Angle of Repose (11 page)

But that episode marked a turning point, and that it did suggests a strength of character in Grandmother that I must admire. Right then, apparently, she put away any pre-emptive right to either Augusta or Thomas. The tide of love, as these romantic girls put it, never came full again in the same way. After her summer of unrest, she relinquished one sort of possibility; and when a month later Augusta and Thomas told her about their engagement, she took the word gamely. I have the note she wrote Thomas.

All right, Grandmother. Generously said. Maybe your emotions and your good-loser response were learned from novels, but they worked, and they lasted. Thenceforward you were a loving sister to Thomas, and dearest friend, without ambiguities, to Augusta. You never expressed to them or to anyone any feeling of betrayal or disappointment. I suspect that you were able to manage yourself so well because by a stroke of luck you were able just then to look at your hole card. The ace-high straight flush you had coming didn’t work out, but at the last minute that buried nine filled a king-high straight.

Within two days after she heard of the engagement of Augusta and Thomas, Oliver Ward wrote that he was coming home from the West.

 

He arrived on a night of hard rain. She and her brother-in-law John Grant waited in the shelter of the landing and watched the three blurred lights of the ferry creep closer, separating themselves from the lights of the Poughkeepsie side. John’s lantern shone back liquid yellow from the puddles, another lantern at the end of the landing threw a streak over the moving river that was roughened every minute or two by gusts. I suspect that Susan’s skin was like the river, chilled by gusts of uncertainty, pebbled with the gooseflesh of anticipation. She knew his intentions; he had warned her.

What did a girl of 1873 feel, waiting for the stranger whom she had never taken quite seriously but whom she had now, in her mind, half resolved to marry? The meeting had all the dramatics of one of her more romantic drawings—shine of lantern light on the oilskins of the ferryman, a tall figure that jumped ashore carrying a carpetbag. And what was he wearing? Some great hooded cloak or ulster that made him like a figure out of a conspiratorial opera. The ferryman’s lantern threw his huge shadow down the landing. She was in suspense to see his face, for she might remember him all wrong. Then he was before them throwing back the hood, shaking her hand with his big wet hand, saying some sort of greeting and in the same breath apologizing for the ulster—it was his field coat, his town coat was stolen in San Francisco.

He arrived looking suitably outlandish, a traveler from a far place, someone to be cautiously investigated. Yet intimate too, because of what had been said between the lines of letters, or what he had said and she had not denied. They jammed into the buggy and the intimacy was physically enforced. Between the two bundled men she could hardly move. They rode turning their faces away from the spitting dark, and she smelled his unfamiliar odors of pipe and wet wool, and said whatever she
would
say, while her taciturn brother-in-law listened. He had a tendency to be critical of people. She wondered how he rated this young man from the West against the writers and painters and editors he had been driving up from the landing for the last four years.

Her parents were standing in the hall to welcome him and exclaim about the wet, and after the introductions—with what shyness, with what a weight of unspoken implication—Susan guided him upstairs to his room, the one they called Grandmother’s room. There he set his carpetbag inside the door and shook himself out of the ulster, and she watched him lay on the dresser, which had never seen anything rougher than a Quaker bonnet or a book of poems in limp leather, a curved pipe, and a great wooden-handled revolver.

Was he showing off? I suppose so. God knows why else a man would bring a pistol to his courting. His character and his role were already Western, he had only that way of asserting himself against the literary gentility with which her house was associated in his mind.

I don’t care about that, and I don’t care whether she was astonished, impressed, shocked, or amused. What I find myself held by, in imagination, is their tentativeness, their half-awkward half-willingness to admit their understanding, as they faced each other in the doorway by the light of the lamp she carried. That too is like one of her drawings —narrative, sidelighted, suffused with possibility.

She was quickly reassured that he was not impossible, at least for any society short of Augusta’s. He was most admiring of her talent and respectful of her friends, he was as big and restful as she had found him in the library in Brooklyn Heights, he had a way of speaking lightly of things without persuading her that he felt them lightly. He was not talkative, but once wound up he charmed them all with his stories of life in California. Her parents sat up late to hear him, though when her New York friends visited they went early to bed. He could play chess—that promised cozy evenings. Her father said he had never seen a man pick a basket of apples faster. And when he took hold of the oars of a rowboat, the rowboat nearly jumped out of the water.

But she puzzled where to take him on some excursion. Long Pond and Black Pond, liked by New York visitors, were not enough for a man who had seen the Yosemite and ridden the length of the San Joaquin Valley through square miles of wildflowers. So she and Bessie and John took him to Big Pond, eight miles back in the woods, a wild romantic place where a waterfall poured into a marble pool and then fell through diminishing pools to the lake.

It was incorrigibly Hudson River school—brown light, ragged elms, romantic water. There they sat on the grass confronting nature. When they had eaten, they did what poets and philosophers did outdoors in the early years of the picturesque—strolled, picked early autumn leaves or late gentians. Susan sketched a little while he stood admiring by. They did not spoon, though Bessie strategically led her husband away so the two could be alone. Having no acceptable way of expressing their feelings directly, they probably vented them on nature. I can see a lot of tableaux while she is struck speechless by a view or a flaming swamp maple, and he stands there with his hat in his hand before the purity of her sensibility.

Late in the afternoon they were back at their picnic spot at the top of the fall. She had always responded strongly to storms, rain in the face, wild winds, wild waters, exciting crossings of the Hudson through floating ice. On this day she lay down and hung her face over the cliff to see down the waterfall. At about the same time, and for similar reasons, John Muir was hanging over the brink of Yosemite Falls dizzying himself with the thunder of hundreds of tons of foam and green glass going by him. Muir had a good deal farther to look down, and the rush of water was far wilder past his ear, but Susan Burling had something her fellow romantic did not. She had Oliver Ward hanging onto her ankles to make sure she didn’t spill over.

Anxious? Not on your life. In these days when a girl goes to bed with anybody who will pat her in a friendly way on the rump, few will be able to imagine how Oliver Ward felt, holding those little ankles. He would not have let go if fire had swept the hilltop, if warrior ants had swarmed over him from head to foot, if Indians had sneaked from the bushes and hacked him loose from his hands. As for Susan Burling, upside down and with her world whirling, that strong grip on her ankles was more than physical contact made sweet by the fact that it came between the bars of an iron cage of propriety, touch asserting itself against a thousand conventions. It was the very hand of the protective male. When she came up out of her dizzying tête-a-tête with the waterfall she was in love.

On the long ride home they did not talk much. They jolted and rocked and smiled, intensely aware of every time their bodies were bumped together. Susan agreed without question when Oliver suggested to John Grant that there was no need of driving them clear to the Burling house. They could get off at the Grant house and walk the last half mile—there was a young moon. So they walked the last dark reach between stone walls that her great-grandfather had laid, along the lane felty with dust, through night air cool with coming fall, tannic with early cured leaves.

Somewhere along the lane they settled it. Two days later Oliver left for Connecticut to see his parents for a few days before going back West to hunt a job and prepare a place for her.

Coming emptyhanded, with nothing to support his suit but hope, he could not have timed his arrival more perfectly or found Susan in a more receptive frame of mind. If the threesome was to be split by marriage (though Augusta and Thomas swore it would not be) New York might be a less happy place, and a Western adventure looked attractive. And if Augusta, despite all her vows, found herself ready to give up art for housekeeping, perhaps her defection demonstrated that after all marriage
was
woman’s highest role. And if Thomas Hudson was to be firmly given up, the eye might do worse than wander to a man of an altogether different kind, attractive in his own way but in no sense a rival of the lost paragon.

But what a confrontation when she told Augusta. I have to imagine it, but there are hints through years of letters to let me know their respective feelings. I imagine it in the studio on 15th Street where they had worked and slept together for four years in their sublimated dream of art’s bachelorhood, and where Susan, looking up from her drawing, had often found Augusta’s dark eyes devouring and caressing her.

No caressing in this scene now. Lovers of a kind, cats of a kind, they would have shown their claws. Augusta was incredulous, aghast, and accusatory; Susan stubborn, perhaps just a shade triumphant. You see? I am not defenseless, I am not to be left out after all. There they sat, burning under their serge and bombazine with emotions hotter than gentility could quite allow.

“Oliver Ward? Who on earth is he? Have I met him? You’re joking.”

“No, I’m quite serious. You haven’t met him. He’s been in California.”

“Then where did
you
meet him?”

“At Emma’s, one New Year’s Eve.”

“And he’s been gone since? How long?”

“Four years, nearly five.”

“But you’ve been writing to him.”

“Yes, regularly.”

“And now he’s proposed and you’ve accepted, all by mail!”

“No, he’s back. He’s been visiting at Milton for a week.”

Augusta, sitting with her head lowered, found a loose thread in the trimming of her gown and pulled it out. Her fingers smoothed the ruffled rickrack braid. Her dark angry eyes touched Susan’s and looked away. “Doesn’t it seem to you odd—it does to
me—
that you wouldn’t ever have mentioned this man’s name to me?”

“I didn’t know he was going to become so important.”

“But now after a week’s visit you know.”

“I do know, yes. I love him. I’m going to marry him.”

Augusta rose and paced the room, stopped and put the heels of both palms against her temples. “I thought there were no secrets between us.”

Susan could not resist sinking a claw in the carelessly exposed flesh. “Now that there’s something to tell, I am telling you. Just as you told me when there was something to tell about you and Thomas.”

Augusta stared with her hands to her head. “Ah, that’s it!”

Her cheeks hot, Susan held her ground. “No, that’s not
it.
But just as you have every right to fall in love and marry, so have I. One doesn’t always know—does one?—when things are headed that way.”

Augusta was shaking her head. “I never expected to see you fall in love like a shopgirl with the first handsome stranger.”

“You’re forgetting yourself!”

“Sue, I think you’re forgetting
yourself.
What does this young man do?”

“He’s an engineer.”

“In California.”

“Yes.”

“And he wants to take you out there.”

“As soon as he finds the right place, with some permanence in it.”

“And you’ll go.”

“When he sends for me, yes.”

Augusta resumed her pacing, throwing her hands outward in little distracted gestures. She straightened a picture on the wall without stopping. She bent her head to gnaw on a knuckle. “What about your art? What about everything we’ve worked for?”

“My art isn’t that important. I’ll never be anything but a commercial illustrator.”

“You know that’s utterly wrongheaded!”

“I know I want to marry him and go where his career takes him. It won’t be forever, but it may take some time. He’s not flashy, he’ll take a little while to establish himself. I can go on drawing. He wants me to.”

“In some mining camp.”

“I don’t know where.”

Now Augusta’s agitation broke out. She stopped, she gripped her hands before her face and shook them. “Susan, Susan, you’re madl You’re throwing yourself away! Ask Thomas. He’d
never
agree this is right.”

“In this,” said Susan, as if in a novel, “I can consult no one but myself.”

“And make a mistake that will ruin your career and lead you a desolate life.”

“Augusta, you’ve never even met him!”

“And don’t want to. I loathe his very name. He can’t come in and overturn your life like this. What about
us?”

They looked, they fell into each other’s arms, they even laughed at the extremity of their disagreement. But though they patched up their difference, they did not change; they were both strong-minded women. Augusta did not abate her disapproval, Susan’s resolution did not weaken. Maybe she was trapped—she had given an impulsive promise, and promises with her were binding. But I think she had been stirred by Oliver Ward’s masculine strength, by his stories of an adventurous life, by his evenness of disposition, by his obvious adoration. I think she was for the first time physically in love with a man, and I like her courage in going where her emotions led her.