Crossing to Safety

Chapter 2 takes the narrative back to 1937. Larry and Sally are a poor, young couple in the Depression traveling to Wisconsin, where Larry is soon to begin a job as a professor at the university in Madison. He regards his job as a “fluke” and is eager for opportunity. While bargaining for temporary lodgings with ever-dwindling savings, he remarks to himself that his position is temporary: “That deep in the Depression, universities had given up promoting and all but given up hiring. […] I was a single cork to plug a single hole for a single season” (16). Adding to this material anxiety, is that Sally is pregnant with their first child: 

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 spend 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 (16).

Chapter 3, introduces Larry’s colleagues and future friends, Sid and Charity. The Langs make a strong impression on Larry, one built of admiration, respect, and partially, intimidation; this is set off when he learns that Charity is “from” Harvard, an institution Larry reveres: “Despite my disillusion with some of my bow-tied colleagues, I was ready in 1937 to believe that the Harvard man was the pinnacle of a certain kind of human development, emancipated by the largeness of his tradition and by the selective processes that had placed him in it from the crudeness of lesser places” (21). At this transition period in Larry’s own life, he cannot help but be taken with Charity, Sid, and their connection to Harvard: “She, and presumably her husband as well, represented the cultivation, good manners, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and brightness of mind and dedication to high thinking that were the goals of outsiders like me, dazzled western barbarians aspiring to Rome. Mixed with my liking was, I am sure an almost equal deference, a respect too sincere to be tainted with envy” (21). As they become acquainted, and Larry begins work, these emotions of alienation and wonder become more significant for the events that follow. Moreover, we learn that Charity is also pregnant, solidifying a bond between the two young families.