Crossing to Safety

  “You’re a liar on all counts,” Sid says, yawning. “They can’t overlook you. And I can tell you, if I’d done what you’ve just done, I’d be changed. I’d be a lot surer I could justify my life.”

  His wool shirt is open at the neck, his wrestler’s throat is exposed. He laughs and throws his hands in the air and stands up. “I should be going. Charity is betting me I can’t finish an article before she comes home from the hospital. Of course I can’t. The more I work at it, the less there is to say. Who the hell cares about the revelations of Tennyson’s personal life in Locksley Hall? How about a turn around the block?”

  Sid and I have a lot in common. He works as hard as I do, and that is a powerful compulsion on my respect. He reads every student theme with the care of a copy editor, he writes comments that are longer than the theme. His house is always open to students, half his women students are in love with him, his office hours stretch on past five o’clock, he prepares for his lectures as if each one were an oral exam. Yet my good luck makes me uneasy around him. Every piece of fortune that enhances me seems to diminish him, though he never fails to warm me with his admiration. He makes me feel bigger and better than I am, and somehow, in the process, manages to lessen himself.

  Because I can’t say any of this, I kid him. “Still walking off your biological urges. I wonder if we’ll ever see you, once Charity’s well.”

  His glance is hard and sharp, offended, as if he heard some hidden slur. Then he shrugs and laughs. “Look who’s talking. I saw you bussing Lib and Alice there. Being a gentleman you could go no further, but if Sally doesn’t get that baby born, Ed and Dave had better look out. How about it, is she asleep? Can you slip out long enough to stretch a leg?”

  “Let me check.”

  I crack the bedroom door and look in, expecting darkness and even breathing. Instead I encounter light, and Sally, bulky in her nightgown, standing by the bed pulling on the sheet. She turns her head and I see that she is crying.

  I slide in and shut the door. “What’s the matter?”

  She won’t meet my eyes. “Oh, Larry, I’m such . . . I’m ashamed. I guess it was the excitement. I wasn’t tight, I didn’t do more than sip my drinks. But I . . . I’ve wet the bed! ”

  Filled with a terrible premonition, I snatch from her hand the corner of the sheet she has been pulling on, and yank it halfway off, certain it will be red with her blood. It isn’t, but it is wet, and so is the pad. I pull them both off and throw them in the corner, I send her to the bathroom and hunt for a dry nightgown, which I finally find in her bag, ready packed for the hospital. I pass it through the bathroom door to her and then I go back into the living room, brushing aside Sid’s questions, and get on the telephone to the doctor.

  9

  An hour after the water sac broke, Sally’s pains began. I monitored them, watch and notebook in hand, while Sid sat in the other room and read a book and hoped to be helpful. At two he drove us to the hospital. A little after three, persuaded that he could do nothing for either Sally or me, he went home. Next morning before eight he was back with a premature pot of flowers for Sally, and some rolls and a thermos of coffee for me, in case, as it happened, I was too preoccupied to get out for breakfast. All that day, Sunday, he and Charity kept track of Sally’s lack of progress from Charity’s room down the hall, and they were both there, Charity having talked the nurses into letting her out in a wheelchair, on Monday morning when the obstetrician decided—I had been telling him for twelve hours—that Sally couldn’t take any more.

  He appeared in the waiting room with his bloody rubber gloves held up at shoulder height—her blood, red as paint—and said, “I’m going to have to go get that babe.”

  At once he turned and started back in. “Go with him!” Charity cried. “Make them let you. Doctor! Doctor Cameron!”

  She got him to pause, she got him to agree. She was not a woman you could argue with. They led me in and a nurse got me into a gown and mask and I watched from the side of the room, watched as much as I could stand to. Times like that are a kind of paralyzed frenzy. I was imbecilic with shock, fatigue, and fear, and close to passing out. But I was furious when the doctor looked up across the sheet humped by Sally’s knees, and the eyes above the mask fixed on me. He paused. Everything paused.

  “Is he all right? Get him out of here.”

  I understood him. He didn’t want any husbands fainting on the delivery room floor while he tried to make up for having been too casual about that broken water sac. But I hated him for what he was doing and what he hadn’t done, and I snarled back, “Tend to her, not me!”

  The eyes stayed on me for a moment; then he went back to work. That was when the anesthetist, bending over Sally’s head and watching her dials, said urgently, “She’s going, Doctor!”

  I had no feelings that I remember. I watched from my torpor, shocked numb, incapable of response, while they hustled and bent, clustered and dispersed and clustered again tensely. Sally told me later that she heard, away down under the ether and exhaustion and pain, and thought in surprise, “She means me!”, and after a moment, “I can’t.”

  In the flurry of hypos, plasma, oxygen, whatever they did to keep her alive, the doctor quit trying to rotate the baby into position, and literally tore it from her body.

  When I came out, blind and nauseated, Sid and Charity were still there. I saw them with stupid surprise. Charity swung her wheelchair around. “How is she? Is it over?”

  I couldn’t answer her. I found a chair and fell into it. My head reeled, the room rolled over, the membranes of my mouth were rank with ether smell. I put my head down between my knees and shut my eyes. After quite a while I felt a hand on my shoulder, and Sid’s voice said, “Here, take a sip.”

  But even the motion of lifting my head to sip from the paper cup set the room to spinning again. My mouth was flooded with brine. I put my head down again and hung on.

  “Find a nurse,” I heard Charity say far off. “Get some smelling salts!”

  Heels on rubber tile, a vast expanse of time, a sense of white, enclosing, emetic space. Then the hand on my back again, the voice. “Try this.” A whiff of ammonia flamed up my nostrils. I coughed, choked, cleared. Another whiff. I waited, and after a while cautiously lifted my face from between my knees. The spinning room slowed, steadied, wobbled, slowed, fell still. Another flame of ammonia. I got my head above my belt buckle.

  “Christ,” I said, ashamed. “What an exhibition.”

  “Keep your head down,” Charity said. “Why wouldn’t you feel faint? You’ve been up for two days and nights.”

  Things were steadier. I waited some more. Sid offered me the ammonia again but I pushed his hand away. “Hahhhhh!” I said, shuddering, and sat up straighter. They swam into focus, anxious-faced, she in her wheelchair, he in his house-detective teaching suit. The waiting room’s sterile lights had been overtaken by morning.

  “Better?” Charity asked.

  I nodded.

  “What happened? Is it over? Is she all right?”

  “The baby’s born,” I said. “I think it’s a girl. I don’t care what it is, so long as she’s rid of it.”

  “But how is she?”

  I sat up a little further. Charity’s face was putty-colored without any makeup. Her hair was in pigtails. “What about this doctor?” I said. “Did he do all right by you, with his unassisted-childbirth line? I was after him all night to do a caesarean, to save her from any more of it, but he wouldn’t. He kept trying to massage the goddamned baby around so it would appear politely. Even with the water sac broken, and a breech delivery, he wanted nature to take its course.”

  “I didn’t have any such trouble,” Charity said. “I had it easy. But oh, I’m sick I recommended him to Sally. He should have. . . .”

  The delivery room doors opened and a nurse came out, bearing a squalling bundle in a pink blanket. “Congratulations, Papa,” she said. “You can see your daughter in the nursery in a few minutes.” She wore a
professional smile. Her mask hung on its strings underneath her chin.

  I sat where I was, but Charity half rose out of her wheelchair, then wheeled it after the departing nurse. “Oh, let me! Let me look at her!” The nurse stopped and bent and folded the blanket away from the baby’s bawling face. Charity and Sid took a long, charmed look. I heard, “Oh, she’s lovely! She’s all right! Oh, what a dolly! It’s all right, Dolly, it’s all over. Now the whole world’s ahead of you.”

  I said, “How’s my wife? What are they doing in there?”

  “She’s fine,” the nurse said. “They’re doing some little—repairs, is all.”

  She carried her bundle away. Charity sat clapping her hands slowly and emphatically, beaming at me. Sid said, “Morgan, you and Sally do things dramatically, I must say. Now you’re coming home with me and going to bed.”

  “I’d better stick around till she’s out of the woods.”

  “She’ll just want to rest,” Charity said. “You’d better too.”

  “You’ve got a house full—your mother, and the nurse she brought, and the nanny, and the hired girl, and tomorrow you and the baby will be home. You don’t need guests.”

  “There’s a whole bloody household over there waiting for somebody to look after,” Sid said. “You’re their first chance.”

  “I wish to hell they’d bring her out,” I said, and then, remembering, “Oh, Christ, what time is it? I’ve got classes at eleven and one.”

  “Which I am taking,” Sid said.

  “You’ve got plenty to do without . . .” But I let my protest die. I couldn’t have dealt with those classes in any case, and he would be seriously upset if I didn’t let him. “I’m not sure you’re qualified.”

  “You’re afraid of being shown up, you mean.”

  The delivery room doors opened again and two women in surgical gowns came pushing a gurney. I jumped up and walked beside it, looking down into Sally’s face. She was fish-belly white, remote, unreachable, out cold. One of the women, whom I recognized as the anesthetist, nodded and smiled at me. The gurney stopped. “She’s had a transfusion,” she said. “She’ll be all right.”

  “Where are you taking her now?”

  “Recovery room.”

  “Can I go along?”

  She looked at me kindly, I thought, her mask dangling and her cap pulled up on the top of her head and her imperturbability rumpled, I supposed, by the close call. “Look, she won’t need you. She’ll be an hour or two coming out of it, and then she’ll sleep. Why don’t you go home to bed and come back after four this afternoon? We’ll have her all pretty for you.”

  “Now you’re talking,” Sid said.

  “Is she really all right?”

  “She’s fine now. Good strong pulse, blood pressure okay. You go along, we’ll take care of her.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “Didn’t you see her?”

  “I guess I didn’t look.”

  Her eyes had golden flecks in the iris, and when she laughed a gold tooth showed back in her mouth. She struck me as a cheerful, humane woman, too good to be assisting that butcher of a doctor. “The baby,” she said, “has a broken arm and a sore mouth. She came the hard way. But babies are like starfish, you can almost chop off a leg and they’ll grow a new one. Two months from now you’ll never know she had a bad time.”

  A broken arm and a sore mouth. My grievance grew bitterer. “Where’s Dr. Cameron?”

  “Washing up.”

  “Come on,” Sid said, “you’re in no shape to talk to him. Let’s go.”

  “Come back after four,” the anesthetist said.

  They wheeled Sally away, corpselike. From her wheelchair Charity said, “Look on the bright side, Larry. It’s over, and they’re both safe. I feel ghastly about recommending that man, and I’ll never use him again if I have twelve children. I’d rather have a baby in a chamber pot. But at least it’s over. You and Sid go on, and you have an enormous breakfast and roll into bed. When you come back you’ll probably find Sally and me comparing children.”

  Her color had come up. She looked radiant, undamaged. If they had let her, she could have gone home the day after having her baby. I felt envious for Sally, ghastly and etherized and patched together with twine. Good fortune was like money; those who had, got. As for me, I knew that I looked and felt and probably smelled like a cigar butt in a spittoon. Suddenly I could hardly keep my eyes open. I was really grateful to be going home with Sid, not having to drive, not even having to look.

  “Did anybody ever tell you two how great you are?”

  “Oh, pooh,” Charity said. “What are you going to name the baby? Have you got any he-or-she names picked out?”

  “You mean in all that talking she never told you?”

  “No.”

  “There was only one name we could agree on. It was the same whether he or she. Her name’s Lang.”

  “What?” Sid said, four times too loud for a hospital waiting room. “You mean it? Oh, say, that does us honor.”

  Charity was quizzing me with a speculative smile. “Really?”

  “Really. Don’t you kind of like the sound of it? Lang Morgan? It sounded very distinguished to us.”

  But Charity thought about it, pouted, and burst into a laugh. “Damn!” she said. “You’ve gone and spoiled everything. Why didn’t Sally think? We had a plot to marry her to David if she turned out female. What kind of name is that going to leave her? Lang Lang. She’ll sound like a streetcar.”

  10

  One more fragment, a crucial afternoon. It is May, only a few weeks before the end of school. Noon. I am in my office eating a bag lunch and grading papers, with the door closed. Most of my colleagues eat together, but I have rarely felt that I can afford the time. Today I am less inclined than ever to join the cabal. The department had delayed and delayed its decisions on promotion, and everybody is on edge. Rumors expand to fill every pause in the talk, rivalries and jealousies surface, we watch each other for clues to conspiracy or secret knowledge. I have told myself that I am not part of that expectation, hope, and dread. I have done my job. If they like me and feel like reappointing me, fine. If they don’t, I will manage. Meantime I have themes to read.

  Bushwah, as they would have said in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, when Sid was growing up there. I would sell my fair white body in the public square to stay on.

  William Ellery Leonard’s fierce narrow face glares down at me from a half dozen frames on the walls. I have a certain fellow feeling for William Ellery, though I have never met him. A poet and iconoclast, he told the department where it could go. So can I, if I have to. Like him, I am a cuckoo in this robin’s nest.

  Bells ring. Ten minutes until one o’clock classes. But I have given my one o’clock the day off, to let the desperate spend an extra hour on their term papers, and I ignore the bells. I pick up another theme, read the first paragraph, correct a couple of misspelled words, scrawl coh, for coherence, in the margin. There is a tapping on the door. Damn.

  “Come in.”

  The door opens and Sid puts his head in. “Busy?”

  “Not to any real purpose.”

  He comes in and closes the door. His face wears a scowl. He looks forward-leaning, hollow-chested, and anxious. “Have you heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “You haven’t, then. They finally met. Adjourned a half hour ago. Mike Frawley brought us word.”

  There is such distress in his face that I say, “Don’t tell me they didn’t up you.”

  Embarrassed, he grimaces. “They didn’t up me, no. But they didn’t down me either. Renewed instructorship, three more years after next year.”

  When I stand up, I have to grab the pile of papers that starts cascading off the desk. I say cautiously, meaning to be supportive but not quite knowing what the vote means, “Isn’t that all right? At least they didn’t cut you off short.”

  He continues to look guilty and confused. “They’re out of their minds. I
can’t imagine what motivates them, or what evidence they judge by, or what kind of department they want.”

  Now I begin to comprehend. “You mean they x-ed me out.”

  There is a hollow in my insides that later, when I have had time to think, I will probably fall into and drown. Without any reason to hope, I have been hoping. I manage a what-the-hell gesture, I flutter my fingers at the future that I am already dreading to take home to Sally. She has been happier this year than any year of her life.

  “The least they could have done was give you the rest of a three-year appointment and put you on the ladder. That’s what we all got, first round. Now some of us get an extension. But you’ve done more in a year than any of us will do in four or five, and they throw you out.”

  “No Ivy degree,” I say. “No defined field. No articles in PMLA. No studies of romantic excess in Comus.”

  “That crap!” Sid says. “That miserable, prechewed, vomited-up reeaten carrion! It’s made a cynic out of Ed. Damn them, they enforce mediocrity. The rest of us have to play the game, but you shouldn’t even be allowed to.” Furiously upset, he walks around knocking his knuckles against bookcases and walls. He stops. “What they did do, in their great charity and wisdom, they gave you the two summer classes. Booby prize. You can do their slave labor through the summer until they give you the gate.”

  Hard times are instructive and humbling. I can’t forget that I have a birth-damaged daughter, just coming around, and a still-recovering wife, and that medical expenses and the girl we have hired to help Sally have eaten up most of our savings. I hear the word about the summer classes gratefully. Something, at least.

  Sid wanders to the window, whose sill is piled with papers God knows how old, scholarly offprints God knows how unimportant, and books God knows how long overdue at the library. His lips flatten against his teeth. He almost spits.

  “How many stories have you written this year? Three? And sold them all. And the novel, which will make you famous—they’ll be teaching it in this lamentable institution before many years. And at least two articles. And some book reviews. And the textbook. All of it while you were teaching a full load. So they pound your fingers off the gunwale. You know why? You threaten the weak sisters. They don’t want distinction around, it would show them up. Energy and talent like yours are bombs under their beds. Half of the executive committee went to college here, and to graduate school here, before they started to teach and they’ve never taught anywhere but here. They’re ingrown, inbred, lazy, and scared. They don’t dare let people like you into the department.”