Crossing to Safety (26 page)

“Then you’ll miss the music,” I said. “You’ll be cut off from our intemperate joy. Really, I want to help. I insist.”

“Insist all you want, you aren’t allowed to,” Charity said. “You’ll find the Ninth Symphony on top of the pile over there.”

Sid had quietly got up and begun to stack dishes on a tray. Charity snuffed the candles. Sally, who had stayed out of the argument because however much she would have liked to, she would have been no help doing dishes, was telling me with her eyes to knock it off and submit. So I went and helped her stand up; and because it was now pretty dim in the dining room, I held her while she bent to lock her knee braces. People who can’t feel their feet must be able to see them, or they lose their balance when they bend down.

I took her chair over by the fire, and she caned over and sat down in it. Charity curled up in a big chair. Mrs. Fellowes said uncomfortably that she would just pop upstairs and take a look at the children, then, and despite Charity’s objections went on up. Sid was backing through the swinging kitchen door, carrying his loaded tray.

“Now let’s just be joyful,” Charity said. “This horrible war is almost over, and we’ve got you back.”

With the records stacked on the changer, I still hesitated. “It would only take the two of us ten minutes to do up those dishes. Then we could all sit and be joyful.”

“Sid is not unhappy,” Charity said. “He’s not out there crying into the dishpan. He’ll come in when he’s through. This is the way we
do
it. This is our
agreement.
”

Mine not to make reply. I pushed the automatic switch. The arm lifted, swung, hovered, and came carefully down. Scratching began, then a quaver of violins against sober strings and horns that quickly rose to a musical shout. Charity stretched up and snapped off the floor lamp. We sat in firelight, watched by the eyes of the owl andirons. The kitchen door, over at the dim dining-room end, was outlined with the light beyond it.

Ordinarily I am an admirer of the Ninth Symphony, but that night it struck me as pompous and overstated. I couldn’t listen because I kept thinking of Sid out there, inferior and unneeded, dismissed to the scullery. And why? Because Charity had set up a schedule and was too inflexible to change it. Either that or she was whipping him for something.

The longer I sat in the firelit dusk, the more annoyed I got. When the first record ended and the changer clashed and the second one dropped, I stood up. It was too dark to see expressions, but I saw that both Charity and Sally had turned their heads and were watching me. I held up one finger and tiptoed out.

The downstairs bathroom was off the hall that ran from the front entrance past the stairs to the kitchen. The whole passage was out of sight from the living room. Bypassing the bathroom, I went down the hall and pushed open the kitchen door.

Sid, at the sink in the middle of chaos, looked around. Every counter and table was loaded with dishes, bowls, pots, pans, milk bottles, strainers, and garbage. Good cooks dirty a lot of dishes, especially when they themselves don’t have to wash them. Out beyond the doors, the music was working back up from pianissimo to fortissimo. “What is it?” Sid said, frowning.

“I thought I’d come out and lend a hand.”

The very thought agitated him. “Come on! You’re supposed to be out there. I’ll take care of this. Get out of here.”

I opened the refrigerator door and put away a butter dish, a bottle of milk, and half a head of lettuce. I scraped some peelings and rinds off a counter into a paper bag and looked around for the garbage pail. Sid had hold of my arm.

“It’s my job. Go on back and listen.”

“They don’t need me to listen.”

“Charity will eat your gizzard out.”

“That’s a giblet that will poison her.” I found an overflowing wastebasket and crammed the sack of peelings into it. There were dishtowels hanging on the oven door handle. I pulled one out and began drying the plates that Sid had set on edge in the drain rack. He tried to take the towel out of my hands.

“Look,” he said, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d go back. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

“If we go together we can go in half the time.”

He let go of the towel. For a moment he stood frowning. Then he shrugged and went back to his sink full of suds.

“Have you been a bad boy?” I asked. “What have you done to deserve three years of K.P.?”

“It hasn’t been that long. And it’s a fair arrangement.”

“How do you tell it from punishment?”

Looking sideward, sharp and at first offended, he raised his eyebrows and shoulders and gave a little laugh. “I guess it
is
punishment.”

“What for?”

Shrug. Another sideward glance. “General incompetence.”

I was wiping and stacking the clean plates on a corner of the counter. “Explain, Professor.”

Sid laughed again, looking at the black window above the sink as if something outside had caught his eye. His tongue came out to touch his upper lip. “I proved I couldn’t hit big-league pitching.”

“Horsefeathers. They called the game on account of wet grounds.”

“Whatever.” His hands paused in the dishwater. “The taste of failure is like the taste of cabbage soup, you know that? It rises sourly in the gorge. Just an echo, hoo hoo. Now you go on back and let me finish my work.”

“With permission,” I said, “the hell with you.”

Once he submitted, we made progress. The stacks of clean dishes grew, the counters and tables got mopped clean, we reached the pots and pans.

“One reason I’m here wiping is that I want to talk to you,” I said. “People are going to be coming back to college. Johnny’ll come marching home. The colleges are going to start hiring again.”

He glanced up, but said nothing. I saw scorn in his face.

“The head of the Dartmouth English Department has been in my section of the OWI,” I said. “He’s just gone back. He’s already looking for people.”

No comment.

“If you think you’d like to go back to teaching, and lay this ridiculous rumor that you’re not competent, I can put your name in.”

Now he did look fully up, and his hands were quiet in the greasy water. The scorn had been wiped from his face; he looked close to terrified. For a long second he stared at me, and then went irritably back to work.

“Slave labor,” I said. “Off the promotion ladder, at least for now. They’ll protect their regular faculty and bring in irregulars for the rush.”

“What as?” Sid said. “Instructors?”

“Mostly. Not you. With your experience you shouldn’t take less than assistant professor. You ought to get associate, but that’s out.”

For a while he scoured the bottom of a saucepan with a Brillo pad. He held the pan under the hot tap and the black scourings rinsed away and left clean red copper. He put the pan upside down on the drain.

“After the Wisconsin debacle I wouldn’t have the chance to take anything. Not at a place as good as Dartmouth.”

“Yes, you would, if you want it.”

“I just reminded you, I proved I can’t hit big-league pitching.”

“And I just told you horsefeathers. You can hit anything they can throw.”

“What makes you think I’d have a chance?”

“Because I’ve talked to Bramwell about you.”

“You have?”

“A couple of times. He’s been beating the bushes. There weren’t many Ph.D.’s produced in the last three years. All of a sudden it’s a seller’s market.
If
you want to go back to teaching.”

He worked away at a colander. In the living room I heard the music swelling up to a passion. “Did you tell Bramwell all about me?”

“Every shameful detail.”

“And he still thought I’d have a chance?”

“You’d have to apply,” I said, irritated. “Remember what old McChesney told Sally when she asked him when the wild strawberries would be ripe? ‘Wal, you have to let ’em blossom first.’ You’d have to act as if you
wanted
a job. You’d have to send him a letter and a
vita.
”

“And if I should, do you think there’s a chance?”

“If you do, you’re in,” I said. “He’s crazy enough to think you’d be a catch. For the kind of job he’s got, you would be.”

He stood motionless, staring at me across the steam of the sink. His eyes began to open, his lips drew back, the vertical creases in his cheeks deepened, his smile broadened. “You sly bugger,” he said. “Morgan . . .”

The door to the dining room was pushed open. Music shouldered into the kitchen. Charity stood in the door. She took in the stacks of wiped dishes, the cleaned counters, the clean pans, Sid with his hands in the water, me with my guilty dishtowel in my hands. Red flooded into her face.

“Really!” she said.

“We’re just finishing,” Sid started to say. He said it to the closing door.

In silence we finished up. He dried his hands, I hung the wet dishtowel with the others on the oven door. Out in the living room a
Heldentenor
was shouting into the fog and the eclipse:
“Freude . . .
Freude . . .”

I said, “I guess it’s time we tiptoed contritely to the doghouse.”

He was not amused. His face was stiff and his eyes veiled. Quietly we went out the hall door and up the hall and stood at the top of the steps leading down into the living room. The tenor was through shouting. Now everyone was shouting. Choral exultancy filled the house and rattled the windows.

For a second or two we stood letting our eyes adjust to the darkroom gloom. The chorus rose and fell in waves, the music skittered from sopranos to tenors to basses and back again, really joyful, so joyful that the blood took off, trying to catch the beat. More than once we had sung that Ode to Joy in the Langs’ Wisconsin living room with Dave Stone at the piano and nobody but friends in sight and the future a challenge that we would meet when it came. Uplifted, I joined in the chorus now, and came down the steps roaring.

No one else joined in. We found chairs. I stopped my clamor. Sally’s face, rosy in the firelight, looked rueful. Charity was only an outline folded into the big chair. In silence we let joy sing itself out.

Long time ago. Better times grew over and healed those bad war years as grass and bushes heal scarred earth. Why did I think of that bad evening when there were so many good ones to remember? It was over next day—would have been over even if the Dartmouth opportunity hadn’t altogether changed the atmosphere.

I am sure now, and was pretty sure then, that she didn’t even know she was punishing Sid for disappointing all her hopes. Probably she had evolved the rationalizing theory that he needed a function, something useful to do—like dishes!—that would persuade him that he mattered in the scheme of things. Something his alone, humble perhaps, but his, a responsibility that he could accept and discharge. It sounds unlikely, but some of her ideas were. That didn’t keep them from being, to her mind, totally logical.

He didn’t need me to get him a teaching job after the war. Almost any of his dozens of friends could and would have done it, or he could have done it himself. All he had to do was write around and indicate that he was available. So even if I hadn’t known Steve Bramwell’s needs, Charity would have had to renounce her dramatizing of failure, and consent to resume life among the living. Still, they chose to think I had done him—done both of them—the greatest favor. If I did, it was not in finding him a job. It was in inducing Charity to end their self-imposed withdrawal and her pose of proud humiliation.

In the little spartan study, that furtive sanctuary, I felt airless and oppressed. I went through the dust-moted streak of sun to the shop door, and out onto the porch. The door slid heavily shut behind me, shutting in the tools waiting to be put to use, the pencils sharp for expression, the pads awaiting words, the dictionary of rhymes with its face turned to the wall in the hope of going undiscovered. With a feeling that I was escaping something, I went on over to the Big House.

3

The porch of the Big House overlooks a lot of family history. The cove itself, which Aunt Emily used to swim across every day before lunch, is private water, a family sea. We sit above it, at a table set with bright, flowered pottery, and look across at the Ellis dock and boathouse, and beyond those, backed by woods, the weathered cottage that is now inhabited by Comfort and Lyle Lister.

Our talk goes as inevitably backward as our eyes. Hallie steers it, obviously trying to get away from the discomfort of our talk in the study, and give us back the Battell Pond we used to know. Sally and I corroborate or amplify as we are called on. Moe listens with his Levantine smile, his watchful, comprehending eyes moving from his wife to us and back to his wife. He listens as an anthropologist might listen to the stories and gossip of primitive villagers in an effort to hear the heartbeat of a culture. He and Sally have something in common, something ancient, knowing, sympathetic, unfretful, and ultimately sad.

It is less a conversation than a series of recollections, reminders, and questions. We are affectionately scolded.

—Doesn’t your conscience bother you? All the time I was growing up, the Morgans and Langs were part of the same family, back and forth between Hanover and Cambridge, and up here together every summer. Then you go and move to New Mexico. Even Lang quit coming.

—It’s my fault. I wanted to get away from Cambridge winters, and once we were out there it was hard to get back. And Lang was on the West Coast, and her job and Jim’s job were obviously going to keep them there.

—Doesn’t she get vacations? Doesn’t she ever want to see her old friends? She’s only brought Jim here once, to our wedding. I always thought of her as my big sister, and wanted our kids to grow up together like cousins, and they’ve never even
met
. How
is
the selfish wretch? Does she like being a banker?

—Securities analyst. She’s fine. Yes, she likes working. I guess she’s good at it. She makes more than Jim does.

—She sold us out for dirty dollars.

—Come on, Hallie. Is it a one-way street? It’s no farther from here to the West Coast than it is from the West Coast here. You could go visit her. She’d love it.

—But this is where we all belong! Don’t tell me you’ve become a chauvinistic westerner.

—I was always a westerner. New England was a rainy interlude.

She is so outraged that I have to back off.

—I take it back. It was no interlude. It was the best time of our lives.

—You’d better not be one of those boosters selling sunshine. What’s the matter with this sunshine? Oh, you know, you really do belong here! You and Mom and Dad were always so in
tune.
I remember you going off to those Sunday evening concerts that Mom started. This was long before you ever saw Battell Pond, Moe. They used to play phonograph records through a loudspeaker from the town dock and everybody’d gather in canoes and rowboats. We could hear it clear over here when we quieted down enough. We’d all get left with Flo or whoever it was that summer, and we’d watch the four of you row away and as soon as you were around the point we’d tear the place apart.

—Charity knew that. She thought it was good for you, once a week. I always felt guilty about making us go in the dumpy old row-boat, but I’d have swamped us if I’d tried to get into a canoe. I loved those concerts. Mozart and Schubert across the water, people drifting around stirring a paddle now and then, and the sunset gathering behind us. Your father loved them too. He couldn’t get his lungs full enough. He
breathed
sunset. By the time the music was over it would be dark and chilly. Charity and I were always wrapped up in those Algerian burnooses.

—Which would have drowned you if we’d capsized.

—I wouldn’t have been any safer in a bathing suit. What nicer way to go, anyway? And Charity had always thought ahead and brought flashlights so we could see to get home. Larry and Sid had to carry me up the path on their hands while Charity and I held the lights. This was the blackest place, at night, I ever saw. I suppose it still is. You couldn’t see the dock till the boat bumped it. You couldn’t see your hand if you had hold of your nose.

—What she is struggling to express is expressed by an old New Mexico saying: It was so dark you couldn’t find your ass with both hands.

—Why, thank you, darling. You took the words right out of my mouth.

Laughter. It is fine to be on that porch, in that company. The sun is full on us, warm but not too warm. It will be a while before the shadow of the nearest tree moves across.

—You were so much a part of us, like aunt and uncle. Meals and swims and hikes and picnics and expeditions. Larry and Dad always had some project—fencing the tennis court, or building a new dock, or putting a cattle guard in the gate up to Folsom Hill. Do you suppose other men get fun out of coming to the country on vacation and working like day laborers? And you and Mom were so close. You really deprived her when you moved west. She’s never found anybody else it’s so much fun to do things with. Actually it isn’t as nice here as it used to be, I think. It’s got dressier, the country-club crowd sets the tone. The way I remember you two, neither of you ever gave a hoot how you dressed. Strangers could never figure you out, you on your canes with your cocky little Bavarian hat with a feather in it, and Mom in one of her bedspread skirts, clear to the ground, and huaraches, and ankle socks, and a
mouchoir
around her head. I’m ashamed to tell you this, Sally, but that winter we were together in Italy I used to walk forty feet behind you two so that nobody would know I belonged with Mom. What was I? Fourteen or so. I just died at some of the things she’d do, and the way she looked. Did I ever tell you about the time you got out of the Marmon in front of McChesney’s, and these two summer people, Upper Montclair types, were standing there? They were fascinated. They couldn’t make out whether you were a rich invalid and Mom was your nurse, or whether you were gypsies, or servants driving the master’s car, or hippies from Stannard Mountain, or what. I heard one of them say, ‘That car’s an absolute heirloom, Ed would be mad for it,’ and the other said, ‘That’s a Liberty’s scarf on the big one, and the one on crutches is wearing a hand-loomed skirt.’ You made this a happy place for all the Langs.

—What are you saying? You made it happy for us. We were privileged visitors.

Hallie is nearly as striking as her mother used to be, and softer, more feminine. For an instant, on the sunny porch, brushing a wind-stirred strand of pale hair away from her face, she looks like Charity in a contentious mood.

—No no no. I won’t have it. Not visitors. Family.

Moe, who has been working on a cork, stands up and goes around pouring.

—Speaking of family. Larry, do you talk a lot about your p-p-p-parents?

—My parents died more than forty years ago.

—Did you talk about them before they died?

—It wouldn’t have occurred to me.

—Wh-
when
they died?

—I shut the door.

—Sally?

—I never had a father. My mother died when I was twelve.

—Then it must seem as strange to you as it does to m-m-me. I sit in, I hear all this family recollection, dissection, analysis, speculation, puzzlement, outrage, rebellion, pity, whatever, and I’m astonished. My father m-m-meant a lot to me, he taught me a lot and I respected him. My m-m-mother was a Jewish Mama, smothering, but you had to love her, right? Well, I never discussed them when they were alive, even with old f-f-f-friends, even with my b-b-brother. I don’t think I’ve talked about them with a dozen p-p-people since they died. This family, though, you can’t b-b-believe them. The minute any two of them get together they’re off on M-M-Mom and Dad.

—You do it yourself ! You’re as much into those bull sessions as any of us.

—I didn’t mean to irritate you, sweetheart. I didn’t m-m-m-mean to exempt myself. I just meant, how those two people do occupy the m-m-minds of the family.

—Not Dad, Mom, yes. But that’s because . . .

—Long before she got s-s-sick. Both of them. The other day I was r-r-reading that Katherine Anne Porter novel, whatsitsname,
Ship of Fools.
There’s a scene where she’s passing in a b-b-bus and catches a glimpse of these two, a man and a woman, she’s stabbing him with a knife, he’s hitting her with a r-r-rock. Stab, clonk, stab, clonk. Mortally locked together. It’s like that.

—Good heavens, Moe, you’ve been reading too much! It isn’t like that at all. It’s never violent. It’s never even competitive. He always loses.

—Maybe so. Just the same, it’s mutual crucifixion. They aren’t individuals, they’re c-c-c-c-confrontation. They’re an insoluble dilemma. Your father is a captive husband, like m-m-me . . .

—Oh, like you!

—Exactly. And like your Grandfather Ellis. Aunt Emily k-k-kept him in his th-th-th-think house, and looked after him kindly, like the family dog. She admired the way he could read G-G-Greek and Latin and H-H-H-Hebrew. I’m sure she loved him, but she wore the pants. This isn’t a f-f-f-family, it’s a pride. Females run it. Us males lie around yawning and showing our two-inch t-t-teeth, and get swatted when we get out of l-l-line. We have only one function.

—Oh, Moe, I feel sorry for you!

—Sorry for me why? I love to yawn and show my t-t-teeth, and have my d-d-dinner brought to me, and service all the l-l-l-ladies. I just wish the family would acknowledge its p-p-p-p . . . p-p-p-p . . . admit what it’s doing. You’ve written a lot of books, Larry, but you’ve n-n-n-neglected one that’s screaming to be written.

—You can’t write about your friends.

—Why not? None of us wants it to happen, but this confrontation, if that’s what it is, is almost over.

—People leave unfinished business. They leave unanswered questions. They leave children, sometimes quite a few.

—Some of us children might like to see them written up. It might help answer some of the unanswered questions. Such as, why have they stuck together all these years. It’s been a kind of agony for both of them.

—Oh, not all the time! Not even very much of the time. I don’t think there’s ever been a question of their splitting up. Neither one would think of it. It would destroy them both.

—I suppose. Just the same . . .

Moe passes the bottle across, and I pour. He looks in the window, frowning. “Is the fool girl
laying
the eggs?” But Hallie pays no attention. She is watching me. She is serious about this. She’d like a book about her parents.

—Hallie, you’ve got the wrong idea of what writers do. They don’t understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer. Those aren’t people that you see in books, those are constructs. Novels or biographies, it makes no difference. I couldn’t reproduce the real Sid and Charity Lang, much less explain them; and if I invented them I’d be falsifying something I don’t want to falsify.

—I thought fiction was the art of making truth out of faked materials.

—Sure. This would be making falsehood out of true materials.

—If you can’t do it, who can?

—Maybe nobody can.

—Doesn’t it bother you the way it does us? It must. They hang in the air like an unresolved chord. Some Mozart has to go downstairs and bang the right notes and let them rest.

—Some other Mozart than this one.

There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?

The people we are talking about are hangovers from a quieter time. They have been able to buy quiet, and distance themselves from industrial ugliness. They live behind university walls part of the year, and in a green garden the rest of it. Their intelligence and their civilized tradition protect them from most of the temptations, indiscretions, vulgarities, and passionate errors that pester and perturb most of us. They fascinate their children because they are so decent, so gracious, so compassionate and understanding and cultivated and well-meaning. They baffle their children because in spite of all they have and are, in spite of being to most eyes an ideal couple, they are remote, unreliable, even harsh. And they have missed something, and show it.

Why? Because they are who they are. Why are they so helplessly who they are? Unanswered question, perhaps unanswerable. In nearly forty years, neither has been able to change the other by so much as a punctuation mark.

Another consideration, a personal and troubling one. I am their friend. I respect and love them both. What is more, our lives have been so twisted together that I couldn’t write them without writing Sally and me as well. I wonder if I could recreate any of us without my portraits being tainted by pity or self-pity.
Amicitia
is a pure stream. Too many ppm’s of pity might make it undrinkable.

The girl interrupts our somewhat awkward silence. She is perhaps the twentieth local girl to work summers in this house. The tray she carries is loaded with a coffeepot, a pitcher of orange juice, and a bowl of raspberries. She plugs the coffeepot into an outlet and hustles back inside, returning almost at once with a platter of ham, hot plates, biscuits, and a big omelet. Moe grunts and shakes out his napkin. Hallie begins to serve. We eat, and the pressure is off me.

—Is everything all right? Is what’s supposed to be hot, hot, and what’s supposed to be cold, cold? Clara doesn’t always get it all together.

—Marvelous. Heavenly.

—Is the sun in your eyes, Sally? Want to be moved around a little?

—I’m fine right here. Always was.

—But you still went and moved to New Mexico.