Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
And along the top of the bench the shelf containing capped and labeled mason jars: nails graded by size and type, wood screws likewise, stove bolts, rivets, brads, tacks, staples. Below the bench, on the plank that was its central brace, a row of two-pound coffee cans, also labeled: Switches. Plugs. Outlets. Electrical Cord.
“See?” Hallie said, as if she had brought me there to prove something. “Everything but ‘string too short to save.’ Was he this way when you first knew him? Did he save things in the refrigerator— saucers of leftover rice, and half a baked potato, and a little rhubarb sauce, and two or three asparagus spears? It drives Mom wild.”
The light in the shop was dusty and cool, the sort of light the past always affects. “Why should he get miserly?” I asked. “Does he think he has to be penurious because she’s extravagant? Is he scared of being part of a three-generation pilgrimage from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves?”
“It isn’t money,” Hallie said. “He never tries to make her economize. She thinks she’s contemptuous of luxuries and comforts, and she is, sort of, but when she wants anything she’ll throw money around in a way to scare you. He never complains. He’s always been generous.”
“Nobody knows that better than we do.”
Her eyes on my face, she hesitated. “If either of them is contemptuous of money, he is. It’s just . . . I don’t know whose side you see it from.”
“Are there sides? Is there an it?”
“I only meant . . . I don’t know. Neither one of them could get along without the other. He needs her to manage him and she needs him to manage. I just wish it was more equal. She’s always been too strong for him. She does everything she wants to do, she’s got the family and a hundred different causes. She flits from socialism to Quakerism, and Quakerism to psychology, and psychology to women’s lib, and meanwhile he gets to do what she lets him do. And they both seem to be disappointed. Also, now that she’s dying, she almost seems to find him in the road. She’s got these notions of how he should take it stoically, and he’s so torn up he can’t, and that upsets her.”
“It’s not easy for either of them.”
“No,” Hallie said discontentedly. “But I wish he’d get up some gumption and make her behave. She’s the sick one. She does herself harm. I wish he’d assert himself more.”
That sounded like an attitude I had heard expressed before, years before.
“This shop is his security blanket,” Hallie said. Something like resentment had heightened her color, as the heat of argument used to heighten her mother’s. “Look at it. Did you ever see it messed up—shavings lying around, brushes in the paint pail, tools scattered, the way it would be if something important were going on in it? I never did. He keeps it like a hospital lab. He’s always either cleaning something up or sharpening something—pencils, tools, whatever he can find that needs it. Last week I came in—you won’t believe this—I came in and found him straightening used nails on the anvil and sorting them into jars. If there’s ever an iron shortage, we’re ready.”
“That’s sad,” I said.
“Of course it’s sad.” Her laugh was a pained, incredulous bark. She troubled me. Obviously she troubled herself.
I said, “Puttering can be a comfort. It goes with rumination, and he’s a ruminator. He should have been a literate gentleman farmer with a telescope in his backyard, and a big library, and all kinds of time to think.”
“A rustic Newton?” she flashed. “Where’s his Principia?”
There was something so close to contempt in her voice that she made me mad. “Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals?” I said. “We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.”
I was too sharp. She was upset enough without my scolding her. The color got deeper in her cheeks, and she made an unhappy, apologetic mouth. “I know. I sound like Mom. But it does bother me that he never gets past preparing. Preparing has been his life work. He prepares, and then he cleans up.”
Trapped flies buzzed at the windows. Over Hallie’s shoulder I could see, through the door that led to the lean-to study, the desk with the short shelf of books above it.
“Hey!” Moe was calling from outside. “Have you gone to sleep in there?”
Hallie turned her head as if to call back, but instead said to me, “Do you think he could have been a poet if she’d let him?”
I spread my hands. “A poet is somebody who has written a poem. He’s written quite a few. Some of them aren’t much good, your mother’s right. He’s too respectful of past poets, his head is full of echoes, the longer he teaches, the more his poems sound like Matthew Arnold. But yes, he’s a poet. I remember one he published in Poetry, years ago. He showed me half a dozen letters he’d got about it. People said they’d been delighted and enriched by this simple little poem about how certain jeweled beetles live and make unnoticed love down among the club moss.”
“The kind of letters you get all the time.”
Again she made me mad. The women in that family are too judgmental. Even with his life getting on into late afternoon, they always have something other, or better, or more distinguished, that they want him to be, when all he wants to do is live quietly down in the club moss. The point, I felt like saying, was not a comparison between my relative success and his relative failure. The point was the unsatisfied hunger in him. No wonder he wrote a poem to a student who admired him.
Hallie made again her shrugging, apologetic gesture. “You knew Dartmouth gave him its Distinguished Teacher award last year, and finally made him a full professor.”
“No. Why wouldn’t they write us about that? That’s wonderful. I hope he was pleased. I hope she was.”
Her look was curiously evasive. “I guess he was. Sure he was. Mom . . . well, you know her. Maybe it was too late. She liked the award, and was glad for him, but she said being promoted just before retirement was a little like charity, a sort of booby prize.”
“Good God!”
“I don’t think she meant to be deflating. Just realistic. Aunt Comfort says she’s never got over Wisconsin. She was just desolated, she broke down and had to go to a sanatorium for two months.”
“I remember.”
“Do you remember that great house? Did you ever see it?”
“Once, when I was bringing Sally home from Warm Springs. It wasn’t quite finished yet, but it was a great house.”
“Mom won’t talk about it. I think I remember it a little—the stairway. But probably I don’t, we left when I was three. Once when I looked for pictures of it in the album I found that Mom had torn them all out. ‘It’s dead,’ she told me. ‘It’s gone. Forget it.’ What was it, Larry? Just not enough publications? He’s a better teacher than almost anybody I had in college. He can make books very important and exciting. I’ve sat in his classes.”
“He was unlucky,” I said. “He came up for tenure just when the war was emptying all the men out of the colleges, and the colleges were cutting back.”
“I suppose,” she said vaguely and discontentedly, as if the subject both bored and irritated her. “All I know I got from Aunt Comfort. She says Dad would have gone into the army himself, or into the OWI the way you did, though with four kids he wouldn’t have had to. But Mom was in her Quaker-Pacifist phase, and all broken up besides, and she wouldn’t even let him take a war job. So they came up here and just vegetated for three years. It was great for us kids, but it must have been like Siberian exile for both of them.”
“Once it would have been just what he wanted.”
“What he did mainly was work for farmers who couldn’t get help.”
“A war job.”
“She thought of it as a community job. She’s always been great for community.”
Her eyes were very clear in the whites, the irises bachelor-button blue—beautiful eyes. I realized that they were Sid’s, without glasses and in a woman’s face.
“Only a couple of times. Sally wasn’t very mobile, and the war made getting around tough enough, even if you didn’t have her problems.”
“But you wrote to each other.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Were they miserable? Did they complain?”
“Not a bit. They made a game out of wartime shortages and hardships. They got into the village in ways they never had. If they could have forgotten Wisconsin they’d have had the time of their lives.”
“But then you saved them by getting him on at Dartmouth.”
“I did that with fear and trembling. I wasn’t sure he should even apply for that job. It put him right back where we’d both been in Madison.”
“Mom thinks you did him the greatest favor. They both do.”
“I hope I did.”
Steps thumped on the porch, and Moe appeared in the doorway. “I hate to hustle anybody, but if one of us doesn’t drop a word on Clara, we’ll eat about three. Shall I go get her started?”
“I’ll come right now,” she said, and to me, “Have you seen it?”
I hadn’t quite. “Could I look in the study for a minute? You go ahead, I’ll be right along.”
She left. Moe worked his eyebrows at me and followed her.
The study was as neat as the shop. On the desk were the portable typewriter with its lid on, a squared stack of yellow pads, a Japanese jar full of sharpened pencils. Above the desk were the books. I read their titles in the gray light: The Oxford Universal Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, the ditto to American literature, Bartlett’s Quotations, The Golden Bough, a foot or so of bird, flower, tree, and fern books. One book was backwards in the shelf, its spine turned inward. When I put it straight I saw that it was a rhyming dictionary. Imagining him jamming it hurriedly out of sight when he heard footsteps, I was ashamed for him. After a minute I turned it back the way he had left it.
2
To travel from Warm Springs to Cambridge by way of Madison was about like going to Dallas by way of Seattle and Green Bay, but that’s what we did—because they would have it that way, because Charity wanted to give Sally a spell of care and affection after the long ordeal of therapy, because she wanted to check out Mrs. Fellowes and see if I had picked somebody suitable to look after Sally. She did not trust my judgment in a lot of things. And anyway, we had to pick up Lang, whom we had not seen since September, a millennium ago.
The new house, in March, still smelled of paint and plaster. The yard under its thawing snowbanks was littered with scraps of lumber and Sheetrock and tin and black flaps of building paper. The allée that Charity planned, a long vista through woods to a far glimpse of lake, had been cleared, and rows of bare sapling poplars planted along its edges. We could sit in the overwarm living room, behind a wall of double-paned windows, and look at the view with the eye of imagination. In a playpen in a corner of the living room a golden retriever with eight puppies dozed while we looked. Charity was noticeably pregnant. Barney and Nicky had discovered the sliding properties of the curving banister, and chased each other up and down.
It was an anniversary, or nearly one. Lang and David had a joint first-birthday party, skewed a few days to take advantage of the reunion. Lots of photographs with flash. Lots of awed talk about how much had happened since that night on Morrison Street when the letter came from Harcourt and our whole ball of string had begun to unravel. In the rush of events I had hardly noticed my book. It was out. It had had some pleasant reviews. It had sold about what Uncle Richard had guessed it would. It had solved none of our problems.
But at least one thing was settled: I was now an editor at Phoenix Books, at a salary nearly twice what Wisconsin had paid me, and we had an apartment waiting for us on Trowbridge Street in Cambridge. We decided that Charity was right, it was better to look forward, not back. I suppose her pregnancy did that to her—you have to look ahead if you’re pregnant, I would guess. But also she had not relinquished one detail of her vision of Sid’s future in the department. She had been assured by Mrs. Rousselot that Professor Rousselot thought the world of Sid, thought him the most dependable of the younger men. Reports on his teaching were full of praise. He served on a lot of committees. Charity looked down that road and it was as clear to her as the unfinished view outside her window. Soon spring would thaw the drifts and reveal the disorder and scarred earth, and she would set to work to transform it into a landscape.
Happy house, happy visit, though when we left after three days both Sally and Charity were in tears.
Then a gap that, as I count back, turns out to have been more than two years long. Once we were settled in Cambridge we hardly budged. I was as usual moonlighting and using the weeks to the last quarter-hour. Sally worked patiently and uncomplainingly on her therapy. We devised little strategies and gadgets that made life easier for her, but even with Mrs. Fellowes, who turned out to be sympathetic, motherly, and immune to illness or fatigue, we found merely living all we could manage.
No Battell Pond visit at all in the summer of 1939. None in 1940 either. Charity came down once, but stayed only a day. Other people’s houses, and routines that she could not control, made her uneasy, and she was as unwilling to be a burden as Sally was.
But by 1941 Sally had rolled her stone a few feet uphill. She could get around better on her canes. She thought she could manage the woody paths and slate steps of the compound. She did not fear that the very sight of the place would break her down. And Lang, at three, was big enough to enjoy the lake and the company of the Lang children. When Charity wrote inviting us, with a scrawled postscript from Sid demanding us, we accepted.
Our other problems had eased, too. I liked my job, and Uncle Richard evidently liked the way I did it. My second novel was out, generally overlooked as Uncle Richard foretold, but again with several respectful reviews. I was selling an occasional story and reviewing books for three or four journals. We had paid off the first two thousand dollars of our debt to the Langs.
In Battell Pond everything—well, nearly everything—was as before. Order, affection, thoughtfulness, consideration, social excitement, strenuous work and strenuous play, sent us to bed blessing the place and the people. We had half forgotten, during our long spell of endurance, what companionship meant. Though Sally’s condition prohibited the shared walks, swims, and canoe rides that had once filled our best hours, we had survived as a foursome. We could still listen peacefully to music after dinner, or sit talking late on the porch, watching the stars pass under the brow of the eaves. We read a good deal aloud, and one story of Faulkner’s gave us a watchword. “They mought of kilt us,” we declared with Faulkner’s unreconstructed redneck. “They mought of kilt us, but they ain’t whupped us.”
Sally was so joyfully there that for hours at a time we accepted her as whole. As for the rest of the world, and its grievous woes, we put aside what we could not prevent or cure. What if Hitler had broken his pact with Stalin, and German panzers were expanding the war into Poland and Russia? What if the Vichy government of fallen France had just turned over military control of Indo-China to the Japanese? What if, at home, people came to blows over Lend Lease, America First, Father Coughlin? What if all the front organizations met and wrangled, what if individuals abdicated the Communist Party in despair over the indigestibility of the party line, while the diehards met to protest the continued imprisonment of Earl Browder? What if. Forget it. Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
We went through those three weeks in the summer of 1941 like people driving an open road while storms gathered ahead and to both sides. On them, the sun still shines. Who knows, the clouds might part, blow over, clear away; the rain might turn out to be no more than a hard shower. Meantime, the light is lurid and lovely, the mesas reach out of black distance and warm their cliff-ends in the sun, unexpected rainbows arch the valleys.
There never were hosts to match them. At first we were even a little hurt to find that during our stay we would not have them to ourselves, that a Wisconsin graduate student and his wife were coming for several days, that Charity was having a widowed college friend up from New Haven, that two of Sid’s Yale classmates would be through for a weekend. People had been coming through that way since early June. They welcomed and absorbed them all. Lang was one of the children, Lang-Lang, from the hour we arrived. Mrs. Fellowes was a benevolent aunty.
Three full weeks without a hint of cross purposes. What he wanted, she wanted; what she wanted, he wanted; what they had, they both wanted. The snake that had once inhabited Innisfree never showed itself.
On the morning we left, the whole family gathered—Sid and Charity, the four children, the nurse girl. Charity’s clothes had got more bizarre during the break in our acquaintance—she looked like a fortune teller. Sid was fitter than I had ever seen him—confident, superb, the demigod who had stalked the island in Ticklenaked Pond. Very shortly we would have concrete evidence that the happy resolution of the problems at Wisconsin had produced a predictable result: In October, Charity would write that child number five, already named Elsie to force it into being a girl, was on the way.