Crossing to Safety
While I crossed off the days on the calendar, I lived on the daily report from Arcadia. For a while, Sid’s mother was visiting, and shared the guest house with Sally—the gentlest woman alive, Sally said, a mouse, not at all what she’d imagined a very rich woman would be like. She could see where some of Sid’s qualities came from.
Mrs. Lang went away, but the dinners and picnics went on. As for me, I rose at six and got in three hours on the typewriter before my first class. I tried writing in the late afternoon, too, but even stripped to the waist I sweltered in the midwestern heat, and my arm stuck to the varnished desk and my sweaty hands smudged the paper. One more day, another, one more, yet another, a week. And nearly every day a letter to tell me how much I was missing. On the days when none arrived, I died. When two arrived in the same mail I fled out under a tree to read them at leisure with my bare feet in the grass.
Once in a while a detail left me brooding. Word of a midnight swim, for instance, a chilly impulse of Sid’s. God help me, I went around for several days wondering if they had worn suits. I resented and feared their skinny-dipping while I had to grind away in the heat teaching high school teachers the elements of English literature from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy. What if, luring my wife out of my protective reach on the pretext of helping us out economically and putting her back into health, this friend of mine worked on her liking and trust? I was enough of a writer even then to imagine the whole business—courtesies, the meeting of eyes, little touchings, moments on dock or porch when no one else was there. Oh, man.
I worried about the future, too. A dozen letters had produced only one nibble. It came from a Lutheran college in Illinois, and I might have pursued even that possibility if they had not wanted me, before any further discussion, to declare my belief in the Apostles’ Creed, the Augsburg Confession, and the principles of higher Christian education.
No jobs. By mid-August we would be on the street. Dreary time, best forgotten. Hot, lonely, laborious summer. No friends in town except the Abbots, and Ed swallowed by his thesis. We had a few beers together at the Union, where back in May we and the Langs had come ashore dripping seaweed, and I went once to their house to dinner. Alice was appealing. That night I kissed her beside the car and found her alarmingly responsive. Thesis widow. But she was not Sally—in fact, that little episode so inflamed me with the plausibility of my imaginings about Sally and Sid that I practically fled the premises. Besides, I liked Ed. I wished his ribald view of the academic scene could give me a clue on how to survive without it.
Even the interminable will end if it is only eight weeks long. Late one August morning—grades in, farewells said (not many), excess Morgan household effects stored in the Langs’ basement, a sack of sandwiches and a thermos of coffee in the seat beside me, I started east, or rather, northeast. I had figured out that by driving up through the Saulte instead of crossing Lake Michigan on the ferry I would save at least ten dollars.
It was like bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix. Daylight galloped, the Ford galloped, we galloped all three. Beaver Dam, Waupun, Fond du Lac, Oshkosh, fell behind. The sun wallowed down into long beds of cloud that went pink, then red, then purple. In the twilight I passed through Appleton, in the dark through Green Bay. There was a sense of dark enclosing forest opening up into lost farms and little lonely towns. A sense of dark enclosing history also—Indians in bark canoes, pork-eaters, blackrobes, fur traders, French explorers greedy for empire. Exhilarated, going the wrong way on a one-way historical street, I rattled back toward the beginnings of the Republic, toward the ancestral East that had never figured in my life, and hadn’t figured in my family’s for three generations. And what was more important, toward reunion with Sally and the baby. Lang would probably not know me. Sally, I hoped, would.
Menominee, when I went through about eleven, was barely alive. Escanaba, after midnight, was as dead under its hissing arc lights as something on a slab. At three-thirty in the morning an American customs man waved me through the gate at the Saulte, and a Canadian on the other side reluctantly left his lighted room and his coffee—I could see it steaming on his desk—to ask me if I had any firearms or pets, and turn away almost before I could answer him.
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. Daylight came sickly on Sudbury’s blasted heath. My nerve ends were like ingrown hairs, my head the size of a pumpkin, my fingers balloons full of water. At Sturgeon Falls I stopped at an all-night diner for a doughnut and a fresh thermos of coffee, but it was no go. I almost fell asleep starting the car, and I barely made it to a place where I could pull off, lock the doors, and lie down in the seat.
Confused hours later I awoke. Somebody tapping on the window—a provincial policeman in a Baden-Powell hat. I sat up, cleared my bleary eyes and my mossy mouth, persuaded the policeman that I was neither dead, drunk, in trouble, nor an outlaw, worked my face into flexibility, had a capful of coffee, and drove on.
It is a long way down the Ottawa. I finished my novel during that stretch, revised it between Ottawa and the St. Lawrence, and threw it away going up the Richelieu. The flat Quebec country disappointed me, and so did the shapeless Quebec houses covered with Johns-Manville shingles in colors that would have been unsalable anywhere else. Drive all this way for this? The day was going, too. I would never arrive in time for after-dinner music, much less dinner, much less sherry. It was already dinner time, and I was still a hundred and fifty miles away.
I ate my last sandwich, drank my last coffee, contemplated starting another novel and couldn’t get interested. Instead, I recited all the poems I knew, from “Lycidas” to “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” doing my best to recall them without error from beginning to end. By the time I ran dry I was at Rouse’s Point, at the upper end of Lake Champlain. The last miles to the customs station I was counting backward from one hundred by sevens, trying to persuade myself that my brains still worked.
At Rouse’s Point they ransacked the car—trunk, back seat, front seat, under the seats. Either they were waiting for someone, or I looked like jail bait. They quizzed me about my identity and the reasons for my quick errand into Canada. They scrutinized such documents as I could produce. Finally, after killing nearly thirty minutes that I valued at a hundred dollars a minute, they let me go on.
Furious, I careened on down through St. Albans. It was already dusk, but I could see that the country had changed. The minute I left Quebec, the flats had given way to hills, lakes, mountains, heavy woods. The Johns-Manville houses had been replaced by clap-boarded farmhouses leading through staggered sheds to big barns. In town I saw white gables, green shutters, porticoed doors with fanlights.
All right. My attention picked up. I was cheered. But sleep had me like a crocodile’s jaws. Twice, after turning off on a lesser road marked “Morrisville,” I awoke with the Ford slewing in the loose gravel of the shoulder. The second time, alarmed, I pulled off and ran up and down in the near-dark for several minutes. But when I got in and drove again I was still sand-blind with sleep. My eyes had sash weights on the lids, the road forked where there were no forks and curved where there were no curves. Headlights glaring in my face shocked me into alertness, but within seconds I was back fighting to stay awake. I pinched myself on the inside of the upper arm, where there seemed to be particularly sensitive nerves. I ground my eyes hard shut and stretched them wide. At once I saw something coming at me, a truck without lights. Slam of brakes, swerve, skid, shuddering stop: all alone on a dark road, nothing visible but roadside woods, black firs and spruces, ghostly birch trees.
Ashamed and scared, but not scared enough to admit I wasn’t fit to drive, I went on. I got lost, unable to follow the inadequate signs and unable to read the map by the dim cowl light. At a crossroad, out in front of the headlights, I determined where I was. Glory be, only seven miles to Battell Pond.
In the village, at nearly eleven o’clock, I couldn’t tell which of two streets to follow and had to knock on the door of the only lighted house. A man i
n his undershirt told me to go straight on one mile. I went on, I found the Ellis mailbox among others on a wagon wheel, I went on another two hundred yards to other mailboxes on a plank. I found an opening in the trees, I turned left. There were three cars in the clearing, one of them the Lang station wagon. I pulled up and let the Ford die and turned off the lights.
Now where? I was in black woods, the sky shut off, the darkness so total I couldn’t see my hands. There was a soft sound of wind up above, in the tops of the trees. Turning on the lights again, I discovered railed steps, paved with slates, leading down. Once I turned off the lights I had to grope to where my retinal memory told me the steps were, and then feel my way down them to level ground. A building loomed up on the left, blacker than the blackness around. With one hand on the wall I followed it to a corner, where a weak bloom of light fell from a window across a porch. Inside I could see a big high-ceilinged room, a single lighted floor lamp, shapes of furniture, no people. Listening, I thought I heard voices from around the next corner.
I felt my way up two steps onto the wooden planking of the porch, and past the window to another corner, and from there, my eyes adjusted by now, I saw the three heads in three chairs under the diffused light from inside.
Feet hit wood, somebody stood up. “Who’s there?” Sid’s voice said. “Larry, is it you, finally? Hello?”
I felt like laughing crazily. I could have rolled on the porch in my frenzy of pleasure. In my best Latin, for my classicist wife, I said the password we had used in Berkeley when she lived in a garage apartment on Arch Street and I used to come around late, unable to study any longer and needing grace.
“Cave,” I croaked. “Cave adsum.” And then for the Langs, who might not understand Latin, “Beware, I am here.”
Insert a blurred, out-of-focus interval. I suppose we talked a while. I imagine that Sally and I sat close together and held hands. I am sure Sid and Charity must have urged hospitality on me—sherry? a sandwich? a piece of cake? a cup of Ovaltine?—and I am sure I was too groggy and happy to think I needed any of those. I had performed my total obligation and achieved my full desire just by getting there. But within minutes I would have begun to fade, and their consideration would have taken over.
“You must be absolutely dead,” Charity would have said. “Off to bed, now. We can talk all day tomorrow. We can talk for three weeks.”
She would have pressed into our hands two of the flashlights she kept by the front door for use by guests who never remembered that this was country, without streetlights. We would have gone stumbling, with our arms around one another, trying to walk double in a single-file path, through fifty yards of black woods to the guest house. We would have gone to bed at once and wrapped each other tightly, intending more than I, at least, could perform. And I would have gone to sleep before I could perform it.
Mumblings. Whispers. Someone was standing by the bed and looking down at me with concern. Whoever it was took my condition more seriously than I did, and I wanted to say something humorous and reassuring, but my tongue was sluggish, and couldn’t find the words.
I opened my eyes and looked toward light and saw Sally, in her robe, standing in the open door talking in low tones to someone— the nurse girl, I decided. Sally was furred with morning. The light penetrated her thin robe and showed her legs. She passed Lang in her basket out the door, the whisper of her voice stopped, the girl’s footsteps went along the porch and down three hard steps into soundless earth. Then Sally turned and found me watching.
“Ah! You’re awake!”
“I hope so. What time is it?”
“Only eight-thirty. I thought you’d sleep longer. Don’t you want to?”
“No. Come here.”
She came, smiling, soft-slipper-footed on the bare wooden floor.
“Climb in.”
A moment’s hesitation, a glance at the windows, and then she opened and shed her robe. I watched the nightgown lift over her head to reveal her; young, soft, brown, restored from what child-bearing had done to her. In a moment I had her locked against me, my face between her breasts, and I was saying into the warmth of her skin, “You’re real. Oh, goddamn, you’re real! Let’s not do that ever again. Two months are too long. Two days are too long!”
Thus to awaken in Paradise. We hadn’t earned it, we didn’t deserve it, we didn’t belong there, it wouldn’t last. But how wonderful to have even a taste. I felt like the grubby child in Katherine Mansfield’s story when she got a glimpse of the rich girl’s dollhouse before being hustled away. I seen the little lamp.
All days should begin as that one did. All life should be like the three weeks that followed.
12
Sally is right about my liking ruts. In graduate school, with more to be done than there were hours to do it in, with obligations and deadlines to meet, with classes to take or teach, papers to write or read, exams to prepare and proctor, meetings to attend, books to locate, charge out, and read—with all that haunted routine of preparation and testing, I used to dream, perhaps beguiled by the examples of Sir Walter Raleigh and Jawaharlal Nehru, of the pleasures of solitary confinement. It seemed to me that nothing could do as much for a man as a good long jail sentence.
To have all of one’s physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one’s mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard’s steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn’t be concerned, one still had months to serve—who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?
If I had known it, I was in jail then, my own jail, and only when Sally joined me and made my confinement unsolitary did I become aware of how completely I had shut myself in. Little by little she coaxed me out, but I came cautiously, not to expose my flanks, and my vision of the ideal isolation never changed.
Now this Vermont lake. Thanks to Charity, its routines were as fixed as those of Alcatraz, but it was a long way from being a maximum-security prison. It organized time, including free time. Like her mother, Charity could not bear randomness or lack of purpose. If your purpose was work, then arrange to do it. If it was play, set aside the time. Don’t, as I heard her tell Barney once during his moody adolescence, don’t just sit and gawp.
I found the days as Sally had described them. We did our hours of constructive work, all of us, from eight to eleven-thirty: Sid in his study, Sally and Charity with their babies and house plans and shopping and village volunteerism, I in the moving shade of the treetops on the guest-house porch, the cook in her kitchen, the nurse girl in the nursery, and God, presumably, in His Heaven.
At eleven-thirty, when the locomotive bell on the porch of the Big House clanged, we gathered for swimming, sunning, and conversation on the dock or the elephant rocks. Suddenly (Charity’s planning again) we were not individuals or couples, but families, or one big family—naked babies being dipped, shrieking; Barney stretching out in knee-deep water and crying at us to watch him swim, with one foot on the bottom; Nicky sitting in the shallows and splashing; Sally, Charity, and the nurse girl wading around, helping. Sid and I spent several of those swimming periods clearing the bottom of stones and building a breakwater of them to catch sand and create more beach for the children. That was only his noon-hour project. He had dozens of others for other hours when he was released from scholarship.
After lunch we retired from one another, the children were put down, we either napped or read. I had never taken an afternoon nap in my life, but I took a few there, inadvertently falling asleep over a book. About three the place came alive again, I heard chopping or poun
ding or sawing and went out to find Sid repairing the dock or clearing paths or replacing a rotted porch rail or working on the woodpile.
At five-thirty another swim, at six-thirty sherry on the porch, at seven dinner, usually with one or another of the Distinctions who walked the roads of that village as unassuming as sparrows.
No bread-and-butter family atmosphere here. The children were all fed in the kitchen and were spirited upstairs before we came in from the porch. No greasy goodnight kisses, no clinging and whining to stay up. The bell rang and they were gone. I suppose Charity checked on them before she went to bed, but they were never allowed to interrupt dinner, which was social and intellectual and adults-only.
The talk was always intense, full of argument and laughter. Charity’s heightened voice was always egging it on. Sid, presiding in his faded work clothes (he spent as much at Sears, Roebuck trying to look like a farmer as some people spend at Brooks Brothers), would start some intellectual hare and chase it through one or two fields and then subside when Charity cried, “Wait. Wait! Let’s hear what Larry thinks.” Or Lyle. Or Uncle Richard. Or Daddy. Or some rosy-cheeked Nobel laureate in medicine or chemistry. Or the headmaster of some academy that I had always associated with the fortunate salt of the earth.
It seemed we all outranked our host. Though he loved discussion and in other circumstances would pursue an argument for hours, at table he had the modest function of the rabbit who sets a fast pace for the first quarter or half so that others may run their four-minute miles. We ran a lot of them, we ran them every evening.
A happy, orderly, lively corner of Eden, as hushed as a hospital at quiet times, jumping with activity as soon as the social bell sounded. The evening usually ended, after the guests had gone, with a walk up and down the road, or a midnight canoe ride on the black lake under a big starry dome of sky, or a late swim as invigorating as shock treatment.