I knew none of the wives, though Sally did, and they said they had met us at the Rousselots’. Lib Stone was a thin Texas belle full of laughter, Alice Abbot a freckled girl from Tennessee, with white eyelashes. Wanda Ehrlich was notable mainly for her shape, which bulged her clothes until her eyes popped.
The Stones and Abbots shook hands with great friendliness. Ehrlich was putting away his goddamned pipe, and acknowledged us with a lift of the head. His wife (I reconstruct this after many years, and without charity, small c) gave us a smile that I thought curiously flat in so plump a face. It struck me then, and strikes me again now, how instantly mutual dislike can make itself evident. Or was I only reacting to their indifference? They did not appear to value me, and so the hell with them.
At least Sally could be reassured. No long dresses, and no wrap a tenth as gorgeous as her dragon robe.
Ed Abbot was antic, and full of party spirit. Going up the walk, he scared the bullbats with a rebel yell and spooked a cat out of the shadows. In two bounds it disappeared under the lilacs, while he helped it on its way with a screech. “Yander goes a critter!” Out of Wanda Ehrlich came a laugh like a hiccup, inadvertent and incredulous. “Ed, you cracker,” said his wife, “you’ll rouse the neighborhood.”
Laughing, smiling, or being superior, each according to his kind, we clustered under the light. Since I was closest to it, I pushed the bell button.
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside must be revealed. Questions will be answered, uncertainties or mysteries dispelled. A situation will be started on its way through unknown complications to an unpredictable conclusion. The answer to your summons may be a rush of tearful welcome, a suspicious eye at the crack of the door, a shot through the hardwood, anything. Any pushing of any doorbell button is as rich in dramatic possibility as that scene in Chekhov when, just as the Zemstvo doctor’s only child dies of diphtheria and the doctor’s wife drops to her knees beside the bed and the doctor, smelling of carbolic, takes an uncertain step backward, the bell sounds sharply in the hall.
I suppose this bell sounded in the hall. But no dazed and haggard doctor answered the door. This door was yanked open, exposing the brilliantly lighted interior, and in the doorway stood—who? Theseus and Ariadne? Troilus and Criseyde? Ruslan and Liudmila?
Oh, my goodness. House detective, did I say? Did I mention Spenser’s Faerie Queene?
Side by side, dressed for the party, shouting welcome, blinding the dim porch with their smiles, these two were the total antithesis of academic mousiness, economic depression, and the meager living that had been our tenement for most of our conscious lives. To our dazed eyes, they were as splendid a pair as lamplight ever shone upon.
Charity I was prepared for, more or less—the fine narrow head, the drawn-back hair, the vivid face, the greetings that managed to be excitedly personal even while she was dividing them among eight of us. She was dressed in a white ruffled blouse and a long skirt made, apparently, of a Paisley bedspread or tablecloth with a hole cut in the center. Her pregnancy didn’t show yet. By February, she would look like a Mississippi River tug pushing a three-by-five tow, but right then, in her doorway, crying greeting, she looked simply tall, beautiful, exotic, and exuberant.
But Sidney Lang, he overwhelmed the sight. He wore an embroidered shirt that I thought might be Greek or Albanian or Jugoslav, but that might have come from Mexico, Guatemala, North Africa, or some tribal culture in the Caucasus. And dress was the least part of his transformation. Something had enlarged and altered him. If this had happened in recent years, I would be compelled toward images of Clark What’s-His-Name throwing off his glasses and business suit and emerging in his cape as Superman.
This English instructor in his Balkan or whatever it was shirt, standing by his beautiful wife and crushing the hands of his guests, was by Michelangelo out of Carrara, a giant evoked from the rock. At the university, in his gray suit, he had seemed of no more than medium height, perhaps because he stooped so attentively to hear the slightest word from the person he was talking to, perhaps because his neat, fair hair made him look somehow ineffectual. Walking with me to a class the day before, he had all but skipped to keep in step, inclining his head to hear the wisdom that dropped from my lips, and I had felt at once flattered and superior. Now, ordering me into his house, roaring his pleasure at our presence, demanding coats for stowing in the closet, he was a djinn. He walked among the treetops and was taller than the trees.
Our hands, offered two at a time because that was how they were demanded, passed from Charity’s to Sid’s. “Oh, Sally Morgan, how absolutely lovely you are!” cried Charity as she passed Sally on. “You belong on a Ming scroll!” And to Wanda Ehrlich, coming next, “Wanda! How nice to see you! Come in, come in!”
I saw Wanda register the difference between Sally’s welcome and her own. I saw Sid seize Sally’s hands with such a passion of greeting that she bounced from the impact. His forearms were massive and dense with blond hair. Golden hair sprouted from the throat of his embroidered shirt. His eyes, with the steel-rimmed spectacles off, were strikingly blue, and the teeth in his square face were as white as Charity’s. He was not only the most robust English teacher I ever saw, but the most charming. With his power turned full on, he could win anybody. In all moods his face fell into pleasant lines, and he had a kind of enthusiastic antique gallantry that blew Sally away. He held her hands high and had her pirouette under them—in effect, they boxed the gnat. “Absolutely lovely is right,” he said. “Oh, beautiful, beautiful! Charity told me, but she didn’t do you justice.”
She began to undo the loops of her robe, but he stopped her. “Don’t. Keep it on. I want to show you off to Aunt Emily.”
He left the rest of us to fend for ourselves, he put an arm around her shoulders and propelled her toward the living room. Being hauled like a captive into a cave, Sally threw me a look: amazement, amusement, a Bronx cheer for my powers of description.
Trailing after them into the living room, we were presented to Aunt Emily, Charity’s mother. Even Charity called her Aunt Emily. She was a lady with gimlety brown eyes and the grim smile of a headmistress who has seen all sorts of naughtiness and still loves children, or swears she does.
“Ah,” she said when it came my turn. “You’re the man with the literary gifts. And such a beautiful wife. Charity and Sid have told me how much you’ve added to the English Department.”
“Added?” I said. “We’ve barely arrived.”
“Obviously you’ve made an impression. I hope we can talk, though the way this costume party is starting out, I may not see you again.”
I liked her. (She flattered me.) “I’m at your command,” I said. “All it will take is a seductive signal with your fan.”
“I’ll have to get a fan and lie in wait. They tell me you’re a writer of great promise.”
Who could resist? There lay the evening before us, more full of promise than even myself. The mere prospect of a square meal could cheer me in those days, and here there was much more— light, glitter, chatter, smiles, dressed-up people, friends, audience. A girl who came across the thick carpets bearing canapés turned out to be a freshman from one of my classes. I liked her seeing me in those surroundings. Books everywhere. Paintings on the walls that were not Van Gogh or Gauguin prints but original oils by Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. I read them as evidence of how enthusiastically these New England Langs had adapted to midwestern life, giving up (I supposed) Winslow Homer for the Hayloft School.
And more. Remember, this was 1937, only four years out of Prohibition and deep in that Depression that is like the Age of Fable to today’s young. Only last month our grandson in La Jolla, twiddling the dials of his five-hundred-dollar stereo in search of the Eagles or James Taylor, interrupted some reminiscence of mine by saying, “Yeah, Grandpa, tell about the time you and Grandm
a saved up for a week for a couple of nickel ice-cream cones.” His 1972 irony is close to our 1937 reality, but to him it will never be anything but a wisecrack. Nickel ice-cream cones make him snort. Any respectable ice-cream cone costs sixty or eighty cents, and a three-decker a dollar and a quarter. And saving up, what is that?
What was true of ice cream was triply true of liquor. Whatever else it did, Prohibition really did inhibit our drinking. In Albuquerque before 1933, our student parties had involved homemade wine or home brew explosive with yeast, sometimes with a stick of grain alcohol or ether in it if we happened to have a medical student among us. Faculty, if they had any hoarded or bootlegged supplies, did not share them with students. In Berkeley, after repeal, faculty receptions did blossom out with jugs of sherry that had been manufactured in haste and aged on a truck coming up from Cucamonga. Student parties graduated to grappa—raw California brandy—or punch. Punch we created in a bowl in the spirit of research, making it up out of fruit juices, soda, and whatever intoxicants we happened to have—gin, rum, grain alcohol, grappa, or all four. These we stirred together and colored pink with the synthetic grenadine syrup called Yum.
Yum.
Now here at the end of the room beyond Aunt Emily was a table burdened with Haig and Haig, Sunnybrook Farm, Duff Gordon, Cinzano sweet and dry, Dubonnet rouge et blonde, Dutch gin, Bacardi. Some Madison liquor store (I had not yet been in one) had been plundered to lay that table, though it turned out that the Langs themselves drank only a little Dubonnet, and Aunt Emily drank nothing at all.
Ed Abbot, coming up beside me to inspect those riches, was so shaken that his knees visibly wilted. He clutched his brow, and clutching it, bent to read labels. His lips moved. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my.” And then, more strongly, “When does the sacrifice begin? Do you-all need a victim? Please! ”
Sid stepped behind the table and called for orders. The gentlemen deferred to the ladies. Of the ladies, one spoke. “I’ll have a Manhattan,” said Wanda Ehrlich, without please.
Those were the days of the silver cocktail shaker. Robert Montgomery’s way with it in the movies had instructed us all. Sid seized his, uncapped it, filled it with ice. His hand moved over the crowded bottles and selected a sweet Cinzano, hovered again and descended on a Haig and Haig Pinch. But Ed and I cried out with one voice, and his hand stopped.
“What’s the matter? Whiskey and sweet vermouth? And bitters? God, I don’t know, I was gently reared. I yield to my betters. Here, one of you make it.”
So Ed Abbot became bartender, beating me out by four one-hundredths of a second, and the rest of us came to the party.
I have heard of people’s lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event—a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody’s life but ours being changed by a dinner party.
We straggled into Madison, western orphans, and the Langs adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull and made moons of us and fixed us in orbit around themselves.
What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. Reading my way out of disaster in the Berkeley library, I had run into Henry Adams. “Chaos,” he told me, “is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.” No one had ever put my life to me with such precision, and when I read the passage to Sally, she heard it the same way I did. Because of her mother’s uncertain profession, early divorce, and early death, she had first been dragged around and farmed out, and later deposited in the care of overburdened relatives. I had lost my security, she had never had any. Both of us were peculiarly susceptible to friendship. When the Langs opened their house and their hearts to us, we crept gratefully in.
Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire. Crowded in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves, thought better of the world.
In its details, that dinner party was not greatly different from hundreds we have enjoyed since. We drank, largely and with a recklessness born of inexperience. We ate, and well, but who remembers what? Chicken Kiev, saltimbocca, escallope de veau, whatever it was, it was the expression of a civilized cuisine, as far above our usual fare as manna is above a baked potato. A pretty table was part of it, too—flowers, wine in fragile glasses, silver whose weight was a satisfaction in the hand. But the heart of it was the two people who had prepared the occasion, apparently just to show their enthusiasm for Sally and me.
They put Sally on Sid’s right, distinguished above other women and exposed to his full gallant attention. Over other conversation I heard him telling her a romantic story about their honeymoon, about a time in Delphi when a man they had met on the boat to Itea fell over the cliff and they were three days finding his body. Sally was a little high. A smile hung on her lips and her eyes were on his face, ready for cues that would move her to amazement, concern, or laughter. As for me, I was king of the castle between Charity and her mother. They quizzed me on a hundred California subjects from Yosemite to Dust Bowl refugees, and not only they but others near us, Alice and Lib especially, attended my answers as if I had been speaking from the sacred cave. How lovely it is to be chosen, how flattering to have such bright eyes on you as you divide the light from the darkness.
After dinner, coffee and brandy in the living room. While my awed freshman student was serving coffee and Sid went around with his tray of snifters and his bottle of VSOP, Charity put a record on the phonograph. “Now!” she cried, and flopped onto a couch. “Now we’ll all sit for a few minutes and just digest and listen!”
But Marvin Ehrlich had carried from the table an argument about the Spanish Civil War he had been having with Ed, a continental neutral. And I had found a place on a sofa beside Charity’s mother, and thought it my duty as a gentleman to make small talk.
As I was settling back after putting Aunt Emily’s cup on the coffee table for her, I heard Marvin say, “. . . rather go fascist? You’ve got to go one way or the other. Want to join up with Franco and Mussolini and Hitler? What’s the matter with being on the side of the masses?”
“Masses?” Ed said. “What masses? Americans don’t know anything about any masses. Masses are a European notion, they’re a cheese that won’t travel.”
“No? What about the middle-class masses?”
Hoots from Ed.
To Aunt Emily, as the strains of clarinet and strings swept the room, I made what I hoped was drawing-room conversation. “What is it about Mozart that makes him sound so happy? Is it just the tempo, or is there something else? How do you make pure sound sound happy?”
“Shhhhhhh!” Charity said, to both Marvin Ehrlich and me, and as we subsided into digestion and attentiveness she salved our severally bruised feelings with the most forgiving of smiles.
I don’t know how English Departments are now, for I escaped them years ago. But I know how they used to look. They used to look first class. They used to look like high serene lamaseries where the elect lived in both comfort and grace. Up there, scholars as learned and harmless as Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford moved among books and ideas, eating and drinking well, sleeping soft, having three-month summer vacations during which they had only to cultivate their inclinations and their “fields.” Freed by tenure, by an assured salary, by modest wants, by an inherited competence, or by all four, they were untouched by the scrabbling and scuffling that went on outside the walls, or down in the warrens where we aspirants worked and hoped.
We knew that vision was only partly true. Some of our superiors were indeed men of brains and learning and disinterested goodwill, but some were stuffed shirts, and some incompetents, and some timid souls escaping from the fray, and some climbers, and some as bitter and jealous as some of us were at being inadequately appreciated. But still there they w
ere, up in the sunshine above the smoke, a patch-elbowed tweedy elite that we might improve when we joined it but that we never questioned. Especially during the Depression, when every frog of us was lustful for a lily pad.
Early in our stay in Madison Professor Rousselot, who was much admired by his junior faculty for his elegant stone house, his snow-white handkerchiefs, his way of taking razor-thin slices off a baked ham or turkey, his mots and aphorisms, his quotations for every occasion, and his summers in the reading room of the British Museum, gave me a hint of how things were. We were talking about one of my fellow instructors who had a sick wife. “Poor Mr. Hagler,” Professor Rousselot said. “He has only his salary.”
Ah, yes, Professor Rousselot. Many of us understand. Poor Mr. Morgan, he too has only his salary, and comes from the boondocks besides. There are several like poor Mr. Hagler and poor Mr. Morgan. Poor Mr. Ehrlich, for example. He has only his salary, and he comes from Brooklyn, and hates it. He tries hard—harder by far than poor Mr. Morgan, who is a little arrogant in his barbarism. Poor Mr. Ehrlich has labored to benefit from what he was taught by Tink and Paul Elmer More. He smokes the right mixture in his Dunhill pipe, he works on his profile, he wears the right flannels and tweeds, he can recommend the right nutty sherries. But he gives himself away, like the Russian agent who ate jam with a spoon.