Crossing to Safety Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bascom Hill to my office in Bascom Hall. Once school opened, I walked it, to and from, each day.
    Sally, who would have liked working and who watched our budget with a miser’s eye, put a cord on the departmental bulletin board advertising that she typed theses and term papers quick and neat, but neither term papers nor theses were in season then, and she got no takers. As soon as I started teaching, she had some long hours alone.
    That deep in the Depression, universities had given up promoting and all but given up hiring. My own job was a fluke. At Berkeley the year before, I had read papers for a visiting professor who happened to like me, and who telephoned when Wisconsin developed a last-minute opening. I was a single cork to plug a single hole for a single season. My colleagues, instructors of one or two years’ standing, were locked in and hanging on. They made a tight in-group, and their conversation tended to include me only cautiously and with suspicion. They all seemed to have come from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. The Harvards and Princetons wore bow ties, and the Yalies went around in gray flannels too high in the crotch and too short in the leg. All three kinds wore tweed jackets that looked as if apples had been carried in the lining.
    I didn’t even have an office mate to talk to. My supposed office partner was William Ellery Leonard, the department’s literary lion, famous for an eccentric theory of Anglo-Saxon prosody, for his romantic and tragic private life as told in his long poem
Two Lives,
for his recent tempestuous marriage to and betrayal by a young woman known around the campus as Goldilocks, and for his former habit of swimming on his back far out into Lake Mendota, wearing a boar helmet and chanting
Beowulf.
    I was looking forward to William Ellery with considerable interest, but almost at once I discovered that his aggravated agoraphobia kept him from venturing more than a block from his house. I had been stuck in with him because his office, though inalienable, was spare space. She’ll have to sleep with Grandpa when she comes. In the year we roomed together he never once came to the office, but his pictures, books, papers, and memorabilia stared and leaned and toppled, ready to fall on me where I had scratched out working space in a corner. Coming there at night, I felt his presence like a poltergeist, and never stayed long.
    That was the way our new life started: two weeks of isolated settling-in followed by a week of registration, transfers, room changes, and the first meetings of classes—the beginnings of a recognizable routine. Then at the end of the first week of classes there was a reception at the chairman’s house. I washed the Ford and we dressed up and went, unconfident and watchful. There were forty or fifty people whose names we never properly heard, or confused with others, or promptly forgot. Some of the younger faculty, including a couple I had found pretty condescending, hung so hungrily around the sherry that out of pure pride I refused to be like them. Sally, even stranger in that company than I was, stuck with me.
    We spent most of the two hours with older professors and their wives, and probably got an instant reputation among our peers for sucking up. Naturally we were both at our most charming. I even think Sally had a good time. She is gregarious, people interest her just by being people, and she is much better on names and faces than I am. And she hadn’t been to any kind of party, even a departmental tea, for a long time.
    I suppose we were both a little depressed at leaving those colleagues, strangers though they were, unknowns with the most profound portent for our future, and going home to our cellar, where we ate the stuff that was good for the budget but not especially for the soul. After dinner we sat on the wall above Lake Monona and watched the sunset, and then we went back in and I prepared for my classes and Sally read Jules Romains. We were tender with