Crossing to Safety

  He knows, and so do I, that he is talking out of loyalty and distress, not out of conviction. There is as much competence in that department as in any he or I know. What he means, and I understand, is that times are tough, and that this time I am the victim. Nevertheless, it is comforting to hear that I am wronged.

  “Remember that speech,” I tell him. “I may want to hear it again. I may want to quote from it. How did Dave make out?”

  “Same as me—extension. They’re cagy. If they keep anybody seven years they’re up against the rule of the American Association of University Professors that says anybody kept for seven years has tenure even if he doesn’t have rank. So they’ll cut everybody off at six.”

  “No, no. You guys will inherit this place. And Ed’s got his job waiting at Georgia. What about Ehrlich?”

  “Out. Next year is terminal.”

  “Out! Like me. Oh, he’ll be fit to be tied. All that Greek he read. All those asses he kissed. How about Hagler?”

  “Out. Terminal. What they’ll do now is recruit three new, cheap, eager instructors to replace the three of you. Three years from now they’ll fire those and start all over.”

  “You and Dave are the only ones continued. That’s a compliment.”

  “Is it?”

  I understand him. If we were all in the same boat, he could be cheerful about it. But he has been preferred over most of his friends, including some that he generously thinks are his betters, and he can conceive no reason for that favoritism except that he is rich, or perhaps that his wife is socially hyperactive. That can’t make him very happy.

  Restlessly he turns and pushes at the casement, which gives with a creaking noise and a lifting of dust. Into the room flows the mild, soft, perfumed air of spring. He stands inhaling it. Fresh air is medicine to him, spring is an eagerness, his automatic response to stress is to walk or run or skate or ski or otherwise work it off.

  “This all gives me the most profound bellyache,” he says. “What are you doing after your one o’clock?”

  “I’m not holding it. I’ll be reading papers.”

  “Can you smell what it’s like outside?”

  “A matter of indifference to me.”

  “You’re a bloody liar. You yearn out the window as much as I do, only you’ve got more willpower. How about going for a sail?”

  “Where would we get a boat?”

  “The Union rents them.”

  “Sid, I’d love to, but if I don’t read these papers this afternoon I’ll have to read them tonight and tomorrow, and that will take me off a story I’m trying to write. I need that story. I need it now more than ever.”

  Twisting the cord of the blind, he watches me, and I read him. He is at once disappointed to have got only a continuance, and miserable to have been continued while I have been rejected. It shocks his whole system of values to think that he should have been preferred over someone he likes and admires. He takes prosperity harder than anyone I ever knew.

  “How did the vote go?” I ask. “Did Mike say? Did anyone vote to promote you, or keep me? Anybody we should be grateful to?”

  “Oh, sure. Mike didn’t say, but you know a lot of them would have voted for you. It’s a conspiracy of the timid mossbacks.”

  “Which we would all love to be.”

  “Speak for yourself.” He walks in a circle, jingling the change in his pocket, and returns to look out the window. “How about it? Just a couple of hours? Why don’t I call Charity and ask her to pick Sally up and meet us at the dock? Can your girl look after the baby for two hours?”

  “She can do everything but nurse it.”

  “Come on then.”

  I hesitate only a moment, and then I fall. Why not? What good does it do to work every minute? “Maybe we’ll all drown,” I suggest. “Then they’ll be sorry. Who’ll they get to teach their summer classes then?”

  Galvanized, emancipated, already in better spirits, we go down the stairs and along the main corridor of Bascom Hall. Most of the time I have known it, it has smelled of steam heat, sodden floors, hot radiator paint, and wet wool, and icy drafts have swept it every time a student shuddered in its doors. Now the doors stand open, and a sweet, beguiling wind blows the length of the hall. Outside, men students in shirtsleeves and girls in summer dresses sprawl on the steep lawn. From where we emerge, sidewalks bulge outward and downward like lines of longitude seen from the North Pole. A professor-hen is clucking a ring of chicks around him under a tree.

  Authentic spring, time of hope. I shut away the bitterness of rejection, I sweep into the back closet of my mind the uncertainties and anxieties that are going to be with us now until I can find something else, in this wasteland of the Depression, that will support us. I sweep them all into the closet along with my anger and wounded vanity and punctured self-esteem and the grim arithmetic I will soon be working on. I say to myself, self-consciously and pompously, as I once said more harshly in Albuquerque, in circumstances a lot bleaker than these, the words of the Anglo-Saxon stoic: “That have I borne, this can I bear also.”

  Almost cheerfully, our coats slung on hooked fingers over our shoulders, we walk down Bascom Hill toward the Union. Halfway down, I ask, “Does Charity know?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nor Sally either. Do we tell them?”

  “Let’s have our boat ride first. Why spoil it?”

  “Hearing that you’ve made it shouldn’t spoil anything for Charity.”

  “Made what? Charity doesn’t accept anything but success. She hates stalemates. Also, hearing that they’ve let you go will spoil everything for her. It spoils everything for me. This place will be a desert without you two.”

  I am not used to such naked expressions of regard. Like his admiration, his affection half embarrasses me. I don’t know what to say. I say nothing.

  The day is breezy, cloudy in the west but clear overhead. Our boat is heavy and broad in the beam, a scow. I sit forward by the mast, Sid at the tiller, the girls on the thwart amidships. The wind tangles Sid’s fair hair as he sculls us out from the dock. I do what he tells me with the jib. Later I do what he tells me with the mainsail. We lean into a long northeast tack up-lake. Settling down on a life preserver with my back against the mast, I am face to face with our two beaming women.

  “Somebody had a good idea,” Charity says. “Isn’t it wonderful to be out, and unpregnant, and free!”

  Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in babushkas they might be out of the peasant chorus of a Russian opera. Any minute now we will sing and dance to the balalaika. Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms. In a couple of hours I will need sympathy, but for now I like being washed by the wind.

  “What are the towers?” Sally asks, and nods ahead. Craning, I look. Beyond the far shore, rising out of green countryside, a cluster of tall buildings.

  “Camelot?” I guess.

  Sid says, crosswind, “The mental hospital.”

  “The one where William Ellery took his demented wife?”

  “That’s it.”

  We discuss my office mate and his really tragic life, his talent, his absurdities, vanities, and pretensions. He must have been something, in his prime. I wonder aloud how it would be to be sailing along like this and have him overtake you, swimming on his back in his boar helmet, with his eagle beak in the air and his voice filling the wind with Anglo-Saxon brag. Sid, completely in character, wonders if this stormy-bright lake might sometime in future acquire, because of William Ellery, a poetic and legendary aura such as Wordsworth and Coleridge gave to the Lake Country and Hardy gave to Dorset. We agree that until it has had a poet, a place is not a place.

  “I’ll bet you’ll be the one to glorify Mendota,” Charity says. “When are you going to write something about all of us here? Don’t we tempt you as a subject?”

  “Give me time.”
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  Which, of course, they are not going to give me. Too bad, Lake Mendota, you’ll never know what you missed.

  Buffeted by a stiffening and changeable wind, we are led to another association suggested by this lake. A couple of years ago I. A. Richards, then a visiting professor, went sailing with a companion from the Wisconsin faculty, just as we are doing now, and at about this season. They capsized, and the lifesaving unit on the Union dock was slow to spot them. When they reached the capsized boat, Richards was still clinging to it, and as if to preserve the meaning of meaning they rescued him. But the Wisconsin professor had let go and drowned.

  We drag our hands over the edge of our sluggish tub and agree that the water is very cold—the ice has been out only a few weeks. How long would a person survive if he went overboard? Ten minutes? A half hour? An hour?

  We have been tacking back and forth, ducking under the swinging boom. Sid is very busy, for the boat handles badly and the wind seems to come from every direction. The sun has gone under, too, and the warmth has left the afternoon. The sky to the west is full of bruise-colored clouds, and the hospital towers on the north shore are lost in gray shrags of rain. In the hostile airs we come almost to a standstill. The canvas flaps. Sid grates out, “Oh, God, don’t lu f !” The boom comes over, we veer sluggishly onto another tack.

  Sally’s eyes find mine. Though the wind has stirred spots of color in her cheeks, she is still wan, for the birth business left her anemic, and she exists on liver and spinach and such things. Now she is clearly uneasy. Her face brings me back from exhilaration with the lurid light and the sense of exposure and risk. I try to incorporate into a look several confident reassurances: Our boat is a scow, unsinkable; Sid is an experienced sailor; shipwreck is something that happens only to the I. A. Richardses of the world. I know she is hoping I will suggest turning back, but I can’t do that. It is Sid’s expedition. He is the one to say when we should head for shore.

  Then in her clear voice, clear as a pitch pipe (in a crisis, or when calling for attention, she pitches her voice as high as she does when starting a song), Charity says, “Sid? Sid? It’s getting too rough. Turn back.”

  He squints at the clouds. “It’s just a squall. It’ll blow over.”

  “No. Go back. Right away.”

  She couldn’t be more peremptory. Only I, who am facing the stern, see the resistance, the active rebellion, in his face. But he obediently prepares to come about. “Heads down! Here we go.” We duck under the slow club of the boom, I feel the wind on the other side of my face as sharp as Charity’s voice, and the movement of the boat as reluctant as Sid’s obedience.

  Off to the left and ahead, as we flounder quartering into the wind, I can see the green shore, the university buildings around and on Bascom Hill, Observatory Hill with its skeleton ski jump. I can’t see the dock, which is low and obscured by spray and the heaving lake. I wonder if the lifesaving outfit on the dock can see us.

  The boat won’t sail so close to the wind, and Sid has to let it fall away a little. The wind whips and shoves, the sails lean, the boat moves like a dog hanging back on its leash. Waves smack us, the gunwales tip, we nervously high-side. The girls have buttoned their coats under their chins. There is water under the duckboards.

  As suddenly as if someone has opened a valve, the rain comes. One minute I am squinting up at the thunderous blue clouds over-topping us, and the next we are being pounded by heavy rain that turns almost at once to hail. We cover our heads with our arms. In a couple of minutes it has passed; I can see it chopping the water astern and to starboard. Then I look down, feeling myself even wetter on the feet than on the rest of me, and find that the water under the duckboards has risen so that the boards are afloat. So much, in that short shower? I find a coffee can and begin to bail.

  I am facing Sally and Charity, looking into their faces. They crowd together on the wet thwart, huddling into their coats. Sally gives me a wan, stoical glance. Charity cries out in cheerful outrage, “Oh, damn the weather! This started out to be fun!”

  A gust explodes against us, the gunwale dips deeply, spray flies. I can’t see that I have gained on the water in the bottom, and my feet are soaked. I shout at Sid, “What do you think? Shall I lower the sail?”

  Sitting with their feet pulled up, looking straight ahead as if the wobbling of their eyeballs might tip us beyond recovery, the girls interpret my shout in different ways. Sally obviously thinks it a confession of crisis, and it alarms her. Charity takes it as a challenge to her leadership. “No! We’re safer if we keep our way.”

  I continue to look at Sid. For all I know, Charity’s judgment may come not out of sailing experience but out of a reading of Captain Marryat. But Sid is no help. He has been overruled before he can open his mouth. He lifts a shoulder, that is all. My icy hand goes back to pouring coffee cans of water over the side. The wind keeps blowing bucketfuls back aboard.

  Despite everything I can do, the water gains on me. I turn to look around, hoping to find the shore and dock nearer, and my eye is struck by how low we are in the water. We are not riding the waves down and then rising buoyantly again. We are simply boring into them, heavier and lower, heading down. The line of the gunwale is aimed at the bottom a quarter of a mile ahead.

  I grab up the two life preservers I have been sitting on, and throw one to Sally, one to Charity. I have time to loosen the sheet from the turnbuckle and let the mainsail pour around me, wet, cold, and enveloping. Another life preserver is there in the water that now reaches to my calves, and I throw it over Sally’s head to Sid. Glaring around, I spot the last one and grab it. Sid is standing in the stern, his hand on the tiller, his eyes on the diving bow. The girls too have stood up, ready to jump. I scream at Sally, “No, the high side! The high side!” But she has no time. We heel over, the bow stays under, the mast hits the waves, and we are in the ice water.

  This is not an adventure story, and being after the fact it doesn’t generate suspense. Obviously we all survived. There were no heroics. Everybody behaved well.

  When I came up gasping and bulging-eyed from the shock of immersion I saw Sally in her cumbersome coat trying to get the section of duckboards she was clinging to free of the sail and the fouled lines. I started to work around the mast to get to her, but Sid reached her first. Then I arrived, and the three of us paddled the duckboards around onto the windward side of the hull where Charity was hanging fast. We tied ourselves to the hulk and waited for rescue.

  It seemed a fatally long time, though I suppose it wasn’t more than ten or twelve minutes, until the Chriscraft roared up, jockeyed around, threw us a line, and hauled us up over the side one by one, the girls first, like gaffed fish. As they got us onto the deck, chattering, blue, and numb, they told us with demoralizing casualness, “Go below. Don’t get the bunks wet.”

  Down in the tiny cabin we huddled together, soaked, freezing, our jaws locked so that we could hardly speak. Charity said incredulously, “Don’t get the . . . bunks wet? What kind of . . . rescue . . . is this? Where are the little . . . barrels of . . . brandy? To hell with keeping their . . . bunks . . . dry!”

  She fell onto the starboard bunk and pulled a blanket over herself, motioning Sally down beside her. We all accepted that invitation, bundling like antique New Englanders in a cold snap, while the Chriscraft bounced and roared toward safety.

  It slowed, swerved, bumped against the dock. Under the eyes of twenty or thirty of the curious we staggered ashore, shoeless, squishing water. Eyeing us with a professional lack of expression, the rescuers relented, and let us each wear a blanket home. “What about the boat?” Sid kept asking. “I rented it. Shall I . . . ?”

  “We’ll take care of it. Come down tomorrow.”

  We hurried to the Langs’ car, too cold to worry about boats or blankets, too cold almost to move. Actually we were probably in more danger than we realized. Doctors these days take hypothermia seriously, and if anybody ever had the right to be hypothermic, we did. We crowded into the
station wagon, Sid drove us to our house. “Get warm,” they chattered at us, and drove away. We made it around to our basement door.

  Our girl Ellen, with Lang on her shoulder bawling her head off, met us. “Oh, my land, did you wreck?”

  “Draw us a tub of hot water, Ellen, please. Hurry!”

  Ellen started to hand Lang to her mother, but Sally was too shattered, wet, and cold. “Not now, not yet. Just get the tub filled.”

  While Ellen drew the tub, we sat on the bed and peeled off our soggy, reluctant clothes. A dry bathrobe should have been a sybaritic pleasure; I never even felt mine. We shuddered and shook. In the bathroom Lang’s bawling drowned the sound of running water.

  “Is it ready, Ellen? If it isn’t, just let it run. We’ll finish up.”

  Ellen came out of the bathroom with Lang purple-faced and unappeasable on her shoulder. We crowded past them into the steam and shut the door, threw aside our robes. “Be careful,” I said. “You won’t feel it. You could scald yourself.”

  Cautiously we felt our way into the tub and settled down facing one another, sinking in to our chins. The heat, at first not felt, moved into our hands and feet as a slow, hard ache. Our skins turned lobster red, our shuddering began to smooth out, it began to be luxurious. We smiled at each other, shaking our heads.

  “That was close.”

  “I thought we were gone.”

  “Feel all right now?”

  “I don’t ever want to move.”

  “Just lie and soak.”