Crossing to Safety (12 page)

“Couldn’t people get together and raise the money? Wouldn’t this Herbert Hill rather sell to his neighbors than to a syndicate?”

“Perhaps he would, but where do his neighbors find eight thousand dollars these days? Most summer people don’t make half that much in a year. The Battell Pond Association got him to hold off for thirty days, but I haven’t seen the money forthcoming.”

“I swear if they build that over there I’ll burn it down,” Comfort said.

“Of course you’ll do nothing of the kind,” her mother said.

“She might,” Charity said, “and I just might help her.”

“The minute they build it,” Comfort said.

Dorothy took away the plates and brought a bowl of strawberries and a pitcher of cream. The table had gone cranky. Again Aunt Emily saw Sid, sensitive as an uneasy hostess, adjust to the changed tone and try to divert the conversation. He turned to Comfort, pushing his glasses up on his nose, and asked her how her name happened to be Comfort. He would have thought that since the first daughter was Charity, the next should have been Faith or Hope.

He asked it teasingly, and his eyes included Aunt Emily in the question, asking her to take this as a conversational gambit only, as essentially well meaning as the wagging of a dog’s tail.

Unfortunate. Comfort apparently thought he was condescending to her as the kid sister. She had not been happy to vacate the dorm, which she and her friends used as a clubhouse, and move for an unknown term over to Uncle Dwight’s. She also hated jokes about her name, which she said made her sound like a featherbed. Now she gave Sid a smoky glance and replied that after Charity was born her parents had given up both Faith and Hope.

“Why, you ungrateful
wretch
!” Charity cried. “After I joined your arson conspiracy.”

“Naming you Comfort may have been our highest expression of hope,” Aunt Emily said, and pushed back her chair, ending the conversation and the dinner.

Dorothy cleared away. George Barnwell rose, shook Sid’s hand and said he hoped they would see more of him, and excused himself to his bedroom and his detective novel. Charity, from across the table, threw Sid a look full of amusement, commiseration, and malice. Comfort disappeared in a cloud of sparks. Aunt Emily, her knitting already in her hand, looked out onto the porch.

“Why, there’s going to be a sunset. Battell Pond is going to show you its better side after all, Mr. Lang.”

“Sid,” Sid said. “Please. Being called Mr. Lang makes me nervous.”

“Come on, Mr. Lang, sir,” Charity said. “You can take me for a canoe ride along Comfort’s enchanted shore. Unless you’d rather read.”

Aunt Emily later, making a story of it, suggested that Sid had come out of the West like Young Lochinvar and taken them by storm. It wasn’t a bad story, or entirely untrue, but during those first days she didn’t think of him as Lochinvar. She thought of him as a pleasant young man who simply wouldn’t do, and she brooded a good deal about how to tell him and Charity so. Interference, she understood, would cause unhappiness, perhaps serious unhappiness. But better a little now than more later.

It took her no more than that first afternoon to discount Charity’s assumed indifference. She was as gone on him as he was on her, and the next days proved it. They could spend all day on a hike or picnic or canoe expedition and still be full of each other at dinner, almost the only time the family saw them. They could be out till all hours—twice Aunt Emily turned her flashlight on the clock when she heard Charity sneaking in, and once the clock said nearly two and the other time nearly three—and still look at one another over the breakfast table as if dazed by the wonder of what they saw.

Aunt Emily had no idea what they did when they were together; she had to rely on Charity’s good sense. Seeing them swimming off the dock, or canoeing around the cove, she could feel a pang like regret. Charity was what she was, a most striking, vivid, headstrong, exasperating, often infuriating young woman. Sid Lang, helping her into the canoe and shoving away from the dock, was a demigod. His back was now red with sunburn and his nose was peeling, but his neck was strong and his back broad. When he dipped the paddle, the canoe shot forward as if motorized.

Pumping him, she had brought up mainly acceptable opinions. It was true that Sid admired Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom the family was divided about because he had already indicated he would replace Aunt Emily’s brother as ambassador to France. But Sid also loved books, had earnest, high-minded ideas and a passion for poetry, felt that each individual should try to leave the world a little better than he found it. On the other hand, he was vague about the future and not at all sure that it involved teaching. He seemed to be in graduate school mainly because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. For a penniless student who ought to be burning with ambition, that seemed odd, even ominous.

Once, half humorously, he told Aunt Emily that what he would really like to do was retire to the woods, such woods as these, where there would be books, music, beauty, and peace, and just walk and read and think and write poems, like a Chinese philosopher of the Taoist persuasion.

They had some dinner-table arguments on that topic. Those were not the most logical years to be advocating philosophical retirement, even for poets. Poetic speech in those days was supposed to be public speech, and bring thousands to the barricades. Literature was for mobilizing the masses (the middle-class masses), Doing Good, and Righting Wrongs. So when Sid, in defense of his vague disinclination to become engaged in social betterment, enlisted poetic support, saying:

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made,
Nine beanrows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee
And live alone in the bee-loud glade”

he started Charity to bouncing in her chair.

“Oh,
pooh,
Sid! That’s a splendid poem, but it’s not a plan for a
life.
It’s defeatist, it’s total retreat. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can’t have a by-product unless you’ve had a product
first.
It’s
immoral
not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.”

“You can get your hands dirty in nine beanrows.”

“Yes, but what are you doing? Feeding your own selfish face. Indulging your own lazy inclinations.”

“Charity, really,” her mother said.

Sid was not offended. “A poem isn’t selfish. It speaks to people.”

“
If
it’s good enough. Has any poem ever moved you to action?”

“I just quoted you one.”

“That’s not action, that’s
inaction
! Really, Sid, the world needs people who will do things, not run from them.”

“I don’t admit that poetry is running from anything, but what would you suggest instead?”

“Teaching.”

“Teaching what?”

“What you’re studying. What you know.”

“Poetry.”

“Oh, you . . . ! You twist things. Look, there are so many empty minds in the world that teaching them
anything
is worthy activity. A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.”

“And a poem doesn’t?”

They were getting heated. No, Aunt Emily decided, only Charity was. Though Sid defended his position, he listened to her as if her warmth fascinated him. Her cheeks were rosy with vehemence. She sat back in her chair, momentarily at a loss, as if his question were unfair, and thought a moment, and burst out again.

“You want to make me sound like a philistine. All I’m saying is that poetry isn’t
direct
enough most of the time. It doesn’t concern itself with the vital
issues.
It may be nice to know how a poet feels when he looks out his window into a fresh snowfall, but it doesn’t help anyone feed his
family.
”

“Charity,” Comfort said, “you argue like a corkscrew.”

But Sid would not accept the chance to laugh the argument away. “Let me get you straight. You think poetry isn’t communication on any significant level, but you think teaching is, even if the teacher is teaching poetry. It’s okay secondhand, but not firsthand.”

“I told you,” Comfort said. “A corkscrew.”

“You keep out of this,” Charity said. Her cheeks were pink. She looked aggrieved and misunderstood. “All I’m saying,” she said to Sid alone, “is that poetry-making isn’t the basis for a full life unless you’re an absolutely
great
poet, and forgive me, I don’t think you are, not yet anyway, and won’t be until you find something to do in your life so that the poetry
reflects
something. It can’t just reflect
leisure.
In this world you can’t have leisure unless you cheat. Poems ought to reflect the
work
the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organizations. You can’t make a life out of nine beanrows. You wouldn’t have anything to write poems about but beans.”

Laughter. “Well,” Sid says, “I have to take a job, is that it?”

“I don’t now what you’re studying for, if not some sort of job.”

“What if I said I’m studying because I think a poet ought to have his head filled with ideas?”

“Then I’d say the ideas you get out of books are secondhand ideas, and the ones you need for writing poems are firsthand ones. Your training leads straight toward the teaching profession, doesn’t it?”

“Usually.”

“Why not in your case?”

“I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes to be a good teacher.”

“Are you sure you’ve got what it takes to be a good poet?”

“No.”

“Well.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

A lull. Charity, fixing her eyes on him hard, smiling and frustrated, said, “Well, you’ll have to grant me one point.”

“What’s that?”

“Teaching at least pays a salary.”

“I know,” he said. “Poverty and poetry are twin-born brats.”

“See?” she cried in triumph. “You just proved my point. You taught us all something. If you hadn’t been studying to be a teacher you wouldn’t know that line, or who said it. Who did?”

“Samuel Butler, I think. And if he hadn’t written it, no teacher would be able to teach it.”

“This is getting excruciating,” Comfort said.

Aunt Emily was making up her mind that the subject must be changed, and was opening her mouth to do so when Charity fired one Parthian shot. “You think you want to withdraw and write poetry because you’re afraid you can’t
contribute
any other way. But you can! Why should you undervalue yourself ? You’ve got all the makings. You can do anything you want if you want to enough.”

Comfort looked at the ceiling. “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime.”

Sid ignored her, looking at Charity. “You believe that?”

“What I said, or what my impertinent sister just said?”

“What you said.”

“You bet I do. So should you. Anything you want to do you
can
do.”

“And if I want nine beanrows and a hive for the honeybee?”

Shrugging, dismissing the very idea, she said, “You don’t need a higher degree for that. Any monk or bum can do that.” Leaning forward, frowning urgently and then breaking into a smile, she said, “Just go at it the way you’re going at you-know-what.”

“I’ve got special reasons there. And it was your idea.”

“What difference does that make? The will to do it is what matters. There’s always some special reason.”

He was attending, half smiling, totally absorbed in her voice, as if it came out of a burning bush. Aunt Emily perceived that he was easily led, that he wanted the kind of direction and reassurance that Charity was prepared to give him. He paid too much attention to other people’s opinions, including, unfortunately, hers. Now he shrugged, nodded, accepted. Aunt Emily could not help asking, “What is this you-know-what?”

Instantly Charity’s face changed from argumentative to gleeful. She laughed out loud. “You’ll find out. Oh, are you going to get a surprise! There’s going to be an
announcement.
Maybe tomorrow.”

Everybody looked her way, awaiting further enlightenment, but she had said all she was going to. It sounded ominous. In fact, it persuaded Aunt Emily that by letting things drift for only five days she had already waited too long. She subsided into watchfulness. But when Dorothy was clearing the table and George Barnwell had rolled his napkin into its ring and Charity had stood up, already in flight, her mother said, “Are you going out again this evening? I had some things I wanted to talk over with you.”

“Can they wait till tomorrow? We have to go down to the village and make some telephone calls.”

“Telephone calls? To whom?”

“That’s part of the surprise. Won’t tomorrow do?”

“I suppose it might if I were sure I’d see you tomorrow.”

“You can be sure. At breakfast.”

“All right.”

She watched Charity go around the table, drop a kiss on her father’s feathery head, and take Sid’s arm. “Come on, Mr. Lang, sir. We’ll be late.” There they went, she in her dirndl and sweater, he in his wrinkled khakis.

Somewhat grimly, Aunt Emily took herself out onto the porch. She sat a long time in the dusk, knitting by ear, thinking and planning, annoyed by Charity’s lack of common sense. Such an airy dismissing of warnings—for she knew precisely what her mother wanted to talk to her about. Such total lack of realism, with her infatuated faith that people could do anything they wanted to if they only wanted it enough. With Sid, at least, Charity’s theory was sound. She could do anything she wanted with
him.
He had no better sense than she had.

Well, tomorrow’s encounter. She would begin by pointing out that her sister Margaret, with Molly and three children, was coming on Sunday, and would require the dormitory. Sid’s visit must therefore be terminated. That would bring on the promised announcement, which she would have to oppose. Then the fat would be in the fire—hurt, tears, protestations, anger, the whole rest of the summer with a sullen Charity moping around the place, unhappy and rebellious and embittered. Perhaps there would be the necessity of resisting her return to Cambridge, where she would be out of control. There would be the unpleasant duty of watching the mail—not to intercept it, she would not stoop to that, but to make sure that the break was clean.