Crossing to Safety (10 page)

So nail the punch and spike the beer,
The fucking Comus Club is here.
We’ll kill the man who would insist
That Comus was a Humanist.

But back to Aunt Emily. New England women, left behind, had few men to pick from except the Irish, Portuguese, Italians, and French Canadians, all of them religiously, economically, and socially unacceptable. Some women turned mannish and assumed roles that their men had once performed. Some espoused causes, affiliated themselves with Abolition or Susan B. Anthony or the antivivesectionists, marched in parades, got themselves arrested, wrote strong letters to the press, addressed meetings, and generally became characters without ever forgetting they were ladies. Even those who found mates among the reduced numbers of New England men found themselves doing things unfamiliar to their grandmothers. These matured as matriarchs, the others as old maids. The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.

It is a fact that no child ever followed George Barnwell Ellis to his work, or aped his way with any tool. His routines are simply not imitable. He appears mistily and cheerfully at breakfast, and shortly disappears—in winter to his office or to the Divinity School, where a child would have a difficult time finding anything at all to do, and in summer up the path to his think house, which by his assumption and Aunt Emily’s interdict is off limits to the young.

In winter he reappears for dinner, but in summer, a less rigorous time, he has another pattern. At precisely twelve he comes with his stiff-legged walk, his thin hair on end, around the corner of the porch. He plucks yesterday’s damp swimming suit off the rail and goes in to change. He and Aunt Emily walk together down to the dock, and there, while Aunt Emily launches into the cold water like a sea lion, displacing a big bow wave, and swims across the cove and back, a good half mile, George Barnwell paddles and putters in the warmer shallows, mostly on his back to avoid flooding his sinuses. When Emily surges up, blowing and exclaiming and shaking her fingers, they come together back to the porch, where the hired girl will have timed lunch for their arrival.

After lunch, Aunt Emily reads or knits on the porch, while George Barnwell disappears into his bedroom for a nap. At two-thirty he emerges, looking aimless but actually as relentless as a guided missile, and goes back up the path to his rendezvous with the Bogomils. At five he returns to the porch, where Aunt Emily, George’s brother Dwight, and Dwight’s wife Heather will be waiting at the bridge table. What Miles Standish used to get out of encounters with hostile sachems, George Barnwell gets out of a tight rubber of bridge. After dinner he will read a detective novel until ten, and go to bed.

No medicine man he, as
Time
might once have said. He is mild, agreeable, wryly humorous, abstracted, distinguished and therefore to be respected, helpless and therefore to be looked after. Aunt Emily’s attitude toward him is not greatly different from her attitude toward any child. On command, like a well-bred spaniel, he will sit, stay, or speak. He will even sing, as lustily as the children though never on key, when Aunt Emily dragoons the extended family into an evening of music and leads them through “Frère Jacques,” “Who Will Carry Me over the River?”, “Ach, wie schön ist mir am Abend,” “Claire de Lune,” “Au Près de Ma Blonde,” and “Why Doesn’t My Goose Sing As Well As Thy Goose?”

Most of the time George Barnwell never notices the children, for most of his time he spends in twelfth-century Bulgaria. It is accepted that whatever the children learn, they learn from Aunt Emily. And any child who undergoes Aunt Emily’s instruction is a post under a pile driver. When Aunt Emily reads, you listen.

Eventually some not-quite-harness-broke child looks up and sees Sid Lang, his glasses streaming and his slicker draped over his head, standing at the corner. She nudges her neighbor, she puts her hand over her mouth. Thus early does Aunt Emily’s influence persuade the young that adult males are an intrusion or an irrelevancy. As awareness of him becomes general, heads turn, eyes roll, giggles are smothered. Aunt Emily goes on obliviously chanting, Sid stands dripping at the corner. Then somebody’s giggle breaks into the open, and Aunt Emily looks up. Her eyes follow the children’s eyes. She of course knows who this has to be, but she says nothing. She waits, radiating control.

Sid starts to speak, finds a frog in his throat, clears it, and says in a strained tenor, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt. Is this . . . ? I was looking for Charity Ellis.”

“Come in under cover,” Aunt Emily says, “and sit down. We’ll be through in a few minutes.”

He comes in under cover, sinks into a warped wicker chair, slides his wet oilskin off his head. He is goggled and giggled at until Aunt Emily, lifting her book, says a single word: “Now!” He feels undoubtedly that he has made the worst possible entrance, and will not be forgiven. Aunt Emily reads again.

“And the birds sang round him, o’er him,
‘Do not shoot us, Hiawatha!’
Sang the robin, the Opechee,
Sang the bluebird, the Owaissa,
‘Do not shoot us, Hiawatha!’ ”

For five or six minutes Sid is chained to the wicker chair while Hiawatha in his magic mittens visits his father Mudjekeewis at the doorways of the West-Wind. The rain falls swishing, a curtain between porch and lake. Distracted by his presence, the girl children whisper behind their hands. Aunt Emily reads on. But during the brief pause while she ordered Sid Lang under cover she has got an impression of this young man whom Charity is so suspiciously indifferent to.

Fairly standard graduate student. Poor, of course, as they all are these days. Poorer than most, to judge by the frayed cuffs of his khaki pants and the blotch on the front of his work shirt as if it had been washed with chocolate in the pocket and the stain then ironed in. Fine fair hair. Skin less tanned than it ought to be this far into the summer. Nearsighted, from the way he squinted when he removed his glasses to dry them. Eyes a striking forget-me-not blue. Pleasant square face, a little gaunt. Quick, eager smile.

Aunt Emily believes she knows how he feels, stuck there in a chair like a visitor to a kindergarten. Looking up briefly, she meets his eyes, his eager smile. Painfully polite to his elders, Charity says. Nothing wrong with that. But he follows the reading so attentively that she is impatient. Surely a student at his stage should have progressed beyond
Hiawatha.

Then sneakers thud on the walk, and Charity bursts around the corner with a newspaper over her head. Sidney Lang forgets
Hiawatha
and leaps to his feet. Aunt Emily closes her book and dismisses the Indians with a wave. They scatter to Chinese checkers, rummy, and ginger-ale-and-grape-juice. For the grown-ups there are introductions.

Though she observes that he can hardly look away from Charity, speckled with rain, laughing, her color high, Aunt Emily concedes that Sid Lang does have a respectful manner. He is almost too deferential, and she can see how he might sometimes fret Charity, who is direct and opinionated and enjoys argument. At the same time, she remembers that Charity, given the chance to scotch this visit, did not do so. She looks anything but bored or fretted now.

“Mr. Lang will want to bring in his things,” Aunt Emily says. “Have you got his quarters ready?”

“That’s what I’ve just been doing.”

“Oh, no no no no no!” Sid cries. “I can’t stay. I only came by to say hello. I’ve got to go on.”

Charity looks at him out of clear skeptical eyes. “To where?”

“Montreal. I’m on my way to see a friend in the McGill Medical School.”

“Can’t he wait?”

“I don’t think so. He . . . we arranged that I’d meet him for dinner tonight.”

“It’s four hours to Montreal,” Aunt Emily says, “and it’s pouring. You can’t possibly make it. At least you must stay tonight and see if Battell Pond won’t show off a little better tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s not it. It’s beautiful, rain and all. What a beautiful pocket of quiet. But I don’t want to barge in and put you all to trouble.”

“I’ve already made your bed,” Charity says. “If you don’t lie in it I’ll be
furious.
So will Mother.”

“And it’s dangerous to infuriate me,” her mother says. “Charity will show you where to put your bag.”

Now Sid is embarrassed. “The fact is, I don’t have a bag. I didn’t even bring a clean shirt. I just took off.”

“To drive,” Charity says, “to Montreal. To dinner. You do need a keeper. You must have brought
something.
Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.” To her mother she says, “He reads
everywhere
—in the subway, between the acts at plays, at intermissions in Symphony Hall, on picnics, on
dates.
”

This speech conveys considerable information to Aunt Emily. She watches Sid’s eyes close in mock agony, while a really very engaging smile takes over from the sheepishness on his face. “Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind. Everybody’s read ten times more than I have.”

“What did you bring?” Charity asks. “Restoration dramas?”

“I’m taking a rest from those. I’ve just got some hole-fillers.
Middlemarch, The Idiot,
things like that, novels I should have read but haven’t.”

“Then let’s put them in the dorm before they mildew,” Charity says, “and then take a walk in the rain. I want to show you Folsom Hill and I won’t
tolerate
your bringing a book along.”

“Dress for it,” says Aunt Emily. “I see you have proper rain gear, Mr. Lang. Charity, take an umbrella. There’s no need to risk grippe.”

“An umbrella? In the woods? The woodpeckers would die laughing.”

About to say something tart and sensible, Aunt Emily closes her mouth on it. “As you wish.” To Sid she says, “We have few rules here, but for the girl’s sake we do like people to be on time for meals. Dinner will be at seven.”

“One thing I’m very prompt about is meals,” Sid says. (Good, thinks Aunt Emily, not such a stick as he seemed at first.)

Charity goes inside and comes out in a raincoat. “No hat?” her mother asks.

Sid says, “I’ve got a sou’wester in the car.”

“Then what will you wear?”

He surprises her. He runs his hand back to front across his head, ruffling the short fair hair, and says in a Yiddish accent, “Vot’s to get vet? Vot’s to get hurt? Anyway . . .” He lifts a finger, and intones:

“I want to drown in good salt water,
I want my body to bump the pier.”

“Bless me,” Aunt Emily says, “what an extraordinary sentiment. Who wrote it?”

“Samuel Hoffenstein,” Sid says. “In the manner of the early Millay.”

He grabs Charity’s arm, and they are gone.

Up to here, I have no trouble imagining. I know how Battell Pond first struck Sid because I remember how it first struck me, and I have many times heard Aunt Emily tell the tale of his first visit, giving it a quality at once humorous and romantic: a fairy story involving a sequestered princess, a prince in pauper’s clothing, a remote place accessible only by back roads approximately as difficult as a sword-edge bridge.

This summer colony is so discreet and understated that from either road or lake it hardly shows. Of its two thousand or so summer residents you rarely see more than a couple of young people in a canoe, a woman at a mailbox, or a gray scholar disappearing toward his think house. Exceptions: summer auctions, and the village store at the hour when the
New York Times
is delivered. Then you will see scores, maybe hundreds.

Battell Pond is out of a Hudson River School painting, uniting the philosophical-contemplative with the pastoral-picturesque. It is not a resort. It is the total opposite of a resort, for the academics who dominate it in summer and pay most of the taxes have quietly scotched all movements for an airport, a movie house, a second gas station, even motorboats on the lake. What Sid Lang saw first in the summer of 1933 was not visibly much different from what George Barnwell Ellis and Bliss Perry began after a buggy tour before the turn of the century. Candles and oil lamps have reluctantly given way to electric lights. Some cottages now have telephones. The rotting planks of porches and docks have been replaced every six or eight years. Not much else has changed.

My problem is not in imagining Battell Pond, but in guessing what Sid and Charity may have said and done that afternoon and on the days thereafter that he stayed, postponing without letter, telephone call, or explanation his dinner date in Montreal. The love scenes of my friends have never been my long suit or my particular interest, and anyway I don’t know that at that point she was sure she wanted him, though I am pretty sure she did. Moreover, a Vermont downpour is no setting for amorous scenes. So I will simply take them on the walk they would probably have taken.

They go back through the wet woods to the main road, turn left on that for a hundred yards, and wedge through a gate with a faded sign:
Defense de Bumper,
some professor’s joke. A dirt road, the road I walked this morning, burrows along the hillside under overhanging trees—sugar maple and red maple, hemlock, white birch and yellow birch and gray birch, beech, black spruce and red spruce, balsam fir, wild cherry, white ash, basswood, ironwood, tamarack, elm, poplar, here and there a young white pine. Being her mother’s daughter, survivor of many a hike with bird, flower, fern, and tree books, Charity knows them all. Sid, whose family has summered in the Carolina mountains among other forests, and a few times on the Cape where eels and alewives are more significant than trees, knows few of them, but welcomes instruction.

The road climbs curving out of wet ground thick with cedars, and up onto a plateau meadow where Jersey cows, beautiful as deer, watch them with Juno eyes. Along the trail the ferns are dense, drooping with wet, twenty kinds of them. Again he does not know them (in my experience, ferns are an exclusively feminine expertise), and she tells him: hay-scented fern, wood fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern, ostrich fern, interrupted fern, Christmas fern, bracken, maidenhair—names that are as pleasant to his ear as the woods smells are to his nose. In the intervals between clumps of spruce, the moss spreads a green carpet, inches thick, feather-soft, with the candles of ground pine and the domes of spotted orange mushrooms rising out of it.