his head thrown back and his curls lying out, struggling with her death terribly, and me, stepping about its edges, walking and wailing without a sound; round and round, seeing them struggling with that death as if they were struggling with the sea and my life; I was weeping and unable to do anything or take myself out of it. There they were, in the grave glass, and the grave water and the grave flowers and the grave time, one living and one dead and one asleep. It went on forever, though it had stopped, my father stopped beating and just lay there floating beside her, immovable, yet drifting in a tight place. And I woke up and still it was going on; it went down into the dark earth of my waking as if I were burying them with the earth of my lost sleep. This I have done to my father’s mother, dreaming through my father, and have tormented them with my tears and with my dreams: for all of us die over again in somebody’s sleep. And this, I have done to Robin: it is only through me that she will die over and over, and it is only through me, of all my family, that my grandfather dies, over and over. I woke and got up out of bed and putting my hands between my knees I said, “What was that dream saying, for God’s sake, what was that dream?” For it was for me also.’
Suddenly, Dr. Matthew O’Connor said: ‘It’s my mother without argument I want!’ And then, in his loudest voice he roared: ‘Mother of God! I wanted to be your son—the unknown beloved second would have done!’
‘Oh, Matthew. I don’t know how to go. I don’t know which way to turn! Tell her, if you ever see her, that it is always with her in my arms—forever it will be that way until we die. Tell her to do what she must, but not to forget.’
‘Tell her yourself,’ said the doctor, ‘or sit in your own trouble silently, if you like, it’s the same with ermines—those fine yellow ermines that women pay such a great price for—how did they get that valuable colour? By sitting in bed all their lives and pissing the sheets, or weeping in their own way. It’s the same with persons; they are only of value when they have laid themselves open to “nuisance"—their own, and the world’s. Ritual itself constitutes an instruction. So we come back to the place from which I set out; pray to the good God, she will keep you. Personally I call her “she” because of the way she made me; it somehow balances the mistake.’ He got up and crossed to the window. ‘That priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind, harnessed to that stupendous and threadbare glomerate compulsion called the soul, ambling down the almost obliterated bridle path of Well and Ill, fortuitously planned—is the holy Habeas-Corpus, the manner in which the body is brought before the judge—still—in the end Robin will wish you in a nunnery where what she loved is, by surroundings, made safe, because as you are you keep “bringing her up", as cannons bring up the dead from deep water.’