Crossing to Safety (18 page)

“See,” Sid said, “you’d be doing us a great favor. We were talking about it while we ate, and it came to both of us at once. First, have you signed a lease for this apartment?”

“Just till June first. But we can have it longer.”

“You don’t want it. Because we’ll be in Vermont all summer and our house will just be sitting there. We’d like you to use it.”

Sally and I looked at each other, each asking, neither answering.

“There’s just no
point
in your paying rent for a place when ours sits empty,” Charity said. “Last summer the Haglers used it. It’s best if there’s someone there. You can mow the lawn if it will make you feel better. But don’t clean out the fireplace! George Hagler was such a model tenant that he wanted to leave the house
spotless,
and he cleaned out the ashes Sid had been half a year collecting. But you don’t
have
to do anything. Just live there and keep prowlers at bay.”

“What about your new house? Will you be going ahead with that?”

“I don’t know,” Sid started to say, but he was overriden by Charity. “Of
course
we’re going ahead. They can’t scare us off with a
postponement.
But the new house isn’t the question. The old one is. Will you look after it for us?”

“Charity,” I said. “Sid . . .” and ended up, “Sally?”

“You could write six stories and another novel,” Charity said. “When one room gets dirty, move into another. After eight weeks you’ll still have one clean one left.”

Looking around our basement, I had to laugh. “Sally is a better housekeeper and I am less messy than appears,” I said. “You catch us in disarray. We just emerged from Lake Mendota, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, and we dripped a little on the floor.”

As a tension-and-gratitude-breaker it was ineffectual. Nobody paid any attention. “Are you just being lovely and kind,” Sally said, “or do you really need somebody in your house?”

“That answers us,” Sid said. “We are not being lovely and kind. We are doing ourselves a great favor. We do want somebody in the house. You. So notify your landlord. Now there’s a part two to this proposition. We asked you before if you wouldn’t spend a summer with us at Battell Pond. The way things have worked out, we can’t have Larry, but what’s wrong with Sally and Lang driving to Vermont with us?”

“You’ve approached it wrong end
to,
” Charity said. “Don’t ask what’s wrong with it.
Nothing’s
wrong with it. It’s the solution. There can’t be a single sensible objection. We’ll have our regular girl there to look after the babies, and she’s wonderful, she can handle four as easily as three. Sally can loaf and get strong again. We can all swim, and walk, and go ferning, and have picnics on Folsom Hill, and read poetry on the porch, and listen to music, and square dance, and just talk around the fire. It isn’t luxurious at all, we don’t do anything that isn’t simple and wholesome and plain. Larry will have to stay here and suffer, but when he’s through he can join us.
Wherever
you go next year, you can get there from Vermont as easily as from Madison. Just say you will, and make us happy. Then we won’t feel so bad about taking you out sailing and nearly drowning you.”

How do you deal with people like that? I said, “You’re outdoing even yourselves. What do you think, Sally?”

“I don’t think I should leave you alone. You’d work too hard.”

“He’ll do that wherever he is,” Sid said.

“Think what a summer of loafing will do for Sally’s health,” Charity said.

They pressed upon us, at a time when we would normally have wanted to be alone with our forebodings. They wanted to express their affection and solidarity, they wanted to ease the blow the department had dealt us, they wanted to make restitution for being rich and lucky.

Sally’s hair had gone curly from the steam of our bath, but the anemic pallor had reasserted itself through the temporary pink. She put her hands over her face and took them away again, ashamed.

“Would you like to?” I said.

“Could you get along?”

“If I couldn’t make it in the Palazzo Lang I ought to be institutionalized.”

“It might be easier for you to write without the baby around. Do you think? How long would it be? Two months?”

“There you are,” I said to Sid and Charity. “She’d like to. I think it would be wonderful for her, the best thing that could happen. I can content myself with merely ducal status at the palazzo. We accept with pleasure. But neither of us will ever figure out a way to repay that sort of kindness.”

“Wonderful!”
Charity’s eyes were so wide open that white showed all around the iris—one of the comic faces she affected when she was especially pleased. She hugged Sally, then she leaned the other way and hugged me. But the kiss that I aimed at her cheek barely grazed her. She was not much of a kisser. She had a way of turning at the last minute and presenting a moving target.

“As for repaying,” she said to me in rebuke, “friends don’t
have
to repay anything. Friendship is the most selfish thing there is. Here are Sid and I just licking our
chops.
We got everything out of you that we wanted.”

So they did. They also got, though that they would never have permitted to figure in our relations, our lifelong gratitude. There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According to this belittling and demeaning theory, gratitude is a festering sore. Maybe it is, if it’s insisted on. But instead of insisting on gratitude, the Langs insisted that their generosity was selfish, so how could we dislike them for it?

We liked those two from the minute of our first acquaintance. After that shipwreck afternoon we loved them both, sometimes in spite of themselves and ourselves. At the time I could not have told them that. I am not sure that either Sally or I was ever able to tell them, though it had to be apparent without telling.

Just in case, I tell them now.

11

On a morning in early June I saw them all into the Lang station wagon—three adults, two infants in baskets in the back seat, two rampant toddlers imprisoned in canvas nests in the middle seat. Commiserating with Sid, condemned to drive that nursery for two and a half days, I helped Charity establish herself in front and got Sally into the back between the two baskets. In the interest of sanity she and Charity would change places every hour or two.

Only as she settled back out of reach did I realize that I was being separated from my girl for the first time in our knowing of one another. She sat there blinking and smiling. Euridice. God damn.

I leaned far in to kiss her, kissed Lang in her basket, gave a finger to the pudgy fist of David Hamilton Lang, and stepped back. The car started and pulled away with hands flapping out the windows and voices calling back things I heard only as noise. There I was, alone on Van Hise Street. Promptly, dog to vomit, I went into Sid’s study and started a novel.

It was five days before I had a letter. After that they came regularly, four or five a week, and they were so full of happiness that I stopped feeling sorry for Sally and began feeling sorry for myself, left in darkest Madison while she frolicked in Arcadia.

Arcadia took shape as a place of great tranquility and order. Every morning, Sally said, Charity lay in bed for a half hour with pad and pencil, and when she got up, the day was organized. Constructive daydreaming, she called it. I suppose a nursing baby and two other children can keep any woman on a schedule, but Charity would have produced a schedule stricter than the Book of Hours without any children at all.

Besides her family obligations, which extended from her immediate family through two dozen aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws, she was the queen of volunteers and the princess of projects. She had a hand in church suppers, auctions, village fairs, Sunday evening concerts on the lake. She planned children’s birthday parties and family picnics. She went fifteen rounds a week, by mail and telephone, with her Madison architect. She knew nearly everybody around the lake, and entertained both those she knew and those she didn’t.

Much of this Sally got pulled into simply by being there, but Charity was perceptive, and honored Sally’s need of rest—in fact, ordered it—and made opportunities for withdrawal from the strain of being a stranger and a guest. What her household offered in the way of warmth and ease and acceptance left Sally almost tearful. She wrote me like this:

You like ruts, because ruts are a sign work is being done. You’d love this rut. Up at seven—we could sleep later but nobody wants to. After breakfast, Charity gets busy with the house or errands (she should wear a big ring of keys on her belt), and sends Sid out to his study. She is absolutely determined that he’s going to write something this summer that will make Wisconsin promote him next year and make them wish they’d promoted him this. She bosses him like mad. He grumbles, but he does. Then the nurse girl Vicky takes all four children up to the play room, and I come out here and sit on the porch and write to you.

It may rain later but right now it’s clear and still. The lake down below is a perfect mirror, with an upside-down reflection of the opposite shore and the Ellis dock and boathouse. I just saw George Barnwell Ellis’s white head going up the path to his think house, and I can almost hear Aunt Emily saying, “There!
He’s
out of the road. Now for the day’s business.” She and Charity are two of a kind. Not like me. If I had you here, and sent you out to your think house, and you went when I sent you, I’d want to tag right along.

Before lunch we all take a swim, and after lunch we nap or read, and after three, on good days, we play tennis or walk. If it’s raining we read or listen to records. Dinners are fun, almost always somebody interesting, and never a night without somebody. Last night it was Uncle Richard, the ex-ambassador, who is now president of Phoenix Books in Boston. And Charity’s sister Comfort and her husband, Lyle Lister. Comfort is terribly pretty, and Lyle is one of the most fascinating men you ever met. You and he should hit it off. He comes from Arizona, and is a biologist, and works all over the world. He and Comfort were married right after he got his Ph.D. at Yale, and they went straight to Alaska, clear up to Point Hope, and lived among the Eskimos, in an igloo practically. If you can believe Aunt Emily, they ate nothing but seal blubber for two years, and I know, from Comfort herself, that they had no bathroom, nothing but a chamber pot, and it was so cold sometimes they had to thaw the pot on the stove before they could dump it. She makes even that sound like an adventure.

Now he’s given up arctic flora and is working on plants that have adapted themselves not to cold, but to drought. He’s just back from several months in Libya, and he had all sorts of stories about caves with people and animals painted all over the walls, and a flint desert where the wind had teed up stones like golf balls, and when you looked, you could see that every stone was a tool left from a neolithic civilization that died thousands of years ago. I swear his clothes smelled of camel-dung fires. Comfort’s eyes never leave his face. She’s so happy to have him here that she makes me jealous.

He stole the show, but Uncle Richard is definitely Somebody, too—dignified and impressive, with a twinkle, and kind of tweedy. Naturally I told him about your novel, and he wants to meet you. Unfortunately he isn’t perfectly trained in Charity’s rules of order, and neither is Lyle. When we went into the living room after dinner, and Charity announced music, and Sid set the needle down on “The Trout,” Uncle Richard and Lyle were still talking away, planning a book on those old Saharan civilizations and the drouth-adapted plants that they and their animals lived on. So there was the music beginning, and there we all were with our hands in our laps and our eyes downcast and respectful, and there were those two still talking. “Uncle Richard!” Charity said to them. “Lyle! Really!” They shushed, but neither of them much liked it. It reminded me so much of the night she shushed you and Marvin Ehrlich. I think she’d shush Franklin Delano Roosevelt if he didn’t keep still for the music.

I could imagine them there in their rustic outpost of culture like colonials being British in a far land. I was homesick for those people before I ever met most of them. Some things that astonished Sally—hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry—could not dispel the impression I got of a simplicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished, a naturalness as artificial as the Petite Trianon, and a social life that was lively, hectic, and incessant.

While I crossed off the days on the calendar, I lived on the daily report from Arcadia. For a while, Sid’s mother was visiting, and shared the guest house with Sally—the gentlest woman alive, Sally said, a
mouse,
not at all what she’d imagined a very rich woman would be like. She could see where some of Sid’s qualities came from.

Mrs. Lang went away, but the dinners and picnics went on. As for me, I rose at six and got in three hours on the typewriter before my first class. I tried writing in the late afternoon, too, but even stripped to the waist I sweltered in the midwestern heat, and my arm stuck to the varnished desk and my sweaty hands smudged the paper. One more day, another, one more, yet another, a week. And nearly every day a letter to tell me how much I was missing. On the days when none arrived, I died. When two arrived in the same mail I fled out under a tree to read them at leisure with my bare feet in the grass.

Once in a while a detail left me brooding. Word of a midnight swim, for instance, a chilly impulse of Sid’s. God help me, I went around for several days wondering if they had worn suits. I resented and feared their skinny-dipping while I had to grind away in the heat teaching high school teachers the elements of English literature from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy. What if, luring my wife out of my protective reach on the pretext of helping us out economically and putting her back into health, this friend of mine worked on her liking and trust? I was enough of a writer even then to imagine the whole business—courtesies, the meeting of eyes, little touchings, moments on dock or porch when no one else was there. Oh, man.

I worried about the future, too. A dozen letters had produced only one nibble. It came from a Lutheran college in Illinois, and I might have pursued even that possibility if they had not wanted me, before any further discussion, to declare my belief in the Apostles’ Creed, the Augsburg Confession, and the principles of higher Christian education.

No jobs. By mid-August we would be on the street. Dreary time, best forgotten. Hot, lonely, laborious summer. No friends in town except the Abbots, and Ed swallowed by his thesis. We had a few beers together at the Union, where back in May we and the Langs had come ashore dripping seaweed, and I went once to their house to dinner. Alice was appealing. That night I kissed her beside the car and found her alarmingly responsive. Thesis widow. But she was not Sally—in fact, that little episode so inflamed me with the plausibility of my imaginings about Sally and Sid that I practically fled the premises. Besides, I liked Ed. I wished his ribald view of the academic scene could give me a clue on how to survive without it.

Even the interminable will end if it is only eight weeks long. Late one August morning—grades in, farewells said (not many), excess Morgan household effects stored in the Langs’ basement, a sack of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee in the seat beside me, I started east, or rather, northeast. I had figured out that by driving up through the Saulte instead of crossing Lake Michigan on the ferry I would save at least ten dollars.

It was like bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix. Daylight galloped, the Ford galloped, we galloped all three. Beaver Dam, Waupun, Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, fell behind. The sun wallowed down into long beds of cloud that went pink, then red, then purple. In the twilight I passed through Appleton, in the dark through Green Bay. There was a sense of dark enclosing forest opening up into lost farms and little lonely towns. A sense of dark enclosing history also—Indians in bark canoes, pork-eaters, blackrobes, fur traders, French explorers greedy for empire. Exhilarated, going the wrong way on a one-way historical street, I rattled back toward the beginnings of the Republic, toward the ancestral East that had never figured in my life, and hadn’t figured in my family’s for three generations. And what was more important, toward reunion with Sally and the baby. Lang would probably not know me. Sally, I hoped, would.

Menominee, when I went through about eleven, was barely alive. Escanaba, after midnight, was as dead under its hissing arc lights as something on a slab. At three-thirty in the morning an American customs man waved me through the gate at the Saulte, and a Canadian on the other side reluctantly left his lighted room and his coffee—I could see it steaming on his desk—to ask me if I had any firearms or pets, and turn away almost before I could answer him.

Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. Daylight came sickly on Sudbury’s blasted heath. My nerve ends were like ingrown hairs, my head the size of a pumpkin, my fingers balloons full of water. At Sturgeon Falls I stopped at an all-night diner for a doughnut and a fresh thermos of coffee, but it was no go. I almost fell asleep starting the car, and I barely made it to a place where I could pull off, lock the doors, and lie down in the seat.

Confused hours later I awoke. Somebody tapping on the window—a provincial policeman in a Baden-Powell hat. I sat up, cleared my bleary eyes and my mossy mouth, persuaded the policeman that I was neither dead, drunk, in trouble, nor an outlaw, worked my face into flexibility, had a capful of coffee, and drove on.

It is a long way down the Ottawa. I finished my novel during that stretch, revised it between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, and threw it away going up the Richelieu. The flat Quebec country disappointed me, and so did the shapeless Quebec houses covered with Johns-Manville shingles in colors that would have been unsalable anywhere else. Drive all this way for
this
? The day was going, too. I would never arrive in time for after-dinner music, much less dinner, much less sherry. It was already dinner time, and I was still a hundred and fifty miles away.

I ate my last sandwich, drank my last coffee, contemplated starting another novel and couldn’t get interested. Instead, I recited all the poems I knew, from “Lycidas” to “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” doing my best to recall them without error from beginning to end. By the time I ran dry I was at Rouse’s Point, at the upper end of Lake Champlain. The last miles to the customs station I was counting backward from one hundred by sevens, trying to persuade myself that my brains still worked.

At Rouse’s Point they ransacked the car—trunk, back seat, front seat, under the seats. Either they were waiting for someone, or I looked like jail bait. They quizzed me about my identity and the reasons for my quick errand into Canada. They scrutinized such documents as I could produce. Finally, after killing nearly thirty minutes that I valued at a hundred dollars a minute, they let me go on.

Furious, I careened on down through St. Albans. It was already dusk, but I could see that the country had changed. The minute I left Quebec, the flats had given way to hills, lakes, mountains, heavy woods. The Johns-Manville houses had been replaced by clap-boarded farmhouses leading through staggered sheds to big barns. In town I saw white gables, green shutters, porticoed doors with fanlights.

All right. My attention picked up. I was cheered. But sleep had me like a crocodile’s jaws. Twice, after turning off on a lesser road marked “Morrisville,” I awoke with the Ford slewing in the loose gravel of the shoulder. The second time, alarmed, I pulled off and ran up and down in the near-dark for several minutes. But when I got in and drove again I was still sand-blind with sleep. My eyes had sash weights on the lids, the road forked where there were no forks and curved where there were no curves. Headlights glaring in my face shocked me into alertness, but within seconds I was back fighting to stay awake. I pinched myself on the inside of the upper arm, where there seemed to be particularly sensitive nerves. I ground my eyes hard shut and stretched them wide. At once I saw something coming at me, a truck without lights. Slam of brakes, swerve, skid, shuddering stop: all alone on a dark road, nothing visible but roadside woods, black firs and spruces, ghostly birch trees.