Angle of Repose (12 page)

But it was hard to know where that would be. For a while Oliver was surveying something for the Southern Pacific around Clear Lake. Then he was on the loose in San Francisco, refusing to take just anything, turning down the jobs with no future, looking for just the right place that would lead somewhere. He stayed for several months with his sister Mary, who had married a prominent mining engineer named Conrad Prager, and at last he found, through Prager’s influence, a job that excited him. He wrote that he was to be Resident Engineer of the New Almaden mercury mine near San Jose, an ancient and famous mine that had furnished mercury for the reduction of the gold of the whole Gold Rush. In a few weeks he would come East and marry her and lead her West.

Then he wrote saying that he was in the midst of an underground survey and couldn’t get away. He would have to finish it before he could leave.

She waited while the river broke up and the old
Mary Powell
began again to lay her plume along the high spring water. Crocuses came and went, the apple trees exploded, lilacs drenched the air, summer came with its visitors and boarders. Before long it was a year since Oliver Ward had held her by the ankles over the waterfall at Big Pond. Augusta was pregnant, they were reconciled to some new relationship, they wrote each other a good deal about the contrary pulls upon a woman who was also an artist. Augusta was very strong that Susan should not let marriage destroy her career. It was as if, having all but given up painting herself, she wanted to force Susan to be their double justification. And give her credit—perhaps she recognized in Susan Burling a capacity that she herself did not have.

But she never accepted Oliver Ward. They simply agreed not to talk about him any more than necessary.

Susan waited, not unhappily, diligent in her work, dutiful in her daughterhood, refreshing herself occasionally in the old friendships at the 15th Street studio. Counting from New Year’s Eve, 1868, when she first met Oliver Ward, she had been waiting just a little longer than Jacob waited for Rachel when Oliver came back in February 1876 and they were married in her father’s house.

No minister married them. According to the Friends’ service, Oliver met her at the foot of the stair and escorted her into the parlor, where in the presence of forty-four witnesses, all of whom signed the marriage paper, they pledged themselves to each other, “she according to the custom of marriage assuming the name of the husband.” There went the rising young artist Susan Burling.

And no one stood up with her. Augusta, only a month out of child-bed, said she was not well enough—“and if I can’t have you I won’t have anyone,” Susan wrote her. Faithful friendship, the old warmth. But in that same note there is a reference to “my friend whom you don’t want to like.” She knew very well why Augusta stayed away; she may have half-granted Augusta’s reasons.

Susan Burling I historically admire, and when she was an old lady I loved her very much. But I wish I could take her by the ear and lead her aside and tell her a few things. Nemesis in a wheelchair, knowing the future, I could tell her that it is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

While they were honeymooning at the Brevoort House, Thomas called on them, alone. Susan watched his face and estimated his decent politeness for what it was. Later, from Oliver’s home in Guilford, she wrote to Augusta:

In another letter—she wrote too many on her honeymoon—she expressed a confidence that to a critical ear sounds a little shrill:

In God’s name, Grandmother, I feel like saying to her, what was the matter with him? Did he have a harelip? Use bad language? Eat with his knife? You can do him harm, constantly adjusting his tie and correcting his grammar and telling him to stand up straight. Augusta has got you buffaloed.

It is all Victorian, as Rodman says, all covered up with antimacassars, all quivering with sensibility and an inordinate respect for the genteel. And not a word about that great plunge into sex, from a virginity so absolute that it probably didn’t know the vocabulary, much less the physiology and the emotions. Not the faintest hint, even to Augusta, of how she felt in the room at Brevoort House, dark except for the fluttering of gaslight from the street below, when the near-stranger she was married to touched the fastenings of her gown, or laid a hand charged with 6000 volts on her breast.

If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferably “comic,” of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax, and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don’t know. I have a good deal of confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.

I do get some hint of her feelings from her Guilford letters, describing walks along the shore amid tempests of wind and rain, with a fire and a cup of tea and the sure affections of a sheltered house afterward. Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.

She watched Oliver’s family for signs in which she could take comfort.

That’s better, Grandmother. No apologies or doubts there. It was nice of you to draw the old couple so that Oliver could take their picture West. And it clearly pleased you to look through the family papers and find there evidence of the sort of respectability and continuity you thought American life too often lacked: such memorabilia as a letter from George Washington to Oliver’s ancestor General Ward, and a love letter to his great-great-grandmother, beginning “Honored Madame.” You thought it amusing that though she rejected the suitor she kept the letter, only tearing off the signature—retaining the admiration, as it were, and obliterating the admirer.

Two weeks after Oliver arrived to be married, he was gone again to prepare their house at New Almaden. Before he left, Augusta brought herself to have the two of them to dinner. I am sure she was charming, I am sure Thomas was a friendly and assiduous host. I am equally sure that Oliver found it impossible to “exploit” himself, and sat silent, diffident, and inferior, listening to the literary and artistic jargon and the flow of public names. I am sure that Susan was a little hysterical with satisfaction and apprehension at finally getting into one room the people she most loved. She probably talked too much and made too much of Augusta’s baby, who like anything of Augusta’s was the most perfect on earth. Let her speak for herself.

There she goes again, incorrigible.

Her version of the marriage was that for perhaps two years she and Oliver would live in the West while he established himself. Then they would return, and somehow or other the discrepancies between Oliver’s personality and Western leanings and the social and artistic brilliance of the Hudsons’ circle would all be smoothed away. They would trade evenings, their children would be inseparable. Of course it would take a little time.

Oliver wrote that he had found a cottage, once inhabited by a mine captain’s family, which with renovations would make them a pleasant and secluded home. The manager had agreed to let him go ahead with the remodeling. He sent a floor plan, onto which she sketched a veranda that went three quarters around, and into whose blank rooms she inserted things she wanted, corner cupboards and such. Their letters of planning went back and forth like installments of a serial.

Help would be a problem. Oliver insisted that she look around for a servant girl to bring along, for the only local product in the servant line was Chinamen. So she found a handsome, rather sullen girl with a seven-months’ baby, a girl who said she had left a brutal husband but who might never have had a husband at all. That was a chilling thought, to bring someone like that into the house. But she was quiet and respectful, and she was eager to go West. When Susan obtained a commission to illustrate a gift edition of
The Scarlet Letter,
that settled it: she would have a very adequate model for Hester Prynne in her own kitchen. But there would have to be a room for her. She wrote Oliver asking if he would mind an infant in the house, and if it was possible to add a room. He wrote back gamely that he didn’t if she didn’t, and that he would put a lean-to off the kitchen. Give him another couple of weeks.

In July he wrote her to come along, the cottage would be ready as soon as she could get there. She shook the envelope, looking for a money order or a bank draft, but there was none. She waited several days, thinking he had probably put the letter in the mail without the check, and would remember and send it on shortly. No word. She contemplated wiring him and was embarrassed to think how such a telegram would look to Mr. Sanderson at the station in Poughkeepsie.

By the fourth day her agitation was extreme. Should she wait longer, and so delay the reunion for which Oliver was obviously impatient, or should she assume that somehow his money order had gone astray and that the best course was to buy the tickets herself and let Oliver straighten the situation out after she got there? Her parents advised her to wait; she could see doubt in their eyes. But after two more sleepless nights she consulted her feelings and decided not to wait. Worried and ashamed, she crossed the river and bought the tickets out of her savings, and on July 20, 1876, in the hundredth year of the republic and the seventh of the transcontinental railroad, she started West.

It was a difficult parting. Custer’s cavalry had been destroyed on the Little Big Horn less than a month before, and her parents imagined Indians ambushed the length of the transcontinental rails. There was also that uncertainty about the train fare. She read their unspoken fear that she had tied herself to an unreliable man. Their silence about him she could only answer by a false cheerfulness and an artificial excitement about the journey.

How she managed to part from Augusta, God knows. I imagine them coming apart like two of the great sheets of flypaper, stuck glue to glue, that I used to separate and set out for summer flies. I know it is not a reverent way to speak of the parting of true minds, but I can’t help it. Obviously I think Susan was better off in the care of Oliver Ward, train fare or no train fare, than under the influence of that glamorous and arty socialite.

Distance, of course, was not enough to keep their true minds apart. Susan was barely to Chicago before she scribbled her first postcard, and a delay in Omaha gave her opportunity to write a five-page letter. Not a word in it about Oliver Ward, no expressed anticipations or worries about California. Those were scabs she would not pick, especially when her confidence was shaken.

But there are passages that I read as shadowy forecasts of her future. She found Omaha “Western in the worst sense of the word. There is one building—the Omaha Stock Market—
plaided,
my dear, in squares of red, white, and blue!” She was depressed by the repetitive ugly barren little towns across the sod house country, and it could be she felt a shiver of premonition as she described the “lonely little clusters of settlers’ houses with the great monotonous waves of land stretching miles around them, that make my heart ache for the women who live there. They stand in the house door as the train whirls past, and I wonder if they feel the
hopelessness
of their exile?”