Crossing to Safety (9 page)

6

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and right now I realize that there is much about Sid and Charity Lang that I either invented or got secondhand. I didn’t know them in college, or when they met and married, and so I have neither memory nor documentation to draw on when I start to imagine what they were like when they first came together. I have only this Vermont lake and its associations, and the stories that they themselves, or Comfort, or Aunt Emily, told us.

First Sid had them feeling sorry for him and rather wishing he would go away. Then he won them over. That in itself is surprising, for neither Charity nor her mother was ever comfortable with a man she couldn’t predict and manage. Maybe the circumstances disarmed them. On the other hand, from the very beginning they may have managed him more than they seemed to. When a male ballet dancer lifts and carries his partner around the stage in a
pas de
deux,
he looks as strong as Atlas, but any ballerina will tell you there is a good deal in knowing how to be lifted.

“Who
is
this boy?” I can imagine her mother asking. “Do we know him? Do we know his family?”

Suppose they are sitting on Aunt Emily’s porch, looking down across waist-high ferns and raspberry bushes to the lake. It is a day of traveling clouds. The porch is a sheltered pocket, though the wind is strong enough to scrape limbs across the roof. Emily Ellis is knitting. Her needles dart and withdraw, her finger with its loop of yarn makes swift circles, she pauses to pull stitches along one needle and tug another yard of yarn loose from the ball. Her eyes are brown and sharp, her face wears an expression at once interested, amused, and self-contained.

Charity, sprawling in the porch swing, her hair in pigtails, waves an opened letter as if waving away smoke. “
I’ve
only known him a few months. He’s a graduate student at Harvard. You wouldn’t know the family—they live in Pittsburgh.”

Her mother’s hands pause. Her lips tighten. She says tartly, “It’s not out of the question that people worth knowing should live in Pittsburgh. Did you invite him?”

“
No!
I came up here to get away from him.”

“What’s the matter with him? He sounds pushy.”

“Pushy is what he absolutely
isn’t.
He’s a pushover. He’s in
love,
Mother. He’s suffering. He hasn’t seen me for a week.”

“Oh, dear me,” her mother says. She counts stitches, moving her lips. “How about you? I suppose you’re suffering too.”

“Then you suppose all wrong. All I’m suffering from are his impetuous
advances.
” She laughs and hoists one foot up on the back of the swing. Her mother looks at the exposed leg until Charity takes it down again.

“You don’t want him to come up, then.”

“How can we stop him? He says he’ll be
passing through,
and would like to drop in. Passing through, my eye. He’s not headed anywhere but right here. Why couldn’t he say so?”

“Perhaps he feels he has to have an escape, in case you don’t make him welcome. Would he be sensitive that way?”

“He would if
you
didn’t welcome him. He’s
painfully
polite to his elders, and he has such a wild idea of the intellectual distinction of this family that he practically genuflects when he speaks Daddy’s name.”

“It’s not unbecoming in him to respect scholarship. How long would he expect to stay?”

“Who knows? Until we drive him away? He’s set himself the goal of reading all of Restoration drama this summer, but he might think he can do that as well up here as in Cambridge.”

Her mother’s hands are moving again, swift and automatic. “Well, if you don’t want him, we can give him tea and send him on his way.”

Charity’s expression incorporates a slight frown. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t that seem a little . . . ? We could put him in the dorm.”

“Comfort is sleeping there.”

“She could go over to Uncle Dwight’s.”

“But must not be sent over,” her mother says. “Arrange it as you like, if Comfort is agreeable. On the other hand, if you don’t want him around, he should be discouraged at once. Firmly.”

Charity stands up, tall and square-shouldered. Seen only from the neck down, she could be thought a bit gangly. With her head on, she is something else. Her neck is long, her head small, molded by the tight braids. Her eyes are hazel, her teeth white and even. Her mother correctly thinks her a striking young woman, and her mind ventures off into speculations. “All right,” Charity says indifferently. “If he’s a pest we’ll just shoo him off.”

“Nevertheless,” says her mother, “let me give you a word of advice. It is neither decorous nor kind to mislead a boy in the condition you say he is in. Unless you’re serious, or think you might be, don’t encourage him. As the saying goes, I don’t want his blood on the rug. Remember that.”

So Sidney Lang, at the end of his first year as a graduate student in English literature, makes his entry into the world of Battell Pond. He arrives, at a guess, about midafternoon, having started from Cambridge at first daylight and driven hard in the rain only to realize, an hour short of his destination, that he will arrive at lunch time. He pulls off the road and sits for two hours, missing his own lunch and watching the peaks of the White Mountains to the south and east appear and disappear in the alternations of sun and rain. Accustomed to making every hour count, he reads a hundred pages of
Middlemarch
while he waits.

When he is sure that his arrival will interrupt neither lunch nor possible after-lunch naps, he drives on. He comes to the village— white frame houses on a single street with a single cross street, nothing very picturesque—and following Charity’s instructions, goes on one mile to some mailboxes mounted on a wagon wheel. A dirt road leads him left between a farmhouse and a pair of lakeside cottages. At once he is engulfed in dense, dripping woods. The track is rutted and chuck-holed, full of puddles, humped with roots. Even dimmer tracks lead off to glimpses of cottages and lake. Both sides. He seems to be on a narrow peninsula. Keeping right, he arrives in a clearing before a weathered shingled cottage. The car parked on the grass he recognizes as Charity’s. Both front windows are open. He leaps out, rolls her windows shut, and crowds back into his own car to ponder strategy.

His view is cut off by the cottage. Off in the woods on the right, a weathered gable shows through the trees: the dorm, though he doesn’t know then what it is. On the left, a path curves behind a clump of young conifers and into thick woods. That leads, though again he doesn’t know, to George Barnwell Ellis’s think house, a shack heated by a sheet-iron stove, where a single hanging light bulb shines down on a desk loaded with books in three dead languages and learned journals in four living ones. Here Professor Ellis has been engaged for ten summers on a book about the twelfth-century heretical sect called the Bogomils. He will still be working on it when he dies, fifteen years from now. He has already distinguished himself with his book on the Albigenses.

Sidney Lang looks at the door that is the only break in the wall of shingles facing him. Hoping that Charity might have been watching for him, he waits for it to open. But the longer he waits, the more he is convinced that that door has not been opened in years. It looks rusted shut and mossed over. A plank walk leads around the cottage on the right-hand side. To welcome him from there, Charity would have to come out in the rain.

For a few minutes more he waits, imagining her under a big umbrella, dazzling the downpour with her smile. She does not appear. No one appears. He hears only the steady patter and rustle and drip of rain in the wet woods, and the gush of water from the downspout at the corner. The woods around him are an intense, wet green. Even the air is green.

Eventually, reluctantly, he reaches his slicker from the back seat, shawls it over head and shoulders, opens the door, sets his L.L. Bean moccasins down on the drenched grass, and is committed. Hunching, he hurries around the house on the slippery walk. From around the corner he hears the steady sound of a woman’s voice.

Emily Ellis’s porch is less porch than command post. It is fifteen feet deep and runs across the entire front of the cottage, railed and low-eaved and sheltered even in the worst weather. I never saw it empty of people, never saw it without a partly solved jigsaw puzzle spread out on a card table and the swing full of dominoes, rummy, and Chinese checkers, rarely saw it without someone playing bridge, either Aunt Emily teaching some children or Aunt Emily and George Barnwell engaged in their intent, competitive afternoon rubbers with Uncle Dwight and Aunt Heather.

The bridge table is at the far end, out of the traffic, which is incessant. Though the Ellis daughters are grown, Charity out of Smith, Comfort halfway through, there are innumerable cousins, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, grandnephews, neighbor children, and the children of visitors and guests. Just inside the door is a circulating library of wholesome books, among which I have noted
The Wind in the Willows, The Boy Scout Handbook,
the entire
Pooh
canon,
Black Beauty, Little Women, The Yearling.
There are also piles of the
National Geographic.

Aunt Emily believes in the freedom of summer. She doesn’t much care what the children do so long as they do something, and know what they are doing. It is idleness and randomness of mind that she cannot abide. When the children go on a hike, she packs bird and flower guides into their knapsacks, and quizzes them on their return to see if they have learned anything. When she accompanies them on an overnight camping trip, sleeping in her own worn pup tent, they can count on instructive fireside talks on the stars. And on rainy days such as this she sits like a confident spider in the midst of her web until boredom drives all the children on the Point to her porch, where she reads to them or teaches them French.

What she is doing now is reading
Hiawatha.
She is fond of Longfellow, whose house is a landmark on Brattle Street hardly a block from her own, and she perceives the rightness of
Hiawatha
in this setting of northern woods. She reads loudly, to be heard above the rush and patter of rain.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.

When he heard the owls at midnight,
Hooting, laughing in the forest,
“What is that?” he cried in terror.
“What is that?” he said. “Nokomis?”
And the good Nokomis answered:
“That is but the owl and owlet,
Talking in their native language,
Talking, scolding at each other.”

Some of those children, years later, may awaken in the night from a dream of that strong voice chanting Iroquois myths in Finnish trochees, and their souls will yearn within them for the certainty and assurance and naturalness and authority of the time Aunt Emily dominated.

In primitive cultures, Aunt Emily will tell anyone with whom she discusses the rearing of children, the young learn by imitating their parents. Girls learn household tasks and the feminine role, including motherhood, by playing house and looking after their younger brothers and sisters. Boys follow their fathers to field and forge, and ape their ways with tools and weapons. Both boys and girls may be instructed in the proprieties of symbolic occasions by medicine men, shamans, and specially delegated elders, just as in our society they are sent to school and set to read books. But in our society (she means Cambridge), men (she means men of education and culture) no longer work with tools or use weapons. Girls can still imitate their mothers, but a man-child finds little in his father’s activities that he can make games of. Women must therefore provide models for both girls and boys, and steer them into paths they might not find for themselves, and above all encourage them in the strenuous use of their minds. Precisely what Nokomis did for her orphaned grandson Hiawatha.

About the abdication of male authority she is, of course, right. A quarter of the male population of New England escaped during the California Gold Rush. Another quarter vanished into the Civil War, and either died or kept on going. Those without the vigor to be Argonauts or warriors stayed to see their work taken over by the Irish, Portuguese, Italians, and French Canadians. They lost some of their political power but kept most of the status. The best of them (she means men like George Barnwell Ellis) continue in the tradition of Emerson and the enlightened divines. They teach at Harvard or the lesser academies, they are scholars and moralists, they love Nature.

Also, though Aunt Emily can’t be expected to think of this, they prepared the way for the New Humanists whose thinking dominated many college campuses in the 1930s. I studied under a couple of them, and was advised for the good of my soul to read others.

They were people such as Irving Babbitt of Harvard, from whom Sid Lang tried to learn the decorum, the
nil admirari,
and the dry reasonableness he was never quite able to attain to, and Paul Elmer More of Princeton, under whom Marvin Ehrlich devoutly read Greek. Ernest Hemingway once guessed that all New Humanists were the product of decorous intercourse. There was one at Wisconsin who directed Ed Abbot’s dissertation on romantic excess in
Comus.
Ed, who had more in common with Comus than with either Milton or his dissertation director, summarized his own position in a quatrain: