Crossing to Safety

  “I suppose anything looks perfect if you’ve had to carry it for nine months. But that kid won’t look like much of anything till he’s been out here a while where it counts. I don’t expect ours to look like me till he’s thirty.”

  “I hope he never looks like you, if that’s the way you feel.”

  “I hope he looks like you. I hope he isn’t a he. Anyway, the first item on the agenda is getting him born. Concentrate on hate.” I grab her arm and hustle her into briskness, calling a cadence: “ Hate-two-three-four, hate-two-three-four!”

  In ten steps she is breathless, and slows us down. She says, “You’ll lose your writing room when he comes. What’ll you do?”

  “Use the office?”

  “People will always be interrupting you.”

  “I’ll lock the door.”

  “But if you’re up there all the time I won’t have the comfort of hearing you hammering away like a mad woodpecker.”

  “Maybe we can move the typewriter into the living room. Babies sleep all the time, don’t they? Maybe we can condition him to drop off the minute he hears me roll a sheet of paper into the machine.”

  She stops. “I’ve had enough. Let’s go back.” Going the other way, she says, “What will you do?”

  “Pitch a tent, or build a lean-to, or change shifts. Something. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s going to be a lot different.”

  “I’ll say. Better. We’ll make it.”

  We walk between steaming roofs, along the drying sidewalk. On the left, between houses, we can see the lake, still icebound, but with slush on top of the ice. Papers and bottles float in it, and after sunset will freeze in. There are neither skaters nor iceboats, only warning signs sticking up here and there. In a week or two, if the groundhog knows what he’s doing, the dirty snow and litter and all the paralysis of cold will be swallowed by bright water, and crocuses will be popping up in flowerbeds under south-facing walls, and lawns will show faint green under the winter soot. I have never seen spring in a really cold country, but I have read books, I know what to expect. I put my arm around Sally’s thick waist.

  Passing the landlord’s door with its two mailboxes, I check. A letter. I read the return address. I freeze as an antelope might freeze at the hot scent of lion.

  Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our totally undramatic life. In any cast of characters playing Morgan Agonistes, the messenger is not a bit player but a principal, and he wears the uniform of the U.S. Postal Service. There we stand in that ambiguous afternoon that can’t make up its mind whether to be latest winter or earliest spring, at a time in our lives when the smallest pebble on the track could derail us. I avoid Sally’s eyes as I rip open the envelope, and then I read, but not aloud, for fear it’s bad.

  Tableau. “What is it?” Sally asks. “Who’s it from?”

  I pass her the letter. It says that Harcourt Brace and Company have found my novel provocative and touching. They think my characters are cut from the real, unassuming stuff of everyday life. They like my combination of irony and pathos, they like my feeling for the tears of things. They want to publish my book in the fall, and can offer me an advance of five hundred dollars against royalties.

  Again I am struck by the meager scale of these successes, and by my own response to them. The letter from the Atlantic was printed on me in Nubian type, like a headline from the old Vanity Fair of the twenties, but this more significant letter leaves only a blur. Already blasé? Hardly. More likely stunned. The first was only a short story, and could have been a lucky accident. This was a novel, an extended effort, and corroboration. The sun ought to break through the clouds and flood Morrison Street with glory, there should be thunder on the right, we ought to throw our stocking caps in the air and caper and cheer. Instead, we look at each other almost furtively, not to say or do the wrong thing, and go around the house and down the steps into our basement, and there, just inside the door, fall into a long, silent hug.

  Sally knows I wrote the last chapters of this book in tears, typing as fast as I could and unable to type as fast as the words wanted to come. She knows I wept some more, revising it. It had been corked up a good while—the story of my decent, undistinguished, affectionate, abruptly dead father and mother, and the glamorous friend who periodically brought excitement, adventure, and romance into our house in Albuquerque; who kept them up late with stories of far places, who used them, and sponged on them, and borrowed money from them that they knew he would never pay back, and who finally, in one of his large gestures of half-drunken good will, took them up for an anniversary joyride in a plane that should have been in the shop. The ending was appropriate for him but not for them. It was not the right reward for generosity and devotion.

  Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

  Shouldn’t we call Sid, so he can let Charity know? Sally asks, and I say hell yes, call the Stones too, and the Abbots, call everybody who was ever pleasant to us, and tell them the Morgans are holding open house and require their presence. I will go and buy the makings.

  In my half-hour trip downtown I buy more bottles (including, God help me, an echo of my Yum days, a bottle of sloe gin) than I have bought in my entire life up to that time, and as I write a check for them I have a warm, confirmed sense of bank account, a flush of security even in a spendthrift moment. We have been living on my salary and putting away whatever I make from writing. Now, in a little while, will come a check that will dwarf those pittances. I feel better than secure; I feel rich and gloriously confident.

  The only party food I know—rye bread, mouse cheese, potato chips, and salted peanuts—I buy in quantity, and add a can of coffee in case we are short at home. Driving back, I note that the days have got longer. At four-thirty there is still plenty of daylight left. Clearing clouds are blowing southward over Lake Mendota.

  As I start down our steps I can hear them inside. They must have dropped everything and come running like a volunteer fire brigade. I push open the door and they burst into applause. Dave Stone, who has recently taken up the recorder and carries one with him wherever he goes, tootles me a theme from Handel: “See, the conquering hero comes!” Cheers. Hands relieve me of my bags.

  True to the potluck morality of our time and status, they have brought contributions, whatever their iceboxes contained, whatever they could grab up or had begun to prepare for their own dinners. There is a plate of cookies on the sink drainboard, and somebody’s idea of a salad (something embalmed in Jell-O), and one magnificent item, a whole ham, fragrant, untouched by the knife, courtesy Alice Abbot’s father’s Tennessee smokehouse.

  People keep arriving. My hand is sore from being shaken, my ears are blunted by the noise we make. Through the smoke and shouting and laughter our Christmas phonograph repeats over and over its one accomplishment, Bach’s Aria for the G String, played by Pablo Casals with a piano accompaniment so insistent and percussive it sounds like a funeral march.

  Alice Abbot and Lib Stone have persuaded Sally to put on the embroidered dragon robe. It is a tight fit across the middle, but it makes her regal. She queens it from the couch, tremulous, moist-eyed, so radiant she seems to give off light. I notice her only intermittently, for the party is a real fog-of-battle scene, as confused as Tolstoy’s Sebastopol or Stendhal’s Waterloo. First I see her serene on the sofa, then erect in a straight chair, then standing. I understand, without being able to do anything about it, or in truth being very alert to the fact that I should, that her inward tenant is kicking her around. Our eyes meet now and then. We shake our heads happily.

  About six, Sid arrives, manic and roaring, bearing bottles of champagne in each hand like Indian clubs. He has a three-by-five card stuck in his breast pocket, which he gestures for me to take. It is from Cha
rity.

  YOU WRETCHED SCENE STEALER!

  DON’T YOU KNOW THIS IS BABY DERBY WEEK?

  NOW SALLY WILL HAVE TO HAVE TWINS TO GET EVEN!

  BUT HOW WONDERFUL IT IS!

  I WISH I COULD HELP YOU CELEBRATE!

  MUCH LOVE, AND CONGRATULATIONS GALORE!

  I manage to reach it to Sally through the crowd, and we have a brief, mute conversation with the eyebrows. Sid and I push into the kitchenette to open the champagne. Alice Abbot, starting to work on the ham, moves over for us and we stand side by side at the sink, pushing at the corks with our thumbs. With a sidelong, down-mouth smile, Sid says to me, “Well, I foretold this. How does it feel?”

  “How does it feel to be the father of three?”

  “Any fool can do that.”

  Whup! His cork hits the ceiling. Whup! Mine follows. Cheers. People drain their glasses, and hold their empties toward us, and we pour. Then Sid is lifting his glass and calling for quiet. Finally he gets it. Sally, I see, is back on the couch. I move to get to her with the champagne bottle, but she raises her glass to show me that someone has already provided.

  “To the talent in our midst,” Sid says. “To the marriage of match and kindling, the divine oxidation.”

  They drink to me while I smirk and squirm. Then Ed Abbot, glowing like a parlor heater, climbs on a chair, and with his glass against the ceiling says, “There’s another kind of creation going on around here. Charity’s already shown how it’s done, and another demonstration may happen before our startled eyes. Here’s to Sally, may her creation be as successful as Charity’s and as easy as my old Georgia mammy used to say it was: ‘Jus’ like shellin’ peas, Boss.’ ”

  This one I can drink to. I pledge Sally with special emphasis, because Ed’s is a toast I should have made myself.

  I have no idea how many people come and go, though once, when I step outside for a breath of the chilly, damp evening, I see evidence in the snowdrift on the back lawn that someone has mixed too many kinds of happiness. The landlord comes down to ask if we can take it a little easy on the noise, and we have him in for a drink. About seven, Alice and Lib serve up the baked ham and rye and salad on paper plates (we have only six of the other kind). We put out the fire we have so enthusiastically built, we drown it in strong coffee, and then we start it again.

  About eight, Sid goes back to see Charity in the hospital, bearing messages and vowing to return. About nine the landlord comes to the door again, apologetically. A neighbor has telephoned. For a few minutes we tune it down. Somebody asks me to read a piece of the novel, but I look at the disheveled basement and postpone the pleasure. The fact is, I have almost no voice.

  Then, as we are all slumping out of exhilaration into fatigue and suppressed yawns, Lib and Alice corner me in the kitchen. They call my attention to Sally, once again in the hard chair, trying to sit up straight and pay attention, trying to smile. “She’s had all she can take,” Lib says. “She ought to be in bed. Shall we . . . ? Or do you . . . ?”

  I down my coffee, assemble my scattered senses, and resume my responsibilities. “I’ll put her down.”

  I go to her and lift her up. Her eyes are on me in questioning or pleading. I lead her to the bedroom door, and there turn her and aim her back at the remnants of the party. “Bedtime. Say goodnight to the nice people.”

  They crowd to kiss her. They really do love her, and I love them drunkenly in consequence. Affectionate, exhausted, and eager to be gone, she smiles back at them as I shut the bedroom door.

  In the bedroom I help her off with the heavy metallic robe. Clumsily I rid her of her stockings and underclothes (whatever they were then, my mind refuses to replay the image), and drop her nightgown over her head and pull it down over her swollen body. With a sigh she lies back on the bed. “Ah, that’s nice. Thank you, sweet. I didn’t have sense enough to know how tired I was.”

  I kiss her belly, solid as wood under the nightgown. “Neither did I. Lib and Alice had to tell me. I spent the whole goddamned party making the most of my sudden rise to fame.”

  “But that’s what the party was about.” She puts her arms up and I bend down and am pulled tightly against her. I feel the bulge of the intruder between us, I feel that her cheek is wet. “I love you,” she says, squeezing me hard. “Oh, I knew you could! I’m so happy for you!”

  “For us.”

  “For us, yes.”

  “Are you all right now?”

  “Fine. A little tired, a little tiddly. Don’t make people go home. Tell them I’m sorry I wasn’t quite up to the occasion. I won’t mind if they make noise.”

  “It’s gone on long enough. I’ll close it out as fast as I can.”

  “But aren’t they wonderful!” she says. “You’d think it was their good luck. Hasn’t it been a day? I can hardly believe it. Spring really did come.”

  Her voice is blurred and drowsy. I kiss her and taste bourbon. “Go to sleep,” I tell her. “The next act is yours. You don’t want to miss your cue.”

  The only people left in the other room are the Abbots and the Stones. Lib and Alice have dumped ashtrays and paper plates and disposed of bottles. They are washing glasses, with Ed wiping, while Dave on the couch accompanies them on his recorder. After all the choral uproar, renderings of “I Am Jesus’ Little Lamb,” and “The Boll Weevil Song,” and “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” the breathy wooden sound is sweet and tremulous, the meditation of a solitary flute. The room, still thick with smoke, swirls in the draft from the open door. Night air bites like menthol in my congested nostrils.

  The recorder stops. They all turn to look at me. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s okay. I put her to bed.”

  “It was too much for her. We should have realized.”

  “I should have realized. But no, she loved it. She says for you not to rush off, she likes the sounds friends make.”

  “She’s a sweetie,” Alice says, “and it’s been a great party, and we’re ever so proud of you and know you will go far. But now we gotta go. We’ve been here so long I don’t remember our address.”

  “Somewhere on Lake Street,” Ed says. “Don’t worry, I can find it. Compass in the car.”

  They sort out coats from the rack behind the door. As they are hunching into them, Sid returns. At first he is inclined to go straight away again, since the party is over, but I persuade him to come inside while the others leave. They go through their congratulations again. Sally is right, you’d think it was their good luck, not ours.

  And now I am confronted by the two women who really produced and directed this revel, one strawberry blond with white eyelashes, the other thin and black-eyed and olive-skinned, both delightful, charming, sisters I wish I had. They stand on tiptoe, one after the other, and kiss me solemnly on the lips, immediately bursting into laughter. One tastes of Scotch, the other of sloe gin. I am flooded with a Turkish feeling of being surrounded by desirable, affectionate women.

  “Don’t forget the remains of your ham,” I say to White Eyelashes. “It’s a shame what we did to it. But it was beautiful, it was loaves and fishes.”

  “It’s for you,” she says. “While Sally’s in the hospital you can nibble on it and dream of me.”

  More kisses. Smooooch, mm. Out they go into the cold, laughing, growing instantly aware of the noise they make, and shushing each other, silently stealing away. Lovely people, the best. As they go around the corner I hear a last word from Dave’s recorder— Papageno’s little fluty trill: Tweedle-eedle-eet! Tweedle-eedle-eet! Silence settles like dust after them, and I shut the door.

  “Well,” Sid says, “how does it feel?”

  “Sid, how the hell do I know? Nobody but the publisher has even seen the book. If there are ever any reviewers, they’ll probably tear it apart. First novels get filed in wastebaskets, readers never hear of them, they never earn their advances. Or so I’m told. Ask me next October, I’ll have a humble answer ready.”

  “We had a word for tha
t in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Bushwah. You’ve broken through, your book’s going to be published. Isn’t that a powerful piece of evidence?”

  “I’ve been celebrating, you notice. But I doubt it’s going to change my life.”

  “Brother, it would change mine!”

  I flop on the couch beside him and put my feet on a chair. I am dog-tired, sleepy, beginning to ache dully in the front of my skull, but curious too. “Would it? Would it make that much difference? You don’t have to teach, you could quit any time you wanted. I couldn’t, even with a break like this. I need that paycheck.”

  He gives this his considered attention. As always, he allows a notion contrary or oblique to his own to make its case. Then he shakes his head.

  “It isn’t as easy to quit as you think. You forget Charity’s time-table. The kids are on time, I’ll say that for her. She’s living up to her part of the compact. But I promised her I’d stay with teaching, and give it my whole attention, without cheating, till we either get promoted or bounced. So far as she’s concerned, that means till we get promoted, she won’t admit the other possibility. She says our commitment to teaching is like a marriage vow. Once you’ve made a decision like that you should never look back. Well, I agree—sort of. Teaching’s okay. I like a lot of things about it—the people you work with, the contact with books and ideas, the institutional reinforcement, the sense of doing something visibly useful. My real problem is the old publish or perish business.”

  “I still think you could write a few poems in your spare time without violating your parole.”

  He pulls down his mouth. “I promised her I’d play by the rules. Poetry’s time will come, she says. She’s very happy about the textbook, incidentally. Something positive for the dossier.” He breathes out through his nose, audibly. “Damn the dossier. You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?’ ”

  We have a laugh in the bleary basement. “Well,” I have to say, “I’m not a devoted teacher, and what I publish doesn’t cut any ice with the department, and nobody is going to mistake me for Jesus Christ.”