The Three Stages of Clarinda Thorbald

by William T. Hamilton

Let’s see. This is a very difficult task. I do not know where to begin. Shall I start at this end? Or shall I take it up from the time I left the house? Our house. I was horribly alone. You will never understand how poignantly alone I was; but that is neither here nor there.

I’ve decided, even in the writing of these first lines where I shall begin. I am going to start with the now and go back. That is I mean to, but I do not promise to keep it up. It is a long story—a miserable history. I’ve sought for breaks in it, but I’ve discovered none. Remember, Peter, I am not sorry. I feel precisely as I did about the whole matter, as I did the day I walked from the house. I’ve not relented, even at this late date. I am not sorry; I do not regret. I repeat this statement in order that it may be impressed clearly upon your mind. I don’t want you to think I am pleading for pity. I am not. I neither crave your sympathy nor your change of feeling. I hope you get this point exactly.

How time flies. You are sixty-two. I am forty-eight. We are both going down the hill, and we are going down alone. It might have been otherwise. The boy is twenty-three. I saw him when he was fifteen. I saw him again when he was twenty, and again when he was twenty-one. I went where he was out of idle curiosity. I wanted to see what this thing of my flesh and blood had grown into. I was pleased and I was not. I thought he ought to have looked better. I wondered what he would have been under my influence, and had had the advantage of a mother’s love. My friends tell me that a boy needs this sort of thing to lift him over the hard places. Curiously enough I didn’t want to speak to him. I didn’t long to hold him in my arms, nor did I feel any desire to have him know me. I wonder whether that is normal. Most mothers, I suppose, would have gone to him and taken him in their arms, and begged him in a melodramatic way for his love. I desired no such thing. It may be that my life has been confused. I don’t know. However, that is neither here nor there. When I left you he was buried. I always looked upon him as a disgrace. He was not in my mind purely born. He was my stigma. So, he is of me and not of me. I will speak of him no more.

I look back upon my life as a series of developments. First, my youth—full of hope, gay, protected, luxurious, a timid child with no conception of life, a thing raised untutored, pushed into a willing marriage. I wanted to marry you. It was a consuming desire upon my part. I hoped so and I loved so. I thought you were wonderful. It gave me a thrill when you came home. I looked upon you as a super-man—unconquerable. Then gradually the veil was rent asunder. You did the tearing and you did it thoroughly. You destroyed me. I, however, felt it come and I tried hard to fight it out. My aim was to conquer the thing so that you and I, Peter, should lead an ideal existence—that we should have children, that love should radiate about us, like a glorious sun, on a glorious summer day. You killed this. You wanted money, success—futile, necessary money.

Remember, Peter, I don’t blame you for all the misfortune, as I may have been equally at fault. I couldn’t advance as rapidly as you did. I suppose it arose from the fact that I wanted you and not the world. I wanted children, and I wanted a home. I wanted to be separated from the frivolities of life. I wanted the burden of your happiness.

It may have been my fault in that I wanted to have you believe that in me and in me alone was the lodestar of all your hopes. In the development of that part of me, with no end of thought, I failed. I’ve always failed. I can’t understand why, but the fact remains.

I remember—it was a long time ago, many, many years. With what perturbation I was filled that first time you went away without kissing me goodbye. That was a tiny omission, but it was an interstice. Then I knew it came out of the blue. I knew I was slipping, that outside things were grasping you, and I sensed this thing clearly. Then I fought—I fought to recover, but although I fought I lost. I lost more and more. Each losing infinitely small. I mean each slip towards the disintegration; but to me these slips were monumental. I developed. I passed in a few short moments into another stage.

My second stage. I wonder as I write this whether you will read it and whether if you do you will be able to understand what I want to convey to you. Sometimes as I read what I write I think I may have missed the point.

In my second stage, I awoke from a poor bedraggled, dispirited woman. I became mad. I lost all sense of proportion. I magnified things you had done to me into things without proper ratios. I even had the temerity to gloat while my Father died. This was a curious experience. I looked back upon it with wonder. I can’t understand exactly how it could have happened. I can’t exactly define my frame of mind. It must have arisen because I blamed him, even as much as I did you, for the condition in which I found myself.

Of course, my Mother was a negligible quantity in my life. And from the things I have learned concerning her since her death, her sorrow over the tragedies that surrounded her life were but passing affairs which did not seem in any way to approach her. She seemed to sense nothing except her material side. Everything was cast from her as a snake sheds its skin. From her I received life and from her I got nothing except life.