THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
687
but as Mother said, "that is only part of it." I wouldn't really
have been afraid to bear Joshua's children;
I
think all together
we could have thrown up that magic ring of fire to protect our
immortality.
I
had a kind of share of immortality once. As always, my
soul unwithers when
I
remember it. So did Joshua. Within that
firey iron ring of Family-internecine passions, false pride, bitter
resentments, pointless loyalties-in that magic area we were for a
while doomed to live, not to die.
If
we had held tightly together,
I
think that no one, not even Vasiliki, could have hurt him.
But
I
suppose it's always the oldest child who breaks the ring
first. One has to get out, go beyond, become a free agent. And
it's probably woman's greatest single delusion that she can save
a man from his destiny.
I
am not crying now in Tyrol for Aggie, but for death, the
stillborn life-that monstrous foreclosure of the mortgage after
, nine months of hard work and promises-the cancer at the bottom
of the box, my own death at twelve years of age, my murder of
Joshua. After all, he could never have loved me if he had known
about the Prince Castle, couLd he? (But
I
dare say, wistful ghost,
you could have performed even that miracle.)
There was only one thing he couldn't do. He couldn't raise
himself from the dead. The absolute, imponderable quality of
extinction surrounded him all
in
a
breath, and he just wasn't able
to ignore that awful Presence.
I
believe that every time he lifted
his hand to paste some bauble in a new box, he felt it moving
slowly through the ether of final outer space, and he simply
didn't have the energy to push his way through it all alone. None
of us do.
But I had so much energy, and I could have helped him.
Had I been older, less selfish; had I understood; had I not been me.
