Crossing to Safety (24 page)

The marble basins lasted only a few hundred yards. Then the mountain steepened, the woods thickened, the gulch deepened and became impassable, so that we were forced up and around, following a trail worn by animals or fishermen, up through dense brush, across a swale waist-high in ferns (ostrich ferns, Sid said, remembering past instruction), and finally out onto a stony level. We were sweating; the air was still. We started together across the open.

And suddenly a misty coolness breathed in our faces, we heard the sounds of water, stereophonic, many-toned, reverberant. The earth gaped before us, and we looked down into a fantastic gulch, shadowed and light-shot, where the stream appeared and vanished and appeared again through grottoes and potholes as slick and twisty as the waterslide at an amusement park. Below us on the right the water burst from the rock and fell ten or fifteen feet into a green pool. Opalescent bubbles streamed along the wall, currents stirred the pool into whorls and upwellings. At its lower end, the water swelled out over a lip and into a second fall, which we could not see but could tell by its rainbow. Down below the second pool, the stream twisted in and out of sight.

“My God,” Sid said. “Can there
be
such a place?”

I expected poetry. Sometimes I have joined Charity in mocking Sid’s habit of bursting into quotations whenever he meets something sublime. He drips poetry as Pavlov’s dog salivated, on cue. No Folsom Hill sunset or druidical old maple or green pocket of woods is safe from him. Here, at the very least, I should hear about Alph, the sacred river, running through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

But within two seconds I realized that it was my mind, not his, that Coleridge invaded. After all, we had been programmed in the same system, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the best that has been known and said in the world during man’s long struggle upward from spontaneity to cliché. That was one of the things we had most in common, and I learned something about us both during the minute or two we stood looking. We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocket.

In this case it was the pilgrim who was more spontaneous in his response. He wagged his head, smiling delightedly, his eyes shining. Then he took off his glasses and laid them carefully on the ground. He unbuttoned and tore off his shirt. “This calls for a baptism,” he said.

For the best part of an hour we played in that rock-and-water funhouse, diving off the brink of the falls, swimming the pool, diving off the second fall, climbing up out of the second pool, sliding down the twisting chute below it, and scrambling back up the cliff to dive and slide again. We stood up to our necks in the seethe and bubble of water, assuring each other that we had to bring the girls up here, tonight or the first thing in the morning, to give them a chance at it before we started our walk home. We revised next year’s itinerary so that we would end up in this same magical place. And if next year, why not every year? Why not make this our place of refreshment and renewal, a retreat that we revealed to no one, keeping it a secret between ourselves and the few locals who might know it?

It felt like a purification before the next fateful, hopeful chapter of our lives. Up to our chins in the water that foamed through its marble bowl, tiptoeing the smooth bottom to keep our noses above the surface, the light wavering and winking down on us and flickering off the curved walls, trees overhanging us and the sky beyond those, and all around and through us, a soul-massage, the rush and patter and tinkle of water and the brush and break of bubbles. It was a present that made the future tingle.

What I didn’t know as I stood blissful in the foam was that I had begun to foam too, though I hadn’t yet felt the salt.

I felt it soon enough. We came down after five, and were met by Charity at the edge of the camp. She was distracted, close to infuriated by our long absence. She would have come hunting us, but hadn’t dared leave Sally, who was burning up with fever, her head splitting so that the lightest jar or footfall made her moan, her neck and back aching. “She’s really
sick,
” Charity said. “It’s not just a headache. We’ve got to get her to a doctor.”

I confess that I hoped her irritation at us made her exaggerate. But when I went over to where Sally lay on her sleeping bag I found her on her back, her parted lips enameled with fever, her breath coming hoarsely through her mouth. She heard me, and her eyes opened, but after the first wincing look they closed. I was not sure she recognized me; and when I put my hand on her forehead to feel how hot she was, she rolled her head away and cried out with pain. She said something and I could not understand her wandering voice. I tiptoed back to where Sid and Charity stood, and we had an anxious huddle.

Within a half hour Sid had improvised a hackamore out of a halter and two lead ropes, and was riding Wizard bareback down the brook, headed for the nearest village, seven or eight miles away. Charity was sitting by Sally’s sleeping bag, every now and then wringing out a towel in a bucket of water and laying it across Sally’s eyes. And I was assembling the gear, grimly packing hampers, rolling up bags and tarps and getting it all in a pile to be carried out somehow, sometime, to the road where the car that Sid would summon would meet us.

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.

II

1

Sally called from inside. I went in and helped her dress and held the door open for her and brought her folding high chair out onto the porch. Sitting down in that is not the collapse that sitting down on an ordinary chair is, and its arms give her something to push against when she wants to stand again. She sat there breathing deeply, or as deeply as she
can
breathe.

“Doesn’t it smell fresh and wonderful! Have you just been sitting here?”

“That’s all.”

“Still feeling sad?”

“You invented that.”

“You were feeling something. Maybe you were just pensive.”

“That’s it. I’ll settle for pensive.”

“I guess there’s reason. Have you seen anybody?”

“Not a soul.”

She started to say, “Doesn’t it seem a little odd . . .” and then I saw her eyes focus on something beyond and below. I turned, and there were Hallie and Moe, standing in the path in shorts, beaming at us.

They made a striking pair, Baltic married to Mediterranean. She is tall, fair, and blue-eyed like her father; he is pear-shaped, Jewish, swarthy as Sennacherib. For the week before they were married, he lived with us in this guest cottage, and we kept him out of the way of the bride and the family and the preparations, and learned to know and like him well. At first we wondered how a Jew, ten years older than this adored daughter, would blend into the New England matriarchy, but we needn’t have. The matriarchy simply unhinged its jaw and swallowed him as it swallows all sons-in-law.

Sally from her high chair was sending them back their smiles. It was plain in her face, the slight trembling, the eagerness below the surface of her serenity, how glad she was to be with them again. They are like our own; in every way but birth they
are
our own.

One after the other they came bounding up the steps to lean and kiss her. I saw them hold back from embracing her too hard and perhaps hurting her. I saw her hand, the half-clenched one, fold over each bent back in turn, pressing, and it struck me in a way it had never struck me before (why not? why ever not?) how touching and attractive the gestures of human affection are. Moe pumped my hand. Hallie kissed me. We could not keep from smiling and smiling.

“Are you rested?” Hallie said. “We didn’t want to come too early.”

“You’re just right,” Sally said. “I had two lovely sleeps, one last night and one after
hazari,
and Larry’s already taken a walk.”

“Has he cut any wood? That used to be the pattern. You’d hardly arrive before I’d hear you and Dad sawing and splitting like a couple of poor woodcutters in a fairy tale.” She did not wait for a response. “How about brunch? Could you eat something?”

“Don’t go to any trouble,” I said. “Any little snack will do. Maybe half a papaya? Orange juice? Cereal with some Vermont raspberries? Eggs Benedict and a little ham? Muffins of some kind, or a waffle? Coffee?”

Hallie laughed like her mother. “Dream on. The girls ate early so they could go with Lyle to Montpelier. They might have left some Rye Krisp and cottage cheese.”

“Some welcome,” I said. “How
are
those twin monsters we’ve never seen?”

“Overfed,” Moe said. “Inexhaustible. Exhausting. P-p-p-praise God Lyle’s got them till the picnic.”

“It all sounds so natural,” Sally said happily. “So as usual. I want to hear all about you. Is the whole family here?”

“If we were, it wouldn’t be as usual. Nick
was
here, but he had to go back to Ecuador. Barney and Peter will be up today, Lyle’s picking them both up at the airport. David’s been living here since last fall. He built himself a sort of
yurt
up on the hill and lives like a Mongol. Mom must have written you.”

“Nearly everybody,” Sally said. “It is critical, then. How long does she have?”

It is hard for Hallie to look grave even in grave situations. Like her mother, she was made for smiling, and she smiled now, a rueful, puckered flash. “Two weeks? A week? She holds herself together by willpower, but she’s terribly weak and thin, and eats hardly anything, and has to rest a lot. You know her, though.
She’ll
decide when it’s time. For one thing, today’s her birthday . . .”

“Oh, Lord! It is! It never crossed my. . . . That’s why the picnic. Oh, I should have remembered!”

“Don’t worry about presents,” Hallie said. “You’re her present. Don’t think she didn’t have that in mind, too. She lies up there in her lounge with her notebook, and plots like a Mafia godfather. She isn’t going until everything is in order. She’s been through all her papers and burned most of them. She gave each of us the book she kept on us from the time we were born. That really made me weep. You have this idea of her as the boss woman with all the reins in her hands, telling everybody what’s best for them, and then you look in this baby book and see her watching every move you make, loving you and studying you and hoping for you and predicting what you might turn into.”

“I know,” Sally said. “I’ve seen those books.”

“And she’s been having the grandchildren in, one per afternoon. Last visits. That’ll tell you everything. Monday it was the twins, they went together. Yesterday it was Margie. You remember Margie. Barney’s oldest.”

“Of course. She must be all grown up.”

“Half,” Hallie said. “And miserable. Barney and Ethel are splitting up, did you know? It’s bitter—shouting, quarrels—awful. They can’t live in the cottage together, so whenever he comes up from Hartford she moves with the children over to Aunt Comfort’s.”

“You’d think they’d call a truce.”

“Till Mom goes. Yes. Ethel might, but not Barney. He thinks Mom takes Ethel’s side against him. Which, of course, she does. Anyway, Margie came back crying, and cried the rest of the afternoon.”

“Poor child.”

“It’s a mess. Not just that Mom’s going to die. She makes no bones about that—cracks
jokes,
if you can believe it. I don’t suppose it’s the split that bothers Margie so much, either. She has to be used to that by now. But she saw this stream of grandchildren going up to the Ridge, pretty solemn, really, and then it came her turn. She said she came out feeling she’d been checked off one of Mom’s to-do lists. She felt completely finished, as if the world had ended. And she loves her mother and her granny but she sort of sides with Barney and Dad.”

“Sid?” I said. “Does he take sides in this? And how is he holding up?”

Hallie answered only the second question. “About as you’d expect.”

We waited, but she didn’t offer any more. An indefinite awkwardness settled like pollen on the porch. Moe finally scattered it. “How about that food? I don’t know about y-y-you, but I’m starved.”

“Me too,” Sally said. She unhooked her canes from the arm of her chair.

Moe rushed to help. His sensitivity is more acute than his muscular coordination. Several times Sally and I have seen him on
Today
or some other broadcast as he explains or predicts the economy, and remarked on how much faster his head works than his tongue can. His wisdom comes off the air as a slurred stammer. If he wasn’t such a tangle-tongue he would be the chief economic adviser to every Democratic administration during his lifetime. You have to read his books and articles to know how bright he is, and you have to know him personally to comprehend how much gentleness and consideration his clumsiness obscures.

To keep him from getting in the road, I said, “Take care of the chair, will you, Moe?”

With my hands in Sally’s armpits I lifted her to her feet. Moe pulled the chair out of the way. Hallie was watching with a wincing, unwilling expression on her face. Though Sally has been in irons since before Hallie was born—we have always assumed, from the evidence, that Hallie was conceived that night on Ticklenaked Pond—it has been eight years since we have seen each other, and I suppose it is a shock to her to see afresh how helpless leglessness can be.

When Sally had planted her canes and was turning, Moe again jumped to help. She gave him her serene smile. “Thanks. I can manage.”

“The steps?”

“I can manage.”

“You’ve heard of a hog on ice,” I said. “She makes the independence of a hog on ice look timid and tentative.”

Reluctantly he fell back. Sally swung to the top of the steps, leaned and planted her canes on the step below, swung her iron-bound dangling legs, just scraping the porch boards, and made it down the first step. Then the second. Then the ground. Moe, entangling the chair in the raspberry bushes, hovered close behind her as she lurched into the path. He was in my road, for I wanted to be close. If she caught a cane or hit a soft spot it could be bad. She has had a broken hip and a broken wrist to demonstrate that she isn’t as invulnerable as she acts.

I couldn’t get around him, but after a few lurching steps Sally took care of herself. She stopped, turned, thrust out her lips humorously, and opened her eyes wide. “Moe, I love you, but if you keep offering me a gentlemanly arm I’m going to fall on my face.”

She made it a laughing matter, and we laughed. Moe, as I edged past him and got behind Sally, shook his head at me in admiration. Sally has always been a legend among the Langs and Ellises for her gameness. And why not?

The path was narrower and more overgrown than it would have been if Sid had still been living in the compound. Then it widened, and we were at his old think house/shop—weathered shingles, sagging porch, cobwebs in the window corners.

Sally stopped to take it in. “It looks absolutely the same as it used to.”

“It ought to,” Hallie said. “We haven’t touched it.”

“Since they moved up to the Ridge?” I said. “That was the summer you got married. Eight years ago. How come you haven’t taken this over, Moe?”

“What do I need of a shop? I can’t fix a leaky t-t-tap. For a study I use the downstairs bedroom.”

“It’s still Dad’s hidey-hole,” Hallie said. “The Ridge was Mom’s project. Remember how she had the Bruce boys cutting with chain-saws all one summer and fall to clear the road? The Turnpike, we used to call it. It’s grown in some, but it’s still wider than a lot of town roads. Dad never had much to do with any of that. His heart’s down here. He likes to keep this place for mending furniture, and stenciling names on mailboxes, and watching warblers, and keeping his journal, and writing poems.”

“He’s still writing poems.”

Sideward flash of eyes, downward curve of mouth. “Wouldn’t he?”

“Your mother used to think his poetry was a waste of time.”

Hallie laughed. “She still does. Especially since last spring when she found out he’d written one to a girl student.”

“My goodness,” Sally said, astonished. “Don’t tell me. He was always so much in her apron pocket.”

“He still is. This wasn’t any Abelard and Heloise, just sort of soft-headed. He was her adored professor, she was his adoring disciple. I guess he liked being adored. But it sure irritated Mom.”

So nothing much had changed. Sid was still trying to go up a road that was blocked by her thought police, she was still trying to keep him from doing something that she thought embarrassingly amateur. To change the subject, I said, “Could I take a look inside? I used to envy him this place.”

“Of course. Sally, can you make it up there?”

“I’ll wait here. You go ahead. You too, Moe, if you want.”

“I’ll wait with you,” Moe said, and offered to unfold her chair.

She cried out, “Moe, you’re too gallant! I can stand here perfectly safely. Really.”

Hallie and I went up on the porch and I slid open the barn door. There lay the sun in its shortened late-morning rectangle, just as it used to lie when I came past before swim time and ventured to intrude (he welcomed intrusions) summer after summer.

Every tool was in its place. The foot-powered grindstone, which he liked to call a grinstun in the Vermont fashion, stood like a paleolithic bicycle in the middle of the floor, with its stone wheel and its iron seat and its funnel-shaped water can. The anvil was where it had always been. There was the bench with its several vises. There was the paint locker, such a paint locker as I had copied when we moved to Pojoaque, but when I opened the door I saw how this one differed from mine. These cans were arranged by size. They had no slops of paint down their sides. Their lids were firmly on. Each can wore a circlet of masking tape marked with a felt pen:
Big
House Kitchen. Children’s House Trim. Guest House Bath.

On the pegboard wall were the carpenter’s tools, not a power tool among them, all of them designed for doing things the hard hand way. Each hung within its drawn outline: hammers, everything from a magnetized tack hammer to six- and eight-pound sledges; wooden and rubber mauls; hatchets and axes, single- and double-bitted; a hand brace and a staggered array of bits; screwdrivers and chisels in ascending sizes; hacksaws, keyhole saws, pulp saws, rip and crosscut saws wearing a bluish film of oil. On the opposite wall, also hung within their drawn outlines, the rakes, hoes, shovels, scythes, sickles, pruning hooks, machetes, splitting hammers, and the seven-foot lumbering saw with three-inch teeth, a relic now retired by the chainsaw.

And along the top of the bench the shelf containing capped and labeled mason jars: nails graded by size and type, wood screws likewise, stove bolts, rivets, brads, tacks, staples. Below the bench, on the plank that was its central brace, a row of two-pound coffee cans, also labeled:
Switches. Plugs. Outlets. Electrical Cord.

“See?” Hallie said, as if she had brought me there to prove something. “Everything but ‘string too short to save.’ Was he this way when you first knew him? Did he save things in the refrigerator— saucers of leftover rice, and half a baked potato, and a little rhubarb sauce, and two or three asparagus spears? It drives Mom wild.”

The light in the shop was dusty and cool, the sort of light the past always affects. “Why should he get miserly?” I asked. “Does he think he has to be penurious because she’s extravagant? Is he scared of being part of a three-generation pilgrimage from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves?”

“It isn’t money,” Hallie said. “He never tries to make her economize. She thinks she’s contemptuous of luxuries and comforts, and she is, sort of, but when she wants anything she’ll throw money around in a way to scare you. He never complains. He’s always been generous.”