Crossing to Safety

  3

  The porch of the Big House overlooks a lot of family history. The cove itself, which Aunt Emily used to swim across every day before lunch, is private water, a family sea. We sit above it, at a table set with bright, flowered pottery, and look across at the Ellis dock and boathouse, and beyond those, backed by woods, the weathered cottage that is now inhabited by Comfort and Lyle Lister.

  Our talk goes as inevitably backward as our eyes. Hallie steers it, obviously trying to get away from the discomfort of our talk in the study, and give us back the Battell Pond we used to know. Sally and I corroborate or amplify as we are called on. Moe listens with his Levantine smile, his watchful, comprehending eyes moving from his wife to us and back to his wife. He listens as an anthropologist might listen to the stories and gossip of primitive villagers in an effort to hear the heartbeat of a culture. He and Sally have something in common, something ancient, knowing, sympathetic, unfretful, and ultimately sad.

  It is less a conversation than a series of recollections, reminders, and questions. We are affectionately scolded.

  —Doesn’t your conscience bother you? All the time I was growing up, the Morgans and Langs were part of the same family, back and forth between Hanover and Cambridge, and up here together every summer. Then you go and move to New Mexico. Even Lang quit coming.

  —It’s my fault. I wanted to get away from Cambridge winters, and once we were out there it was hard to get back. And Lang was on the West Coast, and her job and Jim’s job were obviously going to keep them there.

  —Doesn’t she get vacations? Doesn’t she ever want to see her old friends? She’s only brought Jim here once, to our wedding. I always thought of her as my big sister, and wanted our kids to grow up together like cousins, and they’ve never even met. How is the selfish wretch? Does she like being a banker?

  —Securities analyst. She’s fine. Yes, she likes working. I guess she’s good at it. She makes more than Jim does.

  —She sold us out for dirty dollars.

  —Come on, Hallie. Is it a one-way street? It’s no farther from here to the West Coast than it is from the West Coast here. You could go visit her. She’d love it.

  —But this is where we all belong! Don’t tell me you’ve become a chauvinistic westerner.

  —I was always a westerner. New England was a rainy interlude.

  She is so outraged that I have to back off.

  —I take it back. It was no interlude. It was the best time of our lives.

  —You’d better not be one of those boosters selling sunshine. What’s the matter with this sunshine? Oh, you know, you really do belong here! You and Mom and Dad were always so in tune. I remember you going off to those Sunday evening concerts that Mom started. This was long before you ever saw Battell Pond, Moe. They used to play phonograph records through a loudspeaker from the town dock and everybody’d gather in canoes and rowboats. We could hear it clear over here when we quieted down enough. We’d all get left with Flo or whoever it was that summer, and we’d watch the four of you row away and as soon as you were around the point we’d tear the place apart.

  —Charity knew that. She thought it was good for you, once a week. I always felt guilty about making us go in the dumpy old row-boat, but I’d have swamped us if I’d tried to get into a canoe. I loved those concerts. Mozart and Schubert across the water, people drifting around stirring a paddle now and then, and the sunset gathering behind us. Your father loved them too. He couldn’t get his lungs full enough. He breathed sunset. By the time the music was over it would be dark and chilly. Charity and I were always wrapped up in those Algerian burnooses.

  —Which would have drowned you if we’d capsized.

  —I wouldn’t have been any safer in a bathing suit. What nicer way to go, anyway? And Charity had always thought ahead and brought flashlights so we could see to get home. Larry and Sid had to carry me up the path on their hands while Charity and I held the lights. This was the blackest place, at night, I ever saw. I suppose it still is. You couldn’t see the dock till the boat bumped it. You couldn’t see your hand if you had hold of your nose.

  —What she is struggling to express is expressed by an old New Mexico saying: It was so dark you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.

  —Why, thank you, darling. You took the words right out of my mouth.

  Laughter. It is fine to be on that porch, in that company. The sun is full on us, warm but not too warm. It will be a while before the shadow of the nearest tree moves across.

  —You were so much a part of us, like aunt and uncle. Meals and swims and hikes and picnics and expeditions. Larry and Dad always had some project—fencing the tennis court, or building a new dock, or putting a cattle guard in the gate up to Folsom Hill. Do you suppose other men get fun out of coming to the country on vacation and working like day laborers? And you and Mom were so close. You really deprived her when you moved west. She’s never found anybody else it’s so much fun to do things with. Actually it isn’t as nice here as it used to be, I think. It’s got dressier, the country-club crowd sets the tone. The way I remember you two, neither of you ever gave a hoot how you dressed. Strangers could never figure you out, you on your canes with your cocky little Bavarian hat with a feather in it, and Mom in one of her bedspread skirts, clear to the ground, and huaraches, and ankle socks, and a mouchoir around her head. I’m ashamed to tell you this, Sally, but that winter we were together in Italy I used to walk forty feet behind you two so that nobody would know I belonged with Mom. What was I? Fourteen or so. I just died at some of the things she’d do, and the way she looked. Did I ever tell you about the time you got out of the Marmon in front of McChesney’s, and these two summer people, Upper Montclair types, were standing there? They were fascinated. They couldn’t make out whether you were a rich invalid and Mom was your nurse, or whether you were gypsies, or servants driving the master’s car, or hippies from Stannard Mountain, or what. I heard one of them say, ‘That car’s an absolute heirloom, Ed would be mad for it,’ and the other said, ‘That’s a Liberty’s scarf on the big one, and the one on crutches is wearing a hand-loomed skirt.’ You made this a happy place for all the Langs.

  —What are you saying? You made it happy for us. We were privileged visitors.

  Hallie is nearly as striking as her mother used to be, and softer, more feminine. For an instant, on the sunny porch, brushing a wind-stirred strand of pale hair away from her face, she looks like Charity in a contentious mood.

  —No no no. I won’t have it. Not visitors. Family.

  Moe, who has been working on a cork, stands up and goes around pouring.

  —Speaking of family. Larry, do you talk a lot about your p-p-p-parents?

  —My parents died more than forty years ago.

  —Did you talk about them before they died?

  —It wouldn’t have occurred to me.

  —Wh-when they died?

  —I shut the door.

  —Sally?

  —I never had a father. My mother died when I was twelve.

  —Then it must seem as strange to you as it does to m-m-me. I sit in, I hear all this family recollection, dissection, analysis, speculation, puzzlement, outrage, rebellion, pity, whatever, and I’m astonished. My father m-m-meant a lot to me, he taught me a lot and I respected him. My m-m-mother was a Jewish Mama, smothering, but you had to love her, right? Well, I never discussed them when they were alive, even with old f-f-f-friends, even with my b-b-brother. I don’t think I’ve talked about them with a dozen p-p-people since they died. This family, though, you can’t b-b-believe them. The minute any two of them get together they’re off on M-M-Mom and Dad.

  —You do it yourself ! You’re as much into those bull sessions as any of us.

  —I didn’t mean to irritate you, sweetheart. I didn’t m-m-m-mean to exempt myself. I just meant, how those two people do occupy the m-m-minds of the family.

  —Not Dad, Mom, yes. But that’s because . . .

  —Long before she got
s-s-sick. Both of them. The other day I was r-r-reading that Katherine Anne Porter novel, whatsitsname, Ship of Fools. There’s a scene where she’s passing in a b-b-bus and catches a glimpse of these two, a man and a woman, she’s stabbing him with a knife, he’s hitting her with a r-r-rock. Stab, clonk, stab, clonk. Mortally locked together. It’s like that.

  —Good heavens, Moe, you’ve been reading too much! It isn’t like that at all. It’s never violent. It’s never even competitive. He always loses.

  —Maybe so. Just the same, it’s mutual crucifixion. They aren’t individuals, they’re c-c-c-c-confrontation. They’re an insoluble dilemma. Your father is a captive husband, like m-m-me . . .

  —Oh, like you!

  —Exactly. And like your Grandfather Ellis. Aunt Emily k-k-kept him in his th-th-th-think house, and looked after him kindly, like the family dog. She admired the way he could read G-G-Greek and Latin and H-H-H-Hebrew. I’m sure she loved him, but she wore the pants. This isn’t a f-f-f-family, it’s a pride. Females run it. Us males lie around yawning and showing our two-inch t-t-teeth, and get swatted when we get out of l-l-line. We have only one function.

  —Oh, Moe, I feel sorry for you!

  —Sorry for me why? I love to yawn and show my t-t-teeth, and have my d-d-dinner brought to me, and service all the l-l-l-ladies. I just wish the family would acknowledge its p-p-p-p . . . p-p-p-p . . . admit what it’s doing. You’ve written a lot of books, Larry, but you’ve n-n-n-neglected one that’s screaming to be written.

  —You can’t write about your friends.

  —Why not? None of us wants it to happen, but this confrontation, if that’s what it is, is almost over.

  —People leave unfinished business. They leave unanswered questions. They leave children, sometimes quite a few.

  —Some of us children might like to see them written up. It might help answer some of the unanswered questions. Such as, why have they stuck together all these years. It’s been a kind of agony for both of them.

  —Oh, not all the time! Not even very much of the time. I don’t think there’s ever been a question of their splitting up. Neither one would think of it. It would destroy them both.

  —I suppose. Just the same . . .

  Moe passes the bottle across, and I pour. He looks in the window, frowning. “Is the fool girl laying the eggs?” But Hallie pays no attention. She is watching me. She is serious about this. She’d like a book about her parents.

  —Hallie, you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don’t understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren’t people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I’d be falsifying something I don’t want to falsify.

  —I thought fiction was the art of making truth out of faked materials.

  —Sure. This would be making falsehood out of true materials.

  —If you can’t do it, who can?

  —Maybe nobody can.

  —Doesn’t it bother you the way it does us? It must. They hang in the air like an unresolved chord. Some Mozart has to go downstairs and bang the right notes and let them rest.

  —Some other Mozart than this one.

  There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

  The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time. They have been able to buy quiet, and distance themselves from industrial ugliness. They live behind university walls part of the year, and in a green garden the rest of it. Their intelligence and their civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities, and passionate errors that pester and perturb most of us. They fascinate their children because they are so decent, so gracious, so compassionate and understanding and cultivated and well-meaning. They baffle their children because in spite of all they have and are, in spite of being to most eyes an ideal couple, they are remote, unreliable, even harsh. And they have missed something, and show it.

  Why? Because they are who they are. Why are they so helplessly who they are? Unanswered question, perhaps unanswerable. In nearly forty years, neither has been able to change the other by so much as a punctuation mark.

  Another consideration, a personal and troubling one. I am their friend. I respect and love them both. What is more, our lives have been so twisted together that I couldn’t write them without writing Sally and me as well. I wonder if I could recreate any of us without my portraits being tainted by pity or self-pity. Amicitia is a pure stream. Too many ppm’s of pity might make it undrinkable.

  The girl interrupts our somewhat awkward silence. She is perhaps the twentieth local girl to work summers in this house. The tray she carries is loaded with a coffeepot, a pitcher of orange juice, and a bowl of raspberries. She plugs the coffeepot into an outlet and hustles back inside, returning almost at once with a platter of ham, hot plates, biscuits, and a big omelet. Moe grunts and shakes out his napkin. Hallie begins to serve. We eat, and the pressure is off me.

  —Is everything all right? Is what’s supposed to be hot, hot, and what’s supposed to be cold, cold? Clara doesn’t always get it all together.

  —Marvelous. Heavenly.

  —Is the sun in your eyes, Sally? Want to be moved around a little?

  —I’m fine right here. Always was.

  —But you still went and moved to New Mexico.

  —It wasn’t this I moved from.

  —I was just talking. Even if you did move from this, who could blame you? This was where you had your terrible bad luck.

  —Bad luck?

  —The polio.

  —I could have caught that anywhere.

  —Just the same, Mom blames herself. She says they took you out on a pack trip when you were still anemic and run-down from having Lang. She thinks you might have thrown it off, the way some people do, if they hadn’t overworked you.

  —That’s ridiculous. I was feeling as good as I ever felt in my life. They’d been fattening me up and looking after me all summer. And after it happened, they were both simply wonderful.

  —They say you were the wonderful one. How you stood being brought out on the horse, and afterward. But then, we know you, we’ve seen you all these years.

  I can see those years stretched out in Hallie’s mind, more years than her own total experience of living. All the time of her infancy, childhood, girlhood, adolescence, college, marriage, poor Sally Morgan has been pegging around on crutches, needing help to go to the toilet or get out of bed or even out of a chair, and yet refusing to be either helpless or hopeless. Drives her own specially equipped car. Travels, or used to, all over the world. Cooks, scooting around her kitchen in her high chair on wheels. Does all but the heavy housework. And smiles, is cheerful, and amused, and amusing. Doesn’t complain, thinks of others. Hallie’s eyes are moist as she looks at her. Love is there, and admiration.

  Properly. I have wet an eye myself in contemplation of that woman.

  —Did they ever tell you what they did?

  —What they did? When?

  —While I was sick. If I’d been picking the very worst time to get sick I couldn’t have done better. They were just about to go back to Madison, the dream house was already started, Charity was on fire to get back and oversee it. And she had three children under five, and you in the oven, though she couldn’t have known that yet. We were out of a job, and they’d offered us
this house for the winter. They never missed a chance to be generous. So I go and get sick.

  She sits very erectly, forgetting to eat. Her eyes are wide and glowing. The mere thought of what they did melts her with affectionate gratitude.

  —They just abandoned everything because of me. Charity went with us in the ambulance to Burlington, and when I was in the iron lung, and so to speak safe, she and Larry took turns talking me back to life. Poor Larry, he had to support us, and all he had was book reviews at fifteen or twenty dollars apiece. He’d try to read while he sat watching the air being pumped into me and out again, and when Charity came and took over he’d go back to his room and try to write. Without her there, he’d never have been able to do a thing, and I’d have worried myself to death. In the meantime, Sid had loaded up all the kids, Lang with them, and driven them back to Madison, and Aunt Emily had abandoned your grandfather and gone out on the train to hold the family together. Talk about solidarity!

  The girl reappears on the porch, looking questioning, and Hallie motions her back in. She and Moe are both intent on Sally, stiff in her stiff chair. Her voice comes out of her in a tranced stream, interrupted by pauses while she catches her breath. If I were filming the Delphic Oracle, I would get Sally in that mood to play the Pythoness.

  —You get a new perspective in an iron lung. I was nothing but a suffering vegetable. I couldn’t move anything but my head, but I could certainly worry. I worried about my baby, I worried about poor Larry, dying on his feet. I worried about Charity’s house, going up without her after all her preparations, just because of me. I worried about Sid with that house full of children, and poor helpless Mr. Ellis, left to look after himself in Cambridge. I worried about the enormous bills we were piling up, and about whether I’d ever get well enough to justify all that was being spent on me. When the 1938 hurricane hit us, I worried about the power going off and cutting off my air, and sometimes I almost wished it would. But then I’d look up into my mirror, and there would be Larry half asleep over his book, or your mother with that smile. You’ve inherited it, Halli