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

heavy leaves of a lilac hedge along the driveway.
    “It’s a Charity sort of house,” Sally decided. “Sort of ample and careless. No side.”
    “Lots of front.”
    “Not the kind that puts you off. No iron stags. No ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs.”
    “Did you expect them?”
    “I didn’t know what to expect.” She shrank her shoulders together in the gold-embroidered Chinese dragon robe that was almost the only relic left from her mother’s operatic career, and laughed a little. “I liked her so much I can’t help wondering what
he’ll
be like.”
    “I told you. A friendly house detective.”
    “I can’t imagine her married to a house detective. What’ll I talk to him about? What’s he interested in?”
    “Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
?” I suggested. “The
Marginalia
of Gabriel Harvey?”
    She was not amused. In fact, she was definitely nervous. Peering like a burglar at the lighted house, she said, “Her mother, too. Did you know her mother was one of the founders of Shady Hill School?”
    “What’s Shady Hill School?”
    “Oh, you know!”
    “No.”
    “Everybody knows Shady Hill School.”
    “Not me.”
    “Well, you should.” I waited, but she didn’t enlighten me. After a minute she said, “Charity was telling me about her. She sounds formidable. She’ll probably expect me to converse in French.”
    “Converse in Greek. Put her down. Who does she think she is?”
    She said restlessly, “I wish I’d asked what people would be wearing. What if everybody’s in a long dress, and I come out from under this robe in my two-year-old short thing? The robe’s too fancy and the dress isn’t fancy enough.”
    “Look,” I said, “it isn’t her uncle the ambassador’s. If we aren’t presentable they can send us home.”
    But when I started to open the door she yelped, “No! We don’t want to be the first. We don’t want to be sitting here when the others come, either. Drive around the block.”
    So I drove around the block, slowly, and when we got back, two cars were unloading. Their occupants gathered under the arc light, where bullbats were booming after insects and a chilly Octoberish smell of cured leaves rose from the ground, the indescribable smell of fall and football weather and the new term that is the same almost everywhere in America.
    I knew the three men: Dave Stone, from Texas via Harvard, who looked like Ronald Colman and spoke softly and had already impressed me as one of the younger faculty I could be friendly with; and Ed Abbot, another friendly one, on leave from the University of Georgia while he finished his degree; and Marvin Ehrlich, one of the high-crotch, short-leg, baggy-tweed contingent. He had let me know a day or two earlier, while loading his pipe and scattering tobacco crumbs all over my desk, that he had studied with Chauncey B. Tinker (Tink) at Yale, and then had gone on to Princeton to read Greek with Paul Elmer More. He had also quizzed me on how I happened to have my job—whom I knew on the senior faculty, who had recruited me—how much he had to watch out for me, in other words, in the competition for promotion. I had reacted to him as if he were ragweed, and was not especially happy to see him now.
    I knew none of the wives, though Sally did, and they said they had met us at the Rousselots’. Lib Stone was a thin Texas belle full of laughter, Alice Abbot a freckled girl from Tennessee, with white eyelashes. Wanda Ehrlich was notable mainly for her shape, which bulged her clothes until her eyes popped.
    The Stones and Abbots shook hands with great friendliness. Ehrlich was putting away his goddamned pipe, and acknowledged us with a lift of the head. His wife (I reconstruct this after many years, and without charity, small c) gave us a smile that I thought curiously flat in so plump a face. It struck me then, and strikes me again now, how instantly mutual dislike can make itself evident. Or was I only reacting to their indifference? They did not