Crossing to Safety (13 page)

If she could not persuade them, then she would have to extract a promise that they would wait until Sid finished his degree, assuming he went for a degree, and found a job. No more than Charity did she take seriously those nine beanrows. So, the degree—two more years, perhaps three, longer in any case than their infatuation was likely to last. If they surprised her by holding out, why then God bless them, they would have proved something. She found herself wishing, against her sense of the realities, that they would do just that.

None of her planned program came to pass.

They arrived at the breakfast table late, after George Barnwell had already gone to his think house. Aunt Emily appraised their bottled excitement and waited. She had to wait only the thirty seconds it took for Sid to shove Charity’s chair under her and go around to his own. He was barely seated when Charity said, “Mother, we promised you a surprise. This is it. We want to get married.”

Aunt Emily set down her coffee cup. “That’s not entirely a surprise.”

“Do you approve?”

Aunt Emily looked from her daughter to her daughter’s young man. He had taken off his glasses and was polishing them. Perhaps he felt that he looked more approvable with his blue eyes exposed. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t that he lacked anything personally. He was a thoroughly pleasant young fellow. She caught his eye and smiled, meaning to be kind, thinking, What a pity, what a pity.

“No,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

She expected them, Charity at least, to break out in arguments and expostulations. But Charity only took a sip of her orange juice, sat back in her chair and said with a smile that her mother thought offensively confident, “Why not?”

“I’m surprised that you have to ask.”

“Is there something wrong with Sid?”

“No,” Aunt Emily said, and could not forbear laying her hand on Sid’s for a moment. “I’m very fond of Sid, as you must know. But marriage—children, you just don’t know what you’re doing.”

Holding her mother’s eye, Charity finished her orange juice. When she put down the glass, the little smile was still on her face. “If you’re so fond of him, why do you object? He’s healthy, he’s intelligent, he’s got all his
limbs,
he doesn’t stammer, he’s not disfigured in any way. What’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing’s the matter with him,” Aunt Emily said. “Nothing in the world. What’s the matter has nothing to do with him personally. It only has to do with the times, or the timing. Even if he were sure he wants to be a teacher, he has years of study ahead before he can qualify for a job, and perhaps several more before he can support a wife. If you tell me you’ll work to support
him,
then I have to think that the wildest folly. I’ve seen too many student marriages like that. The wife goes to work and stops growing while the husband grows beyond her. I don’t want that to happen to you, and neither does Sid, I’m sure. Your father’s salary won’t stretch to help support the two of you. You want something that simply isn’t possible. I wish it weren’t so.”

“Is it only economics, then?”

“Only economics,” Aunt Emily said. “There’s your inexperience speaking.”

Charity laughed so freely that her mother was irritated. “Ah,” Charity said, “there’s something you don’t know. If economics weren’t a problem, you’d approve, is that it?”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“
Would
you?”

Now Aunt Emily was truly irritated, trying to be kind and being pushed by this insolent girl into something like a quarrel. “How can you even suggest that economics isn’t a problem?” she said. “Forgive me, Sid, but it seems I have to point out some facts. How can there be no economic problem when Sid doesn’t even have a spare shirt? All the time he’s been here I’ve been wondering how I could steal the one he’s wearing so Dorothy could wash it. No, you’re being absurd.”

Sid surprised her with one of his bellows of laughter. They were both laughing. “His
disguise
is too good,” Charity said. “He had me fooled, too, till lately. What would you say if we told you Sid’s father was for quite a while, and in several business ventures, a partner of Andrew Mellon? Would your objections disappear then?”

For the space of several calming breaths Aunt Emily sat still. Then she said to Sid, “Is this true?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

“You’re
afraid
it is! What is this? Why the disguise? Why does the son of a partner of Andrew Mellon come visiting with chocolate stains on his only shirt?”

“Because he wants to be
himself,
not somebody’s relative,” Charity answered for him. “His father was a fierce banker and business-man, and wanted Sid to step into his shoes, but Sid liked books and poetry, which his father thought frivolous. (And so do you, thought Aunt Emily, but did not say it.) They didn’t agree on anything, practically. So even when his father created this trust for him . . .”

“He was sure I’d never be able to support myself,” Sid said. “I took it as a gesture of contempt, sort of.”

“. . . he wouldn’t use the money. His mother sent him a check to buy a new car last Christmas and he sent it back. He tries to look like the poorest student in Cambridge, but actually he’s as rich as
Croesus.
He leaves all that money accumulating in the trust and lives on a hundred a month.” Crackling with vitality, vivid as a revelation, she threw an enchanting smile at Sid, sitting diffident and charmed, and added, “I’m going to help him break
that
habit.”

Aunt Emily had gradually assembled herself. She said drily, “We don’t see many rich people these days, and since I objected on economic grounds, I must ask you a question.
How
are you rich? Real estate frozen by bank failures? Stocks fallen through the floor? Factories in receivership? Charity mentions a trust. How is that managed?”

“Very conservatively,” Sid said. “My father set up funds for my sisters, too, a good while before he died, and he added to all three of them in his will. The Mellon Bank manages them. My sisters draw on theirs, but I never have. It got hit pretty hard by the crash, but it’s recovered some. I think there are three or four million in it. I can call the trust officer and get an accounting, if you’d like.”

Caught between a laugh and a cough, Aunt Emily put her fist to her mouth for a moment. “No. As an approximation, I think three or four million will do.”

Charity jumped to her feet and flew around the table and wrapped her arms around her mother’s head. “You think it’s all right! I knew you would!”

Disentangling her hair, Aunt Emily said to Sid, “If you didn’t want to use your father’s money before, why do you change your mind now?”

“Because he’s got
motivation
!” Charity said.

“No, let him tell me. Perhaps you’ve persuaded him that his scruples aren’t sound. Perhaps later he’ll wish he’d preserved his independence.”

“But his scruples were . . .”

“Please,” Aunt Emily said. “Sid?”

He was looking at her steadily, wearing a diffident smile. “You think I tempted her with my glittering gold?”

“I don’t think it hurt your chances.”

Now his smile grew broad. “But she said yes before she knew.”

“When she thought you didn’t have a spare shirt to your name?”

He nodded.

“And you’re sure you won’t regret taking this inheritance? You won’t feel you’ve betrayed your principles? Because I don’t mind telling you, if you really do despise wealth, and if your differences with your father went very deep, then I think your scruples were honorable, not foolish.”

“I suppose it was whimsical,” Sid said. “He wasn’t a monster, or a crook, or anything. He made his money honestly, or as honestly as any banker. It was just that he thought more of it than I felt he should, especially since he was such a stiff Presbyterian. I wasn’t ashamed of it. I just didn’t want to get trapped in it, and I didn’t want to take it from him as a contemptuous handout to an incompetent. But he’s gone, and the money sits there. I suppose I could give it to my mother or my sisters, but they don’t need it. I’d rather spend it on Charity.”

“And you’re both absolutely sure.”

They were.

“You thought I’d resist you,” Aunt Emily said. “If I did, it was only because I thought I must, for your own sakes. Well, bless me, this is all very astonishing.”

“Shall we go up and tell Daddy?”

Aunt Emily thought only a second. “No. He wouldn’t like being interrupted. We’ll tell him at lunch.”

“There’s something else,” Charity said, her eyes on Sid. “Do you want to tell her, or shall I?”

“You.”

“You and Comfort won’t have to worry about the development across the cove,” Charity said, and went back around the table into Sid’s arm. “Sid’s bought the land, the whole shebang, from Herbert Hill. We called his trust officer last night, that’s why we had to go into the village. Sid gave Herbert two thousand more than the syndicate had offered, and it’s
all settled.
Isn’t it something?”

“There’s no other name for it. Don’t tell me any more, I couldn’t take it in.” With the two of them before her, she standing, he sitting with his arm around her as if in an old-fashioned wedding photograph, she felt at once dazed and fond. So much good fortune, for such really deserving children. “I suppose you’ll be taking an apartment in Cambridge,” she said, with her eyes as usual down the road.

“That’s something else we want to talk to you about, Mother. Do you know when Uncle Richard plans to leave Paris?”

“Richard? Why? Last time he wrote, he expected not to be replaced until late summer or fall. He certainly isn’t going to leave until that man puts him out.”

“Would he let us be married at his house, do you think?”

“Why, I suppose. But don’t you think Cambridge. . . .”

“I’d like a
Paris
wedding. I won’t really believe I’m Cinderella otherwise. You and Daddy and Comfort could get a trip out of it.”

“Of course we’ll try to do it the way you want, if we can. But it would be very expensive to take everyone abroad.”

Charity dropped her arm from around Sid’s shoulders and fished a worn brown wallet out of his hip pocket and shook it in the air. “Please,” Sid said. “It would give me the greatest pleasure.”

“My goodness,” Aunt Emily said. “Well, I’ll write Richard and see.”

“
Cable
him!”

“Is there that much of a hurry?”

“Yes. Because after we’re married we want to take a trip, a real Grand Tour. Sid’s going to drop out of school for the first semester— I’m willing to make
that
much of a concession to the beanrows and honey-bees. And we’ve got to find an architect right away before we leave so we can settle on plans for a house, and a guest house, and a think house. By next summer we want a regular compound over there across the cove so we can wave dishtowels at each other from porch to porch.”

“Bless me,” said Aunt Emily, for about the fourth time that morning. “You don’t waste any time.”

“Would
you
?” Charity said.

7

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once.

I remember little about Madison as a city, have no map of its streets in my mind, am rarely brought up short by remembered smells or colors from that time. I don’t even recall what courses I taught. I really never did live there, I only worked there. I landed working and never let up.

What I was paid to do I did conscientiously with forty percent of my mind and time. A Depression schedule, surely—four large classes, whatever they were, three days a week. Before and between and after my classes, I wrote, for despite my limited one-year appointment I hoped for continuance, and I did not intend to perish for lack of publications. I wrote an unbelievable amount, not only what I wanted to write but anything any editor asked for—stories, articles, book reviews, a novel, parts of a textbook. Logorrhea. A scholarly colleague, one of those who spent two months on a two-paragraph communication to
Notes and Queries
and had been working for six years on a book that nobody would ever publish, was heard to refer to me as the Man of Letters, spelled h-a-c-k. His sneer so little affected me that I can’t even remember his name.

Nowadays, people might wonder how my marriage lasted. It lasted fine. It throve, partly because I was as industrious as an anteater in a termite mound and wouldn’t have noticed anything short of a walkout, but more because Sally was completely supportive and never thought of herself as a neglected wife—“thesis widows,” we used to call them in graduate school. She was probably lonely for the first two or three weeks. Once we met the Langs she never had time to be, whether I was available or not. It was a toss-up who was neglecting whom.

Early in our time in Madison I stuck a chart on the concrete wall of my furnace room. It reminded me every morning that there are one hundred sixty-eight hours in a week. Seventy of those I dedicated to sleep, breakfasts, and dinners (chances for socializing with Sally in all of those areas). Lunches I made no allowance for because I brown-bagged it at noon in my office, and read papers while I ate. To my job—classes, preparation, office hours, conferences, paper-reading—I conceded fifty hours, though when students didn’t show up for appointments I could use the time for reading papers and so gain a few minutes elsewhere. With one hundred and twenty hours set aside, I had forty-eight for my own. Obviously I couldn’t write forty-eight hours a week, but I did my best, and when holidays at Thanksgiving and Christmas gave me a break, I exceeded my quota.

Hard to recapture. I was your basic overachiever, a workaholic, a pathological beaver of a boy who chewed continually because his teeth kept growing. Nobody could have sustained my schedule for long without a breakdown, and I learned my limitations eventually. Yet when I hear the contemporary disparagement of ambition and the work ethic, I bristle. I can’t help it.

I overdid, I punished us both. But I was anxious about the coming baby and uncertain about my job. I had learned something about deprivation, and I wanted to guarantee the future as much as effort could guarantee it. And I had been given, first by
Story
and then by the
Atlantic,
intimations that I had a gift.

Thinking about it now, I am struck by how modest my aims were. I didn’t expect to hit any jackpots. I had no definite goal. I merely wanted to do well what my inclinations and training led me to do, and I suppose I assumed that somehow, far off, some good might flow from it. I had no idea what. I respected literature and its vague addiction to truth at least as much as tycoons are supposed to respect money and power, but I never had time to sit down and consider
why
I respected it.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through
Pilgrim’s Progress
regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else—pathway to the stars, maybe.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

Right after breakfast I went to the furnace room and wrote till ten minutes to eleven. Then Sally drove me to the foot of Bascom Hill. I climbed the hill, arriving in class just as the bell rang, and taught from eleven to four. Then I walked home, graded papers till dinner, and after dinner prepared for the next day’s classes or went to the furnace room and wrote some more.

Sally had a part in everything I wrote, most of which I read to her after bedtime or during breakfast. She was critic, editor, gadfly, memory bank, research assistant, typist. She decided when things were good enough to be sent out, when they needed doing over, when they wouldn’t do at all. And when I was shut in the furnace room or off at school, she had her own occupations, almost always with Charity.

They were together all the time. Charity, expending herself in twenty directions, pulled Sally along with her. Though she had no musical ability herself, sang sharp, and always pitched a song so high you had to be a castrato to sing it, Charity was intensely fond of music. She was backing a young pianist friend for a Carnegie Hall concert, and she and Sally went often to hear this young woman play. They both sang in the university chorus, with weekly practices and occasional performances. They went to many concerts, with or without Sid or me. Most of those were free, but when they were not, there always seemed to be an extra ticket in Charity’s purse, a ticket she said had been bought for someone who in the end couldn’t use it.

They attended movies, plays, lectures, art classes, photography shows, teas. They took walks. From January on, there were baby showers and other shared preparations. And after March, which I remember well, Sally had some recovering to do and the baby to look after, a diaper case if there ever was one, and us without a washing machine. Fortunately Charity had one, and a hired girl as well. The waste of our offspring got washed away, like sin, over on Van Hise Street.

Once or twice when the weather let up they took a stepladder out to the two acres that the Langs had bought in the suburb called Frostwood, and climbed on its slippery steps to test the view or the solar exposure. For Charity had made up her mind when Sid took the Wisconsin job that they were not going to be like other instructors, kept for three years and then turned out to start all over again in some other, probably lesser, place. Sid was going to be so superior, and together they were going to make themselves so indispensable to the university and the community, that there could be no question of their being let go. She had spent the first year finding land she liked. They would spend this one planning the house they would build on it. No cautionary words had any effect on her. If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.

“It’s making a schizophrenic of me,” Sid said to me on one of the midnight walks he was fond of. “I want her to have this palace, if that’s what will please her, but I keep thinking of all the eyebrows that will go up among the senior members of the department— takes a lot for granted, doesn’t he?—and the envy and jealousy a lot of my colleagues will feel. And maybe there are guys from the gashouse district who will see this schoolteach building a castle in the middle of a depression, and Jesus, look, he’s got three hundred windas to bust. But Charity has the answer to at least one of those problems. She’s going to make the house a weekend rest home for broken-down instructors. Even you may apply. Our friends are going to keep the guest rooms occupied, and we’re going to lay down a law for ourselves: We never accept invitations on weekends. It’s all going to be country walks, rough tweeds, a brace of setters, and on Sunday evenings square dances and Varsovianas and korobotchkas and a convivial punch bowl.”

That was on a night when he was feeling good after a day that had gone well. Other times, he was less relaxed. “It’ll look arrogant,” I heard him tell Charity once. “It’ll look as if we thought we could buy our way to promotion, or as if we thought ourselves so grand we could assume it. There’s absolutely no guarantee we’ll be here longer than this year and next. Do you want to build it just to move out of ? At least let’s not pour any concrete till the department has voted.”

“Pooh,” Charity said. “I’d like to
see
them uproot us. Just have some confidence.”

“Caution would be more appropriate.”

“No, sir,” she said. “You don’t budge me.”

She already had an architect drawing plans, and she was not restraining his imagination. She and Sally went over sketches and scale drawings by the hour, and scratched them up with criticisms and questions and second thoughts, and sent them back to be done over. And over.

Sometimes Sally and I discussed the Langs in bed, bed being the only place where we found much time to discuss anything. Our basement, warm from the furnace just beyond the partition, and lightless as the womb, was a good place to rest the eyes and mind and hear the things that Sally saved up to tell me.

“She wants a lot of children,” she reported. “A real lot—six or seven, the last four preferably girls.”

“Well, she’s going about it the right way,” I said. “She’ll have them by the time she’s thirty. What’ll she do then?”

“I don’t know. Be fulfilled, I guess. That’s what she thinks children do for a woman.”

“How about Sid? Are six or seven children going to fulfill him too?”

I could feel her thinking about that in the dark. Finally she said, “I think she thinks fatherhood doesn’t mean that much to a man. She thinks a man should be fulfilled by his work.”

“Yeah. What if the department doesn’t choose to fulfill him?”

“You and he are always talking that way. Charity just won’t accept the possibility.”

“I know she won’t, and it’s not very bright of her. She’s reckless. I doubt that Sid is going to be fulfilled if he finds himself with a half dozen children and a big house and no job.”

“At least they’ve got money.”

“That does help,” I said. “It even helps her hire a nanny to look after the children she’s already got, so she can be out promoting culture and singing in the chorus and cleaning up Wisconsin politics and being kind to the wives and children of starving instructors. That’s a pretty dispersed lady.”

“But she’s so organized!” Sally said. “She can make time for all sorts of things, and for all that hectic social life, and still be with the children in the morning, and again before dinner, and again at bedtime. She gets them up and she tucks them in, and she sings to them, and reads to them, and plays with them. She’s a wonderful mother.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t. I was just wondering if Sid is as enthusiastic about this program as she is. I even wonder sometimes if she’s as enthusiastic as she thinks she is.”

More pondering. “Maybe she’s a little inconsistent,” Sally said. “She wants all those children, but one of her reasons is so she won’t have too much time to give to one or two. She thinks children in a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect. Her mother dominated her, she says. They clashed a lot, I guess. Well, you can imagine, those two. So Charity wants six or seven so she won’t make the same mistake her mother made. She thinks neglect is good, so long as it isn’t really neglect, so long as the mother is thinking and planning and guiding and keeping an eye on things.”

“You can count on Charity to be doing that.”

“Yes.” More thinking silence. Then, “Sometimes I wonder, though. She’s great, she’s thoughtful, and loving, she’s kept a book on both of the children since the day they were born—you know, first smile, first tooth, first word, first sign of individuality as they develop. Pictures at every stage. She’s teaching Barney to count and tell time and read already, they set aside a half hour every afternoon. She’s simply incredible, the way she can organize a day. But one thing, I don’t think I ever saw her pick up one of those cute kids and give him a big squeeze, just because he’s himself, and hers, and she loves him. When we get ours, don’t let me have an agenda every time I’m with him.”

“I’ll try to remember, if my own agenda lets me.”

Laughter, then quiet. Finally Sally says, “We shouldn’t talk about her this way. Just think what it would be like without them.”

“I have,” I said. “It’d be Worksburg for me and Dullsville for you. I hope all her plans work out. I hope she has seven children, all with an IQ of 160 or above. I hope the last four are girls. I hope they grow up in that big house in Madison and have every summer in Vermont among the cousins, and love their mother and respect their father and do well in school and grow up to be ambassadors to France.”

“Amen,” Sally said. “I’ll tell her you wished that, shall I?”

“Pray do,” I said.

No, Sally was not lonely. Nor were we ever, to my recollection, diverted more than briefly from one another. We loved our life; we never looked up from it except when rallies for the Spanish Loyalists ruffled the waters of the university and upset the state house, or when Governor Phil La Follette made some alarmingly fascist-sounding proposal, or when Hitler’s frothing voice over our radio reminded us that we were on a bumpy gangplank leading from world depression to possible world war.

We weren’t indifferent. We lived in our times, which were hard times. We had our interests, which were mainly literary and intellectual and only occasionally, inescapably, political. But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on a hundred and fifty dollars a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship—parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours.
Amicitia
lasts better than
res publica,
and at least as well as
ars poetica.
Or so it seems now. What really illuminates those months is the faces of our friends.