Angle of Repose (30 page)

 

No sign of failed hope showed on their trip East, for Conrad Prager had a princely way with money, food, wine, cigars, conversation, and Pullman porters, and their party included not only the Pragers and their two children, but a Scotch nurse who seemed to manage three as easily as two. It was a pleasure trip in the company of rich friends. They did not eat out of any basket; they dined largely. The talk was the kind Susan had been hungry for, the wine was picked by an expert, there were hours on the observation platform while the gentlemen smoked and the ladies watched the scenery.

Nevertheless, Susan had a spasm of utter panic, a black, blinding bolt of despair, when the train started out of the Cheyenne station leaving Oliver on the platform with his carpetbag and his rolled tent at his feet, his hat in his hand, the spring sun in his eyes. He seemed to be smiling, but he might have been only squinting against the light. She pressed her frantic face to the glass and kept her handkerchief fluttering as he walked, then trotted, beside the train. The platform ended and he stopped abruptly, began to go backward. Susan seized Ollie from his basket and held him so harshly to the window for a parting sight of his father that she made him cry. Immediately she began to cry herself, hugging him to her and straining for a last glimpse backward. He had passed from sight, the track-side ditch was full of muddy water out of which rose the stark poles of the telegraph line. It all swam and drowned in her tears. She felt the nurse taking the baby, and let him go. She heard Mary Prager say something savingly matter-of-fact, she heard Conrad murmur that he guessed he would go back on the platform and smoke a cigar.

Later it began to rain. Protected by the Pragers’ consideration, she sat by herself and brooded out upon empty plains that winter had barely left and spring hardly touched. Miles of brown grass, raw cutbanks, flooded creeks coming down into the flooded bottoms of the Platte where bare cottonwoods seemed to grow out of a slough, and the benches of the flood plain, seen through rain that swept along the train and rattled on the windows, were the banks of a dreary lake. Now and then a stark, muddy little settlement–but no starker than Deadwood would be. Now and then a shack with pole corrals and livestock huddled on high ground, islanded by the floods–but better than the tent that Oliver would have to live in.

The Platte Valley slid by for a whole day before they even got to Omaha. Omaha, which less than two years before had struck her as the absolute dropping-off place, the western edge of nowhere. She remembered her bright scorn at the stockyards building,
“plaided,
my dear, in red, white, and blue!”, and shrank at the image of the postman delivering that postcard to a crepe-hung door. Now here she came back, already five days on her homeward journey, and she was barely breaking over the rim of the Eastern world (how far she had been away!) bringing her excuses for her husband, her homeless baby, while Oliver fell every minute farther back among the endless plains and badlands.

She planned cunningly how she would tell her story. Deadwood was an opportunity he could not afford to give up, and so she seized the chance for a visit home. She polished phrases that would make his four-day stage ride and his leaky tent and his job for George Hearst seem an adventure. And in the process of framing the West and her husband in words, she began to leave them behind.

She was like a traveler still on the road on one of those evenings when sun and moon, one rising as the other sets, face each other across the world. Once she passed Omaha, Oliver grew steadily more remote in space and time, Milton and Augusta grew nearer. Home was more precious, and her impatience more intense, every hour. She would not let Conrad send a telegram from Chicago to announce her arrival, because she did not want to make her father or John Grant spend a night in Poughkeepsie to meet her late train. She would go to the hotel for what was left of the night, and take the ferry in the morning.

It reconstructed itself in her mind like the lines of a familiar poem: the shabby waiting room, the recognized cabman, the countrified hotel where she would be able to bathe her baby and herself properly for the first time in a week. In confidential whispers she told Ollie how she would show him the apple blossoms on the way down to the ferry, and introduce him to the ferryman, Howie Drew’s father. At New Paltz Landing they would leave their luggage for John to pick up in the buggy, and they would walk up the lane that ran through her childhood, between fields familiar from the time she learned to walk. She would let him smell the dew-heavy hemlocks in the glen, and watch the birds busy in the trees, the chipmunks in the stone walls. They would stop to see how the dogwood hung outward from the woods as if to surprise a passer-by.

But their train, delayed by the universal floods, pulled into Poughkeepsie at four o’clock in the morning. Susan had insisted that the others go to bed, but had not been able to keep Conrad from staying up with her. He wanted her to come on with them to New York, take a room there, and come back rested the next day, but she would not. She motioned the porter to unload her bags, she broke away from Conrad’s restraining hand and stepped down with Ollie. There was a lantern burning above the station agent’s door, a lamp inside the waiting room, but not a soul in sight. Conrad was upset. “Thank you!” Susan cried brightly. “Thank you for everything, you’ve been so kind and good! I’ll be fine, don’t worry. I know this place like my own home.”

The brakeman’s lantern circled, down at the end of the dark train. The porter waited. More agitated than she had ever seen him, Conrad jumped up, the porter picked up his step and swung aboard, the train jerked and bumped and moved. She waved from amid her baggage, leaning back against the baby’s weight, and turned, and found herself alone.

The station agent’s office was dark. There was not a hack to be found. The waiting room was open, dim, empty, and the stove was cold. Susan laid the baby on a bench and tucked his blanket so that he would not roll off. Then, staggering under the weight, she carried her suitcases into the waiting room and sat down beside Ollie. The clock said fourteen minutes past four. She would have lain down except that the benches had iron arms every two feet. Her eyes smarted, her mind was numb, her feet cold. She sat shivering, dozing off: home, or nearly.

At six o’clock a waitress coming to open the lunchroom found her there and was thrown into a passion of sympathy. She lit a fire, made tea, warmed milk for the baby. At seven old Mr. Treadwell, who had driven the hack ever since Susan had been a student at the Poughkeepsie Female Academy, arrived and took her to the hotel. But she was too close now to take a room and sleep. She ate something, gave Ollie some oatmeal and softened toast, cleaned him up, washed her face and hands. At eight thirty they were on their way to the ferry, at a quarter of nine they were aboard. One disappointment–Mr. Drew had died. She had been hoping to talk to him about Howie and hence about the West. She felt cheated; she was ready to chatter about her Western experiences to fascinated listeners.

New Paltz Landing approached angling across the high spring current. At nine thirty a neighbor farmer who had brought eggs to the ferry for market dropped her at her father’s door.

As in all pictures in the American Cottage tradition, there was a welcoming thread of smoke from the chimney. The crocuses and grape hyacinths were out under the porch, the trumpet vine had begun to leaf out in green as fresh as a newly discovered color. Behind it in the summer dark she had sat up late on how many evenings with the old
Scribner
crowd. Inside were the known rooms, the woodwork that loved fingers had worn and polished.

Tired to death, leg weary, her eyes full of tears, her baby a load on her arm, her back aching with carrying him, she climbed the two steps. The door opened and her mother looked out.

I find it hard to make anything of Grandmother’s parents. They take me too far back, I have no landmarks in their world. They were Quaker, kind, loving, getting old, simple people but by no means simple minded. They probably thought their daughter more talented and adventurous than anyone could be. I can’t see them as individuals, I can only type-cast them, a pair of character actors with white hair and Granny glasses. Leave them as a sort of standardized family welcome-tight clutch of hugs, tearful kisses, exclamations, smell of orris root from Great-grandmother’s hair, scamper of Bessie’s feet in from the kitchen –she here too!–calls to the barn for Father to come, Susan’s home.

The April sun shone in through the net curtains, Susan thought she could smell apple blossoms even through a nose stuffy with weeping. There was so much talk, so much laughter, such an outburst of praise for her baby, so many fond minutes of watching him get acquainted with Bessie’s two, that it was an hour later, and they were sitting somewhat exhausted around the kitchen table with their empty tea cups before them, before Susan thought to say, “Oh, all it lacks is Augusta! Can I invite her out, Mother? Have we room?”

“But doesn’t thee know? Didn’t she write thee?”

“Write me what?”

“No, I suppose she couldn’t, thee would have left Santa Cruz before. That must be what the letter upstairs for thee is.”

“But what’s happened? Where is she?”

“Thomas has broken down,” her mother said. “He’s been very ill. He’s been told if he wants to recover he must rest for at least a year. Augusta took him abroad last week.”

May 28, I see by the calendar. The brief and furious spring of these foothills is over, summer is here before I saw it coming. The wildflowers along the fence are dried up, the wild oats are gold, not green, the pine openings no longer show the bloody purple of Judas trees, the orchard and the wistaria are in fruit and pod, not blossom. From now until the November rains, the days will be so unchanging that without the Saturday ballgame I won’t be able to tell week from weekend. Who wants to? When I was a boy here, summer was narcosis. I am counting on it to be what it always was.

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.

Habit is my true, my wedded wife. Each morning, after I have stretched out the worst of the aches and taken the first aspirins, I hoist myself up by the bedpost and ease into the chair, carefully, fearful of the knock or jar that may start me out in pain. I roll to the lift and sink downstairs. On the radio news, while the percolator bubbles toward its red-light stop, I hear about the child killed by wild dogs in San Jose, the hundred pounds of marijuana seized in North Beach, the school board meeting broken up by blacks in Daly City, the wife shot by her husband after a quarrel in an Oakland bar, the latest university riot, the Vietnam score. I follow by traffic-alert helicopter the state of the traffic on the Waldo Grade, the Bay Bridge, the Bayshore, the Alemany Interchange. From the weather-alert man I learn that the day (again) will be fair, with patches of morning fog near the coast, winds from the northwest 5 to 15 miles per hour, temperatures 65 to 70 in San Francisco, 80 to 85 in Santa Rosa, 85 to 90 in San Jose. That means 90 to 95 up here. I see that as I eat it is 67 in the dark, shabby old kitchen, and I hitch over my shoulders the sweater that Ada keeps hung on the back of my chair.

Breakfast is invariable-Special K cereal and milk, a Danish roll that is less trouble than toast, a mug of coffee, and last of all, since I can’t take acids on an empty stomach, a glass of orange juice.

At seven in the morning it is quiet in the house, quiet in the yard, quiet across the pine hills. The freeway is a murmur hardly louder than the chiming hum that millions of pine needles make in a little wind. I roll to the door and out onto the porch that Grandmother referred to as the piazza. Ed has brought the rose garden in the courtyard back, though it isn’t what it was in my grandfather’s time. It, with the mown lawn and the pines beyond, stares back at me like an old photograph caught between the ticks of time. It all looks as it looked in my boyhood, when I was back from school for the summer. My eyes have not changed, the St. Paul’s boy is still there. I feel sorry for him, imprisoned in nearly sixty years of living, chained to a chair, caged in a maimed and petrified body. For an instant the familiar grounds glare and tremble, the prisoner rages at his bars. It would be easy to call it quits.

Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

Behind the pines the sun is a shifting dazzle. It breaks through and glitters along the wet grass. Golden-crowned sparrows are hopping and pecking among the roses, a robin cocks his head to the underground noise of a worm out on the lawn, a pine top shakes to the impetuous landing of a jay. Off on the freeway I hear a diesel coming, shifting down as the hill steepens. Each gear is a lower tone, heavier and more laboring. Doppler Effect? Not quite. But I like the sound of these things better when they are shifting upward through their web of gears, not shifting down. Shifting down, they remind me too much of myself.

In the fresh air I light my first cigar of the day, and break the match before I drop it. My chair is a nest of cloth and paper at least as flammable as the California roadside. Then I wheel in, leaving the door open for Ada, and hitch onto the lift and float up into the airier, brighter upper hall. As I detach myself and turn, I can see the study door and the windows in line with it, the pines stirring beyond the windows, the desk waiting with its piles of books and folders of papers and photographs–home of a kind, life of a kind, purpose of a kind.