Crossing to Safety

  We lay and soaked, but not for long. Out in the bedroom Lang was having an uninterrupted tantrum. Pretty soon Ellen’s hesitant knuckles tapped on the door. “Mrs. Morgan?”

  “What is it? Is she hungry?”

  “It’s nearly an hour past her feeding time. I can’t get her quiet.”

  “Well, bring her in. No, good heavens, don’t do any such thing! Wait a minute.”

  “I’ll get her,” I said.

  I climbed out and hunched into my robe without toweling and opened the door a crack. Out there Ellen was rocking and patting and comforting, obviously very interested in what was going on inside. She was a broad, good-natured girl, no more than eighteen, and coming from Wausau she probably thought Madison wicked and exciting, one of the cities of the plain.

  I took the baby from her. “Can you scrape us up something to eat, Ellen? We’re still frozen solid. Anything, whatever there is. Warm. Just give us a few more minutes to thaw out.”

  Lang liked my shoulder no better than she had liked Ellen’s. Burly, fat-faced, obviously overnourished at Sally’s expense, she did not get my sympathy. What did she have to howl about? But I stripped off her diaper—dry, for a wonder—and shed my bathrobe again. Pink, sighing, liquefied with pleasure, I handed her to Sally, stepped into the tub, and settled down with my back against the taps.

  Three in a tub. I watched my naked daughter laid against the breast of my naked wife. She found a dark nipple, her squalling died in a gurgle, her mouth worked, her eyes closed. Naked in Eden, the ultimate atomic family, pink and wet and warm, we lay entangled in the tub, and rescue was so recent, safety so sweet, that I didn’t have the heart to tell Sally what had happened to us.

  I watched Lang’s fat fingers work in the softness of Sally’s breast, and her mouth work with her feeding. Sally looked up and caught me watching. We smiled, foolishly and gratefully. I moved my foot between Sally’s legs and fitted it like a bicycle seat into her crotch.

  We had come out of the tub finally, Ellen had taken Lang to the furnace room and put her down, Sally and I were sitting in our eight-by-ten kitchen eating some sort of goulash and drinking hot tea with jam in it, Russian style. There was a knock on the door. Sally jumped up and started for the bedroom, but she had no chance. The door opened and in came Sid and Charity.

  They stopped in the doorway, surveying our bathrobes, the remains of supper, the general dishevelment of that crowded little hole.

  “Oh, thank goodness!” Charity cried. “You’re all right ! We’d never have forgiven ourselves if you weren’t. Did you ever have such a time getting warm?”

  “We stepped into a boiling tub and it froze over,” I said. “What are you doing running around? You ought to be in bed with hot-water bottles. That’s where we were going.”

  I was thinking, and I am sure Sally was too, what it must have taken, in the way of friendly concern, to get them into their clothes and out to their car and across town to us. Not very confidently, I wondered if we would have been capable of it. In fact, we hadn’t been. It hadn’t occurred to us to worry about them as they had about us.

  “We were fine as soon as we warmed up,” Charity said. “But wasn’t it paralyzing in that water? All I could think of was I. A. Richards and how awful it would be if one of us couldn’t hang on. And when Sid told me what the department has done. . . .”

  She stopped. Sally was staring at her. “Oh!” Charity said, and hit her head with the heel of her hand as Sid had done that afternoon in my office. A family gesture. “Idiot! How stupid of me. You didn’t know. Larry hasn’t told you.”

  “She has to know,” I said—and to Sally, shocked and woebegone, “we’re out. But we did get summer school, so we’re okay for a while. And Sid got reappointed, Sid and Dave both, so there is a God. If I hadn’t been seduced into getting warm I’d have laid in champagne in the best Lang manner. How about a cup of tea? Sit down. Here, let me clear some space.”

  I babbled, throwing papers and my briefcase off the couch, but when I turned around they were still standing there, Sally looking ready to cry, and Charity and Sid distressed with sympathy.

  “Oh, damn,” Sally said. “I hoped. . . .”

  I put my arm around her. Eventually we all sat down.

  “What’ll you do?” Charity asked.

  “I don’t know. Write a lot of application letters. Hope for some last-minute opening. They made it tough by delaying so long. Everybody who is going to hire has hired.”

  “But you’ve done so much! You’re getting such a dossier. How could they not understand how good you are?”

  I managed not to be too sympathetic with myself, for fear I would let out a bleat of pure self-pity. I agreed with her, I had been unfairly treated. But I suppose I had some dim awareness, too, that in her guidance of Sid, she had been right. Poetry would not get him anywhere in that department. If he wanted to stay, he should do what the system called for. If I had done that, I might well have got at least another couple of years.

  “Hell,” I said, “something will turn up. The novel will sell a million copies. Our textbook will get adopted in Texas and we’ll have to ship it down there by the freight-car load. Sally and I will go down to the Virgin Islands and live on coconuts and bananas and write expensive and live cheap and need no clothes but a dark tan.”

  “You mustn’t do anything like that,” Charity said. “I’m sure this will only be temporary. You’re too good to be unemployed for long, and we love you too much to let you go and live on some beach where we’ll never see you. Sid? Isn’t it time we made our proposal?”

  He sat in our one chair, facing the three of us on the couch. He put his elbows on his knees and knotted his hands and leaned forward. His earnest glasses glinted as he checked Charity’s face for some corroboration or encouragement. “I’ll jump in if they make the slightest objection,” she said.

  “See,” Sid said, “you’d be doing us a great favor. We were talking about it while we ate, and it came to both of us at once. First, have you signed a lease for this apartment?”

  “Just till June first. But we can have it longer.”

  “You don’t want it. Because we’ll be in Vermont all summer and our house will just be sitting there. We’d like you to use it.”

  Sally and I looked at each other, each asking, neither answering.

  “There’s just no point in your paying rent for a place when ours sits empty,” Charity said. “Last summer the Haglers used it. It’s best if there’s someone there. You can mow the lawn if it will make you feel better. But don’t clean out the fireplace! George Hagler was such a model tenant that he wanted to leave the house spotless, and he cleaned out the ashes Sid had been half a year collecting. But you don’t have to do anything. Just live there and keep prowlers at bay.”

  “What about your new house? Will you be going ahead with that?”

  “I don’t know,” Sid started to say, but he was overriden by Charity. “Of course we’re going ahead. They can’t scare us off with a postponement. But the new house isn’t the question. The old one is. Will you look after it for us?”

  “Charity,” I said. “Sid . . .” and ended up, “Sally?”

  “You could write six stories and another novel,” Charity said. “When one room gets dirty, move into another. After eight weeks you’ll still have one clean one left.”

  Looking around our basement, I had to laugh. “Sally is a better housekeeper and I am less messy than appears,” I said. “You catch us in disarray. We just emerged from Lake Mendota, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, and we dripped a little on the floor.”

  As a tension-and-gratitude-breaker it was ineffectual. Nobody paid any attention. “Are you just being lovely and kind,” Sally said, “or do you really need somebody in your house?”

  “That answers us,” Sid said. “We are not being lovely and kind. We are doing ourselves a great favor. We do want somebody in the house. You. So notify your landlord. Now there’s a part two to this proposi
tion. We asked you before if you wouldn’t spend a summer with us at Battell Pond. The way things have worked out, we can’t have Larry, but what’s wrong with Sally and Lang driving to Vermont with us?”

  “You’ve approached it wrong end to,” Charity said. “Don’t ask what’s wrong with it. Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s the solution. There can’t be a single sensible objection. We’ll have our regular girl there to look after the babies, and she’s wonderful, she can handle four as easily as three. Sally can loaf and get strong again. We can all swim, and walk, and go ferning, and have picnics on Folsom Hill, and read poetry on the porch, and listen to music, and square dance, and just talk around the fire. It isn’t luxurious at all, we don’t do anything that isn’t simple and wholesome and plain. Larry will have to stay here and suffer, but when he’s through he can join us. Wherever you go next year, you can get there from Vermont as easily as from Madison. Just say you will, and make us happy. Then we won’t feel so bad about taking you out sailing and nearly drowning you.”

  How do you deal with people like that? I said, “You’re outdoing even yourselves. What do you think, Sally?”

  “I don’t think I should leave you alone. You’d work too hard.”

  “He’ll do that wherever he is,” Sid said.

  “Think what a summer of loafing will do for Sally’s health,” Charity said.

  They pressed upon us, at a time when we would normally have wanted to be alone with our forebodings. They wanted to express their affection and solidarity, they wanted to ease the blow the department had dealt us, they wanted to make restitution for being rich and lucky.

  Sally’s hair had gone curly from the steam of our bath, but the anemic pallor had reasserted itself through the temporary pink. She put her hands over her face and took them away again, ashamed.

  “Would you like to?” I said.

  “Could you get along?”

  “If I couldn’t make it in the Palazzo Lang I ought to be institutionalized.”

  “It might be easier for you to write without the baby around. Do you think? How long would it be? Two months?”

  “There you are,” I said to Sid and Charity. “She’d like to. I think it would be wonderful for her, the best thing that could happen. I can content myself with merely ducal status at the palazzo. We accept with pleasure. But neither of us will ever figure out a way to repay that sort of kindness.”

  “Wonderful!” Charity’s eyes were so wide open that white showed all around the iris—one of the comic faces she affected when she was especially pleased. She hugged Sally, then she leaned the other way and hugged me. But the kiss that I aimed at her cheek barely grazed her. She was not much of a kisser. She had a way of turning at the last minute and presenting a moving target.

  “As for repaying,” she said to me in rebuke, “friends don’t have to repay anything. Friendship is the most selfish thing there is. Here are Sid and I just licking our chops. We got everything out of you that we wanted.”

  So they did. They also got, though that they would never have permitted to figure in our relations, our lifelong gratitude. There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According to this belittling and demeaning theory, gratitude is a festering sore. Maybe it is, if it’s insisted on. But instead of insisting on gratitude, the Langs insisted that their generosity was selfish, so how could we dislike them for it?

  We liked those two from the minute of our first acquaintance. After that shipwreck afternoon we loved them both, sometimes in spite of themselves and ourselves. At the time I could not have told them that. I am not sure that either Sally or I was ever able to tell them, though it had to be apparent without telling.

  Just in case, I tell them now.

  11

  On a morning in early June I saw them all into the Lang station wagon—three adults, two infants in baskets in the back seat, two rampant toddlers imprisoned in canvas nests in the middle seat. Commiserating with Sid, condemned to drive that nursery for two and a half days, I helped Charity establish herself in front and got Sally into the back between the two baskets. In the interest of sanity she and Charity would change places every hour or two.

  Only as she settled back out of reach did I realize that I was being separated from my girl for the first time in our knowing of one another. She sat there blinking and smiling. Euridice. God damn.

  I leaned far in to kiss her, kissed Lang in her basket, gave a finger to the pudgy fist of David Hamilton Lang, and stepped back. The car started and pulled away with hands flapping out the windows and voices calling back things I heard only as noise. There I was, alone on Van Hise Street. Promptly, dog to vomit, I went into Sid’s study and started a novel.

  It was five days before I had a letter. After that they came regularly, four or five a week, and they were so full of happiness that I stopped feeling sorry for Sally and began feeling sorry for myself, left in darkest Madison while she frolicked in Arcadia.

  Arcadia took shape as a place of great tranquility and order. Every morning, Sally said, Charity lay in bed for a half hour with pad and pencil, and when she got up, the day was organized. Constructive daydreaming, she called it. I suppose a nursing baby and two other children can keep any woman on a schedule, but Charity would have produced a schedule stricter than the Book of Hours without any children at all.

  Besides her family obligations, which extended from her immediate family through two dozen aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws, she was the queen of volunteers and the princess of projects. She had a hand in church suppers, auctions, village fairs, Sunday evening concerts on the lake. She planned children’s birthday parties and family picnics. She went fifteen rounds a week, by mail and telephone, with her Madison architect. She knew nearly everybody around the lake, and entertained both those she knew and those she didn’t.

  Much of this Sally got pulled into simply by being there, but Charity was perceptive, and honored Sally’s need of rest—in fact, ordered it—and made opportunities for withdrawal from the strain of being a stranger and a guest. What her household offered in the way of warmth and ease and acceptance left Sally almost tearful. She wrote me like this:

  You like ruts, because ruts are a sign work is being done. You’d love this rut. Up at seven—we could sleep later but nobody wants to. After breakfast, Charity gets busy with the house or errands (she should wear a big ring of keys on her belt), and sends Sid out to his study. She is absolutely determined that he’s going to write something this summer that will make Wisconsin promote him next year and make them wish they’d promoted him this. She bosses him like mad. He grumbles, but he does. Then the nurse girl Vicky takes all four children up to the play room, and I come out here and sit on the porch and write to you.

  It may rain later but right now it’s clear and still. The lake down below is a perfect mirror, with an upside-down reflection of the opposite shore and the Ellis dock and boathouse. I just saw George Barnwell Ellis’s white head going up the path to his think house, and I can almost hear Aunt Emily saying, “There! He’s out of the road. Now for the day’s business.” She and Charity are two of a kind. Not like me. If I had you here, and sent you out to your think house, and you went when I sent you, I’d want to tag right along.

  Before lunch we all take a swim, and after lunch we nap or read, and after three, on good days, we play tennis or walk. If it’s raining we read or listen to records. Dinners are fun, almost always somebody interesting, and never a night without somebody. Last night it was Uncle Richard, the ex-ambassador, who is now president of Phoenix Books in Boston. And Charity’s sister Comfort and her husband, Lyle Lister. Comfort is terribly pretty, and Lyle is one of the most fascinating men you ever met. You and he should hit it off. He comes from Arizona, and is a biologist, and works all over the world. He and Comfort were married right after he got his Ph.D. at Yale,
and they went straight to Alaska, clear up to Point Hope, and lived among the Eskimos, in an igloo practically. If you can believe Aunt Emily, they ate nothing but seal blubber for two years, and I know, from Comfort herself, that they had no bathroom, nothing but a chamber pot, and it was so cold sometimes they had to thaw the pot on the stove before they could dump it. She makes even that sound like an adventure.

  Now he’s given up arctic flora and is working on plants that have adapted themselves not to cold, but to drought. He’s just back from several months in Libya, and he had all sorts of stories about caves with people and animals painted all over the walls, and a flint desert where the wind had teed up stones like golf balls, and when you looked, you could see that every stone was a tool left from a neolithic civilization that died thousands of years ago. I swear his clothes smelled of camel-dung fires. Comfort’s eyes never leave his face. She’s so happy to have him here that she makes me jealous.

  He stole the show, but Uncle Richard is definitely Somebody, too—dignified and impressive, with a twinkle, and kind of tweedy. Naturally I told him about your novel, and he wants to meet you. Unfortunately he isn’t perfectly trained in Charity’s rules of order, and neither is Lyle. When we went into the living room after dinner, and Charity announced music, and Sid set the needle down on “The Trout,” Uncle Richard and Lyle were still talking away, planning a book on those old Saharan civilizations and the drouth-adapted plants that they and their animals lived on. So there was the music beginning, and there we all were with our hands in our laps and our eyes downcast and respectful, and there were those two still talking. “Uncle Richard!” Charity said to them. “Lyle! Really!” They shushed, but neither of them much liked it. It reminded me so much of the night she shushed you and Marvin Ehrlich. I think she’d shush Franklin Delano Roosevelt if he didn’t keep still for the music.

  I could imagine them there in their rustic outpost of culture like colonials being British in a far land. I was homesick for those people before I ever met most of them. Some things that astonished Sally—hard beds, hard chairs, unfinished walls, Ivory soap, no liquor harder than sherry—could not dispel the impression I got of a simplicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished, a naturalness as artificial as the Petite Trianon, and a social life that was lively, hectic, and incessant.