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Overview
Christina and Cornelius Chapman have spent their summers in Willard for years, shunning the city’s hottest months in favor of New Hampshire’s rocky, rolling hills. In Willard, Christina looks forward to spending time with Ellen, enjoying forest walks and the easy conversation that come with longstanding friendship. But while Christina and Cornelius move comfortably between country and city, Ellen and her husband, Nick, are bound to Willard—their working-class lives standing in stark contrast to the moneyed effortlessness of their friends. This summer, however, is different. Rather than moving back to the city once fall sets in, the Chapmans have decided to stay. Characters of all sorts populate the New England town, and through their first winter in Willard, narrated in part through Christina’s journal entries, the friendship between Christina and Ellen deepens, as does the one between Christina and Cornelius.
Beautifully written and warmly rendered, Kinds of Love is a heartfelt portrait of marriage, friendship, class, and aging set against a tranquil, small-town New Hampshire backdrop.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497685505 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 12/16/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 452 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her memoir Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.
May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award.
An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.
Read an Excerpt
Kinds of Love
A Novel
By May Sarton
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1970 May SartonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-8550-5
CHAPTER 1
Old Pete, out chopping wood beside his shack, saw the two women go past down the dirt road toward the brook and watched them, as he watched everything within range, with lively curiosity. Ellen must be seventy-five if she's a day, and Christina Chapman can't be much younger, he thought, but they walk like gazelles—"gazelles"—he savored the word. Christina was tall, lean as a beanpole; beside her Ellen looked like a skinny little kid. But whatever the difference in height, their stride was easy.
"Going to explore the old lumber road, I'll bet. They'll find it changed."
Many were the times in the last forty years that Old Pete had watched those two go off together as if they were kin. He could remember back to when Christina had come up from Boston and spent a winter with Ellen's family, when they were eleven or twelve years old. Christina had married into the Chapman clan, and they went back three generations, among the earliest of the summer people, built a grand place on top of the hill, raised horses and sheep for the fun of it, kept gardeners and stable boys. They came with the swallows and left after Thanksgiving. No one could call them natives. They had a smoother grain. They had not had to struggle just to keep alive, like Ellen and her family, and the difference showed in the two women's faces. Christina stood straight as ever, held her head high, and showed hardly a wrinkle except that deep one between her eyes that made her look curiously intent. But her dark blue eyes could still take a man by surprise with the fire that flashed out when she was pleased or angered.
Ellen showed the strain of the winters, the strain of a hard life. Her thin face was covered with a veil of fine wrinkles now. Her brown eyes had sunk deep into the bone with time. But she had kept her slim figure, and from the back, as Old Pete watched her now, she might have been a girl.
A sight like this would keep him dreaming for the next hour. He had moved about the village from one abandoned sugarhouse or shack to another for the past sixty years, unwilling to work more than now and then, a living encyclopedia of Willard lore, a great talker, hunter, and fisherman. He knew the rich, for he and his dog, Flicker, hunted and fished with them, and he knew the poor as one of them. In the winter he sat by many a stove and gossiped. But he had not been welcome at Ellen's, because he liked to drink as well as Rufus, her husband, and when Rufus got liquor in him he had been a hard man to live with. Ellen had managed by sheer grit, and by her silences that surely had been punishment for that gregarious man.
"Seems like the women around here have been given a grain or two more pluck than the men, and that's an odd thing." Old Pete sat down to cogitate, for he was not a man to let an idea go unchewed over, especially as thinking gave him a chance to light his pipe and lay his ax down.
Christina lifted her head and flashed a smile at her companion. They were walking under a golden and scarlet cloud of maple leaves, and it was irresistible to look up and through to the blue overhead. You could get drunk on the color. It banged like a clash of cymbals.
"I wonder how the old road will be."
"So overgrown you won't recognize it," Ellen answered.
Then they were silent, absorbed in the walk itself, content to be together.
"You can still outpace me." Christina stopped to catch her breath. "As you've been doing for the last sixty years. Sixty! Can you believe it, Ellen? Where has it all gone?"
"Seems like yesterday that we set out with a picnic basket and got lost up the minister's hill, lost the trail altogether—do you remember?"
"We were fifteen then. We could still run away!" And Christina laughed her loud boyish laugh, which, Ellen thought, had not changed at all. "The worst thing about old age is that you can't run away. Life has you all right—caught in such a net, it's little short of a miracle to get off for a walk in the morning with an old friend. As it was, Cornelius didn't want me to go. But I needed to see you, Ellen—I needed a breath of fresh air."
"It can't be easy for you, with him so down these days."
"It's harder on him. The stroke made him a cripple in a few seconds. After all, he played tennis when he was past sixty, sailed his own boat when he was seventy. It's hard with all that in you to find it next to impossible to get up out of a chair. Hard to believe it was just six weeks ago."
They had reached what had once been the entrance to the lumber road, but the town graders had torn up the whole bank and left huge boulders and rubble where, a few years before, painted trillium and wake-robin and small ferns had grown. The alders had grown up around old stumps.
"It's horrible!" Christina called out, trying to pick a way in. "How can they do this to the roadside? Does nobody care?"
Ellen smiled a thin smile. Christina's vehemence, her outrage before what could not be changed, had always amused her, for it seemed so innocent. She herself expected the worst and was never surprised when it happened. She followed her tall friend, scratching her face on a sharp twig, but at last they had scrambled their way through and stood in the tangle of brush, close to an old cellar hole where, in the eighteenth century, there had been a clothespin factory.
Now it was possible to discern a faint open path through the bracken and small trees.
"Well," Ellen said, "there's still a road anyway. Look, there's a deer-hoof mark in the mud."
"So it is. Think we might see one?"
"I doubt it, with all the dogs loose in the village these days. Why, the deer used to come right out on the green ten years ago, to get the windfalls. It's a rare sight now."
"The wilderness is being taken from us," Christina said, and then laughed, for they were pushing their way now into dense undergrowth along a stand of pine by the brook, "but one can't call this exactly tame."
"It's just a different kind of wilderness, I guess."
But Christina had not heard—she was stooped over to look closely at a perfect round cushion of pale green moss with a brown mushroom beside it. "Dear things," she said. "How long is it since we have made a wild garden to take home? Oh, I do wish I had brought a basket and a trowel. Cornelius would have liked to see these."
A jay screamed overhead. They could hear the brook trickling along somewhere to the right over boulders and under fallen trees. Everything had a wild, damp, sweet smell of moss and pine and fallen leaves. And the two women stood there a moment, just sensing the intricate, rich atmosphere around them, the woodsiness of woods.
"I'm so glad we came," Christina said. Then, gazing around her, she added, "I wish I could have seen it before all the great trees were lumbered off," and led the way on, holding onto the sharp branches for Ellen, handing the end of one to her so it couldn't snap back. "Yes, a raggedy, odds-and-ends kind of wilderness it is now."
Pretty soon the silence all around silenced them, and they were inside the adventure, for it was something of an adventure as they got deeper and deeper in, feeling their way by instinct and keeping to the road by following the sound of the brook. There was no road anymore.
"Isn't this fun?" Christina turned round to enfold her friend in a smile.
"It ought to be close to that big rock where we used to sit. There! See it? Just beyond that pine."
Here they climbed up and sat down, for auld lang syne—Ellen with quick grace, Christina cursing a stiff knee as she slipped and nearly fell and tore a hole in her tweed skirt. Once settled, she leaned her head against the trunk of the pine and closed her eyes.
Ellen watched the water curling round a boulder, making small eddies, and thought she could watch moving water forever and not tire of it.
They were comfortable together. They didn't need to talk, never had. It was the quality of silence between them that had made this friendship last and renew itself over all the years.
Christina lit a cigarette.
"You shouldn't do it, Christy—after pneumonia and all."
"Don't badger me. I'm happy." She inhaled deeply, and was seized by a spasm of coughing.
"See?"
"Oh dear ..." Her face had become quite pink with the racking cough. "I do hate carrying this decaying carcass around."
Ellen laughed. "I can hear you saying that twenty years ago ... you've always said it."
"Have I?" Christina was astonished. "I don't remember." —She pushed all this talk aside. "How's Nick?" she asked.
Ellen noticed that she had put out the cigarette.
"He doesn't change much. Lately he's got interested in making bird feeders—invented a new kind that he says will keep jays and squirrels out. You might like to try one, Christina—then he could see if it works."
"Hasn't he tried one himself?"
"Birdseed is expensive."
Just there the perfect harmony between the two women showed a tiny crack or scratch on its surface. Ellen had learned long ago that Christina could never possibly imagine what her life was like, what it meant when a cold spell came early and the heat bill soared, how pennies must be counted. What made it worse was that Christina thought she understood.
Christina was dismayed. After all these years, I still do it, she thought to herself. But because her nature flowed outward, because she was an optimist and would not dwell on the darkness, she said at once, "I want to buy one for Cornelius."
Ellen did not say thank you. She was animated at these moments by fierce, bitter pride. She said, "Nick will like that," and got up.
Christina sat there thinking about Nick, the abnormally gentle son of a hard-hitting, hard-drinking man. Either he had been born lacking any masculine drive, or something had been beaten out of him young. He had been drafted into World War II, had come back silent and sick, and had spent five years in the state hospital. When he finally came home to the farm, his father was, perhaps mercifully, dead, and it was taken for granted that he would not ever again be asked to do a full day's work. He puttered around, adored by his mother, with whom he communicated mostly without words.
While Christina thought about Nick, Ellen had been walking on, and now Christina tried to get up to follow, but found she was absurdly stiff.
"Give me a hand, Ellen, or I'll never get these old bones perpendicular again." Christina felt the strength in the wiry little body as Ellen gave a great tug. "Hurrah! We're in motion. Do you think we could find the old trail and go home over the hill and back?"
"Is that what you had in mind?" Ellen smiled in spite of her crossness. The trail hadn't been used for years. They were sure to get lost. But why not, after all? There was no one else in Willard who could get Ellen out on a crazy adventure like this. "Let's give it a try. But what if we get lost?"
"We won't. Besides, I brought my compass."
"Old Pete saw us go—he'll know if we never come back," Ellen chuckled. "Send that clever hound of his after us."
The mood had lightened. And there was something about a brilliant autumn day like this that called out for adventure, for getting out of the routine. Christina whistled as they pushed their way farther and farther in, then stayed by the brook, watching for a place where they might cross over without getting soaking wet.
"Not many mushrooms this year. It's been too dry," Ellen noted.
"Wasn't there a huge pine just at the start of the trail, along that stone wall?" These were the things one remembered with one's whole system, Christina was thinking. She would never forget that pine and the shape of its trunk, split about ten feet up into two huge branches; but ask her the name of one of her schoolmates in the seventh grade and she would hesitate. Names and dates flew out of her head these days, and she hardly bothered to try to recapture them.
"Yes, and there it is, if we can get over."
"There it is!" They felt it as triumph to have come out just right like this, after fifty years or more. "Topped though," Christina added as she looked up through the great tree and saw its top cracked off, lying caught in the lower branches. "Lightning, I suppose." They managed to scramble over the brook, although Christina got one leg pretty wet when she slipped on a wet stone.
"All right? You didn't hurt your knee?"
"Nope."
"We follow the stone wall first," Ellen directed.
"I wonder who cleared all this and dragged those stones and built a wall—not more than a hundred and fifty years ago, but it might as well never have been done. I feel for that man. He must have thought he was building a sure foundation for sons and grandsons-but no doubt they went West, or just petered out, until the homestead rotted back into the woods or burned."
This outburst was not answered as Ellen, in the lead now, picked her way upwards. If all went well they would reach the great rock from where, if you managed to scramble up, you got an unexpected view of the village, the pond, and, in the distance, all the way to Vermont on a good day. She was animated now by a strong wish to get there, and she was pushing on.
"Hey, wait for me!" Christina called. It was no longer an idle walk, she realized, but an expedition. "Hold your horses, girl, remember you're with an old lady." And, indeed, she was out of breath and sat down on a convenient rock when she caught up with Ellen.
"I wonder what Jem will do about the bicentennial. It's his baby, from what I hear."
"Oh, he's only interested in cellar holes and gravestones," Ellen said contemptuously. "Especially those of his own family."
"Well, he's asked me to do a chapter of the history on the women of Willard."
"Going to do it?"
"Yes," Christina said seriously. "The subject interests me. Besides, with Cornelius kept indoors, I'll have time on my hands."
"I have to do education."
"Well, if anyone knows about it you do."
Ellen had taught school from the time she was sixteen, until she married Rufus Comstock at twenty-five. Then a Boston girl took over for a while for the sheer fun of the thing, a college graduate, but the old brick school-house had been long abandoned. Willard children joined those of the next village and were driven to the school-house there instead of walking two or three miles as they had done all through the nineteenth century.
"Jem's good at getting slave labor. I don't want to do it," Ellen said, walking on ahead.
"But you'll do a good job. You know you will."
"Seems like I've worked for this town enough for little pay and no thanks. I was Town Clerk all those years."
"I know." They were climbing now, and Christina needed her breath for that. So for a while there was silence. A chipmunk chittered, gave a little squeak, and disappeared like lightning under a stone. Christina's knee bothered her, but her head was a whirl of thoughts, a kind of intersection where the scream of a flicker was noted, and the way the light struck a birch just ahead, or the silent fall of a single golden leaf wavering through the still air; and at the same time she was thinking about Ellen, and Ellen's style, which was to complain about almost everything life asked of her and then do a superlative job; Ellen was a born nay-sayer who lifted herself into action with bitter humor and who, if ever a person could be counted on, could be counted on—this tiny woman battered so consistently and recklessly by life. But underneath both the physical world around them and the person plunging on ahead, this walk had another dimension for Christina: the history of the town that might have been written if Jem had not taken it over—the complex, heartbreaking tale of the slow erosion of any possibility of fanning on this rocky, poor land, and what happened to people who had to live with failure, the kinds of ingenuity, courage, and sheer stubborn grit that life here had demanded.
Not only that general a tale was in her thoughts, more alive than usual to the adventure, but something about Christina Holt, now Chapman, herself. How different a person I would be if my father had not come here as a boarder nearly a hundred years ago—if there had been only Boston and no Willard in my life! Who was going to speak of these interchanges? Of what Holts and Chapmans and Bakers and Jameses had brought to this little corner of New England, and what they had been given in exchange? It was not a simple story, and, alas, Jem Grindell was a simple man, a teller of tales, a believer in all the clichés of New England history, a professor of chemistry long retired, grown immensely fat and preposterously absorbed in genealogies. For years Christina had fled at his approach. But now she was cornered.
"There are going to be an awful lot of long-winded meetings, I'm afraid." That is what came out of her meditations, aloud.
They had reached a kind of cliff. There seemed no way around or up it.
"Was this here? Do you think we are lost?"
But Ellen was out of sight.
"Ellen, where are you?" Christina shouted, and was relieved to get an answer from off to the left.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kinds of Love by May Sarton. Copyright © 1970 May Sarton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note,Chief Characters,
PART ONE A Walk Through the Woods,
PART TWO Winter People,
PART THREE A Stranger Comes to Willard,
PART FOUR A Celebration,
A Biography of May Sarton,
