The Little Locksmith
» The autobiography and very liuman transformation of a Salem child who broke out of her chrysalis of invalidism to meet the challenge of reality.
by KATHARINE BUTLER HATHAWAY
5
WHEN I was fifteen my horizontal life of night and day was ended. In that year I was pronounced cured; I was to get up at last and see things from a perpendicular and movable point of view, after watching them for so long from a horizontal and fixed one. Everything would look different, of course. Also, I knew that I myself would look different standing up from the way I had looked lying down. Why, at the great age of fifteen I didn’t even know how tall I was!
And I had begun to wonder about my back. There was that unknown territory between my shoulders where the tuberculosis had lodged and burrowed for so long. How much it had disfigured me I didn’t know. As I had grown older there had been a baffling silence in regard to that side of my illness, and I never dared to ask. Nobody guessed that I was secretly worrying about it, and I could not tell them. Nobody guessed because, I suppose, I gave the impression of being such a happy, humorous child. But when I was alone in the room I sometimes slid my hand up under me to explore that fateful part. And my hand always got strangely panic-stricken and came hurrying back without making me any wiser than before. My hand seemed to be mortally afraid of that place, which remained therefore unknown, waiting for the day when I should get up and stand plainly revealed.
Although when I was little my mother had often told me how lucky I was, as I grew older she never spoke of my being lucky. Instead, quite a different feeling seemed to come over her whenever she or anybody else spoke of my “trouble” as it was called. I must first explain that when I was young my mother seemed to me dull and uninteresting compared with my father. Everything he said held my attention and was interesting and important to me. In comparison, my mother seemed to have to think and talk about a lot of unimportant, boring things, and her real self, for me, was lost and hidden in them. I had a feeling that she didn’t like unessential things, but that she didn’t quite know how to manage them easily and get them out of the way. So she labored awkwardly, directing the house and servants, and she worried, and had to go to bed with sick headaches. Sometimes I felt very maternal toward her, she had such a hard time doing things that I thought looked quite easy. My own hands were so much more skillful than hers, for instance, that if she tried to make a paper doll for me, she seemed to me like a clumsy younger child.
She was not an artist or a craftsman like the rest of us, and so she thought we were much more wonderful than we were. I never saw her eyes really shine with happiness as much as they did when she was admiring us as artists, and treasuring all the things we made. Then she made herself, in comparison, seem humble and undiscriminating before us. In matters of our conduct as human beings she was severe and sure of what was right and wrong, and we feared and accepted her judgment. But when she was admiring us as artists slie gave us a feeling of absolute freedom from authority. We were all for weighing and criticizing each other’s works. We knew to a hair’s breadth which was better than another, and why. We were the ones then who were severe and critical of ourselves while she liked everything we did, our good things and also the ones we would have torn up and thrown away. She gathered them all together and kept and treasured them, and her eyes shone over us with a pride and a tenderness that I shall never see again.
Because of this humble uncritical attitude of hers toward art, I didn’t notice her very much, and when I did, I often wished that she were more exciting and knew how to do things herself. But once in a great while, when somebody spoke of my illness or she mentioned it herself, she was all changed. A terrific wave of pain sprang up in her blue eyes, and it was evident suddenly that the pain was always there, controlled, inside her, like something terribly alive, always ready to leap up and hurt her all over again. She never cried, but her self-control was worse than crying.
“I ought never to have let it happen! It was wicked! Wicked! ” she would burst out. And then, immediately after, I witnessed the silent and to me awful struggle as for some reason she fought against the physical symptoms of her grief. Not a tear ever succeeded in getting past the barrier of her will, and not a sob. But during those few seconds when she could not trust herself to speak, and her gentian-blue eyes were fiercely widened to prevent the tears from coming into them as she stared away from me, out of the window, anywhere, away from me, and swallowed back that great lump of sadness and forced it away down into the secret part of her being, I was awe-struck and shaken, much more than I should have been to see her yield to tears. Her secretive Spartan way made crying seem like an enemy that one must never submit to. The awesome struggle that it cost her affected me almost as if I had been forced to watch her from a distance struggling all alone with a savage animal and managing by sheer force of her will and character to keep it at bay.
When she was like that, 1 could not very well not notice her or think she was uninteresting. Then her aliveness frightened and thrilled me. And I loved her more than I could possibly have told. I felt a furious will to cherish her and to protect her and never to let her suffer, when I got old enough to influence or control her. Yet I could not show her what I felt. Besides being inarticulate myself, I knew that I had seen something in her that she thought I was too young to see or even to know about, and I knew I must pretend I hadn’t seen it. It was not her concern for me that made me love her so much then. It was because I saw her in the grip of essential things, and she became alive, and fiery, and very brave. I felt humble before her, for myself and all the rest of us toward whom she had made herself seem unclever and unimportant.
Although I felt an almost unbearable tenderness and love for her in those moments, I felt hatred and rebellion too. I was angry because, when she battled with those surging tears, I had to battle too. For she seemed to waken something in me that was a disgusting traitor to my conscious self: a sorrow over my plight that I did not know I felt, and was not willing to feel. I could love her piteous sorrow for me, but I loathed and despised it in myself. And I pushed it away from me with an almost masculine strength and confidence in my own soundness and well-being.
I always longed to know intimately and adore and caress that real fiery self of my mother. Why did she hide it from her children and even from herself? It was as if she thought that if she ever once let her emotion escape from under her control its poignancy would be unbearable and would destroy her and destroy us all. Whatever the reason, when these moments arrived they passed in fierce silence and aloofness. Our hearts ached in pity for each other, each separate, stoical, and alone.
So, lying still and watching her, I was tense and fighting for her, helping her with all my might not to be overcome by the enemy that was trying to make us both cry and break out into sobs. I knew that if anything could make her lose the battle it would be to have me be anything except the happy, unconscious child she thought I was. And, besides, except when she acted like this, I was happy. After all, what was there so sad about me and my illness? It was a mystery to me. I thought my mother’s sadness must be just a phenomenon of mother love, which exaggerates everything.
When I got up at last, fifteen years old, and had learned to walk again, one day I took a hand glass and went to a long mirror to look at myself, and I went alone. I didn’t want anyone, my mother least of all, to know how I felt when I saw myself for the first time. But there was no noise, no outcry. I didn’t scream with rage when I saw myself. I just felt numb. That person in the mirror couldn’t be me. I felt inside like a healthy, ordinary, lucky person — oh, not like the one in the mirror! Yet when I turned my face to the mirror, there were my own eyes looking back, hot with shame. I had turned out like the little locksmith after all — oh, not so bad, nearly, but enough like the little locksmith to be called by that same word.
What I felt that day did not fit in with the pleasant cheerful atmosphere of our family any more than my horrors had fitted in. There was no place for it among us. It was something in another language. It was in the same language as my mother’s suppressed panic-stricken grief, and I would have died rather than let that come to the surface of our cheerful life for her to see and endure in me. And so from that first moment, when I did not cry or make any sound, it became impossible that I should speak of it to anyone, and the confusion and the panic of my discovery were locked inside me then and there, to be faced alone for a very long time to come.
Here, then, was the beginning of my predicament. A cruel disguise had been cast over me, as if by a wicked stepmother. And I now had ahead of me, although I didn’t know it, the long, blind, wistful struggle of the fairy tales. I had to wander stupidly and blindly, searching for I didn’t know what, following fantastically wrong clews, until at last I might hit upon a magic that could set me free.
6
Three things had ended suddenly all at the same time: my illness, my childhood, my father’s life. When one thing ends, another must begin. At the end of my illness there began my ignorant and lonely struggle to adapt myself to what I had seen in the mirror. At this same time, my childhood ended and a thrilling ferment of new consciousness had begun to go on inside me which made me feel myself turning wonderfully into a haughty and grand young lady. Although my body was impeded in its growth and I was bewildered by its misfortune, my mind was not impeded. My mind grew independently of my body and independently of the shape of my body. It grew and behaved at first as if nothing were wrong with me anywhere. I was even more concerned at first with extricating myself from the disgrace of being considered a child than I was concerned with the fearful fact of my deformity.
Now that I was up and walking around at last like the rest of the world, I felt a fierce resentment against my bed and my invalid life, and especially against the bright little girl who had accepted it all so sweetly and submissively. I suddenly hated my adorable microscopic world and all the little arts out of which, with painstaking care, I had constructed my joys. I hated the loving admiration of the grownups for me and everything I did. I felt rebellious and strong and angry with them and myself. Something new had come into my mind, and it was like a labor agitator who comes into a peaceful town and tries to destroy the docile contentment of workers who have so long adapted themselves to a narrow life that they do not even realize it is narrow. Out of loyalty to the new values that were dawning in me and making me, as I believed, into an entirely new person, I had to do cruel violence to the contented little girl. I had to emphasize my separateness from her in every possible way because the grownups persisted in clinging to her with an absurd devotion and insisting she was me, whereas I knew with every part of myself that she was not me any more.
I was through with her — through because a wonderful thing had happened to me. I had found suddenly that I was not frightened any more by the abstract ideas that had frightened the little girl so terribly in her bed. I had begun to fall at first gingerly and then boldly in love with the mystery of the Universe. Instead of wanting to curl my mind up and tuck it away in some cozy little place where it could never think those terrifying thoughts of death and birth and time, my mind suddenly wanted to reach out and fearlessly embrace those mysteries and become a conscious, proud part of them. It seemed to me that I had suddenly grown so tall that my head was among the stars. Relieved of my cosmic fears, I felt an almost drunken sense of liberation.
Over and over I forgot what I had seen in the mirror. It could not penetrate into the interior of my mind and become an integral part of me. I fell as if it had nothing to do with me; it was only a disguise. But it was not the kind of disguise which is put on voluntarily by the person who wears it, and which is intended to confuse other people as to one’s identity. My disguise had been put on me without my consent or knowledge, like the ones in fairy tales, and it was I myself who was confused by it, as to my own identity.
I looked in the mirror and was horrorstruck because I did not recognize myself. In the place where I was standing, with a persistent romantic elation in me, as if I were a favored, fortunate person to whom everything was possible, I saw a stranger, a little pitiable hideous figure, and a face that became, as I stared at it, painful and blushing with shame. It was only a disguise, but it was on me, for li fe. 11 was there, it was there, it was real. Every one of those encounters was like a blow on the head. They left me dazed and dumb and senseless every time, until slowly and stubbornly my robust, persistent illusion of well-being and of personal good fortune spread all through me again and I forgot the irrelevant reality and was all unprepared and vulnerable again.
7
At this time of secret confusion it was lucky for me that I found my brother Warren. He acted as if he did not even see my disguise. He never mentioned it, he never explained how he felt. He merely treated me as if he saw in me the growing-up proud person that I felt myself to be.
In spite of my new fierceness I was shy and inarticulate, while he was not. He was a Harvard undergraduate then, and he had just found for himself the exhilaration and joy of intellectual exercise. He loved argument and discussion, and he loved also his own uninterrupted discourse. He could talk brilliantly and he loved to arouse and excite an admiring listener with his talk. He had the intellectual young man’s favorite passion for influencing and moulding another mind, especially a young, docile, feminine mind, since that was the sort of mind which lent itself most willingly to be moulded. He gave me such a strong impression that he was always right in his opinions that I never doubted he was, and 1 felt lucky and proud to be moulded and influenced by him.
I never could learn to talk easily with him. A fear and shyness as hard as iron barred my most important ideas and feelings out of all conversation, in spite of my will and my enormous need to share them. Whenever I tried to talk I was always embarrassed, and what I said was painfully clumsy and ineffective compared with what I felt inside me. Every time after we had been together I suffered unbearably from the pent-up feelings and thoughts which his companionship had excited and roused, and which my shyness had prevented me from expressing. In order to relieve this feeling I began to write to him every week as soon as he had gone back to Cambridge. On paper nothing embarrassed me, nothing was too difficult or too emotional for me to try and express it. But as soon as I had mailed the letter I would begin to grow hot and cold because of the things I had written. I hungered for intimacy and yet when I had invited it and felt it coming toward me I was panic-stricken. I remember the torture I felt, the first time I had written to him, whenever the postman rang, and the almost unbearable feeling when his letter actually came and I took in my hand the heavy, fat, cream-white envelope with the crimson seal of Harvard on the flap.
Opening that letter and reading it gave me a pleasure that seems strange and absurd as I remember it now, because of the intensity which made it two-thirds pain.
His letters, so cherishing and responsive, seemed to me almost like love letters, and our meetings almost like lovers’ meetings. K very week-end he came home, and he always called my name as soon as he got inside the house, as if the only thing that mattered about coming was to know that I was there. I thought to myself very solemnly, “ Nobody will ever love me or marry me, and so it is all right for me to feel as if this were a love affair, as it almost seems to be.”
On those week-end evenings we used to borrow Betty, my sister’s horse, and her open buggy that had rubber tires and square kerosene lamps. With these dim and elegant little lights bobbing on each side of us, we drove along pitch-dark roads, out into the wide and fragrant night, out under the stars, moving slowly, almost imperceptibly.
Being young, we had just discovered the wonderful charm of Night — night away from houses, night moving along country roads, noiseless silken wood roads, black bumpy roads of pastures and farms, and the soft, misty, sweet-smelling roads with old wooden bridges, where we stopped to listen to the gentle Ipswich River. Night was a new element that we, and only we, had discovered. Yet curiously it was the same element that had been only a year or two ago nothing else than a tall policeman to us, the negative tiresome dark that put an end to all our pleasures, and which my revengeful imagination had filled with insane horrors. Now we were grown up, and by the magic of transformation the great welcoming night had become our partner and our friend, the only time that was really congenial to our new selves and our new emotions.
The country round us was benign and safe for our wanderings. It was a country of small towns and quiet villages, where nobody sat up late except when there was a meeting of the local historical society or the grange. We drove past the sleeping barns and farmhouses of North Beverly, and the yellow lighted houses of Putnamville and out on to our favorite and lonely Valley Road to Topsfield, where the street lights stopped and there was nothing but the vague, dark shapes of trees moving slowly past us on either side and Betty’s ears bobbing up and down ahead of us, sometimes dimly visible and sometimes vanishing altogether in the darkness. With only Betty’s light footsteps and the spindly wheels of our little ambling carriage to disturb the silence, we were nearer to the slow clouds and the stars then, in those roads, than we ever have been since on any other roads. We could hear every rustle of leaves along the roadside and even the soft sound of wind in ferns. Betty carried us along with a lulling motion and a pace that was very nourishing and kind to our mood of intimate companionship. In that dreamy silence my own stillness and shyness were no longer a handicap. We both were still, each aware of the other’s awareness and happiness as if we were two parts of the same person. Once, after such a silence, I heard my brother say, “Sometimes I wish that you were not my sister.”
Five or six times since I was born I have heard a sentence spoken that sounded as if it were made out of an entirely different substance from the substance of ordinary sentences — as if it were carved out of a piece of strange foreign wood. These sentences had no visible connection with what had been said before or with anything that came after them. They were undecipherable fragments, like meteorites from another world. For, as I have already said, I grew up in a family where a certain kind of intimate personal emotion was all so carefully hidden that it sounded to me, when I heard it. like a foreign language, while at the same time that it shocked and frightened me it sounded more familiar and more real than anything I had ever heard before. Those sentences were made of what George Meredith, on a crucial page of The Amazing Marriage, called “arterial words.” They spurted out of the body involuntarily, coming from some hidden and much deeper source than ordinary speech. In our family those arterial sentences were instantly treated as if they had not been spoken. They were not. answered, never repeated, and never referred to again.
They were something not wanted, and something terrifyingly alive. They were foundling sentences. We all looked the other way, we pretended we hadn’t heard, and those parentless sentences were left to starve and perish, because picked up and warmed and fed they might have had the power to change our whole lives.
When I was young, I blindly imitated the family tradition of ignoring those bursts of intimacy — I caught the contagion of our family’s fear and disapproval of them. But even without the fear and the disapproval, since I was utterly inexperienced and untaught in the language of intimacy, although I felt a great hungering for the emotion and experience of it, I never in the world would have known what to do or to say in response to them.
So, when my brother said to me, after a long silence, that night when we were driving across a dark, starlit place somewhere between the woods and the sea along the Beverly shore, “Sometimes I wish that you were not my sister,” I recognized it for one of those strange sentences. It was meant for me, and for no one else, but I had absolutely no skill or grace to receive it. It was like a letter sent to a person who hadn’t any name, or any street and number. I was powerless to claim it even though I knew it was mine. It set up such a commotion inside me that I could scarcely breathe.
I could secretly pretend that I had a lover in him, but I could never risk showing that I thought such a thing was possible for me, even if he were not my brother. Because of my repeated encounters with the mirror and my irrepressible tendency to forget what I had seen, I had begun to force myself to believe and to remember, and especially to remember, that I would never be chosen for what I imagined to be the most thrilling of all experiences. I had heard people laugh and talk about funny-looking old maids or very homely girls who had the absurd effrontery to imagine that men were in love with them. Even the kindest people seemed to feel that for this mistake there should be no mercy, and that such foolish women deserved all the ridicule they got. In my secret meditations I pitied those naive women because I understood how easily they could forget the baffling discrepancy between their desirous hearts and their undesirableness. I had sworn that I never for one instant would forget that discrepancy in my own case. I never would be caught imagining that anyone was or ever could be in love with me.
And so I sat very still beside my brother in the little carriage and let his foundling sentence die of neglect as though it were an atom of naked truth that was not wanted. We were drawn slowly forward side by side in the starlight, all alone by ourselves in the sweet, lonely night. But after he had spoken, we were as far apart as if I had been a wild animal whose distrust and fear of human beings even the most generous offer of love and good-will cannot cure.
In my sudden isolation I felt as if it were all unreal. Had he said that extraordinary thing, or had I imagined it? There was nothing in our silence to tell me. Everything seemed the same as before he had spoken. I waited, half expecting him to say a little more, so that I could be sure. But that was the end; he never said it again.
It never died in my mind. It never even grew misty or vague. Whenever I thought of if, even long afterward, I heard it again as clear and startling and as incomprehensible as the first time. For that kind of unanswered sentence never does die. It stays always in our minds, ready to be remembered on the slightest provocation. It stays there always, even though it may turn into something altogether incongruous and irrelevant as our life grows and changes, a queer outlandish memento, like a piece of lava from Vesuvius lying on the parlor table.
8
When, we came home from our drives and crept upstairs to our rooms afterward, I often felt too excited to go to sleep. I lay across my bed with my head beside the lamp and a paper and pencil in front of me. Those nights out-of-doors filled me with a curious elation. When it came it completely possessed me, as if my body were a musical instrument suddenly picked up and played upon by an unseen hand. The boldness and strength and happiness that were natural to me, and to which I was denying’ their natural outlet by my fear and shyness, refused to be denied and to be made sickly and fearful, and they poured through me then in an action of delight that was healthy and bold and strong. I forgot who or where I was and I made a sort of buzzing, humming noise like a top spinning or a bee. I crouched over my pad and held my pencil slavishly quick and intense, ready to serve this marvelous buzzing happiness at the moment when, like surcharged atmosphere, it should condense and form what seemed to me marvelous words that dropped on to my paper from the end of my pencil.
I was not conscious of my buzzing until after the rapture left me. Then I heard the tail end of it, like the merry-go-round breaking down, and I thought for a split second how queer it was. But everything was queer in those days and nothing astonished me. To me that involuntary sound was altogether natural, a sort of om, the murmur of life. It was a new way, for me, of worshiping the inexpressible charm which had so troubled and enthralled me when I was a child.
My poems were small ones, brief songs; and usually one was written complete before the rapture left me, and afterward it lay there on the paper in front of me, something visible that I could hold in my hands and admire— like a damp newborn kitten that I could fondle — and believe to be as wonderful as the joy that caused it. Then was the only time when I felt really at ease and tranquil in the world. I used to lie and stare around me in a kind of blissful emptiness.
The next step in the poem’s existence came when, returning to my other dimension of shyness and fear, I struggled for half the next day before I could bring myself to give it to my brother to read. He would receive it from me very seriously, as if I were honoring him with something very valuable. But in spite of his deference toward me there was so much of the critic and the judge in him that I always waited in painful suspense for what he would say. Often he made some criticism, but time after time he said with quietness and authority, “That, is a wonder.” Once he said, “That seems to me pure genius.” I was awed and even frightened by his attitude toward me. It seemed that I had in my care a very precious talent for which I must be responsible. He told me I was capable of knowing great things. He filled me with enormous dreams.
His praise was like an enveloping garment that canceled my predicament entirely. It seemed to me then that we were everything to each other. But his life had other things in it besides. He used to tell me about wrestling matches he took part in in Cambridge, and beer-drinking parties in Boston taverns. I listened eagerly and adoringly. It seemed to add to his distinction and importance in my eyes to know that he was living partly in a world so unknown to me. Also, in spite of my severe warnings to myself, I was romantically curious about his new friends, those young men who reflected the masculine and convivial side of his nature, and soon he began to bring them home for week-end visits.
The presence of these solemn, handsome young strangers in our house brought me unexpected pain. When they were introduced to me their discomfiture was as much of a shock to me as if each of them had held up a mirror for me to look at. They were not interested in poetry, and their embarrassed glance showed me very plainly that there was something the matter with me, and that I was not their idea of what a friend’s sister should be. If one of them happened to be left alone in the room with me for a few minutes, he would hastily pick up a magazine and become laboriously absorbed. I had read that when men and women are together it is the woman’s part to entertain and be amusing and, if the man is shy, to overcome his shyness and draw him out. My inability to play this skillful feminine role was so complete that, instead of being a negative thing, it was like a destructive force in Nature — like a dust storm or a tornado. It shriveled and exterminated any ease or charm or spontaneity which might have been in the room if I had not been there. Sometimes, however, one of the Harvard visitors would be a young man of more social experience than the others, or perhaps of an inborn sympathy, and he would make an attempt to be nice to me. He would try to brighten me up with a little polite badinage, treating me as if I were a sort of interesting curiosity, a strange and intelligent child. But whether my brother’s friends were embarrassed with me or kindly avuncular, I knew that when they were in the room with me they were only passing as best they could a stagnant interval until my brother should come and take them to call on the girls up the street.
It was then that I first became painfully conscious of girls, when nearly every weekend two or three Harvard boys came to our house. I had already begun to wish I might have an int imate girl friend, and I had tentatively begun to seek acquaintance with one or two of the priggish, bookish ones in our town. With the advent of the young men I became conscious of girls in a new and disturbing way. My excruciatingly observant eyes saw their long slender backs, their narrow waists, and their fascinating mysterious little bosoms. I saw their prettiness and stylishness and the way their clothes fitted their slender womanly bodies.
I also noticed another thing which was possessed by all girls who were what girls are expected to be. This thing was a mysterious source from which flowed an endless supply of silliness. It came in the form of lively, tireless, aimless joking talk about the young men, and about themselves, and about nothing. Real girls, desirable girls, I found, all were gifted with that capacity for saying whatever came into their heads and making it seem to the young men like rare entertainment. I envied everything about those lucky, delectable girls, but most of all I envied this Wonderful silliness. Even though I knew it was not really amusing or witty at all
by any other standard except theirs, nevertheless it was that strange silliness more than anything else which made girls correct and acceptable to the difficult and solemn young Harvard students and to that side of my brother which did not belong to me.
My brother, sauntering up the street with his friends in search of girls, had turned my new values upside down. Left at home alone now, I lay on the window seat in the room at the top of the house where he and I often spent our intimate hours. Now that he had deserted me, the magic he had given me was not enough. Poetry was contemptible dead stuff compared with the girls who lived up the street, compared with living girls, foolish joking girls, idiotic bewitching girls. I didn’t feel angry or rebellious against him for his desertion of me. I went about; in a state of stupid wistfulness, uncritical and uncomprehending. And I felt starved without really understanding what I lacked. I felt Starved and dumb and alone. Just as in my childhood my suffering seemed so queer to me that I could not speak of it to anyone.
I knew that afterward my brother would tell me scornfully how idiotic the girls were and how they bored him, and how he had only gone to sec them because he had to do it in order to entertain his more frivolous friends. But I knew that there was something about the girls that was more important to him than he ever told me, and I would have hurled away all our sacred friendship and his great dreams for me if only I could have had instead the mysterious allure that those girls had —an allure so powerful and so mysterious that it could be drenched in boring silliness and still hold my brother and his friends enslaved for hours.
(To be continued)