Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

married, and so I have neither memory nor documentation to draw on when I start to imagine what they were like when they first came together. I have only this Vermont lake and its associations, and the stories that they themselves, or Comfort, or Aunt Emily, told us.
    First Sid had them feeling sorry for him and rather wishing he would go away. Then he won them over. That in itself is surprising, for neither Charity nor her mother was ever comfortable with a man she couldn’t predict and manage. Maybe the circumstances disarmed them. On the other hand, from the very beginning they may have managed him more than they seemed to. When a male ballet dancer lifts and carries his partner around the stage in a
pas de
deux,
he looks as strong as Atlas, but any ballerina will tell you there is a good deal in knowing how to be lifted.
    “Who
is
this boy?” I can imagine her mother asking. “Do we know him? Do we know his family?”
    Suppose they are sitting on Aunt Emily’s porch, looking down across waist-high ferns and raspberry bushes to the lake. It is a day of traveling clouds. The porch is a sheltered pocket, though the wind is strong enough to scrape limbs across the roof. Emily Ellis is knitting. Her needles dart and withdraw, her finger with its loop of yarn makes swift circles, she pauses to pull stitches along one needle and tug another yard of yarn loose from the ball. Her eyes are brown and sharp, her face wears an expression at once interested, amused, and self-contained.
    Charity, sprawling in the porch swing, her hair in pigtails, waves an opened letter as if waving away smoke. “
I’ve
only known him a few months. He’s a graduate student at Harvard. You wouldn’t know the family—they live in Pittsburgh.”
    Her mother’s hands pause. Her lips tighten. She says tartly, “It’s not out of the question that people worth knowing should live in Pittsburgh. Did you invite him?”
    “
No!
I came up here to get away from him.”
    “What’s the matter with him? He sounds pushy.”
    “Pushy is what he absolutely
isn’t.
He’s a pushover. He’s in
love,
Mother. He’s suffering. He hasn’t seen me for a week.”
    “Oh, dear me,” her mother says. She counts stitches, moving her lips. “How about you? I suppose you’re suffering too.”
    “Then you suppose all wrong. All I’m suffering from are his impetuous
advances.
” She laughs and hoists one foot up on the back of the swing. Her mother looks at the exposed leg until Charity takes it down again.
    “You don’t want him to come up, then.”
    “How can we stop him? He says he’ll be
passing through,
and would like to drop in. Passing through, my eye. He’s not headed anywhere but right here. Why couldn’t he say so?”
    “Perhaps he feels he has to have an escape, in case you don’t make him welcome. Would he be sensitive that way?”
    “He would if
you
didn’t welcome him. He’s
painfully
polite to his elders, and he has such a wild idea of the intellectual distinction of this family that he practically genuflects when he speaks Daddy’s name.”
    “It’s not unbecoming in him to respect scholarship. How long would he expect to stay?”
    “Who knows? Until we drive him away? He’s set himself the goal of reading all of Restoration drama this summer, but he might think he can do that as well up here as in Cambridge.”
    Her mother’s hands are moving again, swift and automatic. “Well, if you don’t want him, we can give him tea and send him on his way.”
    Charity’s expression incorporates a slight frown. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t that seem a little . . . ? We could put him in the dorm.”
    “Comfort is sleeping there.”
    “She could go over to Uncle Dwight’s.”
    “But must not be sent over,” her mother says. “Arrange it as you like, if Comfort is agreeable. On the other hand, if you don’t want him around, he should be discouraged at once. Firmly.”
    Charity stands up, tall and square-shouldered. Seen only from