Crossing to Safety (27 page)

—It wasn’t this I moved from.

—I was just talking. Even if you did move from this, who could blame you? This was where you had your terrible bad luck.

—Bad luck?

—The polio.

—I could have caught that anywhere.

—Just the same, Mom blames herself. She says they took you out on a pack trip when you were still anemic and run-down from having Lang. She thinks you might have thrown it off, the way some people do, if they hadn’t overworked you.

—That’s ridiculous. I was feeling as good as I ever felt in my life. They’d been fattening me up and looking after me all summer. And after it happened, they were both simply wonderful.

—They say you were the wonderful one. How you stood being brought out on the horse, and afterward. But then, we know you, we’ve seen you all these years.

I can see those years stretched out in Hallie’s mind, more years than her own total experience of living. All the time of her infancy, childhood, girlhood, adolescence, college, marriage, poor Sally Morgan has been pegging around on crutches, needing help to go to the toilet or get out of bed or even out of a chair, and yet refusing to be either helpless or hopeless. Drives her own specially equipped car. Travels, or used to, all over the world. Cooks, scooting around her kitchen in her high chair on wheels. Does all but the heavy housework. And smiles, is cheerful, and amused, and amusing. Doesn’t complain, thinks of others. Hallie’s eyes are moist as she looks at her. Love is there, and admiration.

Properly. I have wet an eye myself in contemplation of that woman.

—Did they ever tell you what
they
did?

—What they did? When?

—While I was sick. If I’d been picking the very worst time to get sick I couldn’t have done better. They were just about to go back to Madison, the dream house was already started, Charity was on fire to get back and oversee it. And she had three children under five, and you in the oven, though she couldn’t have known that yet. We were out of a job, and they’d offered us this house for the winter. They never missed a chance to be generous. So I go and get sick.

She sits very erectly, forgetting to eat. Her eyes are wide and glowing. The mere thought of what they did melts her with affectionate gratitude.

—They just abandoned everything because of me. Charity went with us in the ambulance to Burlington, and when I was in the iron lung, and so to speak safe, she and Larry took turns talking me back to life. Poor Larry, he had to support us, and all he had was book reviews at fifteen or twenty dollars apiece. He’d try to read while he sat watching the air being pumped into me and out again, and when Charity came and took over he’d go back to his room and try to write. Without her there, he’d never have been able to do a thing, and I’d have worried myself to death. In the meantime, Sid had loaded up all the kids, Lang with them, and driven them back to Madison, and Aunt Emily had abandoned your grandfather and gone out on the train to hold the family together. Talk about solidarity!

The girl reappears on the porch, looking questioning, and Hallie motions her back in. She and Moe are both intent on Sally, stiff in her stiff chair. Her voice comes out of her in a tranced stream, interrupted by pauses while she catches her breath. If I were filming the Delphic Oracle, I would get Sally in that mood to play the Pythoness.

—You get a new perspective in an iron lung. I was nothing but a suffering vegetable. I couldn’t move anything but my head, but I could certainly worry. I worried about my baby, I worried about poor Larry, dying on his feet. I worried about Charity’s house, going up without her after all her preparations, just because of me. I worried about Sid with that house full of children, and poor helpless Mr. Ellis, left to look after himself in Cambridge. I worried about the enormous bills we were piling up, and about whether I’d ever get well enough to justify all that was being spent on me. When the 1938 hurricane hit us, I worried about the power going off and cutting off my air, and sometimes I almost wished it would. But then I’d look up into my mirror, and there would be Larry half asleep over his book, or your mother with that smile. You’ve inherited it, Hallie. It’s a wonderful gift. It has life in it. I couldn’t think of dying with that shining on me.

Pause while she draws a ragged breath. None of us speaks. Moe, with his eyes on Sally’s face, gropes his coffee down blindly, feeling for the saucer.

—She paid the bills, too—just went to the office and settled the whole thing and asked them to send any further bills to her. Larry was upset, but my goodness, how much she took off our minds! He got her to take his note for it, and later for a lot more she advanced us. We were years paying it back, and every time we’d send a few hundred dollars they’d act as if we were some kind of paragons of honesty, as if nobody ever heard of people who tried to pay back a precious debt.

—I never heard any of that. It sounds like Mom.

—Like both of them. He’d write me these letters full of news and funny little poems, and snapshots of Lang, and sound as if it was a privilege to take care of all those children while he was starting a new term. Nearly every day, something to cheer me up. Then when the doctors said my best chance of getting back some muscular control was Warm Springs, that really sunk us, it was so utterly impossible. This was the Depression, remember, there wasn’t any unemployment insurance, or health care, or anything. Larry didn’t even have a job. But Charity and Sid just jumped at it. Yes! they said. Do it, whatever it costs. Don’t
worry
about costs. So Larry took me to Georgia, and at first I was terribly depressed. My legs were gone, and one hand not much use, and I was surrounded by people as bad off or worse, people who gave me an idea of what I could expect my life to be like. Some parts of the therapy were all right, but some were so rough and callous they almost killed me. They’d put you on a treadmill, for instance, with rails to hold on to, and you were supposed to try to walk. There was a nurse behind you with a hand in your belt, but she never kept you from falling. They were careless, they didn’t hang on tight. We all fell. I found out later they did that on purpose, to harden your will. Unless you’d grit your teeth and take any amount of punishment and failure and still go on trying, they knew you’d never improve. I was so discouraged I cried all the time, and when Charity heard that, she abandoned the family again, and came down. When they put me on the treadmill she was right there to help me and encourage me. She made me try, and try, and try. I never did get so I could walk, but I got more control in other ways. There was a boy there, about seventeen, a high school athlete from Chicago, a very nice boy. They hoisted him up and tried to make him start again, and he wouldn’t. He just hung there with his teeth in his lip and tears running down his face. He never did get on again, and after a while they sent him home. He’s written me for years. He’s lived ever since in a wheelchair.

The tranced voice pauses, the tranced eyes become aware of what they see. Sally blinks, and sends a startled, apologetic-defiant look around the table. She laughs, a strangled little hiccup. We are all silent. Surely Hallie and Moe never heard anything like this passionate rush of feeling from Sally. I never did either, not in public, nowhere except once in a while in bed when she has awakened from a dream to find herself still imprisoned in her helpless flesh.

—So who was wonderful? I was just a crippled thing that had to be made to want to live. They made me—Charity especially, but both of them. I had to live, out of pure gratitude.

The girl looks out again, gets a nod from Hallie, and begins loading dishes on a tray. Sally, her thin shoulders pulled together, sits stiffly, her eyes downcast and her breath uneven. Her hands, the half-clenched one on top, are folded in her lap, in the sun. Her feet are quiet on the metal step of the chair, also in the sun. But her face is in the shade that moves and changes with the movement of leaves up above.

—I’m ashamed. For years now we haven’t been as close as we used to be. I let myself get irritated at her way of taking charge of everything. I thought she was a tyrant to all of you in the family. I still do. But I shouldn’t have ever let myself forget what a wonderfully unselfish friend she has been. I should have had the grace to forgive what I knew she couldn’t help. We parted almost as if we
weren’t
friends, and it’s been eight years.

She sits. Her eyes go quickly around from one to another of us. She forces the tension out of her lips and cheeks; the
kore
smile tries to return. But something will not quite loosen. Under the returning placidity some tight muscle gives her expression a shadow of sternness. Her eyes lift, and fix themselves on Hallie.

“Tell me exactly how she is. Is she in pain? I can’t tell from her letters.”

“If she was, she wouldn’t let on. But I don’t think so. Stomach cancer is supposed to be less painful than other kinds. Of course, it’s metastasized, it’s all through her now. Earlier this summer, just in case, she and David did some meditation training—controlling pain by a sort of self-hypnosis. I don’t know if she’s had to use it. I do know she hasn’t taken any pain-killers. Won’t.”

“No. I remember when she was having David, she didn’t even want any ether. She wanted to experience everything. She isn’t afraid, is she?”

“Not a bit. She’s incredible. The other day we were talking, and somebody—Nick, I guess, he was still here—forgot for a minute how things were, it was such an ordinary kind of family conversation, and asked her how she was going to vote in November. You know what she said? She looked at him with her eyebrows cocked in that way she has, and her eyes just dancing, you’d have thought she was letting some happy secret out of the bag, and said ‘Absentee.’ We cracked up, we couldn’t help it. No, you’re absolutely right. She wants to experience everything, and she won’t be shortchanged. You know how she likes to plan. Well, she’s planning this the same way. She’s like a choreographer, every little step is plotted out. Even . . .”

Hesitation. “What?” Sally says.

“Better not,” Moe says.

“Oh, they have to know! I hate it, I can’t bear to think about it. But she’s already signed the papers. She’s willed her body to the organ bank of the Hitchcock Clinic in Hanover. God, I just . . . I blew up when she told me. I said, ‘Mom, who
wants
a sixty-year-old kidney or a pair of sixty-year-old corneas? You’re doing this for some theoretical reason. It’ll torture us. Let your poor body go in peace.’ But she says she wants to be a good steward. Whatever’s worn out can be cremated and go back to the earth, but whatever’s still useful ought to be used by someone who needs it.”

Indignant tears stand in her eyes. She bends her head and puts her fist to her lips, then looks up, laughs, shakes her head. Sally, from her edge of shade, looks out broodingly as if from a cave.

“She’s really getting ready.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Oh, I wish she’d let me know sooner! We should have come weeks ago. It’s what she would have done for me. But she sounded as if it was under control.”

“She’s known since May. But there was a remission, it just seemed to mark time. She didn’t want to worry you.”

“She knew I couldn’t do anything,” Sally says, with a sad mouth. “She’d have been trying to look after
me.
” She broods at the crumpled napkin in her hand as if she can’t make up her mind what it is or how it came there. Then she lays it on the table. “When can we see her?”

“Anytime.”

“Won’t they be having lunch?”

“She hardly eats anything. Dad generally has just a sandwich at noon. She said bring you when you’re rested and have eaten.” She looks at her watch. “We’ve got a couple of errands to do before the picnic. We’ll leave you there and meet you later, on the hill. So anytime you’re ready.”

“I should make a couple of telephone calls,” Moe says. “Maybe now is the time.”

Sally reaches for her canes and props them against her chair. Moe leaps up, but I sit still, because I can see that she is still brooding, not ready to move. I know what she is doing. She is looking, in her steady way, at what we have until now pretty well covered over with a mulch of nostalgia.

Hallie, thinking aloud, says, “Moe, you’d
better
make those calls. I want to talk to Clara, too. Would you two mind waiting just a few minutes?”

“Of course not,” I say. Sally says nothing, sitting stiffly and staring into the past or the future, whichever it is that oppresses her.

Hallie has paused in mid-departure, watching Sally’s face. “Is something wrong? Can I do anything?”

Sally lifts her eyes, huge wide-spaced eyes in a face whose skin is tightly stretched on its bones. The slight pucker in her forehead smooths out, the plane of her cheek softens, the look that only seconds before glared out like the high beam of a headlight is shuttered and focused down.

“Nobody can do anything,” she says. “It’s the way things are.”

Left without anything to do but mutter agreement, Hallie and Moe delay awkwardly for a moment and then excuse themselves. We sit on. Sally blots her eyes one after the other with a knuckle.

“I guess I was hoping I’d wake up and find it wasn’t so.”

“It seems to be closer than we thought.”

“It’s hard to take in, there are so many reminders. She
lives
so. She’s everywhere you look. Did you notice the dishes?”

“Cantigalli, weren’t they?”

“Yes. From Florence. Remember the day we went with her to buy them?”

“Was I along?”

“Sure. We went out to the factory. She bought sets and sets of them. Later they arrived in Hanover in three big barrels.”

“I take your word for it.”

“You can. I haven’t forgotten one hour of that year.”

“A year without housework.”

“Oh, more than that! That year was all spring, even when it snowed. Every so often I wake up and that little poem of Lorenzo’s is running through my head. Remember? The one they teach to every tourist?

Quant’ è bella giovinezza
Che si fugge tuttavia”

She shakes her head. “Youth did flee, too, but that year we were young—that was the second year. The first was Madison. Before that it was all kind of gray, and since then it’s been mainly hanging on. Is that the way it’s been for you? But that year in Florence we were young. Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”