Crossing to Safety

  They stood with their arms around one another in the scatter of shade and early sun. “Well, Kernel,” Sid said, “remember the password. They kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit.”

  Our hands were out the windows, our necks craned for a last look at the people who above any other two on earth made us feel good, wanted, loved, important, and happy.

  “Good-bye,” we cried. “It was wonderful. Thanks for everything.”

  “Oh, thank you!” they cried to our departing dust. “Thank you for coming! We’re counting on you again next year. Every year!”

  Re-enter the law of nature. On December 7, a Sunday, the radio announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the war that had been everybody else’s was abruptly ours too. By May I had taken leave from Phoenix Books and we had moved to Washington for the duration, bent upon helping Elmer Davis prove that the way to have an informed public opinion was to inform the public. At about the same time, Professor Rousselot, almost in tears, told Sid that the department could not promote him after all, and since it could not promote him, it could not retain him either.

  It was not from the Langs that we heard the news. We heard it from the Stones, already at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station learning to be a warrior and a warrior’s wife. Sid and Charity simply dropped out of sight like weighted bodies in a pond. No letters came back in answer to ours; we were unable to reach them by telephone. When we finally did hear, Charity had recovered from her breakdown and left the sanatorium, and the family was together in Battell Pond.

  That was August, 1942. We did not see them until June, 1945, and when we did at last get together, the snake was back in Eden. At least once during our ten-day stay it stood on its tail like a spitting cobra and menaced our eyes.

  About nothing. About who should do the dishes. Standing in the quiet lean-to that for years had been Sid’s prison and hideout, I could hardly credit what I remembered, it was so bizarre and unnecessary.

  We got a hint of trouble when we came in from the porch with our sherry glasses in hand and found Barney, ten or eleven years old by then, sitting at the table. Charity left us in the doorway and crossed quickly to where he sat. “Have you finished?”

  “I can’t eat it.”

  “Yes, you can eat it. You’ll sit here till. . . . No, you can go now. Go on up to your room. I’ll save it for you. You can eat it for breakfast.”

  She picked up the dish from in front of him. With her other hand she hoisted him to his feet and pushed him off toward the kitchen. I had a glimpse of his sidelong, sullen eyes, his wedge-thin face, before the door closed on them both. Sid was making quite a production of building a fire in the fireplace. Sally and I said nothing.

  After a minute Charity came back out, shooting one of her exasperated smiles across the big living room as she bent to brush Barney’s crumbs away and begin setting the table for the five of us. “Vegetables!” she said. “You’d think they were being poisoned.”

  “Poor Barney,” Sally said. “I never much liked vegetables either. Where are the other kids?”

  “Up in the nursery playing canasta.”

  “And Barney can’t?” Mrs. Fellowes said. “Why don’t I just. . . . Maybe I can. . . .”

  “No,” Charity said. “He knows what he has to do. He can solve his problem in three minutes whenever he wants to.”

  We had a splendid dinner that Charity had cooked herself—four courses, with a Bordeaux that must have been gathering dust in their cellar since before the fall of France. We warmed up, there was a lot of laughter. I had managed to avoid all talk of the war or of Washington, either of which might stir up Charity’s irritable, and, as I felt it, irrational pacifism. Well fed and comfortable, we sat over coffee for a good while.

  Then Charity stood up and announced that we would now go in and sit by the fire and listen to some music. They had a new Toscanini recording of Beethoven’s Ninth that they had been saving just for tonight. Something joyful, to celebrate. She meant celebrate our reunion, and we were all for that. But victory in Europe was only a few weeks old; the war in the Pacific could end any time. There was more to celebrate than Charity wanted to talk about.

  Fine, wonderful, we said. Wasn’t the Ninth pretty long, though? Shouldn’t we do up the dishes first?

  Mrs. Fellowes stood up promptly, saying why didn’t she do them? She hadn’t been allowed to do a thing all day. We should go on in and have our music, she’d have them done in a jiffy.

  “No,” Sid said, and Charity said, intensely smiling, “Mrs. Fellowes, you’re a guest, and in this house we don’t let guests do dishes.”

  “But you don’t have any help!”

  “Sid will do them.”

  “Sid will?” I said. “Sid and I will. Pride will not suffer a Morgan to sit at his ease while his host is up to his elbows in dishwater made necessary by the Morgan presence. You ladies have three choices. Wait a few minutes for the music, or let me help with the dishes after the music, or have the music without the comforting presence of the gentlemen.”

  “You’re a windbag,” Charity told me. “And you are not doing any dishes. You can be the opérateur of the music machine. Sid does the dishes.”

  “Why should he get to do dishes when I can’t?”

  “Because that’s our agreement. That’s the way it’s been ever since our last help went down country. I cook, he cleans up.”

  “Say it isn’t so,” I said to Sid.

  He said it was so. No amateurs allowed in the kitchen.

  Sally and Mrs. Fellowes were looking from face to face, smiling, trying to find an agreeable way out of the impasse. “Why don’t we leave them till afterward, then?” Sally said.

  Sid looked as if that might suit him, but then he looked at Charity and saw by her clouded face that it wouldn’t suit him after all. “I’ll just get them done before they all dry out and harden.”

  “Then you’ll miss the music,” I said. “You’ll be cut off from our intemperate joy. Really, I want to help. I insist.”

  “Insist all you want, you aren’t allowed to,” Charity said. “You’ll find the Ninth Symphony on top of the pile over there.”

  Sid had quietly got up and begun to stack dishes on a tray. Charity snuffed the candles. Sally, who had stayed out of the argument because however much she would have liked to, she would have been no help doing dishes, was telling me with her eyes to knock it off and submit. So I went and helped her stand up; and because it was now pretty dim in the dining room, I held her while she bent to lock her knee braces. People who can’t feel their feet must be able to see them, or they lose their balance when they bend down.

  I took her chair over by the fire, and she caned over and sat down in it. Charity curled up in a big chair. Mrs. Fellowes said uncomfortably that she would just pop upstairs and take a look at the children, then, and despite Charity’s objections went on up. Sid was backing through the swinging kitchen door, carrying his loaded tray.

  “Now let’s just be joyful,” Charity said. “This horrible war is almost over, and we’ve got you back.”

  With the records stacked on the changer, I still hesitated. “It would only take the two of us ten minutes to do up those dishes. Then we could all sit and be joyful.”

  “Sid is not unhappy,” Charity said. “He’s not out there crying into the dishpan. He’ll come in when he’s through. This is the way we do it. This is our agreement.”

  Mine not to make reply. I pushed the automatic switch. The arm lifted, swung, hovered, and came carefully down. Scratching began, then a quaver of violins against sober strings and horns that quickly rose to a musical shout. Charity stretched up and snapped off the floor lamp. We sat in firelight, watched by the eyes of the owl andirons. The kitchen door, over at the dim dining-room end, was outlined with the light beyond it.

  Ordinarily I am an admirer of the Ninth Symphony, but that night it struck me as pompous and overstated. I couldn’t listen because I kept thinking of Sid out there, inferior and unneeded, d
ismissed to the scullery. And why? Because Charity had set up a schedule and was too inflexible to change it. Either that or she was whipping him for something.

  The longer I sat in the firelit dusk, the more annoyed I got. When the first record ended and the changer clashed and the second one dropped, I stood up. It was too dark to see expressions, but I saw that both Charity and Sally had turned their heads and were watching me. I held up one finger and tiptoed out.

  The downstairs bathroom was off the hall that ran from the front entrance past the stairs to the kitchen. The whole passage was out of sight from the living room. Bypassing the bathroom, I went down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door.

  Sid, at the sink in the middle of chaos, looked around. Every counter and table was loaded with dishes, bowls, pots, pans, milk bottles, strainers, and garbage. Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don’t have to wash them. Out beyond the doors, the music was working back up from pianissimo to fortissimo. “What is it?” Sid said, frowning.

  “I thought I’d come out and lend a hand.”

  The very thought agitated him. “Come on! You’re supposed to be out there. I’ll take care of this. Get out of here.”

  I opened the refrigerator door and put away a butter dish, a bottle of milk, and half a head of lettuce. I scraped some peelings and rinds off a counter into a paper bag and looked around for the garbage pail. Sid had hold of my arm.

  “It’s my job. Go on back and listen.”

  “They don’t need me to listen.”

  “Charity will eat your gizzard out.”

  “That’s a giblet that will poison her.” I found an overflowing wastebasket and crammed the sack of peelings into it. There were dishtowels hanging on the oven door handle. I pulled one out and began drying the plates that Sid had set on edge in the drain rack. He tried to take the towel out of my hands.

  “Look,” he said, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d go back. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

  “If we go together we can go in half the time.”

  He let go of the towel. For a moment he stood frowning. Then he shrugged and went back to his sink full of suds.

  “Have you been a bad boy?” I asked. “What have you done to deserve three years of K.P.?”

  “It hasn’t been that long. And it’s a fair arrangement.”

  “How do you tell it from punishment?”

  Looking sideward, sharp and at first offended, he raised his eyebrows and shoulders and gave a little laugh. “I guess it is punishment.”

  “What for?”

  Shrug. Another sideward glance. “General incompetence.”

  I was wiping and stacking the clean plates on a corner of the counter. “Explain, Professor.”

  Sid laughed again, looking at the black window above the sink as if something outside had caught his eye. His tongue came out to touch his upper lip. “I proved I couldn’t hit big-league pitching.”

  “Horsefeathers. They called the game on account of wet grounds.”

  “Whatever.” His hands paused in the dishwater. “The taste of failure is like the taste of cabbage soup, you know that? It rises sourly in the gorge. Just an echo, hoo hoo. Now you go on back and let me finish my work.”

  “With permission,” I said, “the hell with you.”

  Once he submitted, we made progress. The stacks of clean dishes grew, the counters and tables got mopped clean, we reached the pots and pans.

  “One reason I’m here wiping is that I want to talk to you,” I said. “People are going to be coming back to college. Johnny’ll come marching home. The colleges are going to start hiring again.”

  He glanced up, but said nothing. I saw scorn in his face.

  “The head of the Dartmouth English Department has been in my section of the OWI,” I said. “He’s just gone back. He’s already looking for people.”

  No comment.

  “If you think you’d like to go back to teaching, and lay this ridiculous rumor that you’re not competent, I can put your name in.”

  Now he did look fully up, and his hands were quiet in the greasy water. The scorn had been wiped from his face; he looked close to terrified. For a long second he stared at me, and then went irritably back to work.

  “Slave labor,” I said. “Off the promotion ladder, at least for now. They’ll protect their regular faculty and bring in irregulars for the rush.”

  “What as?” Sid said. “Instructors?”

  “Mostly. Not you. With your experience you shouldn’t take less than assistant professor. You ought to get associate, but that’s out.”

  For a while he scoured the bottom of a saucepan with a Brillo pad. He held the pan under the hot tap and the black scourings rinsed away and left clean red copper. He put the pan upside down on the drain.

  “After the Wisconsin debacle I wouldn’t have the chance to take anything. Not at a place as good as Dartmouth.”

  “Yes, you would, if you want it.”

  “I just reminded you, I proved I can’t hit big-league pitching.”

  “And I just told you horsefeathers. You can hit anything they can throw.”

  “What makes you think I’d have a chance?”

  “Because I’ve talked to Bramwell about you.”

  “You have?”

  “A couple of times. He’s been beating the bushes. There weren’t many Ph.D.’s produced in the last three years. All of a sudden it’s a seller’s market. If you want to go back to teaching.”

  He worked away at a colander. In the living room I heard the music swelling up to a passion. “Did you tell Bramwell all about me?”

  “Every shameful detail.”

  “And he still thought I’d have a chance?”

  “You’d have to apply,” I said, irritated. “Remember what old McChesney told Sally when she asked him when the wild strawberries would be ripe? ‘Wal, you have to let ’em blossom first.’ You’d have to act as if you wanted a job. You’d have to send him a letter and a vita.”

  “And if I should, do you think there’s a chance?”

  “If you do, you’re in,” I said. “He’s crazy enough to think you’d be a catch. For the kind of job he’s got, you would be.”

  He stood motionless, staring at me across the steam of the sink. His eyes began to open, his lips drew back, the vertical creases in his cheeks deepened, his smile broadened. “You sly bugger,” he said. “Morgan . . .”

  The door to the dining room was pushed open. Music shouldered into the kitchen. Charity stood in the door. She took in the stacks of wiped dishes, the cleaned counters, the clean pans, Sid with his hands in the water, me with my guilty dishtowel in my hands. Red flooded into her face.

  “Really!” she said.

  “We’re just finishing,” Sid started to say. He said it to the closing door.

  In silence we finished up. He dried his hands, I hung the wet dishtowel with the others on the oven door. Out in the living room a Heldentenor was shouting into the fog and the eclipse: “Freude . . . Freude . . .”

  I said, “I guess it’s time we tiptoed contritely to the doghouse.”

  He was not amused. His face was stiff and his eyes veiled. Quietly we went out the hall door and up the hall and stood at the top of the steps leading down into the living room. The tenor was through shouting. Now everyone was shouting. Choral exultancy filled the house and rattled the windows.

  For a second or two we stood letting our eyes adjust to the darkroom gloom. The chorus rose and fell in waves, the music skittered from sopranos to tenors to basses and back again, really joyful, so joyful that the blood took off, trying to catch the beat. More than once we had sung that Ode to Joy in the Langs’ Wisconsin living room with Dave Stone at the piano and nobody but friends in sight and the future a challenge that we would meet when it came. Uplifted, I joined in the chorus now, and came down the steps roaring.

  No one else joined in. We found chairs. I stopped my clamor. Sally’s face, rosy in the fire
light, looked rueful. Charity was only an outline folded into the big chair. In silence we let joy sing itself out.

  Long time ago. Better times grew over and healed those bad war years as grass and bushes heal scarred earth. Why did I think of that bad evening when there were so many good ones to remember? It was over next day—would have been over even if the Dartmouth opportunity hadn’t altogether changed the atmosphere.

  I am sure now, and was pretty sure then, that she didn’t even know she was punishing Sid for disappointing all her hopes. Probably she had evolved the rationalizing theory that he needed a function, something useful to do—like dishes!—that would persuade him that he mattered in the scheme of things. Something his alone, humble perhaps, but his, a responsibility that he could accept and discharge. It sounds unlikely, but some of her ideas were. That didn’t keep them from being, to her mind, totally logical.

  He didn’t need me to get him a teaching job after the war. Almost any of his dozens of friends could and would have done it, or he could have done it himself. All he had to do was write around and indicate that he was available. So even if I hadn’t known Steve Bramwell’s needs, Charity would have had to renounce her dramatizing of failure, and consent to resume life among the living. Still, they chose to think I had done him—done both of them—the greatest favor. If I did, it was not in finding him a job. It was in inducing Charity to end their self-imposed withdrawal and her pose of proud humiliation.

  In the little spartan study, that furtive sanctuary, I felt airless and oppressed. I went through the dust-moted streak of sun to the shop door, and out onto the porch. The door slid heavily shut behind me, shutting in the tools waiting to be put to use, the pencils sharp for expression, the pads awaiting words, the dictionary of rhymes with its face turned to the wall in the hope of going undiscovered. With a feeling that I was escaping something, I went on over to the Big House.