Crossing to Safety (8 page)

“Poems will help with that. This is an English Department, after all.”

Sid holds his nose delicately with thumb and finger as if shutting out a bad smell. “Charity’s got a very practical head, a hell of a lot more practical than mine. Last year she made a study of all the ranking professors and associate professors—what they’d done to get promoted to tenure. The results were what you’d expect. A scholarly book is best—write
The Road to Xanadu
and you’re in. Next best is articles, but it takes a lot of them. She cites me DeSerres, who takes a single idea like perfectibility and lays out a whole string of thinkers and writers on that bed, one after the other. Jefferson on Perfectibility. Freneau on Perfectibility. Emerson on Perfectibility. Whitman on Perfectibility. You can practically do it out of the indexes to the collected works.”

“Don’t tell me Charity likes that bullshit better than poetry.”

“No. She just thinks I have to write it for a while. It’s like politics, she says. First you get elected, doing whatever you have to do; then you can vote your principles. Academics have it better than politicians because if you’re a congressman, say, you have to get re-elected every two years, but if you’re a teacher all you need to do is get promoted to associate professor and you’re as safe as a justice of the Supreme Court. They may never promote you from associate to full professor, but they can’t fire you.”

“Why is it so important to be safe?”

He must hear something scornful in my voice, because he looks at me sharply, starts to reply, changes his mind, and says something obviously different from what he has intended. “Charity’s family are all professors. She likes being part of a university. She wants us to get promoted, and stay.”

“Yeah,” I say. “All right, I can see that. But if I were in your shoes I might feel like utilizing the independence I’ve already got, rather than breaking my neck to get promoted into a kind I might not like so well.”

“But you aren’t in my shoes,” Sid says. It sounds like a mild rebuke, and I shut my mouth. But after a few seconds he adds, squinting my way, “Ask Charity about the fate of poets in this English Department. They’ve got just one, William Ellery, and he’s a pariah.”

“He’s got tenure.”

“Not because he’s a poet. Because he’s an Anglo-Saxon scholar.”

“I hate to think you’ll have to write articles about Floyd Dell on Perfectibility for six or seven years before you can write poetry again.”

“That’s about it.”

“Well, good luck,” I tell him. “Count on my reading you when tenure has brought you independence.”

Laughing, he shakes his head. Ahead of us Charity and Sally have climbed through a fence and started up a hill crowned with yellow trees. We follow, saving our wind for the climb.

When we arrive, our wives are clearing a space of limbs and nut hulls. We spread a blanket. Charity opens the basket and lays out fried chicken wrapped in wax paper, a wooden bowl of ready-mixed salad, French rolls already buttered, a jar of artichoke hearts, celery sticks, fruit, cookies, napkins, paper plates. And our Jonathan apples, to make us feel we have contributed. Sid and I lie on the ground and crack hickory nuts between rocks. The view is spreading, bronzed, conventionalized like a Grant Wood landscape. The air smells of cured grass, cured leaves, distance, the other sides of hills.

Charity looks up, as brilliant as a flash from a heliograph. “We’re ready.
Sid?
”

He rises promptly. His arm goes into the hamper and brings out a sodden sack. Inside is a wet towel with ice chips in it, and inside the ice chips is a magnum of champagne. (I have never seen one, but I am literary, I recognize it.) Abruptly he is manic, reviving the shouting conviviality of the night before. His excess leaves me faintly uncomfortable. “Celebration!” he cries. “The day of Jubilo!”

He untwists the wire, the cork explodes up into the hickory leaves, he shakes the bubbles off his hand. “I know it’s show-off to blow the cork. Experts do it with a discreet sigh of gas. Well, better overstimulated champagne than no champagne.”

We hold up our Dixie cups and he fills them. With the enormous bottle in one fist, he raises his cup with the other. “What an occasion! How marvelous to be in on it! We salute you at the beginning of a great career.”

“Wait,” I protest, and Sally says, “No, no, no! It’s
your
day, it’s your fourth anniversary. Here’s health and happiness forever and ever.”

Stalemate. We stand with our uplifted cups throwing bubbles above their rims, and our smiles are uncertain but our intentions honorable and unselfish. After a moment Charity saves us. “It’s
all
our day, yours and ours too. Here’s to all of us.”

Sitting on our blanket among twigs and yellow leaves and dusty blue asters, we sip what is probably the first champagne that either Sally or I ever drank, and are promptly refilled, and refilled again. In the circumstances, it doesn’t take much to exhilarate me. So I am caught in the wrong mood when Sid, looking down as if with distaste into his cup, repeats the toast with variations. “To all of us. May we all survive the departmental axe.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, somewhat raucously. “I’m cannon fodder, I’m a nine-month wonder. But if anybody’s in, you are.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Rousselot was inquiring delicately just the other day what I’m working on. By the time they vote in April or May you’ll have a bibliography as long as your arm, and I’ll have my little undergraduate poems.”

Our faces, I am sure, reflect our degrees of understanding of what is going on. Sally knows nothing about any poems, and is only curious and interested. I know about them but don’t believe they are as amateur as he suggests, or that Charity is really opposed to his writing them. Charity doesn’t know what Sid may have said to me but knows he must have said something. Her eyes flick from his face to mine and back to his.

Sitting cross-legged with the salad bowl in her lap, she makes a sudden, impatient face and bends far over the bowl and straightens up again. “Oh,
bosh,
Sid! Have some
confidence
in yourself ! You’re a splendid teacher, everybody says so. Go on being that. If they demand publications,
write
some. Just take it for granted you’re going to be promoted, and they won’t have the nerve not to.”

At me she smiles with all her vividness and urgency, a smile meant to tell me that my luck with the
Atlantic
has hit him, and she knows it, and knows I know it, and wants me to know that it is nothing serious. It’s not
your
fault, she seems to say. If he sounds discouraged it’s only because your letter started him thinking about
us.

Troubled that what started as a celebration has begun to sound tense, I hold out my Dixie cup for more champagne. “Let us be unignorable,” I propose.

“Exactly!”
says Charity. “You have to take your life by the throat and
shake
it.” She shakes a double handful of air, strangling it, and we all laugh. We sidle away from Sid’s anxiety and whatever it is between him and Charity. We fill our plates with chicken and salad and rolls, we eat with our eyes contentedly grazing on the countryside, in shade as temperate as the air of Eden, colored gold by hickory leaves. And then, as Charity rises to her knees to help us to more, she freezes, tilts her head listening, and makes a shushing motion with her free hand. “Oh, listen. Listen!”

A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are, a wavering V headed directly over our hilltop, quite low, beating southward down the central flyway and talking as they pass. We stay quiet, suspending our human conversation until their garrulity fades and their wavering lines are invisible in the sky.

They have passed over us like an eraser over a blackboard, wiping away whatever was there before they came.

“Oh, don’t you
love
them!” Charity says. “Sometimes when we stayed late in Vermont, or went up late for the color, we’d see and hear them like that, coming over Folsom Hill. Someday you’ve got to visit us there. We’ve got all
kinds
of room. How about next summer?”

“Next summer,” I tell her, “if they’ll let me, I’ll be teaching summer school, and maybe cleaning out steam tables at the hospital in the evenings, and driving a cab nights. Come spring we will have a little hostage to fortune.”

“Summer after next, then.”

“Summer after next I may be wearing out shovels for the WPA.”

“Pooh,” she says. “Sid’s right, by then you’ll be famous.
Please
plan on coming. You can write all day except for mealtimes and picnic times and swim times and walk times.”

Sally’s big eyes, liquid, shiny with champagne and feeling, touch mine, and she shakes her head as if in disbelief. The hickories move in the light wind, and a nut thumps down. “Don’t extend any invitations you don’t want accepted,” Sally says. “It’s dangerous to wave raw meat around tigers.”

“We never invite if we don’t mean it,” Sid says. He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe. “God, how marvelous that would be! That’s a standing invitation. Anytime you can, for as long as you can.”

In that fine place, in the ripened Indian summer weather, those two once again choose us. In circumstances where smaller spirits might let envy corrode liking, they declare their generous pleasure in our company and our good luck. What we felt last night when we fell into a laughing bearhug and fused our frosty breaths outside their door, we feel again on this placid hill. We have been invited into their lives, from which we will never be evicted, or evict ourselves.

But I have become aware of unexpected tensions in their relationship, and to my own surprise have begun to feel a little protective of a man whom only last evening I thought the luckiest and most enviable man alive.

Another afternoon. We are skating on Lake Monona, just off our snow-mounded wall. Silvery air, slatey sky, spidery clinging flakes of snow, red runny noses, a cold wind, laughter. January, probably; I have the feeling that Christmas has passed. The girls are both noticeably pregnant. Sally is being extremely cautious, for ice skating was not her most natural sport in Berkeley, and she is afraid of falling and doing harm to the child she carries.

Charity is so unapprehensive as to seem reckless. “If you’re going to fall, you’ll fall on your
bum,
” she says. “There’s nothing
there
to get hurt but you.”

Only a week or so ago, out on a country hill beyond Middleton, I watched her and the blue-blooded wife of a visiting Irish professor coasting on Flexible Flyers. The Irish lady bellyflopped like a ten-year-old. Charity at least had the sense to sit on the sled and steer with her feet, but she didn’t have the sense not to race. They came together down the hill, screeching. As they passed under a big oak they hit soft snow. Their runners dropped in, the sleds stopped, the ladies went skidding, the Irish woman on her stomach, Charity ponderously on her bum. “Jesus Crust,” the Irish lady said, or I think she said. Wiping snow off their faces, shaking it out of their mittens, beating it out of their clothes, laughing their heads off, they went plowing back up, dragging their sleds, for another run.

Now here we are, still advocates of the strenuous life and healthful exercise in the open air, out on Lake Monona on skates. This time cautious Sally has been persuaded to join in, though God knows why this seems safer than coasting. Here, iceboats sneak up silently behind you and pass with one up-reared runner skimming your head. There is even a little airplane that lands and takes off on the ice. You skate, believe me, with one eye over your shoulder, especially if you are on blades for the first time in your life, and most especially if you are pregnant, almost ready to pop your cocoon.

Charity’s eyes are snapping and her nose is red. She wipes it with the back of her red mitten. “It’s not so different from roller skating, only
teeterier.
Don’t lean back, lean forward. Just push off and let yourself
swoop.
” She swoops, heavy and graceful. Out farther, Sid is sprinting, cutting corners, braking with a shower of shaved ice when an iceboat cuts across his bows.

Meantime, I am limping around on the insides of my ankles. When I try to help Sally get started, I slide out from under myself and pull her down in a soft huddle on top of me. Obviously she needs better instruction than mine. Sid, observing, glides in, lifts her up with encouraging words, takes her left hand in his right, lays his left arm around her shoulders, fits her right arm around his waist. Tentative and floundering, she is skated away with, begins to feel the rhythm, begins to make cautious strokes. There they go in increasingly confident arcs, out away from the rougher inshore ice and onto the open lake. Watching and applauding, I pay insufficient attention to my own peril, and
bomp,
I go out from under myself again and bruise my tailbone on the ice.

I remember the gray, snow-spitting afternoon, the bite of cold wind on chin and cheeks and brows, the cold of feet cramped into too-small borrowed skate shoes, the throttled-down whistle and mutter of the plane landing behind me, the vision of a racing iceboat shearing away with one runner off the ice and the operator spread-eagled on the deck, and the sight of Sally and Sid leaning and stroking, and Charity gliding by, portly and exhilarated, encouraging me while I flounder flabby-ankled, and fall down, and get up, and fall down again.

But I remember even better the hour afterward in our basement, hot buttered rum and Sally’s cinnamon rolls still warm from the oven. Red faces, tingling skin, exuberant vitality, laughter, and for Sally and me the uncustomary pleasure of giving instead of taking.

There sit our two podded wives close together on the couch, whispering and intimate, two months away, rosy with the heat of indoors. Coming from the kitchen bringing the rum bottle and the teakettle for a fresh round of drinks, I see them there, and think how in those two women four hearts are beating, and it awes me.