Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online

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. . . .”
    “Sally, for hell’s sake,” I said.
    But she had to get in her brag, confession, whatever it was. She needed something on our side to match that Paris wedding and those camel rides.
    “See, both his parents were killed,” she said. She flushed, but she was going to tell this new friend all, like some teenager at a slumber party. “When you were what?” she said, with a look that barely reached me before it fell. “Twenty? Twenty-one? Anyway, when he was a senior at New Mexico.”
    When Charity wasn’t taken over by her smile, her face was still intensely alive. Without her usual gush, without any theatrical emphasis, she said, “What did you do?”
    “What would I do? I took the roast out and turned off the oven. I buried them. I sold the house and furniture and everything but the car and moved into a dorm. I went back between semesters and made up the examinations I’d missed. When I graduated, I went straight off to Berkeley to graduate school, because school looked like the safest place to be.”
    “Was there money in the estate to help you through?”
    “Estate? Well, I guess that’s what it was. I got about five thousand out of it. I put it in the bank and the bank failed.”
    “What rotten luck,” Charity said. “Were they traveling somewhere? Was it an automobile accident?”
    I suppose there was a certain bravado involved, or I would have turned her questions off. But I decided that if Charity Lang wanted