Crossing to Safety (35 page)

Sally and I had barely stopped in the alcove where the grandchildren’s toys were stacked when Mrs. Norton put her head out the kitchen door. Sally had been standing with one hand to her mouth. She took it away and said steadily, across living room and dining room, “Give them a few minutes.” Mrs. Norton’s head withdrew. We stood flooded with light from the bow window.

I said, “Has she been having these pains often?”

“One other time while I was with her.”

“Shouldn’t someone call the doctor?”

“I did.”

“What did he say?”

“He thought it was time she came to the hospital. He said Mrs. Norton should give her a hypo.”

“It doesn’t seem to have had much effect.”

“She didn’t give it. Charity wouldn’t take it. That’s why Mrs. Norton was upset.”

“Doing it what she calls ‘right,’ she makes it awful hard on everybody else.”

Thoughtful, sober, her thin shoulders pushed upward by the weight she put on the canes, her collarbones starved and vulnerable, her face puckered in the ancient, sorrowful acceptance that is increasingly its basic expression, Sally said, “She says what she’s trying to do is
save
everybody else. Especially Sid. She says if she lets him take her to the hospital he’ll have to acknowledge it’s all ending, and he’ll go all to pieces. You’ve been talking to him. Do you think he would?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. At least he wouldn’t feel shut out.”

“She wanted him to be kept busy with something physical. She thinks he can reconcile himself better if he finds out afterward, when it’s at a distance. She says he’s so dependent and emotional that even looking at her breaks him down. He weeps. She was going to have this picnic for a last farewell, she’d be as they all remember her. Then in a day or so, maybe right the next morning, she’d send Sid on some errand and she’d slip away.”

“Forethoughted,” I said. “Not necessarily sound.”

“Oh, it’s all spoiled now. She realized she didn’t have strength for the picnic, so she was going to get away this afternoon. But he guessed, and now it’s all happened just the way she didn’t want it to.”

“But she’s still going to shut him out.”

“I guess,” Sally acknowledged. “I wish . . .”

“What?”

But she was not ready to tell me what she wished. She said instead, “I found out she hasn’t eaten anything for two days. She hides the things Mrs. Norton brings, and manages to flush them down the toilet.”

I thought about that. “You mean she’d already started two days before you got here? That seems strange.”

“She expects it to take a while, maybe as long as a week.”

“But she was really going to the picnic? Fasting? You’d think she’d have tried to keep up her strength that long.”

She gestured with her hands—a kind of shrug without letting loose of the handles of the canes.

“How about you?” I said. “Aren’t you about done in? You’ve had a trip through the wringer.”

“I’m all right.”

She did seem so—all right, but sad.

“What do you suppose they’re doing in there now?”

“I hope,” Sally said, “I hope they’re doing what they were when we got out.
Hugging
each other.” Her eyes flashed up, swimming with sudden tears.

“Wouldn’t you think she could just let him drive her to the hospital? If she’s trying to save him she’s doing it in the cruelest possible way.”

She didn’t bother to wipe away the tears that ran down her cheeks. She only looked at me, shrugged hopelessly, and shook her head.

“She’s the most bullheaded woman alive.”

“Larry, she’s dying!”

“By compass.”

Sally did not answer. She brooded out the bow windows into the glorious afternoon.

“Would you do it this way?” I said. “If you die before I do, am I to have access to your last hours?”

Before she could reply, fast hard steps came down the hall. Sid went past, never seeing us. His heels left hardwood, pocked across the slate pavement in front of the fireplace, and went silent in the dining room rug. The kitchen door burst open, light from the other side outlined him, the door swung shut. Sally moved one of her canes and shifted her weight so that she could lay her fingers on my arm. We stood that way while Mrs. Norton came out of the kitchen and hurried off to the bedroom.

“I keep trying to remember she has to be forgiven what she can’t help,” Sally said. “We’re different people. You’re not dependent the way he is. I’m not strong the way she is. I don’t have to protect you.” Her voice ran almost out. “Couldn’t.”

We stood. Finally I asked, “When are they coming?”

“They said they’d be here about four-fifteen, after you and Sid would have left for the hill.”

My watch read ten of four. “When will you be back?”

“I don’t know. We’ll probably get her settled and have dinner there and go see her afterward. If it gets too late we might stay all night. I’ll have to call and let you know.”

“We’ll be at the picnic.”

“Till when? Nine or so?”

“At least.”

“Keep him as late as you can. Take him for a walk afterward. He always loved late walks with you.”

“If I know him he’d rather walk by himself tonight. He might not be at the picnic, either.”

“Well, stay with him if you can. I’ll call here, and if I can’t raise anybody I’ll leave word with Moe. Or I may be home before you are.”

“If you are, how will you get to bed?”

“Mrs. Norton.”

“Pretty grumpy help.”

“She’s all right. She’s just frustrated that Charity won’t be treated like a patient. I won’t give her that kind of trouble.”

We had a sort of smile between us. I said, “So everybody will have somebody to take care of.”

“Yours will be the hardest.”

“Yours doesn’t strike me as easy.”

“There’ll be three of us. And she’s so brave about it she makes me feel proud. It’s a sort of privilege.”

Her hand came up, with the crutch still sleeved on it, and she wiped a knuckle along her cheekbone before she tilted her face to be kissed.

“Stay with him,” she said again. “Walk him. Make him forget she’s gone. If you have to, stay up with him overnight, or bring him down to the guest house. The other bed’s made up.”

“All right.” For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it. I said, “Are you up to all this?”

“Yes.”

“I hate to think of you being at the mercy of Charity’s plans.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t
think
of putting us out! We’ll have to fight for everything we get to do for her.”

“It’s only Sid she’s willing to put out.”

Long dark look. “But that’s because he’s so much herself,” Sally said.

She planted her canes and went off down the hall, frail, contorted, devoted. I went looking for Sid.

4

Nine forty-five. It seems a geological age since I awoke this morning. Since I opened my eyes and looked around the familiar shabbiness of the guest cottage, continents could have regrouped themselves, species and genera could have evolved and vanished, the ice could have come and gone more than once. At the very least, lifetimes must have passed.

I sit on the porch step, dead tired from all the walking. The sun set nearly two hours ago, the long twilight has ebbed, the sky behind the hill spiky with spruce has gone the color of buffed iron. But over the lawn before me, over Moe’s gray Rambler, over Charity’s lounge and Sally’s chair lying folded where I dropped them, spreads a pallid, dusty, trembling wash from the moon. By craning to look up past the porch eaves, I can see it almost straight overhead, something over a half moon, enough to dim the stars.

It is the kind of evening that calls for meditation, nostalgia, vague religious thoughts, remembered lines of poetry. But I am not meditative. I am anxious. I have exhausted myself to no purpose, and my mind frets itself with worry and obligation. For I have not found Sid, and I do not know what to do next.

When I left Sally I expected to find him in the kitchen. He was not there. Neither was he on the terrace. Neither was he waiting in the Marmon. Neither was he down at the stable cleaning stalls or filling mangers, trying to make his muscles do for him what his mind would not.

He must have gone blindly walking. Should I try to follow him? If so, where? The hill was a network of trails, miles of them. I didn’t relish the thought of going through the woods calling his name. I liked neither the idea of seeming to pursue him nor the idea of his perhaps hiding from me, watching from cover as I went calling past. If he wanted to be alone, he should be allowed to be.

On the other hand, the family would probably already have started for Folsom Hill by the village road, and Charity’s peace of mind depended on their having a picnic, and all the wherewithal of the picnic sat here in the Marmon. What was more, the station wagon would be coming for Charity at a quarter past four, twenty minutes from now. Charity must not come out for her last ride and find the Marmon still there and Sid rebelliously off in the woods. If he did not soon appear, I should probably take the car up. I might meet him on the road. Perhaps he was walking up to the hilltop, disciplining himself to the master plan and depending on me to bring the picnic.

But I still had a few minutes to look for him. Where? The idiot boy sent to find a lost horse asked himself where he would go if he were a horse, and went there, and there the horse was. In my experience, horses never strayed downhill, always up. If I were a horse— or if I were Sid Lang—I would not stray downhill either.

So I went for a quarter of a mile or so up the hayroad that Sid and Charity used as a shortcut to the picnic site: through a gate, along a warm fragrant tunnel under the balsams, and into the empty meadow that Charity had had bulldozed for a playing field.

It seemed to me an absolutely characteristic Charity artifact. She had prepared that field in a burst of enthusiasm without considering that it was a steep mile and a half from the lake where all the children lived. The uncut grass was eighteen inches high. Obviously nobody had played anything there all summer.

But then, as I neared the far edge, I saw off to the left a trampled circle marked by horse dung. Margie, undoubtedly, the bewildered and desolated granddaughter, had been there training her sister-companion-friend to trot, canter, and change leads, in brooding repetitive circles. Not so different from what Sid was doing out here somewhere, and without even a horse for company.

It didn’t seem right to call out in that quiet place. Quiet—only when I stopped at the edge of the spruce woods did I realize how quiet. The sun beat down on me, angled but still hot. The air hummed and buzzed with insects, but their noise was a form of silence, not a sound, and over the whole hill lay a cushiony emptiness that absorbed and blotted up every vibration of air. I listened until the stillness rang in my ears. The meadow, unstirred by the slightest wind, darkened as I watched it, like a curing Polaroid film.

Then I heard a car. At first I thought it must be the station wagon coming up for Charity, and I started to run back, thinking I must somehow get the Marmon—no, too late. Then I realized that the sound was coming from behind me, and turning, I saw Moe’s old Rambler nosing out of the woods into the open.

We had a hurried, baffled conference. He had seen nothing of Sid on his way down from the hill, though as he said, he had not been looking for Sid, he had been keeping his eye out for the Marmon. Charity’s directions, relayed by Sally over the telephone, had been to get the family up to the hilltop, and if Sid and I were not already there, to come and get us—at once.

Moe was sober and upset. “It’s like something out of K-k-Kafka,” he said. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Walking, I guess.”

“Is the c-car still there?”

“Yes.”

“Hallie and Comfort haven’t shown up yet?”

“They hadn’t ten minutes ago.”

“We’d better h-hustle,” Moe said.

I climbed in beside him and we went on down, leaving the gate open, and parked beside the Marmon on the grass. There was no sign of anyone, or any movement through the kitchen windows. Charity’s bedroom, on the other side of the house and at the far end, was out of sight and out of earshot.

Moe, in a tearing hurry, motioned for me to drive, but I said I thought I’d better try to find Sid. We could walk up, or come in Moe’s Rambler. Moe agreed after only a moment’s hesitation. Obviously the thought of being caught there by the station wagon caused him intense anxiety. He climbed into the Marmon and looked distractedly down at its mysterious dashboard. I had to show him where the switch and the starter button were. He bucked the car a foot forward trying to start it in gear. Finally he got it going.

“If I run across him I’ll take him on up,” he said. “We’ll h-h-honk all our h-h-horns. If you find him, b-bring him. The key’s in the car.”

“Fine.”

At the last moment, I yanked Charity’s lounge and Sally’s chair from behind the running-board rack and dropped them on the lawn. Charity wouldn’t need her lounge ever again, but Sally could not get along without the chair. Standing on the running board, I rode with Moe up the hill to the gate. With a relief that surprised me, I stepped off as we pulled behind the screen of birches and brush, and just before I stepped off I grabbed a flashlight out of the top of one of the hampers in the back. So powerfully did Charity’s instructions and training direct our every move.

At the gate Moe gave me a sober look, grimaced, and drove away, looking small and childlike behind the wheel of that leviathan. He rocked ahead and disappeared down the balsam tunnel, leaving me standing in the spritzy smells of raspberry and hazelbrush, my ears alert for the sound of the station wagon coming up the hill.

I heard it almost at once. While I waited for it to come in sight below me, I was wondering what effect the sound of cars might have on Sid. First the Rambler, then the Marmon, now the station wagon—any one of them might be the sound of the end of his life. Would it drive him deeper into the woods, or would it draw him to lurk by the side of the road and watch?

The station wagon topped the steep pitch and drew up beside the Rambler. Hallie and Comfort got out and hurried inside. I waited. The door, left open behind them, stared back at me, as pregnant with unfulfilled possibility as an open door on an empty stage.

Then in a very few minutes it filled. The white outline of Mrs. Norton appeared in it, carrying a suitcase. She backed through, set the suitcase down, and leaned in to help Hallie and Comfort get Charity through.

Intent on the step down, Charity did not look up. I saw her cameo profile and the graceful, weak, flowerlike droop of her neck and head. Her helpers moved with her in synchronized steppings and bendings. They were like the chorus of women in some Greek drama, or Morgain le Fay and her maidens bringing wounded Arthur on board the barge for Avalon.
Totentanz.
Grave and solicitous, intensely concentrated, they crossed the porch and descended the other step to the lawn.

From behind the screen of brush I watched them, hoping that Sid was not hidden anywhere, watching as I was. In his shoes, I could not have borne this.

Then the doorway filled again, and there, hobbling and lurching, helpless to help or even keep up, shrunken and warped out of shape, came Sally—no part of the dance, but harder to watch than any of it.

The vision of her floundering in the wake of the concentrated helpers and their feeble charge turned my distress into outrage. Not at any of the helpers, not at Charity’s willfulness, not at the solidarity of women collaborating in what only they could do as well, while excluding male intrusions. No, at
it,
at fate, at the miserable failure of the law of nature to conform to the dream of man: at what living had done to the woman my life was fused with, what her life had been and was. What she had missed, how much had been kept from her, how little her potential had been realized, how hampered were her affection and willingness and warmth. The sight of her burned my eyes.

The other three helped Charity into the middle seat and propped her with cushions. Mrs. Norton got the suitcase and herself into the back. Outside, Hallie and Comfort stood a moment looking, it seemed to me with satisfaction, at the Rambler. They said something, but I could not distinguish words. They looked up my way, so that I shrank behind my screen of brush like a discovered peeping tom.

Then Hallie got into the back beside Mrs. Norton. Comfort slid into the driver’s seat. Sally braced her canes and boosted herself awkwardly in beside her, pulled in her canes, and shut the door. The engine started, the station wagon backed and headed down the road. I watched it until it dipped down behind a clump of birches. For a little while I heard the engine, then only the humming quiet of the hill.

Down at the house I found the door unlocked. For some reason, the fact that I could get in, and Sid too if he should return, reassured me. On an impulse, perhaps to see what he would find if he did return, I went through the house to the bedroom. It showed no signs of precipitate flight. The bed was made, books and magazines were stacked neatly on the bed table, the curtains were drawn against the dropping sun, the implements of sickness—sipping glass, bottles, Kleenex, mohair comforters, heating pad—were out of sight, put away, disposed of. An empty bedroom, no more.

Outside again, I scribbled a note on the pad that hung beside the door. I said that Moe had taken the Marmon, and that I was walking. If Sid came back here, he should take Moe’s car and go on up. I would see him.

This note I stuck on the Rambler’s aerial, and with the flashlight in my hip pocket went up the rise to the pasture gate, through the balsam tunnel, and across the playing field’s tangled grass to the edge where woods met meadow in a line as abrupt as a cliff. Tentatively, not as loud as I intended, I called. Listening brought me no answer. I found the masked entrance of the path and stepped inside.

In one step I was in brown twilight. Nothing grew in that dense shade. The lower branches of even healthy trees were shade-killed, spiky, scaly with gray lichen, and many trees had been broken or tilted by wind or snow, and lay crosswise, hung up, down and half down. The path that I remembered wound through this tangle, soft underfoot with duff and moss, and where trees had gone down across it someone with an axe or machete had cut through the trunks or trimmed the branches. I knew who. In a summer like this, Sid would have spent a lot of time clearing paths like this. He might be doing it right now.

I listened, but I heard nothing. Nor did I call in there. The shrouded quiet forbade noise. Anyway, there was no use to call, or search the skeleton woods for a sign of him. If he was in there, he would be on the path, and that went secretly ahead of me. I followed it.

And found nothing. I walked every trail on the hill, some of which I knew from past summers and some of which I found with my feet. I went to the hidden spring deep in the woods that he had shown me once, a place like a boys’ hideout. Nothing. I walked the long trail clear around the hill, a tiring hour and a half of up and down, because it occurred to me that what he wanted was the most strenuous walk he could find. Nothing.

There were scuffs in the trail, and chunks of moss had been kicked off an outcrop in one place, but I was not tracker enough to know whether those marks had been made that afternoon or last month. The woods were silent, except once when I came into the open and heard the yelling of kids, a good way off on the hilltop. It offended me, and I drew a gloomy parallel between Charity and the bare, gnarled, immoderately branched, very dead seed trees that I had come across here and there in the spruce woods—trees that had obviously grown up in an open meadow and seeded the area around themselves, and then been choked out by their profuse offspring. It was unfair to blame those children for having the fun that Charity had arranged for them, but that’s the way I felt.

Later, at nearly seven o’clock, I came close enough to see them. They were all spread out on the knoll above the cooking fire, eating while Lyle and David squatted in the smoke, carving up steaks, and Barney circulated with a wine jug on his finger. They irritated me too. Why were they so carefree, when they must know why neither Charity nor Sid, nor Sally nor I, nor Comfort nor Hallie, was there? But a moment’s thought convinced me that they didn’t know. At most, Moe and maybe Lyle knew; and they would not have told, because Charity’s orders were very clear. If they were worried about Sid, they must have persuaded themselves that I had him somewhere, or was walking his legs off for therapy.

That I didn’t, that it was only my own legs I had been walking off, was all the more reason for not going over to join them and partake of the feast whose smells across the hill watered my mouth. If I went over there I would get sidetracked into a lot of greetings and questions and sociability, or else I would have to tell them why I couldn’t get sidetracked, and that would break up the picnic.