Angle of Repose (41 page)

“Yeah,” Shelly said. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I don’t know. I suppose it is sick. But . . . Isn’t sex the business of the people having it? That’s what Larry always says. Shouldn’t they be able to do it as they please, in public if that’s the way it suits them? The audience can walk out if it isn’t entertained.” Irritable and moody, she shook her hair back and leaned back on her braced hands and scowled at me. Then the scowl broke. “But that’s a different thing from your book. In a book, I think sex ought to be written about just like anything else.”

I twitched the chair a little further askew. I liked neither the confessional nor the evangelical aspects of that conversation. “Ah,” I said, “is it like everything else?”

Ho ho ho.
Good. We were off the confessional. “All right,” she said, “it’s your book. Just pretend you’ve had a fan letter signed ‘Modern Reader’ saying ‘I like your book fine but why do you draw the curtain across the love scenes’?”

“I thought it was the light I turned off.”

“Same thing.”

She was laughing, bowed over her cross-legged Yogi squat with her hair hanging to the floor. If I had not been what I am, her mother’s broken doll, a grotesque, and three times her age at that, I would have thought she had excited herself with her own talk, confessional, evangelical, or otherwise. Her eyes had a moist shine in them that a sound man would have had to make a decision about. I suppose the piquancy for her is not in the talk, which is standard fare in the crowd she has been running with, but in getting the Gorgon to discuss these emancipated matters with its stone lips.

I said, “When you come right down to it, I neither pulled the curtain nor turned off the light. If you’re going to be a literary critic you’re going to have to learn to read what’s there. In that scene you just typed, the room is full of refracted moonlight and the door is wide open and the curtains are pulled back and the night air of the mountains is blowing through. For Victorians they weren’t doing so badly. It’s just unfortunate that their little love scene didn’t do everything a love scene is supposed to do.”

“Why? Didn’t the housecleaning last?”

“Maybe a half hour. Then she found out that if he joined the Survey he’d be posted for winter field work in California, and the next summer he might be almost anywhere in the West. She’d either have to trail around boarding in the nearest town, or go back to Milton.”

“So I suppose she wouldn’t let him take it.”

“She wouldn’t have put it that way. She was worried about her child, she wondered if he’d ever have a secure home to grow up in, I suppose she wondered how she’d get along herself, without anybody artistic and intellectual to talk to. So they debated and hesitated a couple of days, and then when Grandfather was offered the managership of the Adelaide mine, he took that instead. That way, she could go on planning an expansion of the cabin, to be ready for her child and next summer’s guests. It isn’t quite Living Theater, I guess, but it’s the sort of thing her life was made of.”

She was watching me with her big gray upturned eyes and sucking on the bent knuckle of her thumb, which she now released with a slurping sound and said, “I thought she was going to quit making decisions that fouled up his career.”

“So did she. In a pinch she couldn’t help herself.”

“He let her lead him by the nose. Was he sort of soft?”

“He was no good at the talkee-talkee,” I said. “He loved his wife and child. He had just been, for a Victorian, exceptionally well loved. It wasn’t an easy decision. It could have gone either way.”

“I suppose,” Shelly said. “I guess I don’t understand this home business of hers, either. She’s not only a culture hound, she’s got a terrible property consciousness. What would be the matter with traveling around? When Larry and I were hitching, I loved it. That gypsy hobo life, that’s it. I know a pair who hitch hiked all the way from Singapore to London. I’d like to do that. I don’t dig these home bodies.”

“Times change,” I said, not without irony. “Why didn’t you and your husband stay on the road, if it was so great?”

She was at her knuckle again. Slurp. Sidelong flash of eyes. “He’s not my husband, of course. That’s for the family only.”

“All right,” I said. “The man you travel with, then. Why aren’t you still traveling?”

She threw her hands up in the air and leaned back, stretching, arching her chest upward.
Ohne
Büstenhalter
again. “Yakh!” she said. “It did get a little hairy, sleeping in the washrooms of Canadian tourist parks in the rain. But I’d do it again. I mean, you’re never that free again.” She stood up and slapped the seat of her pants as if the floor had been a dusty roadside. “Anyway I take it back about the sex scene. Even if you’d spelled it out, I guess it wouldn’t have been a climax to much of anything.”

“Is it ever?” I said. “No, it was just sort of like everything else.”

Grandmother wanted her son to grow up, as she had, knowing some loved place down to the last woodchuck hole. The rural picturesque was not only an artistic manner with her, it was a passionate conviction. She had been weaned on the Romantic poets and the Hudson River school, and what the West had so far taught her was an extension of those: beyond Bryant lay Joaquin Miller, beyond Thomas Cole spread a vast wild grandeur supervised by Bierstadtian peaks. It was never the West as landscape that she resisted, only the West as transience and social crudity. And those she might transform.

There was a real nester in that woman. When she got flirting around with a twig or piece of string in her bill she was not to be balked. In September they began the addition to the cabin–a kitchen, bedroom, and vast rock fireplace designed more for social evenings than for domestic comfort. “Ye’ll have no hate in the house,” said the reluctant Irish mason who laid up the stones, and delighted her with his omen in brogue.

The curtained bedroom angle that Conrad Prager had called the upstairs was decurtained and christened Pricey’s Corners. It held the bookcase, the rocker, and a small table equipped with a stereopticon and two hundred frontier views, the bread and butter gift of Thomas Donaldson. I have the views here, or most of them–brown, mounted on stiff cardboard with beveled and gilded edges, the twin photographs curving in a little like weakly crossing eyes: the early West as caught in the lenses of O’Sullivan, Hillers, Savage, Haynes, Jackson–a little musty, spotted with time, but still, when I hold one of them to that binocular viewer, touched with the wonder and excitement of a new country. Along with them in their box is Donaldson’s ponderous report on the Public Domain, a work as neglected by the Congress that commissioned it as King predicted it would be, but a benchmark in the nation’s understanding of itself, the sort of contribution to disinterested knowledge that my grandfather would have liked to make. These things are about all that is left of the Leadville years.

Early in November, their eyes watchful of a leaden sky that dusted them with snow, a characteristic Leadville buggy-full went over the pass, accompanied by a half dozen riders. The riders were of the class of young, well-born, and well-trained men who had recently contributed twenty-seven graduates of top technical schools to the procession carrying General Vinton, son of Dr. Vinton of Trinity Church, to his Leadville grave. The buggy contained, besides Susan and Oliver, his remote cousin W. S. Ward, W.S.’s older brother Ferd, called the Wizard of Wall Street, and Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., a man who has no historical personality for me except for the somehow awful fact that as a boy of twelve or so he was posted on a hill by his father so that he could watch the slaughter at Shiloh.

If Grant had been equipped to hear the Doppler Effect of time, it might have made him as uneasy to take that ride with Ferd Ward as it had to sit through a battle. It might have made them all uneasy. Before too long, Ferd Ward as General Grant’s financial adviser, would utterly ruin the ex-hero, and shred away the last rag of his dignity and reputation. He would also, as one of the syndicate that owned the Adelaide mine, put a kink in my grandparents’ lives. He was not a man it was quite safe to know. But Grandmother in her innocence thought it rather splendid that Mr. Ward was going over the range with them and that he would be on the same train as herself as far as Chicago. He was a testimony to their rise, he announced the circles that by his professional competence Oliver had earned the right to move in. This time, when she left him on a station platform, she would leave him solidly established, and she would go East without the taste of failure in her mouth.

In every way this returning was different from the last. Despite the prospect of another winter apart, no tears, no dreary thoughts. In Chicago, Ferd Ward and Mr. Grant took her to a banquet honoring General Grant, and she capped her social season by shaking that conquering hand and looking into those sad, streaked eyes. She met General Sherman and a half dozen other generals of the Army of Tennessee, and she had an animated ten-minute conversation with the principal speaker, Mr. Samuel Clemens. These items are not important. They have for me, as a historian, a sort of corroborating charm: they prove that my grandmother did indeed live in time, among people.

Through the fading autumn she came back to Milton, and after a day’s dismay that her child did not know her, and after a few days of unpacking, washing, talking, and preparing, found herself ready for a winter’s work. There was nothing to hinder–Augusta and Thomas were still abroad. She had finished the Louisa Alcott blocks and had no other contracts for the moment. Without planning it, she found herself beginning a novel about her grandfather, the Quaker preacher who by his abolitionism had got the whole Milton meeting set down.

Writing books about grandparents seems to run in the family.

 

From the parental burrow Leadville was so far away it was only half real. Unwrapping her apple-cheeked son after a sleigh ride down the lane, she had difficulty in believing that she had ever lived anywhere but here.

She felt how the placid industry of her days matched the placid industry of all the days that had passed over that farm through six generations. Present and past were less continuous than synonymous. She did not have to come at her grandparents, as I do, through a time machine. Her own life and that of the grandfather she was writing about showed her similar figures in an identical landscape. At the milldam where she had learned to skate she pulled her little boy on his sled, and they watched a weasel snow-white for winter flirt his black-tipped tail in and out of the mill’s timbers. She might have been watching with her grandfather’s eyes.

Watching a wintry sky die out beyond black elms, she could not make her mind restore the sight of the Sawatch at sunset from her cabin door, or the cabin itself, or the smokes of Leadville, or Oliver, or their friends. Who were those glittering people intent on raiding the continent for money or for scientific knowledge? What illusion was it that she bridged between this world and that? She tried to think whether she would possibly believe in Sam Emmons if he appeared at her Milton door in his white buckskins. She paused sometimes, cleaning the room she had always called Grandma’s Room, and thought with astonishment of Oliver’s great revolver lying on the dresser.

Milton was dim and gentle, molded by gentle lives, the current of change as slow through it as the seep of water through a bog. More than once she thought how wrong those women in San Francisco had been, convinced that their old homes did not welcome them on their return. Last year she would have agreed. Now, with the future assured, the comfortable past asserted itself unchanged. Even the signs of mutability that sometimes jolted her–the whiteness of her mother’s hair, the worn patience of Bessie’s face, the morose silences of her brother-in-law, now so long and black that the women worried about him in low voices–could not more than briefly interrupt the deep security and peace.

Need for her husband, like worry over him, was tuned low, and Augusta’s continued absence aroused only an infrequent, pleasant wistfulness. They had not seen each other in nearly four years. Absorbed in her child and her book, sunk in her affection for home, she could go whole days without mentioning or thinking Augusta’s name.

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that anyone of Rodman’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she could have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being the wife of a failure and a woman with no home.

When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization : what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even living in traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!