All-Weather Friends

All three novels of marriage I’ve looked at so far have a certain sense of the privacy of marriage, which can become isolation. In fact, the focus has narrowed with each novel: Extended family and community are essential parts of Kristin Lavransdatter, but its heart remains with Kristin’s marriage and home; the isolation of the married couple is part of the point of How to Be Good; and Gilead gains much of its force from the sense that the dying narrator is increasingly separate from his wife, child, and best friend. Something is missing here. Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety is a terrific portrayal of that missing piece of marriage: the way it intertwines with friendships, the way one’s own marriage isn’t solely one’s own.

Crossing to Safety tells a story which begins during the Depression, but is being recalled in the 1970s. It’s the story of two marriages, two professors and their wives. Larry and Sally struggle first with money troubles and then with Sally’s crippling bout of polio. Sid and Charity have no material wants, but Charity’s ferocious personality threatens to overwhelm and diminish her self-doubting husband. All four of them are the kind of friends who shape one’s sense of self. When they meet they’re all already married, so they don’t technically serve as witnesses to one another’s weddings; and yet they offer the kind of friendship which is witness, which sustains a marriage through the sometimes dizzying spin of fortune.

Charity just blazes forth from the page, from the first time we meet her. She’s a lover of order who comes across as a force for chaos. She’s the kind of woman her children sum up by saying, “Mom… well, you know her.” Even when she’s Letting Go of something she has a clutching intensity that leaves claw marks on her renunciations. She’s an unforgettable character, but she isn’t the heart of the book. When she and Sally are pregnant at the same time, Larry muses, “in those two women four hearts are beating.” In this book there are four hearts as well.

Crossing to Safety is not without flaws. Its narrator overwrites—I’m attributing that to the narrator rather than to Stegner himself, because it seems to fit Larry’s overall personality. It took me a while to acclimate to things like, “Over Stannard Mountain the sun is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down,” which came after several paragraphs of that exact kind of thing. Some of Larry’s insights are labored (do hedonists really resent overachievers because overachievers have more fun? That isn’t why I resent them!) or kind of morally tacky (the extended disquisition on why he wished he were in solitary confinement, the dehumanization of his line about how Sally without her crutches would be “hardly more than a broken stick with eyes”).

But you don’t need to like Larry to love the book. I realized I was hooked when I found myself fearing for the characters, and pleading with the book to keep them from making too many irrevocable mistakes. I recognized Charity and Sid’s marriage and its heartbreaks, and the depiction of how weird it is to witness a marriage like that from the outside and to wish it well.

There are beautiful descriptions: “We were tender with one another in bed: babes in the woods, lost in a strange indifferent country, a little dispirited, a little scared.” There are some really good choices about when to make the subtle metaphor suddenly concrete: Larry and Sally owe Charity and Sid an actual, monetary debt which hangs over their heads for years after the richer couple pays for Sally’s (horrifying) polio rehabilitation. Larry’s parents were killed when a friend of theirs took them up in his plane, dying at the hands of a friend and as a consequence of that friendship. This works because the most powerful feature of Crossing to Safety is its conviction that friendship has its own pitfalls—the possibility or fear of adultery, painful comparisons as the friends’ fortunes diverge, getting caught in somebody else’s marital crossfire—and yet it is still, inescapably, a form of love which lasts if you let it.

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