Between the taking of a cinnamon toast and tea she let drop bits of information that my mind scurried to gather up and plaster against the wall for future use, like a Bengali woman gathering wet cow dung for fuel. She came from Cambridge. Her father was a professor of religious history at Harvard. She had gone to Smith. She and her husband had met while he was a graduate student at Harvard and she, after graduation, was marking time working as a docent in the Fogg Museum.
She could not have disclosed these facts to a more susceptible ear than mine. Despite my disillusion with some of my bow-tied colleagues, I was ready in 1937 to believe that the Harvard man was the pinnacle of a certain kind of human development, emancipated by the largeness of his tradition and by the selective processes that had placed him in it from the crudeness of lesser places. He had looked on Kittredge bare, he had been where John Livingston Lowes loved and sung, he had read in the enchanted stacks of Widener and walked in thoughtful conversation along the Charles. Certain eastern women’s colleges, in their separate but not quite equal way, produced female variants of the same superior breed.
Charity was clearly one of these. Born to Harvard, she had gone to Smith and returned to marry Harvard. She had grown up in contact with the beauty and the chivalry of Cambridge. She, and presumably her husband as well, represented the cultivation, good manners, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and brightness of mind and dedication to high thinking that were the goals of outsiders like me, dazzled western barbarians aspiring to Rome. Mixed with my liking was, I am sure, an almost equal deference, a respect too sincere to be tainted with envy.
And here was this Harvard/Smith woman obviously enjoying cinnamon toast and Lipton’s Orange Pekoe in our basement, and she and her Harvard husband professed to admire a story by Larry Morgan, lately from Berkeley, California, and before that from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Further information: The Langs had two sons, the younger, Nick, a baby barely a year old; the older, aged three, named George Barnwell after Charity’s father and known as Barney. Charity grumbled cheerfully about him. She thought he must have been prenatally influenced. He had been conceived on an expedition into the Sahara, and he had the exact character, including the stubbornness, the evil eye, and the distressing voice, of a baggage camel.
Wait a minute, we said. The Sahara? You’re kidding.
But she wasn’t. When they decided to get married, Sid dropped out of graduate school for a semester. They had been married in Paris, at the house of her uncle. . . .
Ah, said Sally, it must be nice to have relatives who live in Paris!
“Well, they don’t any more,” Charity said. “Roosevelt replaced him—fired him, I guess you’d have to say.”
Roosevelt did? Fired him from what? What did he do?
I thought Charity blushed, and in the circumstances I thought blushing was another evidence of the civilized sensibility and modesty of her kind. It had just struck her how something that she took for granted would sound to our ears. “He didn’t do anything. Nothing to get him fired. It was just that the government had changed. He was Ambassador to France.”
Oh.
“And then we took this long wedding trip,” Charity said. “Down through France and Spain to Italy, Greece, the Middle East, Jerusalem, Egypt. We were quite mad, we wanted to see everything. I’d gone to school in France and Switzerland, but Sid had never been abroad, not once. We wound up in North Africa, Algeria, where we rented camels and went off into the desert for three weeks.”
She said it breathlessly, slurring the gorgeous details, obviously wanting to get out of the appearance of place-dropping she had got herself into. But good Lord, ambassador uncles and three-month wedding trips and expeditions into the Sahara, those meant not only family distinction, but amounts of money unlikely in our times and inconceivable from our sparse cellar.
“What makes you think the camels marked Barney?” I asked, just to keep the revelations flowing. “Has he got a hump, or a cleft palate, or what?”
“Oh no, nothing like that,” Charity said, almost crowed, delighted and hyperbolic. “He’s quite beautiful, really. But he’s got their grumpy disposition. Their grumpy disposition and their inch-long eyelashes.” Her laugh was as clear and uninhibited as everything else about her. “Did you notice how I was avoiding Dr. Rousselot the other day? You know how he looks, with those sad, long cheeks?” She pulled her face down with her fingertips. “I didn’t dare glance at him, even, because I’m pregnant again, and I had this horrible feeling that if I let my eyes even touch him, this new one would look like him.”
“Pregnant?” Sally said. “You too? When? When is it due?”
“Not till March. And are you? When’s yours?”
“The same time!”
That ended the revelations about the rich, cultivated, and romantic background of Charity Lang. She and Sally fell on each other. You never saw two more delighted people. If they had been twins separated in infancy, and now revealed to one another by some birthmark or other perepetia, they couldn’t have been more exhilarated. “It’ll be a race!” Charity said. “Let’s keep notes, and compare. Who’s your obstetrician?”
“I haven’t got one yet. Is yours a good one?”
A big ringing laugh, as if parturition, which sometimes brought the clammy sweat of apprehension to Sally and me, were the most fun since Run Sheep Run. “I guess so,” Charity said. “I really don’t know him very well. He’s only interested in my uterus.”
Sally looked a little daunted. “Well,” she said, “I hope he’ll like mine.”
I made to rise. “Excuse me,” I said. “I believe the only wholesome thing is to blush a deep crimson and leave the room.”
Hoo hoo, ha ha. We filled the basement with our laughter and our discovered common concern. Charity wrote the name of her doctor in a large scrawl on a three-by-five card (she kept a pack of them in her purse). Then she snapped the purse shut and held it on her lap as if about to spring up and go. But she wasn’t going, not yet. In a lamenting voice, she cried, “Look what I’ve done! I came over to get to know you, and all we’ve done is talk about Sid and me. I want to know all about you. You’re both from California. Tell me about it. What did you do there? How did you meet?”
Sally and I looked at each other and laughed. “Not on a camel expedition.”
“Ah, but in the West you’ve got things every bit as good. Those big open spaces, and all that freedom and opportunity and sense of youth, and the freshness of everything. I wish I’d grown up there instead of in stuffy Cambridge.”
“With permission,” I said, “you’re out of your mind. The Berkeley English Department is Harvard and water.”
“It would have been fine if we’d had any money,” Sally said. “Neither of us did. Do.”
“Were you both students? How did you meet?”
“In the library,” Sally said. “I had a part-time job charging out books in graduate student carrels. I noticed him because he was always there, and every day there’d be about twenty new books to be charged, and twenty old ones to be returned to the stacks. I thought anybody that industrious was bound to get somewhere, so I married him.”
Charity was very interested, like someone peeking through a microscope at a bunch of paramecia. Fascinating, all those cilia and pulsating vacuoles. Her smile was irresistible; you had to smile back. She said to me, “I gather you had nothing to do with it.”
“A willing victim,” I said. “I kept seeing this gorgeous girl with big Greek eyes padding around with her charge slips and keeping me honest with the desk. When she tore up an overdue notice, I knew she was the one.”
“You’re right about the eyes,” Charity said, and turned her attention on Sally. “They’re the first thing I noticed about you at the Rousselots’. Are you Greek?”
“My mother was.”
“Tell me about her. Tell me about both your families.”
I could see Sally becoming diffident. “We haven’t any. They’re al
l dead.”
“All? Both sides?”
Defensive on the couch, Sally shrugged a quick little shrug and threw her hands up and let them fall in her lap. “Everybody close. My mother was a singer. She died when I was twelve. I was brought up by my American aunt and uncle. He’s dead now, and she’s in a home.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Charity said, and stared from Sally to me and back. “So you had no help from anyone. You had to do it all alone. How did you manage?”
If Sally was getting diffident, I was getting edgy. Interest is one thing, prying is another. I have never welcomed dissections of my insides. I waved an airy hand. “There are all sorts of ways. You give placement exams. You read papers for professors. You help some Dr. Plush on a six-thousand-dollar salary make his textbooks. You teach sections of Dumbbell English. You work in the library for two bits an hour.”
“But when did you study?”
Sally blurted out a laugh. “All the time!”
“Did you do that too, work your way and finish your degree?”
“No,” I said. “Like a dumb Greek peasant she hitched herself to the plow. She gave up her degree to support us. As soon as this baby is born and weaned you’ll see me herding her down State Street headed for the Graduate Studies office.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that much of a do,” Sally said. “I wasn’t close to finishing. Anyway, I was in Classics, and who studies Classics anymore? I couldn’t have got a job if I’d finished my degree. Larry was obviously the one.”
Charity had a fine narrow head that nodded and turned on her neck like a flower on its stalk. I had seen that comparison in poetry; I had never seen a person who suggested it, and I found it fascinating. Her smile came and went. I could see her mind pouncing on things and letting them go.
“The short and simple annals of the poor,” I said fatuously.
“Well,” she said, “I think it’s admirable. It’s not as if you’d been run through the assembly line, like some of us, having fenders and headlights bolted on. You’ve done it yourselves.”
Sally said, with a quick, shy, proud glance at me, “I’m glad you think he’s admirable, because I do too. He used to amaze me, how he’d be there in that carrel day after day and night after night. I never came that he wasn’t there. At first I thought he was some kind of grind. Then I found out. . . .”
“Sally, for hell’s sake,” I said.
But she had to get in her brag, confession, whatever it was. She needed something on our side to match that Paris wedding and those camel rides.
“See, both his parents were killed,” she said. She flushed, but she was going to tell this new friend all, like some teenager at a slumber party. “When you were what?” she said, with a look that barely reached me before it fell. “Twenty? Twenty-one? Anyway, when he was a senior at New Mexico.”
When Charity wasn’t taken over by her smile, her face was still intensely alive. Without her usual gush, without any theatrical emphasis, she said, “What did you do?”
“What would I do? I took the roast out and turned off the oven. I buried them. I sold the house and furniture and everything but the car and moved into a dorm. I went back between semesters and made up the examinations I’d missed. When I graduated, I went straight off to Berkeley to graduate school, because school looked like the safest place to be.”
“Was there money in the estate to help you through?”
“Estate? Well, I guess that’s what it was. I got about five thousand out of it. I put it in the bank and the bank failed.”
“What rotten luck,” Charity said. “Were they traveling somewhere? Was it an automobile accident?”
I suppose there was a certain bravado involved, or I would have turned her questions off. But I decided that if Charity Lang wanted to know all about us, let her hear it. Let her find out how different other lives were from hers. I said, “We had a boarder in Albuquerque, a world-war buddy of my father’s. He came and went, around for a few weeks and then gone for months. He had an old Standard biplane tied together with piano wire that he used to fly upside down around county fair racetracks, and take up wing walkers and parachutists. A barnstormer. He used to let me wear his British officer’s boots to school, and when things were slow he’d take my girl and me up. Nobody beat my time in high school. So this pal of mine ended by orphaning me. He took my folks for a joyride on their wedding anniversary and ran them into the side of the Sandias. I was home studying and minding the anniversary roast.”
In the subdued light Charity sat still, her hands on the purse in her lap. Her head tilted, she made a half smile as if about to say something placatory or humorous. But all she said, and still without the inordinate emphasis of her customary conversation, was “That’s terrible. Both of them. Were you very fond of them? What did your father do?”
“He ran an auto repair shop,” I said.
So much for family backgrounds. So much for animated afternoon conversations, too. I seemed to have squelched her curiosity. Within a couple of minutes she was turning her watch to the light and crying that she must go, Barney would have absolutely devoured the nanny, or smothered Nicky. But first, could we come to dinner Friday evening? They wanted to know us well, as soon as possible. They didn’t want to be deprived of us a minute longer than they had to. Wasn’t it luck that What’s-His-Name Jesperson went to Washington to work for Harold Ickes, and that we had been picked to take his place? He was such a fud. Could we make it Friday? It would be just two or three couples, young faculty we probably knew already, and her mother, who was visiting from Cambridge. Please be able to come.
It crossed my mind, and if it crossed mine it had already passed through Sally’s, that we had a humiliatingly blank calendar. One quick look established the fact that we had no more pride than we had engagements. Friday, then.
We walked Charity up the three steps from the basement, and around the house to where her car was parked in the street. It was not a fancy car—a Chevy station wagon about the age and condition of our Ford—and it could have stood a wash. The back seat had some rolled-up clothes in it, obviously headed for the cleaners.
“I feel we’re going to be such friends!” Charity said, and hugged Sally and gave my hand a hard squeeze and climbed into the driver’s seat and irradiated us with that smile. “Start keeping notes!” she said to Sally. Ox-eyed Sally, she of the Demeter brow, she had no residue of impatience at having been pried at, as I did. She hadn’t been bothered by Charity’s curiosity. She had invited it. She had poured us out like a libation on the altar of that goddess.
We stood waving as Charity drove away toward the Capitol dome that showed above the trees. All right. I admitted it: a charming woman, a woman we couldn’t help liking on sight. She raised the pulse and the spirits, she made Madison a different town, she brought life and anticipation and excitement into a year we had been prepared to endure stoically. Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.
4
Friday evening, uneasily on time, we rolled along Van Hise Street under big elms. The western sky was red, and there was light enough to read the numbers painted on the curb. A car length past, we stopped and looked the house over.
To my rank-conscious eyes it looked like a house with tenure— big front lawn with maples, unraked leaves thick on the grass and in the gutter, windows that stretched like a nighttime train. Above the door an entrance light showed two brick steps, a flagstone walk, and the heavy leaves of a lilac hedge along the driveway.
“It’s a Charity sort of house,” Sally decided. “Sort of ample and careless. No side.”
“Lots of front.”
“Not the kind that puts you off. No iron stags. No ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs.”
“Did you expect them?”
“I didn’t know what to expect.” She shrank her shoulders together in the gold-embroidered Chinese dragon robe that was almost the only relic left from her mother’s operatic career, a
nd laughed a little. “I liked her so much I can’t help wondering what he’ll be like.”
“I told you. A friendly house detective.”
“I can’t imagine her married to a house detective. What’ll I talk to him about? What’s he interested in?”
“Spenser’s Faerie Queene?” I suggested. “The Marginalia of Gabriel Harvey?”
She was not amused. In fact, she was definitely nervous. Peering like a burglar at the lighted house, she said, “Her mother, too. Did you know her mother was one of the founders of Shady Hill School?”
“What’s Shady Hill School?”
“Oh, you know!”
“No.”
“Everybody knows Shady Hill School.”
“Not me.”
“Well, you should.” I waited, but she didn’t enlighten me. After a minute she said, “Charity was telling me about her. She sounds formidable. She’ll probably expect me to converse in French.”
“Converse in Greek. Put her down. Who does she think she is?”
She said restlessly, “I wish I’d asked what people would be wearing. What if everybody’s in a long dress, and I come out from under this robe in my two-year-old short thing? The robe’s too fancy and the dress isn’t fancy enough.”
“Look,” I said, “it isn’t her uncle the ambassador’s. If we aren’t presentable they can send us home.”
But when I started to open the door she yelped, “No! We don’t want to be the first. We don’t want to be sitting here when the others come, either. Drive around the block.”
So I drove around the block, slowly, and when we got back, two cars were unloading. Their occupants gathered under the arc light, where bullbats were booming after insects and a chilly Octoberish smell of cured leaves rose from the ground, the indescribable smell of fall and football weather and the new term that is the same almost everywhere in America.
I knew the three men: Dave Stone, from Texas via Harvard, who looked like Ronald Colman and spoke softly and had already impressed me as one of the younger faculty I could be friendly with; and Ed Abbot, another friendly one, on leave from the University of Georgia while he finished his degree; and Marvin Ehrlich, one of the high-crotch, short-leg, baggy-tweed contingent. He had let me know a day or two earlier, while loading his pipe and scattering tobacco crumbs all over my desk, that he had studied with Chauncey B. Tinker (Tink) at Yale, and then had gone on to Princeton to read Greek with Paul Elmer More. He had also quizzed me on how I happened to have my job—whom I knew on the senior faculty, who had recruited me—how much he had to watch out for me, in other words, in the competition for promotion. I had reacted to him as if he were ragweed, and was not especially happy to see him now.