Crossing to Safety (3 page)

“Better.”

“If you say so.”

She drops to her lap the half-clenched hand with the half orange in it—the hand that will never quite unclench because while she was in the iron lung all of us, even Charity who thought of everything, were so concerned that she go on breathing that we forgot to work on her hand. It stayed clenched there for too long. Now for a moment her controlled serenity, her acceptance and resignation, her stout and stoical front, dissolve away again. The woman who looks out at me is emotional and overtired.

“Ah, Larry,” she says accusingly, “it does make you sad. It makes you as sad as it does me.”

“Only when I laugh,” I say, for emotional or not, she puts up with long faces no more than Charity does. She lets herself be rebuked, lets me tuck her in, lets me kiss her, smiles. I draw the blinds. “Hallie and Moe won’t be here for two or three hours. Sleep. It’s only five in the morning, Santa Fe time. I’ll wake you when they come.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. I’ll be out on the porch, looking and smelling and recherching
temps perdu.
”

Which is what I do for a good long time. It is no effort. Everything compels it. From the high porch, the woods pitching down to the lake are more than a known and loved place. They are a habitat we were once fully adapted to, a sort of Peaceable Kingdom where species such as ours might evolve unchallenged and find their step on the staircase of being. Sitting with it all under my eye, I am struck once more, as I was up on the Wightman road, by its changelessness. The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

I sit uninterrupted by much beyond birdsong and the occasional knocking and door-slamming of waking noises from the compound cottages hidden in the trees off to the left. Only once is there anything like an intrusion—a motorboat sound that develops and grows until a white boat with a water skier dangling behind it bursts around the point and swerves into the cove, leading a broadening wake across which the skier cuts figures. They embroider a big loop around the cove and roar out again, the noise dropping abruptly as they round the point.

Early in the morning for such capers. And, I have to admit, a sign of change. In the old days forty academics, angry as disturbed dwarfs, would already have been swarming out of their think houses to demand that the nuisance be abated.

But apart from that one invasion, peace, the kind of quiet I used to know on this porch. I remembered the first time we came here, and what we were then, and that brings to mind my age, four years past sixty. Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards—the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees—have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with.

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could
contribute.
We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest. We never kidded ourselves that we had the political gifts to reorder society or insure social justice. Beyond a basic minimum, money was not a goal we respected. Some of us suspected that money wasn’t even very good for people—hence Charity’s leaning toward austerity and the simple life. But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused. In certain moods I might bleat that we were all trapped, though of course we are no more trapped than most people. And all of us, I suppose, could at least be grateful that our lives have not turned out harmful or destructive. We might even look enviable to the less lucky. I give headroom to a sort of chastened indulgence, for foolish and green and optimistic as I myself was, and lamely as I have limped the last miles of this marathon, I can’t charge myself with real ill will. Nor Sally, nor Sid, nor Charity—any of the foursome. We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.

In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero—
De Senectute,
on old age;
De Amicitia,
on friendship.
De Senectute,
with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But
De Amicitia
I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.

2

Rain was falling when we reached the Mississippi. Going through Dubuque we bumped along brick streets between shabby, high-porched, steep-gabled houses with brick church spires poking up from among them, and down a long cathedral-aisle of elms toward the river. To my western eyes it was another country, as alien as North Europe.

The bridge approach lifted us up parallel to the dam. We could see the broad slaty pool above it, mottled with green islands, and the bluffs of the far shore green and shining in the rain. “Welcome to Wisconsin,” I said.

Sally stirred and gave me a minimal, enduring smile. We had been on the road for three days, at nearly six hundred miles a day, over all kinds of roads including miles of construction in Nebraska, and she was three months pregnant. She probably felt about as cheerful as the afternoon looked, but she tried. She stared down-river to where Iowa and Illinois were linked by a double hyphen of bridges, and ahead to where the road curved out of the river trough toward the rolling Wisconsin farmland. “Ha!” she said. “The
vita
nuova.
About time.”

“Another couple of hours.”

“I’m ready.”

“I’ll bet you are.”

We coiled along the bluff and up onto the top. The rain fell steadily on the narrow, right-angled road, on white farmhouses and red barns whose roofs announced Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, on browning September cornfields, and pigs knee-deep in muddy pens. It fell steadily as we passed through Platteville, Mineral Point, Dodgeville, and was still falling when somewhere beyond Dodgeville the wiper blade disintegrated and bare metal began to scrape in a crazy arc across the windshield. Rather than delay us by stopping to get it fixed, I drove from Mount Horeb to Madison with my head out the window, my hair soaked, and water running down inside my shirt collar.

The traffic led us directly into State Street. However Sally felt, I was interested. This that we were entering was our first chance at a life. I knew that the university was at one end of State Street and the State Capitol at the other, and I couldn’t resist driving the length of it once, and partway back, just to get the feel. Then I saw a hotel entrance and a parking place simultaneously, and ducked in. As I was opening the door to start sprinting for the sheltered entrance, Sally said, “Not if it’s too much!”

Hair soaking, shoulders wet, I made it to the hotel desk. The clerk put both hands flat on the walnut and looked inquiring.

“How much is a double room?”

“With bath or without?”

Momentary hesitation. “With.”

“Two seventy-five.”

I had been afraid of that. “How much without?”

“Two and a quarter.”

“I’d better check with my wife. Be right back.”

I went out under the canopy. The rain, falling straight down, bounced in the wet street. In the fifty feet to the car I got soaked again. Crowding into the dense, damp interior, I had to take my glasses off to see Sally. “Two seventy-five with bath, two and a quarter without.”

“Oh, that’s too much!”

We had a hundred and twenty dollars in traveler’s checks to last us till my first payday on October first.

“I thought maybe. . . . It’s been a hard trip for you. Don’t you think maybe a hot bath, and clean clothes, and a good dinner? Just to start off on the right foot?”

“Starting off on the right foot won’t help if we haven’t got anything in our pockets. Let’s look for a bed-and-breakfast place.”

Eventually we found one, a low-browed bungalow whose lawn bore a sign, “Overnite Guests.” The housewife was large and German, with a goiter; the room was clean. A dollar fifty, breakfast included. We huddled such luggage as we needed through the kitchen, took serial baths (plenty of hot water), and went to bed supperless because Sally said she was tired, not hungry—and besides, we had eaten a late picnic lunch the other side of Waterloo.

In the morning, still in the rain, we went looking for permanent housing. The fall term would not begin for two weeks. We hoped we were ahead of the rush.

We were not. We saw a house for a hundred a month and an apartment for ninety, but nothing close to affordable until we were shown a small, badly furnished basement apartment on Morrison Street. It was sixty dollars a month, twice what we had hoped to get by for, but its back lawn dropped off a low wall into Lake Monona, and we liked the look of sailboats slanting past. Discouraged, afraid we might hunt for the next two weeks and find nothing better, we took it.

Recklessness. Paying the first month’s rent cut our savings in half and sent us into serious computations. Take $720 a year out for rent and we would have left, out of my $2,000 salary, exactly $1,280 for food, drink, clothing, entertainment, books, transportation, doctor bills, and incidentals. Even with milk at five cents a quart and eggs at twelve cents a dozen and hamburger at thirty cents a pound, there would be little enough for drink or entertainment. Scratch those. Doctor bills, though inevitable, were unpredictable. The going rate in Berkeley for delivering a baby was fifty dollars, prenatal care thrown in, but there was no telling what the price was here, and no estimating the cost of postnatal care and the services of a pediatrician. We had to save everything we could against the worst possibilities. As for incidentals, they were going to be very incidental indeed. Scratch those too.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The storeroom next to the furnace, warm and dry, would be my study until Junior arrived. I set up a card table for a desk and made a bookcase out of some boards and bricks. In my experience, the world’s happiest man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world’s most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression from which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.

We were poor, hopeful, happy. Nobody much was yet around. In the first week, before I had to report to the university, I wrote a short story—or rather, it wrote itself, it took off like a bird let out of a cage. Afternoons, we felt our way into that odd community, half academic, half political, that was Madison in 1937. We parked the Ford and walked. From our apartment it was a mile and a half around the Capitol and up State Street and up Bascom Hill to my office in Bascom Hall. Once school opened, I walked it, to and from, each day.

Sally, who would have liked working and who watched our budget with a miser’s eye, put a cord on the departmental bulletin board advertising that she typed theses and term papers quick and neat, but neither term papers nor theses were in season then, and she got no takers. As soon as I started teaching, she had some long hours alone.

That deep in the Depression, universities had given up promoting and all but given up hiring. My own job was a fluke. At Berkeley the year before, I had read papers for a visiting professor who happened to like me, and who telephoned when Wisconsin developed a last-minute opening. I was a single cork to plug a single hole for a single season. My colleagues, instructors of one or two years’ standing, were locked in and hanging on. They made a tight in-group, and their conversation tended to include me only cautiously and with suspicion. They all seemed to have come from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The Harvards and Princetons wore bow ties, and the Yalies went around in gray flannels too high in the crotch and too short in the leg. All three kinds wore tweed jackets that looked as if apples had been carried in the lining.

I didn’t even have an office mate to talk to. My supposed office partner was William Ellery Leonard, the department’s literary lion, famous for an eccentric theory of Anglo-Saxon prosody, for his romantic and tragic private life as told in his long poem
Two Lives,
for his recent tempestuous marriage to and betrayal by a young woman known around the campus as Goldilocks, and for his former habit of swimming on his back far out into Lake Mendota, wearing a boar helmet and chanting
Beowulf.

I was looking forward to William Ellery with considerable interest, but almost at once I discovered that his aggravated agoraphobia kept him from venturing more than a block from his house. I had been stuck in with him because his office, though inalienable, was spare space. She’ll have to sleep with Grandpa when she comes. In the year we roomed together he never once came to the office, but his pictures, books, papers, and memorabilia stared and leaned and toppled, ready to fall on me where I had scratched out working space in a corner. Coming there at night, I felt his presence like a poltergeist, and never stayed long.

That was the way our new life started: two weeks of isolated settling-in followed by a week of registration, transfers, room changes, and the first meetings of classes—the beginnings of a recognizable routine. Then at the end of the first week of classes there was a reception at the chairman’s house. I washed the Ford and we dressed up and went, unconfident and watchful. There were forty or fifty people whose names we never properly heard, or confused with others, or promptly forgot. Some of the younger faculty, including a couple I had found pretty condescending, hung so hungrily around the sherry that out of pure pride I refused to be like them. Sally, even stranger in that company than I was, stuck with me.

We spent most of the two hours with older professors and their wives, and probably got an instant reputation among our peers for sucking up. Naturally we were both at our most charming. I even think Sally had a good time. She is gregarious, people interest her just by being people, and she is much better on names and faces than I am. And she hadn’t been to any kind of party, even a departmental tea, for a long time.

I suppose we were both a little depressed at leaving those colleagues, strangers though they were, unknowns with the most profound portent for our future, and going home to our cellar, where we ate the stuff that was good for the budget but not especially for the soul. After dinner we sat on the wall above Lake Monona and watched the sunset, and then we went back in and I prepared for my classes and Sally read Jules Romains. We were tender with one another in bed: babes in the woods, lost in a strange indifferent country, a little dispirited, a little scared.