Crossing to Safety (5 page)

“Sally, for hell’s sake,” I said.

But she had to get in her brag, confession, whatever it was. She needed something on our side to match that Paris wedding and those camel rides.

“See, both his parents were killed,” she said. She flushed, but she was going to tell this new friend all, like some teenager at a slumber party. “When you were what?” she said, with a look that barely reached me before it fell. “Twenty? Twenty-one? Anyway, when he was a senior at New Mexico.”

When Charity wasn’t taken over by her smile, her face was still intensely alive. Without her usual gush, without any theatrical emphasis, she said, “What did you do?”

“What would I do? I took the roast out and turned off the oven. I buried them. I sold the house and furniture and everything but the car and moved into a dorm. I went back between semesters and made up the examinations I’d missed. When I graduated, I went straight off to Berkeley to graduate school, because school looked like the safest place to be.”

“Was there money in the estate to help you through?”

“Estate? Well, I guess that’s what it was. I got about five thousand out of it. I put it in the bank and the bank failed.”

“What rotten luck,” Charity said. “Were they traveling somewhere? Was it an automobile accident?”

I suppose there was a certain bravado involved, or I would have turned her questions off. But I decided that if Charity Lang wanted to know all about us, let her hear it. Let her find out how different other lives were from hers. I said, “We had a boarder in Albuquerque, a world-war buddy of my father’s. He came and went, around for a few weeks and then gone for months. He had an old Standard biplane tied together with piano wire that he used to fly upside down around county fair racetracks, and take up wing walkers and parachutists. A barnstormer. He used to let me wear his British officer’s boots to school, and when things were slow he’d take my girl and me up. Nobody beat my time in high school. So this pal of mine ended by orphaning me. He took my folks for a joyride on their wedding anniversary and ran them into the side of the Sandias. I was home studying and minding the anniversary roast.”

In the subdued light Charity sat still, her hands on the purse in her lap. Her head tilted, she made a half smile as if about to say something placatory or humorous. But all she said, and still without the inordinate emphasis of her customary conversation, was “That’s terrible. Both of them. Were you very fond of them? What did your father do?”

“He ran an auto repair shop,” I said.

So much for family backgrounds. So much for animated afternoon conversations, too. I seemed to have squelched her curiosity. Within a couple of minutes she was turning her watch to the light and crying that she must go, Barney would have absolutely
devoured
the nanny, or smothered Nicky. But first, could we come to dinner Friday evening? They wanted to know us
well,
as soon as possible. They didn’t want to be deprived of us a
minute
longer than they had to. Wasn’t it
luck
that What’s-His-Name Jesperson went to Washington to work for Harold Ickes, and that we had been picked to take his place? He was such a fud. Could we make it Friday? It would be just two or three couples, young faculty we probably knew already, and her mother, who was visiting from Cambridge.
Please
be able to come.

It crossed my mind, and if it crossed mine it had already passed through Sally’s, that we had a humiliatingly blank calendar. One quick look established the fact that we had no more pride than we had engagements. Friday, then.

We walked Charity up the three steps from the basement, and around the house to where her car was parked in the street. It was not a fancy car—a Chevy station wagon about the age and condition of our Ford—and it could have stood a wash. The back seat had some rolled-up clothes in it, obviously headed for the cleaners.

“I feel we’re going to be such friends!” Charity said, and hugged Sally and gave my hand a hard squeeze and climbed into the driver’s seat and irradiated us with that smile.
“Start keeping notes!”
she said to Sally. Ox-eyed Sally, she of the Demeter brow, she had no residue of impatience at having been pried at, as I did. She hadn’t been bothered by Charity’s curiosity. She had invited it. She had poured us out like a libation on the altar of that goddess.

We stood waving as Charity drove away toward the Capitol dome that showed above the trees. All right. I admitted it: a charming woman, a woman we couldn’t help liking on sight. She raised the pulse and the spirits, she made Madison a different town, she brought life and anticipation and excitement into a year we had been prepared to endure stoically. Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.

4

Friday evening, uneasily on time, we rolled along Van Hise Street under big elms. The western sky was red, and there was light enough to read the numbers painted on the curb. A car length past, we stopped and looked the house over.

To my rank-conscious eyes it looked like a house with tenure— big front lawn with maples, unraked leaves thick on the grass and in the gutter, windows that stretched like a nighttime train. Above the door an entrance light showed two brick steps, a flagstone walk, and the heavy leaves of a lilac hedge along the driveway.

“It’s a Charity sort of house,” Sally decided. “Sort of ample and careless. No side.”

“Lots of front.”

“Not the kind that puts you off. No iron stags. No ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs.”

“Did you expect them?”

“I didn’t know what to expect.” She shrank her shoulders together in the gold-embroidered Chinese dragon robe that was almost the only relic left from her mother’s operatic career, and laughed a little. “I liked her so much I can’t help wondering what
he’ll
be like.”

“I told you. A friendly house detective.”

“I can’t imagine her married to a house detective. What’ll I talk to him about? What’s he interested in?”

“Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
?” I suggested. “The
Marginalia
of Gabriel Harvey?”

She was not amused. In fact, she was definitely nervous. Peering like a burglar at the lighted house, she said, “Her mother, too. Did you know her mother was one of the founders of Shady Hill School?”

“What’s Shady Hill School?”

“Oh, you know!”

“No.”

“Everybody knows Shady Hill School.”

“Not me.”

“Well, you should.” I waited, but she didn’t enlighten me. After a minute she said, “Charity was telling me about her. She sounds formidable. She’ll probably expect me to converse in French.”

“Converse in Greek. Put her down. Who does she think she is?”

She said restlessly, “I wish I’d asked what people would be wearing. What if everybody’s in a long dress, and I come out from under this robe in my two-year-old short thing? The robe’s too fancy and the dress isn’t fancy enough.”

“Look,” I said, “it isn’t her uncle the ambassador’s. If we aren’t presentable they can send us home.”

But when I started to open the door she yelped, “No! We don’t want to be the first. We don’t want to be sitting here when the others come, either. Drive around the block.”

So I drove around the block, slowly, and when we got back, two cars were unloading. Their occupants gathered under the arc light, where bullbats were booming after insects and a chilly Octoberish smell of cured leaves rose from the ground, the indescribable smell of fall and football weather and the new term that is the same almost everywhere in America.

I knew the three men: Dave Stone, from Texas via Harvard, who looked like Ronald Colman and spoke softly and had already impressed me as one of the younger faculty I could be friendly with; and Ed Abbot, another friendly one, on leave from the University of Georgia while he finished his degree; and Marvin Ehrlich, one of the high-crotch, short-leg, baggy-tweed contingent. He had let me know a day or two earlier, while loading his pipe and scattering tobacco crumbs all over my desk, that he had studied with Chauncey B. Tinker (Tink) at Yale, and then had gone on to Princeton to read Greek with Paul Elmer More. He had also quizzed me on how I happened to have my job—whom I knew on the senior faculty, who had recruited me—how much he had to watch out for me, in other words, in the competition for promotion. I had reacted to him as if he were ragweed, and was not especially happy to see him now.

I knew none of the wives, though Sally did, and they said they had met us at the Rousselots’. Lib Stone was a thin Texas belle full of laughter, Alice Abbot a freckled girl from Tennessee, with white eyelashes. Wanda Ehrlich was notable mainly for her shape, which bulged her clothes until her eyes popped.

The Stones and Abbots shook hands with great friendliness. Ehrlich was putting away his goddamned pipe, and acknowledged us with a lift of the head. His wife (I reconstruct this after many years, and without charity, small c) gave us a smile that I thought curiously flat in so plump a face. It struck me then, and strikes me again now, how instantly mutual dislike can make itself evident. Or was I only reacting to their indifference? They did not appear to value me, and so the hell with them.

At least Sally could be reassured. No long dresses, and no wrap a tenth as gorgeous as her dragon robe.

Ed Abbot was antic, and full of party spirit. Going up the walk, he scared the bullbats with a rebel yell and spooked a cat out of the shadows. In two bounds it disappeared under the lilacs, while he helped it on its way with a screech.
“Yander goes a critter!”
Out of Wanda Ehrlich came a laugh like a hiccup, inadvertent and incredulous. “Ed, you cracker,” said his wife, “you’ll rouse the neighborhood.”

Laughing, smiling, or being superior, each according to his kind, we clustered under the light. Since I was closest to it, I pushed the bell button.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside must be revealed. Questions will be answered, uncertainties or mysteries dispelled. A situation will be started on its way through unknown complications to an unpredictable conclusion. The answer to your summons may be a rush of tearful welcome, a suspicious eye at the crack of the door, a shot through the hardwood, anything. Any pushing of any doorbell button is as rich in dramatic possibility as that scene in Chekhov when, just as the Zemstvo doctor’s only child dies of diphtheria and the doctor’s wife drops to her knees beside the bed and the doctor, smelling of carbolic, takes an uncertain step backward, the bell sounds sharply in the hall.

I suppose this bell sounded in the hall. But no dazed and haggard doctor answered the door. This door was yanked open, exposing the brilliantly lighted interior, and in the doorway stood—who? Theseus and Ariadne? Troilus and Criseyde? Ruslan and Liudmila?

Oh, my goodness. House detective, did I say? Did I mention Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
?

Side by side, dressed for the party, shouting welcome, blinding the dim porch with their smiles, these two were the total antithesis of academic mousiness, economic depression, and the meager living that had been our tenement for most of our conscious lives. To our dazed eyes, they were as splendid a pair as lamplight ever shone upon.

Charity I was prepared for, more or less—the fine narrow head, the drawn-back hair, the vivid face, the greetings that managed to be excitedly personal even while she was dividing them among eight of us. She was dressed in a white ruffled blouse and a long skirt made, apparently, of a Paisley bedspread or tablecloth with a hole cut in the center. Her pregnancy didn’t show yet. By February, she would look like a Mississippi River tug pushing a three-by-five tow, but right then, in her doorway, crying greeting, she looked simply tall, beautiful, exotic, and exuberant.

But Sidney Lang, he overwhelmed the sight. He wore an embroidered shirt that I thought might be Greek or Albanian or Jugoslav, but that might have come from Mexico, Guatemala, North Africa, or some tribal culture in the Caucasus. And dress was the least part of his transformation. Something had enlarged and altered him. If this had happened in recent years, I would be compelled toward images of Clark What’s-His-Name throwing off his glasses and business suit and emerging in his cape as Superman.

This English instructor in his Balkan or whatever it was shirt, standing by his beautiful wife and crushing the hands of his guests, was by Michelangelo out of Carrara, a giant evoked from the rock. At the university, in his gray suit, he had seemed of no more than medium height, perhaps because he stooped so attentively to hear the slightest word from the person he was talking to, perhaps because his neat, fair hair made him look somehow ineffectual. Walking with me to a class the day before, he had all but skipped to keep in step, inclining his head to hear the wisdom that dropped from my lips, and I had felt at once flattered and superior. Now, ordering me into his house, roaring his pleasure at our presence, demanding coats for stowing in the closet, he was a djinn. He walked among the treetops and was taller than the trees.

Our hands, offered two at a time because that was how they were demanded, passed from Charity’s to Sid’s. “Oh, Sally Morgan, how absolutely
lovely
you are!” cried Charity as she passed Sally on. “You belong on a Ming scroll!” And to Wanda Ehrlich, coming next, “Wanda! How
nice
to see you! Come in, come
in
!”

I saw Wanda register the difference between Sally’s welcome and her own. I saw Sid seize Sally’s hands with such a passion of greeting that she bounced from the impact. His forearms were massive and dense with blond hair. Golden hair sprouted from the throat of his embroidered shirt. His eyes, with the steel-rimmed spectacles off, were strikingly blue, and the teeth in his square face were as white as Charity’s. He was not only the most robust English teacher I ever saw, but the most charming. With his power turned full on, he could win anybody. In all moods his face fell into pleasant lines, and he had a kind of enthusiastic antique gallantry that blew Sally away. He held her hands high and had her pirouette under them—in effect, they boxed the gnat. “Absolutely lovely is right,” he said. “Oh, beautiful, beautiful! Charity told me, but she didn’t do you justice.”

She began to undo the loops of her robe, but he stopped her. “Don’t. Keep it on. I want to show you off to Aunt Emily.”

He left the rest of us to fend for ourselves, he put an arm around her shoulders and propelled her toward the living room. Being hauled like a captive into a cave, Sally threw me a look: amazement, amusement, a Bronx cheer for my powers of description.

Trailing after them into the living room, we were presented to Aunt Emily, Charity’s mother. Even Charity called her Aunt Emily. She was a lady with gimlety brown eyes and the grim smile of a headmistress who has seen all sorts of naughtiness and still loves children, or swears she does.

“Ah,” she said when it came my turn. “You’re the man with the literary gifts. And such a beautiful wife. Charity and Sid have told me how much you’ve added to the English Department.”

“Added?” I said. “We’ve barely arrived.”

“Obviously you’ve made an impression. I hope we can talk, though the way this costume party is starting out, I may not see you again.”

I liked her. (She flattered me.) “I’m at your command,” I said. “All it will take is a seductive signal with your fan.”

“I’ll have to get a fan and lie in wait. They tell me you’re a writer of great promise.”

Who could resist? There lay the evening before us, more full of promise than even myself. The mere prospect of a square meal could cheer me in those days, and here there was much more— light, glitter, chatter, smiles, dressed-up people, friends, audience. A girl who came across the thick carpets bearing canapés turned out to be a freshman from one of my classes. I liked her seeing me in those surroundings. Books everywhere. Paintings on the walls that were not Van Gogh or Gauguin prints but original oils by Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. I read them as evidence of how enthusiastically these New England Langs had adapted to midwestern life, giving up (I supposed) Winslow Homer for the Hayloft School.

And more. Remember, this was 1937, only four years out of Prohibition and deep in that Depression that is like the Age of Fable to today’s young. Only last month our grandson in La Jolla, twiddling the dials of his five-hundred-dollar stereo in search of the Eagles or James Taylor, interrupted some reminiscence of mine by saying, “Yeah, Grandpa, tell about the time you and Grandma saved up for a week for a couple of nickel ice-cream cones.” His 1972 irony is close to our 1937 reality, but to him it will never be anything but a wisecrack. Nickel ice-cream cones make him snort. Any respectable ice-cream cone costs sixty or eighty cents, and a three-decker a dollar and a quarter. And saving up, what is that?

What was true of ice cream was triply true of liquor. Whatever else it did, Prohibition really did inhibit our drinking. In Albuquerque before 1933, our student parties had involved homemade wine or home brew explosive with yeast, sometimes with a stick of grain alcohol or ether in it if we happened to have a medical student among us. Faculty, if they had any hoarded or bootlegged supplies, did not share them with students. In Berkeley, after repeal, faculty receptions did blossom out with jugs of sherry that had been manufactured in haste and aged on a truck coming up from Cucamonga. Student parties graduated to grappa—raw California brandy—or punch. Punch we created in a bowl in the spirit of research, making it up out of fruit juices, soda, and whatever intoxicants we happened to have—gin, rum, grain alcohol, grappa, or all four. These we stirred together and colored pink with the synthetic grenadine syrup called Yum.

Yum.

Now here at the end of the room beyond Aunt Emily was a table burdened with Haig and Haig, Sunnybrook Farm, Duff Gordon, Cinzano sweet and dry, Dubonnet
rouge et blonde,
Dutch gin, Bacardi. Some Madison liquor store (I had not yet been in one) had been plundered to lay that table, though it turned out that the Langs themselves drank only a little Dubonnet, and Aunt Emily drank nothing at all.

Ed Abbot, coming up beside me to inspect those riches, was so shaken that his knees visibly wilted. He clutched his brow, and clutching it, bent to read labels. His lips moved. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my.” And then, more strongly, “When does the sacrifice begin? Do you-all need a victim?
Please!
”

Sid stepped behind the table and called for orders. The gentlemen deferred to the ladies. Of the ladies, one spoke. “I’ll have a Manhattan,” said Wanda Ehrlich, without please.

Those were the days of the silver cocktail shaker. Robert Montgomery’s way with it in the movies had instructed us all. Sid seized his, uncapped it, filled it with ice. His hand moved over the crowded bottles and selected a sweet Cinzano, hovered again and descended on a Haig and Haig Pinch. But Ed and I cried out with one voice, and his hand stopped.