Crossing to Safety (6 page)

“What’s the matter? Whiskey and sweet vermouth? And bitters? God,
I
don’t know, I was gently reared. I yield to my betters. Here, one of you make it.”

So Ed Abbot became bartender, beating me out by four one-hundredths of a second, and the rest of us came to the party.

I have heard of people’s lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event—a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody’s life but ours being changed by a dinner party.

We straggled into Madison, western orphans, and the Langs adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull and made moons of us and fixed us in orbit around themselves.

What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. Reading my way out of disaster in the Berkeley library, I had run into Henry Adams. “Chaos,” he told me, “is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.” No one had ever put my life to me with such precision, and when I read the passage to Sally, she heard it the same way I did. Because of her mother’s uncertain profession, early divorce, and early death, she had first been dragged around and farmed out, and later deposited in the care of overburdened relatives. I had lost my security, she had never had any. Both of us were peculiarly susceptible to friendship. When the Langs opened their house and their hearts to us, we crept gratefully in.

Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire.
Crowded
in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves, thought better of the world.

In its details, that dinner party was not greatly different from hundreds we have enjoyed since. We drank, largely and with a recklessness born of inexperience. We ate, and well, but who remembers what? Chicken Kiev, saltimbocca, escallope de veau, whatever it was, it was the expression of a civilized cuisine, as far above our usual fare as manna is above a baked potato. A pretty table was part of it, too—flowers, wine in fragile glasses, silver whose weight was a satisfaction in the hand. But the heart of it was the two people who had prepared the occasion, apparently just to show their enthusiasm for Sally and me.

They put Sally on Sid’s right, distinguished above other women and exposed to his full gallant attention. Over other conversation I heard him telling her a romantic story about their honeymoon, about a time in Delphi when a man they had met on the boat to Itea fell over the cliff and they were three days finding his body. Sally was a little high. A smile hung on her lips and her eyes were on his face, ready for cues that would move her to amazement, concern, or laughter. As for me, I was king of the castle between Charity and her mother. They quizzed me on a hundred California subjects from Yosemite to Dust Bowl refugees, and not only they but others near us, Alice and Lib especially, attended my answers as if I had been speaking from the sacred cave. How lovely it is to be chosen, how flattering to have such bright eyes on you as you divide the light from the darkness.

After dinner, coffee and brandy in the living room. While my awed freshman student was serving coffee and Sid went around with his tray of snifters and his bottle of VSOP, Charity put a record on the phonograph.
“Now!”
she cried, and flopped onto a couch. “Now we’ll all sit for a few minutes and just digest and
lis
ten!”

But Marvin Ehrlich had carried from the table an argument about the Spanish Civil War he had been having with Ed, a continental neutral. And I had found a place on a sofa beside Charity’s mother, and thought it my duty as a gentleman to make small talk.

As I was settling back after putting Aunt Emily’s cup on the coffee table for her, I heard Marvin say, “. . . rather go fascist? You’ve got to go one way or the other. Want to join up with Franco and Mussolini and Hitler? What’s the matter with being on the side of the masses?”

“Masses?” Ed said. “What masses? Americans don’t know anything about any masses. Masses are a European notion, they’re a cheese that won’t travel.”

“No? What about the middle-class masses?”

Hoots from Ed.

To Aunt Emily, as the strains of clarinet and strings swept the room, I made what I hoped was drawing-room conversation. “What is it about Mozart that makes him sound so happy? Is it just the tempo, or is there something else? How do you make pure sound sound happy?”

“Shhhhhhh!”
Charity said, to both Marvin Ehrlich and me, and as we subsided into digestion and attentiveness she salved our severally bruised feelings with the most forgiving of smiles.

I don’t know how English Departments are now, for I escaped them years ago. But I know how they used to look. They used to look first class. They used to look like high serene lamaseries where the elect lived in both comfort and grace. Up there, scholars as learned and harmless as Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford moved among books and ideas, eating and drinking well, sleeping soft, having three-month summer vacations during which they had only to cultivate their inclinations and their “fields.” Freed by tenure, by an assured salary, by modest wants, by an inherited competence, or by all four, they were untouched by the scrabbling and scuffling that went on outside the walls, or down in the warrens where we aspirants worked and hoped.

We knew that vision was only partly true. Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping from the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they were, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad.

Early in our stay in Madison Professor Rousselot, who was much admired by his junior faculty for his elegant stone house, his snow-white handkerchiefs, his way of taking razor-thin slices off a baked ham or turkey, his mots and aphorisms, his quotations for every occasion, and his summers in the reading room of the British Museum, gave me a hint of how things were. We were talking about one of my fellow instructors who had a sick wife. “Poor Mr. Hagler,” Professor Rousselot said. “He has only his salary.”

Ah, yes, Professor Rousselot. Many of us understand. Poor Mr. Morgan, he too has only his salary, and comes from the boondocks besides. There are several like poor Mr. Hagler and poor Mr. Morgan. Poor Mr. Ehrlich, for example. He has only his salary, and he comes from Brooklyn, and hates it. He tries hard—harder by far than poor Mr. Morgan, who is a little arrogant in his barbarism. Poor Mr. Ehrlich has labored to benefit from what he was taught by Tink and Paul Elmer More. He smokes the right mixture in his Dunhill pipe, he works on his profile, he wears the right flannels and tweeds, he can recommend the right nutty sherries. But he gives himself away, like the Russian agent who ate jam with a spoon.

Neither of us may in fact make the club, but poor Mr. Ehrlich is in even worse shape than poor Mr. Morgan, for Mr. Morgan, besides being a little arrogant, is uncomplicatedly upward-mobile, whereas Mr. Ehrlich is bent on tearing down the demo-plutocracy whose airs he affects. He snows you with his Yale-Princeton superiorities at the very moment when he is trying to sign you up in the Young Communist League. He seems to Mr. Morgan to be hung up halfway between the British Museum and Red Square, paralyzed by choice.

I spend a minute on Marvin Ehrlich not because he matters to me, or ever did, but because that evening, by his failure to make it into the junior version of what we all coveted, he emphasized my own euphoric sense of being welcomed and accepted. Maybe we were all anti-Semitic in some sneaky residual way, but I don’t think so. I think we simply felt that the Ehrlichs didn’t permit themselves to be part of the company.

Marvin never did get over his flushing resentment at being shushed by Charity. And when, after the music, she stood in the middle of the room and blew a police whistle and ordered us to get ready for square dancing, the Ehrlichs didn’t know how and refused to learn. Dave Stone coaxed them with some real hoedown music on the piano, and Charity told them how easy it was, Sid would call only the very simplest things. The rest of us formed a square and waited. No go. Since Dave was needed at the piano, we were one short. After a while we replaced the rug and accepted the songbooks that Sid passed out.

Brand new, my mind said to me. Ten of them. I peeked at the price on the dust jacket of mine. $7.50. Seventy-five dollars for songbooks, just for one evening.

The Ehrlichs didn’t sing, either. They sat with the open book between them and moved their lips and made no sound. Maybe they were tone deaf, maybe they had grown up to other kinds of songs. But their eyes burned with resentment and reproach.

Certainly what we sang could not have evoked their scorn. None of your “Home on the Range” stuff, nor bawdy ballads, nor tunes remembered from Boy Scout campfires. No no. We sang things that Tink himself might have applauded: “Eine feste Burg,” “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” “Down by the Salley Gardens.” Martin Luther, Johann Sebastian Bach, William Butler Yeats. That was a civilized bunch of people. All of them, barring the Ehrlichs, could carry a tune. And behold, Sid turned out to be a glee club tenor, Sally Morgan was a real contralto, a rich inherited voice, Larry Morgan could at least sing barbershop, and Dave Stone was a genius on the piano. We rolled our eyes and held long reverberating chords.

“Why, how well you did that!” cried Aunt Emily, and clapped her hands. “You’re practically professional!” We were all applauding ourselves. On the piano bench Dave nodded gravely and beat his hands together. We were full of self-congratulation and the discovery of a shared pleasure. And there sat the impossible Ehrlichs, smiling and smiling, with their useless book open and their mouths shut, hating what they envied.

After a while Charity saw their discomfort, and sent a look across the room to Sid, who stood up and wondered if anyone was getting dry. Several of us answered his call, and as we stood with glasses in our hands, prepared for more choral song or whatever Charity’s agenda had in mind, Sid picked up a volume of Housman’s poems from a table, opened it, and said in his light, pleasant, hurried voice, “Listen. I’d like your opinion on something. Listen.”

“Shhhhh!”
Charity said. “Sid has a question for you poetry critics.”

We hushed. Sid stood by the piano, cleared his throat, waited for full quiet, and read, taking it seriously. I didn’t know it then, but this was one of his roles—starting an intellectual hare.

EASTER HYMN

If, in that Syrian garden, ages slain
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

We stood or sat, waiting. “What’s the question?” Dave Stone asked.

“Does it satisfy you? Is it good Housman?”

“Satisfy how? It’s good Housman, sure. It’s a good poem. It should be read aloud every morning in Madrid and Barcelona.”

“Larry, does it satisfy you?”

“Sure. I believe in all that unquenched hate. I guess I didn’t know Housman was tempted by Christianity, though.”

“Exactly!” Sid cried. “Exactly! Doesn’t that strike an odd note, for him—that plea for salvation? That’s not the old stoic. That’s not the fellow who said ‘Play the man, stand up and end you / When your sickness is your soul.’ It makes me wonder if he really wrote this. He didn’t publish it, it’s one his brother found among his papers. You know what I think? I think Lawrence Housman got the stanzas mixed. I think he printed the stanzas in the wrong order. Wouldn’t it be more Housman if they were reversed? If it ended ‘Sleep well and see no morning, son of man’? ”

As a diversion, it was successful. We were all pretty high, we were all the kind of people for whom reading poetry aloud—lily parties, we used to call them—is neither odd nor sissy. A brisk argument ensued. We went to other volumes of Housman for corroborations, and volumes of Housman led us to other poets. Before long we were ransacking the packed bookshelves so we could read some favorite. That was how, within a few minutes, Sally and I, but mainly Sally, managed to give the Ehrlichs the coup de grâce.

Looking through the shelves to nail down some point or other, I found an
Odyssey
in Greek. I was astonished. Why should Sid, who I was sure didn’t know Greek, own Homer in the original? An affectation, like Ehrlich’s pipe? A feel for completeness, a need to have the total poetry of the world at his fingertips? A sense of what the well-bred house should contain? Had Charity’s father, a classical scholar, given it to them in an absentminded moment, forgetting it was Greek to them? Anyway, I was surprised. I had thought we might be the only household in Madison that gave shelf room to Homer and Anacreon and Thucydides. And we had them not because of anything I could do with them but because of Sally.

I plucked the book from the shelf and turned around and said, “Sally! Read us some Homer. Bend our minds with some hexameters.”

General consternation. “Do you read
Greek
?” Charity said. “Oh, please, yes!
Quiet,
everybody. Shhhh! Sally’s going to read Homer.”

Sally protested, but let herself be coerced. Half drunk and proud, I watched her stand up by the piano and get herself together. Her eyes went over us, she sobered the smile on her mouth. She has great dignity and presence when she is cornered, and when she reads that antique poetry she can bring tears to your eyes. It is much better than if you could understand it. She chants out of a remote time with the clang of bronze in it.