Crossing to Safety (4 page)

3

One day the next week I came home about four. I came down the steps hoohooing, feeling that Sally needed a show of cheerfulness and a promise of news from the outside. Coming from bright afternoon into our cave, I stopped in the doorway, struck blind. “God, darling,” I said, “why do you sit in the dark? This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.”

Somebody laughed—a woman, not Sally. I found the light switch and revealed the two of them, Sally on the couch and the other in our not-too-easy chair, with a tea tray on the homemade coffee table (more boards and bricks) between them. They sat smiling at me. Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth, but it has a certain distance about it, it is under control, you can see her head going on working behind it. This other one, a tall young woman in a blue dress, had quite another kind. In the dim apartment she blazed. Her hair was drawn back in a bun, as if to clear her face for expression, and everything in the face smiled—lips, teeth, cheeks, eyes. I mean to say she had a most vivid and, I saw at once, a really beautiful face.

Astonishment. I stood blinking in the doorway. “Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t know we had company.”

“Ah, don’t call me
company
!” the visitor said. “I didn’t come
over
to be
company.
”

“You remember Charity Lang, Larry,” Sally said. “We met at the Rousselots’ tea.”

“Of course,” I said, and went in and shook her hand. “I couldn’t see when I came in. How are you?”

But I didn’t remember her at all. Even in the crowd at that stiff reception, how could I have missed her? She ought to have showed up like a burning lighthouse.

Her talk was as animated as her face. Every fourth word was underlined—she had the habit of feminine emphasis with a vengeance. (Later, when we diverged into different associations and we got letters from her, we discovered that her writing was the same way. You couldn’t read it except in her tone of voice.)

“Sid says you two have got to know each other at
school,
” she was saying. “And he brought home
Story Magazine
with your
story
in it. We read it aloud in bed. It’s splendid!”

My God. An audience. Just what I’ve been looking for. Pay attention to this delightful young woman, she is obviously somebody special. Her husband too, evidently. Sid Lang. Do I know him? With difficulty, while murmuring false modesty to his enthusiastic wife, I track him down in my mind: spectacled, sober-suited, fairhaired, soft-high-voiced, friendly, forgettable, undistinguished by song, plumage, or nesting habits from a dozen others. At least not one of the snooty ones, and obviously a man to cultivate. I excuse him for not having put himself more forcefully forward. Perhaps, perceiving me to be a writer of power and promise, he was diffident.

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Was our friendship for the Langs born out of simple gratitude to this woman who had the kindness to call on a strange young wife stuck in a basement without occupation or friends? Was I that avid for praise, to feel so warm toward them both because they professed to like my story? Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me? Or did I (I hope I did) like Charity Lang on sight because she was what she was, open, friendly, frank, a little ribald as it turned out, energetic, interested, as full of vitality as her smile was full of light?

Between the taking of a cinnamon toast and tea she let drop bits of information that my mind scurried to gather up and plaster against the wall for future use, like a Bengali woman gathering wet cow dung for fuel. She came from Cambridge. Her father was a professor of religious history at Harvard. She had gone to Smith. She and her husband had met while he was a graduate student at Harvard and she, after graduation, was marking time working as a docent in the Fogg Museum.

She could not have disclosed these facts to a more susceptible ear than mine. Despite my disillusion with some of my bow-tied colleagues, I was ready in 1937 to believe that the Harvard man was the pinnacle of a certain kind of human development, emancipated by the largeness of his tradition and by the selective processes that had placed him in it from the crudeness of lesser places. He had looked on Kittredge bare, he had been where John Livingston Lowes loved and sung, he had read in the enchanted stacks of Widener and walked in thoughtful conversation along the Charles. Certain eastern women’s colleges, in their separate but not quite equal way, produced female variants of the same superior breed.

Charity was clearly one of these. Born to Harvard, she had gone to Smith and returned to marry Harvard. She had grown up in contact with the beauty and the chivalry of Cambridge. She, and presumably her husband as well, represented the cultivation, good manners, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and brightness of mind and dedication to high thinking that were the goals of outsiders like me, dazzled western barbarians aspiring to Rome. Mixed with my liking was, I am sure, an almost equal deference, a respect too sincere to be tainted with envy.

And here was this Harvard/Smith woman obviously enjoying cinnamon toast and Lipton’s Orange Pekoe in our basement, and she and her Harvard husband professed to admire a story by Larry Morgan, lately from Berkeley, California, and before that from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Further information: The Langs had two sons, the younger, Nick, a baby barely a year old; the older, aged three, named George Barnwell after Charity’s father and known as Barney. Charity grumbled cheerfully about him. She thought he must have been prenatally influenced. He had been conceived on an expedition into the Sahara, and he had the exact character, including the stubbornness, the evil eye, and the distressing voice, of a baggage camel.

Wait a minute, we said. The
Sahara
? You’re kidding.

But she wasn’t. When they decided to get married, Sid dropped out of graduate school for a semester. They had been married in Paris, at the house of her uncle. . . .

Ah, said Sally, it must be nice to have relatives who live in Paris!

“Well, they
don’t
any more,” Charity said. “Roosevelt replaced him—
fired
him, I guess you’d have to say.”

Roosevelt did? Fired him from what? What did he do?

I thought Charity blushed, and in the circumstances I thought blushing was another evidence of the civilized sensibility and modesty of her kind. It had just struck her how something that she took for granted would sound to our ears. “He didn’t do anything. Nothing to get him fired. It was just that the
government
had changed. He was Ambassador to France.”

Oh.

“And then we took this long wedding trip,” Charity said. “Down through France and Spain to Italy, Greece, the Middle East, Jerusalem, Egypt. We were quite mad, we wanted to see
everything.
I’d gone to school in France and Switzerland, but Sid had never been abroad, not once. We wound up in North Africa, Algeria, where we rented camels and went off into the desert for three weeks.”

She said it breathlessly, slurring the gorgeous details, obviously wanting to get out of the appearance of place-dropping she had got herself into. But good Lord, ambassador uncles and three-month wedding trips and expeditions into the Sahara, those meant not only family distinction, but amounts of money unlikely in our times and inconceivable from our sparse cellar.

“What makes you think the camels marked Barney?” I asked, just to keep the revelations flowing. “Has he got a hump, or a cleft palate, or what?”

“Oh no,
nothing
like that,” Charity said, almost crowed, delighted and hyperbolic. “He’s quite beautiful, really. But he’s got their grumpy
disposition.
Their grumpy disposition and their inch-long eyelashes.” Her laugh was as clear and uninhibited as everything else about her. “Did you notice how I was avoiding Dr. Rousselot the other day? You know how he looks, with those sad, long cheeks?” She pulled her face down with her fingertips. “I didn’t dare glance at him, even, because I’m pregnant again, and I had this
horrible
feeling that if I let my eyes even touch him, this new one would look like
him.
”

“Pregnant?” Sally said. “You too? When? When is it due?”

“Not till March. And are
you
? When’s yours?”

“The same time!”

That ended the revelations about the rich, cultivated, and romantic background of Charity Lang. She and Sally fell on each other. You never saw two more delighted people. If they had been twins separated in infancy, and now revealed to one another by some birthmark or other perepetia, they couldn’t have been more exhilarated. “It’ll be a race!” Charity said. “Let’s keep notes, and compare. Who’s your obstetrician?”

“I haven’t got one yet. Is yours a good one?”

A big ringing laugh, as if parturition, which sometimes brought the clammy sweat of apprehension to Sally and me, were the most fun since Run Sheep Run. “I guess so,” Charity said. “I really don’t know him very well. He’s only interested in my
uterus.
”

Sally looked a little daunted. “Well,” she said, “I hope he’ll like mine.”

I made to rise. “Excuse me,” I said. “I believe the only wholesome thing is to blush a deep crimson and leave the room.”

Hoo hoo, ha ha. We filled the basement with our laughter and our discovered common concern. Charity wrote the name of her doctor in a large scrawl on a three-by-five card (she kept a pack of them in her purse). Then she snapped the purse shut and held it on her lap as if about to spring up and go. But she wasn’t going, not yet. In a lamenting voice, she cried, “Look what I’ve done! I came over to get to know
you,
and all we’ve done is talk about Sid and
me.
I want to know all about you. You’re both from California. Tell me about it. What did you
do
there? How did you meet?”

Sally and I looked at each other and laughed. “Not on a camel expedition.”

“Ah, but in the West you’ve got things every bit as good. Those big open spaces, and all that freedom and opportunity and sense of
youth,
and the
freshness
of everything. I wish I’d grown up there instead of in stuffy Cambridge.”

“With permission,” I said, “you’re out of your mind. The Berkeley English Department is Harvard and water.”

“It would have been fine if we’d had any money,” Sally said. “Neither of us did. Do.”

“Were you both students? How
did
you meet?”

“In the library,” Sally said. “I had a part-time job charging out books in graduate student carrels. I noticed him because he was always there, and every day there’d be about twenty new books to be charged, and twenty old ones to be returned to the stacks. I thought anybody that industrious was bound to get somewhere, so I married him.”

Charity was very interested, like someone peeking through a microscope at a bunch of paramecia. Fascinating, all those cilia and pulsating vacuoles. Her smile was irresistible; you
had
to smile back. She said to me, “I gather you had nothing to do with it.”

“A willing victim,” I said. “I kept seeing this gorgeous girl with big Greek eyes padding around with her charge slips and keeping me honest with the desk. When she tore up an overdue notice, I knew she was the one.”

“You’re right about the eyes,” Charity said, and turned her attention on Sally. “They’re the first thing I noticed about you at the Rousselots’.
Are
you Greek?”

“My mother was.”

“Tell me about her. Tell me about
both
your families.”

I could see Sally becoming diffident. “We haven’t any. They’re all dead.”

“
All?
Both sides?”

Defensive on the couch, Sally shrugged a quick little shrug and threw her hands up and let them fall in her lap. “Everybody close. My mother was a singer. She died when I was twelve. I was brought up by my American aunt and uncle. He’s dead now, and she’s in a home.”

“Oh, my goodness,” Charity said, and stared from Sally to me and back. “So you had no help from
anyone.
You had to do it all alone. How did you manage?”

If Sally was getting diffident, I was getting edgy. Interest is one thing, prying is another. I have never welcomed dissections of my insides. I waved an airy hand. “There are all sorts of ways. You give placement exams. You read papers for professors. You help some Dr. Plush on a six-thousand-dollar salary make his textbooks. You teach sections of Dumbbell English. You work in the library for two bits an hour.”

“But when did you study?”

Sally blurted out a laugh. “All the time!”

“Did you do that too, work your way and finish your degree?”

“No,” I said. “Like a dumb Greek peasant she hitched herself to the plow. She gave up her degree to support us. As soon as this baby is born and weaned you’ll see me herding her down State Street headed for the Graduate Studies office.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that much of a do,” Sally said. “I wasn’t close to finishing. Anyway, I was in Classics, and who studies Classics anymore? I couldn’t have got a job if I’d finished my degree. Larry was obviously the one.”

Charity had a fine narrow head that nodded and turned on her neck like a flower on its stalk. I had seen that comparison in poetry; I had never seen a person who suggested it, and I found it fascinating. Her smile came and went. I could see her mind pouncing on things and letting them go.

“The short and simple annals of the poor,” I said fatuously.

“Well,” she said, “
I
think it’s admirable. It’s not as if you’d been run through the assembly line, like some of us, having fenders and
headlights
bolted on. You’ve done it yourselves.”

Sally said, with a quick, shy, proud glance at me, “I’m glad you think he’s admirable, because I do too. He used to amaze me, how he’d be there in that carrel day after day and night after night. I never came that he wasn’t there. At first I thought he was some kind of grind. Then I found out. . . .”