Crossing to Safety (16 page)

10

One more fragment, a crucial afternoon. It is May, only a few weeks before the end of school. Noon. I am in my office eating a bag lunch and grading papers, with the door closed. Most of my colleagues eat together, but I have rarely felt that I can afford the time. Today I am less inclined than ever to join the cabal. The department had delayed and delayed its decisions on promotion, and everybody is on edge. Rumors expand to fill every pause in the talk, rivalries and jealousies surface, we watch each other for clues to conspiracy or secret knowledge. I have told myself that I am not part of that expectation, hope, and dread. I have done my job. If they like me and feel like reappointing me, fine. If they don’t, I will manage. Meantime I have themes to read.

Bushwah, as they would have said in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, when Sid was growing up there. I would sell my fair white body in the public square to stay on.

William Ellery Leonard’s fierce narrow face glares down at me from a half dozen frames on the walls. I have a certain fellow feeling for William Ellery, though I have never met him. A poet and iconoclast, he told the department where it could go. So can I, if I have to. Like him, I am a cuckoo in this robin’s nest.

Bells ring. Ten minutes until one o’clock classes. But I have given my one o’clock the day off, to let the desperate spend an extra hour on their term papers, and I ignore the bells. I pick up another theme, read the first paragraph, correct a couple of misspelled words, scrawl
coh,
for coherence, in the margin. There is a tapping on the door. Damn.

“Come in.”

The door opens and Sid puts his head in. “Busy?”

“Not to any real purpose.”

He comes in and closes the door. His face wears a scowl. He looks forward-leaning, hollow-chested, and anxious. “Have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“You haven’t, then. They finally met. Adjourned a half hour ago. Mike Frawley brought us word.”

There is such distress in his face that I say, “Don’t tell me they didn’t up you.”

Embarrassed, he grimaces. “They didn’t up me, no. But they didn’t down me either. Renewed instructorship, three more years after next year.”

When I stand up, I have to grab the pile of papers that starts cascading off the desk. I say cautiously, meaning to be supportive but not quite knowing what the vote means, “Isn’t that all right? At least they didn’t cut you off short.”

He continues to look guilty and confused. “They’re out of their minds. I can’t imagine what motivates them, or what evidence they judge by, or what kind of department they want.”

Now I begin to comprehend. “You mean they x-ed
me
out.”

There is a hollow in my insides that later, when I have had time to think, I will probably fall into and drown. Without any reason to hope, I have been hoping. I manage a what-the-hell gesture, I flutter my fingers at the future that I am already dreading to take home to Sally. She has been happier this year than any year of her life.

“The least they could have done was give you the rest of a three-year appointment and put you on the ladder. That’s what we all got, first round. Now some of us get an extension. But you’ve done more in a year than any of us will do in four or five, and they throw you out.”

“No Ivy degree,” I say. “No defined field. No articles in
PMLA.
No studies of romantic excess in
Comus.
”

“That crap!” Sid says. “That miserable, prechewed, vomited-up reeaten carrion! It’s made a cynic out of Ed. Damn them, they enforce mediocrity. The rest of us have to play the game, but you shouldn’t even be allowed to.” Furiously upset, he walks around knocking his knuckles against bookcases and walls. He stops. “What they did do, in their great charity and wisdom, they gave you the two summer classes. Booby prize. You can do their slave labor through the summer until they give you the gate.”

Hard times are instructive and humbling. I can’t forget that I have a birth-damaged daughter, just coming around, and a still-recovering wife, and that medical expenses and the girl we have hired to help Sally have eaten up most of our savings. I hear the word about the summer classes gratefully. Something, at least.

Sid wanders to the window, whose sill is piled with papers God knows how old, scholarly offprints God knows how unimportant, and books God knows how long overdue at the library. His lips flatten against his teeth. He almost spits.

“How many stories have you written this year? Three? And sold them all. And the novel, which will make you famous—they’ll be teaching it in this lamentable institution before many years. And at least two articles. And some book reviews. And the textbook. All of it while you were teaching a full load. So they pound your fingers off the gunwale. You know why? You threaten the weak sisters. They don’t want distinction around, it would show them up. Energy and talent like yours are bombs under their beds. Half of the executive committee went to college here, and to graduate school here, before they started to teach and they’ve never taught anywhere but here. They’re ingrown, inbred, lazy, and scared. They don’t dare let people like you into the department.”

He knows, and so do I, that he is talking out of loyalty and distress, not out of conviction. There is as much competence in that department as in any he or I know. What he means, and I understand, is that times are tough, and that this time I am the victim. Nevertheless, it is comforting to hear that I am wronged.

“Remember that speech,” I tell him. “I may want to hear it again. I may want to quote from it. How did Dave make out?”

“Same as me—extension. They’re cagy. If they keep anybody seven years they’re up against the rule of the American Association of University Professors that says anybody kept for seven years has tenure even if he doesn’t have rank. So they’ll cut everybody off at six.”

“No, no. You guys will inherit this place. And Ed’s got his job waiting at Georgia. What about Ehrlich?”

“Out. Next year is terminal.”

“Out! Like me. Oh, he’ll be fit to be tied. All that Greek he read. All those asses he kissed. How about Hagler?”

“Out. Terminal. What they’ll do now is recruit three new, cheap, eager instructors to replace the three of you. Three years from now they’ll fire those and start all over.”

“You and Dave are the only ones continued. That’s a compliment.”

“Is it?”

I understand him. If we were all in the same boat, he could be cheerful about it. But he has been preferred over most of his friends, including some that he generously thinks are his betters, and he can conceive no reason for that favoritism except that he is rich, or perhaps that his wife is socially hyperactive. That can’t make him very happy.

Restlessly he turns and pushes at the casement, which gives with a creaking noise and a lifting of dust. Into the room flows the mild, soft, perfumed air of spring. He stands inhaling it. Fresh air is medicine to him, spring is an eagerness, his automatic response to stress is to walk or run or skate or ski or otherwise work it off.

“This all gives me the most profound bellyache,” he says. “What are you doing after your one o’clock?”

“I’m not holding it. I’ll be reading papers.”

“Can you smell what it’s like outside?”

“A matter of indifference to me.”

“You’re a bloody liar. You yearn out the window as much as I do, only you’ve got more willpower. How about going for a sail?”

“Where would we get a boat?”

“The Union rents them.”

“Sid, I’d love to, but if I don’t read these papers this afternoon I’ll have to read them tonight and tomorrow, and that will take me off a story I’m trying to write. I need that story. I need it now more than ever.”

Twisting the cord of the blind, he watches me, and I read him. He is at once disappointed to have got only a continuance, and miserable to have been continued while I have been rejected. It shocks his whole system of values to think that he should have been preferred over someone he likes and admires. He takes prosperity harder than anyone I ever knew.

“How did the vote go?” I ask. “Did Mike say? Did anyone vote to promote you, or keep me? Anybody we should be grateful to?”

“Oh, sure. Mike didn’t say, but you know a lot of them would have voted for you. It’s a conspiracy of the timid mossbacks.”

“Which we would all love to be.”

“Speak for yourself.” He walks in a circle, jingling the change in his pocket, and returns to look out the window. “How about it? Just a couple of hours? Why don’t I call Charity and ask her to pick Sally up and meet us at the dock? Can your girl look after the baby for two hours?”

“She can do everything but nurse it.”

“Come on then.”

I hesitate only a moment, and then I fall. Why not? What good does it do to work every minute? “Maybe we’ll all drown,” I suggest. “Then they’ll be sorry. Who’ll they get to teach their summer classes then?”

Galvanized, emancipated, already in better spirits, we go down the stairs and along the main corridor of Bascom Hall. Most of the time I have known it, it has smelled of steam heat, sodden floors, hot radiator paint, and wet wool, and icy drafts have swept it every time a student shuddered in its doors. Now the doors stand open, and a sweet, beguiling wind blows the length of the hall. Outside, men students in shirtsleeves and girls in summer dresses sprawl on the steep lawn. From where we emerge, sidewalks bulge outward and downward like lines of longitude seen from the North Pole. A professor-hen is clucking a ring of chicks around him under a tree.

Authentic spring, time of hope. I shut away the bitterness of rejection, I sweep into the back closet of my mind the uncertainties and anxieties that are going to be with us now until I can find something else, in this wasteland of the Depression, that will support us. I sweep them all into the closet along with my anger and wounded vanity and punctured self-esteem and the grim arithmetic I will soon be working on. I say to myself, self-consciously and pompously, as I once said more harshly in Albuquerque, in circumstances a lot bleaker than these, the words of the Anglo-Saxon stoic: “That have I borne, this can I bear also.”

Almost cheerfully, our coats slung on hooked fingers over our shoulders, we walk down Bascom Hill toward the Union. Halfway down, I ask, “Does Charity know?”

“Not yet.”

“Nor Sally either. Do we tell them?”

“Let’s have our boat ride first. Why spoil it?”

“Hearing that you’ve made it shouldn’t spoil anything for Charity.”

“Made what? Charity doesn’t accept anything but success. She hates stalemates. Also, hearing that they’ve let you go will spoil everything for her. It spoils everything for me. This place will be a desert without you two.”

I am not used to such naked expressions of regard. Like his admiration, his affection half embarrasses me. I don’t know what to say. I say nothing.

The day is breezy, cloudy in the west but clear overhead. Our boat is heavy and broad in the beam, a scow. I sit forward by the mast, Sid at the tiller, the girls on the thwart amidships. The wind tangles Sid’s fair hair as he sculls us out from the dock. I do what he tells me with the jib. Later I do what he tells me with the mainsail. We lean into a long northeast tack up-lake. Settling down on a life preserver with my back against the mast, I am face to face with our two beaming women.

“Somebody had a good idea,” Charity says. “Isn’t it wonderful to be
out,
and unpregnant, and free!”

Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in
babushkas
they might be out of the peasant chorus of a Russian opera. Any minute now we will sing and dance to the balalaika. Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms. In a couple of hours I will need sympathy, but for now I like being washed by the wind.

“What are the towers?” Sally asks, and nods ahead. Craning, I look. Beyond the far shore, rising out of green countryside, a cluster of tall buildings.

“Camelot?” I guess.

Sid says, crosswind, “The mental hospital.”

“The one where William Ellery took his demented wife?”

“That’s it.”

We discuss my office mate and his really tragic life, his talent, his absurdities, vanities, and pretensions. He must have been something, in his prime. I wonder aloud how it would be to be sailing along like this and have him overtake you, swimming on his back in his boar helmet, with his eagle beak in the air and his voice filling the wind with Anglo-Saxon brag. Sid, completely in character, wonders if this stormy-bright lake might sometime in future acquire, because of William Ellery, a poetic and legendary aura such as Wordsworth and Coleridge gave to the Lake Country and Hardy gave to Dorset. We agree that until it has had a poet, a place is not a place.

“I’ll bet you’ll be the one to glorify Mendota,” Charity says. “When are you going to write something about all of us here? Don’t we tempt you as a subject?”

“Give me time.”

Which, of course, they are not going to give me. Too bad, Lake Mendota, you’ll never know what you missed.

Buffeted by a stiffening and changeable wind, we are led to another association suggested by this lake. A couple of years ago I. A. Richards, then a visiting professor, went sailing with a companion from the Wisconsin faculty, just as we are doing now, and at about this season. They capsized, and the lifesaving unit on the Union dock was slow to spot them. When they reached the capsized boat, Richards was still clinging to it, and as if to preserve the meaning of meaning they rescued him. But the Wisconsin professor had let go and drowned.

We drag our hands over the edge of our sluggish tub and agree that the water is very cold—the ice has been out only a few weeks. How long would a person survive if he went overboard? Ten minutes? A half hour? An hour?

We have been tacking back and forth, ducking under the swinging boom. Sid is very busy, for the boat handles badly and the wind seems to come from every direction. The sun has gone under, too, and the warmth has left the afternoon. The sky to the west is full of bruise-colored clouds, and the hospital towers on the north shore are lost in gray shrags of rain. In the hostile airs we come almost to a standstill. The canvas flaps. Sid grates out, “Oh, God, don’t
lu f
!” The boom comes over, we veer sluggishly onto another tack.