Crossing to Safety (17 page)

Sally’s eyes find mine. Though the wind has stirred spots of color in her cheeks, she is still wan, for the birth business left her anemic, and she exists on liver and spinach and such things. Now she is clearly uneasy. Her face brings me back from exhilaration with the lurid light and the sense of exposure and risk. I try to incorporate into a look several confident reassurances: Our boat is a scow, unsinkable; Sid is an experienced sailor; shipwreck is something that happens only to the I. A. Richardses of the world. I know she is hoping I will suggest turning back, but I can’t do that. It is Sid’s expedition. He is the one to say when we should head for shore.

Then in her clear voice, clear as a pitch pipe (in a crisis, or when calling for attention, she pitches her voice as high as she does when starting a song), Charity says, “Sid?
Sid?
It’s getting too rough. Turn back.”

He squints at the clouds. “It’s just a squall. It’ll blow over.”

“No. Go back. Right away.”

She couldn’t be more peremptory. Only I, who am facing the stern, see the resistance, the active rebellion, in his face. But he obediently prepares to come about. “Heads down! Here we go.” We duck under the slow club of the boom, I feel the wind on the other side of my face as sharp as Charity’s voice, and the movement of the boat as reluctant as Sid’s obedience.

Off to the left and ahead, as we flounder quartering into the wind, I can see the green shore, the university buildings around and on Bascom Hill, Observatory Hill with its skeleton ski jump. I can’t see the dock, which is low and obscured by spray and the heaving lake. I wonder if the lifesaving outfit on the dock can see
us.

The boat won’t sail so close to the wind, and Sid has to let it fall away a little. The wind whips and shoves, the sails lean, the boat moves like a dog hanging back on its leash. Waves smack us, the gunwales tip, we nervously high-side. The girls have buttoned their coats under their chins. There is water under the duckboards.

As suddenly as if someone has opened a valve, the rain comes. One minute I am squinting up at the thunderous blue clouds over-topping us, and the next we are being pounded by heavy rain that turns almost at once to hail. We cover our heads with our arms. In a couple of minutes it has passed; I can see it chopping the water astern and to starboard. Then I look down, feeling myself even wetter on the feet than on the rest of me, and find that the water under the duckboards has risen so that the boards are afloat. So much, in that short shower? I find a coffee can and begin to bail.

I am facing Sally and Charity, looking into their faces. They crowd together on the wet thwart, huddling into their coats. Sally gives me a wan, stoical glance. Charity cries out in cheerful outrage, “Oh,
damn
the weather! This started out to be
fun
!”

A gust explodes against us, the gunwale dips deeply, spray flies. I can’t see that I have gained on the water in the bottom, and my feet are soaked. I shout at Sid, “What do you think? Shall I lower the sail?”

Sitting with their feet pulled up, looking straight ahead as if the wobbling of their eyeballs might tip us beyond recovery, the girls interpret my shout in different ways. Sally obviously thinks it a confession of crisis, and it alarms her. Charity takes it as a challenge to her leadership. “No! We’re safer if we keep our
way.
”

I continue to look at Sid. For all I know, Charity’s judgment may come not out of sailing experience but out of a reading of Captain Marryat. But Sid is no help. He has been overruled before he can open his mouth. He lifts a shoulder, that is all. My icy hand goes back to pouring coffee cans of water over the side. The wind keeps blowing bucketfuls back aboard.

Despite everything I can do, the water gains on me. I turn to look around, hoping to find the shore and dock nearer, and my eye is struck by how low we are in the water. We are not riding the waves down and then rising buoyantly again. We are simply boring into them, heavier and lower, heading down. The line of the gunwale is aimed at the bottom a quarter of a mile ahead.

I grab up the two life preservers I have been sitting on, and throw one to Sally, one to Charity. I have time to loosen the sheet from the turnbuckle and let the mainsail pour around me, wet, cold, and enveloping. Another life preserver is there in the water that now reaches to my calves, and I throw it over Sally’s head to Sid. Glaring around, I spot the last one and grab it. Sid is standing in the stern, his hand on the tiller, his eyes on the diving bow. The girls too have stood up, ready to jump. I scream at Sally, “No, the high side! The high side!” But she has no time. We heel over, the bow stays under, the mast hits the waves, and we are in the ice water.

This is not an adventure story, and being after the fact it doesn’t generate suspense. Obviously we all survived. There were no heroics. Everybody behaved well.

When I came up gasping and bulging-eyed from the shock of immersion I saw Sally in her cumbersome coat trying to get the section of duckboards she was clinging to free of the sail and the fouled lines. I started to work around the mast to get to her, but Sid reached her first. Then I arrived, and the three of us paddled the duckboards around onto the windward side of the hull where Charity was hanging fast. We tied ourselves to the hulk and waited for rescue.

It seemed a fatally long time, though I suppose it wasn’t more than ten or twelve minutes, until the Chriscraft roared up, jockeyed around, threw us a line, and hauled us up over the side one by one, the girls first, like gaffed fish. As they got us onto the deck, chattering, blue, and numb, they told us with demoralizing casualness, “Go below. Don’t get the bunks wet.”

Down in the tiny cabin we huddled together, soaked, freezing, our jaws locked so that we could hardly speak. Charity said incredulously, “Don’t get the . . .
bunks
wet? What kind of . . . rescue . . . is this? Where are the little . . . barrels of . . . brandy? To hell with keeping their . . . bunks . . . dry!”

She fell onto the starboard bunk and pulled a blanket over herself, motioning Sally down beside her. We all accepted that invitation, bundling like antique New Englanders in a cold snap, while the Chriscraft bounced and roared toward safety.

It slowed, swerved, bumped against the dock. Under the eyes of twenty or thirty of the curious we staggered ashore, shoeless, squishing water. Eyeing us with a professional lack of expression, the rescuers relented, and let us each wear a blanket home. “What about the boat?” Sid kept asking. “I rented it. Shall I . . . ?”

“We’ll take care of it. Come down tomorrow.”

We hurried to the Langs’ car, too cold to worry about boats or blankets, too cold almost to move. Actually we were probably in more danger than we realized. Doctors these days take hypothermia seriously, and if anybody ever had the right to be hypothermic, we did. We crowded into the station wagon, Sid drove us to our house. “Get warm,” they chattered at us, and drove away. We made it around to our basement door.

Our girl Ellen, with Lang on her shoulder bawling her head off, met us. “Oh, my land, did you wreck?”

“Draw us a tub of hot water, Ellen, please. Hurry!”

Ellen started to hand Lang to her mother, but Sally was too shattered, wet, and cold. “Not now, not yet. Just get the tub filled.”

While Ellen drew the tub, we sat on the bed and peeled off our soggy, reluctant clothes. A dry bathrobe should have been a sybaritic pleasure; I never even felt mine. We shuddered and shook. In the bathroom Lang’s bawling drowned the sound of running water.

“Is it ready, Ellen? If it isn’t, just let it run. We’ll finish up.”

Ellen came out of the bathroom with Lang purple-faced and unappeasable on her shoulder. We crowded past them into the steam and shut the door, threw aside our robes. “Be careful,” I said. “You won’t feel it. You could scald yourself.”

Cautiously we felt our way into the tub and settled down facing one another, sinking in to our chins. The heat, at first not felt, moved into our hands and feet as a slow, hard ache. Our skins turned lobster red, our shuddering began to smooth out, it began to be luxurious. We smiled at each other, shaking our heads.

“That was close.”

“I thought we were gone.”

“Feel all right now?”

“I don’t ever want to move.”

“Just lie and soak.”

We lay and soaked, but not for long. Out in the bedroom Lang was having an uninterrupted tantrum. Pretty soon Ellen’s hesitant knuckles tapped on the door. “Mrs. Morgan?”

“What is it? Is she hungry?”

“It’s nearly an hour past her feeding time. I can’t get her quiet.”

“Well, bring her in. No, good heavens, don’t do any such thing! Wait a minute.”

“I’ll get her,” I said.

I climbed out and hunched into my robe without toweling and opened the door a crack. Out there Ellen was rocking and patting and comforting, obviously very interested in what was going on inside. She was a broad, good-natured girl, no more than eighteen, and coming from Wausau she probably thought Madison wicked and exciting, one of the cities of the plain.

I took the baby from her. “Can you scrape us up something to eat, Ellen? We’re still frozen solid. Anything, whatever there is. Warm. Just give us a few more minutes to thaw out.”

Lang liked my shoulder no better than she had liked Ellen’s. Burly, fat-faced, obviously overnourished at Sally’s expense, she did not get my sympathy. What did she have to howl about? But I stripped off her diaper—dry, for a wonder—and shed my bathrobe again. Pink, sighing, liquefied with pleasure, I handed her to Sally, stepped into the tub, and settled down with my back against the taps.

Three in a tub. I watched my naked daughter laid against the breast of my naked wife. She found a dark nipple, her squalling died in a gurgle, her mouth worked, her eyes closed. Naked in Eden, the ultimate atomic family, pink and wet and warm, we lay entangled in the tub, and rescue was so recent, safety so sweet, that I didn’t have the heart to tell Sally what had happened to us.

I watched Lang’s fat fingers work in the softness of Sally’s breast, and her mouth work with her feeding. Sally looked up and caught me watching. We smiled, foolishly and gratefully. I moved my foot between Sally’s legs and fitted it like a bicycle seat into her crotch.

We had come out of the tub finally, Ellen had taken Lang to the furnace room and put her down, Sally and I were sitting in our eight-by-ten kitchen eating some sort of goulash and drinking hot tea with jam in it, Russian style. There was a knock on the door. Sally jumped up and started for the bedroom, but she had no chance. The door opened and in came Sid and Charity.

They stopped in the doorway, surveying our bathrobes, the remains of supper, the general dishevelment of that crowded little hole.

“Oh, thank goodness!” Charity cried. “You’re all right ! We’d never have forgiven ourselves if you weren’t. Did you ever have such a time getting
warm
?”

“We stepped into a boiling tub and it froze over,” I said. “What are you doing running around? You ought to be in bed with hot-water bottles. That’s where we were going.”

I was thinking, and I am sure Sally was too, what it must have taken, in the way of friendly concern, to get them into their clothes and out to their car and across town to us. Not very confidently, I wondered if we would have been capable of it. In fact, we hadn’t been. It hadn’t occurred to us to worry about them as they had about us.

“We were fine as soon as we warmed up,” Charity said. “But wasn’t it
paralyzing
in that water? All I could think of was I. A. Richards and how awful it would be if one of us couldn’t hang on. And when Sid told me what the
department
has done. . . .”

She stopped. Sally was staring at her. “Oh!” Charity said, and hit her head with the heel of her hand as Sid had done that afternoon in my office. A family gesture. “
Idiot!
How stupid of me. You didn’t know. Larry hasn’t told you.”

“She has to know,” I said—and to Sally, shocked and woebegone, “we’re out. But we did get summer school, so we’re okay for a while. And Sid got reappointed, Sid and Dave both, so there is a God. If I hadn’t been seduced into getting warm I’d have laid in champagne in the best Lang manner. How about a cup of tea? Sit down. Here, let me clear some space.”

I babbled, throwing papers and my briefcase off the couch, but when I turned around they were still standing there, Sally looking ready to cry, and Charity and Sid distressed with sympathy.

“Oh, damn,” Sally said. “I hoped. . . .”

I put my arm around her. Eventually we all sat down.

“What’ll you do?” Charity asked.

“I don’t know. Write a lot of application letters. Hope for some last-minute opening. They made it tough by delaying so long. Everybody who is going to hire has hired.”

“But you’ve done so much! You’re getting such a
dossier.
How could they not understand how good you are?”

I managed not to be too sympathetic with myself, for fear I would let out a bleat of pure self-pity. I agreed with her, I had been unfairly treated. But I suppose I had some dim awareness, too, that in her guidance of Sid, she had been right. Poetry would not get him anywhere in that department. If he wanted to stay, he should do what the system called for. If I had done that, I might well have got at least another couple of years.

“Hell,” I said, “something will turn up. The novel will sell a million copies. Our textbook will get adopted in Texas and we’ll have to ship it down there by the freight-car load. Sally and I will go down to the Virgin Islands and live on coconuts and bananas and write expensive and live cheap and need no clothes but a dark tan.”

“You mustn’t do anything like that,” Charity said. “I’m sure this will only be temporary. You’re too good to be unemployed for long, and we love you too much to let you go and live on some beach where we’ll never see you.
Sid?
Isn’t it time we made our proposal?”

He sat in our one chair, facing the three of us on the couch. He put his elbows on his knees and knotted his hands and leaned forward. His earnest glasses glinted as he checked Charity’s face for some corroboration or encouragement. “I’ll jump in if they make the slightest objection,” she said.