Angle of Repose (47 page)

My father, despite his Idaho governess, had gone to St. Paul’s badly prepared, an inferior Western child. Grandmother was determined that I should not, and being past her working years, and with time to spare, she saw to my education personally. She read me poetry, she read me Scott and Kipling and Cooper, she read me Emerson, she read me Thomas Hudson. She listened to my practise recitations and helped me write my themes and do my numbers. My homework went in bound in neat blue legal covers, moreover, and a lot of it was illustrated by Susan Burling Ward. The quick little vignettes that ornamented the margins of themes and arithmetic papers looked as if they had been made by the brush of a bird’s wing. They delighted my teachers, who pinned them up on blackboards and told the class how fortunate Lyman was to have so talented a grandmother.

I accepted her help willingly, because it brought me praise, but I had no clear idea of who she was or what she had done. The bindings of her books in the library were not inviting, and I can’t recall ever reading one of her novels when I was young. I didn’t know her writings, apart from a few children’s stories, until years after her death, nor much of her art either, since most of that is buried in the magazines that published her. I would have been surprised to hear that some people considered her famous.

But I remember a day when I came home from school and told her I had to write a report on Mexico–how Mexicans live, or something about Mexican heroes, or some incident from Cortez and Montezuma or the Mexican War.

She put aside the letter she was writing and turned in her chair. “Mexico! Is thee studying Mexico?”

Yes, and I had to write this report. I was thinking Chapultepec, maybe, where all the young cadets held off the U. S. Army. Where were all those old
National Geography?

“I had Alice take them up to the attic.” Her hand reached up and unhooked her spectacles, disentangling the earpieces from her side hair. I thought her eyes swam oddly; she smiled and smiled. “Did thee know thee might have
been
Mexican?”

It didn’t seem likely. What did she mean?

“Long ago we thought of living there. In Michoacán. If we had, thee’s father would probably have grown up and married a Mexican girl, and thee would be Mexican, or half.”

I had trouble interpreting her smile; I could feel her yearning toward some instructive conclusion. She took her eyes off me and looked out into the hall, where the light lay clean and elegant across the shining dark floor.

“How different it would all be!” she said, and closed her light-sensitive eyes a moment, and opened them again, still smiling. “I would have stayed. I loved it, I was crazy to stay. I had been married five years and lived most of that time in mining camps. Mexico was my Paris and my Rome.”

I asked why she hadn’t stayed, then, and got a vague answer. Things hadn’t worked out. But she continued to look at me as if I had suddenly become of great interest. “And now
thee
is studying Mexico. Would thee like to see what I wrote, and the pictures I drew, when I was studying it? It started out to be one article, but became three.”

So she led me up here to this room, and from her old wooden file brought out three issues of
Century
from the year 1881. There they are on the desk. I have just been rereading them.

As a boy I never came into this studio without the respectful sense of being among things that were old, precious, and very personal to Grandmother. She flavored her room the way her rose-petal sachet bags flavored her handkerchiefs. The room has not changed much. The revolver, spurs, and bowie hung then where they hang now, the light wavered through the dormer, broken by pines and wistaria, in the same way. Then, there was usually an easel with a watercolor clothespinned to it, and the pensive, downcast oil portrait of Susan Burling Ward that I have moved up from the library is no proper substitute for Grandmother’s living face; but reading her articles this morning I might have been back there, aged twelve or so, conspiring with her to write a paper called “My Grandmother’s Trip to Mexico in 1880,” illustrated with her woodcuts scissored from old copies of
Century Magazine.

Her traveler’s prose is better than I expected–lively, perceptive, full of pictures. The wood engravings are really fine, as good as anything she ever did. Our scissors left holes in both text and pictures, but from what remains I get a strong impression of the excitement with which she did them.

I remember excitement in her face, too, or think I do, and in her leaning figure, and her fine old hands, when we resurrected those drawings forty years after she had drawn them. She chattered to me, explaining things. She excited herself just by talking, she remembered Spanish words forgotten for decades, she laughed the giggly laugh she usually reserved for safe old friends. Her agitation was too violent for her, it was close to hysteria and not far from pain. She got the giggles; she ended by bursting into tears.

Her Paris and her Rome, her best time, the lost opportunity that she may have regretted more than any of the other lost opportunities of her life. She would never have admitted it, she would have denied it with vehemence, she kept up all her life the pretense that Augusta was a superior Genius, but Grandmother was a much better artist than her friend, and she would have profited from, and certainly couldn’t help envying a little, Augusta’s opportunities for travel and study. Probably she nursed a secret conviction, which she would have suppressed as Unworthy, that in marrying Oliver Ward she had given up her chance to be anything more than the commercial illustrator she pretended she was. That sort of feeling would have grown as she felt her powers growing.

She came before the emancipation of women, and she herself was emancipated only partly. There were plenty of women who could have provided her the models for a literary career, but hardly a one, unless Mary Cassatt, whom she apparently never met, who could have shown her how to be a woman artist. The impulse and the talent were there, without either inspiring models or full opportunity. A sort of Isabel Archer existed half-acknowledged in Grandmother, a spirit fresh, independent, adventurous, not really prudish in spite of the gentility. There was an ambitious woman under the Quaker modesty and the genteel conventions. The light foot was for more than dancing, the bright eye for more than flirtations, the womanliness for more than mute submission to husband and hearth.

The conventions of her time and place never inhibited her, I think, because it never occurred to her to rebel against them. The penalties, the neurasthenia and breakdowns of the genteel female, she never experienced either. But the ambitions that gave her purpose and the talents that helped fill a life not otherwise satisfying, she never fully realized or developed. That she never got off the North American continent, and lived most of her life in the back corners of that, was a handicap she couldn’t help feeling. Once she turned down a commission to illustrate a novel of F. Marion Crawford’s because, as she said, she didn’t even know the kind of chairs they sat on in the great European houses and
palazzi
where the story took place. She could infuse with her own special emotion anything she could draw, but she could draw only what she had seen.

Mexico was indeed her Paris and her Rome, her Grand Tour, her only glimpse of the ancient and exotic civilizations that in her innocent nineteenth-century local-colorish way she craved to know. Now for once she traveled not away from civilization but toward it, and thanks to the Syndicate’s desire to present a confidently prosperous front she traveled first class. Among her baggage were twenty-four whited blocks hastily prepared at the
Century
office, and in her portmanteau was a cabled commission from Thomas in Geneva–a commission that had arrived along with two dozen long-stemmed roses.

To Susan’s eye, the island ports they touched at on the way down were unbearably picturesque. They wore the patina of romantic time, their fortresses had been guarding the approaches to the Americas when her own home on the Hudson knew nothing but wild men dancing feast dances. She begrudged sleep, stayed up late to watch the lights and listen to the sounds from shore, and to see the moon set behind palms, got up before dawn to see the light grow across the perfumed open sea. As if on a honeymoon cruise, she and Oliver danced, dined, drank champagne at the captain’s table, listened to Spanish love-songs from the Cubans down in steerage, sat up half one moonlit night to hear a fantastic recitation of the
Frithjof Saga
in the original by a young Swedish engineer on his way to build a Mexican railroad.

He reminded her of themselves; she liked the way he took his tradition with him into cultural strangeness. She herself, who thought herself an especially understanding audience because of all the Vikings she had drawn for Thomas, Longfellow, and Boyesen, went to bed that night and reassembled her own somewhat dispersed inheritance, resolved not to let it be weakened by whatever Mexico should provide. One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism–not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately
right
, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.

Then after five days they went on deck one morning and saw a rosy snow-peak floating high on a white bed of cloud: Orizaba. A little later they steamed into the harbor of Veracruz, and Mexico rose before Susan Ward like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests, and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been. Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.

My grandfather, operating on his belief that ladies were to be protected, conspired with the Swedish engineer to fill all the seats in the first-class carriage to Mexico City with the more desirable passengers, but he had no such control over the diligence that took them from Mexico City to Morelia. For four days they sat jammed into an old Concord coach with six other people, none of whom spoke English but all of whom turned out to be of an excruciating politeness. Grandmother’s first article drily remarks that their intimacy ripened rapidly from their being thrown much together. Their driver, ancestor of all modern Mexican bus drivers, was one of those who put on speed for towns, arrivals, departures, turns, steep down grades, and stretches of rough road. Beside him on the box a
mozo
with a leather sack of stones encouraged the lead mules when they needed encouragement. Beside and before and behind, a protection against bandits, rode a detachment of
guardia
civil
in gray uniforms, with carbines and swords, and in the intervals between their bursts of speed, to which they responded as hunting dogs respond to sight and smell of a gun, they dozed in their saddles or eyed the ladies in the diligence or sang to themselves endless
corridos
, those improvised songs that are part ballad, part newspaper, part wish-fulfillment.

If they eyed the ladies, so did one lady eye them. She saw everything and drew much of it; her sketchbooks, if they had been preserved, are something I would have cherished. All I know of them is that Thomas Hudson thought them superb and that Winslow Horner and Joseph Pennell both praised them. Even the two dozen woodcuts that were developed from the sketchbooks have great variety and spirit: Toluca with its sixteenth-century profile of bell towers, terraced roofs, tiled domes, and cypresses; Indian huts where women set out on cloths weighted with stones the pulque, tortillas, and fruit of roadside refreshment ; packmules and burros, old subjects from New Almaden; bullock carts with solid wooden wheels; sandaled Indians bent under hundred-pound bundles of
camotes,
or towers of pottery woven together with cords, or bales of matting; swineherds driving herds of black pigs and wearing capes made of dry corn leaves so that they looked and sounded like walking corn shocks. Somehow, staggering after dark to one of the bare rooms that inns provided, she managed to pause long enough to get sketches of arcades and courtyards. Rising at three, in total darkness, she stood in the
corredor
long enough to catch the scene below, where men brought out and harnessed the mules by torches of agave rope. dipped in pitch.

She had a heart as well as an eye, and they were sometimes at war. Patient Indian women with their babies slung in
rebozos,
men bowed under their burdens, looked to her like people waiting for their souls. A cathedral rising out of a huddle of huts, a ranch whose stone water-works seemed to her to rival those of Seville, made her ashamed of the delight she took in a picturesqueness created out of so much driven human labor. She saw a bullfight in Maravatio and was sickened by it, but got her sketches just the same.

At two o’clock in the morning, after twenty-three hours on the road, they crashed through the silent streets of Morelia, past what her fellow passengers murmured was San Pedro Park, and into the courtyard of the Hotel Michoacán. A sleepy
mozo
came out and took the mules, a sleepy maid smiled at them from the doorway, a tall man dressed in American business clothes met them in the lobby and presented his card: Don Gustavo Walkenhorst. Speaking English with a German accent and Spanish turns of phrase, and with a look in his pale pop eyes that asked them to observe how well he played the role of international grandee, at home anywhere and with anyone, he said that he had waited only to welcome them, not to dismay them with his company when they were–especially the señora–so tired. He had taken the liberty of ordering beds for them, and a light supper. Tomorrow, when they were rested, he begged permission to call on them. He and his dear dead wife’s sister, who kept his house, would be honored if Señor and Señora Ward would be their guests at Casa Walkenhorst during their stay. And now, with permission, he would take his leave. Until tomorrow. Sleep well. He hoped the room would be satisfactory. He had particularly specified that they were to have this poor hotel’s best.