Crossing to Safety

  “I never agreed to that! That’s your plan, not mine. How would I know when it’s time, as you put it? You never tell me honestly how you feel. You keep it a secret from me, how long you. . . . You think it’s time now, and you want to send me out on a picnic?”

  His feelings strangled him. Violently he turned away and stood with his back turned, his face set rigidly out the windows toward the blue line of mountains across gulfs of summer air.

  “Ah, ah,” Charity said. She was crying. “Ah, don’t! Why do you . . .” Her tone softened. She said, as if the reasonableness of what she said could not be questioned, “You weren’t to know it’s time, not till I’d gone. And it isn’t the end, darling. It may be days yet. You’ll be visiting me, it’s only eighty miles. Is it awful that I want to go away quietly, without any fuss, and get braced there?”

  His head did not turn, and he said nothing. His shoulders looked as if he were holding his breath. Staring from her pillows into the light, her yellow-pale cheeks wet, Charity was shaken by sudden impatience. Her face darkened and grew forbidding, her voice burst out with an edge of anger in it.

  “I don’t want to die where I’ve lived so much!” she said. “Can’t you understand? I want to go gradually, a step at a time, in some kind of decent order. Is that too much to ask? I’m trying to do it right, and you won’t help me. Oh, it was just to avoid scenes like this that I . . . I don’t want to bother anybody, I don’t want a lot of crying and breaking down! I hate it! All I want to do is go away quietly while the family is together and enjoying itself.”

  A long silence. Then, without turning, Sid asked, “Who was supposed to take you?”

  “We called Hallie and Comfort. Sally says she’ll come along. And of course Mrs. Norton. I’ll be well looked after.”

  He continued to stare out the window. The sun pouring past him lit a halo in his thinning hair, and showed me once more the somehow pitiful clockwise whorl of his crown. Slowly he turned around. He said as if in puzzlement or wonder, “Your daughter, your sister, your friend, and your nurse all get to go with you. Your husband doesn’t.”

  Her eyes closed for a moment, her head moved slightly, a spasm quirked her lips. She did not reply.

  “Why?” Sid said. “In God’s name, why am I shut out? At least let me drive the car. We can take the Marmon. It’ll only take five minutes to unload it. There’s room for everybody, even with you lying down.”

  “Comfort’s bringing her station wagon.”

  “I’ll drive that, then.”

  “No! That would only complicate things! I want you to go to the picnic and hold things together.”

  Sid stood very still for a moment. Then I saw him begin to shake. He shook all over, like a man with a chill. He cried out, “The hell with the picnic! The hell with holding things together! I’m going with you!”

  Once again, as if he needed it for a brace, he put his shaking hands on the footboard. He leaned on it, the tears streaming behind his glasses so that he raised his hand and ripped the glasses sideward and off. They fell somewhere below and beyond. Without protection or disguise, his naked face hung contorted at the foot of her bed.

  “Why?” he shouted. “Do you hate me? Am I a handicap, or an embarrassment? Am I so troublesome you have to invent errands to send me off on? I’m your husband! I have the right to be with you. It isn’t as if you were going shopping, or off to a luncheon. Have you thought where you’re going, or were you too busy planning how to get me out of the road? Have you thought what it means to exclude me?”

  She lay quiet. Her braids lay across her collarbones, which rose and fell with her quick breathing. Her eyes glittered, her mouth was unyielding, her voice rose against his and cut him off.

  “Because I can’t stand it when you break down!” she said. “I haven’t the strength. I’m trying to do it right. If you’d just let me do it my way it’d be best for everybody, it’d be ever so much better. But you won’t!”

  Sally and I stood in the doorway wanting desperately not to hear this, wanting to wipe out what we had heard, wanting to be gone. If sympathy means literally “suffering with,” we were utterly sympathetic. Also helpless and miserable. What I heard in Charity’s voice, I was sure Sid heard in it too: the exasperation of an assured, competent, organized, supremely confident woman having to deal with a fumbling man. Must I hold you up even now? that sub-voice said. I’ve picked you up after every failure, I’ve kept you from falling more than once, I’ve tried to give you some of my strength, I’ve been loyal, I’ve been a helpmeet. You know you can trust me to do what’s best. Why can’t you now, when it’s all I can do to keep going, just do as I ask, and spare me all this?

  There was hardly enough life left in her to let her lift a hand— both hands lay strengthless at her sides—but the old fighting pink showed in her cheeks, and as soon as she stopped speaking her mouth was a hard thin line. Mistress of the implacable silence, she stared him down.

  Then, in the midst of that confrontation, I saw her face change. Some tension pulled it out of shape. A whimpering sound bubbled from her throat, her head drew backward, the cords of her neck stood out, her body arched under the blanket, her eyes closed, her lower lip was bitten between her teeth. I could feel the effort she made to lie still.

  Sid sprang around the bed and bent over her.

  Until then I had somehow not thought of pain as a problem, perhaps remembering Hallie’s word that stomach cancer is relatively painless, perhaps taking at face value Charity’s confidence that she could handle any pain that came. As of course it would come. Had come. The thing had already metastasized away back in May, when she had the operation. By now she could have it in the lungs, liver, pancreas, bones, brain, anywhere.

  For what seemed an unbearably long time, maybe as long as ten seconds, she lay with her teeth in her lip and her eyes shut. Then— of itself or by an act of will?—her body relaxed in a series of little jerks. Her breath drew in and breathed out again in a long sigh. Her eyes opened blindly. Fumbling a Kleenex out of a box on the bed table, she wiped her wet face.

  “Better?” Sid said. “Okay now?”

  No answer.

  “Shall I call Mrs. Norton?”

  It was as if she neither heard nor saw him.

  He offered her the water glass with its bent sipping straw.

  Her hand came up and brushed it away from her mouth.

  For a few seconds he stood looking down at her. His hand set the rejected glass back on the bed table. Then, with a sound like someone trying to breathe with his throat cut, he dropped on his knees. His arms spread across her, his face broke up in her shoulder. Sobs shook him. They shook her too, her face broke up in suffering and pity, and she bent her neck as if to kiss the top of his head.

  But the will took over, the emotional impulse was put down. Her right arm, which had moved as if to go across his back in an embrace, drew back and stretched itself along the pillow, as far from him as it could get. Her face, still twisted with the feelings at war in her, turned away from the head that burrowed in her shoulder. She lay rigid, every muscle in her body repudiating him. Though with his face buried that way he couldn’t see her, he had to feel how completely she rejected him.

  Almost at once, without raising his face, he surrendered. “All right! All right, whatever you want. Any way you must. I’ll stay out of it, I’ll try to . . . I just can’t. . . .”

  That was all she wanted. From her deathbed, practically, she had mastered him once more. Her will would be done. But the moment she had beaten him he was her hurt child. The arm came off the pillow and clenched around him, the lips touched the whorl of his crown.

  “It’s best,” she whispered. “You’ll see it is. You can come over and see me when I’m . . . settled. Come and see me tomorrow.”

  Sally touched my arm, set her canes, and turned into the hall. I started after her, but as I went through the door I could not keep my eyes from going back to the bed. Charity, holding Sid’s head against her should
er, looked straight at me. Her mouth made an indescribable, wistful, begging, please-understand, pained and painful smile. Her eyes, to my fascinated imagination, were like the eyes of Piero’s gloomy Christ—a painting that she had once, wanting to count no hours but the sunny ones, affected to repudiate.

  Sally and I had barely stopped in the alcove where the grandchildren’s toys were stacked when Mrs. Norton put her head out the kitchen door. Sally had been standing with one hand to her mouth. She took it away and said steadily, across living room and dining room, “Give them a few minutes.” Mrs. Norton’s head withdrew. We stood flooded with light from the bow window.

  I said, “Has she been having these pains often?”

  “One other time while I was with her.”

  “Shouldn’t someone call the doctor?”

  “I did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He thought it was time she came to the hospital. He said Mrs. Norton should give her a hypo.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have had much effect.”

  “She didn’t give it. Charity wouldn’t take it. That’s why Mrs. Norton was upset.”

  “Doing it what she calls ‘right,’ she makes it awful hard on everybody else.”

  Thoughtful, sober, her thin shoulders pushed upward by the weight she put on the canes, her collarbones starved and vulnerable, her face puckered in the ancient, sorrowful acceptance that is increasingly its basic expression, Sally said, “She says what she’s trying to do is save everybody else. Especially Sid. She says if she lets him take her to the hospital he’ll have to acknowledge it’s all ending, and he’ll go all to pieces. You’ve been talking to him. Do you think he would?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. At least he wouldn’t feel shut out.”

  “She wanted him to be kept busy with something physical. She thinks he can reconcile himself better if he finds out afterward, when it’s at a distance. She says he’s so dependent and emotional that even looking at her breaks him down. He weeps. She was going to have this picnic for a last farewell, she’d be as they all remember her. Then in a day or so, maybe right the next morning, she’d send Sid on some errand and she’d slip away.”

  “Forethoughted,” I said. “Not necessarily sound.”

  “Oh, it’s all spoiled now. She realized she didn’t have strength for the picnic, so she was going to get away this afternoon. But he guessed, and now it’s all happened just the way she didn’t want it to.”

  “But she’s still going to shut him out.”

  “I guess,” Sally acknowledged. “I wish . . .”

  “What?”

  But she was not ready to tell me what she wished. She said instead, “I found out she hasn’t eaten anything for two days. She hides the things Mrs. Norton brings, and manages to flush them down the toilet.”

  I thought about that. “You mean she’d already started two days before you got here? That seems strange.”

  “She expects it to take a while, maybe as long as a week.”

  “But she was really going to the picnic? Fasting? You’d think she’d have tried to keep up her strength that long.”

  She gestured with her hands—a kind of shrug without letting loose of the handles of the canes.

  “How about you?” I said. “Aren’t you about done in? You’ve had a trip through the wringer.”

  “I’m all right.”

  She did seem so—all right, but sad.

  “What do you suppose they’re doing in there now?”

  “I hope,” Sally said, “I hope they’re doing what they were when we got out. Hugging each other.” Her eyes flashed up, swimming with sudden tears.

  “Wouldn’t you think she could just let him drive her to the hospital? If she’s trying to save him she’s doing it in the cruelest possible way.”

  She didn’t bother to wipe away the tears that ran down her cheeks. She only looked at me, shrugged hopelessly, and shook her head.

  “She’s the most bullheaded woman alive.”

  “Larry, she’s dying!”

  “By compass.”

  Sally did not answer. She brooded out the bow windows into the glorious afternoon.

  “Would you do it this way?” I said. “If you die before I do, am I to have access to your last hours?”

  Before she could reply, fast hard steps came down the hall. Sid went past, never seeing us. His heels left hardwood, pocked across the slate pavement in front of the fireplace, and went silent in the dining room rug. The kitchen door burst open, light from the other side outlined him, the door swung shut. Sally moved one of her canes and shifted her weight so that she could lay her fingers on my arm. We stood that way while Mrs. Norton came out of the kitchen and hurried off to the bedroom.

  “I keep trying to remember she has to be forgiven what she can’t help,” Sally said. “We’re different people. You’re not dependent the way he is. I’m not strong the way she is. I don’t have to protect you.” Her voice ran almost out. “Couldn’t.”

  We stood. Finally I asked, “When are they coming?”

  “They said they’d be here about four-fifteen, after you and Sid would have left for the hill.”

  My watch read ten of four. “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll probably get her settled and have dinner there and go see her afterward. If it gets too late we might stay all night. I’ll have to call and let you know.”

  “We’ll be at the picnic.”

  “Till when? Nine or so?”

  “At least.”

  “Keep him as late as you can. Take him for a walk afterward. He always loved late walks with you.”

  “If I know him he’d rather walk by himself tonight. He might not be at the picnic, either.”

  “Well, stay with him if you can. I’ll call here, and if I can’t raise anybody I’ll leave word with Moe. Or I may be home before you are.”

  “If you are, how will you get to bed?”

  “Mrs. Norton.”

  “Pretty grumpy help.”

  “She’s all right. She’s just frustrated that Charity won’t be treated like a patient. I won’t give her that kind of trouble.”

  We had a sort of smile between us. I said, “So everybody will have somebody to take care of.”

  “Yours will be the hardest.”

  “Yours doesn’t strike me as easy.”

  “There’ll be three of us. And she’s so brave about it she makes me feel proud. It’s a sort of privilege.”

  Her hand came up, with the crutch still sleeved on it, and she wiped a knuckle along her cheekbone before she tilted her face to be kissed.

  “Stay with him,” she said again. “Walk him. Make him forget she’s gone. If you have to, stay up with him overnight, or bring him down to the guest house. The other bed’s made up.”

  “All right.” For a moment I studied her sad, resigned, trying-to-be-cheerful face. I thought of how it might be to look at the face of the woman you loved and had lived your life with, and know that this might be the last, or the next-to-last, or the next-to-next-to-last time you would see it. I said, “Are you up to all this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hate to think of you being at the mercy of Charity’s plans.”

  “Oh, she wouldn’t think of putting us out! We’ll have to fight for everything we get to do for her.”

  “It’s only Sid she’s willing to put out.”

  Long dark look. “But that’s because he’s so much herself,” Sally said.

  She planted her canes and went off down the hall, frail, contorted, devoted. I went looking for Sid.

  4

  Nine forty-five. It seems a geological age since I awoke this morning. Since I opened my eyes and looked around the familiar shabbiness of the guest cottage, continents could have regrouped themselves, species and genera could have evolved and vanished, the ice could have come and gone more than once. At the very least, lifetimes must have passed.

  I sit on the porch step, dead tir
ed from all the walking. The sun set nearly two hours ago, the long twilight has ebbed, the sky behind the hill spiky with spruce has gone the color of buffed iron. But over the lawn before me, over Moe’s gray Rambler, over Charity’s lounge and Sally’s chair lying folded where I dropped them, spreads a pallid, dusty, trembling wash from the moon. By craning to look up past the porch eaves, I can see it almost straight overhead, something over a half moon, enough to dim the stars.

  It is the kind of evening that calls for meditation, nostalgia, vague religious thoughts, remembered lines of poetry. But I am not meditative. I am anxious. I have exhausted myself to no purpose, and my mind frets itself with worry and obligation. For I have not found Sid, and I do not know what to do next.

  When I left Sally I expected to find him in the kitchen. He was not there. Neither was he on the terrace. Neither was he waiting in the Marmon. Neither was he down at the stable cleaning stalls or filling mangers, trying to make his muscles do for him what his mind would not.

  He must have gone blindly walking. Should I try to follow him? If so, where? The hill was a network of trails, miles of them. I didn’t relish the thought of going through the woods calling his name. I liked neither the idea of seeming to pursue him nor the idea of his perhaps hiding from me, watching from cover as I went calling past. If he wanted to be alone, he should be allowed to be.

  On the other hand, the family would probably already have started for Folsom Hill by the village road, and Charity’s peace of mind depended on their having a picnic, and all the wherewithal of the picnic sat here in the Marmon. What was more, the station wagon would be coming for Charity at a quarter past four, twenty minutes from now. Charity must not come out for her last ride and find the Marmon still there and Sid rebelliously off in the woods. If he did not soon appear, I should probably take the car up. I might meet him on the road. Perhaps he was walking up to the hilltop, disciplining himself to the master plan and depending on me to bring the picnic.