Crossing to Safety

  In those late hours when we were most a foursome, it was Charity who was quiet and Sid who expanded. He loved to exercise his muscles, he loved the night sky and the intimacy of night stillness. We sang a good deal, walking or canoeing, because singing was what we had most to say. Charity did not pitch those songs as she did in company. She let Sally do it, deferring to Sally’s musical taste and knowledge. It evened things, somehow, that Charity had no gift that way. It let Sally give something in exchange for all we took.

  When we had walked a couple of miles, or found the dock and hauled the canoe out and turned it over, we said goodnight and separated, probing the woods with our flashlights in different directions to our separate cottages. Two Adams and two Eves, an improvement on God’s plan, and one I recommend to Him next time He makes a world.

  He would also do well to surround His doubled first family with a web of relatives. Neither Sally nor I had any experience with families. Neither of us had grandparents, parents, sisters, or brothers. If we had cousins, they were strangers, mine scattered through the West and Midwest, hers in Greece.

  Here, relatives swarmed like termites. The first time we went along on a Folsom Hill picnic, I thought Charity must have invited half the village. But no, they were all Langs and Ellises, mostly Ellises. They perched on logs and stones, sprawled on blankets, hid and raced with the kids playing Prisoner’s Base or Kick the Can. What confidence they had! How fully they belonged! Roles developed without prompting. Charity, Comfort, and Sally (by now an honorary Ellis) presided over the picnic hampers; Sid over the barbecue; Lyle and I over the firewood; Aunt Emily, Aunt Heather, and the hired girls over the smaller children; Uncle Dwight over the sherry; and George Barnwell over the children’s game, blinking nearsightedly in the wrong directions, cheerfully faking an incompetence double his natural gift, while grandchildren and second cousins twice-removed stole home on him, and the hilltop wind blew his wispy white hair on end.

  Indispensable to those picnics was the Marmon, vintage 1931, once Sid’s father’s car, that Charity had rescued from sale and put to humble family use when Sid’s mother bought something less grand. It was a touring car, with a top that now was permanently furled, and it had plate-glass wind wings, a plate-glass partition to separate the driver from the quality, seats that would hold ten or twelve in a pinch, and running boards that would take six more. Its snout was long and sleek, and it had extended bumpers that would accommodate still more, and an engine that from the look of the hood must have been twelve in line. That was a triumphal chariot. When fully loaded you couldn’t see it for bodies, and once at the picnic site it proved itself bottomless, disgorging hampers, boxes, bags, blankets, grills, and a dozen flashlights.

  When the games were over, there was eating—steaks, naturally. When the eating was over, there was singing around the fire. Light hung a long time in the sky, but the dusk edged upward and eventually crowded us all into a ring. The marshmallows ran out, the smaller children huddled in blankets or snuggled in against their parents’ knees, the fire shone red in a ring of eyes. Everybody sang, whether he could sing or not—Charity saw to that. But there were solos too. “Sid, do ‘Barbara Allen.’ ” “No, you know, the one about ‘Go, little boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye.’ ” “No, ‘Lord Randall.’ ”

  He had a fine, true, plaintive voice, exactly right for sad ballads, and he knew a lot of them. Their lugubrious tragedies ticked themselves out, a notch at a time, like the wooden wheels of a Seth Thomas clock. Between songs figures rose and threw wood on the fire and blotted part of the ring with their shadows, and set off showers of sparks. Sally was made to sing—she was an instant success. Even I had to sing, something hoarse and western to impress these New Englanders with the roughness of a man with the bark on: “Blood on the Saddle,” maybe, or “Strawberry Roan,” or “I Shall Be an Old Bum, Loved but Unrespected.”

  That tribe whose size and energy amazed us, amazed us equally with their courtesy. Happily, eagerly, they expanded their circle and let us in. Professors, diplomats, editors, bureaucrats, brokers, missionaries, biologists, students, they had been most places in the world and loved no place as they loved Battell Pond. Their loyalties were neither national nor regional nor political nor religious, but tribal.

  Over all that tribe, Aunt Emily was matriarch. Daughters and sons never left, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law were absorbed and naturalized and weaned away from whatever loyalties they had once had. Children were incorporated as they arrived, widows held full membership for life. Sally and I too, as if we had married into the clan.

  We put Wisconsin and its failure behind us, we forgot to worry about the future. When they asked us what we did, we said that I was working on my next book. My next book. What an ego-inflating phrase. It made the future sound not uncertain and scary, but possible, and even, after a slight necessary delay, assured.

  I have difficulty in recognizing those hopeful innocents as ourselves. What justification did Sally have for her faith in me? What justification did I have for faith in myself ? Why did all those Ellises and Langs, down to the remotest cousin, take us at our declared value—or more accurately, at the value that Sid and Charity declared for us?

  I suppose I know. To them we were no very special phenomenon— a young couple on their way up, just starting out. That family expected young people to be reasonably attractive socially, and gifted in some way. They had bred so many kinds of competence and so many examples of distinction that mediocrity would have surprised them more than accomplishment did. And they rather liked the fact that like Lyle Lister we came from nowhere. We corroborated some transcendental faith of theirs that the oversoul roof leaked on all alike.

  Perhaps also, in some small way, I was Cinderella to them, as I was to myself. No matter how cold the ashes or grubby the household chores, I lived by the faith that when the time came, the glass slipper would fit my little foot, and that when I needed her the Fairy Godmother would pull up in her pumpkin coach.

  She didn’t even need to pull up. She lived there. In the line of succession to be chief matriarch, already accustomed to manage everybody’s affairs whether asked or not, Charity dealt with our future both imaginatively and practically, along with all the other items on her daily agenda, while sitting in bed with her notebook doing her constructive daydreaming.

  Her method exploited what Sally and I, in our nonentity and unawareness, had until then known nothing about: connections. Specifically, Uncle Richard, when he came up from Boston for the weekend and was ordered over to dinner along with Aunt Emily and George Barnwell.

  He had been primed to ask about my book, and courteously did so. He wondered if I had a copy of the manuscript that he could read. I said I would be honored, but Harcourt Brace was publishing it, and I didn’t suppose he’d want to spend his time for nothing. His eyebrows went up. Nothing? He liked reading good books, he had so many opportunities to read bad ones, and Charity had assured him that mine was a good one. Did I have a copy? I did. I also had the galleys, which had come the day before. Fine. Could he borrow them for a day before I sent them back?

  Very flattering. He had Airedale eyebrows and a long, disciplined face like a horse on parade, and when he looked straight at you, which was most of the time, he turned out to have Aunt Emily’s gimlety brown eyes. He said he understood that I was into a second novel. How did that go? I told him: slow and hard. Good, he said. Hard writing makes easy reading.

  The cook came to the windows that looked onto the porch and said to Charity that dinner was ready. Charity rose and shooed us all in. “There’s a spinach soufflé and it won’t wait.”

  Even the seating at table was conspiratorial, as Sally pointed out to me later—she next to Uncle Richard, to soften him up, and I across from him, on Charity’s right, in the best position for talking to him. As I might have expected if I had been as sharp as writers are supposed to be, Sid started an intellectual hare calculated to get Uncle Richard running. He challenged Uncle R
ichard to justify a big best seller, a drugstore-lending-library romance, that he had just published.

  “Didn’t you betray us?” Sid said. “Just for a handful of silver, didn’t you let down all those readers who expect Phoenix Books to publish only books of quality? Because of my faith in you, I bought the thing. It’s a cream puff.”

  Uncle Richard dropped his long head and looked at Sid through the tops of his bifocals. “You too?”

  “There must have been better things to choose. There are hundreds of good books written every year that never get published at all.”

  “Show me where they are and I’ll make your fortune,” Uncle Richard said.

  “There have to be books better than this one. Couldn’t you have left this one to some shoddy popular publisher? Seeing it on your list is like finding a True Confessions story in the Atlantic.”

  Uncle Richard, knife and fork in hand English-fashion, considered. He suggested that publishing was not a charitable enterprise. He named six titles on his fall list that he would be unable to publish if he weren’t able to count on the sales of this one that Sid thought shouldn’t have been published at all.

  Being an academic table, we began deploring the level of popular taste. Only junk seemed to sell. Wasn’t there any market for good, serious, intelligent, well-written books? There must be. Couldn’t you count on a good book’s finding an audience—small, maybe, but enough to carry it?

  “Sometimes,” Uncle Richard said.

  “How many copies would a book like that be likely to sell?”

  Uncle Richard made a balancing, delicate, così-così gesture with his hand.

  “How many would it have to sell before its publisher broke even?”

  “Depends on size and price. An ordinary novel, around thirtyfive hundred.”

  “And you say it would have trouble doing even that well?”

  “One out of two dozen will do that well.”

  Groans, the company’s outward, mine inward. So much for the furtive Morgan dream that his little unheralded novel would impress tens of thousands with its irony and pity and feel for the tears of things, and deliver the Morgans by pumpkin coach to their new home on Easy Street.

  Everybody at the table except perhaps George Barnwell and I understood what was going on, and nobody except the two of us was likely to have been surprised when Charity, as we rose to take coffee before the fire, proposed a treat. Instead of music, would Larry read a chapter of his novel? Oh, please!

  Far from unwilling, I took a flashlight and went over to the guest house for the galleys. When I returned, Sid had set a lamp behind a big chair, and they were all sitting around in the glow of the fireplace, the fire shining through the amber eyes of the owl-shaped andirons, ready to listen to some real literature, the kind that ought to make Book of the Month and the best seller lists but would probably never lead to anything more significant than the Nobel Prize.

  Afterward, when everybody had exercised his option to be enthusiastic, I found myself, just as Charity had planned it, talking solo to Uncle Richard.

  Not for the last time in his life, he was extraordinarily kind. He told me that Sid and Charity were not mistaken, I had something special, I had a future if I would work for it. He wanted to know if I had given up teaching, and when I told him I was looking for a position but had had no luck yet, he advised me bluntly to stop looking. Teaching, carried on too long, could turn a good writer into a twenty-five-watt Henry James.

  He thought I should settle in somewhere and finish the second novel, which he would like a chance at if Harcourt Brace didn’t have me tied up with an option, or if they should turn it down. Some publishers published books, he tried to publish authors. I might find it advantageous to be with a house that was willing to carry me for two or three books. Flash-in-the-pan writers sometimes made it big with their first one, but often faded. Real writers were more likely to make it with their fourth or fifth or even sixth. Did I have any way of supporting myself ? No, not unless writing would do it. I had had some luck with magazines, but not enough to live on.

  Had I considered working in a publishing house? (I sure had— why else was I perched next to him like a house finch at a bird feeder?) Publishing had its disadvantages for a writer, as teaching did, and I was overqualified—you didn’t need a Ph.D. to be a publisher, or to tell a good book from a bad one; in fact, many Ph.D.’s couldn’t—but he thought I had the kind of instinctive perception, and liking for books, that I would need. And the pay was better in publishing, and there was no tenure to squabble and scrabble for. He himself had no openings at the moment, but things could pick up, and there was always some movement of people. I should let him know where I would be. If by chance I came through Boston, I should call him, and he would introduce me to people who might be of service to me. Or he would give me letters if I went to New York.

  Which is to say, he took me under his wing, he treated me as he would have treated an ambitious and reasonably promising member of the Ellis clan. Having absolutely no other alternatives, except the vague one of going to New York, huddling in a cold-water Village walkup, and living on love and beans while I wrote my way to fortune, Sally and I decided that night that Boston, not New York, was our choice and that Uncle Richard was our hope. Only when Sally explained the evening to me did I begin to realize what Charity had done for us. Until then, I thought things had just happened.

  We added up the money I had made from stories and reviews in the past year. We estimated what it would take to get by in Boston, or more likely Cambridge, where there must be cheap student housing and where the presence of Aunt Emily would be a comfort. We speculated on how realistic it was to hope to live by writing, without a backlog paycheck. We hoped Uncle Richard might occasionally give us manuscripts to read, as he had hinted he might, and that by that door I might ease into some editorial slot. We figured out what a $2.50 novel would earn, at ten percent royalty, if it sold thirty-five hundred copies, and found that if mine did that well we would have an extra three hundred and seventy-five dollars beyond the advance. We hoped the textbook, which was also in press, might get some adoptions and make us a little, though first it would have to earn back about a thousand dollars in reprint permission fees advanced by the publisher.

  Somehow we would make it. As soon as the Langs started back to Wisconsin, and Battell Pond folded up for the winter, we would point the Ford toward Boston, carrying our by-now-exuberantly-healthy daughter, my portable typewriter and Sally’s portable phonograph, and our bank book showing four hundred and ninety dollars savings at four percent.

  Meantime there were these friends, this open-armed family, this summer weather, these peaceful mornings on the guest-house porch where, with my typewriter on a card table, and the thrushes and whitethroats singing up the last act of the summer’s intense family life, I could sit among the treetops and look down through the hemlocks to the glitter of the lake and feel my mind as sharp as a knife, capable of anything, including greatness.

  13

  Eden. With, of course, its serpent. No Eden valid without serpent.

  It was not a big serpent, nor very alarming. But once we noticed it, we realized that it had been there all along, that what we had thought only the wind in the grass, or the scraping of a dry leaf, was this thing sliding discreetly out of sight. Even when we recognized it for what it was, it did not seem dangerous. It just made us look before we sat down.

  Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree. But we are sometimes tempted to lie elsewhere, too. I could probably be tempted to lie just here. This is a crucial place for the dropping of hints and the planting of clues, the crucial moment for hiding behind the piano or in the bookcase the revelations that later, to the reader’s gratified satisfaction, I will triumphantly discover. If I am after drama.

  Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in suc
h a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting. Since this story is about a friendship, drama expects friendship to be overturned. Something, the novelist in me whispers, is going to break up our cozy foursome. Given the usual direction of contemporary fiction and the usual contemporary notions of human character and conduct, what more plausible than that Sid Lang, a rampant male married to a somewhat unmalleable wife, should be tempted by Sally’s softer nature. I have already dropped a hint of that by recalling my uneasiness about their skinny-dipping.

  The possibilities are diverse, for friendship is an ambiguous relationship. I might be attracted to Charity. She is an impressive woman—though I can’t quite imagine myself smitten by her, or her by me. There are other possibilities, too: Sid with me, Charity with Sally. We could get very Bloomsbury in our foursome. Anything to get this equilibrium of two-and-two overturned.

  Well, too bad for drama. Nothing of the sort is going to happen. Something less orthodoxly dramatic is. Nevertheless there is this snake, no bigger than a twig or a flame of movement in the grass. It is not an intruder in Eden, it was born here. It is one of Hawthorne’s bosom serpents, rarely noticed because in the bosom it inhabits it can so easily camouflage itself among a crowd of the warmest and most generous sentiments.

  From the first days of our friendship with the Langs we had been aware of it, but pretended it wasn’t there. Comfort, one night in a canoe, told us about an episode in Greece, when her junior year abroad had intersected briefly with their honeymoon; but instead of being alarmed or dismayed, we had chosen to be amused at something so outrageously characteristic. But on the walking trip that we took as the grand finale to that summer, a trip that both Charity and Sid—especially Sid—had been planning for weeks, we had a revelation or two that we couldn’t ignore or simply be amused by.