Angle of Repose (15 page)

“But he
promised!”

“Sure,” Oliver said. “But then somebody overspent on one of the Hacienda cottages and Kendall said no more renovations.”

“But that’s unfair!” she said. “You should have told Mr. Prager.”

His laugh was incredulous. “Yes? Run crying to Conrad?”

“Well then you should just have stopped. We could have lived in it as it was.”

“I could have,” Oliver said. “You couldn’t. I wouldn’t have let you.”

“Oh I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t understand. I’ve been such an expense to you.”

“It seems to me I’ve been an expense to you. How much did you spend for those tickets?”

“I won’t tell you.”

They stared at each other, near anger. She forgave him everything except that he hadn’t explained. One word, and she would have been spared all her doubts about him. But she would certainly not let him pay her back. The hardship would not be all his. He was looking at her squarely, still mulish. She wanted to shake him. “You great . . . Why couldn’t you have told me?”

She saw his eyebrows go up. His eyes, as they did when he smiled, closed into upside-down crescents. Young as he was, he had deep fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that gave him a look of always being on the brink of smiling. And now he
was
smiling. He was not going to be sullen. They were past it.

“I was afraid you’d be sensible,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this place sitting here all ready for you and you not in it.”

 

Supper was no more than bread and butter, tea from Augusta’s samovar, and a left-over bar of chocolate. (Ah, sweet linkage! Are you thinking of me, dear friend back there in New York, as I am thinking of you? Do you comprehend how happy I am, am determined to be? Didn’t I tell you he knew how to look after me?) The dog lay at their feet on the veranda. Along the ridge with its silvery comb of fog the sky faded from pale blue to steely gray, and then slowly flushed the color of a ripe peach. The trees on the crest–redwoods, Oliver said–burned for a few seconds and went black. Eastward down the plunging mountainside the valley fumed with dust that was first red, then rose, then purple, then mauve, then gray, finally soft black. Discreet and quiet, Lizzie came out and got the tray and said good night and went in again. They sat close together in the hammock, holding hands.

“I don’t believe this is me,” Oliver said.

“Thee mustn’t doubt it.”

“Theeing?” he said. “Now I know I’m one of the family.”

A shiver went through her from her hips up to her shoulders. At once he was solicitous. “Cold?”

“Happy, I think.”

“I’ll get a blanket. Or do you want to go in?”

“No, it’s beautiful out here.”

He got a blanket and tucked her into the hammock as if into a steamer chair. Then he sat down on the floor beside her and smoked his pipe. Far down below, in the inverted sky of the valley, lights came on, first one, then another, then many. “It’s like sitting in the warming oven and watching corn pop down on the stove,” Susan said.

Sometime later she held up her hand and said, “Listen!” Fitful on the creeping wind, heard and lost and heard again, came a vanishing sound of music–someone sitting on porch or balcony up in the Mexican camp and playing the guitar for his girl or his children. Remembering nights when Ella Clymer had sung to them at Milton, Susan all but held her breath, waiting for the rush of homesickness. But it never came, nothing interrupted this sweet and resting content. She put out a hand to touch Oliver’s hair, and he captured it and held the fingers against his cheek. The bone of his jaw, the rasp of his beard, sent another great shiver through her.

They sat up a good while, watching the stars swarm along the edge of the veranda roof. When they finally went to bed I hope they made love. Why wouldn’t they, brought together finally after eight years, and with only a two-week taste of marriage? I am perfectly ready to count the months on Grandmother. Her first child, my father, was born toward the end of April 1877, almost precisely nine months after her arrival in New Almaden. I choose to believe that I was made possible that night, that my father was the first thing they did together in the West. The fact that he was accidental and at first unwanted did not make him any less binding upon their lives, or me any less inevitable.

In the night she may have heard the wind sighing under the eaves and creaking the stiff oaks and madrones on the hillside behind. She may have heard the stealthy feet of raccoons on the veranda, and the rumble and rush as Stranger rose and put the intruders out. She may have waked and listened to the breathing beside her, and been shaken by unfamiliar emotions and tender resolves. Being who she was, she would have reasserted to herself beliefs about marriage, female surrender, communion of the flesh and union of the spirit that would have been at home in a Longfellow poem. She could have both written and illustrated it. And if she thought of Augusta, as she probably did, she would have poulticed the bruise of abandoned and altered friendship with healing herbs gathered from all the literary gardens where she habitually walked: parted as they were, each was fulfilled in another and nobler way. When I catch Grandmother thinking in this fashion I shy away and draw the curtains, lest I smile. It does not become a historian to smile.

 

Her eyes popped open. Gray daylight, unfamiliar room–something was wrong. Up on her elbow, shaking the sleep from her eyes, she recognized her new bedroom, cluttered with half-unpacked belongings. She was alone in the bed. Where was Oliver? Something
was
wrong, there was crying from the other wing where Lizzie and Georgie slept, and outside now began an uproar of barking and the honking wheeze of a donkey. Then she heard Oliver shout, “Sic ’im, Stranger, take him out of here!” A growling rush, the clatter of hoofs in stones, a threshing of bushes. Oliver sent a piercing whistle after dog and donkey, and blending with it, coming in like a thin woodwind in duet with a piccolo, a queer, high voice cried, “Fis! Fis! Fis!”

Oliver’s bare feet thudded down the porch. “No want fish, John. Go way.”

“Fis belly flesh,” said the voice.

“No want fish,” Oliver said. “What for come so early, John? Go way now.”

“Fis belly flesh,” the voice said, receding, complaining, vanishing. Roosters were crowing both above and below. The sound of Oliver’s feet crossed the living room. He opened the door upon her as she sat up in bed.

“What on earth!” she said.

He was rumbling with laughter. His blond mustache, which he had probably grown to make him look older and more authoritative, made him look about twenty. “Welcome,” he said. “Everybody wants to welcome you, even a jackass and a jackass Chinaman.”

 

At midmorning they were moving furniture around. Oliver had bought it from Mother Fall, who in her turn had acquired it from the desperate mine captain who had formerly lived in this house. He had brought his young wife here, she had had her baby here, they had laid out all they owned in furnishing the place. Then without warning he had lost his job. An ill omen, but she hardly even acknowledged that she was adapting the wreckage of an unlucky life to her own uses, for everything that she saw of the house with rested eyes pleased her. The veranda that she had drawn around three sides of Oliver’s sketch, and had him spend most of his savings on, was a triumph. It took her breath to look east, it filled her heart to look west or south. The rooms themselves were good, the furniture would do for the brief time they would be here. But she gave Oliver a good deal of exercise moving it, anyway, trying it in all possible positions and combinations, and enjoying herself extremely as she stood around in a dressing sacque being a young housewife. Then he happened to glance out the window as he pushed a chair across the room. “Whsht!” he said. “Get dressed. We’re being called on.”

She flew into the bedroom and slammed the door, and as she fumbled into her traveling dress, all she had until the trunks came, she heard feet come up the porch and into the house, and voices, a man’s and a woman’s. When she came out–and she would have come out rosy and vivacious and charming as if she had not twenty seconds before been biting her lips and muttering un-Quakerish words at hooks and eyes that had disappeared in the fabric or eluded her fingers –Oliver introduced her to Mr. and Mrs. Kendall, the manager and his wife.

Mr. Kendall was not a smiler. He had gimlet eyes and a notably still, restrained manner. But he took her hand and looked into her face until she blushed, and said to Oliver, “Well, Ward, I see why you were so impatient to get readied up here.” Wanting to dislike him for his broken promise, she could find no fault with his manners. His wife was ladylike, gentle, soft-spoken, and welcoming. Both of them regretted that the Wards had not chosen to live down at the Hacienda, where things were rather more civilized and where people would have had a better chance of their company. Mrs. Kendall asked if she might come by in her carriage and take Susan for a drive around on the mountain trails. She asked them to dinner the Sunday following. She was almost effusively glad to have so charming an addition to New Almaden society, she had heard that Susan was an accomplished artist and hoped to become familiar with her work, she hoped that New Almaden would offer many subjects for her pencil. They stood on the veranda and admired the view and praised what Oliver had been able to do with the old cottage. There was a lot of waving and smiling in both directions as they left.

“Well,” Oliver said when the carriage had passed out of sight among the oaks.
“That’s
something I never saw before.”

“What? Their calling? It seems only polite.”

“They’ve never called on anyone else.”

“It’s because of Conrad Prager. Mr. Kendall knows you’ve got an important connection.”

“If he thought my connections were that important, why wouldn’t he let me go East and get you?” Oliver said. “Why would he stick me for the whole price of the renovations? No, you’ve got them wrong. They’re impressed because you’re an artist. You make New Almaden look classy.” He looked at her as he might have looked at a horse he was thinking of buying. “Matter of fact,” he said, “you do.”

In the afternoon Susan got a few minutes to herself and began a serial letter to Augusta. She got in a good deal of literary landscape painting and an impression of the manager and his wife. Mrs. Kendall, she thought, “has those qualities of surface prettiness and ladylike manners that make her at once attractive and uninteresting.” Of Kendall himself she said, “It is hard to believe that this largest mine in the world–Oliver says there are twenty-seven miles of underground workings-should be under the absolute despotic control of this small, mild-mannered man, and that one’s whole future should be at the mercy of his whim. Fortunately, he appears to regard Oliver highly, and Oliver, I am proud to say, bears himself in the presence of his superior as befits a man. In spite of his agreeableness I could not quite forget that he forced Oliver to spend his last cent in making over the cottage that is properly part of his compensation–the cottage moreover which he now praises for its charm.”

That night they had supper with the lower echelons of New Almaden society, the crew of junior engineers, college students, and “outside captains” who boarded with Mother Fall. I don’t suppose the atmosphere of a third-class boardinghouse was any more exhilarating to her than the near-gentility of the Kendalls, but at least it was honestly what it was, and Oliver was at ease in it. The talk was about evenly divided between engineering technicalities and comments an Oliver’s undeserved luck. In their exaggerated joking, at once boisterous and shy, they enlisted her sympathy, because she thought them lonely, but she did not therefore think of them as potential friends or companions. When she had occasion to add a few paragraphs to her letter she told Augusta that they were “nice enough to see once in a while, but I don’t think I shall care greatly for any of the people here.”

A terrible snob you were, Grandmother, in spite of the Quaker background and the farm upbringing, and in spite of the fact that you would have been too warmhearted to let any of these young men see your snobbery. Thanks partly to your success in art, and more to the influence of Augusta and Thomas Hudson, you had gentility in your eye like a cinder, and there would be a lot of rubbing, reddening, and irritation before your tears flooded it out.

As they sat after supper talking and rocking on the boardinghouse porch in the chilly night air tainted with Cornish Camp smells, two miners approached and signaled Oliver down the steps. There was a good deal of snickering, some glancing up at the porch. “Now, you,” Mother Fall said to them, “wot’re you planning, you two?”

They shook hands with Oliver and went away, walking fast. Oliver came back and stood smiling, behind Susan’s chair, pushing it so that she rocked forward and touched her toes and could spring back again against his hands. “We must go,” he said.

The young men were indignant, Mother Fall was hurt. Susan stood up obediently, unsure of what was happening.

“There was some talk about a charivari,” Oliver said. “I gave them money for a couple of barrels of beer. So now I’m going to take Sue home and barricade the doors.”

They protested. Nobody in camp would think of pulling any horseplay on the Resident Engineer’s wife. Even if they didn’t have sense enough to know that anything roughhouse would be out of keeping, they were all too scared for their jobs. Oliver should have told them to go chase themselves. Stay on here, maybe it would get lively. Get your health drunk in person.

That was just what he expected, Oliver said. He saw no reason Susan should be exposed to a bunch of beery admirers. Are you ready, Susan?

She shook their hands one by one. With some sort of inward shudder she let herself be clasped to Mother Fall’s faintly onion-smelling best dress. She expressed her thanks for all they had done to make things easy and pleasant, and she went away not sure whether they would pick her to pieces as being too high toned for mining-camp life, or whether they would be groaning with envy at Oliver’s luck. And what if those men did decide to play some drunken prank? She had heard of the most appalling things–kidnapped bride, imprisoned and humiliated bride-groom, Halloween destructions and practical jokes.