Crossing to Safety Read Online Free PDF

a quarter.”
    “I’d better check with my wife. Be right back.”
    I went out under the canopy. The rain, falling straight down, bounced in the wet street. In the fifty feet to the car I got soaked again. Crowding into the dense, damp interior, I had to take my glasses off to see Sally. “Two seventy-five with bath, two and a quarter without.”
    “Oh, that’s too much!”
    We had a hundred and twenty dollars in traveler’s checks to last us till my first payday on October first.
    “I thought maybe. . . . It’s been a hard trip for you. Don’t you think maybe a hot bath, and clean clothes, and a good dinner? Just to start off on the right foot?”
    “Starting off on the right foot won’t help if we haven’t got anything in our pockets. Let’s look for a bed-and-breakfast place.”
    Eventually we found one, a low-browed bungalow whose lawn bore a sign, “Overnite Guests.” The housewife was large and German, with a goiter; the room was clean. A dollar fifty, breakfast included. We huddled such luggage as we needed through the kitchen, took serial baths (plenty of hot water), and went to bed supperless because Sally said she was tired, not hungry—and besides, we had eaten a late picnic lunch the other side of Waterloo.
    In the morning, still in the rain, we went looking for permanent housing. The fall term would not begin for two weeks. We hoped we were ahead of the rush.
    We were not. We saw a house for a hundred a month and an apartment for ninety, but nothing close to affordable until we were shown a small, badly furnished basement apartment on Morrison Street. It was sixty dollars a month, twice what we had hoped to get by for, but its back lawn dropped off a low wall into Lake Monona, and we liked the look of sailboats slanting past. Discouraged, afraid we might hunt for the next two weeks and find nothing better, we took it.
    Recklessness. Paying the first month’s rent cut our savings in half and sent us into serious computations. Take $720 a year out for rent and we would have left, out of my $2,000 salary, exactly $1,280 for food, drink, clothing, entertainment, books, transportation, doctor bills, and incidentals. Even with milk at five cents a quart and eggs at twelve cents a dozen and hamburger at thirty cents a pound, there would be little enough for drink or entertainment. Scratch those. Doctor bills, though inevitable, were unpredictable. The going rate in Berkeley for delivering a baby was fifty dollars, prenatal care thrown in, but there was no telling what the price was here, and no estimating the cost of postnatal care and the services of a pediatrician. We had to save everything we could against the worst possibilities. As for incidentals, they were going to be very incidental indeed. Scratch those too.
    In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The storeroom next to the furnace, warm and dry, would be my study until Junior arrived. I set up a card table for a desk and made a bookcase out of some boards and bricks. In my experience, the world’s happiest man is a young professor building bookcases, and the world’s most contented couple is composed of that young professor and his wife, in love, employed, at the bottom of a depression from which it is impossible to fall further, and entering on their first year as full adults, not preparing any longer but finally into their lives.
    We were poor, hopeful, happy. Nobody much was yet around. In the first week, before I had to report to the university, I wrote a short story—or rather, it wrote itself, it took off like a bird let out of a cage. Afternoons, we felt our way into that odd community, half academic, half political, that was Madison in 1937. We parked the Ford and walked. From our apartment it was a mile and a half around the Capitol and up State Street and up