Crossing to Safety

  Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

  Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

  Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

  I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by Story and then by the Atlantic, intimations that I had a gift.

  Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider why I respected it.

  Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

  I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

  Right after breakfast I went to the furnace room and wrote till ten minutes to eleven. Then Sally drove me to the foot of Bascom Hill. I climbed the hill, arriving in class just as the bell rang, and taught from eleven to four. Then I walked home, graded papers till dinner, and after dinner prepared for the next day’s classes or went to the furnace room and wrote some more.

  Sally had a part in everything I wrote, most of which I read to her after bedtime or during breakfast. She was critic, editor, gadfly, memory bank, research assistant, typist. She decided when things were good enough to be sent out, when they needed doing over, when they wouldn’t do at all. And when I was shut in the furnace room or off at school, she had her own occupations, almost always with Charity.

  They were together all the time. Charity, expending herself in twenty directions, pulled Sally along with her. Though she had no musical ability herself, sang sharp, and always pitched a song so high you had to be a castrato to sing it, Charity was intensely fond of music. She was backing a young pianist friend for a Carnegie Hall concert, and she and Sally went often to hear this young woman play. They both sang in the university chorus, with weekly practices and occasional performances. They went to many concerts, with or without Sid or me. Most of those were free, but when they were not, there always seemed to be an extra ticket in Charity’s purse, a ticket she said had been bought for someone who in the end couldn’t use it.

  They attended movies, plays, lectures, art classes, photography shows, teas. They took walks. From January on, there were baby showers and other shared preparations. And after March, which I remember well, Sally had some recovering to do and the baby to look after, a diaper case if there ever was one, and us without a washing machine. Fortunately Charity had one, and a hired girl as well. The waste of our offspring got washed away, like sin, over on Van Hise Street.

  Once or twice when the weather let up they took a stepladder out to the two acres that the Langs had bought in the suburb called Frostwood, and climbed on its slippery steps to test the view or the solar exposure. For Charity had made up her mind when Sid took the Wisconsin job that they were not going to be like other instructors, kept for three years and then turned out to start all over again in some other, probably lesser, place. Sid was going to be so superior, and together they were going to make themselves so indispensable to the university and the community, that there could be no question of their being let go. She had spent the first year finding land she liked. They would spend this one planning the house they would build on it. No cautionary words had any effect on her. If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.

  “It’s making a schizophrenic of me,” Sid said to me on one of the midnight walks he was fond of. “I want her to have this palace, if that’s what will please her, but I keep thinking of all the eyebrows that will go up among the senior members of the department— takes a lot for granted, doesn’t he?—and the envy and jealousy a lot of my colleagues will feel. And maybe there are guys from the gashouse district who will see this schoolteach building a castle in the middle of a depression, and Jesus, look, he’s got three hundred windas to bust. But Charity has the answer to at least one of those problems. She’s going to make the house a weekend rest home for broken-down instructors. Even you may apply. Our friends are going to keep the guest rooms occupied, and we’re going to lay down a law for ourselves: We never accept invitations on weekends. It’s all going to be country walks, rough tweeds, a brace of setters, and on Sunday evenings square dances and Varsovianas and korobotchkas and a convivial punch bowl.”

  That was on a night when he was feeling good after a day that had gone well. Other times, he was less relaxed. “It’ll look arrogant,” I heard him tell Charity once. “It’ll look as if we thought we could buy our way to promotion, or as if we thought ourselves so grand we could assume it. There’s absolutely no guarantee we’ll be here longer than this year and next. Do you want to build it just to move out of ? At least let’s not pour any concrete till the department has voted.”

  “Pooh,” Charity said. “I’d like to see them uproot us. Just have some confidence.”

  “Caution would be more appropriate.”

  “No, sir,” she said. “You don’t budge me.”

  She already had an architect drawing plans, and she was not restraining his imagination. She and Sally went over sketches and scale drawings by the hour, and scratched them up with criticisms and questions and second thoughts, and sent them back to be done over. And over.

  Sometimes Sally and I discussed the Langs in bed, bed being the only place where we found much time to discuss anything. Our basement, warm from the furnace just beyond the partition, and lightless as the womb, was a good place to rest the eyes and mind and hear the things that Sally saved up to tell me.

  “She wants a lot of children,” she reported. “A real lot—six or seven, the last four preferably girls.”

  “Well, she’s going about it the right way,” I said. “She’ll have them by the time she’s thirty.
What’ll she do then?”

  “I don’t know. Be fulfilled, I guess. That’s what she thinks children do for a woman.”

  “How about Sid? Are six or seven children going to fulfill him too?”

  I could feel her thinking about that in the dark. Finally she said, “I think she thinks fatherhood doesn’t mean that much to a man. She thinks a man should be fulfilled by his work.”

  “Yeah. What if the department doesn’t choose to fulfill him?”

  “You and he are always talking that way. Charity just won’t accept the possibility.”

  “I know she won’t, and it’s not very bright of her. She’s reckless. I doubt that Sid is going to be fulfilled if he finds himself with a half dozen children and a big house and no job.”

  “At least they’ve got money.”

  “That does help,” I said. “It even helps her hire a nanny to look after the children she’s already got, so she can be out promoting culture and singing in the chorus and cleaning up Wisconsin politics and being kind to the wives and children of starving instructors. That’s a pretty dispersed lady.”

  “But she’s so organized!” Sally said. “She can make time for all sorts of things, and for all that hectic social life, and still be with the children in the morning, and again before dinner, and again at bedtime. She gets them up and she tucks them in, and she sings to them, and reads to them, and plays with them. She’s a wonderful mother.”

  “I didn’t say she wasn’t. I was just wondering if Sid is as enthusiastic about this program as she is. I even wonder sometimes if she’s as enthusiastic as she thinks she is.”

  More pondering. “Maybe she’s a little inconsistent,” Sally said. “She wants all those children, but one of her reasons is so she won’t have too much time to give to one or two. She thinks children in a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect. Her mother dominated her, she says. They clashed a lot, I guess. Well, you can imagine, those two. So Charity wants six or seven so she won’t make the same mistake her mother made. She thinks neglect is good, so long as it isn’t really neglect, so long as the mother is thinking and planning and guiding and keeping an eye on things.”

  “You can count on Charity to be doing that.”

  “Yes.” More thinking silence. Then, “Sometimes I wonder, though. She’s great, she’s thoughtful, and loving, she’s kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born—you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She’s teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She’s simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don’t think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he’s himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don’t let me have an agenda every time I’m with him.”

  “I’ll try to remember, if my own agenda lets me.”

  Laughter, then quiet. Finally Sally says, “We shouldn’t talk about her this way. Just think what it would be like without them.”

  “I have,” I said. “It’d be Worksburg for me and Dullsville for you. I hope all her plans work out. I hope she has seven children, all with an IQ of 160 or above. I hope the last four are girls. I hope they grow up in that big house in Madison and have every summer in Vermont among the cousins, and love their mother and respect their father and do well in school and grow up to be ambassadors to France.”

  “Amen,” Sally said. “I’ll tell her you wished that, shall I?”

  “Pray do,” I said.

  No, Sally was not lonely. Nor were we ever, to my recollection, diverted more than briefly from one another. We loved our life; we never looked up from it except when rallies for the Spanish Loyalists ruffled the waters of the university and upset the state house, or when Governor Phil La Follette made some alarmingly fascist-sounding proposal, or when Hitler’s frothing voice over our radio reminded us that we were on a bumpy gangplank leading from world depression to possible world war.

  We weren’t indifferent. We lived in our times, which were hard times. We had our interests, which were mainly literary and intellectual and only occasionally, inescapably, political. But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship—parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars poetica. Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.

  About November first I began a novel. Once I had begun it, I couldn’t have stopped it if I had wanted to. I wrote on it every morning, I wrote on it evenings, Saturdays, Sundays. I finished a draft in six weeks, and revised the whole thing in a marathon burst during the Christmas holidays. Two days after New Year’s I sent it off to a publisher.

  Older and wiser, I would have put two years into a book that I wrote in two months. Some of my haste was a stupid pleasure in breaking records and making every minute count. I knew a miser’s joy in the way the manuscript from week to week gained thickness and heft. The routines of work were the sacred routines of my life, not to be broken. I think I am correct in remembering that the morning I took the manuscript to the post office I came home, and instead of savoring the accomplishment, salvaged the hour before class to start a book review.

  By mid-January Dave Stone, Sid, and I were at work on one of those anthology textbooks that young instructors hope will look impressive on a vita. Stone, Lang, and Morgan, Writing from Conviction. But I didn’t steal from my writing hours to work on it. I stole from evenings, from Sally, from class preparation, and from sleep.

  If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Eventless as our life was, it swept us along. Were we any less a Now Generation than the one that presently claims the title? I wonder. And it may be just as well that I have no diary to remember by. Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.

  8

  Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.

  Morrison Street, afternoon. We have visited Charity in the hospital and I am walking Sally around the block, slowly because she is heavy and near her time, cautiously because there are still icy patches on the sidewalk. The air is clammy, cold in the nostrils, but it can’t be really cold, for when the sun breaks through the clouds, the roofs steam. Trickles of thaw creep from under slumped drifts along curbs and driveways. Here and there are patches of unappetizing black lawn.

  We have been speaking of the groundhog. Figuring on my fingers, I have discovered that it is already more than six weeks since he ducked back into his hole on a bright February second.

  “Is it six weeks more of winter, or two months, if he sees his shadow?” I want to know. “Six weeks, isn’t it? Spring should already have started.”

  “I don’t know,” Sally says. “But I wish! I wish it would come. I wish this baby would come.”

  “You want to lay that burden down.”

  “I sure do. Did you notice how slim Charity was in that hospital bed? A broomstick. I bent over to kiss her and could hardly reach her for this in the way. She’s going home on Tuesday and here I am, still as big as a beer wagon. I wonder if it isn’t hatred that finally tells us to give birth. When we hate it so much we can’t stand carrying it any more, we get rid of it.”

  “Concentrate on hate, then.” I help her across an icy spot crusted with cinders. “You lost the baby derby, but you’re a cinch for second. Fix your mind on that. Silver medal.”

  Big and mournful, her eyes turn on me. Her face is broader, she looks frumpy in her cloth coat that will button only
partway down. I know and love this woman well, but she is not the girl I married. I wonder if, on the morning after she has finally had this incubus, I will walk into her room and find the old girl intact and beautiful, as Sid found Charity. He has not relished her pregnancy. Several times lately he has walked clear over from Van Hise Street and got me to chug around the block with him near midnight. God pity Charity when she is well. He has a lot of energy to work off.

  Well, God pity Sally too.

  “Silver medal,” she says. “If there’d been twenty contestants I’d have been sure to finish last. Once, for a paper for Mr. Gayley, I wrote something on the first Isthmian Games. According to Pausanias there was a Roman running in them. Plautus. Flatfoot. That’s who I feel like.”

  “I thought Plautus was a dramatist.”

  “There’s more than one Flatfoot in the world.” She slaps her galosh down in a wet spot, splashes us both, and laughs. “But doesn’t Charity look fine? She says she was conscious nearly the whole time. Oh, I want it to happen!”

  “If you produce something like David Hamilton Lang, will it be worth the effort?”

  “Oh, yes! Don’t you think he’s beautiful? He looks like Sid.”

  “I thought he looked like an irritated lingcod.”

  “Oh, faw on you. He’s darling, with his silky hair and his little perfect hands. It’s the perfection that’s so wonderful.”