Crossing to Safety
I have made up my mind that I will not drive up there after all. If they are singing, they are close to finished with their family duty. Moe and Lyle, and perhaps others, will surely be stopping by here to check with Sid and me. I would gain only a few minutes, and risk breaking up what they have loyally held together, if I went up now.
And anyway, Sally’s voice is still in my ears, wearier than I have ever heard it. Even in her worst spells she doesn’t sound like this, and she takes care to see that there are very few bad spells, and that when she has them they do not show. On the screen of my mind appears her struggling image, floundering across the grass toward the station wagon, left behind by the others, even by the friend to whom she gives her whole store of love and gratitude. She is like some unbearable, sticky-sweet Disney character, some hurt and wistful little creature scorned by her kind. In a Disney fable, there would be a transformation—Dumbo would find that his big ears let him fly, the Ugly Duckling would sprout the white plumage and grow the imperial neck of a swan. But in this script there will be no such ending.
“Could you survive her?” Sid asked me this afternoon. I read his question as being aimed really at himself, and answered it accordingly. Now that I ask it seriously of myself I don’t know how to reply.
One of the peculiarities of polio is that its victims, once they have recovered from the virus and settled down to whatever muscular control it has left them, live a sort of charmed life. Crippled as they are, they are rarely ill, they are surprisingly tough and durable, they astonish their sound companions with their capacity to endure.
But that is not forever. There comes a time in the life of every such patient when the whole system—muscles, organs, bones, joints—begins to fall apart all at once, like the wonderful one-hoss shay. Every polio patient is warned to expect that time, every polio family lives with that foretold doom waiting for it at some unknown but expected time in the future. One learns to live with it by turning away from it, by not looking. And yet on occasion one is aware of an intense, furtive watchfulness, and the victim, the doomed one, must surely have just as often the vulnerable sense of being watched.
Could I survive her? More accurately, can I? Suppose the tired conversation we just had on the telephone were the last, what would I do? Run mad through the woods like Sid, to be found later in some pond, or hanging from a tree?
The image is too clear to me, and I rise, intending to head for the Rambler, to drive up and start what I should have started hours ago. But then I see on the sky, above the wall of trees, a long dim movement of light. Someone up on the hilltop is turning or backing around, his headlights pouring off into the sky. Better to wait. And brace up—answer the question.
I am so tired that I melt back onto the step. Too old for this physical and spiritual exertion. I will be worthless now for any further searching. I should have gone straight on up with Moe, we should have roused the whole summer colony, the farmers around, the police. Guilt comes to join anxiety in my mind, I am near to tears for my own incompetence.
The lawn spreads out before me under the moon, light gleams off curving metal surfaces, I see the moon’s reflection in glass, reflected as if from water, and looking out with unfocused eyes I see it as another scene. My tired mind, dreaming or inventing or remembering, moves reality ahead as a carousel moves a color slide, and another slide takes its place.
I am in our walled yard at Pojoaque, standing beside the swimming pool that we installed for Sally’s therapy. The moon shines down on me from a polished black sky, and shines up at me from black water. I have been hearing the screech of a hunting owl, and now I see him on the telephone wire, a Halloween silhouette, cat-size and cat-eared. A moment only, and then he is not there, gone as soundlessly as a falling feather. The moon stares back at me from the pool.
Then it cracks, crazes, shivers, spreads on tiny, almost imperceptible ripples. Some moth or night-flying beetle has blundered into it, I think. But when I put my flashlight on the spot from which the ripples seem to emanate (and who is ever without a flashlight?) I see that a mouse is drowning there. He is a very small mouse, hardly bigger or heavier than a grasshopper, and he apparently cannot sink. But he must have been in the water for some time, for his struggles are feeble, and as I watch, they stop completely. He lies on the surface, his ripples spread and dissipate and smooth out.
I am not unused to things drowning in our pool. Rabbits and ground squirrels come in from the dry country around in search of a drink, and sometimes, like this mouse, fall in and find themselves trapped by walls of shiny, unclimbable tiles. Once in, they have no way to get out, though twice I have found bedraggled mice crouching in the opening where the Jacuzzi drains into the main pool. That is no escape, only a respite, for as soon as the filter pump starts they will be washed into the pool again.
And once, on a morning after a big thunderstorm, I came out and found a neighbor’s bulldog dead on the bottom. He had wandered in the open gate, probably blinded and scared by the cloud-burst, and fallen in. Heavy bodied, heavy headed, and short-legged, he had swum, I suppose, a round or two of the slick walls before he went down. That was not a good morning.
Now this mouse, intruding on my prebedtime breath of air with his trouble. Generally when I find mice in the pool they are dead, and I can scoop them out with the net and throw in an extra gallon of chlorine to disinfect their intrusion. I will do the same with this one, I think, and get the net.
Even while I am dipping him up, I wonder why I do it. Perhaps the owl scared him into the pool. If he is alive when he comes out, the owl may get him. Or I may have to thump him on his paper-thin skull, for fear his mouselike reproductive capacities will people the patio with skittering offspring, to endanger Sally on her canes.
I lay the net on the pavement and turn the light on it close. A wet wisp, thoroughly dead, the mouse lies in the nylon web. I pick up the net and carry it to the low back wall and turn it upside down on the other side. In the flashlight beam the mouse is so tiny I can hardly see him, there at the edge of a grass clump—a tuft of fur, a recently sentient little chunk of complicated proteins now ready for recycling.
Then miracle. The fur stirs, finds itself on dry ground. In a scurry of legs it disappears among the grass and weeds.
Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.
I squeeze my eyes hard shut, and when I open them again, New Mexico is gone from my sight. But what put it in my mind is not. I remember Sally’s face, contracted with pain, when we brought her out of that last camp to the road where the car waited—I riding behind her to hold her on, Sid leading old Wizard, Charity walking alongside to steady and hold as she could. It was not a rescue according to any Pritchard formula, but a desperate improvisation like much that has followed. And every detail of that long improvisation has tightened the bonds that hold us together.
Suppose she had died in childbirth under the care of that doctor whom I can’t think of even yet without anger—whose name I have carefully forgotten. I would have left that delivery room a nothing, made nothing by the nothing that remained on the bloody table, but I would have survived her. I would probably even have gone on writing, for writing was the only thing besides Sally that gave meaning and order to my life. A nothing, writing nothings, I might have gone on a long time, out of habit or brute health.
It would have been an appalling fate. I am flooded with gratitude that I wasn’t asked, quite yet, to survive her, that down under her cone of pain and ether she heard the anesthetist’s exclamation, “She’s going, Doctor!” and brought herself back, thinking, “I can’t!”
But of course she is going, as surely as Charity is though not quite so soon. The sentence is handed down and recorded and understood; some shadow of it was in Sally’s voice just now on the telephone. You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.
Of all the pe
ople I know, Sid Lang best understands that my marriage is as surely built on addiction and dependence as his is. He tells me what under other circumstances would infuriate me— that he takes some satisfaction in my ill luck, that it gives him comfort to see someone else in chains. He says too that he would not be unchained if he could, and he knows I wouldn’t either. But what he doesn’t understand is that my chains are not chains, that over the years Sally’s crippling has been a rueful blessing. It has made her more than she was; it has let her give me more than she would ever have been able to give me healthy; it has taught me at least the alphabet of gratitude. Sid can take his guilty satisfaction in my bad luck if he pleases. I will go on pitying him for what his addiction has failed to give him.
But where is he? Out in the woods somewhere debating between what he has lost and what he can’t give up, wandering without her guidance in a freedom he has never learned to use.
Perhaps, in some obscure desk drawer in his mind, is that list she left him. Assuming he is all right, and will come back, will he ever take it out and ponder it, and act on it? It could be the saving of him—as she undoubtedly knew when she lay in bed with her notebook making it out. She is often right.
She is also capable of a noble generosity, and of cramming it down on the head of the recipient like a crown of thorns. She wept, Sally said, going in the station wagon to the hospital. Was she already thinking ahead for him, breaking him away from her by an act of cruelty and preparing him for healing and the list?
If we could have foreseen the future during those good days in Madison where all this began, we might not have had the nerve to venture into it. I find myself wondering whatever happened to the people, friends and otherwise, with whom we started out. Whatever happened to poor Mr. Hagler, who had only his salary? Whatever happened to Marvin and Wanda Ehrlich, and the Abbots, and the Stones? How much would they understand, from their own experience, of what has happened to us?
I hope they have done more than survive. I hope they have found ways to impose some sort of order on their chaos. I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don’t want it ended, as Sid may right now be trying to persuade himself he does.
There is a car, or more than one, coming down the hay road. In the stillness I can hear the growl of low gear, the creaking and bouncing in rough ruts. Lights grope through the highest treetops, turn, are lost, reappear. I stand up readying my tongue for what it must tell them, my mind for more uncertainty, and my legs for more walking.
And now I see the figure, dusty-gold in the moonlight, coming steadily up the road from the stable. It is blurred, its shadow encumbers its feet, but it comes without pause, as if timing itself to meet the family coming down from the hill.
“Sid?” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
AFTERWORD
T. H. Watkins
In the prologue to his biography of Wallace Stegner, Jackson Benson wrote of his conversations with his subject, “Although he was very candid and forthright, he did project a sense of reserve, friendly and kind, but never too close.”
That reserve would not have surprised anyone who knew Stegner. He was a man of rectitude, with regard to himself as well as others. In the twenty-seven years I knew him, I never heard him succumb to common gossip, and in responding to inquiries about his personal history he would, as often as not, refer the questioner to his fiction as the best guide to his origins and experiences. But even in The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Recapitulation —the two novels most closely tied to his own life—his fiction is not always a particularly reliable guide to the man, as Stegner knew perfectly well. “You break experience up into pieces,” he told an interviewer, Richard Etulain, “and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined. . . . It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It’s all of it not true, and it’s all of it true.”
This is some of what we know to be true: Born in Iowa in 1909, he grew up poor in a rootless and spectacularly dysfunctional family in which learning was hit-or-miss and stability never more than a vague dream. His childhood was a hegira that took the family from Iowa to a North Dakota farm town, out to the lumber camps of Washington State, back to Iowa, up to a futile homestead in southern Saskatchewan, then down to the wrong side of town in both Great Falls, Montana, and Salt Lake City, Utah, where the family moved from house to house but never moved up. His father, George Stegner, a handyman, erstwhile entrepreneur, and sometime bootlegger, was an erratic provider and a physically and emotionally abusive man who seemed to single out his somewhat delicate son for special cruelties. Stegner would spend much of his life trying to exorcise the pain his father had caused him by using literature as therapy—“writing him out of my system,” as he once put it. By the end of his life, he thought he had managed to do it; I’m not so sure he had.
His mother, with whom he was very close, did her best to protect him, though she was all but helpless in the face of the father’s relentless personality. Still, her attempts to soften the harshness of the boy’s environment were a legacy he carried in his heart for the rest of his life and gave him, I am convinced, an uncanny sensitivity to the needs and feelings of women in general; this is certainly reflected in his fiction, in which women play a larger and more central role than in the work of any other male writer I know about. Her death from breast cancer while Stegner was a graduate student at Iowa was an almost unendurable blow. It was Wallace who nursed her in her final days, since the father could not abide the presence of death. The experience fed the fire of the young Stegner’s anger at his father and at the same time gave him an understanding of the bitter implacability of fate that never really left him. This was echoed again and again in his later life, as cancer seemed to haunt many of the women closest to him, including his wife, Mary. This, too, he dealt with in his writing, most notably in All the Little Live Things and in his final novel, Crossing to Safety.
His mother’s death left him with a shrinking family circle. His older married brother, Cecil, had died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-three. He did keep in touch with his aunt Min Heggen, his mother’s sister, who lived in Minnesota with her family. He was particularly close to her son Tom, who would eventually write Mister Roberts under his guidance. The possibility that Wallace and his father could ever have reconciled was slim at best, and that possibility vanished when, not long after his mother’s death, George died by his own hand.
Out of this wreckage, Stegner built a life fired by his determination to overcome his bleak and often lonely upbringing—not by pursuing the main chance, like his father, but through learning. Learning was a ladder to respectability and stability, to all that his childhood and youth had lacked, and it must be said that he succeeded magnificently. The boy who had learned to read almost in spite of his childhood education, who had once been trapped in a seemingly inescapable vortex of poverty and instability, scrabbled his way through two universities and achieved three degrees (this in the heart of the Great Depression). He became one of the most respected writers and thinkers of the twentieth century—and in the American West, which he did as much to define and defend as any writer in that century, he was nothing less than an icon.
He would teach at the Universities of Utah and Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Creative Writing Program in 1946 and headed it up until his retirement in 1971. Many of the more than one hundred writers who passed through that program went on to produce enduring and even important work: Eugene Burdick, N. Scott Momaday, Tillie Olsen, Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and Harriet Doerr, among many others. He taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference every summer, beginning in the late 1930s and continuing throughout his Harvard years, cheek by jowl with such luminaries as Robert Frost (who became a close friend), Bernard DeVoto (who became an even closer friend), Archibald MacLeish, and Louis Untermeyer. br />
His twenty-eight books would include three short-story collections, three collections of essays, thirteen novels, two biographies, three histories, and one historical commentary; he was the editor of an artful and effective conservation polemic, This Is Dinosaur, of John Wesley Powell’s classic Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, and of DeVoto’s Letters; as World War II was drawing to a close he wrote One Nation, a groundbreaking investigative report on race and religious prejudice in America, and thirty-six years later, he published American Places, a collection of essays on the natural human landscapes of the country written with his son, Page. His short stories were selected for inclusion in seven annual volumes of The Best American Short Stories and four O. Henry Awards anthologies—and he and his wife, Mary, served as editors of one O. Henry volume. He wrote both fiction and nonfiction for most of the major magazines of his time; he was the editor in chief of one magazine (The American West) and contributed in one editorial capacity or another to several more, including Saturday Review. He and Mary were for many years the West Coast editors for Houghton Mifflin. He won both the Pulitzer Prize (for Angle of Repose, also selected by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best novels of the century) and the National Book Award (for The Spectator Bird ). He received three Guggenheim fellowships; was a Fulbright lecturer in Europe and the Middle East; taught a session at the University of Toronto; had a collection of honorary degrees; and was a card-carrying member of the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Phi Beta Kappa.
In short, as a man of letters, Stegner was himself a significant contributor to what he called “the great community of recorded human experience” and one of this country’s few genuine “belletrists,” as his Stanford friend and colleague Nancy Packer described him. It was a career, said his friend the critic Malcolm Cowley, that was “unequaled in this century,” and for that alone his story is worth the telling.