Crossing to Safety (33 page)

What should anyone say to that?

“Still another thing I’m sure of is how lucky I am,” Charity said, and smiled around our attentive circle in a proud, self-congratulatory way. “I don’t have to do this alone. I’m
surrounded
by the people I love, and I’m doing my best to teach them what I’m trying to learn myself: not to be afraid, not to resist, not to grieve.”

Her smile, directed now at Sid alone, widened; her face took on a look at once monitory and mischievous. “It’s as natural as being born,” she said, “and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there’s an immortality of organic molecules that’s absolutely certain. Don’t you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we’ll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we’ll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve loved every
minute.
”

She stopped. Her eyes touched us all, Sid last. A wistful, questioning, pleading smile hung on her lips, a smile that held and wavered as her look wavered and held on his face. Any man would be shaken to have a woman look at him like that. Sid was.

“I’ve had the man I loved,” she said very softly. “I never lost him the way so many women do. I’ve had bright, beautiful children. I’ve had dear friends. You may not believe this, but this has been the happiest summer of my life.”

Still none of us found anything to say. Air moving uphill from the woods and lake stirred the seeding flower-heads of Delphinium that rose above the wall. A Monarch butterfly caught in the draft was lifted twenty feet over our heads. I saw Sid look away from Charity’s unsteadily insistent glance to follow the Monarch’s movement. Perhaps he was fantasizing, as I was, that there went part of what had once been the mortal substance of Aunt Emily or George Barnwell or Uncle Dwight, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel, dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk, nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown out of a tree in a windstorm, soaked up by the earth, extruded as grass, eaten by a freshening heifer, some of it foreordained to be drunk, as Charity said, by its own descendants with their breakfasts, some of it deposited in cowpads, to melt into the earth yet again, and thrust upward again, immortal, in another milkweed stalk preparing itself to feed more Monarch butterflies.

Fragile as tissue, the butterfly wavered off and away. From her lounge Charity urgently demanded our agreement; her strained smile pinned us to our chairs. She widened the smile by an act of will as definite as the shoving open of a jammed window. Her freckled hands fluttered over the steamer rug, straightening it across her knees. When she spoke again, her voice was screwed up close to shrillness.

“So I’m trying to do it
right.
Most of the family are helping. They find it hard, but they’re trying. I hope you will too. When the time comes, nobody should be unhappy. It shouldn’t be made a production of. I’ll just go away.”

We assented in silence. Of course. Of course, dear Charity. However you want it. Whatever will help you. Sid stared gloomily at something beyond the hilltop, off in the air.

“I knew I could count on you,” Charity said. The shrillness was out of her voice; she sounded happy. “Well! I’m glad we got it out in the open right away, so there’ll be no pretending and long faces, and we can make the absolute
most
of what’s left.” Now she managed the full, unforced smile. “That’s more than enough of that! Now let’s forget it. This afternoon we’re not dying. We’re
together
again. The whole family’s coming for a picnic on the hill, did Hallie tell you? Oh, you don’t know how grateful I am that you could come! I hated to ask you, I know how hard traveling is for you now. But I’m glad as I can be.”

She did not look glad. The smile had already faded. She looked ghastly, as if the effort of talking had forced all the blood from her face, which was jaundice-yellow. She wet her lips and closed her eyes and turned her face sideward against the cushion that hung on loops from the back of the lounge. Her thin throat worked. When she opened her eyes again it was as if marble had awakened.

“Now!”
she cried in a wan effort at decisiveness. “Now we’re going in and rest awhile so as to be ready. Sally, you come with me. If you don’t want to rest, we can talk, and if you don’t want to talk we can meditate. We won’t leave for the hill till four. Larry can help Sid load the Marmon.”

“My goodness, is that still running?” Sally said. “Oh, it
will
be like old times! I love that car.”

She sounded tinny and false. Poor lady, she found it as difficult as I did to know how to act or what to say. Later, with practice, we might do better. The star had her part down cold, but the male lead didn’t like his lines, and the walk-ons had never seen the script until forty minutes ago.

Watching Sally, I saw her eyes widen and her body start forward in the chair. Her hand reached helplessly out, two yards short of its mark, and I became aware that Charity had leaned sideward and was vomiting over the side of the lounge. Sid leaped out of his chair with an exclamation and got his hand under her forehead. He held her, looking down with a face like granite on her dry retching.

Weakly Charity leaned back and wiped her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must excuse me.”

“Oh, we’ve been too much for you!” Sally said. “We should have known.”

“It’s nothing,” Charity said. “It happens now and then. Now let’s go in and take our rest.”

Silently Sid helped her to her feet. He was careful and gentle, she was grateful for his arm. The opportunity to help and be helped was good for them both.

For a moment Charity stood tottering. I saw her discipline her body and mind before she tried to take a step. With his arm around her, Sid threw an unreadable look over his shoulder and started her slowly across the grass toward the house, where a woman in white nylon, who had apparently been watching from the window, had appeared and was holding open the screen door. From the lawn I watched the two careful backs receding. In the plate glass I saw the two careful faces approach.

Without waiting for my help, Sally had pushed herself to her feet and locked her braces, and with her weight on her spread canes was also watching the receding backs.

“Will you want your chair?” I said.

Her somber eyes considered. “No, leave it here. We’ll be lying down, I suppose. If I want it the nurse can get it for me.”

She turned and swung after them toward the door. The Langs had disappeared, the one faltering, the other attentive. Inside, I saw Charity and the nurse go past the windows, moving slowly, and in a moment Sid was back holding the screen open for Sally. She had trouble with the two high steps, and I saw him start to help her, then hold back. She struggled up onto the landing, and with an upward flash of eyes passed him and entered. He eased the door shut behind her. In a moment they went together past the windows.

I waited—troubled, supernumerary, out of it. It was as if Charity had just, in that brief spasm of nausea, disproved her own statement that you cannot rehearse for your own death. I could not have been much shakier if I had watched her die. I was bothered by the ruthlessness with which she disciplined and drove her sick body— picnics, in that condition!—and I remembered the time the four of us were lost in the woods somewhere off the overgrown Bayley-Hazen road, and Charity disagreed with Sid and me about the best way out. She had chosen a compass course and forced it on us, and we had plowed through swamps and blowdowns, making a beeline like Achilles the tortoise over and through obstacles that we might have avoided by finding and following the brook. She had put her trust in Pritchard, the authority, and been betrayed by him, and eventually had to repudiate him. This time she was writing the guidebook herself, as she went, and its authority could not be challenged or repudiated. But the method was the same. She still preferred a compass course.

What would she do if she broke a leg in those woods she was headed into? Did she have contingency plans? Would she find a handy tree crotch into which she could wedge her heel? Would she come out on the other side on a peg leg whittled out of a forked stick?

Pitying and shaken as I was, I had to admit she was the same old Charity. She saw objectives, not obstacles, and she did not let her uncomplicated confidence get clouded by other people’s doubts, or other people’s facts, or even other people’s feelings. Nor by weakness. Once she had nerved herself to accept the death sentence, it would not have occurred to her that others, Sid especially, might not share her determination to suck every drop of sweetness out of the experience.

It was her death. She had a right to handle it her own way. But I felt sorry for Sid, a reluctant stoic, and I dreaded the coming hour or two when I would be alone with him. I was the person he was most likely to confide in, and I feared his confidence and had on tap no word of consolation or comfort. It crossed my mind, while I sat waiting on the lawn above the green and blue view, that down under his anguish and panic he might even look forward to her death as a release. Then I decided not. Charity had mastered him, but she also supported him. She not only ran his life, she was his life.

I didn’t like to think what would happen to him with her gone. His resistance and resentment were only expressions of his dependence. Sally resented her crutches, too, but without them she would have been hardly more than a broken stick with eyes.

2

Finally Sid came out. Whatever he had been doing inside, he had got himself in hand. When I asked how she was, he acted as if it took him a moment to know whom I was talking about. All right, he said. Fine now. Inside, our wives would already be deep in confidences, but Sid and I would pretend that this was an August afternoon and we were getting organized for a picnic. Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.

He looked me up and down as if estimating my weight. “Ehyuh,” he said. “I wonder what you’re good for. Ever done any work?”

“Once I was a hired man in a Vermont compound.”

“Long time ago. Still, maybe there’s a little left in you.”

As we walked down the road toward the stable he took off his glasses, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose. When he saw me noticing, he said, “Damn the goldenrod.”

“Still bothers you.”

“I don’t know how I ever got fond of this place. Drip, drip, drip.”

Snuffling, wiping a leaking eye with a finger, his hay fever about as persuasive as his cheerfulness, he led me down to the stable. Inside, the whole right side was divided into four stalls, each one opening onto the paddock. The left side of the stable was drive-through space, with doors at each end, and in this corridor, soaking in the odors of hay and oats and horse manure, the Marmon sat with its top down, its seats and furled roof and long hood whitened with dust and straw. Inside were the relics of past picnics: a flashlight battery, an empty Coke bottle, some crumpled paper napkins, a bandanna, kernels of trampled popcorn, crumbs of crushed potato chips. A toy revolver was stuck behind one of the jump seats. The space between the back seat and the plate-glass partition that prevented fraternization between passengers and driver looked big enough for a square dance.

“She hasn’t been used for a month,” Sid said. “If she won’t start, we could be in trouble.”

But he did not look troubled. He had perked up. A certain alacrity had come into his expression and his movements. He eyed the Marmon as he might have eyed a cliff he was about to climb.

Everything about that behemoth was an anachronism—hand choke, starter button on the floor, a switch instead of a key, a hinged hood that lifted up on both sides, a chrome radiator cap in the form of a naked lady who leaned into the wind. Sid unscrewed the lady, stuck his finger down the pipe, and screwed her back on. He lifted one side of the hood and found the dipstick and pulled it out and carried it to the light and squinted at it and brought it back. With one foot he flattened the folding luggage rack on the running board, opened the door, and climbed in. Squinting down into the shadow, he pulled out the choke. I heard his foot pump the throttle three times.

“Hail Mary full of grease,” he said, and stepped on the starter.

A subterranean grinding, heavy and hoarse. I could imagine pistons the size of gallon jugs trying to move in the cylinders. Sid took his foot off the starter, adjusted the choke, and stepped down again. The grinding resumed, went on patiently for a good minute, grew slower, weakened. Another tired half turn—
uh-RUH!
—and on the last juice from the battery she coughed, raced, faded, caught again, and was running.

“Ha!” Sid said. He sat nursing her, easing the choke in until she talked to us comfortably. Looking in under the propped hood I could see that the engine was not twelve in line, as I had always half believed, but a V-16. It would have pulled a fire truck. At every stroke a stream of gasoline as thick as my finger must be pulsing through the carburetor. She panted at us in the whiskey-and-emphysema whisper of an Edith Wharton dowager.
“Dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar,”
the Marmon said.

I lowered the hood and locked the catches. “How about opening the door on this end and we’ll drive her out on the grass and give her the treatment,” Sid said. He looked ten years younger than he had up on the terrace.

We gave her the treatment—took off shirts and shoes and socks, rolled up pants, and swept her out, washed her down, rinsed her off with the hose, went over her chrome and glass with damp chamois skins, wiped off the seats and the wheel and the dash and the gearshift knob, even wiped down the wooden spokes of her wheels and the two vast spares that rode in wells on her front fenders. Then we drove her up and parked her gleaming by the kitchen door.

The running-board rack we pried up again, and behind it we stowed Sally’s chair and Charity’s lounge, brought folded from the terrace. When we went inside, I saw that Sid had already been busy at preparations. On the kitchen counter were two Styrofoam coolers full of beer and soft drinks and ice cubes. On the floor were two thermos jugs of water, and next to them two stained pack hampers half loaded. I thought I recognized them.

“Those look like what we hung on old Wizard, away back before the Deluge.”

A quick, curious look, as if I had recalled him from thoughts so different that he needed to reorient himself. “The hampers? I guess they’re the same ones. I can’t remember ever ordering new ones.”

I might have asked him if he had remembered to pack the tea, but heard my own intention in time, and said instead, “They’re going to last forever.”

“Longer than any of
us
.”

He was a man in a briar patch. So long as he kept still he was comfortable, but every time he moved he found thorns. Or put it the other way around. Busy, he could forget where he was. The minute he paused, he was reminded.

“Have you ever been back to that Shangri-La we found?”

Again he gave me the curious, sidelong look. “No.”

“Ever been tempted to? It shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“Charity and I have talked about it once or twice. We decided not to.”

“That’s probably sensible.”

Dead end. I kept trying. “Looks as if you’ve got a standard Lang picnic on the planning board.”

I didn’t need to ask him, or look in the hampers, to know what was in them: two grills in stained canvas bags, a canvas sack of cutlery and toasting forks, a nest of smoked, scoured kettles, two dozen tin plates and cups, packs of plastic glasses, paper plates, napkins, and tablecloths, a roll of paper towels. And packed in and around all that, dozens of sandwich rolls, bags of sweet corn, jars of mayonnaise and mustard, boxes of crackers, chunks of aged Cabot cheddar, bottles of apple and cranberry juice. In the refrigerator, ready to go into the hampers at the last minute, would be bowls of salad ready for the dressing, carrot and celery sticks wrapped in a damp cloth, Sara Lee cakes thawing toward edibility, whatever fruits of the season McChesney’s offered, and above all the centerpiece of this pagan festival, the steaks, a dozen of them, great marbled slabs two inches thick, each a surfeit for three lumberjacks. Steaks for a platoon, and scraps left over for all the platoon’s dogs.

Nothing would have been forgotten, any more than the tea had been forgotten years ago, and nothing would be out of place. In his way, Sid was as rigid a planner as Charity. It was probably she who inherited or instituted the ritual family picnic, decreed its forms and abundance, and selected its vessels and instruments; but it was Sid who conducted the ceremonies, and he knew them as a priest knows the mass.

We finished packing the hampers and loaded everything onto or into the Marmon. As we reentered the kitchen we met the nurse, putting the teakettle on a burner. Sid introduced her: Mrs. Norton. She had frizzy hair and a curiously whittled nose, and she was glad to meet me, she said, though I did not think she was excessively cordial. Her eyes were suspicious and pocketed in radiating wrinkles.

“Are they awake in there?” Sid asked.

“They rested awhile. Now they’re talking. Too much, to my notion. I’m taking them a cup of tea. You want some too?”

“Do you, Larry? No? I don’t think so, thanks, Mrs. Norton. I feel more like a beer. How about you two?”

She declined, I accepted. We stood drinking out of the cans, watching her put a tea bag in a cup, pour boiling water over it, let it steep only a second or two, move it into another cup, pour water over it again, and rescue it again within seconds.

“Pretty weak tea,” Sid observed. “I suppose that’s best.”

Mrs. Norton, for some reason, looked offended. “She likes it cambric. Cambric’s all her stomach will
take.
” Angrily she set sugar bowl and milk pitcher on her tray and dug spoons out of a drawer. Sid watched her.

“I suppose,” he said vaguely. He looked at his watch. “Well, there’s still plenty of time, but you can tell them anytime they’re ready, we are.”

The nurse did not answer at once. She shook Arrowroot biscuits out of a box, thought a moment, went to the refrigerator and spooned some custard out of a bowl into a glass dish. She folded two paper napkins into triangles and picked up the tray. With her hip against the swinging door she looked back and said, “She oughtn’t be going, you know.”

The look that passed between her and Sid was so long and unrelieved that I felt it like a bar in the air, something that would stop you if you tried to walk through it. Finally Sid said in the quietest voice, “Can you think of a way to
keep
her from going?”

Mrs. Norton’s face was red. “I’ve told her. She won’t pay any attention to me. She might to you.”

“She might not, too,” Sid said. “Today’s her birthday. She’s got her heart set on it.”

“Yes, and she’s weak’s a cat. She threw up again a half hour ago. She’s running on her nerve. Two, three hours up there in the wind, all the hooraw and excitement, I already told her she’s not up to it. I won’t be responsible.”

“Nobody will hold you responsible,” Sid said. “You can only do what you can do. What did she say?”

“What?”

“When you told her she shouldn’t go.”

Mrs. Norton breathed through her nose. “She said, ‘Oh pooh!’ ”

Sid laughed, shaking his head. “I can hear her.” He shrugged and spread his hands, asking her complicity, admitting his helplessness. “I don’t think anything we say will make her stay home. We’ll just have to keep an eye on her and try to keep her from overdoing.”

“I most generally do keep an eye on her,” Mrs. Norton said, offended all over again.

Patiently, wearily, Sid said, “I know. It’s hard. I’m grateful for all you do. I just meant, up there on the hill I’ll be cooking, I may not notice. You’ll have to let me know if she starts having trouble.”

“She’ll have trouble,” Mrs. Norton said. “You can count on it.” She pushed the door open with her hip and backed through it with her tray. Sid stood watching the door’s dying oscillations.

“She’s got a case,” he said. “Can you imagine a more difficult patient?”

“Sid,” I said, “why do we do this at all? Why don’t we take all this stuff up and leave it for the others, and then come back here? Charity and Sally can have their talk out, or if Charity’s too tired we’ll go back to the guest house. Then we can come again tomorrow without feeling that we’ve done her in.”

He started shaking his head the minute I started to talk, and he shook it as long as I was talking.

“Maybe she’ll stay home for Sally’s sake,” I said. “I can get Sally to say she’s too tired.”

For a moment that idea half appealed to him, then he rejected it too. “That’d make Sally into a party pooper. No, there’s no way. Charity planned this, and she won’t be kept home. It’d probably be worse for her to be kept home than to go.”

“Mrs. Norton seems to think she can do herself real harm.”

He looked at me as if he could not believe what he had heard. “For God’s sake, Morgan, of course she’ll do herself harm.
All
her harm is real! She’s fixed her mind on dying, and when she fixes her mind on something nothing is going to stop her. Her pride’s at stake. She’s planned it all, every step.” In the gray north light his face wore the challenging, sneering expression of a man talking his way into a fight. “While she was planning for herself, she didn’t forget the rest of us, either. Want to know how the script goes?”

I said nothing. We stood in the kitchen as if on the brink of a quarrel.

In a mincing, schoolteacherish voice, Sid said, “This is how it’ll go. Once she’s carried out her part of the program, or before that if it can be managed, Barney will patch it up with Ethel, and the family will carry on without that lesion. Nick will come back from Quito and get a job at some American college, preferably Harvard or Yale, and marry some nice girl and raise another branch of the family. Only Nick didn’t agree, he was insubordinate and went away without agreeing. She was very upset. Still, she holds to the plan; she thinks he’ll come to it. David will quit living like the hermit of Folsom Hill, and give up looking for whatever self realization he’s been looking for, and go to law school and become a civil-liberties lawyer and do good in the world, and marry some nice girl and start raising still another branch of the family. Hallie’s all right the way she is, I guess, except that she should have a couple more children before it’s too late. Peter’s to quit playing the field, and marry
yet
another nice girl, and build a cottage on the lake, down by the boathouse, and start raising, you guessed it,
another
branch of the family. He’s nearly thirty, it’s time he got going. Charity’s had a lake lot surveyed, and she’s given it to him as a premarital bribe. Everything tight and orderly. No loose ends.”

“Sid,” I said, “would you rather she sat wringing her hands?”

“All kinds of real-estate plans,” he said, ignoring me. “She’s had all the hill land resurveyed and divided, grandchildren to take their pick of lots when they reach eighteen. The top of the hill, four hundred acres of it, is to be kept as a nature preserve, given to the town if the town’ll accept it, or to Nature Conservancy, or as a last resort managed by the family trust. That’s her bequest to Battell Pond, a permanent picnic ground.”

He flattened his lips in a smile of derision and distaste. “Her bequest to me is more personal, naturally.”

I waited. He watched me with his crooked grin.

“After a suitable interval,” he said, “I am to remarry. ‘Oh, no, I won’t,’ I tell her, and ‘Yes, you will, of course you will,’ she says. ‘Why shouldn’t you? You
need
someone, it’s best for you.’ She’s never been in any doubt what’s best for me. ‘But not somebody our age,’ she says. ‘Not some comfortable widow. Somebody younger, quite a bit younger, somebody with lots of energy and ideas who will keep you lively and not let you sag back. Because that’s what you’ll do if you’re not watched,’ she says.”