Laughter. “Well,” Sid says, “I have to take a job, is that it?”
“I don’t now what you’re studying for, if not some sort of job.”
“What if I said I’m studying because I think a poet ought to have his head filled with ideas?”
“Then I’d say the ideas you get out of books are secondhand ideas, and the ones you need for writing poems are firsthand ones. Your training leads straight toward the teaching profession, doesn’t it?”
“Usually.”
“Why not in your case?”
“I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes to be a good teacher.”
“Are you sure you’ve got what it takes to be a good poet?”
“No.”
“Well.”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
A lull. Charity, fixing her eyes on him hard, smiling and frustrated, said, “Well, you’ll have to grant me one point.”
“What’s that?”
“Teaching at least pays a salary.”
“I know,” he said. “Poverty and poetry are twin-born brats.”
“See?” she cried in triumph. “You just proved my point. You taught us all something. If you hadn’t been studying to be a teacher you wouldn’t know that line, or who said it. Who did?”
“Samuel Butler, I think. And if he hadn’t written it, no teacher would be able to teach it.”
“This is getting excruciating,” Comfort said.
Aunt Emily was making up her mind that the subject must be changed, and was opening her mouth to do so when Charity fired one Parthian shot. “You think you want to withdraw and write poetry because you’re afraid you can’t contribute any other way. But you can! Why should you undervalue yourself ? You’ve got all the makings. You can do anything you want if you want to enough.”
Comfort looked at the ceiling. “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime.”
Sid ignored her, looking at Charity. “You believe that?”
“What I said, or what my impertinent sister just said?”
“What you said.”
“You bet I do. So should you. Anything you want to do you can do.”
“And if I want nine beanrows and a hive for the honeybee?”
Shrugging, dismissing the very idea, she said, “You don’t need a higher degree for that. Any monk or bum can do that.” Leaning forward, frowning urgently and then breaking into a smile, she said, “Just go at it the way you’re going at you-know-what.”
“I’ve got special reasons there. And it was your idea.”
“What difference does that make? The will to do it is what matters. There’s always some special reason.”
He was attending, half smiling, totally absorbed in her voice, as if it came out of a burning bush. Aunt Emily perceived that he was easily led, that he wanted the kind of direction and reassurance that Charity was prepared to give him. He paid too much attention to other people’s opinions, including, unfortunately, hers. Now he shrugged, nodded, accepted. Aunt Emily could not help asking, “What is this you-know-what?”
Instantly Charity’s face changed from argumentative to gleeful. She laughed out loud. “You’ll find out. Oh, are you going to get a surprise! There’s going to be an announcement. Maybe tomorrow.”
Everybody looked her way, awaiting further enlightenment, but she had said all she was going to. It sounded ominous. In fact, it persuaded Aunt Emily that by letting things drift for only five days she had already waited too long. She subsided into watchfulness. But when Dorothy was clearing the table and George Barnwell had rolled his napkin into its ring and Charity had stood up, already in flight, her mother said, “Are you going out again this evening? I had some things I wanted to talk over with you.”
“Can they wait till tomorrow? We have to go down to the village and make some telephone calls.”
“Telephone calls? To whom?”
“That’s part of the surprise. Won’t tomorrow do?”
“I suppose it might if I were sure I’d see you tomorrow.”
“You can be sure. At breakfast.”
“All right.”
She watched Charity go around the table, drop a kiss on her father’s feathery head, and take Sid’s arm. “Come on, Mr. Lang, sir. We’ll be late.” There they went, she in her dirndl and sweater, he in his wrinkled khakis.
Somewhat grimly, Aunt Emily took herself out onto the porch. She sat a long time in the dusk, knitting by ear, thinking and planning, annoyed by Charity’s lack of common sense. Such an airy dismissing of warnings—for she knew precisely what her mother wanted to talk to her about. Such total lack of realism, with her infatuated faith that people could do anything they wanted to if they only wanted it enough. With Sid, at least, Charity’s theory was sound. She could do anything she wanted with him. He had no better sense than she had.
Well, tomorrow’s encounter. She would begin by pointing out that her sister Margaret, with Molly and three children, was coming on Sunday, and would require the dormitory. Sid’s visit must therefore be terminated. That would bring on the promised announcement, which she would have to oppose. Then the fat would be in the fire—hurt, tears, protestations, anger, the whole rest of the summer with a sullen Charity moping around the place, unhappy and rebellious and embittered. Perhaps there would be the necessity of resisting her return to Cambridge, where she would be out of control. There would be the unpleasant duty of watching the mail—not to intercept it, she would not stoop to that, but to make sure that the break was clean.
If she could not persuade them, then she would have to extract a promise that they would wait until Sid finished his degree, assuming he went for a degree, and found a job. No more than Charity did she take seriously those nine beanrows. So, the degree—two more years, perhaps three, longer in any case than their infatuation was likely to last. If they surprised her by holding out, why then God bless them, they would have proved something. She found herself wishing, against her sense of the realities, that they would do just that.
None of her planned program came to pass.
They arrived at the breakfast table late, after George Barnwell had already gone to his think house. Aunt Emily appraised their bottled excitement and waited. She had to wait only the thirty seconds it took for Sid to shove Charity’s chair under her and go around to his own. He was barely seated when Charity said, “Mother, we promised you a surprise. This is it. We want to get married.”
Aunt Emily set down her coffee cup. “That’s not entirely a surprise.”
“Do you approve?”
Aunt Emily looked from her daughter to her daughter’s young man. He had taken off his glasses and was polishing them. Perhaps he felt that he looked more approvable with his blue eyes exposed. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that he lacked anything personally. He was a thoroughly pleasant young fellow. She caught his eye and smiled, meaning to be kind, thinking, What a pity, what a pity.
“No,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
She expected them, Charity at least, to break out in arguments and expostulations. But Charity only took a sip of her orange juice, sat back in her chair and said with a smile that her mother thought offensively confident, “Why not?”
“I’m surprised that you have to ask.”
“Is there something wrong with Sid?”
“No,” Aunt Emily said, and could not forbear laying her hand on Sid’s for a moment. “I’m very fond of Sid, as you must know. But marriage—children, you just don’t know what you’re doing.”
Holding her mother’s eye, Charity finished her orange juice. When she put down the glass, the little smile was still on her face. “If you’re so fond of him, why do you object? He’s healthy, he’s intelligent, he’s got all his limbs, he doesn’t stammer, he’s not disfigured in any way. What’s the matter with him?”
“Nothing’s the matter with him,” Aunt Emily said. “Nothing in the world. What’s the matter has nothing to do with him persona
lly. It only has to do with the times, or the timing. Even if he were sure he wants to be a teacher, he has years of study ahead before he can qualify for a job, and perhaps several more before he can support a wife. If you tell me you’ll work to support him, then I have to think that the wildest folly. I’ve seen too many student marriages like that. The wife goes to work and stops growing while the husband grows beyond her. I don’t want that to happen to you, and neither does Sid, I’m sure. Your father’s salary won’t stretch to help support the two of you. You want something that simply isn’t possible. I wish it weren’t so.”
“Is it only economics, then?”
“Only economics,” Aunt Emily said. “There’s your inexperience speaking.”
Charity laughed so freely that her mother was irritated. “Ah,” Charity said, “there’s something you don’t know. If economics weren’t a problem, you’d approve, is that it?”
“You’ll have to explain.”
“Would you?”
Now Aunt Emily was truly irritated, trying to be kind and being pushed by this insolent girl into something like a quarrel. “How can you even suggest that economics isn’t a problem?” she said. “Forgive me, Sid, but it seems I have to point out some facts. How can there be no economic problem when Sid doesn’t even have a spare shirt? All the time he’s been here I’ve been wondering how I could steal the one he’s wearing so Dorothy could wash it. No, you’re being absurd.”
Sid surprised her with one of his bellows of laughter. They were both laughing. “His disguise is too good,” Charity said. “He had me fooled, too, till lately. What would you say if we told you Sid’s father was for quite a while, and in several business ventures, a partner of Andrew Mellon? Would your objections disappear then?”
For the space of several calming breaths Aunt Emily sat still. Then she said to Sid, “Is this true?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“You’re afraid it is! What is this? Why the disguise? Why does the son of a partner of Andrew Mellon come visiting with chocolate stains on his only shirt?”
“Because he wants to be himself, not somebody’s relative,” Charity answered for him. “His father was a fierce banker and business-man, and wanted Sid to step into his shoes, but Sid liked books and poetry, which his father thought frivolous. (And so do you, thought Aunt Emily, but did not say it.) They didn’t agree on anything, practically. So even when his father created this trust for him . . .”
“He was sure I’d never be able to support myself,” Sid said. “I took it as a gesture of contempt, sort of.”
“. . . he wouldn’t use the money. His mother sent him a check to buy a new car last Christmas and he sent it back. He tries to look like the poorest student in Cambridge, but actually he’s as rich as Croesus. He leaves all that money accumulating in the trust and lives on a hundred a month.” Crackling with vitality, vivid as a revelation, she threw an enchanting smile at Sid, sitting diffident and charmed, and added, “I’m going to help him break that habit.”
Aunt Emily had gradually assembled herself. She said drily, “We don’t see many rich people these days, and since I objected on economic grounds, I must ask you a question. How are you rich? Real estate frozen by bank failures? Stocks fallen through the floor? Factories in receivership? Charity mentions a trust. How is that managed?”
“Very conservatively,” Sid said. “My father set up funds for my sisters, too, a good while before he died, and he added to all three of them in his will. The Mellon Bank manages them. My sisters draw on theirs, but I never have. It got hit pretty hard by the crash, but it’s recovered some. I think there are three or four million in it. I can call the trust officer and get an accounting, if you’d like.”
Caught between a laugh and a cough, Aunt Emily put her fist to her mouth for a moment. “No. As an approximation, I think three or four million will do.”
Charity jumped to her feet and flew around the table and wrapped her arms around her mother’s head. “You think it’s all right! I knew you would!”
Disentangling her hair, Aunt Emily said to Sid, “If you didn’t want to use your father’s money before, why do you change your mind now?”
“Because he’s got motivation!” Charity said.
“No, let him tell me. Perhaps you’ve persuaded him that his scruples aren’t sound. Perhaps later he’ll wish he’d preserved his independence.”
“But his scruples were . . .”
“Please,” Aunt Emily said. “Sid?”
He was looking at her steadily, wearing a diffident smile. “You think I tempted her with my glittering gold?”
“I don’t think it hurt your chances.”
Now his smile grew broad. “But she said yes before she knew.”
“When she thought you didn’t have a spare shirt to your name?”
He nodded.
“And you’re sure you won’t regret taking this inheritance? You won’t feel you’ve betrayed your principles? Because I don’t mind telling you, if you really do despise wealth, and if your differences with your father went very deep, then I think your scruples were honorable, not foolish.”
“I suppose it was whimsical,” Sid said. “He wasn’t a monster, or a crook, or anything. He made his money honestly, or as honestly as any banker. It was just that he thought more of it than I felt he should, especially since he was such a stiff Presbyterian. I wasn’t ashamed of it. I just didn’t want to get trapped in it, and I didn’t want to take it from him as a contemptuous handout to an incompetent. But he’s gone, and the money sits there. I suppose I could give it to my mother or my sisters, but they don’t need it. I’d rather spend it on Charity.”
“And you’re both absolutely sure.”
They were.
“You thought I’d resist you,” Aunt Emily said. “If I did, it was only because I thought I must, for your own sakes. Well, bless me, this is all very astonishing.”
“Shall we go up and tell Daddy?”
Aunt Emily thought only a second. “No. He wouldn’t like being interrupted. We’ll tell him at lunch.”
“There’s something else,” Charity said, her eyes on Sid. “Do you want to tell her, or shall I?”
“You.”
“You and Comfort won’t have to worry about the development across the cove,” Charity said, and went back around the table into Sid’s arm. “Sid’s bought the land, the whole shebang, from Herbert Hill. We called his trust officer last night, that’s why we had to go into the village. Sid gave Herbert two thousand more than the syndicate had offered, and it’s all settled. Isn’t it something?”
“There’s no other name for it. Don’t tell me any more, I couldn’t take it in.” With the two of them before her, she standing, he sitting with his arm around her as if in an old-fashioned wedding photograph, she felt at once dazed and fond. So much good fortune, for such really deserving children. “I suppose you’ll be taking an apartment in Cambridge,” she said, with her eyes as usual down the road.
“That’s something else we want to talk to you about, Mother. Do you know when Uncle Richard plans to leave Paris?”
“Richard? Why? Last time he wrote, he expected not to be replaced until late summer or fall. He certainly isn’t going to leave until that man puts him out.”
“Would he let us be married at his house, do you think?”
“Why, I suppose. But don’t you think Cambridge. . . .”
“I’d like a Paris wedding. I won’t really believe I’m Cinderella otherwise. You and Daddy and Comfort could get a trip out of it.”
“Of course we’ll try to do it the way you want, if we can. But it would be very expensive to take everyone abroad.”
Charity dropped her arm from around Sid’s shoulders and fished a worn brown wallet out of his hip pocket and shook it in the air. “Please,” Sid said. “It would give me the greatest pleasure.”
“My goodness,” Aunt Emily said. “Well, I’ll write Richard and see.”
“Cable him!”
“Is there that much of a hurry?”
“Yes. Because after we’re married we want to take a trip, a real Grand Tour. Sid’s going to drop out of school for the first semester— I’m willing to make that much of a concession to the beanrows and honey-bees. And we’ve got to find an architect right away before we leave so we can settle on plans for a house, and a guest house, and a think house. By next summer we want a regular compound over there across the cove so we can wave dishtowels at each other from porch to porch.”
“Bless me,” said Aunt Emily, for about the fourth time that morning. “You don’t waste any time.”
“Would you?” Charity said.
7
And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once.
I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.
What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to Notes and Queries and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.