Crossing to Safety (23 page)

We were tired, not talkative. Charity in particular seemed subdued. She sat on the ground, leaning back against Sid’s shins, and he ran her hair through his hands, spreading and shaking it to dry it. I saw the fire glint in her eyeballs as she bent her head back against him. I saw him kiss the top of her head. Sally and I sat opposite them, hugging our knees, soaking up warmth.

Then I stood up to throw more wood on the fire, and a beaver’s tail slapped the water at our very doorstep, loud as a shotgun in the stillness. We laughed, full of pleasure. “Hey, we’ve got company!” We held still and listened. Silence, a ripple, a clink of halter rings. Stars were entangled in the tops of the trees.

“Anybody feel like joining him?” Sid asked. “How about a swim before bed?”

None of us felt that energetic. For a little while we sat on, just enjoying the fire and the surrounding darkness and the feel of listening trees. Then we got up all at once as if on cue, checked to see that no food was left out where squirrels or raccoons could get into it, moved Wizard’s picket pin to give him fresh grass for the night, made our pilgrimage with flashlights, ladies left, gents right, said our goodnights, admitted we were tired and lame, agreed that the red sunset should mean good weather tomorrow, and went to our separate tents, pitched on opposite sides of the clearing. We undressed outside, vaguely visible to each other in the starlight and the last glow of the fire. The shapes of the Langs disappeared; Sally and I slid feet-first into our sleeping bags in the sausage-tight space.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Good. Tired.”

“Too tired?”

“Shhh. They’ll hear you.”

“Can you hear them?”

We listened. Nothing, not even the earth-transmitted thud of Wizard’s slow feet.

“Well,
are
you too tired?”

“Yes, of course I am,” she said. “So are you. We’ll both be stiff as planks tomorrow.
Ugh!
”

“What’s the matter?”

“Rock. I thought I’d. . . . Uh. Oh. There. Now goodnight. I’m dead.”

Her face came poking out of the sleeping bag, her thrust-out lips found mine. She was warm, and smelled of cold cream and wood-smoke and toothpaste. “Goodnight,” she said again. “Ugh, I wonder if I really
can
sleep on this. Maybe if there’d been any hemlocks around we could have made beds as soft as mattresses, the way Pritchard promised. I wish there’d been room on Wizard for air mattresses.”

“Take-um deep breath,” I advised her. “Blow-um self up like water wings.”

I remember—my bones remember—how it felt to wake up, aching from the hard ground, one arm asleep, my pillow of shoes-rolled-up-in-pants-and-shirt gone somewhere and my face on a ground-cloth sweating cold dew. Stre-e-e-etch, extend the legs, tighten the knees, push against the bottom of the bag as a diver pushes up from the bottom of a pool. Khaki light overhead. I determine where I am. What woke me? Birds? Wizard whiffling a hayseed out of his nostrils or stretching his picket rope toward better grass? Beside me Sally is still asleep, only a mass of dark hair showing.

Carefully I reach the flap and pull it aside. Through the opening I can see trampled grass, the log, the corner of the grate over the dead fire. The dew has been heavy—while I am holding it, the flap drips on my wrist, and the grass outside is blue. Birds I don’t recognize are skirring and chirping. Was it they who brought me out of my aching sleep?

No. There. Splashings. Our friend the beaver?

I slide out of the bag like a snake out of his skin, and stand up in my underpants. The ground is wet, cold, and rough with twigs, and I grope inside for my shoes with my clothes wrapped around them. Sally does not stir. The tent across the clearing is closed and quiet.

Then voices, male and female, just a word or two. I turn. The lake, obviously warmer than the air, steams. The island lies green in the lead-colored water. Out of its brush, splendidly naked, come Sidney and Charity Lang, picking berries into a metal saucepan.

They are in sight only a moment, and they are intent upon what they are doing, and do not look my way. Standing in my startled goose-pimples, I watch them pick along the fringe of brush and out of sight again, glimpsed and gone, woods creatures.

But one impression is inescapable. If there was ever a dominant male, Sid is it. He is muscled like Michelangelo’s Adam anyway, but this morning he looks proud, sure of his power, even arrogant. And Charity? Docile female, following obediently, turning to pick from a bush he designates as hers, needing no Pritchard to give her crosswise advice. It is not Pritchard who calls the shots this morning, nor was it Pritchard, I am sure, who called the shots last night.

I have ducked half down, for I have the instant perception that if Sid looks over and sees me he will bellow for me to come over and join them, for both of us to join them. And I don’t want to, for complicated reasons. Perhaps I am uneasy with broad daylight skinny-dips. I am pretty sure Charity would be, too. Perhaps I feel that this is their moment, they should have it alone.

But also, Sid’s physical presence is overwhelming. He stalks like a god over on that island. It may be that I remember a day on the dock when, as we all lay sunning, he reared up on an elbow and laid his hand on Sally’s instep and said, as if unaware of my presence, “What a dainty, feminine little foot!” More than once, since we have known them, I have had the impression that Charity does not always match his physical vigor, and that when she resists or repulses him he can lean toward anything that is feminine, comforting, and at hand.

Do I shrink from comparisons and competitions on his terms, preferring my own that I am confident in? Maybe. In any case, I get into my clothes and go over and start a fire, being careful to make some noise about it so they will know I am up. Pretty soon I am aware that the two of them are in the water, swimming back to camp, Sid pushing ahead of him the floating pan of berries. When they stand up, they are wearing suits. Rowdily they come ashore, shaming us as slugabeds, and towel themselves before my fire. Beautiful people, blazing with life.

Being who she was, and as honest as she was, Charity had obviously made up her mind to admit her mistake, and not make that particular one again. And when she made up her mind to something, it stayed made up. All the rest of that trip she was gay, amusing, malleable, endlessly enthusiastic and interested, thoughtful, generous. We loved her all over again, as fresh as new, from the moment when she came like laughing Venus out of the water of what I remember as Ticklenaked Pond.

Later, of course, the roof fell in—but let that rest a while, let me try to remember this in sequence. There is still something of that walking trip left.

We were camped, on the next to last day, beside a brook that came down through marble basins, overflowed down marble cascades, filled other basins, and overflowed again. The banks, like the basins and chutes, were clean stone. The sun was out after two days of rain. We spread out and spent the morning drying tents, clothes, and sleeping bags.

The days before had been without flaw or jar, even through the rain. We had outdone ourselves in cheerfulness, helpfulness, and good nature. We had sung one night in a dry hayloft. We had made sport of yesterday’s soaking morning when everything except our mason jar of matches was wet. Now we sprawled in swimming suits on the clean marble while green and white water, veined like marble itself, went past us and Wizard rolled in deep grass at the foot of the cascades, kicking his feet in the air and rolling clear over. Worth a hundred dollars, we said. Good for you, Wizard.

Our gear was spread out along the bank like a
National Geographic
photograph of washed carpets drying along the river in Isfahan. We were utterly at peace, comfortable, indolent, basking. Charity and Sally, who had telephoned home at every chance—well, twice, once from a village store and once from a farmhouse—seemed to have forgotten their abandoned babies. There we lay, young, healthy, relaxed, without a care, forgetful of everything except comfort and sun.

“Larry,” Charity said without preamble, into the noise of the brook. “Sally. What are you going to do?”

“Do about what?” I said. “Do when?”

“About how you’ll live, and where.”

The sun lay on my back like a poultice. Warm, safe, and untroubled, I raised my face off my wrist and looked toward Sally, who did not move, and then toward Charity, who was on her stomach with her chin propped in her hands. Beyond her lay Sid, a sea-lion bull whose work is done and who doesn’t give another damn.

“What brought up that repulsive subject, in this moment of euphoria?”

“I’ve been thinking. Sid and I have been talking.
Are
you going down to Boston to try to make it free-lancing?”

“I guess so, unless Uncle Richard rescues us with a job.”

“Do you think you
can
?”

“Fate will let us know.”

“You’re a brute,” Charity said. “You’ve got a
wife and child.
”

“I give thanks for them. Don’t you think they’ll like Boston?”

“Not if they don’t have enough to eat. I worry about them. I even worry about you. You’re so short of resources.”

“The Lord will send His ravens,” I said, not especially believing it, saying it only because we lay under that beneficent sun and I didn’t want to look past the day. “Events will transpire. I will win the Pulitzer Prize. We will sell a lot of copies. Magazines will come hat in hand to our door. Uncle Richard will find that he can’t get along without my editorial talents. The Fairy Godmother will appear.”

As, of course, she already had. That was she speaking.

“Do you think you could survive a Vermont winter, with the baby?”

Sid had rolled over onto his back and was squinting up at the strato-cumulus clouds that coasted over in armadas. Sally had not moved, but her bare brown back was listening.

“We won’t
be
in Vermont,” I said.

“What if you were? That’s what we’ve been talking about. What if you just stayed on after we leave? The Big House has a wood-burning furnace, and is winterized. It’s hard to heat, with that cathedral ceiling, but you could shut off everything but the downstairs and one bedroom. The cellar is full of wood, and there’s plenty more if you want to cut it. You might want to put in a telephone, so you could call out if anybody got sick. That would be up to you. But there the place
sits.
Why shouldn’t you use it? Finish your book and make yourself famous and come out in the spring like the groundhog.”

Sally now had turned her head and was looking at me, startled, past her shoulder. Down the rock Sid sat up, indolent and sleepy-eyed, as if God’s finger had just touched him. “Please,” he said. “Sally, Larry, please. It would give us both so much pleasure.”

They worried more about us than we had the sense to worry about ourselves. What they had, and they had so much, was ours before we could envy it or ask for it. One sort of morality, a somewhat stiff-legged kind that I used to think I subscribed to, would have told us to refuse, to stand on our own feet, to be poor but proud, lest we become the hungry poor relations of the rich. But if we had said no, we would have been depriving them as much as ourselves.

The ethical niceties are academic anyway. Like much else that Charity planned during her bouts of constructive daydreaming, our winter in the Big House never happened. Thomas Hardy, whom I had recently been teaching to Wisconsin high school teachers, might have guessed that the President of the Immortals had other sport in mind for us. My own view is less theatrical. Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Exhilarated by the sudden solution to the Morgan problem, we decided not to move on that afternoon, but to stay in our pleasant brookside camp and walk the whole distance to Battell Pond, a little over twenty miles, the next day. By then we were trail-hardened. We had demonstrated to ourselves that we could keep up a good three-mile-an-hour pace for hours on end. If we got any kind of start, we would be in by early afternoon.

Sally, though she didn’t press for that decision, admitted that she welcomed it. She didn’t feel especially well today—headachy and dull, perhaps some allergy. After lunch she took a couple of aspirin and lay down in the shade to sleep it off. She has that gift: Illness makes her sleepy.

The rest of us took a swim in the marble pool, and came out and lay like drying salmon on the stone bank, and plotted another walking trip for the next year, and spoke of the possibility that Sid and Charity might leave the children with their nanny between Christmas and New Year’s, and spend a few days with us, cross-country skiing. We discussed some repairs and improvements that I might make, if I chose, around the compound; and what I should do about the spring that kept breaking out in the Big House basement during wet spells. Charity revealed that she and Sid had talked about the possibility that, once he was promoted to tenure, they might start a movement to bring us back to Madison. She admonished me to be
immensely
productive so that the mossbacks could see what a mistake they had made.

From that we got to talking about the ideal department in the ideal university. It contained us, of course, plus certain friends like the Abbots and the Stones. I wanted to establish this university in the West somewhere, maybe at Chaco Canyon, but they both thought it should be planted in some little New England town under the elms. We compromised on Battell Pond. We lay there cutting the future into happy stars and circles like girls making Christmas cookies.

Finally Charity got up and went tender-barefooted across the hot rock and close to where Sally lay. She craned and peered and came back saying that Sally was asleep, just as she ought to be. She thought she might take a nap herself. That released Sid and me for an expedition up the creek.