Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
I had been prepared to find Charity a transparent husk all but eaten away from within and held together only by pride and will. I should have known better.
True, she was thin, and for sure she was held together by will. But there was nothing feeble about her looks or her manner. Hers is a face that does not depend on flesh; it is built from the bones outward. And her skin was tanned, and her brown, freckled hands took hold of me with a bird’s strength when I bent to kiss her. Her voice piped and cracked with excitement, her smile was a window onto an internal incandescence. Her spirit gushed and overflowed and swept us up, making us forget pity, caution, concern, everything but the pleasure of her presence.
All her life she has been demanding people’s attention to things she admires and values. She has both prompted and shushed, and pretty imperiously too. But she herself never needed or accepted prompting in her life, and she is not going to be shushed, not even by cancer. She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.
“Now!” she cried, in the same voice and with the same emphasis she used to employ when she cried us to attention for music and digestion after dinner. “Now we’ve finally got you here again we want to know all about you! Oh, it’s been so much too long! Sally, are you well? You look it, you look wonderful. Was the trip too hard? I won’t ask about Larry, he’s obviously disgustingly healthy. Tell us, are you still doing therapy? Have you got more muscle activity back? You must have, you practically came running across the lawn just now. New Mexico must be good for you, much as I’d like to think you’d be better off here. Do you still like it? Do you move better, and breathe better, where it’s high and dry? How’s Lang? And your grandchildren, tell us about them. Tell us everything. At once!”
Time has not dimmed her, sickness has only increased her wattage. She lights things up like a photoflood. There was so much animation in her that I wondered why she had held off this meeting through the whole empty morning, when she was apparently as eager to see us as we were to see her. Letting us rest, I supposed, whether we wanted to or not. Lie down, you’re tired.
She would not have let her own tiredness interfere with something she wanted to do. Theatrical, Hallie called her, the choreographer of her own Totentanz. I didn’t mind. I had no will to resist or bait her as I often had in the past. If she wanted to heighten this fatally late reunion with a little deliberate dramatic delay, who lost by her theatrics? I didn’t feel anything false, I didn’t feel manipulated, and I am sure Sally didn’t either. I just felt warm and friendly, and grateful that Charity made it easier to talk by making us talk about ourselves, not her.
So we sat in the sun discussing Pojoaque, and our house, and our all-gray garden, and altitude and aridity, and Indian cultures, and Sally’s daily routines, and what I was working on, and Lang, and Lang’s job, and Lang’s two boys. Not much about Lang’s husband, whose promotion to a professorship has already been held up once because he hasn’t got his book finished. Perishing for lack of publication was not a subject we wanted to open up in that company.
We were voluble, we all but babbled. Charity was interested and animated, Sid attentive. Sneaking a look when I could, I saw that he had aged more than I first thought. He has the kind of rugged athlete’s face that does age—the bones get heavier, the lines deeper, the skin rougher—instead of the academic face that George Barnwell, for instance, had, the kind that stays smooth and boyish into the seventies. And his eyes, when he took off his glasses to clean them, were more faded and watery than I remembered them. Circling his handkerchief with thumb and finger around a lens, he laughed at something Sally said, and laughed too loud.
Anybody listening might have thought this just any coming-together of friends after a long separation. But it was an exercise in levitation, not indefinitely supportable, and it was Sid, listening but not contributing much, who by his soberness slowed us down. He sat among us, one of us, but with an unease about him, as if he might at any minute tiptoe away, like a man at a meeting that has gone on so long he is afraid of missing his plane, or someone trying to pay attention while resisting an irresistible need to go to the bathroom.
The chatter for which I had at first been grateful began to be objectionable, a sort of flippancy in the wrong place at the wrong time. There came a moment when we all felt it. The web of talk broke, and we dropped into a lull from which we blinked and smiled at each other. The only questions remaining to be asked were those whose answers we already knew and did not want to hear.
I say we; I mean I. Sally is far less cowardly in these situations than I am. Also, she had more at stake. Charity and I like each other well and somewhat warily. Half of our pleasure in each other’s company comes from resisting each other. But Charity and Sally are stitched together with a thousand threads of feeling and shared experience. Each is for the other that one unfailingly understanding and sympathetic fellow-creature that everybody wishes for and many never find. Sid and I are close, but they are closer. Apart from Mrs. Fellowes and myself, Charity is the only person Sally ever willingly allowed to help her up or down or to the bathroom, the only person besides the two of us that her disability is comfortable with.
The cant word these days is “bonding.” I suppose some people see in a relationship like that signs of an unacknowledged lesbianism—the same people who probably speculate about the sex life of somebody like me, a perfectly healthy man with a crippled wife. I don’t care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.
We ran down. We sat. Eventually Sally, on the heels of something frivolous that had left her laughing, sent across at Charity’s lounge an abruptly earnest, pleading look, and said what she was thinking. “Charity, I have to know. What do they say? How is your health?”
“Right now, wonderful.”
“Then it isn’t true, what Hallie tells us?”
A long steady look held between them. Charity’s mouth was a little slack, as if caught unexpectedly between expressions, but her forehead was untroubled and her eyes were candid and, I thought, pitying. “That I’m going to die soon. Yes.”
“Charity . . . !” Sid said. The frail canvas chair creaked with his sudden leaning.
“Oh, Sid, don’t,” she said. “Of course it’s certain. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise.”
“There’s all kinds of sense in not just accepting a sentence like that! If you’d only agree to radiation or chemotherapy. Cobalt. Whatever. All of them! You’ve got chances if you’ll take them. But no, you won’t. You give up. You won’t try to save yourself. You won’t let me take you down to Sloan Kettering.”
“The doctors say there’s no point.”
“You put the idea in their heads!”
“Sid, dear, hush,” Charity said as if to a nagging child. “You’re not helping. I don’t want to go into all that again.”
“But. . . .”
“Please! Let’s not make a scene.”
For a moment her look was hot and peremptory. Then, when he looked away, blindly searching the grass as if for four-leaf clovers, her face softened. She seemed about to say something consoling, but by then he had distanced himself. His face bleak and bruised-looking, his eyes hooded, he had settled back in his chair and was looking at the view.
Sally, with her eyes filling, said, “Charity, I didn’t mean to distress you. Sid, I’m sorry if. . . . But it isn’t like you, Charity. When I was sick and wanting to die, you sat by my bed and made me live. You wouldn’t let me give up hope. Isn’t there some way we . . . something we can . . . ?”
“Bless you,” Charity said. Her neck looked too thin to carry even her small head, but her e
“What did they tell you after the operation?”
Charity smiled and spread her hands.
“They didn’t suggest radiation, or chemotherapy, or anything?”
“It had already metastasized.”
“But sometimes even then . . .”
“They said I might have a little time,” Charity said. “They were right. I could have had the treatments, but they didn’t hold out any hope except maybe for a little delay. And there’s all that appalling nastiness of losing your hair, and people I’ve known who took those treatments were sick all the time. I decided I’d rather be intact for whatever time I was given.”
Holding the little smile, she shut her eyes. She looked like a woman carved out of pale wood. Figure of a goddess, remote and removed, cleansed and pitying. Prosperine. That used to be Sally’s role.
Her eyes opened, still crinkled with the faint, grave smile. I saw them rest a moment on Sid, heavy and somber in his striped chair. Then they came back to Sally. “Dying’s an important event,” she said. “You can’t rehearse for it. All you can do is try to prepare yourself and others. You can try to do it right. In a way, cancer is a blessing, it generally does give you a little time.”
Now Sid looked up. His eyes were as hot as if he hated her, and he pounded one hand against the other in a parody of applause. “Oh, wonderful!” he said. “Cancer’s a blessing. It gives us that precious time. And just think, without it we wouldn’t have all that useful cancer research. God Almighty, darling, you’ve been reading some novel that bids farewell to life in a dying fall of sweet relinquishment! I’ve talked to the doctors, too. They’re the first to tell you that the patient’s attitude makes all the difference. There are all kinds of cases of people who lived just because they refused to give up and die. Just what you’ve been advocating all your life. And now when it’s your life on the line, you. . . . You do have a chance. Even if it’s only ten percent, even if it’s only five, why not take it? Are you so tired of living? Are you so tired of us?”
For a long time they looked at each other. Finally she shook her head. “You wouldn’t want the five or ten percent they might save. Neither would I.”
Sid jerked his glance away, and in the reflecting plate glass his eyes met mine with a jolt that was like running into a door. His twitched away a fraction of a second ahead of mine. Pitying and inexorable, Charity continued to study him, and Sally, her precise shoes propped precisely on the chair’s step, kept her wide eyes on Charity’s face. No one said anything. I was thinking that this was a Charity I did not know. Or was it? And she was not through talking.
“There’s no decent literature on how to die. There ought to be, but there isn’t. Only a lot of religious gobbledygook about being gathered in to God, and a lot of biological talk about returning your elements to the earth. The biological talk is all right, I believe it, but it doesn’t say anything about what religion is talking about, the essential you, the conscious part of you, and it doesn’t teach you anything about how to make the transition from being to not-being. They say there’s a moment, when death is certain and close, when we lose our fear of it. I’ve read that every death, at the end, is peaceful. Even an antelope that’s been caught by a lion or cheetah seems not to struggle at the end. I guess there’s a big shot of some sedative chemical, the way there’s a big shot of adrenaline to help it leap away when it’s scared. Well, a shot will do for quick deaths. The problem is to get that same resignation to last through the weeks or months of a slow one, when everything is just as certain but can’t be taken care of with some natural hypo. I’ve talked to my oncologist about it a lot. He has to deal with death every day, seventy-five percent of his patients die. But he can’t tell me how to do it, or give me any references in medical literature that will help. Medical literature is all statistics. So I’m having to find out my own way.”
Bemused and listening, we sat around her, thinking more things than we would have said. At last Sally ventured, “But you could be wrong about it, Charity! And if you’re not absolutely sure . . .”
“I’m sure,” Charity said. “Oh, I’m sure! That’s one of the few things I am sure of. Another is pain. If there’s pain, I can handle it. Most pain is mental anyway.”
Sid jerked in his chair and pressed his lips together. Looking at him with an expression that I could only define as stern pity, Charity went on.
“It’s the fear of cancer that hurts, and there’s a whole library of palliative medicine that can help us over that. We just need to learn not to panic. Then we can meditate pain away, or just ignore it.”
What should anyone say to that?
“Still another thing I’m sure of is how lucky I am,” Charity said, and smiled around our attentive circle in a proud, self-congratulatory way. “I don’t have to do this alone. I’m surrounded by the people I love, and I’m doing my best to teach them what I’m trying to learn myself: not to be afraid, not to resist, not to grieve.”
Her smile, directed now at Sid alone, widened; her face took on a look at once monitory and mischievous. “It’s as natural as being born,” she said, “and even if we stop being the individuals we once were, there’s an immortality of organic molecules that’s absolutely certain. Don’t you find that a wonderful comfort? I do. To think that we’ll become part of the grass and trees and animals, that we’ll stay right here where we loved it while we were alive. People will drink us with their morning milk and pour us as maple syrup over their breakfast pancakes. So I say we should be happy and grateful, and make the most of it. I’ve had a wonderful life, I’ve loved every minute.”
She stopped. Her eyes touched us all, Sid last. A wistful, questioning, pleading smile hung on her lips, a smile that held and wavered as her look wavered and held on his face. Any man would be shaken to have a woman look at him like that. Sid was.
“I’ve had the man I loved,” she said very softly. “I never lost him the way so many women do. I’ve had bright, beautiful children. I’ve had dear friends. You may not believe this, but this has been the happiest summer of my life.”
Still none of us found anything to say. Air moving uphill from the woods and lake stirred the seeding flower-heads of Delphinium that rose above the wall. A Monarch butterfly caught in the draft was lifted twenty feet over our heads. I saw Sid look away from Charity’s unsteadily insistent glance to follow the Monarch’s movement. Perhaps he was fantasizing, as I was, that there went part of what had once been the mortal substance of Aunt Emily or George Barnwell or Uncle Dwight, absorbed by the root of a beech tree in the village cemetery, incorporated into a beechnut, eaten by a squirrel, dropped as a pellet in a meadow, converted into a milkweed stalk, nibbled and taken in by this butterfly, destined to be carried south on a long, unlikely, interrupted migration, to be picked off by a flycatcher, brought back north in the spring as other flesh, laid in an egg, eaten by a robbing jay and laid as another kind of egg, blown out of a tree in a windstorm, soaked up by the earth, extruded as grass, eaten by a freshening heifer, some of it foreordained to be drunk, as Charity said, by its own descendants with their breakfasts, some of it deposited in cowpads, to melt into the earth yet again, and thrust upward again, immortal, in another milkweed stalk preparing itself to feed more Monarch butterflies.
Fragile as tissue, the butterfly wavered off and away. From her lounge Charity urgently demanded our agreement; her strained smile pinned us to our chairs. She widened the smile by an act of will as d
“So I’m trying to do it right. Most of the family are helping. They find it hard, but they’re trying. I hope you will too. When the time comes, nobody should be unhappy. It shouldn’t be made a production of. I’ll just go away.”
We assented in silence. Of course. Of course, dear Charity. However you want it. Whatever will help you. Sid stared gloomily at something beyond the hilltop, off in the air.
“I knew I could count on you,” Charity said. The shrillness was out of her voice; she sounded happy. “Well! I’m glad we got it out in the open right away, so there’ll be no pretending and long faces, and we can make the absolute most of what’s left.” Now she managed the full, unforced smile. “That’s more than enough of that! Now let’s forget it. This afternoon we’re not dying. We’re together again. The whole family’s coming for a picnic on the hill, did Hallie tell you? Oh, you don’t know how grateful I am that you could come! I hated to ask you, I know how hard traveling is for you now. But I’m glad as I can be.”
She did not look glad. The smile had already faded. She looked ghastly, as if the effort of talking had forced all the blood from her face, which was jaundice-yellow. She wet her lips and closed her eyes and turned her face sideward against the cushion that hung on loops from the back of the lounge. Her thin throat worked. When she opened her eyes again it was as if marble had awakened.
“Now!” she cried in a wan effort at decisiveness. “Now we’re going in and rest awhile so as to be ready. Sally, you come with me. If you don’t want to rest, we can talk, and if you don’t want to talk we can meditate. We won’t leave for the hill till four. Larry can help Sid load the Marmon.”
“My goodness, is that still running?” Sally said. “Oh, it will be like old times! I love that car.”