Crossing to Safety (34 page)

Meeting his eyes was like taking hold of a hot wire. I said, “Sag back into what?”

“Into what? Into myself. Into my dilatoriness and incompetence.” A scrape on the back of his hand attracted his attention. He examined it carefully, pinching the skin around it. Then his eyes lifted to mine again. He puckered his lips as if about to whistle. The pucker widened into a smile. “Know what she’s done to guide me? You’ll never guess. Don’t even try. She’s made a list. Women here and in Hanover it would be okay for me to marry. Five names, listed in their order of suitability.”

The refrigerator came on with a behind-the-scenes whir. I felt the warm gush of its exhaust against my ankles. “You’re kidding,” I said.

“I am not kidding. Want to see the list?”

“I guess not.”

“No,” he said with sudden gloom. His hand reached out and turned on the tap in the sink. For a few seconds he watched the water run as if he had never seen water run out of a tap before. Then he shut it off.

“Plans,” he said. “She lies with that notebook on her stomach and lays out the future of everything. She’s written and rewritten her will ten times. The lawyer is over from Montpelier every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She’s foreseen every contingency and plotted everybody’s life. All any of us will have to do in any crisis is consult the master plan.”

“I still can’t believe she made you out a list of prospective wives.”

“She did just that.”

“Out of the most loving motives, surely.”

“Of course. Out of the most loving motives. And with the most scrupulous regard to common sense.”

“She’s been looking after people all her life. She’s made a career of being thoughtful. Isn’t it kind of wonderful that even now her mind is on others, not herself ?”

Sid turned his seamed face and stared out the window above the sink. To the leaves and sky out there he said, “She hasn’t forgotten herself. She’s got plans for herself, too. Horrible plans.”

“Hallie told us. That’s hard to take.”

“You bet it’s hard to take. Did Hallie tell you the rest?” His voice rose, he pushed at the nosepiece of his glasses and looked at me furtively through his hand before he turned half away and said, “You heard her, out on the lawn. When it’s time, she thinks she can just slip quietly away. Not bother anybody, just quietly withdraw, like someone having to leave a party early.”

“She wants to spare you.”

“Sure. What am I supposed to do, wave bye-bye and forget her, just go on fixing the vacuum cleaner or whatever I’m doing? Just erase her from mind and memory, while she goes off to the hospital and lies there refusing to eat or drink—well, she’ll have to drink water, I guess, she couldn’t get the doctor to agree to not even water. But she did get him to agree he wouldn’t force-feed her. That way, she thinks it won’t be drawn out.”

It took me a while before I could think of anything to say to him. “But don’t you approve of that?” I said finally. “I do. I hope they’ll do as much for me when I come to that situation.”

The muscles were suddenly ridged in his jaw; his eyes were blue blurs behind the glasses. “Oh, it’s sensible! Everything she does is sensible. It can’t be argued with. I just wonder sometimes if she knows people have feelings.”

High and constricted, his voice came out almost as a squeak. “Think who it
is
we’re talking about! Think who it
is
we’re supposed to close the door on as if she were someone selling magazine subscriptions!”

His hands went out in a violent gesture, and the can he held in one of them shot a spurt of beer out onto the floor. At once, not looking at me, he grabbed a handful of paper towels off the roll and knelt down and began mopping. I saw that his hair had grown thin on the crown. The skimpy whorl on the top of his tanned skull reminded me of something Lyle Lister had told me once, whether in earnest or as a joke I never knew—that south of the Equator the crowns and cowlicks of the natives, like the whirlpools in bathtub drains, go counterclockwise, the opposite of the way they go up here. Sid’s went clockwise.

“So, to return to your original question,” he said to the floor between his knees, “what if this picnic is too much for her? From her point of view, does it make any difference whether she dies Thursday instead of Saturday? What right has anybody to tell her she can’t spend her last hours roller-skating, if that’s what she wants? How are you going to keep her from doing what she’s going to do whether you forbid it or not?”

Standing up, he slammed the wad of towels into the wastebasket. His eyes slid around to meet mine, hot with outrage. “I could refuse to take her—she can’t go without help. But you know what she’d do. She’d find the help. She’d persuade somebody. She’d go if she knew she was going to die right there on the hill. She’d go to her death fighting me. She’d sew her lips shut. She’s the mistress of the implacable silence. I couldn’t stand it. I never could.”

The beer can went into the wastebasket after the towels. “Great way to celebrate her birthday. Deathday. Great setting for our loving farewells.”

A prickly, electric energy agitated his hands and moved the muscles of his face in spasmodic grimaces. He fixed me with his eye as he might have fixed a student in a class, someone he intended to drop a hard question on. “So what’s the proper procedure here?” he said, almost ruminatively. “What do decorum and common sense advise? She wants to leave her love and thoughtfulness in an irrevocable trust that will protect us all forever. Life betrayed her by not always going as she told it to. Now she hopes she can make death behave better. All my life she’s stopped me and started me and run me like a lawn mower or a dishwasher. She knows I can’t run myself. I’ll need somebody—why not a plump young handmaiden? So she comes up with that list. It’s a shrewd list, too, it says a lot about both her and me. And now she’s going to have this final picnic if it kills her and everybody else.”

His shoulders slumping, his hand jammed down in the pockets of his worn khakis, he brooded again out the window, and said, so low that I wondered if he was talking to himself, “She’s dividing herself like some inexhaustible Eucharist. She’s going around to everybody she loves, saying. ‘Take, eat, this is my body.’ ”

“She’s trying to do it right, she says.”

“Sure.” The quick glint of his glasses was eloquent with a kind of helpless derision. “Sure. If she can’t do it right, she’ll refuse to do it.” His words made him laugh. “And if we won’t eat, she’ll cram it down out throats. God, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Once more he turned on the tap and watched the water run. When he turned it off he squinted at me sideways. “It’s a hell of a way to treat a friend.” Then he must have seen that I was confused, thinking he was still talking about Charity, and added, “Dumping all this on you.”

“It’s what friends are for.”

“I appreciate that.” He took off his glasses and polished them. Carefully he hooked them back over his ears and looked at me through them. Polishing the lenses had done nothing to change the expression of his eyes. He said, “You’ve always thought my marriage was a kind of slavery.”

“What are you talking about?”

“No, of course you have. I’m not so stupid I can’t see my own situation, or understand how it looks to others. My trouble is that it’s a slavery I couldn’t bear to part with. I value it above anything that might have taken its place, even a plump handmaiden.”

“I don’t think any of us ever doubted that.”

“Never? Well, maybe. You’re part of us, you know us as well as we know ourselves. We’re two of a kind, in a way. I don’t mean you’re henpecked. I mean your marriage has been a sort of bondage, too. You fell in love with a good woman, just as I did, and are chained to her.”

I stood looking at him.

“Does this bother you?” he said. “Kick me if it does. But I admit I’ve taken a kind of comfort from your bad luck. I’ve seen someone else tied and helpless, though for very different reasons. You’ve been constant, a rock, and I’ve admired you for that. But I’ve wondered what your life might have been if Sally hadn’t got polio. You were upward bound when we first knew you, headed up like a rocket. Success might have taken you away from her—you wouldn’t have been the first one. You’ve done a lot anyway, but maybe not all you might have done if you hadn’t had the greater obligation of looking after her. I think your marriage did to you something like what mine did to me.”

“If you’re suggesting I regret it, I don’t. I never wanted out.”

“No,” he said. “No, of course not, that’s not what I meant. I never wanted out either. I just wish . . . I mean I can’t help envying you because she needs you, she can’t get along without you.” He broke our rather frowning look with an embarrassed movement of the shoulders. “She couldn’t survive you. Could you survive her?”

His question jolted me. It was not what I had been expecting. We stared at one another in the north light of the kitchen. Finally I said, “If you’re wondering about yourself, don’t. We’re all tougher than we think we are. We’re fixed so that almost anything heals.”

“I wonder.”

“No, you don’t. You know Sally could survive me, dependent as she is, and that I could survive her. We wouldn’t be the same, but we’d survive. You’ll survive Charity, too. You know what would happen if you let grief and despair overcome you? She’d come back and shake you out of it. She’d have none of that.”

I made him laugh. “I suppose,” he said. “God, why are we on this subject? I’m sorry. I let self-pity take charge.”

Straightening, he stretched his hands as high toward the ceiling as he could reach. I could almost hear his muscles creaking for some sort of saving action. He brought his arms down. “We’re still up against this damned picnic. Can you imagine going up there and playing games, and stuffing ourselves, and making pretty toasts, and wishing her many happy returns, and singing ‘Happy Birthday to You’ through gritted teeth while
she
grits her teeth to keep from screaming? Jesus. It’s fiendish to ask you and Sally to contribute your bit to another round of traditional family fun.”

He wandered around the kitchen, looking at anything rather than me. To the wall of cabinets, throwing the words aside as if they were not intended for ears, he said, “No birthday cake. Hallie was going to bring one, and then we both started to imagine her blowing out the candles.”

A sound at the dining room door. Sid spun around by the sink and busied himself rinsing his hands. When he turned back, drying them with a paper towel, Sally was braced in the door, trying to keep her balance while holding the door open with one hand. I went and opened it all the way so that it would stand.

“Are we ready to go?”

Her eyes were telling me something grave. Already she had her body half turned, ready to go back the way she had come. “She wants you both to come in.”

Blotting his hands a last time, Sid threw the towel in the sink and came quickly across the kitchen. He fixed Sally with a hard, searching look before he went past her and through the dining room and out of sight.

“Trouble?” I said. “Is she worse?”

She only gave me a mute, clouded glance, tilting her head to indicate that I should go first. “You,” I said and when she started I followed her.

3

We went through the dining room, then the living room with its big rock fireplace, then the alcove where books, blocks, cars, dolls, dump trucks, and board games filled shelves and cabinets on both sides of a bow window, ready on an instant’s notice for the visits of grandchildren. The hall into the bedroom wing was dark, the room at its far end bright. Then we were in it, a big, glassed-in promontory exposed on three sides to the view. From the first time we ever saw it, Sally and I had envied them that room. It would have been like sleeping in a treetop.

Charity was in bed, propped against the pillows and looking through slitted eyes at Sid, who had stopped with his back to the windows and his hands on the spooled footboard. Alarm and foreboding made his face look accusing. Charity’s face, in the uncompromising full-front light, was yellow-gray.

“Thank you, Mrs. Norton,” Charity said, and dropped her head in a slight nod. For a moment I thought the nurse was going to refuse what the look implied. Her face was rebellious, her odd little eyes screwed themselves deeper into their surrounding wrinkles. But after a moment, without a word, she picked up the tea tray and came out past us. I saw that the biscuits and custard were untouched.

“What is it?” Sid said. “Is something wrong? Have you had another spell?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I feel all right.” But her voice was low, without animation, missing the usual fluty emphasis. She kept her eyes almost shut against the light from the windows.

“Why did you send for us?”

“I thought we’d better talk.”

“Mrs. Norton says you’ve been talking too much.”

Impatience flashed in her face and voice. “Sid! What a wretched thing to say in front of Sally! It’s been
wonderful
talking to her, it’s what I’ve been wanting for years. I wouldn’t have missed one word. Mrs. Norton thinks I should lie here like a cat on a comforter while she tiptoes around drawing curtains.”

“She doesn’t think you should go on the picnic.”

“I know she doesn’t,” Charity said. Her eyes closed completely. After a few seconds they opened again. “That’s what I want to talk about. I’ve decided she’s right. I shouldn’t.”

He was like someone who has hurled himself at a door and found it made of paper. It took him a second or two to pick himself up. “Well, good,” he said confusedly. “I’m glad you finally. . . .” Then the implications must have struck him. His eyes widened. As if apologetically, acknowledging some undue vehemence, he took his hands off the spooled footboard. “I think that’s best,” he said. “It’s too bad about your birthday, but they’ll . . . I’ll call Moe or Lyle to pick up the Marmon. It’s all loaded. They might as well go ahead with it.”

She cut in on him. “No, I want you to go. Larry too.”

Now he did stare at her—glared at her was more like it. “With you feeling this way? That’s absurd.”

“It isn’t absurd at
all,
” she said. “I’m not feeling any particular way. I’m just tired. I don’t think I could stick it out. I’d spoil it for everybody. You’ll all get protective and think you should bring me home. If I’m not there you can go ahead and enjoy yourselves.”

He was shaking his head.

“Sid, be sensible. It’s a
family
picnic. You’re
needed.
Who’d broil the steaks? I’m
sorry
I don’t think I should go, but that’s not reason everybody else has to be done out of it. And it’s such a perfect day for it.”

His head went on stubbornly shaking back and forth. “They can have their picnic. All they have to do is come by and pick up the Marmon.”

“Yes, and then they’ll get the idea I’m too ill to go, and they’ll get upset and hover around here trying to look after me. I don’t need any looking after, I’d just rather be quiet. You don’t have to say anything to them except that Sally and I felt a little tired. We’ll take it easy down here, and think about you up there playing Kick the Can and eating steaks and singing around the fire.”

“There isn’t going to be any singing around the fire. Not by me.”

“Yes!”
Charity said. She started to sit up straight, lost her balance, slipped sideways, pushed herself awkwardly upright again, and said intensely, leaning toward him, “Sid, I
want
you to! You
must!
David’s bringing his guitar, and the kids will want to toast marshmallows and sing. You must go, and you must stay till after dark so they can have the fun of the stars.”

Mulish, his eyes full of suspended panic, he kept on shaking his head. “What’s the point of a birthday picnic if you’re not there? We’ll have your birthday down here. The picnic’s expendable. Let the kids and the others have it.”

Weakly, tentatively, she let herself back against the pillows. She stared at him in impatience and frustration. “Oh, Sid, darling, why must you
argue
? If you’d like to do something for me on my birthday, just go up there and play paterfamilias. Do their steaks as only you can do them. Sing them some of your lovely sad ballads. Make Larry sing ‘Blood on the Saddle,’ the grandchildren have never heard that. Do that for me.”

Gripping the foot of the bed, he stared back at her. Their look held and held. Beside me I heard Sally’s crutch clink against the wall as she shifted her weight.

“I can’t,” Sid said in a tense, harsh whisper. “I won’t. I know what you’re planning.”

“What? What am I planning?”

“You’re planning to slip away while I’m gone.”

I felt Sally move again. Our eyes touched. But Charity caught even that slight movement. Without taking her eyes from Sid’s she said, “Stay. Stay, please.” To Sid she said in a tone that was at once pleading and hopeless, “Darling, what if I was? That was our
agreement,
that when it came time. . . .”

“I never agreed to that! That’s your plan, not mine. How would I know when it’s
time,
as you put it? You never tell me honestly how you feel. You keep it a secret from me, how long you. . . . You think it’s time now, and you want to send me out on a
picnic
?”

His feelings strangled him. Violently he turned away and stood with his back turned, his face set rigidly out the windows toward the blue line of mountains across gulfs of summer air.

“Ah, ah,” Charity said. She was crying. “Ah,
don’t!
Why do you . . .” Her tone softened. She said, as if the reasonableness of what she said could not be questioned, “You weren’t to
know
it’s time, not till I’d gone. And it isn’t the end, darling. It may be days yet. You’ll be visiting me, it’s only eighty miles. Is it awful that I want to go away quietly, without any fuss, and get
braced
there?”

His head did not turn, and he said nothing. His shoulders looked as if he were holding his breath. Staring from her pillows into the light, her yellow-pale cheeks wet, Charity was shaken by sudden impatience. Her face darkened and grew forbidding, her voice burst out with an edge of anger in it.

“I don’t want to die where I’ve lived so much!”
she said. “Can’t you understand? I want to go gradually, a step at a time, in some kind of decent order. Is that too much to ask? I’m trying to do it right, and you won’t help me. Oh, it was just to avoid scenes like this that I . . . I don’t want to
bother
anybody, I don’t want a lot of crying and breaking down! I
hate
it! All I want to do is go away quietly while the family is together and enjoying itself.”

A long silence. Then, without turning, Sid asked, “Who was supposed to take you?”

“We called Hallie and Comfort. Sally says she’ll come along. And of course Mrs. Norton. I’ll be
well
looked after.”

He continued to stare out the window. The sun pouring past him lit a halo in his thinning hair, and showed me once more the somehow pitiful clockwise whorl of his crown. Slowly he turned around. He said as if in puzzlement or wonder, “Your daughter, your sister, your friend, and your nurse all get to go with you. Your husband doesn’t.”

Her eyes closed for a moment, her head moved slightly, a spasm quirked her lips. She did not reply.

“Why?”
Sid said. “In God’s name, why am I shut out? At least let me drive the car. We can take the Marmon. It’ll only take five minutes to unload it. There’s room for everybody, even with you lying down.”

“Comfort’s bringing her station wagon.”

“I’ll drive that, then.”

“No!
That would only
complicate
things! I want you to go to the picnic and hold things together.”

Sid stood very still for a moment. Then I saw him begin to shake. He shook all over, like a man with a chill. He cried out, “The hell with the picnic! The hell with holding things together! I’m going with you!”

Once again, as if he needed it for a brace, he put his shaking hands on the footboard. He leaned on it, the tears streaming behind his glasses so that he raised his hand and ripped the glasses sideward and off. They fell somewhere below and beyond. Without protection or disguise, his naked face hung contorted at the foot of her bed.

“Why?” he shouted. “Do you hate me? Am I a handicap, or an embarrassment? Am I so troublesome you have to invent errands to send me off on? I’m your husband! I have the right to be with you. It isn’t as if you were going shopping, or off to a luncheon. Have you
thought
where you’re going, or were you too busy planning how to get me out of the road? Have you thought what it means to exclude me?”

She lay quiet. Her braids lay across her collarbones, which rose and fell with her quick breathing. Her eyes glittered, her mouth was unyielding, her voice rose against his and cut him off.

“Because I can’t stand it when you break
down
!” she said. “I haven’t the strength. I’m trying to do it right. If you’d just let me do it my way it’d be best for everybody, it’d be
ever
so much better. But you won’t!”

Sally and I stood in the doorway wanting desperately not to hear this, wanting to wipe out what we had heard, wanting to be gone. If sympathy means literally “suffering with,” we were utterly sympathetic. Also helpless and miserable. What I heard in Charity’s voice, I was sure Sid heard in it too: the exasperation of an assured, competent, organized, supremely confident woman having to deal with a fumbling man.
Must I hold you up even now?
that sub-voice said.
I’ve
picked you up after every failure, I’ve kept you from falling more than once,
I’ve tried to give you some of my strength, I’ve been loyal, I’ve been a helpmeet.
You know you can trust me to do what’s best. Why can’t you now, when it’s all
I can do to keep going, just do as I ask, and spare me all this?

There was hardly enough life left in her to let her lift a hand— both hands lay strengthless at her sides—but the old fighting pink showed in her cheeks, and as soon as she stopped speaking her mouth was a hard thin line. Mistress of the implacable silence, she stared him down.

Then, in the midst of that confrontation, I saw her face change. Some tension pulled it out of shape. A whimpering sound bubbled from her throat, her head drew backward, the cords of her neck stood out, her body arched under the blanket, her eyes closed, her lower lip was bitten between her teeth. I could feel the effort she made to lie still.

Sid sprang around the bed and bent over her.

Until then I had somehow not thought of pain as a problem, perhaps remembering Hallie’s word that stomach cancer is relatively painless, perhaps taking at face value Charity’s confidence that she could handle any pain that came. As of course it would come. Had come. The thing had already metastasized away back in May, when she had the operation. By now she could have it in the lungs, liver, pancreas, bones, brain, anywhere.

For what seemed an unbearably long time, maybe as long as ten seconds, she lay with her teeth in her lip and her eyes shut. Then— of itself or by an act of will?—her body relaxed in a series of little jerks. Her breath drew in and breathed out again in a long sigh. Her eyes opened blindly. Fumbling a Kleenex out of a box on the bed table, she wiped her wet face.

“Better?” Sid said. “Okay now?”

No answer.

“Shall I call Mrs. Norton?”

It was as if she neither heard nor saw him.

He offered her the water glass with its bent sipping straw.

Her hand came up and brushed it away from her mouth.

For a few seconds he stood looking down at her. His hand set the rejected glass back on the bed table. Then, with a sound like someone trying to breathe with his throat cut, he dropped on his knees. His arms spread across her, his face broke up in her shoulder. Sobs shook him. They shook her too, her face broke up in suffering and pity, and she bent her neck as if to kiss the top of his head.

But the will took over, the emotional impulse was put down. Her right arm, which had moved as if to go across his back in an embrace, drew back and stretched itself along the pillow, as far from him as it could get. Her face, still twisted with the feelings at war in her, turned away from the head that burrowed in her shoulder. She lay rigid, every muscle in her body repudiating him. Though with his face buried that way he couldn’t see her, he had to feel how completely she rejected him.

Almost at once, without raising his face, he surrendered. “All right! All right, whatever you want. Any way you must. I’ll stay out of it, I’ll try to . . . I just can’t. . . .”

That was all she wanted. From her deathbed, practically, she had mastered him once more. Her will would be done. But the moment she had beaten him he was her hurt child. The arm came off the pillow and clenched around him, the lips touched the whorl of his crown.

“It’s best,” she whispered. “You’ll see it is. You can come over and see me when I’m . . . settled. Come and see me tomorrow.”

Sally touched my arm, set her canes, and turned into the hall. I started after her, but as I went through the door I could not keep my eyes from going back to the bed. Charity, holding Sid’s head against her shoulder, looked straight at me. Her mouth made an indescribable, wistful, begging, please-understand, pained and painful smile. Her eyes, to my fascinated imagination, were like the eyes of Piero’s gloomy Christ—a painting that she had once, wanting to count no hours but the sunny ones, affected to repudiate.