The Dragon's Lair

continued

I couldn't be! The gynecologist I'd seen in Geneva before we married had told me I could not conceive without surgery. Since newspapers of the day were full of Russia's latest "Five Year Plan", John and I had decided on a five-year plan of our own. That long to launch our writing careers, then the operation and hopes for a family.

But at the end of March, as telltale signs persisted, I visited an obstetrician. On a day of squally rain, both John and I returned to the doctor's office to be told that the impossible had happened. But the baby, the physician went on, had no chance of survival. "Continuing the pregnancy threatens Madame's life too," he said as he filled out the admission form for the hospital where I could get the abortion.

We sat numbly in our apartment that night, listening to the rain on the sloping roof. The excitement we'd felt at the prospect of being parents had turned to confusion, which we confided in letters to our families that night.

My father wrote back at once. In typical take-charge fashion he'd already lined up "the best obstetrician in New York." Return boat fare for two was enclosed. So once again we made that walk across the Seine to the Cunard-White Star office.

It was in the fourth century that a father of the church wrote of the dragons on the way to heaven. That's how we know we're on the true route, Cyril of Jerusalem advised his congregations: A dragon will roar from its hiding place only if it's being threatened.

My own dragons lay not in the life of a writer in Paris, but back in New York. In 1950 I knew nothing about dragons, still less about heaven. But I was on that journey nonetheless, as each of us is, knowingly or not. I know today that had we made our permanent home overseas as we intended, I would not have encountered those dragons that each of us must face. Not so soon. Perhaps not ever.

Or perhaps the One who designed us for heaven would have planted my particular dragons in another place under another guise. Perhaps there is no place we can hide where his love will not confront us with the creatures of our darkness. I only know that France was for me, and still is, a place without shadows, a place of perpetual student-hood, where I can learn and learn without ever having to graduate into the world of application. To go forward, I had first to go back.