Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Page B

make him snort. Any respectable ice-cream cone costs sixty or eighty cents, and a three-decker a dollar and a quarter. And saving up, what is that?
    What was true of ice cream was triply true of liquor. Whatever else it did, Prohibition really did inhibit our drinking. In Albuquerque before 1933, our student parties had involved homemade wine or home brew explosive with yeast, sometimes with a stick of grain alcohol or ether in it if we happened to have a medical student among us. Faculty, if they had any hoarded or bootlegged supplies, did not share them with students. In Berkeley, after repeal, faculty receptions did blossom out with jugs of sherry that had been manufactured in haste and aged on a truck coming up from Cucamonga. Student parties graduated to grappa—raw California brandy—or punch. Punch we created in a bowl in the spirit of research, making it up out of fruit juices, soda, and whatever intoxicants we happened to have—gin, rum, grain alcohol, grappa, or all four. These we stirred together and colored pink with the synthetic grenadine syrup called Yum.
    Yum.
    Now here at the end of the room beyond Aunt Emily was a table burdened with Haig and Haig, Sunnybrook Farm, Duff Gordon, Cinzano sweet and dry, Dubonnet
rouge et blonde,
Dutch gin, Bacardi. Some Madison liquor store (I had not yet been in one) had been plundered to lay that table, though it turned out that the Langs themselves drank only a little Dubonnet, and Aunt Emily drank nothing at all.
    Ed Abbot, coming up beside me to inspect those riches, was so shaken that his knees visibly wilted. He clutched his brow, and clutching it, bent to read labels. His lips moved. “Oh my,” he said. “Oh my.” And then, more strongly, “When does the sacrifice begin? Do you-all need a victim?
Please!
”
    Sid stepped behind the table and called for orders. The gentlemen deferred to the ladies. Of the ladies, one spoke. “I’ll have a Manhattan,” said Wanda Ehrlich, without please.
    Those were the days of the silver cocktail shaker. Robert Montgomery’s way with it in the movies had instructed us all. Sid seized his, uncapped it, filled it with ice. His hand moved over the crowded bottles and selected a sweet Cinzano, hovered again and descended on a Haig and Haig Pinch. But Ed and I cried out with one voice, and his hand stopped.
    “What’s the matter? Whiskey and sweet vermouth? And bitters? God,
I
don’t know, I was gently reared. I yield to my betters. Here, one of you make it.”
    So Ed Abbot became bartender, beating me out by four one-hundredths of a second, and the rest of us came to the party.
    I have heard of people’s lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event—a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody’s life but ours being changed by a dinner party.
    We straggled into Madison, western orphans, and the Langs adopted us into their numerous, rich, powerful, reassuring tribe. We wandered into their orderly Newtonian universe, a couple of asteroids, and they captured us with their gravitational pull and made moons of us and fixed us in orbit around themselves.
    What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. Reading my way out of disaster in the Berkeley library, I had run into Henry Adams. “Chaos,” he told me, “is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.” No one had ever put my life to me with such precision, and when I read the passage to Sally, she heard it the same way I did. Because of her mother’s uncertain profession, early divorce, and early death, she had first been dragged around and farmed out, and later deposited in the care of overburdened relatives. I had lost my security, she had never had any. Both of us were peculiarly susceptible to friendship. When the Langs opened their house and their hearts to us, we crept gratefully in.
    Crept? Rushed. Coming from meagerness and low expectations, we felt their friendship