Endgame by May Sarton

Author:May Sarton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504017947
Publisher: Open Road Media

Saturday, December 22

Between four and seven I lay awake in a waking nightmare over the war—the war that is almost bound to happen and hasn’t happened. And the strange darkness that we’re in while we wait and the extraordinary flightiness of our president, who seems to have no real policy. When the war starts, what then? If we win, what then? Who knows? Who knows what’s going to happen? One simply suffers heartbreak thinking about it and the four hundred thousand or more families who will have a dismal Christmas this year. One has the feeling that Hussein is simply playing for time, that he thinks that if he holds out long enough things will fall apart, that the allies will not sustain the effort. Of course, that is partly why George Bush is being so adamant and so violent. He’s trying desperately to hang on to the reins. There is something upsetting and even futile about this. No American can be told that we are going to throw twenty thousand lives of Americans away for a slight reduction in the price of oil. It is a grotesque idea. As far as Kuwait goes, there are argments on both sides. It was not a democracy, that’s for sure, but that they have suffered, that they have been very badly treated, there’s no doubt. If, as one general said recently, we throw everything into the first few hours and win, that would be an optimum end, but if we don’t and then have to go on for months it’s going to be a sorry, brutal, brutalizing war.

Meanwhile here at home Susan is making a hearth and Christmas house of this house. It would be, God knows, desolate without her. Janice, who usually comes and makes fish chowder on Christmas Eve, can’t come because Priscilla’s friend Angela is dying of cancer in Westminster. Janice must go and be with Priscilla during these last terrible hours as Angela’s life wanes.

I’m hoping that this afternoon we’ll be able to see Katharine Hepburn in that poignant film Summertime. More than any other film in which I’ve seen her this brings out the tenderness and the really deep capacity for love that she proved in her long relation with Spencer Tracy, who could not divorce because he was Catholic—a long, faithful love affair. I think of her nursing him when he was so ill, bringing him soup that she made, being at the same time outside the family, which must have been hard.

Rod Kessler, when he came the other day, took a photograph of me sitting in the chaise longue where I am all day long. It was not with a flash and there I sit—a really very old lady. I’m shocked to see it. Luckily inside myself I don’t see the lines, I don’t see the really appallingly frail and old-looking woman that I have become. The long illness may have something to do with it. If I had not been ill I would presumably not look quite so old.

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