Free Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

completeness, a need to have the total poetry of the world at his fingertips? A sense of what the well-bred house should contain? Had Charity’s father, a classical scholar, given it to them in an absentminded moment, forgetting it was Greek to them? Anyway, I was surprised. I had thought we might be the only household in Madison that gave shelf room to Homer and Anacreon and Thucydides. And we had them not because of anything I could do with them but because of Sally.
    I plucked the book from the shelf and turned around and said, “Sally! Read us some Homer. Bend our minds with some hexameters.”
    General consternation. “Do you read
Greek
?” Charity said. “Oh, please, yes!
Quiet,
everybody. Shhhh! Sally’s going to read Homer.”
    Sally protested, but let herself be coerced. Half drunk and proud, I watched her stand up by the piano and get herself together. Her eyes went over us, she sobered the smile on her mouth. She has great dignity and presence when she is cornered, and when she reads that antique poetry she can bring tears to your eyes. It is much better than if you could understand it. She chants out of a remote time with the clang of bronze in it.
    We hushed. She read.
    She not only brought tears to some people’s eyes, she brought down the house. Cheers, applause, excitement. Isn’t she great? God, I wish I could do that. But no sooner had the clapping died out into a babble of talk than the Ehrlichs rose to leave. “Oh, no!” Sid and Charity said. “The evening is young. Stay awhile.” But I noted a point at which they tacitly agreed not to press the Ehrlichs further. The Ehrlichs shook hands with Aunt Emily, still beaming on the sofa, and as they came past me, Wanda bent her overupholstered body close and said something tense and furious.
    I was caught unready. “What?” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear.”
    “My husband can read Greek too!” Wanda said, quite loudly, and went on out to where Sid was holding her coat and Charity was opening the door. Host and hostess, with their shining smiles, they cried the Ehrlichs out. “Goodnight, goodnight. Thank you for coming. Goodnight.” Returning to the living room, they made a wry, disconcerted face at the rest of us.
    Altogether, a lovely scene. I felt guilty and triumphant. There we were, still in the warmth and light and grace of that room, while those who didn’t belong, those who hated and envied, those who were offensive to Athena, went out into the chilly darkness. I knew how they felt, and I hated it for their sakes. But I also knew how
I
felt. I felt wonderful.
    The party broke up a little while afterward, and guess which couple was the last to go. Neither Sally nor I had ever known people like the Langs, neither of us had ever spent so exhilarating an evening. And just as we were getting ready to go, the Langs found themselves unwilling to part with us. Aunt Emily had gone up to bed, the door had closed on the Abbots and Stones. Standing with Sally’s dragon robe in his hands, Sid said suddenly, “Don’t go yet. How about a walk? Wait, it’s got chilly, this won’t keep you warm. Charity, where are the burnooses?”
    She knew, and brought them—long white cowled woollen robes that covered us from skull to heels. We got into them, all four of us, and went out into a night of frost. If anyone had looked out his window he might have thought he was seeing the ghosts of Fra Lippo Lippi and his pals weaving back to the monastery after a night on the town.
    I remember how quiet it was, how empty the streets at that hour, how our feet were loud on pavement and then hushed in grass and then crackly in leaves. There was a glint of settling frost in the air. Our voices and breaths went up and got mixed with the shadows of trees and the bloom of arc lights and the glitter of stars.
    It was like nothing I had known either in Albuquerque or Berkeley. It looked different, sounded different, smelled different, felt different. And those two