Crossing to Safety (14 page)

About November first I began a novel. Once I had begun it, I couldn’t have stopped it if I had wanted to. I wrote on it every morning, I wrote on it evenings, Saturdays, Sundays. I finished a draft in six weeks, and revised the whole thing in a marathon burst during the Christmas holidays. Two days after New Year’s I sent it off to a publisher.

Older and wiser, I would have put two years into a book that I wrote in two months. Some of my haste was a stupid pleasure in breaking records and making every minute count. I knew a miser’s joy in the way the manuscript from week to week gained thickness and heft. The routines of work were the sacred routines of my life, not to be broken. I think I am correct in remembering that the morning I took the manuscript to the post office I came home, and instead of savoring the accomplishment, salvaged the hour before class to start a book review.

By mid-January Dave Stone, Sid, and I were at work on one of those anthology textbooks that young instructors hope will look impressive on a
vita.
Stone, Lang, and Morgan,
Writing from Conviction.
But I didn’t steal from my writing hours to work on it. I stole from evenings, from Sally, from class preparation, and from sleep.

If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Eventless as our life was, it swept us along. Were we any less a Now Generation than the one that presently claims the title? I wonder. And it may be just as well that I have no diary to remember by. Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.

8

Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.

Morrison Street, afternoon. We have visited Charity in the hospital and I am walking Sally around the block, slowly because she is heavy and near her time, cautiously because there are still icy patches on the sidewalk. The air is clammy, cold in the nostrils, but it can’t be really cold, for when the sun breaks through the clouds, the roofs steam. Trickles of thaw creep from under slumped drifts along curbs and driveways. Here and there are patches of unappetizing black lawn.

We have been speaking of the groundhog. Figuring on my fingers, I have discovered that it is already more than six weeks since he ducked back into his hole on a bright February second.

“Is it six weeks more of winter, or two months, if he sees his shadow?” I want to know. “Six weeks, isn’t it? Spring should already have started.”

“I don’t know,” Sally says. “But I wish! I wish it would come. I wish this baby would come.”

“You want to lay that burden down.”

“I sure do. Did you notice how
slim
Charity was in that hospital bed? A broomstick. I bent over to kiss her and could hardly reach her for
this
in the way. She’s going home on Tuesday and here I am, still as big as a beer wagon. I wonder if it isn’t hatred that finally tells us to give birth. When we hate it so much we can’t stand carrying it any more, we get rid of it.”

“Concentrate on hate, then.” I help her across an icy spot crusted with cinders. “You lost the baby derby, but you’re a cinch for second. Fix your mind on that. Silver medal.”

Big and mournful, her eyes turn on me. Her face is broader, she looks frumpy in her cloth coat that will button only partway down. I know and love this woman well, but she is not the girl I married. I wonder if, on the morning after she has finally had this incubus, I will walk into her room and find the old girl intact and beautiful, as Sid found Charity. He has not relished her pregnancy. Several times lately he has walked clear over from Van Hise Street and got me to chug around the block with him near midnight. God pity Charity when she is well. He has a lot of energy to work off.

Well, God pity Sally too.

“Silver medal,” she says. “If there’d been twenty contestants I’d have been sure to finish last. Once, for a paper for Mr. Gayley, I wrote something on the first Isthmian Games. According to Pausanias there was a Roman running in them. Plautus. Flatfoot. That’s who I feel like.”

“I thought Plautus was a dramatist.”

“There’s more than one Flatfoot in the world.” She slaps her galosh down in a wet spot, splashes us both, and laughs. “But doesn’t Charity look fine? She says she was conscious nearly the whole time. Oh, I want it to happen!”

“If you produce something like David Hamilton Lang, will it be worth the effort?”

“Oh, yes! Don’t you think he’s beautiful? He looks like Sid.”

“I thought he looked like an irritated lingcod.”

“Oh, faw on you. He’s darling, with his silky hair and his little perfect hands. It’s the perfection that’s so wonderful.”

“I suppose anything looks perfect if you’ve had to carry it for nine months. But that kid won’t look like much of anything till he’s been out here a while where it counts. I don’t expect ours to look like me till he’s thirty.”

“I hope he never looks like you, if that’s the way you feel.”

“I hope he looks like you. I hope he isn’t a he. Anyway, the first item on the agenda is getting him born. Concentrate on hate.” I grab her arm and hustle her into briskness, calling a cadence: “
Hate
-two-three-four,
hate
-two-three-four!”

In ten steps she is breathless, and slows us down. She says, “You’ll lose your writing room when he comes. What’ll you do?”

“Use the office?”

“People will always be interrupting you.”

“I’ll lock the door.”

“But if you’re up there all the time I won’t have the comfort of hearing you hammering away like a mad woodpecker.”

“Maybe we can move the typewriter into the living room. Babies sleep all the time, don’t they? Maybe we can condition him to drop off the minute he hears me roll a sheet of paper into the machine.”

She stops. “I’ve had enough. Let’s go back.” Going the other way, she says, “What
will
you do?”

“Pitch a tent, or build a lean-to, or change shifts. Something. Don’t worry.”

“It’s going to be a lot different.”

“I’ll say. Better. We’ll make it.”

We walk between steaming roofs, along the drying sidewalk. On the left, between houses, we can see the lake, still icebound, but with slush on top of the ice. Papers and bottles float in it, and after sunset will freeze in. There are neither skaters nor iceboats, only warning signs sticking up here and there. In a week or two, if the groundhog knows what he’s doing, the dirty snow and litter and all the paralysis of cold will be swallowed by bright water, and crocuses will be popping up in flowerbeds under south-facing walls, and lawns will show faint green under the winter soot. I have never seen spring in a really cold country, but I have read books, I know what to expect. I put my arm around Sally’s thick waist.

Passing the landlord’s door with its two mailboxes, I check. A letter. I read the return address. I freeze as an antelope might freeze at the hot scent of lion.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our totally undramatic life. In any cast of characters playing
Morgan Agonistes,
the messenger is not a bit player but a principal, and he wears the uniform of the U.S. Postal Service. There we stand in that ambiguous afternoon that can’t make up its mind whether to be latest winter or earliest spring, at a time in our lives when the smallest pebble on the track could derail us. I avoid Sally’s eyes as I rip open the envelope, and then I read, but not aloud, for fear it’s bad.

Tableau. “What is it?” Sally asks. “Who’s it from?”

I pass her the letter. It says that Harcourt Brace and Company have found my novel provocative and touching. They think my characters are cut from the real, unassuming stuff of everyday life. They like my combination of irony and pathos, they like my feeling for the tears of things. They want to publish my book in the fall, and can offer me an advance of five hundred dollars against royalties.

Again I am struck by the meager scale of these successes, and by my own response to them. The letter from the
Atlantic
was printed on me in Nubian type, like a headline from the old
Vanity Fair
of the twenties, but this more significant letter leaves only a blur. Already blasé? Hardly. More likely stunned. The first was only a short story, and could have been a lucky accident. This was a novel, an extended effort, and corroboration. The sun ought to break through the clouds and flood Morrison Street with glory, there should be thunder on the right, we ought to throw our stocking caps in the air and caper and cheer. Instead, we look at each other almost furtively, not to say or do the wrong thing, and go around the house and down the steps into our basement, and there, just inside the door, fall into a long, silent hug.

Sally knows I wrote the last chapters of this book in tears, typing as fast as I could and unable to type as fast as the words wanted to come. She knows I wept some more, revising it. It had been corked up a good while—the story of my decent, undistinguished, affectionate, abruptly dead father and mother, and the glamorous friend who periodically brought excitement, adventure, and romance into our house in Albuquerque; who kept them up late with stories of far places, who used them, and sponged on them, and borrowed money from them that they knew he would never pay back, and who finally, in one of his large gestures of half-drunken good will, took them up for an anniversary joyride in a plane that should have been in the shop. The ending was appropriate for him but not for them. It was not the right reward for generosity and devotion.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

Shouldn’t we call Sid, so he can let Charity know? Sally asks, and I say hell yes, call the Stones too, and the Abbots, call everybody who was ever pleasant to us, and tell them the Morgans are holding open house and require their presence. I will go and buy the makings.

In my half-hour trip downtown I buy more bottles (including, God help me, an echo of my Yum days, a bottle of sloe gin) than I have bought in my entire life up to that time, and as I write a check for them I have a warm, confirmed sense of bank account, a flush of security even in a spendthrift moment. We have been living on my salary and putting away whatever I make from writing. Now, in a little while, will come a check that will dwarf those pittances. I feel better than secure; I feel rich and gloriously confident.

The only party food I know—rye bread, mouse cheese, potato chips, and salted peanuts—I buy in quantity, and add a can of coffee in case we are short at home. Driving back, I note that the days have got longer. At four-thirty there is still plenty of daylight left. Clearing clouds are blowing southward over Lake Mendota.

As I start down our steps I can hear them inside. They must have dropped everything and come running like a volunteer fire brigade. I push open the door and they burst into applause. Dave Stone, who has recently taken up the recorder and carries one with him wherever he goes, tootles me a theme from Handel: “See, the conquering hero comes!” Cheers. Hands relieve me of my bags.

True to the potluck morality of our time and status, they have brought contributions, whatever their iceboxes contained, whatever they could grab up or had begun to prepare for their own dinners. There is a plate of cookies on the sink drainboard, and somebody’s idea of a salad (something embalmed in Jell-O), and one magnificent item, a whole ham, fragrant, untouched by the knife, courtesy Alice Abbot’s father’s Tennessee smokehouse.

People keep arriving. My hand is sore from being shaken, my ears are blunted by the noise we make. Through the smoke and shouting and laughter our Christmas phonograph repeats over and over its one accomplishment, Bach’s Aria for the G String, played by Pablo Casals with a piano accompaniment so insistent and percussive it sounds like a funeral march.

Alice Abbot and Lib Stone have persuaded Sally to put on the embroidered dragon robe. It is a tight fit across the middle, but it makes her regal. She queens it from the couch, tremulous, moist-eyed, so radiant she seems to give off light. I notice her only intermittently, for the party is a real fog-of-battle scene, as confused as Tolstoy’s Sebastopol or Stendhal’s Waterloo. First I see her serene on the sofa, then erect in a straight chair, then standing. I understand, without being able to do anything about it, or in truth being very alert to the fact that I should, that her inward tenant is kicking her around. Our eyes meet now and then. We shake our heads happily.

About six, Sid arrives, manic and roaring, bearing bottles of champagne in each hand like Indian clubs. He has a three-by-five card stuck in his breast pocket, which he gestures for me to take. It is from Charity.

YOU WRETCHED SCENE STEALER!
DON’T YOU KNOW THIS IS BABY DERBY WEEK?
NOW SALLY WILL HAVE TO HAVE
TWINS
TO GET EVEN!
BUT HOW WONDERFUL IT IS!
I
WISH
I COULD HELP YOU CELEBRATE!
MUCH LOVE, AND CONGRATULATIONS
GALORE
!

I manage to reach it to Sally through the crowd, and we have a brief, mute conversation with the eyebrows. Sid and I push into the kitchenette to open the champagne. Alice Abbot, starting to work on the ham, moves over for us and we stand side by side at the sink, pushing at the corks with our thumbs. With a sidelong, down-mouth smile, Sid says to me, “Well, I foretold this. How does it feel?”

“How does it feel to be the father of three?”

“Any fool can do that.”

Whup!
His cork hits the ceiling.
Whup!
Mine follows. Cheers. People drain their glasses, and hold their empties toward us, and we pour. Then Sid is lifting his glass and calling for quiet. Finally he gets it. Sally, I see, is back on the couch. I move to get to her with the champagne bottle, but she raises her glass to show me that someone has already provided.

“To the talent in our midst,” Sid says. “To the marriage of match and kindling, the divine oxidation.”

They drink to me while I smirk and squirm. Then Ed Abbot, glowing like a parlor heater, climbs on a chair, and with his glass against the ceiling says, “There’s another kind of creation going on around here. Charity’s already shown how it’s done, and another demonstration may happen before our startled eyes. Here’s to Sally, may her creation be as successful as Charity’s and as easy as my old Georgia mammy used to say it was: ‘Jus’ like shellin’ peas, Boss.’ ”

This one I can drink to. I pledge Sally with special emphasis, because Ed’s is a toast I should have made myself.

I have no idea how many people come and go, though once, when I step outside for a breath of the chilly, damp evening, I see evidence in the snowdrift on the back lawn that someone has mixed too many kinds of happiness. The landlord comes down to ask if we can take it a little easy on the noise, and we have him in for a drink. About seven, Alice and Lib serve up the baked ham and rye and salad on paper plates (we have only six of the other kind). We put out the fire we have so enthusiastically built, we drown it in strong coffee, and then we start it again.

About eight, Sid goes back to see Charity in the hospital, bearing messages and vowing to return. About nine the landlord comes to the door again, apologetically. A neighbor has telephoned. For a few minutes we tune it down. Somebody asks me to read a piece of the novel, but I look at the disheveled basement and postpone the pleasure. The fact is, I have almost no voice.

Then, as we are all slumping out of exhilaration into fatigue and suppressed yawns, Lib and Alice corner me in the kitchen. They call my attention to Sally, once again in the hard chair, trying to sit up straight and pay attention, trying to smile. “She’s had all she can take,” Lib says. “She ought to be in bed. Shall we . . . ? Or do you . . . ?”