Neither of us may in fact make the club, but poor Mr. Ehrlich is in even worse shape than poor Mr. Morgan, for Mr. Morgan, besides being a little arrogant, is uncomplicatedly upward-mobile, whereas Mr. Ehrlich is bent on tearing down the demo-plutocracy whose airs he affects. He snows you with his Yale-Princeton superiorities at the very moment when he is trying to sign you up in the Young Communist League. He seems to Mr. Morgan to be hung up halfway between the British Museum and Red Square, paralyzed by choice.
I spend a minute on Marvin Ehrlich not because he matters to me, or ever did, but because that evening, by his failure to make it into the junior version of what we all coveted, he emphasized my own euphoric sense of being welcomed and accepted. Maybe we were all anti-Semitic in some sneaky residual way, but I don’t think so. I think we simply felt that the Ehrlichs didn’t permit themselves to be part of the company.
Marvin never did get over his flushing resentment at being shushed by Charity. And when, after the music, she stood in the middle of the room and blew a police whistle and ordered us to get ready for square dancing, the Ehrlichs didn’t know how and refused to learn. Dave Stone coaxed them with some real hoedown music on the piano, and Charity told them how easy it was, Sid would call only the very simplest things. The rest of us formed a square and waited. No go. Since Dave was needed at the piano, we were one short. After a while we replaced the rug and accepted the songbooks that Sid passed out.
Brand new, my mind said to me. Ten of them. I peeked at the price on the dust jacket of mine. $7.50. Seventy-five dollars for songbooks, just for one evening.
The Ehrlichs didn’t sing, either. They sat with the open book between them and moved their lips and made no sound. Maybe they were tone deaf, maybe they had grown up to other kinds of songs. But their eyes burned with resentment and reproach.
Certainly what we sang could not have evoked their scorn. None of your “Home on the Range” stuff, nor bawdy ballads, nor tunes remembered from Boy Scout campfires. No no. We sang things that Tink himself might have applauded: “Eine feste Burg,” “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” “Down by the Salley Gardens.” Martin Luther, Johann Sebastian Bach, William Butler Yeats. That was a civilized bunch of people. All of them, barring the Ehrlichs, could carry a tune. And behold, Sid turned out to be a glee club tenor, Sally Morgan was a real contralto, a rich inherited voice, Larry Morgan could at least sing barbershop, and Dave Stone was a genius on the piano. We rolled our eyes and held long reverberating chords.
“Why, how well you did that!” cried Aunt Emily, and clapped her hands. “You’re practically professional!” We were all applauding ourselves. On the piano bench Dave nodded gravely and beat his hands together. We were full of self-congratulation and the discovery of a shared pleasure. And there sat the impossible Ehrlichs, smiling and smiling, with their useless book open and their mouths shut, hating what they envied.
After a while Charity saw their discomfort, and sent a look across the room to Sid, who stood up and wondered if anyone was getting dry. Several of us answered his call, and as we stood with glasses in our hands, prepared for more choral song or whatever Charity’s agenda had in mind, Sid picked up a volume of Housman’s poems from a table, opened it, and said in his light, pleasant, hurried voice, “Listen. I’d like your opinion on something. Listen.”
“Shhhhh!” Charity said. “Sid has a question for you poetry critics.”
We hushed. Sid stood by the piano, cleared his throat, waited for full quiet, and read, taking it seriously. I didn’t know it then, but this was one of his roles—starting an intellectual hare.
EASTER HYMN
If, in that Syrian garden, ages slain
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.
But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.
We stood or sat, waiting. “What’s the question?” Dave Stone asked.
“Does it satisfy you? Is it good Housman?”
“Satisfy how? It’s good Housman, sure. It’s a good poem. It should be read aloud every morning in Madrid and Barcelona.”
“Larry, does it satisfy you?”
“Sure. I believe in all that unquenched hate. I guess I didn’t know Housman was tempted by Christianity, though.”
“Exactly!” Sid cried. “Exactly! Doesn’t that strike an odd note, for him—that plea for salvation? That’s not the old stoic. That’s not the fellow who said ‘Play the man, stand up and end you / When your sickness is your soul.’ It makes me wonder if he really wrote this. He didn’t publish it, it’s one his brother found among his papers. You know what I think? I think Lawrence Housman got the stanzas mixed. I think he printed the stanzas in the wrong order. Wouldn’t it be more Housman if they were reversed? If it ended ‘Sleep well and see no morning, son of man’? ”
As a diversion, it was successful. We were all pretty high, we were all the kind of people for whom reading poetry aloud—lily parties, we used to call them—is neither odd nor sissy. A brisk argument ensued. We went to other volumes of Housman for corroborations, and volumes of Housman led us to other poets. Before long we were ransacking the packed bookshelves so we could read some favorite. That was how, within a few minutes, Sally and I, but mainly Sally, managed to give the Ehrlichs the coup de grâce.
Looking through the shelves to nail down some point or other, I found an Odyssey in Greek. I was astonished. Why should Sid, who I was sure didn’t know Greek, own Homer in the original? An affectation, like Ehrlich’s pipe? A feel for completeness, a need to have the total poetry of the world at his fingertips? A sense of what the well-bred house should contain? Had Charity’s father, a classical scholar, given it to them in an absentminded moment, forgetting it was Greek to them? Anyway, I was surprised. I had thought we might be the only household in Madison that gave shelf room to Homer and Anacreon and Thucydides. And we had them not because of anything I could do with them but because of Sally.
I plucked the book from the shelf and turned around and said, “Sally! Read us some Homer. Bend our minds with some hexameters.”
General consternation. “Do you read Greek?” Charity said. “Oh, please, yes! Quiet, everybody. Shhhh! Sally’s going to read Homer.”
Sally protested, but let herself be coerced. Half drunk and proud, I watched her stand up by the piano and get herself together. Her eyes went over us, she sobered the smile on her mouth. She has great dignity and presence when she is cornered, and when she reads that antique poetry she can bring tears to your eyes. It is much better than if you could understand it. She chants out of a remote time with the clang of bronze in it.
We hushed. She read.
She not only brought tears to some people’s eyes, she brought down the house. Cheers, applause, excitement. Isn’t she great? God, I wish I could do that. But no sooner had the clapping died out into a babble of talk than the Ehrlichs rose to leave. “Oh, no!” Sid and Charity said. “The evening is young. Stay awhile.” But I noted a point at which they tacitly agreed not to press the Ehrlichs further. The Ehrlichs shook hands with Aunt Emily, still beaming on the sofa, and as they came past me, Wanda bent her overupholstered body close and said something tense and furious.
I was caught unready. “What?” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”
“My husband can read Greek too!” Wanda said, quite loudly, and went on out to where Sid was holding her coat and Charity was opening the door. Host and hostess, with their shining smiles, they cried the Ehrlichs out. “Goodnight, goodnight. Thank you for coming. Good
night.” Returning to the living room, they made a wry, disconcerted face at the rest of us.
Altogether, a lovely scene. I felt guilty and triumphant. There we were, still in the warmth and light and grace of that room, while those who didn’t belong, those who hated and envied, those who were offensive to Athena, went out into the chilly darkness. I knew how they felt, and I hated it for their sakes. But I also knew how I felt. I felt wonderful.
The party broke up a little while afterward, and guess which couple was the last to go. Neither Sally nor I had ever known people like the Langs, neither of us had ever spent so exhilarating an evening. And just as we were getting ready to go, the Langs found themselves unwilling to part with us. Aunt Emily had gone up to bed, the door had closed on the Abbots and Stones. Standing with Sally’s dragon robe in his hands, Sid said suddenly, “Don’t go yet. How about a walk? Wait, it’s got chilly, this won’t keep you warm. Charity, where are the burnooses?”
She knew, and brought them—long white cowled woollen robes that covered us from skull to heels. We got into them, all four of us, and went out into a night of frost. If anyone had looked out his window he might have thought he was seeing the ghosts of Fra Lippo Lippi and his pals weaving back to the monastery after a night on the town.
I remember how quiet it was, how empty the streets at that hour, how our feet were loud on pavement and then hushed in grass and then crackly in leaves. There was a glint of settling frost in the air. Our voices and breaths went up and got mixed with the shadows of trees and the bloom of arc lights and the glitter of stars.
It was like nothing I had known either in Albuquerque or Berkeley. It looked different, sounded different, smelled different, felt different. And those two people were the newest and best part of it. It is there in my head now, as bright and dark as Housman’s vision of human hate, but with the opposite meaning. We talked and talked. We told each other what we liked and what we had done and what we wanted to do. If we quit talking for a minute, in flowed that frosty, comforting midwestern night.
“Don’t you think of this place as an opportunity?” Charity asked us. “Don’t you feel the way we do, how young and promising it is, and how much there is to be done, and given, and taught, and learned? Sid and I feel so lucky. Back in Cambridge some people felt sorry for us, going away out to Wisconsin, as if it were Siberia. They just don’t know. They don’t know how warm and friendly and open and eager it is. And bright, too.
“Maybe the students aren’t as well trained as Harvard students, but a lot of them are just as bright. If there are Winesburgs in the Middle West it’s because people don’t give them a chance to become anything. They expect too much too soon. They won’t stick it out and give what they ought to give. Instead, they run away to Chicago or New York or Paris. Or else they stay home and just grumble and knock and talk about spiritual poverty.
“I don’t know about you, but Sid and I think a little city like this, with a good university in it, is the real flowering of the American dream. Don’t you feel it? It might have felt like this in Florence in the early fifteenth century, just before the big explosion of art and science and discovery. We want to settle in, and make ourselves as useful as we can, and help it grow, and grow ourselves. We’re determined to give it our absolute best. Before we’re all done with it, let’s make Madison a place of pilgrimage !”
She went on like that for blocks, while Sid murmured, and agreed, and prompted, and listened. She said a lot of things we might have thought or hoped but would have been embarrassed to express. Never in our lives had we felt so close to two people. Charity and Sally had their competitive pregnancies, we were all at the beginning of something, the future unrolled ahead of us like a white road under the moon. When we got back to their big lighted house, it seemed like our house too. In one evening we had been made at home in it.
All of us felt it. We must have. For in front of their gate, before we drove away still wearing their burnooses, we fell into a four-ply, laughing hug, we were so glad to know one another and so glad that all the trillion chances in the universe had brought us to the same town and the same university at the same time.
5
Madison. It comes back as broken scenes. We sit in ragged lawn chairs on the ragged lawn. I am grading papers through a hangover headache, Sally is still trying to get through Jules Romains’ Men of Good Will. Saturday, not quite noon, the morning after we came home from the Langs’ dinner party wearing their romantic burnooses and too stimulated to sleep. We talked, we made love, we talked some more, finally we wore out. Now it is the next day.
It is a fair blue day, Lake Monona is tepeed with white sails, there is a bright chop on the water that my aching eyes avoid, focusing out of duty on the pages of a freshman theme describing Observatory Hill. Something strikes my eye, I laugh out loud, Sally looks up from her book.
“Listen to this. ‘The top of the hill is round and smooth, worn down by centuries of eroticism.’ Is she pulling my leg, or is this one for Dave Stone’s boner collection?”
“I suppose she means ‘erosion.’ ”
“I suppose she does. But yearning speaks between the lines. It’s like that headline, ‘Pen Is Mightier Than Sword, Says Wilson,’ that left out the slug between ‘Pen’ and ‘Is.’ Inadvertence is the truest humor.”
“Is it, now.”
The wind moves the silver maple over our heads, and some leaves rustle down. Offshore a boat comes about with wooden knockings, watery slappings, a pop of canvas. And now, from the corner of the house, voices. There are Sid and Charity, dressed for outdoors, full of urgency. Can we come on a picnic? Since we have no telephone yet, they took a chance and just made a lunch and came. Last night was their wedding anniversary. They were going to pour champagne for a finale, but then the Ehrlich business sort of damped the party and they didn’t. But they want a celebration, and they want us along. They know a hill out in the country where you can see a long way, where last spring they found pasqueflowers, and where now there might be hickory nuts. No need to bring anything—it’s all packed.
Vigorous, vital, temperate, and hence not hung over, they flush us out of our culvert of duty. We bundle our books and papers inside the basement door, we manage to contribute some apples to the picnic supplies, and we pour around the house to their car.
Out in front, the mailman is just arriving. He hands me a letter and I see the return on the envelope. My eyes jump to meet Sally’s. A hope as startling as a stray bullet ricochets off up Morrison Street. When I stick my finger under the flap, Sally frowns slightly: Not now, don’t open your mail in public. Sid is holding open the station wagon door.
But I can’t wait. I never could. I have been opening my mail in public all my life. I can no more refrain than Noah could have refrained from taking the sprig of green from the dove’s beak. Already moving to get in the car, I rip open the envelope and snatch a look. I let out a yell.
Sally knows instantly, but Sid and Charity stare. “What is it? Is it good news of some kind?”
I pass Sid the letter. Atlantic wants my story, the one I wrote in the week before the beginning of classes. They will pay me two hundred dollars.
The Langs join us in a war dance around the station wagon, and all the way out into the country their excited faces turn from the front seat to shine on us. They ask a hundred questions, they burst with pleasure, they warm us with their total, generous happiness in our good luck. Everybody’s tap is wide open.
Once we have parked and started down a country road between stripped cornfields, with crows cawing over, Sally and Charity go on ahead. Sid carries a big Adirondack pack basket that he will not let me spell him with. The girls, after their first briskness, dawdle, stopping often to examine roadside weeds, and we consciously slow our pace so as not to catch up.
I can hear Charity’s high animated voice doing most of the talking. She is endlessly volatile and enthusiastic and provocative. I gather that she is back on baby-making, telling Sally not to be afraid,
to give herself to it and get the most out of it. Herself, she intends this time to be conscious the whole time. She will not take any ether unless it gets unbearable, which she does not expect it to do, being the third time. She has worked out a system: She will take a little flag into the delivery room, and when she can’t bear any more, if it comes to that, she will raise the flag as a signal to the anesthetist. She wishes she could rig a mirror so that she could see the birth.
I am guessing, but not wildly. Their talk often goes like that. As for me, I walk in the mellow sun with that letter in my shirt pocket as warm as if it had life. Two hundred dollars are a tenth of a year’s pay. I wrote that story in a week. If I could go on doing even a quarter that well and that fast, I might double Wisconsin’s salary. I tell myself I will do just that. I decide that for Christmas I will get Sally a portable phonograph and some records, to cheer up her basement during the winter months and give us something to listen to together, the way the Langs do.
Beside me, Sid walks under his pack basket as if it weighed no more than his shirt. He is earnest, I have discovered. His grappling, wrestler’s mind is not quick, but it will not let go of an idea until he has pinned it or it has patted the mat. The Atlantic’s letter has turned him to the subject of writers and writing.
He believes that all serious writers have a vocation, a sort of mystical call. What they exploit is not intelligence or training, but a glorious gift that is also an obligation. He believes I have it. He wonders that I have never written poetry—he thinks I am a poet manqué, and he surprises me by quoting lines from the one story of mine that he has read (the only one I have ever published), to illustrate what he calls the particularity and brightness of my images, my sense of place, my verbal felicity.
“You know how to do it,” he says almost plaintively. “You could study for years and not learn how to do what you do. Right from the first paragraph of your first story, you know how. Now you’ve done it again. In a week. My God, it takes me a week to get my pencils sharpened and my rump comfortable in the chair. I envy you. You’re an instrument that blows no blue notes. You’re on your way.”