Crossing to Safety (7 page)

We hushed. She read.

She not only brought tears to some people’s eyes, she brought down the house. Cheers, applause, excitement. Isn’t she great? God, I wish I could do that. But no sooner had the clapping died out into a babble of talk than the Ehrlichs rose to leave. “Oh, no!” Sid and Charity said. “The evening is young. Stay awhile.” But I noted a point at which they tacitly agreed not to press the Ehrlichs further. The Ehrlichs shook hands with Aunt Emily, still beaming on the sofa, and as they came past me, Wanda bent her overupholstered body close and said something tense and furious.

I was caught unready. “What?” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”

“My husband can read Greek too!” Wanda said, quite loudly, and went on out to where Sid was holding her coat and Charity was opening the door. Host and hostess, with their shining smiles, they cried the Ehrlichs out. “Goodnight, goodnight. Thank you for coming. Goodnight.” Returning to the living room, they made a wry, disconcerted face at the rest of us.

Altogether, a lovely scene. I felt guilty and triumphant. There we were, still in the warmth and light and grace of that room, while those who didn’t belong, those who hated and envied, those who were offensive to Athena, went out into the chilly darkness. I knew how they felt, and I hated it for their sakes. But I also knew how
I
felt. I felt wonderful.

The party broke up a little while afterward, and guess which couple was the last to go. Neither Sally nor I had ever known people like the Langs, neither of us had ever spent so exhilarating an evening. And just as we were getting ready to go, the Langs found themselves unwilling to part with us. Aunt Emily had gone up to bed, the door had closed on the Abbots and Stones. Standing with Sally’s dragon robe in his hands, Sid said suddenly, “Don’t go yet. How about a walk? Wait, it’s got chilly, this won’t keep you warm. Charity, where are the burnooses?”

She knew, and brought them—long white cowled woollen robes that covered us from skull to heels. We got into them, all four of us, and went out into a night of frost. If anyone had looked out his window he might have thought he was seeing the ghosts of Fra Lippo Lippi and his pals weaving back to the monastery after a night on the town.

I remember how quiet it was, how empty the streets at that hour, how our feet were loud on pavement and then hushed in grass and then crackly in leaves. There was a glint of settling frost in the air. Our voices and breaths went up and got mixed with the shadows of trees and the bloom of arc lights and the glitter of stars.

It was like nothing I had known either in Albuquerque or Berkeley. It looked different, sounded different, smelled different, felt different. And those two people were the newest and best part of it. It is there in my head now, as bright and dark as Housman’s vision of human hate, but with the opposite meaning. We talked and talked. We told each other what we liked and what we had done and what we wanted to do. If we quit talking for a minute, in flowed that frosty, comforting midwestern night.

“Don’t you think of this place as an
opportunity
?” Charity asked us. “Don’t you feel the way we do, how young and promising it is, and how much there is to be done, and given, and taught, and learned? Sid and I feel so lucky. Back in Cambridge some people felt sorry for us, going away out to Wisconsin, as if it were Siberia. They just don’t
know.
They don’t know how warm and friendly and open and eager it is. And bright, too.

“Maybe the students aren’t as well trained as Harvard students, but a lot of them are just as bright. If there are Winesburgs in the Middle West it’s because people don’t give them a
chance
to
become
anything. They expect too much too soon. They won’t stick it out and give what they ought to give. Instead, they run away to Chicago or New York or Paris. Or else they stay home and just grumble and knock and talk about spiritual
poverty.

“I don’t know about you, but Sid and I think a little city like this, with a good university in it, is the real flowering of the American dream. Don’t you feel it? It might have felt like this in Florence in the early fifteenth century, just before the big explosion of art and science and discovery. We want to settle in, and make ourselves as useful as we can, and help it grow, and grow ourselves. We’re determined to give it our absolute best. Before we’re all done with it, let’s make Madison a place of
pilgrimage
!”

She went on like that for blocks, while Sid murmured, and agreed, and prompted, and listened. She said a lot of things we might have thought or hoped but would have been embarrassed to express. Never in our lives had we felt so close to two people. Charity and Sally had their competitive pregnancies, we were all at the beginning of something, the future unrolled ahead of us like a white road under the moon. When we got back to their big lighted house, it seemed like our house too. In one evening we had been made at home in it.

All of us felt it. We must have. For in front of their gate, before we drove away still wearing their burnooses, we fell into a four-ply, laughing hug, we were so glad to know one another and so glad that all the trillion chances in the universe had brought us to the same town and the same university at the same time.

5

Madison. It comes back as broken scenes. We sit in ragged lawn chairs on the ragged lawn. I am grading papers through a hangover headache, Sally is still trying to get through Jules Romains’
Men of Good Will.
Saturday, not quite noon, the morning after we came home from the Langs’ dinner party wearing their romantic burnooses and too stimulated to sleep. We talked, we made love, we talked some more, finally we wore out. Now it is the next day.

It is a fair blue day, Lake Monona is tepeed with white sails, there is a bright chop on the water that my aching eyes avoid, focusing out of duty on the pages of a freshman theme describing Observatory Hill. Something strikes my eye, I laugh out loud, Sally looks up from her book.

“Listen to this. ‘The top of the hill is round and smooth, worn down by centuries of eroticism.’ Is she pulling my leg, or is this one for Dave Stone’s boner collection?”

“I suppose she means ‘erosion.’ ”

“I suppose she does. But yearning speaks between the lines. It’s like that headline, ‘Pen Is Mightier Than Sword, Says Wilson,’ that left out the slug between ‘Pen’ and ‘Is.’ Inadvertence is the truest humor.”

“Is it, now.”

The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop of canvas. And now, from the corner of the house, voices. There are Sid and Charity, dressed for outdoors, full of urgency. Can we come on a picnic? Since we have no telephone yet, they took a chance and just made a lunch and
came.
Last night was their wedding anniversary. They were going to pour champagne for a finale, but then the Ehrlich business sort of damped the party and they didn’t. But they want a celebration, and they want us along. They know a hill out in the country where you can see a long way, where last spring they found pasqueflowers, and where now there might be hickory nuts. No need to bring anything—it’s all packed.

Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty. We bundle our books and papers inside the basement door, we manage to contribute some apples to the picnic supplies, and we pour around the house to their car.

Out in front, the mailman is just arriving. He hands me a letter and I see the return on the envelope. My eyes jump to meet Sally’s. A hope as startling as a stray bullet ricochets off up Morrison Street. When I stick my finger under the flap, Sally frowns slightly: Not now, don’t open your mail in public. Sid is holding open the station wagon door.

But I can’t wait. I never could. I have been opening my mail in public all my life. I can no more refrain than Noah could have refrained from taking the sprig of green from the dove’s beak. Already moving to get in the car, I rip open the envelope and snatch a look. I let out a yell.

Sally knows instantly, but Sid and Charity stare. “What is it? Is it good news of some kind?”

I pass Sid the letter.
Atlantic
wants my story, the one I wrote in the week before the beginning of classes. They will pay me two hundred dollars.

The Langs join us in a war dance around the station wagon, and all the way out into the country their excited faces turn from the front seat to shine on us. They ask a hundred questions, they burst with pleasure, they warm us with their total, generous happiness in our good luck. Everybody’s tap is wide open.

Once we have parked and started down a country road between stripped cornfields, with crows cawing over, Sally and Charity go on ahead. Sid carries a big Adirondack pack basket that he will not let me spell him with. The girls, after their first briskness, dawdle, stopping often to examine roadside weeds, and we consciously slow our pace so as not to catch up.

I can hear Charity’s high animated voice doing most of the talking. She is endlessly volatile and enthusiastic and provocative. I gather that she is back on baby-making, telling Sally not to be afraid, to
give
herself to it and get the most out of it. Herself, she intends this time to be conscious the whole time. She will not take any ether unless it gets unbearable, which she does not expect it to do, being the third time. She has worked out a system: She will take a little flag into the delivery room, and when she can’t bear any more, if it comes to that, she will raise the flag as a signal to the anesthetist. She wishes she could rig a mirror so that she could
see
the birth.

I am guessing, but not wildly. Their talk often goes like that. As for me, I walk in the mellow sun with that letter in my shirt pocket as warm as if it had life. Two hundred dollars are a tenth of a year’s pay. I wrote that story in a week. If I could go on doing even a quarter that well and that fast, I might double Wisconsin’s salary. I tell myself I will do just that. I decide that for Christmas I will get Sally a portable phonograph and some records, to cheer up her basement during the winter months and give us something to listen to together, the way the Langs do.

Beside me, Sid walks under his pack basket as if it weighed no more than his shirt. He is earnest, I have discovered. His grappling, wrestler’s mind is not quick, but it will not let go of an idea until he has pinned it or it has patted the mat. The
Atlantic
’s letter has turned him to the subject of writers and writing.

He believes that all serious writers have a vocation, a sort of mystical call. What they exploit is not intelligence or training, but a glorious gift that is also an obligation. He believes I have it. He wonders that I have never written poetry—he thinks I am a poet manqué, and he surprises me by quoting lines from the one story of mine that he has read (the only one I have ever published), to illustrate what he calls the particularity and brightness of my images, my sense of place, my verbal felicity.

“You know how to do it,” he says almost plaintively. “You could study for years and not
learn
how to do what you do. Right from the first paragraph of your first story, you know how. Now you’ve done it again. In a week. My God, it takes me a week to get my pencils sharpened and my rump comfortable in the chair. I envy you. You’re an instrument that blows no blue notes. You’re on your way.”

Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something—forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.

Talent, I tell him, believing what I say, is at least half luck. It isn’t as if our baby lips were touched with a live coal, and thereafter we lisp in numbers or talk in tongues. We are lucky in our parents, teachers, experience, circumstances, friends, times, physical and mental endowment, or we are not. Born to the English language and American opportunity (I say this in 1937, after seven years of depression, but I say it seriously) we are among the incredibly lucky ones. What if we had been born Bushmen in the Kalahari? What if our parents had been undernourished villagers in Uttar Pradesh, and we faced the problem of commanding the attention of the world on a diet of five hundred calories a day, and in Urdu? What good is an ace if the other cards in your hand are dogs from every town?

Sid has picked up a stick from under a tree, and he swings it on thistles and milkweed stalks along the road, causing explosions of fluff and seeds. In a tone so surly that it surprises me, he says, “What if you’re born in Pittsburgh and your father thinks literature is a frill, for women and sissies?”

We walk on in silence. “Is this you?” I ask finally.

Between beheadings of roadside weeds he looks at me sidelong. “My most vivid memory of my father is the total incomprehension— the contempt—in his face when I told him I wanted to major in English literature at Yale. That and the red hairs that sprouted on the backs of his hands. His hands always made me think of some clean, well-manicured strangler. I was afraid of him from the time I learned to walk. That hand with its pink fur was the symbol of power, callousness, philistinism, Presbyterian bigotry, business ruthlessness, everything I didn’t want to be ruled by. Is that what you’d call bad luck, or should I have been stimulated to surmount it?”

Caught off guard, and more than a little incredulous, I say cautiously, “But you did surmount it. You did go ahead and study literature. You’re teaching it.”

“Not with his blessing. I was in economics till he died, then I switched. And sure I’m teaching, but that wasn’t exactly the idea.”

He has taken off his glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket and buttoned them down. At once he looks less scholarly, more robust, and more cheerful. Many times, later, I saw that change. Glasses, and winter pallor, and his teaching uniform, could make him look like Milquetoast. Outdoors, and with a summer tan, he was somebody else.

Out of the corner of his eye he is studying me. “Your father was a mechanic, Charity says.”

“Yes.”

“Did he have any opinions about poetry? Did he think it’s a frill?”

“I doubt that he ever thought much about it.”

“So he left you alone to develop your gift.”

“He was a hard-working, home-brew-making, ballgame-going, lawn-mowing, decent, unintellectual man. We got along very well, generally. I think he was proud of me. He used to tell me, ‘Do what you like to do. It’ll probably turn out to be what you do best.’ ”

“Ha!” Sid says. “He was a wise man. That’s all it would take.” He swipes at some goldenrod and kicks the litter off the road. “It would have made a lot of difference to me if my father had said anything like that to me. If he’d been proud instead of baffled when I published a couple of poems.”

“You write poetry?”

“I used to. I tried to, never very successfully, never with much encouragement. I was the only son, I was supposed to step into banker’s shoes after a good long humbling training of twenty years or so. I don’t suppose he had any objection to poetry as a hobby. But to study it seriously, make it a career, that simply undid him. So I went into economics. A month after I went back to New Haven for my junior year, he dropped dead. At midterm I switched to literature, and I’ve felt guilty ever since. End of stupid story.”

We walk. Crows flap over. The woods on the hill ahead glow yellow and bronze. “Why is it the end of it?” I ask. “Why feel guilty?”

He ponders that, shrugging the pack basket higher on his shoulders. “I suppose you’re right,” he says. “Maybe it didn’t have to be the end of it. And I did go back to writing poems. I never quit, in fact. I published a few, mostly in little magazines but some in other places—
The Nation, Saturday Review.
But every time I wrote one I could feel his eyes on me. Every time I published one I’d read it with his eyes, and gag. Then I went to Harvard to graduate school, and you know how that is. You spend so much time filling the cistern that you don’t have any time or strength to do any pumping. Then teaching—other things. I’ve just sort of let it lapse.”

“Recite one.”

But he won’t. I understand that his father is still looking over his shoulder telling him they’re amateur and unworthy of a grown man’s time. He would be overcome with embarrassment to expose them to a real writer, one with the
Atlantic
’s letter in his pocket. Though I can’t see that poems in
The Nation
and
The Saturday Review of Literature
are necessarily lesser things than a story in
Atlantic,
and would have been very high on myself if I had made those magazines as an undergraduate, I don’t grant him his premise that there is a deficiency in him, kindling or match or both.

Full of abounding conviction that what we elect is not beyond us, I urge him to start writing again, turn it out, not let anyone discourage him. Graduate school, after all, is over; his life is what he wants to make it; he has passed all the examinations required of him. I have the insufferable confidence of a small success.

But he won’t talk about his poems. He turns the conversation to that banal subject, fascinating to non-writers, of why writers write. Ego enhancement, sure. What else? Psychological imbalance? Neurosis? Trauma? And if trauma, how far can trauma go before it stops being stimulating and becomes destructive? Academic pressures to publish, do those mean anything? Not much, we agree. How about the reforming impulse, a passion for social justice?

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission? If Time alone makes masterpieces, as Anatole France thought, then great writing is just trial and error tested by time, and if it’s that, then above all it has to be free, it has to flow from the gift, not from outside pressures. The gift is its own justification, and there is no way of telling for sure, short of the appeal to posterity, whether it’s really worth something or whether it’s only the ephemeral expression of a fad or tendency, the articulation of a stereotype.

But the fact is, you
can
tell, don’t I think? He quotes me, seriously, the old bromide about a pretty good poem being like a pretty good egg, and asks me if anyone could feel good about laying pretty good eggs.

I can’t help suggesting that he has overlooked an important inducement, and that outside pressures do count. The libraries are full of authentic masterpieces that were written for money. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.

“Or a wife’s?”

Again I am astonished. “Don’t tell me Charity is against poetry.”

Swinging his stick, he walks with his head down, brooding at the road. “She wants me to get promoted.”