Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page A

to know all about us, let her hear it. Let her find out how different other lives were from hers. I said, “We had a boarder in Albuquerque, a world-war buddy of my father’s. He came and went, around for a few weeks and then gone for months. He had an old Standard biplane tied together with piano wire that he used to fly upside down around county fair racetracks, and take up wing walkers and parachutists. A barnstormer. He used to let me wear his British officer’s boots to school, and when things were slow he’d take my girl and me up. Nobody beat my time in high school. So this pal of mine ended by orphaning me. He took my folks for a joyride on their wedding anniversary and ran them into the side of the Sandias. I was home studying and minding the anniversary roast.”
    In the subdued light Charity sat still, her hands on the purse in her lap. Her head tilted, she made a half smile as if about to say something placatory or humorous. But all she said, and still without the inordinate emphasis of her customary conversation, was “That’s terrible. Both of them. Were you very fond of them? What did your father do?”
    “He ran an auto repair shop,” I said.
    So much for family backgrounds. So much for animated afternoon conversations, too. I seemed to have squelched her curiosity. Within a couple of minutes she was turning her watch to the light and crying that she must go, Barney would have absolutely
devoured
the nanny, or smothered Nicky. But first, could we come to dinner Friday evening? They wanted to know us
well,
as soon as possible. They didn’t want to be deprived of us a
minute
longer than they had to. Wasn’t it
luck
that What’s-His-Name Jesperson went to Washington to work for Harold Ickes, and that we had been picked to take his place? He was such a fud. Could we make it Friday? It would be just two or three couples, young faculty we probably knew already, and her mother, who was visiting from Cambridge.
Please
be able to come.
    It crossed my mind, and if it crossed mine it had already passed through Sally’s, that we had a humiliatingly blank calendar. One quick look established the fact that we had no more pride than we had engagements. Friday, then.
    We walked Charity up the three steps from the basement, and around the house to where her car was parked in the street. It was not a fancy car—a Chevy station wagon about the age and condition of our Ford—and it could have stood a wash. The back seat had some rolled-up clothes in it, obviously headed for the cleaners.
    “I feel we’re going to be such friends!” Charity said, and hugged Sally and gave my hand a hard squeeze and climbed into the driver’s seat and irradiated us with that smile.
“Start keeping notes!”
she said to Sally. Ox-eyed Sally, she of the Demeter brow, she had no residue of impatience at having been pried at, as I did. She hadn’t been bothered by Charity’s curiosity. She had invited it. She had poured us out like a libation on the altar of that goddess.
    We stood waving as Charity drove away toward the Capitol dome that showed above the trees. All right. I admitted it: a charming woman, a woman we couldn’t help liking on sight. She raised the pulse and the spirits, she made Madison a different town, she brought life and anticipation and excitement into a year we had been prepared to endure stoically. Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.

4
    Friday evening, uneasily on time, we rolled along Van Hise Street under big elms. The western sky was red, and there was light enough to read the numbers painted on the curb. A car length past, we stopped and looked the house over.
    To my rank-conscious eyes it looked like a house with tenure— big front lawn with maples, unraked leaves thick on the grass and in the gutter, windows that stretched like a nighttime train. Above the door an entrance light showed two brick steps, a flagstone walk, and the