Angle of Repose (49 page)

“It’s only a possibility,” Oliver said to her turned back. “It wouldn’t do to bet on it. But if there’s a mine there, Simpson’s crowd will buy it, or the Syndicate will decide to work it. Either way I might be offered the job. It’s likelier than that–I’m nearly a cinch to be. So you be looking it over while I’m gone. See if you think you’d want to live here.”

The stone of the Moorish arches around the courtyard of the Casa Gutierrez was twisted like rope, and looked as soft. The stairway was the finest in Morelia. The ladies posed for her at the head of the steps, black against the pink stone, docile, smiling, their faces pale and soft like the faces of nuns. But when the
mozos
led out into the court a great clatter of horses and mules, the artist turned the page of her sketchbook and crowded to the balustrade with the others.

Again she was struck by the contrast with Leadville. There, when Oliver and Frank went out on a mine inspection, they wore buckskin and corduroy and battered felt hats. They creaked up into fifty-dollar Whitman saddles and yanked the lead rope of a packhorse carrying a pair of bedrolls, a few cans of beans and a slab of bacon and a frying pan, a loaf or two of bread, a pick and shovel and geologist’s hammer. The tarp that covered the load by day would cover their beds at night.

Down below her, Oliver was the only familiar thing, and he, wearing what he would have worn in Colorado, looked very shabby to her critical eye. Don Pedro Gutierrez, supplying mules and horses and servants for the expedition, was clearly bent on upholding the prestige of his family and impressing the engineers of two syndicates. He stood just at the gate, with all the seethe and clatter of twenty-five mules, a half dozen saddle horses, and eight servants under his eye, and coerced it into ceremonious order.

No corduroy or stained buckskins for him. His tight leather trousers, belled at the bottom, were embroidered down the seams. His leather jacket was gorgeous with togs and silver buttons and embroidered frogs. His white beaver hat had a brim like a halo, and around it for a band was wound a silver cord. His boots looked as soft as gloves, his silver spurs were wheels. A serape of great price was folded narrow and tossed over one shoulder. He might have been ridiculous; instead he was close to magnificent. Susan, seeing him at breakfast the morning before, had thought him the sort of little dark man of fifty who might have sold dry goods on Sixth Avenue, but she revised her opinion as she labored to catch his likeness from the
corredor.
His family went back to the Conquest, he owned great ranches and historic mines, he would have scorned to measure the extent of his lands. Standing by the gateway he moved the sweating servants with an eyebrow, directed them with half-inch movements of his head.

In her quick sketch, Don Pedro’s small, quiet, ornate figure came forward, larger than life, dominating all that swarming activity and the other figures who might have competed for attention. Oliver, Simpson, Don Gustavo, grown men capable of decision and authority, stood back against the wall smoking cigars and leaving everything to Don Pedro. Trying to catch in some expression or posture the authority that flowed from him, she thought of other kinds of authority she had observed in other men–Ferd Ward’s utterly confident money power, Thomas Hudson’s mixture of sensibility and probity, Lawrence Kendall’s tight-mouthed rigor, Conrad Prager’s
savoir faire,
Oliver’s promptness in a crisis. Don Pedro, gaudy as a ringmaster in his noisy courtyard, was more impressive than any of them.

Like the shaped stone, the fully formed architecture, the household with its routines as fixed as holy offices, he represented a civilized continuity unbroken even by transplantation to a new country. He expressed a security of habit such as that which made Milton dear to her, but older, more cultivated, and with more power to shape the individual to the group image. The Inquisition spoke through him, Ferdinand and Isabella, the conquistadors. The black-clad, soft-faced, subservient women on the balcony confirmed his potency. If he had raised his voice or his hand it would have had an effect like another man’s fury.

How did one draw that? She couldn’t, not to her satisfaction. But she looked at Don Pedro long enough and hard enough to comprehend him as one aspect of what life would be like in Morelia: around a man like that, life stayed within traditional bounds. His perfection as a type made Don Gustavo look like a pretender, Simpson an outlander, Oliver all but uncouth. Unwilling to accept the implications of what her drawing was leading her to, she gave it up and simply watched.

They were going out for three weeks into the mountains, up trails as steep as ladders, and would be camping in country dozens of miles from any town–justification, she would have thought, for taking every necessity and eliminating every luxury. But she saw go onto those twenty-five mules iron pots and Dutch ovens, bundles of silver knives and forks and spoons wrapped in soft deerskin, china that from the
corredor
she thought she recognized as Limoges. There were crates of chickens, hampers of fresh fruits and vegetables, hampers of canned goods and vintage wines that had already traveled from Europe by ship, and from Veracruz and Mexico City by train, diligence, and packhorse. There were down pillows in silk covers, linen fit for the trousseau of a duchess. She saw what the Señora Gutierrez y Salarzano said was a camp bed–solid brass, complete with springs and mattress–taken apart and lashed onto two mules.

One by one, as the pack animals were loaded, Don Pedro’s eyes inspected them and gave some signal invisible to Susan. One by one the
mozos
led them out into the street. The courtyard thinned, the piles of boxes, crates, hampers, and leather
maletones
were gone. Only the horses remained, in their enormous silver-mounted saddles and their bridles and martingales whose leather was a crust of filigree and rosettes. They stood mouthing their bits and rubbing their noses against the pink pillars, each one held by a
mozo
in a scarlet sash. Don Pedro looked deliberately around the court, then at the three men standing against the wall. They threw away their cigars and came to him as obediently as acolytes attending a priest.

The ladies were already drifting into line as the men started up the stairs. As in a court ceremony, the gentlemen bent one by one over transparent hands. The ladies gave them murmured adjurations to go with God. But Oliver, at the end of the line, came to a stubborn uncourtly decision that Susan saw take form in his face and manner. Here came Don Pedro bowing, here came Don Gustavo imitating him, here came Simpson, sandy-haired and amused, imitating them both. And here came Oliver shaking, not kissing, each extended hand, and giving each lady in turn a wholly inadequate friendly nod.

Susan was embarrassed for him. In matters such as this he hadn’t the least grace. Then when Don Pedro stood before her, grave and deferential, she put out her hand, saw how brown it was, and lost her own poise. “It is not a hand fit to kiss,” she said in English. “I’ve been too much in the sun.”

Interrupted in his bow, Don Pedro slid his eyes sideward toward Don Gustavo, seeking translation. Don Gustavo translated. Don Pedro returned his gaze to Susan, wagged his head ever so slightly, smiled with a look like mild reproof, and brushed, or did not quite brush, her knuckles with his lips.

Don Gustavo, coming after him, had prepared a compliment: “It is a privilege to salute a hand at once so shapely and so gifted.” He gave her hand a wet smack that she instantly wanted to rub off. Because she felt like kicking him, she smiled with extra warmth.

“Please,” said Don Gustavo. “While we are gone, my poor house is your own. Whateffer you wish, command.” His pale pop eyes crawled on her like slugs. She smelled the pomaturn on his hair.

“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind,” and moved her eyes to Simpson, coming up.

Grinning, he bent over her hand, which she felt dangled out there like a hurt paw or the hand of a statue on a newel post. “I’m not very graceful about all this,” Simpson said, “but you can’t blame me if I enjoy it.”

“More than Oliver does.” She looked for a moment or two into his shrewd light-lashed eyes. She liked him. Perhaps one day he would be Oliver’s collaborator. She might be entertaining him at dinners when he came down to consult, or to make periodic inspections. By then would they all be wearing Mexican clothes and taking all this Mexican courtliness for granted, acting like Don Gustavo, who had been in Mexico twenty years and wished it to appear that he had been there two hundred? The worst thing she knew about Don Gustavo had to do with blue eyes: despite his Mexican pretensions, he took pains to make it clear that the blue eyes of his wife and daughter and Emelita derived from a superior strain related to his own. They might be Spanish, but they were really Visigoths. By such means he excused himself for having married into an inferior race.

“It could become a bad habit,” Susan said drily. “Good-bye, Mr. Simpson. I hope you find what you came looking for.”

“What we all came looking for,” Simpson said. “Next time I kiss your hand on a balcony I’ll be loaded down with silver like one of Don Pedro’s horses.”

Now Oliver. Not only did he not feel his own awkwardness, she saw, but he was enormously tickled by the whole circus. He took her hand with formality, as if just being introduced, and shook it up and down. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “And I thought we were going camping.”

“You’re a little underdressed for the parade,” she couldn’t help saying.

In surprise he looked down at himself: corduroy pants, leather shirt, revolver, bowie, big iron spurs. “Why, it’s authentic Colorado. And the spurs are authentic Chihuahua.”

“Iron, though. Not silver.”

Laughing, he hugged an arm around her shoulders, making her self-conscious. “Isn’t it nice that
something
isn’t silver? Would you like me to look like Don Pedro? He makes Clarence King look like a piker, doesn’t he?” In front of them all he leaned and kissed her lightly, and when she pulled back, frowning, he looked at her with his smile hanging on his lips as if he had just made a joke. “Just be yourself,” he said softly. “Don’t let all the grandeur buffalo you.”

His good sense released her from some inhibition or pretense that had been trying to establish itself. Looking from him to Don Gustavo she comprehended how foolish she had been about to be. She did not want Oliver to be a pretender, she didn’t want to be one herself.

“I’ll try.”

“Get a lot of sketches.”

“I’ve already made three times more than I can use. I’ll have to see if Thomas won’t print more than one article.”

“Write it so he has to. Get rich.”

“You too. Find a mine richer than the Little Pittsburgh.”

“Or the Adelaide,” he said, and pulled his mouth down. “You keep your eyes open, eh? Maybe we could do worse than Michoacán.”

“I’ll know by the time you get back. I’m pretty sure already.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, darling. Be careful.”

The laugh bubbled out of him again. “The worst that could happen to me would be that I’d fall out of that brass bed.”

“Do you get to use that?”

“I don’t know. I can’t wait to find out. Certainly it’s not for Don Pedro. He wouldn’t put a guest on the ground and sleep in splendor himself. So who is it for? Don Gustavo? Simpson? Me? It’s a protocol problem.”

The others were standing, men in one group, women in another, waiting. Susan kissed him quickly again, impropriety or no impropriety. The men clanked and jingled down the stairs, mounted, rode single file to the gate. Don Pedro looked an imperceptible message to the
mozo
there, and the gate opened. The ladies were fluttering handkerchiefs from the balustrade. Don Pedro bowed from the saddle, Don Gustavo bowed from the saddle, Simpson bowed from the saddle, not without being amused at himself. Oliver touched his hatbrim, looking upward specifically at her.

He was tall, fair, sober, shabby in his worn field clothes, and he slouched as he rode. He could not have been pompous like Don Gustavo without laughing. He had to be himself–nothing spectacular, nothing gorgeous or picturesque. Just, as she had more than once said in her letters to Augusta, her plain boy. But it was on his skill and judgment that everything hung. Having doubted him through the picturesque hour of departure, she now saw him go with a quick, strong rush of love and pride.

Casa Walkenhorst

Morelia, Michoacán

September 12, 1880

Dearest Augusta–

It is now over a week since Oliver went off with the owners and the engineer of the prospective buyers to inspect the mine. They departed like a Crusade–but I shall save that for when I see you. It seems too good to be true that this letter can be mailed to the dear old studio address, and that when we return next month you and Thomas will be back in New York. After how many?–four long years when I have been deprived of the sight of you! My darling, we shall have more than Oliver’s Crusade to talk about.

I am settled as happy as a worm in an apple at the Casa Walkenhorst, the home of Morelia’s Prussian banker. With
my norteamericana
habits I am probably almost as disconcerting as a worm, or half a worm as Bessie would say, giggling–to Emelita, the sister-in-law who keeps Don Gustavo’s house. But she is such a sweet and gentle nature, and such a model of consideration, that she would never let me know, no matter how much I disrupted her household. I could go around on stilts, and wearing a bearskin, and she would keep her countenance and her sweetness, convinced that these were the whims and eccentricities, or perhaps the native customs, of an American woman artist. For I am an artist here –my reputation is greatly enlarged by their inability to consult any of my work. But once when I made my own bed (having been brought up my mother’s helper and having been maid of all work in a log cabin on a ditch) I heard her afterward scolding the maid for not being prompt, and so I have subsided not unwillingly into luxury, laziness, and daily drawing.