Barely two weeks later, in October, Cal wrote to Elizabeth that he felt “torn apart,” but that state was preferable to being obliged to make a decision.14 “After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet?” He didn’t think so. He could not “weigh the dear, troubled past . . . in which you saved everything” against a future with Caroline. And yet, he wrote, “allow me this short space before I arrive in New York to wobble in my mind.” He planned to visit New York at Christmas with his new love, comparing his feeling for her to his feeling for Elizabeth when they were at Yaddo. She wrote to Blair that she didn’t believe Caroline would come with him (“This is his fantasy”), and that he was probably afraid to leave without her, because “she might not be there when he got back.”15 He did not seem to realize that he would never see Elizabeth again after this visit, when he needed to “settle up things, make arrangements and then leave forever.” (In a phone conversation, Elizabeth had told Blair that if Caroline accompanied Cal on this trip, she planned to leave town.) But maybe he wouldn’t come after all. “In all the months he has been gone,” she confided, “I’ve heard from him a lot and he has never answered one question that I have put to him, or discussed really anything . . . except himself.” What especially irritated her, she told Mary, was “that terrible breeziness and casualness about the deepest feelings of your own life, and also of his own.”16 She described him as “such a childish torturer—that little side look of malice he gives you—and so spooky, more and more.”17

The essay Elizabeth published in Vogue in the summer of 1971 was unusually personal. “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” begins with a confession about her ever-present anxieties and tendency to worry about all sorts of things.20 As a young woman, she wrote, her worries were centered on “disgrace,” the potential results of her involvements with men (at a time—as she did not feel the need to explain here—when the taint of promiscuity or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy could destroy a woman’s good name). Even marriage to the wrong man could mean not living “the life you wanted.” Then, as a married woman, the birth of her child temporarily made her reluctant to travel. Working on her writing involved “an almost puritanical pressure,” but it was important to pay attention to housework as well, “if that makes someone else happier.” (In reality, as soon as Elizabeth could afford it, she hired other women to do the cleaning.) This shadowy “someone” takes on a greater presence in succeeding paragraphs, where she invokes a poem by Sylvia Plath about children whom “an educated, sophisticated man” has left behind “when he changed his mind.” The woman doesn’t become accustomed to the absence of this man. She is forced into self-reliance, but not by women’s liberation. “The brevity of love must be acknowledged,” Elizabeth concluded. Her self-revelation is heartbreaking.

A long article Elizabeth wrote during this fraught period offers a window into her state of mind. In “When to Cast Out, Give Up, Let Go,” she likens the “pinching shoe, the single glove” that women often hang on to despite their uselessness to “the longings, the clingings” of women’s inner lives.113 She writes of “painful memories . . . enshrining resentments and long, futile angers” that only forgiveness would allow women to relive “without desperation.” In her view, “the inclination to repeat our grievances, to insist that payment is always due us . . . is an indulgence that everyone must sooner or later give up.” Elizabeth concludes that by throwing away “one-sided love,” women can attain “a true condition of ‘loving’ someone who has long ago treated us badly. Then affection is not a weird, ambivalent manipulation of the death of love, but a sort of salute to its happier beginning.” This extraordinary essay suggests an answer to those who wonder how she could have loved and stayed with Cal all those years: “To think about a troubled person is to ask . . . where does he hurt and how can it be changed? . . . Sympathy is a gift, sometimes almost an occupation.” Elizabeth’s ultimate loyalty was to an ethical ideal: “Always what is most important in one’s personal life is to forgive the unforgivable.”