Crossing to Safety (20 page)

“There must have been better things to choose. There are hundreds of good books written every year that never get published at all.”

“Show me where they are and I’ll make your fortune,” Uncle Richard said.

“There have to be books better than this one. Couldn’t you have left this one to some shoddy popular publisher? Seeing it on your list is like finding a
True Confessions
story in the
Atlantic.
”

Uncle Richard, knife and fork in hand English-fashion, considered. He suggested that publishing was not a charitable enterprise. He named six titles on his fall list that he would be unable to publish if he weren’t able to count on the sales of this one that Sid thought shouldn’t have been published at all.

Being an academic table, we began deploring the level of popular taste. Only junk seemed to sell. Wasn’t there any market for good, serious, intelligent, well-written books? There must be. Couldn’t you count on a good book’s finding an audience—small, maybe, but enough to carry it?

“Sometimes,” Uncle Richard said.

“How many copies would a book like that be likely to sell?”

Uncle Richard made a balancing, delicate,
così-così
gesture with his hand.

“How many would it have to sell before its publisher broke even?”

“Depends on size and price. An ordinary novel, around thirtyfive hundred.”

“And you say it would have trouble doing even
that
well?”

“One out of two dozen will do that well.”

Groans, the company’s outward, mine inward. So much for the furtive Morgan dream that his little unheralded novel would impress tens of thousands with its irony and pity and feel for the tears of things, and deliver the Morgans by pumpkin coach to their new home on Easy Street.

Everybody at the table except perhaps George Barnwell and I understood what was going on, and nobody except the two of us was likely to have been surprised when Charity, as we rose to take coffee before the fire, proposed a
treat
. Instead of music, would Larry read a chapter of his novel? Oh, please!

Far from unwilling, I took a flashlight and went over to the guest house for the galleys. When I returned, Sid had set a lamp behind a big chair, and they were all sitting around in the glow of the fireplace, the fire shining through the amber eyes of the owl-shaped andirons, ready to listen to some
real
literature, the kind that ought to make Book of the Month and the best seller lists but would probably never lead to anything more significant than the Nobel Prize.

Afterward, when everybody had exercised his option to be enthusiastic, I found myself, just as Charity had planned it, talking solo to Uncle Richard.

Not for the last time in his life, he was extraordinarily kind. He told me that Sid and Charity were not mistaken, I had something special, I had a future if I would work for it. He wanted to know if I had given up teaching, and when I told him I was looking for a position but had had no luck yet, he advised me bluntly to stop looking. Teaching, carried on too long, could turn a good writer into a twenty-five-watt Henry James.

He thought I should settle in somewhere and finish the second novel, which he would like a chance at if Harcourt Brace didn’t have me tied up with an option, or if they should turn it down. Some publishers published books, he tried to publish authors. I might find it advantageous to be with a house that was willing to carry me for two or three books. Flash-in-the-pan writers sometimes made it big with their first one, but often faded. Real writers were more likely to make it with their fourth or fifth or even sixth. Did I have any way of supporting myself ? No, not unless writing would do it. I had had some luck with magazines, but not enough to live on.

Had I considered working in a publishing house? (I sure had— why else was I perched next to him like a house finch at a bird feeder?) Publishing had its disadvantages for a writer, as teaching did, and I was overqualified—you didn’t need a Ph.D. to be a publisher, or to tell a good book from a bad one; in fact, many Ph.D.’s couldn’t—but he thought I had the kind of instinctive perception, and liking for books, that I would need. And the pay was better in publishing, and there was no tenure to squabble and scrabble for. He himself had no openings at the moment, but things could pick up, and there was always some movement of people. I should let him know where I would be. If by chance I came through Boston, I should call him, and he would introduce me to people who might be of service to me. Or he would give me letters if I went to New York.

Which is to say, he took me under his wing, he treated me as he would have treated an ambitious and reasonably promising member of the Ellis clan. Having absolutely no other alternatives, except the vague one of going to New York, huddling in a cold-water Village walkup, and living on love and beans while I wrote my way to fortune, Sally and I decided that night that Boston, not New York, was our choice and that Uncle Richard was our hope. Only when Sally explained the evening to me did I begin to realize what Charity had done for us. Until then, I thought things had just happened.

We added up the money I had made from stories and reviews in the past year. We estimated what it would take to get by in Boston, or more likely Cambridge, where there must be cheap student housing and where the presence of Aunt Emily would be a comfort. We speculated on how realistic it was to hope to live by writing, without a backlog paycheck. We hoped Uncle Richard might occasionally give us manuscripts to read, as he had hinted he might, and that by that door I might ease into some editorial slot. We figured out what a $2.50 novel would earn, at ten percent royalty, if it sold thirty-five hundred copies, and found that if mine did that well we would have an extra three hundred and seventy-five dollars beyond the advance. We hoped the textbook, which was also in press, might get some adoptions and make us a little, though first it would have to earn back about a thousand dollars in reprint permission fees advanced by the publisher.

Somehow we would make it. As soon as the Langs started back to Wisconsin, and Battell Pond folded up for the winter, we would point the Ford toward Boston, carrying our by-now-exuberantly-healthy daughter, my portable typewriter and Sally’s portable phonograph, and our bank book showing four hundred and ninety dollars savings at four percent.

Meantime there were these friends, this open-armed family, this summer weather, these peaceful mornings on the guest-house porch where, with my typewriter on a card table, and the thrushes and whitethroats singing up the last act of the summer’s intense family life, I could sit among the treetops and look down through the hemlocks to the glitter of the lake and feel my mind as sharp as a knife, capable of anything, including greatness.

13

Eden. With, of course, its serpent. No Eden valid without serpent.

It was not a big serpent, nor very alarming. But once we noticed it, we realized that it had been there all along, that what we had thought only the wind in the grass, or the scraping of a dry leaf, was this thing sliding discreetly out of sight. Even when we recognized it for what it was, it did not seem dangerous. It just made us look before we sat down.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree. But we are sometimes tempted to lie elsewhere, too. I could probably be tempted to lie just here. This is a crucial place for the dropping of hints and the planting of clues, the crucial moment for hiding behind the piano or in the bookcase the revelations that later, to the reader’s gratified satisfaction, I will triumphantly discover. If I am after drama.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting. Since this story is about a friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome. Given the usual direction of contemporary fiction and the usual contemporary notions of human character and conduct, what more plausible than that Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat unmalleable wife, should be tempted by Sally’s softer nature. I have already dropped a hint of that by recalling my uneasiness about their skinny-dipping.

The possibilities are diverse, for friendship is an ambiguous relationship. I might be attracted to Charity. She is an impressive woman—though I can’t quite imagine myself smitten by her, or her by me. There are other possibilities, too: Sid with me, Charity with Sally. We could get very Bloomsbury in our foursome. Anything to get this equilibrium of two-and-two overturned.

Well, too bad for drama. Nothing of the sort is going to happen. Something less orthodoxly dramatic is. Nevertheless there is this snake, no bigger than a twig or a flame of movement in the grass. It is not an intruder in Eden, it was born here. It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.

From the first days of our friendship with the Langs we had been aware of it, but pretended it wasn’t there. Comfort, one night in a canoe, told us about an episode in Greece, when her junior year abroad had intersected briefly with their honeymoon; but instead of being alarmed or dismayed, we had chosen to be amused at something so outrageously characteristic. But on the walking trip that we took as the grand finale to that summer, a trip that both Charity and Sid—especially Sid—had been planning for weeks, we had a revelation or two that we couldn’t ignore or simply be amused by.

The morning after I arrived, I found Sid’s shop already piled with the gear he was assembling and mending and adapting. We would take a packhorse to carry most of it. We would be out a week. We would walk a hundred-mile circuit by the remotest back roads Sid could find on the map. We would sleep beside mountain brooks, or on the shores of little, still lakes buried in the woods, and if the weather was bad, in the lofts of friendly barns. It would be a last burst of freedom before we had to divide and go our separate ways, Sid and Charity back into the teaching suit and the departmental politics and the house-building in Madison, we to Boston or wherever the path of least resistance led.

We did walk some overgrown back roads, leading a horse named Wizard. There were days of rain, days of sun, nights of stars and storms. We met gnarled old couples on back farms, men with weathered faces and veiny rough hands, women with washed-out blue eyes and a passion for talk. We ran into French Canadians fresh down from Quebec who stopped their plows—one of them was plowing with oxen—and drowned us in a rush of
joual
that none of us could understand, not even Charity, who had spent three years in French and Swiss schools.

We ate our lunches in the yards of abandoned schoolhouses, and among the rank roses and heliotrope and goldenglow of abandoned cemeteries, and under the dooryard maples of windowless farmhouses. Sleeping in meadows, we were awakened by the snuffling of grazing cows. Sleeping in a hayloft, we were bombed by swallows disturbed by our flashlights.

Everything was as green as a salad, but with hints of fall— occasional maples burning, ferns blackened by a hard frost. We were reddened by sun and stung by yellowjackets, we ate dehydrated soup and peanut-butter sandwiches and raisins and chocolate, and once, after we passed through a village, a tough steak, and once, after we passed a farm, some tough and memorable chickens.

That trip was indeed what Sid planned it to be, the crown and climax of summer. We came to the sixth day of it rejuvenated, swearing that next year we would walk the international border from Beecher Falls to Lake Memphremagog, or do a backpack trip, without benefit of Wizard, on the Long Trail from Middlebury Gap to Jay Peak.

I remember, it seems, every detail of it until the end, when it falls apart in the memory as it fell apart in fact. The end I will have to get to, but everything that led up to it tempts me more.

It didn’t begin promisingly. It began, actually, with a clash of temperament and will, a flare-up over trivialities, like a wink through the shutters showing fire inside the house.

Morning light, without gleam or glare. The rented horse stands patiently in his aristocratic bones, a superannuated Irish hunter seventeen hands high, fallen from the days when he used to jump hedges and ditches with a pink coat aboard him. The bare wooden saw-buck of the packsaddle demeans his bony elegance and emphasizes his patience.

On the ground, spread out on a tarp, is what we intend to put on him—sleeping bags, pup tents, canvas bucket, axe, coils of rope, a half sack of oats, and two big pack hampers crammed with food, utensils, sweaters, slickers, and extra socks. Sid tightens and tests the cinch. Vicky, with the two infants in their shared buggy, and Barney and Nicky held back by the hand from tearing onto the tarp and disturbing its careful order, stands back with Charity and Sally. The babies are only recently weaned, and their mothers are nervous about leaving them. Aunt Emily circles, getting us into a snapshot.

Sid grabs a hamper, I grab the other, and we heave them up and hang them over the forks of the saddle. But Charity, who has been giving Vicky last-minute instructions written out on two sheets of paper, looks up just then and cries out, “Wait.
Wait!
We have to check the list.”

With his hand on Wizard’s neck, Sid says in his light, musical voice, “Larry and I checked it when we packed, last night.”

“Ah, but Pritchard says
always
doublecheck.”

Incredulous, he stares. “You mean take everything out and repack it?”

“I don’t know how else we can be sure.”

“Then why did we pack it all last night?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. You should have known we’d have to check.”

He starts to answer, but says nothing. But old Larry, frisky and full of morning, and believing that she can’t be serious, puts in his nickel’s worth. “Sitting Bull no check-um on Little Big Horn. Have-um good chiefs, trust-um catch Custer.”

Charity has a way of smiling more strenuously when challenged. Her color comes up, she is good-naturedly scornful. “Look who’s talking! The man who only last night, with approval, was quoting Artemus Ward: ‘Trust everybody, but
cut the cards.
’ Well, I took you seriously. Let’s
cut
the cards. Anybody can make a mistake. What if we got out fifteen miles from anywhere and found out you’d forgotten the matches?”

“Rub-um sticks together.”

She is impatiently patient with my nonsense. Sid says, “We haven’t forgotten the matches. There’s a whole waterproof jar of them in there.”

Smiling, she looks at him. “Just the same.”

Incredibly, it has become a confrontation. You can feel the stubbornness in the air. It will show up in the snapshot that Aunt Emily is taking from the corner of the garage. The peripheral image I have of her over there, bending over her box Brownie unwittingly recording tension, brings to my mind another scene, also involving a camera—the scene Comfort was telling us about the other night, reporting with amusement and sisterly malice a morning in the little inn called La Belle Helene, near Agamemnon’s tomb in Mycenae.

The sisters sit at the breakfast table ready for a day in Agamemnon’s city and beehive tomb. Charity has on the chair beside her the product of her constructive daydreaming: camera, binoculars, guidebook, notebook,
Greek for Travelers,
a knitted woolen Cretan bag containing Kleenex, aspirin, antacid tablets, sunglasses (the November light across the Argive plain is diamond-bright), flashlight (the tomb may be dark). The honeymoon journey is two months old. Comfort joined it two days ago, in Náŭplion. The three of them are the only guests at La Belle Helene. The table is littered with the crumbs of their breakfast rolls, their coffee cups contain the sludge of their coffee. In the doorway the proprietress lurks, listening with Greek xenophilia to their conversation.

Eventually Charity looks at her watch. “What on earth can be
keeping
him? We don’t want to lose the whole morning.”

“Didn’t you say his hay fever is bothering him?”

“He likes to make the most of that. Maybe I’d better . . .”

At that moment he appears. He has his handkerchief in his hand, and he sneezes three times crossing the dining room. His eyes are red, and he sniffles. Charity bursts out laughing.

He looks annoyed. “What’s so fuddy?”

“You are. You look so
lugubrious.
”

“I
feel
lugubrious.”

“Well, you can’t,” Charity says. “You’ll just have to brace up, because we’ve got to see
everything
here today if we’re going to Pylos tomorrow.”

He continues to sniffle and wipe his eyes. The proprietress comes and pours coffee and goes away again, heavy in black dress and slippers. Comfort says sympathetically, “You sound terribly stuffed. What could be blooming, this time of year?”

He shrugs. “I do’ doe. Idsect spray, baybe. Roach powder? The place is crawlig with roaches.”

“You’ll just have to get on top of it,” Charity says. “Have some coffee. Eat something, you’ll feel better. Oh, come
on
! Don’t be such a baby! Here, I’ll take your picture and you can carry it around to remind you how not to look on your honeymoon.”

She picks up the camera and points it at him. He frowns, shaking his head, and turns his face into his handkerchief to sneeze again. When his face comes up, the camera is still aimed at him. “Don’t!” he says sharply.

And there it is. Confrontation. Challenge and response. “Why, of course I will if I want to,” she says.

His voice rises. “I’m asking you, don’t snap that thing.”

She puts her eye to the finder, aims, and clicks the shutter. Furiously he stands up. For a moment he seems to grope for words. Then he goes out, back toward the room.

Comfort says nothing. Charity, though she smiles, is a little tight around the mouth, and her cheekbones are pink. “He’ll be back,” she says. “Anyway, I didn’t take it. There’s no film in the camera. But I couldn’t let him get away with that, telling me what I can and can’t do. Could I?”

The moral, Comfort says, is not to accept an invitation to any honeymoon except your own. But the instant, fighting assertion of will that Charity has demonstrated is something Comfort knows from way back. It is what she grew up with as Charity’s younger sister. It is what caused so many clashes between Charity and Aunt Emily. It is what shows now while Wizard waits patiently to be loaded.

For a second or two Sid stands looking at the ground, his eyes veiled. Then he unhooks the hamper from his side of the saddle. I do the same. We spill the painstakingly packed contents onto the tarp. Expressionless, Sid turns his hamper upside down to show that it is empty—a little angry showmanship there. Charity gets out her stenographic notebook and a pencil. Sally discreetly gives her attention to the babies side by side in their buggy.

For the next half hour I hand things to Sid one at a time and he repacks them while Charity checks them off. Aunt Emily says her good-byes and leaves—time to get George Barnwell fed and off to his think house. Finally the tarp is clear except for tents, sleeping bags, axe, oats, and ropes. Consulting her pad, Charity asks, “Where’s the tea?”

An extraordinary expression passes over Sid’s face—defeat? outrage? resignation? the
wish
for resignation?—and he says, “In here. You just checked it off.”

“No, I didn’t.” Then, when he starts to speak, “I’m sorry, Sid, I
didn’t.
”

“I called it out.”

“You can’t have.”

I expect him to call on me to back him, and there is nothing I would so happily avoid. But he says nothing. Stalemate. At last he says, almost surlily, “What if it isn’t there? Let’s get started. Do we need tea? We’ve got coffee.”

“Tea is lighter to carry,” Charity says, as if reciting a lesson. “You can take enough tea for
months
and only add ounces to your load. Pritchard says the Hudson Bay York boats
never
carried coffee, only tea. They stopped to boil the pot every noon. Tea kept them going.”

This extraordinary speech we all greet with silence. The silence lengthens while Sid stares at her. Finally he says, “Are we going in a York boat? Are we going for months? Will it help the weight problem to carry tea if we’re taking coffee too? Anyway the tea’s in there, I know it is.”

“Then why don’t I have it checked off ?”

The answer to that is unthinkable. Standing on the sidelines, I have the impression that somebody should laugh. Me? No. Charity has to know how preposterous she is being, but having said what she has said and taken the stand she has taken, she is planted, she will not budge. Somebody else can budge, and if Sid does, we’ll be unpacking and repacking those hampers all over again.