Crossing to Safety (19 page)

Ashamed and scared, but not scared enough to admit I wasn’t fit to drive, I went on. I got lost, unable to follow the inadequate signs and unable to read the map by the dim cowl light. At a crossroad, out in front of the headlights, I determined where I was. Glory be, only seven miles to Battell Pond.

In the village, at nearly eleven o’clock, I couldn’t tell which of two streets to follow and had to knock on the door of the only lighted house. A man in his undershirt told me to go straight on one mile. I went on, I found the Ellis mailbox among others on a wagon wheel, I went on another two hundred yards to other mailboxes on a plank. I found an opening in the trees, I turned left. There were three cars in the clearing, one of them the Lang station wagon. I pulled up and let the Ford die and turned off the lights.

Now where? I was in black woods, the sky shut off, the darkness so total I couldn’t see my hands. There was a soft sound of wind up above, in the tops of the trees. Turning on the lights again, I discovered railed steps, paved with slates, leading down. Once I turned off the lights I had to grope to where my retinal memory told me the steps were, and then feel my way down them to level ground. A building loomed up on the left, blacker than the blackness around. With one hand on the wall I followed it to a corner, where a weak bloom of light fell from a window across a porch. Inside I could see a big high-ceilinged room, a single lighted floor lamp, shapes of furniture, no people. Listening, I thought I heard voices from around the next corner.

I felt my way up two steps onto the wooden planking of the porch, and past the window to another corner, and from there, my eyes adjusted by now, I saw the three heads in three chairs under the diffused light from inside.

Feet hit wood, somebody stood up. “Who’s there?” Sid’s voice said. “Larry, is it you, finally? Hello?”

I felt like laughing crazily. I could have rolled on the porch in my frenzy of pleasure. In my best Latin, for my classicist wife, I said the password we had used in Berkeley when she lived in a garage apartment on Arch Street and I used to come around late, unable to study any longer and needing grace.

“Cave,”
I croaked.
“Cave adsum.”
And then for the Langs, who might not understand Latin, “Beware, I am here.”

Insert a blurred, out-of-focus interval. I suppose we talked a while. I imagine that Sally and I sat close together and held hands. I am sure Sid and Charity must have urged hospitality on me—sherry? a sandwich? a piece of cake? a cup of Ovaltine?—and I am sure I was too groggy and happy to think I needed any of those. I had performed my total obligation and achieved my full desire just by getting there. But within minutes I would have begun to fade, and their consideration would have taken over.

“You must be absolutely dead,” Charity would have said. “Off to bed, now. We can talk all day tomorrow. We can talk for three weeks.”

She would have pressed into our hands two of the flashlights she kept by the front door for use by guests who never remembered that this was
country,
without streetlights. We would have gone stumbling, with our arms around one another, trying to walk double in a single-file path, through fifty yards of black woods to the guest house. We would have gone to bed at once and wrapped each other tightly, intending more than I, at least, could perform. And I would have gone to sleep before I could perform it.

Mumblings. Whispers. Someone was standing by the bed and looking down at me with concern. Whoever it was took my condition more seriously than I did, and I wanted to say something humorous and reassuring, but my tongue was sluggish, and couldn’t find the words.

I opened my eyes and looked toward light and saw Sally, in her robe, standing in the open door talking in low tones to someone— the nurse girl, I decided. Sally was furred with morning. The light penetrated her thin robe and showed her legs. She passed Lang in her basket out the door, the whisper of her voice stopped, the girl’s footsteps went along the porch and down three hard steps into soundless earth. Then Sally turned and found me watching.

“Ah! You’re awake!”

“I hope so. What time is it?”

“Only eight-thirty. I thought you’d sleep longer. Don’t you want to?”

“No. Come here.”

She came, smiling, soft-slipper-footed on the bare wooden floor.

“Climb in.”

A moment’s hesitation, a glance at the windows, and then she opened and shed her robe. I watched the nightgown lift over her head to reveal her; young, soft, brown, restored from what child-bearing had done to her. In a moment I had her locked against me, my face between her breasts, and I was saying into the warmth of her skin, “You’re real. Oh, goddamn, you’re real! Let’s not do that ever again. Two months are too long. Two
days
are too long!”

Thus to awaken in Paradise. We hadn’t earned it, we didn’t deserve it, we didn’t belong there, it wouldn’t last. But how wonderful to have even a taste. I felt like the grubby child in Katherine Mansfield’s story when she got a glimpse of the rich girl’s dollhouse before being hustled away.
I seen the little lamp.

All days should begin as that one did. All life should be like the three weeks that followed.

12

Sally is right about my liking ruts. In graduate school, with more to be done than there were hours to do it in, with obligations and deadlines to meet, with classes to take or teach, papers to write or read, exams to prepare and proctor, meetings to attend, books to locate, charge out, and read—with all that haunted routine of preparation and testing, I used to dream, perhaps beguiled by the examples of Sir Walter Raleigh and Jawaharlal Nehru, of the pleasures of solitary confinement. It seemed to me that nothing could do as much for a man as a good long jail sentence.

To have all of one’s physical needs taken care of by specially appointed assistants; to be marched to and from meals with neither choice nor cooking, payment nor dishwashing, on one’s mind; to be sent at stipulated times to the yard for exercise; to have whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, of freedom from interruption, with only the passing and repassing of a guard’s steps in the corridor to assure and emphasize it; to hear the clang of opening and closing doors down the cellblock and know that one needn’t be concerned, one still had months to serve—who could not write the history of the world under such circumstances? Who could not, in a well-insulated but austerely padded cell, think all the high thoughts, read all the great books, perhaps even write one or two?

If I had known it, I
was
in jail then, my own jail, and only when Sally joined me and made my confinement unsolitary did I become aware of how completely I had shut myself in. Little by little she coaxed me out, but I came cautiously, not to expose my flanks, and my vision of the ideal isolation never changed.

Now this Vermont lake. Thanks to Charity, its routines were as fixed as those of Alcatraz, but it was a long way from being a maximum-security prison. It organized time, including free time. Like her mother, Charity could not bear randomness or lack of purpose. If your purpose was work, then arrange to do it. If it was play, set aside the time. Don’t, as I heard her tell Barney once during his moody adolescence, don’t just sit and
gawp.

I found the days as Sally had described them. We did our hours of constructive work, all of us, from eight to eleven-thirty: Sid in his study, Sally and Charity with their babies and house plans and shopping and village volunteerism, I in the moving shade of the treetops on the guest-house porch, the cook in her kitchen, the nurse girl in the nursery, and God, presumably, in His Heaven.

At eleven-thirty, when the locomotive bell on the porch of the Big House clanged, we gathered for swimming, sunning, and conversation on the dock or the elephant rocks. Suddenly (Charity’s planning again) we were not individuals or couples, but families, or one big family—naked babies being dipped, shrieking; Barney stretching out in knee-deep water and crying at us to watch him swim, with one foot on the bottom; Nicky sitting in the shallows and splashing; Sally, Charity, and the nurse girl wading around, helping. Sid and I spent several of those swimming periods clearing the bottom of stones and building a breakwater of them to catch sand and create more beach for the children. That was only his noon-hour project. He had dozens of others for other hours when he was released from scholarship.

After lunch we retired from one another, the children were put down, we either napped or read. I had never taken an afternoon nap in my life, but I took a few there, inadvertently falling asleep over a book. About three the place came alive again, I heard chopping or pounding or sawing and went out to find Sid repairing the dock or clearing paths or replacing a rotted porch rail or working on the woodpile.

At five-thirty another swim, at six-thirty sherry on the porch, at seven dinner, usually with one or another of the Distinctions who walked the roads of that village as unassuming as sparrows.

No bread-and-butter family atmosphere here. The children were all fed in the kitchen and were spirited upstairs before we came in from the porch. No greasy goodnight kisses, no clinging and whining to stay up. The bell rang and they were gone. I suppose Charity checked on them before she went to bed, but they were never allowed to interrupt dinner, which was social and intellectual and adults-only.

The talk was always intense, full of argument and laughter. Charity’s heightened voice was always egging it on. Sid, presiding in his faded work clothes (he spent as much at Sears, Roebuck trying to look like a farmer as some people spend at Brooks Brothers), would start some intellectual hare and chase it through one or two fields and then subside when Charity cried, “Wait. Wait! Let’s hear what
Larry
thinks.” Or Lyle. Or Uncle Richard. Or Daddy. Or some rosy-cheeked Nobel laureate in medicine or chemistry. Or the headmaster of some academy that I had always associated with the fortunate salt of the earth.

It seemed we all outranked our host. Though he loved discussion and in other circumstances would pursue an argument for hours, at table he had the modest function of the rabbit who sets a fast pace for the first quarter or half so that others may run their four-minute miles. We ran a lot of them, we ran them every evening.

A happy, orderly, lively corner of Eden, as hushed as a hospital at quiet times, jumping with activity as soon as the social bell sounded. The evening usually ended, after the guests had gone, with a walk up and down the road, or a midnight canoe ride on the black lake under a big starry dome of sky, or a late swim as invigorating as shock treatment.

In those late hours when we were most a foursome, it was Charity who was quiet and Sid who expanded. He loved to exercise his muscles, he loved the night sky and the intimacy of night stillness. We sang a good deal, walking or canoeing, because singing was what we had most to say. Charity did not pitch those songs as she did in company. She let Sally do it, deferring to Sally’s musical taste and knowledge. It evened things, somehow, that Charity had no gift that way. It let Sally give something in exchange for all we took.

When we had walked a couple of miles, or found the dock and hauled the canoe out and turned it over, we said goodnight and separated, probing the woods with our flashlights in different directions to our separate cottages. Two Adams and two Eves, an improvement on God’s plan, and one I recommend to Him next time He makes a world.

He would also do well to surround His doubled first family with a web of relatives. Neither Sally nor I had any experience with families. Neither of us had grandparents, parents, sisters, or brothers. If we had cousins, they were strangers, mine scattered through the West and Midwest, hers in Greece.

Here, relatives swarmed like termites. The first time we went along on a Folsom Hill picnic, I thought Charity must have invited half the village. But no, they were all Langs and Ellises, mostly Ellises. They perched on logs and stones, sprawled on blankets, hid and raced with the kids playing Prisoner’s Base or Kick the Can. What confidence they had! How fully they belonged! Roles developed without prompting. Charity, Comfort, and Sally (by now an honorary Ellis) presided over the picnic hampers; Sid over the barbecue; Lyle and I over the firewood; Aunt Emily, Aunt Heather, and the hired girls over the smaller children; Uncle Dwight over the sherry; and George Barnwell over the children’s game, blinking nearsightedly in the wrong directions, cheerfully faking an incompetence double his natural gift, while grandchildren and second cousins twice-removed stole home on him, and the hilltop wind blew his wispy white hair on end.

Indispensable to those picnics was the Marmon, vintage 1931, once Sid’s father’s car, that Charity had rescued from sale and put to humble family use when Sid’s mother bought something less grand. It was a touring car, with a top that now was permanently furled, and it had plate-glass wind wings, a plate-glass partition to separate the driver from the quality, seats that would hold ten or twelve in a pinch, and running boards that would take six more. Its snout was long and sleek, and it had extended bumpers that would accommodate still more, and an engine that from the look of the hood must have been twelve in line. That was a triumphal chariot. When fully loaded you couldn’t see it for bodies, and once at the picnic site it proved itself bottomless, disgorging hampers, boxes, bags, blankets, grills, and a dozen flashlights.

When the games were over, there was eating—steaks, naturally. When the eating was over, there was singing around the fire. Light hung a long time in the sky, but the dusk edged upward and eventually crowded us all into a ring. The marshmallows ran out, the smaller children huddled in blankets or snuggled in against their parents’ knees, the fire shone red in a ring of eyes. Everybody sang, whether he could sing or not—Charity saw to that. But there were solos too. “Sid, do ‘Barbara Allen.’ ” “No, you know, the one about ‘Go, little boat, like a bird on the wing, over the sea to Skye.’ ” “No, ‘Lord Randall.’ ”

He had a fine, true, plaintive voice, exactly right for sad ballads, and he knew a lot of them. Their lugubrious tragedies ticked themselves out, a notch at a time, like the wooden wheels of a Seth Thomas clock. Between songs figures rose and threw wood on the fire and blotted part of the ring with their shadows, and set off showers of sparks. Sally was made to sing—she was an instant success. Even I had to sing, something hoarse and western to impress these New Englanders with the roughness of a man with the bark on: “Blood on the Saddle,” maybe, or “Strawberry Roan,” or “I Shall Be an Old Bum, Loved but Unrespected.”

That tribe whose size and energy amazed us, amazed us equally with their courtesy. Happily, eagerly, they expanded their circle and let us in. Professors, diplomats, editors, bureaucrats, brokers, missionaries, biologists, students, they had been most places in the world and loved no place as they loved Battell Pond. Their loyalties were neither national nor regional nor political nor religious, but tribal.

Over all that tribe, Aunt Emily was matriarch. Daughters and sons never left, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law were absorbed and naturalized and weaned away from whatever loyalties they had once had. Children were incorporated as they arrived, widows held full membership for life. Sally and I too, as if we had married into the clan.

We put Wisconsin and its failure behind us, we forgot to worry about the future. When they asked us what we did, we said that I was working on my next book. My next book. What an ego-inflating phrase. It made the future sound not uncertain and scary, but possible, and even, after a slight necessary delay, assured.

I have difficulty in recognizing those hopeful innocents as ourselves. What justification did Sally have for her faith in me? What justification did I have for faith in myself ? Why did all those Ellises and Langs, down to the remotest cousin, take us at our declared value—or more accurately, at the value that Sid and Charity declared for us?

I suppose I know. To them we were no very special phenomenon— a young couple on their way up, just starting out. That family expected young people to be reasonably attractive socially, and gifted in some way. They had bred so many kinds of competence and so many examples of distinction that mediocrity would have surprised them more than accomplishment did. And they rather liked the fact that like Lyle Lister we came from nowhere. We corroborated some transcendental faith of theirs that the oversoul roof leaked on all alike.

Perhaps also, in some small way, I was Cinderella to them, as I was to myself. No matter how cold the ashes or grubby the household chores, I lived by the faith that when the time came, the glass slipper would fit my little foot, and that when I needed her the Fairy Godmother would pull up in her pumpkin coach.

She didn’t even need to pull up. She lived there. In the line of succession to be chief matriarch, already accustomed to manage everybody’s affairs whether asked or not, Charity dealt with our future both imaginatively and practically, along with all the other items on her daily agenda, while sitting in bed with her notebook doing her constructive daydreaming.

Her method exploited what Sally and I, in our nonentity and unawareness, had until then known nothing about: connections. Specifically, Uncle Richard, when he came up from Boston for the weekend and was ordered over to dinner along with Aunt Emily and George Barnwell.

He had been primed to ask about my book, and courteously did so. He wondered if I had a copy of the manuscript that he could read. I said I would be honored, but Harcourt Brace was publishing it, and I didn’t suppose he’d want to spend his time for nothing. His eyebrows went up. Nothing? He
liked
reading good books, he had so many opportunities to read bad ones, and Charity had assured him that mine was a good one. Did I have a copy? I did. I also had the galleys, which had come the day before. Fine. Could he borrow them for a day before I sent them back?

Very flattering. He had Airedale eyebrows and a long, disciplined face like a horse on parade, and when he looked straight at you, which was most of the time, he turned out to have Aunt Emily’s gimlety brown eyes. He said he understood that I was into a second novel. How did that go? I told him: slow and hard. Good, he said. Hard writing makes easy reading.

The cook came to the windows that looked onto the porch and said to Charity that dinner was ready. Charity rose and shooed us all in. “There’s a spinach soufflé and it
won’t wait.
”

Even the seating at table was conspiratorial, as Sally pointed out to me later—she next to Uncle Richard, to soften him up, and I across from him, on Charity’s right, in the best position for talking to him. As I might have expected if I had been as sharp as writers are supposed to be, Sid started an intellectual hare calculated to get Uncle Richard running. He challenged Uncle Richard to justify a big best seller, a drugstore-lending-library romance, that he had just published.

“Didn’t you betray us?” Sid said. “Just for a handful of silver, didn’t you let down all those readers who expect Phoenix Books to publish only books of quality? Because of my faith in you, I bought the thing. It’s a cream puff.”

Uncle Richard dropped his long head and looked at Sid through the tops of his bifocals. “You too?”