Angle of Repose (20 page)

In late February, when the hillsides were patched with lupine, poppies, and blue-eyed grass, Mary Prager spent a few days. I quote from Grandmother’s reminiscences: “She thought the place ideal. The valley, changing from hour to hour, battle-fronts of clouds forming along the bases of the mountains, charging, breaking, scattering in tatters and streamers wildly flying ; tops of the mountains seen with ineffable colors on them at sunset and the nearer hills like changeable cut velvet. She walked the piazza smiling to herself; she laid soft hands on my housekeeping. I think our simple routine rested her after the conventional perfection she had set herself to achieve in her marriage to a man whose life demanded it; for she had been a farmer’s daughter, too, and I daresay had to ask her husband what wines to serve with what courses when she gave her exquisite little dinners . . . She and Oliver sassed each other in the Ward family way; and when she saw the artist-wife in her digging hours–more really at home than in the city where she was inclined toward excess of participation under the influence of evening clothes and evening company–I think whatever misgivings she may have had were satisfied. She knew that, in the words of her father when he read that Quaker marriage contract, ‘it would hold.”’

Leaving, Mary Prager held their hands and hoped they would be spared the footloose life common to the profession. Why should they ever leave New Almaden? He could be manager here one day; he had a great opportunity to succeed without making his wife into a wanderer.

As for the young men from Mother Fall’s who drifted up to the Wards’ veranda on chilly spring evenings, they thought Oliver Ward’s clover very deep indeed. To a man they were in love with Susan, pregnant or not. One of them, a boy from the University of California with loads of undigested information in his head and a word of kindly unasked advice for anyone he talked to, stumbled off the porch one evening and blurted to Oliver that Mrs. Ward was more an angel than a woman. “Which amused both of us,” Susan wrote, “but made one of us feel sad and old.”

She was posing, of course. She was thirty. Oliver, whom she sometimes called Sonny, and bossed around, was twenty-eight. It was impossible that they could have been happier. Though the weekly letters still poured back to New York, the tone of them is serene, excited, amused, anything but homesick or desperate. And now and then the East reached out a hand to her and made her realize how much she had changed in barely more than half a year.

Here came Howie Drew, a boy from Milton bent on finding his fortune in the West, and spent a weekend investigating the possibilities of New Almaden, and was advised by Oliver to move on. Because Oliver was busy, Susan took Howie around, and one morning they walked along the new road that Chinese coolies were building to the Santa Isabel tunnel. As they walked, talking about home, she looked past his red head and saw the nameless local flowers looking down at them from the bank. They passed blackened places where pig-tailed Chinese had built noon fires for their tea. The signal bells clinked from the shaft house and a tram car dumped with a rumbling roar off the platform of the Day tunnel. And here was Howie Drew from down the road, the son of the ferryman, a boy she used to look after for his mother when she was fifteen. And here was herself, Mrs. Oliver Ward, no longer Susan Burling, barrel-shaped with child, only walking at all because she had Howie to go along, only appearing with Howie because he was an old friend, almost family. Familiar and unfamiliar swam and blended into a strangeness like dreaming as she saw Howie Drew’s face out of her girlhood against the mountainside of her present life. A wash of confused feeling went over her like wind across a sweating skin, for the identity that Howie took for granted and talked to and reflected back at her was not the identity it used to be, not the one that had signed all her past drawings, not the one she knew herself. Then what was it now? She didn’t know.

Or here was another echo from home, a Mrs. Elliott, a friend of her Aunt Sarah’s, who came up from Santa Cruz all uninvited and planted herself among them for four days. In her youth she too had had another identity: she had been Georgiana Bruce, and she was one of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. All her life she had been saving the world. She had burned for Abolition, for Woman’s Suffrage, for Spiritualism, for Phrenology, for heaven knew what. She possessed, and quoted from, what Grandmother assumed to be the only copy
of Leaves of Grass
in California.

In those surroundings she was stranger than Howie Drew, for she sat in Susan’s parlor and talked about Bradford, Curtis, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne–Hawthorne, while just over in the corner cupboard ten feet from her, was a pile of blocks on which Susan had been trying for months to make Hawthorne’s prose into pictures. Mrs. Elliott’s talk was full of names and books and causes that Susan had been brought up to think worth reverence-and a few, such as Whitman, worth a pang of excited alarm–but in person she looked more like this careless coast than like intellectual New England. She could not have bought a new pair of shoes since Brook Farm.

Though it was Susan, in love with talk and ideas, who ought to have responded to this apparition, this gray-haired, leather-faced, shining-eyed Cassandra, it was Oliver, who liked “characters,” who found her amusing. Mrs. Elliott bothered Susan because for all her ideas she was not genteel; she delighted Oliver because she was as odd as Dick’s hatband.

One evening she read their heads. Susan she granted sensibility and delicacy of feeling, but Oliver who had what she called the big top, was the one with the intellectual power. She forced him to admit that he had great headaches, and she instructed Susan to pour cold water, very slowly, on a certain spot–right here, this knob–when the big top ached. Oliver hooted. Why not put a pistol to his head and be done with it?

An eccentric but not a fool, she whipped their quiet routine into a froth. Totally humorless, she made them collapse in laughter. As unkempt as a hermit, she had innumerable suggestions on dress and housekeeping. Obviously a careless mother, she dwelt on the Coming Event and irritated Susan by knowing everything that should be done in preparation and in the way of upbringing. She cast her bright enameled blue eye on Georgie, known as Buster because he busted everything within reach, and told dismayed Lizzie that he was destructive because his latent tenderness had not been appealed to. Boys should play with dolls, to teach them care for others and to stimulate their later parental responsibility–brickbats and tiles they would find for themselves.

Demanding rags, she made in a jiffy a rag baby which she laid in Buster’s arms with sounds of transcendental love. Georgie took it, a wonder. Then he crawled to the edge of the veranda and threw it into the chaparral. He would come to it, Mrs. Elliott said. Give him time. He had been let to get too good a start on a wrong path. But when she left at the end of four days Buster was still throwing the rag doll into the chaparral, and Lizzie confessed to Susan that she didn’t mind. It proved to her that he was all boy.

Come, come to Santa Cruz! Mrs. Elliott said as she departed. When the Great Event had happened, and Susan was rested, and wanted quiet in which to concentrate on the proper influences for that little unformed soul, she should bring him to Santa Cruz where he could wake and sleep to the sound of the sea. It would soothe his harsh masculine temperament if he was male, and reinforce her capacity for love and devotion if she was female.

 

Though Susan would not have called the assortment of people who passed through her house a society of a stimulating kind, she was neither lonely nor bored. Though she affected to view with dismay Mary Prager’s suggestion that they plan to stay their lives in New Almaden, she took great satisfaction in how well Oliver did his job. His survey had spotted the Santa Isabel tunnel within a foot, his map grew by tiny meticulous increments and had the praise of Mr. Smith, who said there was no finer thing of its kind. Without glancing at the implications, Susan praised him to Augusta for having taken the measure of the largest and most difficult mine on the continent in a single year. She tried not to begrudge him the time he spent working at night and on Sundays, and when his eyes gave out on him or one of his headaches came on, she willingly read aloud to him the things he felt he should study-treatises on the construction of arches, reports on Colorado mining districts, technical journals full of the grimmest algebra. While she had him there helplessly listening, she generally managed to work in Thomas Hudson’s latest poem of Old Cupboard essay, and she always reported him to Augusta as deeply moved.

Her own work did not satisfy her, but the closer she came to her time the harder she worked, though she could hardly sit in a chair for ten consecutive minutes. She was always one to clean her desk. Work, progress, and the inviolability of contract, three of the American gospels, met and fused in her with the doctrines of gentility and the cult of the picturesque. She was some sort of cross between a hummingbird and an earth mover. The
Scarlet Letter
blocks went off in March.

It would be pleasant to find that these pictures, though done in exile and against difficulties, triumphantly justify her as an artist. They don’t. They are fairly routine illustrations of a kind now rendered almost obsolete by facsimile reproduction processes. However she attenuated Grandfather, who was her only male model, she couldn’t make him come out looking like a guilty and remorseful preacher. As for Lizzie, she looks more propped-up than passionate.

Nevertheless, done, packed up, sent off, the contract satisfied, the money assured. Hardly had she had Oliver turn the package over to Eugene the stage driver than he brought her a letter from Thomas Hudson. He said that he and Augusta had found her Almaden letters so colorful and interesting that he thought
Scribner’s
readers should share in the pleasure. Would she want to try putting them together into an article? If she could not (he was too delicate to hint
why
she perhaps could not), Augusta had said she would be glad to do the little arranging necessary. And did she have any drawings that could be used as illustrations?

“Good heavens,” she said to Oliver, “I can’t think Scribby is in such a bad way that it has to fall back on me for its Western correspondent. He ought to get Mr. Harte or Mark Twain or someone.”

“Harte and Mark Twain don’t live in New Almaden,” Oliver said. “If he didn’t want you to do it he wouldn’t have asked you. Wait till you’re rested after the baby and do it then.”

“But I’m not a writer!”

“He seems to think you are.”

She brooded. That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. “It’s all right,” he said. “But I’d take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about used up, I should think.”

Meekly, astonished at herself, she took it out, rewrote the sketch as much in the spirit of discovery as possible, and sent it in. She put in Mother Fall, and her cook China Sam, who had murdered a rival and been reprieved from the rope because he was too good a cook to hang. He had a fourteen-year-old mail-order bride–sent, rumor said, by his real wife in China, who did not want to risk herself when Sam sent for her. She put in the Christmas custom of the Cornish miners, who visited the house and sang carols, those “rude uncultivated people” singing parts as if they had been born the children of choir masters. She put in every rag of local color she could think of about New Almaden, but she still mistrusted what she had done, and she still was afraid that Thomas would take it out of friendship and not for its own merits.

I have no evidence, but I think Grandmother must have been set up to be asked to write that piece. She would have loved to think it was good. It would demonstrate that marriage had not shrunk her career, but broadened it. She wanted to grow, as she imagined Thomas and Augusta growing, and as she was sure that Oliver grew, in his own way, through his work at the mine. Yet to think of herself appearing page to page with Cable or Nadal or any of the
Scribner’s
writers left her cold with the fear that her sketch would show up as a lame and embarrassing thing.

She had to know. So in two evenings she wrote another little story about the fiesta on Mexican Independence Day in September, with double heroines in Mr. Hernandez’s languid and beautiful sisters. This she sent off smoking hot to Mr. Howells at the
Atlantic,
submitting herself to a less partial judge than Thomas. That gave her three things to wait for.

Late afternoon, a soft spring day, the hills so green and soft she thought she would like to roll down them as she and Bessie used to roll down the pasture hill in Milton when they were children. Instead, she moved from the chair on the valley side of the porch to the bench on the trail side. The hammock she had given up weeks ago; she could not have got out of it if she had got in. Lizzie’s noises in the kitchen, and a banging that was probably Buster among the stovewood, might have been the sounds from her mother’s kitchen. The smells of damp and mold from below the porch were so familiar that it seemed her family must be just over the hill, to be visited in a ten-minute walk. Across on a blue, lupine-covered saddle two white mules were grazing, as peaceful as two white clouds in a summer sky.

Stranger scrambled out from under the porch and went off up the trail. That should mean Oliver was coming. In a minute he appeared, so much like a farmer returning from the fields in his corduroy pants and blue shirt that he might have been her father, or John Grant. He made a pass at Stranger’s ears, the dog bounced around him like a playful plowhorse. She saw a letter in Oliver’s shirt pocket. His forehead and nose were red from working all day Sunday in the yard. She sat still, placid and waiting, until he was clear up the steps. Then she lifted her smiling face to be kissed.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s been so beautiful I hated to think of you down that grim old mine.”