Angle of Repose (65 page)

Naturally Grandmother didn’t hear my warning blowing backward out of the fog of consequences that is her future and my past. She was not a brooder, but she had had her disappointments and her grievances and her anxieties, and she believed in the aspirations, refinements, and pretenses of gentility. She had watched her hopes recede, had had her pride humiliated. Her ambitions for her children seemed certain to be frustrated. The life she had given up lay far off and far back in time, unbelievable as a mirage. She had a reputation and enjoyed a certain fame, but all by mail, all from a distance, or else among the ladies of Boise whose opinion she did not choose to value.

By then her parents were both dead; one of the bitterest results of their poverty was that she had been unable to go back, either time, to help Bessie lay Father or Mother in loved Milton ground. If she dreamed of going back to renew however briefly her intimacy with Augusta and Thomas, she had to remind herself that her friends were now close to the very great indeed. Stanford White had recently built them a grand house on Staten Island. Their casual guests were cabinet ministers and political leaders and ambassadors and millionaires and internationally famous artists. Their closest friends, the couple with whom they slipped away for quiet weekends at their cottage on the Jersey shore, were President Grover Cleveland and his wife.

Imagine her feelings. The First Lady of the Land had stolen her place in her friend’s heart, a place she might still occupy if she had not married exile and failure. If it gave her a mournful pride to know her dear ones valued in such high places, it only made all the more insufferable the worry she felt every time Oliver went moodily into town.

Her reminiscences are not quite candid about the breakup; they reduce what was complicatedly personal to simple economics. “Since I could not march with my beaten man,” she wrote, “I preferred to march alone somewhere down to sea level and have my children to myself for a little while and learn to know my silent boy of eleven, who if I could possibly arrange it would be leaving us for an eastern school in the fall.”

 

Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. (“It is easier to die than to move,” she wrote Augusta once; “at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.”) She went about the long packing with a tight face and a knot in her solar plexus and a sense of disaster in her mind. Wan was mutely expressing his distress by washing everything–blankets, linen, dishes, clothes–before it was put away. Everything he hung on the line, every article she packed or threw away, every object that met her eye, every meal they ate at the trestle table the juniors had built under the cooktent fly, assaulted her sensibilities with its testimony of lost felicity and abandoned hope.

After one day of it, as they sat eating their noon soup and sandwiches, she burst out, “Oh, why must we pack everything? Can’t we just lock it up and leave?”

The way he chewed, thoughtfully, with his head down, struck her as wary; he seemed to be sorting possible replies. Finally he said, “You have to expect to be back if you do that.”

“Don’t you?”

Tough of eyes, the sort of look a man under orders might have given his superior, a look in which there was acquiescence but no agreement. “Yes,” he said, “but I didn’t think you did.”

She in turn meant her own look to be plain as day to him. She meant it to mean Yes, if.

He held his sandwich in both hands and looked at her over it. “You don’t have to leave at all, really. John can move up to the shack and look after you. I can get back once or twice during the summer. In the winter we can rent the place to the Survey as an office, and stay on.”

Susan thought about it. If she stayed on, what would her staying imply? What would she be staying for? How long could her children go on living in an isolated canyon without growing up eccentric or barbarian? How long could she herself give up contact with all culture without loss of herself? Anyway, it was hope that had held them there, and that was gone. She gave a simple answer to a complicated question. “No. It wouldn’t do.”

“Then we’ve got to clear it out. If we locked it up and left it, the first sheepherder that passed through would be sleeping in your bed and lighting fires with pages of your books.”

“I suppose,” she said. “What about the books? What about Frank’s and Wiley’s?”

“I wrote and told them last week where their stuff would be.”

“There are dozens,” she said. “And all those leather bindings they worked so hard over. They wouldn’t want to lose those.”

A little later, Oliver and Ollie took a load of things to town for storage. Betsy helped Nellie clear her room. Agnes, who was sick with summer complaint and some form of the bronchial trouble she seemed to be susceptible to, lay in a window seat while her mother put books in a box. She was pale, big-eyed, and languid. Nellie, passing by, smiled and shook her head at her and said in her North Country voice, “Little wist-faced baby!”

“This climate isn’t good for her,” Susan said. “I hope the sea air will be better. She’s never well.”

Nellie went back to her room, and Agnes lay and watched her mother stow in the box their Household Poets, the cover read completely off and replaced with calf; and War and Peace, and Fathers and Sons, and some Dickens and Thackeray and Howells and James, and some Constance Fenimore Woolson, and some Kate Chopin, and some Cable. She insisted on having each one pass through her hands, so that she could pat it and brush it neat, before it was put away.

Then a volume in limp leather, tooled and stamped in gold: Tennyson’s Idyls
of
the King, bound for her by Frank Sargent as a gift on her thirty-eighth birthday. She let it fall open, and of course what did it open to? “The old order changes, yielding place to new.” She flipped to the title page and read the inscription. “To Susan Ward, on her birthday.” But she knew it came with love. Nellie had told her he had worked on it for a month, and spoiled two other books, before he got one he was willing to give her.

She rubbed her palm across the rough, inside-out leather, thinking about that devoted young man. Young man? He was thirty-two; she was forty-one. In a story written that spring, in desperation for money and out of the voiceless longing of the canyon April, she had made him into a Lochinvar who rode in to an isolated ranch and carried off the daughter of an embittered solitary–once a gentleman–and rescued her for society, the world, fulfillment. But the maiden of that story had been twenty.

In forlorn amazement at herself she laughed aloud, a sound so harsh that Agnes looked at her curiously, reaching for the book to give it her housekeeper’s pats. Wist-faced baby indeed, and more in need of rescue than any fictitious maiden designed for the pages of Century. Susan let her have the book, and lifted a hand to the little girl’s forehead, feeling for fever or the clamminess of debility. As she did so she glanced out the window, down across the hill and the river with its parabola of bridge, and by one of those coincidences that happen all the time in Victorian novels, but that nevertheless sometimes happen in life too, there was Frank Sargent unsaddling his sorrel horse Dan at the corral gate.

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood. Gladness and guilt hit her like waves meeting at an angle on a beach. She hung a moment, half inclined to slip out the back and not be findable when he came up the hill. But only a moment. Then she was at the door, waving and calling from the top step. He could not have heard her for the river, but he must have been unsaddling with his eye on the house. She saw his teeth flash in his dark face, he waved exuberantly, flapping a long arm; he spatted the horse into the corral, rammed the gate poles home, and came running. The bridge slowed him no more than if it had been a rigid sidewalk; he came up the hill in great long-legged strides. She met him with both hands outstretched.

“Frank, Frank! Oh, how wonderful! What are you doing here? You’re almost too late–we’re leaving.”

His long brown hands, with a turquoise ring from Arizona on the ring finger of the left, held hers tightly. He was panting from his rush up the hill, he laughed and talked and smiled all at once. She had told him once he was the only man she knew who could talk while smiling.

“Oliver . . . wrote me. I came to get my stuff.”

“Ah, is that all?”

“No. To see you, mostly. How are you? Let me look at you.”

Still holding her hands, he turned her into the bald sunlight, and she shrank a little, remembering the last time he had looked at her, steadily. It seemed to her that what he saw was wan, weathered, and rebellious, and her good sense told her that at forty-one a woman should neither be looked at in that way by a man not her husband, nor should accept such a look with so much willingness.

Then his eyes left her and saw Agnes, round-eyed and hostile in the doorway. “And this is . . . ?”

“Agnes.”

Out of my body. What you saw as an ugly swelling, and an ugly reminder of the secrets of marriage, the last time you spoke to me. Before she was born she was more than you could stand. My poor unwanted child, my poor excluded lover!

“I don’t like you,” Agnes said.

“Agnes, child! What are you saying?”

Frank’s smile faded but did not go entirely away. His hands hung onto Susan’s. His glowing brown eyes looked at Agnes for a long quiet time; he made no attempt to win her, he only looked. “She’s like you,” he said without taking his eyes off her scowling face. “She’s like what you must have been.”

“Heavens, I hope not, with that face!” But some sort of elation came over her; in one remark he wiped away the bitterness in which they had parted. Having accepted the fruit of her womb–even when it looked at him with suspicion–he moved in some way closer to her, awkwardness was lifted off her as a cover might be lifted off a parrot’s cage, releasing all that pent-up garrulity. Belatedly, with a laugh that was half embarrassed and half playful, she looked down at her imprisoned hands until he let them go.

What would Susan Ward and Frank Sargent have said to each other in the two hours before Oliver and Ollie returned from town? Having brought them together, I find it difficult to put words in their mouths. Their words, like their actions, would have been hedged by a hundred restraints. She was incorrigibly a lady, he was self-consciously honorable. The novels of their time, to which they were both addicted, were full of hopeless and enduring loves too lofty for treacherous thoughts or acts. Their training urged them toward self control, not toward “naturalness” or “self-expression.” Those contemporaries of Shelly’s, those young men hot as he-dogs, those antic maidens who yank off their blouses and dance around maypoles in the People’s Park, or couple with a series of partners on somebody’s parlor rug, would find Susan and Frank as amusing as all the other Victorians. What a hangup about bare skin! What a hypocritical refusal to acknowledge the animal facts of life! The Victorians were a race without biology.

Horsefeathers. Grandmother grew up on a farm and lived much of her life on crude frontiers. She knew the animal facts of life as few of us are likely to again. Without embarrassment she accepted the animal functions of, say, buggy horses that would bring giggles and hooraws from emancipated moderns. Until she and Grandfather built Zodiac Cottage in 1906, she habitually used a privy, and no gussied-up WPA privy either. She could kill a chicken, and dress it, and eat it afterward, with as little repugnance as her neighbor Mrs. Olpen, and that is something most of us couldn’t. We have been conditioned to think of chickens as neatly sorted cellophane packages of breasts, wings, legs, thighs, and necks, without guts or mess, without death. Death and life were everyday matters to Grandmother. The breeding of horses, mules, cattle, the parturition of dogs, the smug and polygamous fornications of chickens, raised no eyebrows. When animals died, the family had to deal with their bodies; when people died, the family’s women laid them out. In the 1880s you suffered animal pain to a degree no modern would submit to. You bore your children, more likely than not, without anesthetic.

We have only switched prohibitions and hypocrisies with them. We blink pain and death, they blinked nudity and human sex, or rather,
talk
about sex. They deplored violations of the marriage bond and believed in the responsibilities of the unitary family and thought female virginity before marriage a guarantee of these, or at least a proper start. But wild boys and young bachelors they winked at because they must, and both wandering husbands and unfaithful wives they understood, and girls who “got in trouble” they pitied as much as they censured. They could tell a good woman from a bad one, which is more than I can do any more. And they managed to be fertile in times when fertility meant inevitable sorrow, when women had six or eight children in order to be sure of three or four.

So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from the casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy? One thing that happened was platonic friendship, another was breakage. The first always risked the second.

Frank Sargent was deeply in love. He had to be, to have hung around as he did for eight or nine years. He would have thought it the act of a cad to take advantage of her friendship or betray the confidence of Oliver, but in those nine years he would have learned to mistrust his own self control. The thing he most prided himself on, his hopeless faithfulness, was precisely his greatest danger. As for Susan, though she knew that danger, she was disappointed in her husband and her hopes, bruised in her domestic sentiments, distraught with uncertainties and with the sense of how much she had lost and might still lose. She had always made a companion of Frank. He loved books, loved talk, was altogether readier and more romantic and more enthusiastic than the man she was married to.