Crossing to Safety (11 page)

Sid treads on it in his wet moccasins. He jumps up and down as if on a trampoline. He stoops to press it with his flat hand. “God,” he says, “I want to roll in it. Any minute now a leprechaun will pop out from under one of those toadstools.”

“Those are not toadstools,” Charity tells him. “Those are mushrooms. Deadly amanita mushrooms.
Ne mangez pas.
”

“You know everything that grows here. That’s wonderful.”

“Not so wonderful. I grew up here.”

“I grew up in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, too, but I couldn’t tell you the name of one thing that grows there. One, maybe. Lilacs.”

“You didn’t grow up with my mother.”

There they are, smiling at each other in the dwindling rain. He loves the even whiteness of her smile, as who doesn’t; though as for smiling they are about equal, they both have what he disparagingly calls a rush of teeth to the mouth. The rain drips off the brim of the yellow sou’wester, and he thinks it the most fantastically attractive head covering he ever saw. I suppose he has an impulse to bed her right there in the pneumatic moss, reproducing a scene between Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper that he has reread several times in a borrowed, bootlegged copy. Her eyes are laughing and alive. I suppose he reaches for her. I suppose she fends him off. That is what girls did in 1933. They walk again.

A partridge comes out of a tree above them with a startling rush of wings. They see a snowshoe rabbit (not a rabbit, she tells him, it’s a varying hare, they only
call
them rabbits). By now they are walking between half-obliterated stone walls and ancient, broken maples, along what was once a road. The sloping meadows on both sides are on their way back to woods. She tells him about the farms that used to be up here, and shows him foundations overgrown with roses gone wild, and heliotrope, and browning lilacs, and Virginia creeper rank as weeds.

At some unnoticed moment the rain has stopped. Off to the west, high and far off, blue shows, and when they climb the last pitch onto a summit marked by the stone hearths of picnic fires, there are the mountains to westward. Those too she names as they reveal themselves: Camel’s Hump, Mansfield, Belvidere, Jay. A thin sun gilds them. He spreads his slicker dry-side-up on the grass, and they sit.

The view from Folsom Hill is not grand in the way of western landscapes. What gives it its charm is the alternation of wild and cultivated, rough woods ending with scribed edges against smooth hayfields—this and the accent dots of white houses, red barns, and clustered cattle tiny as aphids on a leaf. Directly below them, across the shaggy top of a lesser hill, is the lake, heartshaped, with the village at its southern end. Hardly a cottage (the local word is “camp”) shows around the lake, hardly a dock or boathouse. Green woods and greener meadows meet blue water, and it all looks nearly as wild as it must have looked to General Hazen’s men, cutting a road to Canada through these woods during the Revolution.

Sid breathes it in, sucks it in through his pores. If there was ever a romantic who should not have studied with Irving Babbitt, he is the one. He is more Hudson River School than Asher Durand, more transcendentalist than Emerson, more kin to fox and woodchuck than Thoreau.

“You never told me,” he says. “It must be the most beautiful place on earth.”

“Not that beautiful, but beautiful enough. I love it up here. I’m glad it’s quit raining. Maybe tomorrow we can paddle around the lake.”

“Should I stay tomorrow?”

“Will your McGill friend worry?”

This is pure malice. He cuts the McGill friend off with a chop of the hand. “Do you want me to stay?”

Expressive shrug. Enigmatic smile.

“Are you annoyed that I followed you up here?”

“No.”

“Why did you run away from Cambridge?”

“I didn’t run away. I came up here for my vacation.”

“And didn’t even tell me where you were going. Of course you ran away. I had to find out from the Fogg where you’d gone.”

“I decided on the spur of the moment.”

“Because of me.”

“Not
everything
has reference to you!”

“But this did.”

Shrug.

“Charity,” he says in desperation, “do you want me to go? I’ll go right now if you say so. I do have a friend at McGill. He isn’t expecting me, that was all blather, but he exists. I’ll get out of your way in five minutes if that’s what you want. How do I know you’re not playing games? I love you, does that mean anything? I’ll hang around forever if there’s a chance, but I don’t want to be a pitiable nuisance. I want you to marry me. I’ll do whatever it takes, if it takes years. But I won’t have you stringing me along because you feel sorry for me.”

“Of
course
you’re not a nuisance,” she says. “Of
course
I want you to stay.
Mother
wants you to stay. I’m glad you came, I truly am. I hoped you would. But marry you! How could we get married when you’re still two or three years from your degree? Everybody’s starving in breadlines, and there we’d be without a job or prospects, and
years
from getting any. Your mother might support you as long as you’re in school, but she won’t if you’re crazy enough to get married.”

“There are ways.”

“What would you do, rob banks?”

“If that’s what it took. The question is not how we’d manage, it’s do you want to.”

She looks at him with clear eyes from under the brim of the sou’wester. He grabs for her hand and she pulls it away. Gritting his teeth, he sits looking off down the hill. Distant, half smiling, she says nothing, but when she changes her position, bracing herself and leaning backward, he discovers that one of her hands is again within reach. This time he covers it with his own and will not let it go. Leaning close, he all but roars in frustration and desire, “Charity . . . !”

With her other hand she sweeps the long wet grass and sprinkles him with cold drops. “Dampen that ardor.”

“You bloody witch. Tell me one thing.”

“Of course.”

“If you wanted me to follow you up here, why didn’t you invite me?”

“I couldn’t be sure it would match Mother’s plans.”

“You could have telephoned and found out.”

“No, I couldn’t. We don’t have a telephone up here.”

“You could have written.”

“The mail takes
days.
”

“So you just left without a word to me.”

Her laughter bursts out. “You found me.”

Pulling at her hand he tips her toward him. “Charity . . . !”

But she looks at the watch on her wrist, exposed by his pulling, and yanks her hand free and jumps to her feet. “Good Lord, dinner’s in twenty-five minutes. We can’t be late, not your first day. That’d be
fatal.
”

“Fatal to what?”

But she is already running. He sweeps up the slicker and comes after her like a big yellow bat, swooping down the wet hill between the broken stone walls and the old maples. They run all the way home. One minute before the hired girl Dorothy brings on the soup tureen, thirty seconds before George Barnwell Ellis drops his head to say grace, they pant up to the table and scramble into the two empty chairs. Charity has thrown a sweater over her shoulders to dignify her dress for dinner, he has comb marks in his wet hair.

Aunt Emily gives them a sharp, searching look. Comfort, at nineteen a younger, softer, prettier, less striking version of Charity, has already dropped her chin for the prayer, but lets her eyes wander to Sid, on her left, and then to Charity, across the table. George Barnwell, seeing all chairs filled, does not pause for introductions. He folds his hands and looks benevolently at his plate. “Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for all Thy loving care. Bless us this day, and sanctify this food to our use. Amen.”

Amen.

I can’t imagine Sid Lang venturing into the Ellis household without preparing himself. He probably looked up George Barnwell in
Who’s Who,
the
Directory of American Scholars,
and the card catalogue of Widener. He might have thumbed through the vast volume on the Albigenses, the seventh person in history to do so. He might even have checked the book out and brought it along in his green bag along with
Middlemarch
and
The Idiot.
For he felt the obligation to read everything, and both his passion for Charity and his respect for learning would have made him look upon George Barnwell Ellis as a gold thread in the tapestry of human thought.

Alone with Professor Ellis he would quickly have established a relationship, as he did with all professors whom he respected. He would have primed the pump, asked questions, listened with attention. But the other presences at the table were distracting, and since introductions had been suspended in favor of grace, and George Barnwell clearly didn’t have the slightest idea who the young man at his table was, Sid found himself exposed to Aunt Emily. She would not have held still for intellectual conversation anyway. She had lived too long with her husband to let him wander into shop talk. “Hush, G.B.,” she had been known to say in company. “Nobody wants to hear about your Bogomils.” Now, while Sid ate like a threshing hand (she did not know he had missed lunch), she set her eyes on him as she might have set a carving fork in a roast. That he ate so heartily prejudiced her in his favor. It had always exasperated her that George Barnwell ate so pickingly.

“You come from Pittsburgh, Charity tells me.”

“Sewickley. It’s a suburb.”

“That must be pleasanter. From all one hears, Pittsburgh is a rather dirty industrial city.”

“It’s smoky, yes. We’re across the river, on the bluffs.”

“Has your family lived there long?”

“My grandfather came there from Scotland.”

“Like Andrew Carnegie.”

Laughter. “Well, not
quite
like Andrew Carnegie.”

“What does your father do?”

A little glinting look through shining glasses. “My father’s dead.”

“I’m sorry. What
did
he do?”

“He was in business. Various businesses.”

From his slight hesitation she judged that he was evading her question. Ashamed of his father? Lost everything in the crash, perhaps? Jumped out a window? The boy was practically in rags. Could he be really poor, the son of a steel worker or something like that? A thoroughgoing egalitarian, Aunt Emily would not have minded. But his laconics made her more curious.

“Where did you go to school before Harvard?”

He had a pleasant, musical voice. “Yale,” he said. “Before that, Deerfield.”

That accounted for his good manners. Pittsburgh could hardly have taught them to him. So respectable an educational background, moreover, argued parents who knew what was best for their son, and were able to afford it.

“Is your mother living? Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“My mother still lives in Sewickley. One of my sisters lives in Akron, the other in Chicago.”

It sounded rather drearily midwestern. Possibly the boy was trying to outgrow his origins, perhaps with the disadvantage of a family financial collapse. If he was making his own way through graduate school, as so many had to do these days, he was to be respected.

George Barnwell had become aware that the young man he was entertaining was a Harvard student, and asked courteously after his studies. When he learned that Sid had taken courses with both Irving Babbitt and John Livingston Lowes, he chuckled out a story about a colleague who, seeing those two crossing the Yard together, remarked, “There go a scholar and a gentleman.”

Sid Lang astonished Aunt Emily by leaning back in his chair and guffawing like a tavern drunk. His neck was as wide as his head. He was an odd one, so soft-voiced and polite, and so violently amusable. George Barnwell, surprised at the success of his joke, beamed. Charity looked opaque—annoyed with her father for retailing stale Cambridge witticisms, or embarrassed by her young man’s outburst? Comfort was watching Sid noncommittally. Aunt Emily saw him become aware of the attention being paid him, and feel his way toward safer ground. He advanced the theory that the surest way to
be
a gentleman was to be a scholar. And what a place for the studious life Battell Pond was! What quiet and beauty, what time for thinking.

“Yes,” Comfort said. “Up to now.”

“Why? What’s the matter with it now? The rain? I think the rain’s wonderful, it puts such a living shine on everything.”

“Oh, not the rain! Good heavens, if we couldn’t stand a little rain we ought to move to Arizona. No, they’re all set to spoil Battell Pond. You know the shore across the cove?”

“I don’t think . . . I just got here this afternoon.”

“It’s all just wild woods. And some criminal bunch, some syndicate, wants to buy it and put in a cabin camp for transients, and a dock, and a gas station, and store—what’s the matter with McChesney’s—and maybe even a movie house and dance hall.”

Aunt Emily said, “Comfort shouldn’t let it upset her so, but it
is
too bad.”

“Too bad?” Comfort said. “It’s horrible. Imagine a lot of tourists, and motorboats, and all-night dances, and broken beer bottles, and all the rest of it. The cove is where all the little kids catch perch. That’s where the bullfrogs congregate. That’s where it’s fun to drift along in a canoe and watch minks and weasels on shore.”

“It’ll
ruin
the view from our porch, Mother,” Charity said.

Sid was attending carefully. “Is it inevitable? Couldn’t you fight it in town meeting?”

“Town meeting’s not till March,” Comfort said. “They rig it that way so the summer people aren’t here to vote. Anyway, some people around here obviously want a resort. They think it’ll bring on prosperity. They’re all such money-grubbers! So’s Herbert Hill. He doesn’t have to take their dirty money.”

“He’s a poor farmer,” her mother said. “We can’t expect him to turn down a good offer simply because it will inconvenience us.”

“Us and everybody else on the lake.”

“How much money?” Sid asked.

“I don’t know. Eight thousand, is it? For just those twenty acres of shore. Whole farms, with buildings and stock and machinery, are going for less.”