Angle of Repose (29 page)

Mrs. Elliott turned on her a pair of faded, slightly bulging blue eyes that the wind had filled with tears without blurring their sharpness. “Go where your husband’s work takes him. Make him feel that what he can do is worth doing. Take your child along and let him eat his peck of dirt. He’ll be all the better for it, and he might have an interesting life. So might you. You won’t always live like a lady, but that won’t hurt you. You can help your man be somebody, and be somebody yourself. He ought to leave all this dealing and promoting to somebody like Elliott who can’t do anything else.”

The insufferable eye dug at Susan. Mrs. Elliott rubbed a knuckle across it, and when she took the knuckle away the eye was redder, but just as sharp.

“Thank you,” said Susan furiously. “I’ll think about it.”

She gave her attention to a yard where some young people were playing the newly popular game called croquet. Obviously they were trying out a Christmas present. The lawn they knocked the striped balls around on had rose bushes in bloom along one side, and on the other a ten-foot pine tree hung with paper chains and strings of cranberries and popcorn that the birds were after. Her headache skewered her from temple to temple. She knew this as the worst Christmas of her life. Dinner among strangers, she and Ollie and Marian almost pensioners at the table made rowdy by the Elliotts’ three romping daughters, and Oliver not there, tied up by a last-minute job he didn’t think he could afford to turn down. She had been remembering all day how Christmas used to be at Milton, and how the whole week between Christmas and New Year used to be spent at receptions and house parties in New York. She had been remembering that it was now almost exactly ten years since she had met Oliver sitting on a stiff gilt chair under the controlling eye of Mrs. Beach and listening to the harangue of his unpleasant famous cousin.

“You are not to be angry with me,” said the nasal New England voice at her side. “Your Aunt Sarah was my good friend. I feel an obligation to look after you.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Stuff. You’re furious. But I’m very sure I’m right. Your husband hates promoting cement. His interest was in solving the problem of how to make it. He’s got the head for doing important things.”

“I believe I appreciate him almost as much as you do.”

“I wonder if you do,” said Mrs. Elliott, not in the least downed. “He’s not a type you were trained to understand.”

The horse lifted his tail and dumped a bundle on the doubletree, and for a blazing unladylike second Susan felt that he had made Mrs. Elliott the only possible answer.

A freckled hand was laid on her arm. “As long as I’ve already made you mad, let me tell you the rest of what I think.” Susan moved her shoulders very slightly, looking straight ahead. “You’re an artist and a lady,” Mrs. Elliott said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if you weren’t maybe just a little too much of both, but my views may be peculiar. And it has nothing to do with being fond of you. I
am
fond of you, though you wouldn’t believe it right now. What bothers me is that Oliver thinks you’re better than he is, some sort of higher creature. He thinks what you do is more important than what he does. I don’t deny you’re special. You’re both special. But I’d hate to see you discourage him from doing what he’s special at, just so you can coddle some notions about dirt and culture. Do you follow me?”

Just for an instant Susan’s eyes flared aside at the craggy, brown, long-jawed face and the blue eyes with their fuzzy eyebrows and the impossible clout bound above them. “I think so,” she said. “But I can’t say I understand you. One day you talk about woman’s slavery and the next you talk like this. I don’t mind your taking my husband’s side against me–or what you think is my husband’s side. Sometimes I do myself. But I want you to know, Mrs. Elliott, that I don’t consider our marriage a slavery for either of us. We decide things together. You think he’s slaving in the City at something he dislikes, just to keep us in comfort down here, but let me tell you, I work too. It’s my money that pays our board.”

“Is that so?” said Mrs. Elliott. “Then it’s worse than I thought.”

January 4, 1878

Dearest Augusta–

Christmas was such an utter failure for us that we have not quite recovered our hope for the future, which we planned in the crazy way people do ‘when hope looks true and all the pulses glow.’ Ten years on this coast and then home. Is ten years an eternity? Will you all be changed or dead; will we be ‘Western’ and brag about ’this glorious country’ and the general superiority of half-civilized to civilized societies?

That sounds bitter. There are such good people here, but I simply
can’t
care for them! I fear I am too old to be transplanted. The part of me which friendship and society claim must wait, or perish in waiting.

This is the way I feel when Oliver is in S.F. When he comes down, it is like high tide along the shore–all the wet muddy places sparkle with life and motion. I have discovered that I am not a serene person at all. I am fearfully down or else soaring. Perhaps I may reach a level resting-place in time. But this little bright town is a desert to me. I go about vacantly smiling upon people and feeling like a ghost. . . .

Good-bye, my darling other woman. It would not be well for one of us to be unmarried. It is better to go hand in hand, babies and all. But oh! it would be lovely to see you!

 

February 6, 1878

Dearest Augusta -

Miss P. has just brought in little Oliver with his bib on and a chunk of beefsteak in his fat fist-
raw
steak. Do you approve? I didn’t when Mrs. Elliott first started it, but he seems to enjoy it immensely–any kind of food. His four front teeth are through and two more in the upper jaw are pressing. The gum looks clear over them and they will soon be through. He is
so
well. What a blessing it is. What should I do–what might I have done –with a sick baby and no doctor I could trust.

It is an awfully hard winter in S.F. and Oliver’s negotiations continue to hang fire. Money is very tight and capitalists are holding on until better times. Oliver thought last week all was settled, but still he is obliged to wait in the most exasperating way. His patience is wonderful, it passeth my understanding. I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten. If he
is
beaten finally, I have made up my mind that I shall try to come home, for he will almost certainly have to take a place in some remote mine. I try to console myself for the injustice of what may happen with the fact that it may at least return me to where I may see you.

 

February 15, 1878

Dear Thomas–

I sent you yesterday the large block and the vignette for my Santa Cruz article. Others will come shortly. I am working on them as hard as I can, for the immediate future seems more and more uncertain. Things are so crazy out here–the madman Denis Kearny is shouting that the Chinese must go, and many workingmen are unemployed and surly, so that men with capital, fearing the disaster that may occur to their existing plants if a full-scale anti-Chinese riot breaks out, hesitate to erect anything new. For of course the erection of anything new would involve Chinese labor. It is cheaper.

You should be scolded for working so hard. Augusta writes that between converting old lovely Scribby into the new
Century,
and sitting on commissions, and fighting Tammany, you are seldom in your bed before two or three. You must stop this, sir. You are too valuable a citizen to be allowed to destroy your health in however good a cause.

 

March 4, 1878

Darling Augusta–

If nothing happens, I shall spend the apple blossom time in Milton, and the summer around generally, and not rejoin Oliver until at least the fall.

We shall have to postpone cement, and with it our lighthouse on that windy point. It is such a hard year and they all say Oliver looks so young–and when they ask him how much it will cost to make cement he hasn’t the cheek to show a balance sheet with startling immediate profits, but says the plain truth, that he
don’t know.
However, there are men who say they will go in on it next year. Meantime we must live. So Oliver takes up the shovel and the hoe and tells me privately that he is glad enough to lay down the fiddle and the bow. He enjoyed the wrestle with rock and clay and the triumph of finally uniting them in an insoluble marriage, but he has hated the tedious and humiliating waiting on rich men, and all the talk.

Mr. Prager has been appointed one of the commissioners to the Paris Exposition. My journey East will probably be made with them. If Oliver can only come part of the way with us it will not seem so cruel. He is at present negotiating about a place in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, the wildest of the wilds, where I cannot possibly take Ollie. But if he can come with us as far as Cheyenne, that will be four days together. I never thought that when I came back to you I would come hesitantly, but you will forgive me if I admit that coming back without Oliver will not be an unmixed blessing. But then I think of seeing
you
, and the long nights of talk. I am so restless with it all that I cannot write a decent letter. And I daren’t take a walk, I dare hardly look out the window, for fear of being reminded of that windy point overlooking the sweep of the Pacific. Who would have thought that the prospect of leaving this place could make me want to weep! Oliver takes it far better than I, though the hard work and the disappointment were mainly his.

End of dream number one, which was her dream, not his. It came and went within six months. Others, better at the talkee-talkee, would later take his formula, which he characteristically had not patented or kept to himself, and tear down the mountains of limestone and the cliffs of clay, grind them and burn them to clinker, add gypsum, and grind and roll clinker and gypsum together into the finest powder for the making of bridges, piers, dams, highways, and all the works of Roman America that my grandfather’s generation thought a part of Progress. The West would be in good part built and some think ruined by that cement. Many would grow rich out of it. Decades later, over the mountain at Permanente, not too far from New Almaden, Henry Kaiser would make a very good thing indeed out of the argillaceous and calcareous that Oliver Ward forced into an insoluble marriage in the winter of 1877.

My feelings about this are mixed, for it would have made me uneasy to be descended from Santa Cruz cement. If Grandfather had got his backing, neither he nor Grandmother would have become the people I knew. I can’t imagine him a small-town millionaire, or Grandmother a prettier and more snobbish Mrs. Elliott, a local intellectual remembering her great days of contact with some equivalent of Margaret Fuller.

It makes me restless, too, to see Oliver Ward going off to Deadwood, a raw Black Hills gulch lately stolen from the Sioux. When he started for there, Custer’s cavalry had been two years dead, and the Sioux were either behind reservation fences or gnawing the bones of exile in the Wood Mountain and Cypress Hills country beyond the Canadian line. So I don’t fear for his scalp. I fear for his soul. His employer was to be George Hearst, then building the sort of empire that Grandfather might have built if he had been another sort of man–George Hearst who, according to Clarence King, was once bitten on the privates by a scorpion, which fell dead.

Clarence King himself, Conrad Prager’s friend and superior on the Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and later on a friend of my grandparents, would turn out to be not untroubled by the temptations of a George Hearst. There was no reason Oliver Ward should not have been, except character. Pioneer or not, resource-raider or not, afflicted or not with the frontier faith that exploitation is development, and development is good, he was simply an honest man. His gift was not for money making and the main chance. He was a builder, not a raider. He trusted people (Grandmother thought too much), he was loved by animals and children and liked by men, he had an uncomplicated ambition to leave the world a little better for his passage through it, and his notion of how to better it was to develop it for human use. I feel like telling him to forget Deadwood. There never was anything there for a man like him.

But he had no options, having married a lady with a talent and having so far demonstrated his inability to keep her as he believed she should be kept. It was clear to him that, however she tried to reassure him, Susan carried his failure home in her baggage. She returned East poorer than she had come West, still homeless, and with a remoter chance of being soon settled. And she paid her own fare again, a thing that galled him.

Probably Susan consoled herself with the thought that she brought at least one good thing home: her baby. Perhaps she also had in some private corner of her mind the satisfaction of knowing that in spite of marriage, motherhood, and economic uncertainty she had not ceased to exist as an artist.

If she felt regret at having to leave Lizzie and Marian Prouse out on the edge of the half-civilized world, she shouldn’t have; she could have done them no greater favor. Whatever the West of 1878 was for young mining engineers, it was the land of opportunity for unmarried women. Lizzie shortly would marry her rancher, and before she was through would give Buster five brothers and sisters. Marian Prouse, that large, soft, surprisingly adventurous young woman, would go on even farther west, to the Sandwich Islands, and there would marry a sugar planter and live on a beach more romantic than the one Grandmother coveted in Santa Cruz–a beach of silvery sand above Lahaina, on Maui, where coconut palms lean to frame the hump of Lanai across the Auau Channel.

It is odd to think, as I sit here in Grandmother’s study imagining a future that is already long past, that I have walked that Lahaina beach with Marian’s grandchildren, and found them, as they perhaps found me, only pleasant strangers. Irrationally, at the time, I couldn’t help thinking that because their grandmother’s life was briefly entangled with that of Susan and Oliver Ward, we owed each other something more than casual politeness.