Angle of Repose (52 page)

“You know how I feel about you,” he said. “Always, from the minute I came in here and saw you in your little traveling hat. The day they hanged Jeff Oates.”

“I know,” she said. “But you mustn’t.”

“Easier said than done. You know how I feel about Oliver, too.”

“He feels the same. There’s nobody he trusts more.”

The laugh that came out of him struck her ear unpleasantly. “He should read Artemus Ward: Trust everybody, but
cut the cards.’ ”

“I don’t understand.” Troubled, she started to take her hand away, but he caught it with his right hand and held it down on his left wrist.

“Nothing. Forget it. I’m just . . .” Smiling, he studied her; he shook his head and laughed. “You’re beautiful, you know?
And
kind.
And
talented.
And
intelligent. You’re a thoroughbred.”

“Frank . . .”

“You’re everything good I can possibly imagine in a woman.”

She tugged at her anchored hand. “You’re forgetting.”

“I’m not forgetting anything,” Frank said. “I know who you are, and who I am, and who Oliver is, and what a gentleman does in the circumstances. I know all about it, I’ve thought about it enough. But I can’t get up on my hind legs and cheer about it.”

What could she do but smile, an affectionate, shaky smile.

“Once you kissed me, by mistake,” he said. “Would you kiss me good-bye,
not
by mistake?”

Only for a second she hesitated. “Do you think . . . ? Yes. Yes, I will.”

She stood on tiptoe to brush his cheek with her lips, but while she was still coming up, with puckered lips, she saw something happen in his eyes, and she was grabbed hard and he was kissing her, not on the cheek, but hard and hungry on the mouth. It was a long blind time before he let her pull away.

“That wasn’t . . . fair,” she said.

“It’s little enough. I’m not made of wood.” He would not meet her eyes. He began carrying the luggage outside to be ready for the buggy.

With the skirt still against her face, Susan looked across at Oliver, his fair hair rumpled, his neck and arms burned dark, working at the table under the ornate oil lamp. She felt she owed him something, she wanted to say something that would restore them. Crossing behind him, she slipped one hand over his eyes and with the other held the skirt under his nose. “Smell. What does that smell like?”

Obediently he sniffed. “Mold?”

“Oh, mold!” She yanked it away. “It smells like Leadville, that’s what it smells like. Can you imagine? It makes me homesick. In spite of everything, I want to go back.”

Half turned in his chair, he took her outburst with complete seriousness. When he was very tanned, as now, his eyes were as blue as blue turquoise. “Sue, I wouldn’t count on it.”

One last time she sniffed at the skirt–sniffed and couldn’t be sure she had really smelled in it that intoxicating essence of the mountains. She gave it up. “I suppose not. It just came over me like a gust. For a second I knew exactly who I was: Mrs. Ward from Ditch Walk. I guess I’d better get ready to be the Wandering Jew again.”

“He’s immortal, isn’t he?” Oliver said. “He
never
gets to settle down. We’ll make it, sooner or later.”

“In Heaven, I expect.”

“Oh ye of little faith. Come on, Sue, we’ll make it. We’ll get that right job and that house and that yard and that attic. We really will.”

“It’s hard to see how, or when.”

“Mañana,”
Oliver said. He gave her a pat on the hip and turned back to his notes and map. “Hadn’t you better get packing? We’ve got forty miles to ride tomorrow.”

She had to laugh. No sooner did the talk get around to settling down than it was time to go somewhere.

 

End of dream number three, which like the Santa Cruz dream was more hers than his. A short dream, but intense, it had briefly enchanted the artist as well as the wife. She put it aside, and did not mope, and made the most of the trip back. It is a commentary both on her personally and on the Genteel Female that she rode the two hundred and fifty miles to Mexico City in a little over five days, and on the way, literally writing and drawing in the saddle, made all the notes and some of the sketches for a third
Century
article.

She had the terrier temperament, and she was interested in everything that moved. Through the black silk face mask that Emelita had given her as protection against the
muy fuerte
Mexican sun, her eyes were very busy. Her pencil was always out.

They were four–she and Oliver, Simpson, and a villainous-looking colonel of cavalry, one of Diaz’s colonels, who rode a horse he called Napoleon Tercero and whom they suspected of having been a bandit before patriotism ennobled him. They accepted his company because there were many of his kind, un-ennobled, along the roads they must travel.

Behind the riders came the little train of two pack mules, two lead mules, and two spare horses, managed by six servants, the last of whom rode his mule very close to the tail, at the very end of the procession, and so far as they could see, did nothing but adjust the angle of his sombrero according to the angle of the sun.

Ahead of them by six hours rode a trusted servant of the house of Gutierrez who prepared their way at the great
estancias
where they rested in the afternoons or slept at night. Nothing could have appealed to Grandmother’s romantic medievalism more than those houses. They arrived like knights errant, a seneschal swung open the gates, at the inner gate the lord met them and made them welcome. Vassals led away the lady’s palfrey and unbuckled the knights’ spurs, demoiselles led the lady to her room. They dined at feudal boards with retainers clustered below the salt, while outside in courts lighted by torches there was minstrelsy on the guitar.

Fairyland, a storybook country of antique courtesy and feudal grandeur, with a passionate concentration of the picturesque on which Susan Ward throve. She left every great house with reluctance. As they jingled and shuffled along a road through some sun-baked high valley, their shoulders keeping the same motion, the cartridges clunking in the men’s carbines to the same rhythm, she may have thought that they owed it all to Don Pedro Gutierrez, and that if Oliver’s report were only going to be different, they might still become part of that world. I catch her, in the reminiscences, wondering wistfully if those
estancias
have managed to survive within sound of the train whistle, if there are still houses like Querendero and Tepitongo and Tepititlan, where their whole cavalcade of ten people, twelve horses, and four mules could be taken in on an hour’s notice and cause not a ripple except the friendly, grave stir of hospitality.

There is only one passage in her third
Century
article to indicate that she sometimes forgot the romantic color of what she was seeing, and let her mind brood on the fact that this picturesque road led nowhere but
back,
and back to what? Not even the meager stability of Leadville.

“We met no one but Indians,” she writes. “Once it was a young man who had given his straw hat to the woman behind him and went bareheaded himself, his coarse thatch of hair shining like shoe blacking in the sun. She carried a sleeping child swaying heavily in the folds of her
rebozo.
With one hand, which also carried her shoes of light-colored sheepskin, she held the end of the
rebozo
across her face. In the other hand she carried a rude guitar. Over the blue cotton cloth held across her face she stared at us fixedly out of her great black eyes.

“I wondered at her look of awed curiosity, until I realized that I was riding with my hands clasped behind me, to rest them from holding in my
rosillo,
while Oliver had taken my bridle and was leading me along. I was wearing the black silk mask that Emelita had given me. To that Indian woman I must have looked like a captive, bound and masked, being led away to the mountains.”

I hear you, Grandmother.
Entiendo.

“Susan,” said Thomas Hudson from his William Morris chair, looking at her over his tented fingers, “do you have any idea how remarkable you are?”

“Oh my goodness!” Susan said. “Here we sit, just the three of us, the perfect leftovers of a perfect evening. Don’t spoil the best part with flattery.”

“Look at her, Augusta,” Thomas said. “Isn’t she beautiful? As rosy as one of her father’s apples. You absolutely charmed Godkin, you know. It’s a pity Mr. James was indisposed, he’d have found a new model for the American girl.”

“Girl! Anyway I’m not sure I could stand being attenuated in Mr. James’s fashion. I was half glad he didn’t appear, isn’t it awful? I’d have been terrified to find myself talking to him. And he would have distracted my attention from you two.”

She felt warm, tired, cherished. Before the fire’s warmth she positively blinked. It had been the kind of evening that heightened her color and loosened her tongue. First dinner at the house of E. L. God-kin, the editor of
The Nation,
to meet his houseguest Henry James, who didn’t appear–sent down his apologies because of an earlier indiscretion with coffee. So she had to put up with being seated between Mr. Godkin and Joseph Jefferson. Then
Patience,
with Godkin on one side of her and Thomas on the other, laughing themselves weak. Then oysters and champagne for eight here at the studio, and praise for her Mexican sketchbooks, spread out on display. Now this sweet and intimate late half hour of low fire and warm eyes. She would have to go back to Milton and work hard for a week to take the bubbles out of her blood.

Thomas’s smiling, narrow face watched her from the shadowy chair. All around, on walls, mantel, whatnot, highboy, were mementoes of the Hudsons’ rich life–the sort of life she had shared all evening: photographs of the famous, a drawing of Augusta by Homer, a pair of china lions, the gift of Raphael Pumpelly, a whole wall of Japanese prints, a Malay
kris
with a wavy blade, an Australian boomerang, a lugubrious wooden saint from a Burgundian church. They gathered objects as they gathered friends; the richness of their accumulations was an index of the open-handedness of their giving. They made the wildest incongruities harmonious. They took Susan Ward, a country cousin, and blended her with Jefferson, Godkin, themselves–could even have blended her with Henry James if he had appeared. Now they sat and looked at her with such love and approval that her warm face grew warmer. It was joy to hear them praise her; she could not resist.

“All right,” she said, “you may tell me in what way I’m remarkable.”

Augusta from her hassock–soft face, dark hair, shining brown eyes, said, “As if you didn’t know.”

Thomas slid farther into his chair with his elbows propped and his fingers tented before his mouth and talked to the weathered saint on his pedestal behind Susan.

“How art thou remarkable? Let me count the ways. Hmm? She’s been out in the unhistoried vacuum of the West for nearly five years, as far from any cultivated center as possible. What does she do? She histories it, she arts it, she illuminates its rough society. With a house to keep and a child to rear, she does more and better work than most of us could do with all our time free. She goes to Mexico for two months and returns with a hundred magnificent drawings and what amounts to a short book–she writes as well as Cable and draws better than Moran. She has been over Mosquito Pass in a buckboard and across Mexico by stage coach and saddle horse, she has been down mines and among bandits, places where no lady ever was before, and been absolutely unspoiled by it. There isn’t a roughened hair on her head. To cap it, she is so vivacious and charming that she makes an old political warhorse like Godkin beg for sugar lumps, and draws a hundred pairs of glasses to our box.”

“Of course I don’t believe in this woman at all,” Susan said. “Those glasses were on Augusta.”

Thomas ignored her, with a sidling smiling look at his wife. “Her husband is away,” he said. “She has to deal with all the routines of life. So what is she doing? I know of at least three commissions for drawings that she is working on, and I would bet a year’s salary that she is also writing something.”

“Something ridiculously beyond her powers,” Susan said.

“What?” Augusta said. “Tell us.”

“Ah!” Susan said, “what do you care what I’m doing? You’re both doing things so much better and more important.”

“Of course we’re important,” said Thomas. “I would be the last to deny it. But I call your attention to the almost diseased modesty of this young woman we’re speaking of. To hear her tell it, she is a clumsy illustrator and a writer of amateur sketches. The fact is, any editor in the country would jump at the chance to sew up everything she does. I live in daily fear that she’ll be lured away from the
Century
by gold and flattery.”

“What
are
you writing?” Augusta said. Where she sat by the fire, the light touched one side of her face, which glowed with dark warmth. Her skin had always been Susan’s despair, it was as flawless as wax fruit. “You have to tell us-we’re your first public. Did you know I’ve kept every single letter from you, ever since you went out to New Almaden?”

“And made up my first sketch for me out of them. If I
am
anything, you two made me.”

“Nobody made you but yourself,” Thomas said. “I also suspect the hand of God–no other hand could be quite that sure of itself. Now tell us what you’re writing, in those hours when lesser people sleep.”

He was one who could make her believe in herself. Close friend, once a sort of suitor, he was also the most respected editor in the United States. Merely to be his contributor made one’s reputation. She said, “Something beyond me. I’m constantly being stopped by ignorance. I have always to write from outside, from the protected woman’s point of view, when I ought to be writing from within. I’m doing a novel about Leadville.”