The Staircase Letters Read Online Free Page A

obviously loving craftsman. Down, down, down, always slowly down. Sometimes she would pretend that the steps she walked on were encrusted with jewels and highly polished. Sometimes they would be of silver or gold. And as she stepped down, one by one, she would marvel at the work, itsdesign, its symmetry, its sheer beauty, its honesty of purpose. She would continue down the staircase of her years, the journey of her life, until she found herself regressing into young adulthood by stair thirty-one, then childhood by stair twelve, but losing track of whatever number it was in infancy, where sleep never failed to arrive.
    Dear E. and C.,
    I have just returned from a concert in Antigonish—that name, by the way, according to guide books, is a Mi’kmaq word meaning “The place where bears gather in the winter and eat beech nuts,” demonstrating an economy of language unrivalled by anything in English.
    Thank you for all you have both sent. My heart is in the right place, I hope, but what the two of you are experiencing leaves me feeling helpless on the outside, even when I’m not.
    I like the idea of feeling one’s way down a flight of stairs in order to find sleep, and must try it sometime without falling. Do you remember, Elma, your own fall down the stairsin my Lennoxville house long years ago? You had brought Martin, your new husband, whom I had not met, to stay with my wife and me in our rented campus house, only to have me take you to the hospital later that evening, when you tried to stumble up the stairs to bed but fell so badly to the bottom. More and more, however, I feel like a doctor out of Chekhov, amazed at all he once knew and no longer remembers in detail. Lucky for you, maybe!
    I was sorting through some of my old poems the other day, prior to reading a few at a gathering here in Sackville, and thought you both might like the one I will now copy out for you, especially since it is short. (It would be even shorter, of course, if I had a complete vocabulary of Mi’kmaq words.) You might have to read between the lines a bit to see that the Old and the New Testaments are there, as well as all those of us who search for love, everything from one bite of apple! It was published once in a small literary journal out of Halifax, called
The Pottersfield Portfolio
. Its title is “Eden”:
    Love came from chaos at the first, the Word transforming dark to light, and Eve was flashed into knowing Genesis was no myth
.
    One bite and the world sang its pain, its paean of lost and found and lost again, and Mary’s flesh discovered the tree was no myth
.
    But who would put the apple back? Not I, standing at last with you, my world held now in shining hands, my love no myth
.
       Ever … ever … ever …
    A.
    I have to admit to feelings of inadequacy, as I struggled to say anything even remotely helpful to two women who were dying of cancer when I was perfectly healthy and enjoying my life. Forty years earlier, in any parallel situation, I would have felt even more inadequate. To an outsider, I would haveappeared a happy man, married with two beautiful children, a son and a daughter, enjoying my work, enjoying much of my life. But I was leading parts of my life secretly, forever fearful that a disapproving world would break in and try to destroy what was there. If any two friends had told me in those bigoted, uncertain days that they were living with cancer and writing to each other about it and would I join in, I would have been at even more of a loss to say anything helpful about living and loving and dying, when so much of my own emotional energy was spent in a search to discover myself and to understand a little of what I think I understand better now.
    When old age does not bring further stupidity, it can at least bring clearer perspective; for I have lived, since my divorce, in a long and settled relationship with my much younger partner, Alasdair MacLean, an established classical composer. I like to believe that