Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the novel Chamber Music by Doris Grumbach (©1979 by Doris Grumbach). The narrator, Caroline Maclaren, was married to a well-known composer, Robert Maclaren. The Community refers to an artists' colony.

I have decided to write this account because, long my life has been, it has given me as no opportunity before this to say what I wish to put down here. Perhaps the time was not right to do it before.

When I was young, and even into my middle years, a scrim of silence surrounded what really happened in our lives. If there was talk, it was quiet conjecture about the indiscretions of our friends and neighbors. Rumor and gossip were conveyed in whispers. Secrets were surely no better kept than they are now, but they lived quietly, under the breath. They never appeared in public print or were reported by professional gossips on the air waves. They were confined to the inner coils of the private ear, a foot away, perhaps, no farther. We closeted our secrets, or forgot them. This we called decorum, and we lived securely under its warm protection.

But now the Maclaren Foundation, which I headed for So many years, almost fifty by now, wishes to have a permanent record of Robert's life, and mine. Ours together, to put it more exactly, and mine alone with the Community, after his death. The government has become interested, they tell me, in "the arts." There is a chance that, with its financial help, in some place, the Community will be restored to life.

My initial reluctance to accede to their request is a matter of personal habit, I suppose. I am an old woman born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with all that decent age's love of a calm surface to our society. It was then the custom to have a regular, uniform pattern to our lives, to present the historian with only those facts which would contribute to an orderly picture.

So I am not equipped to write a confession in the modern sense. Whether what I remember here will be useful as a record to the new Foundation I cannot say. I am of an age not to care, almost ninety. My hearing is defective, my bones seem to lie upon each other like dry kindling, my skin falls away in slack little pinches of flesh. I am dry and brittle, I strain and break easily. Rarely any more do I insert my two rows of teeth; few persons bother to visit.

I write this description of myself not because I want pity—who pities the very old?—but to explain my unaccustomed openness in this account. I have nothing to lose that:extreme old age has not already taken from me, and no time to gain. The way the world thinks of me may well change, but even that, if it happens,I will not survive. The Foundation promises me that it will be some time before the history of the founding of the Community can be completely collated and that it has no plans: to publish it. I will not be here to witness the astonishment of the reader. I am comforted by the realization that there is no one I know alive to be surprised at me.

For the representation of truth, old age is a freeing agent. No one should write of her life until all the witnesses and acquaintances, family and lovers, are dead. In addition, it helps to outlive the mode of one's time until it has changed beyond recognition. Then one is left alone with what was. The wrinkled, spotted hand writes of a time out of the memory of everyone alive but itself. So what one tells is unavailable to verification or correction.

I write this, then, because I am freed by my survival into extreme old age, and because I write in the air of freer times. Whether this air is entirely salutary, whether the old must of chests, of closets, bell jars, and horsehair sofas is not a better climate for the storage of the private life, I do not know. But I tire very quickly these days and must speak openly, for once. I am now free.Extraordinary for me, and for one of my time, I intend to put down extraordinary truths.

I rejected the offer to dictate to a secretary, deciding I would celebrate my ninetieth year with a final effort to donate to paper my inner life together with the externals already known. I would put it down in my own hand as a way, I think, of signifying, attesting to the truth by the witness of my handwriting as well as the force of my own words.

The Foundation will say: What you have managed only partial and personal, to remember is perhaps biased truth. You have not given us Robert's truth. Surely it would have differed from yours.I would reply: True.He never wrote about his life.

But, at the last, I think, the historian's view always superimposes itself upon history. Out of a vast amount of available facts from an infinite acreage he chooses what fits his limited and single vision and writes one story. In this case, the story is mine alone. It is all I am able to know.