Angle of Repose (77 page)

But if I don’t do it, what do I do? Stop? She has kept me alive all summer, that woman. I have been her private werewolf. I know, furthermore, that my reluctance to expose her trouble is calculated to spare myself, not her. What point is there in sparing a woman who has been dead more than thirty years? So I will do it like fortune telling. I will start at the top of that little stack of clippings and read down through them and see what they tell me.

The first one is a very brief notice, a pencil-encircled paragraph from the “Of Local Interest” column for July 22, 1890. It says that Mrs. Oliver Ward, accompanied by her son Oliver junior and her daughter Elizabeth, left on that day to visit relatives at the East, and to put young Oliver in school in New Hampshire.

Either because his readers would all have been full of the affairs of the Oliver Wards and the London and Idaho Canal Company, or out of some feeling of charity or compassion, the editor says no more than that–nothing about the events that for two weeks have been the sensation of the town. And at once, with his bare notice of Susan’s departure, he presents me with a question that is unanswerable by reference to any of the known facts.

From later letters, I know that Grandmother delivered my father to St. Paul’s sometime around the first of August, a good month before school opened. Since they left Boise on July 22, and would have taken the best part of a week crossing the continent, she could have paused in Milton only two or three days before taking him on to Concord.

Why that haste? They were all stunned, distracted, grieving, shot to bits. Why wouldn’t that mother have kept the remains of her family around her? Wouldn’t her silent manly boy have been a comfort to her, wouldn’t she have felt that she should be near to comfort
him?
I suppose she may have felt uncomfortable about throwing herself on the mercy of Bessie and John, after the loss and disappointment those two had had on account of her and hers. But Bessie was the warmest and most affectionate of sisters; in the circumstances she would have opened every door and room and heart in her house to Susan and her children. And even if Susan felt that she herself shouldn’t or couldn’t stay, why wouldn’t she have left Ollie to have a healthy and healing time with his cousins on the farm? He was big enough and handy enough to be a help to John, and he would certainly have been happier there than moping around in a deserted school with his loneliness and misery. Yet his mother snatched him away from Milton after barely forty-eight hours, and took him up to Concord and unloaded him on Dr. Rhinelander as she might have sped an unwelcome visitor.

Why?

All her life she spoke of Dr. Rhinelander with gratitude, because that summer and two summers thereafter he took Ollie in with his own family, carried him along to a Maine island, found scholarship money to support him through St. Paul’s, and when he graduated, got him a scholarship to MIT. Reasons enough for gratitude. But put that kindness of Dr. Rhinelander’s against the fact that my father did not come home again for ten years. Until he graduated from St. Paul’s, he spent every summer vacation with the Rhinelanders; after he started at MIT he took summer jobs. One of them brought him out on a surveying crew to the Idaho mountains where his father had worked years before. By then his family were living here in Grass Valley, but their son did not come the rest of the way west to see them. He saw his father once or twice a year in New York. His mother he saw not at all. When he graduated from MIT he found a job in Korea–and sailed from Seattle without a visit home–and he stayed in Korea until the Russo-Japanese War drove him out. Then, and only then, he accepted Grandfather’s offer to become superintendent of the Zodiac when Grandfather became general manager.

Ten years. What am I to make of that? Especially when I remember the lifelong taciturnity that was more like a disease than a mere quality of his temperament? Especially when I remember how Grandmother deferred to him, and feared his silences? Especially when I remember her frantic haste to get rid of him in the summer of 1890? I have to conclude that he knew something, or suspected something, or had seen something, or thought her to blame for the catastrophes that within three or four days had shaken down his world. I have to believe that in her distraction and self-loathing–he could not have blamed her more than she blamed herself–she could not bear the look in her son’s eyes. And though I could probably make up some episode to corroborate what I suspect, I think I shall not. Let it go at the fact that from that time on he had an aversion, all but incurable, against his mother; and that she read his mind before they left Idaho, and could not stand what she saw.

So there they go again on a transcontinental train, this time not merely in defeat but in utter rout–a sullen white-faced boy, a scared little girl not quite ten, a mother strung up like a piano string, turning a white blank smile toward people who came up to her or called from the platform–Boise was a town that met the through trains. But it all came apart when Nellie broke down into terrible weeping, grabbed the children and hugged them and wet them with her tears, clung to Susan with sobs that shook and shattered them both. They were all crying. With streaming eyes Nellie stood back, tried to say something, strangled, looked at them all piteously for a moment with her weak English chin trembling, and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and put her head down and fled. Susan herded the children aboard, a sympathetic porter found their seats and brought their bags and left them, they huddled in the high Pullman plush and hid from the eyes of the curious. It was like coming into a room full of people with all their desolation plain upon them. They could hear the rustling of newspapers. For some reason the man across the aisle chose that moment to pick up the orange skins and litter on the seat and floor around him. They turned their faces away from his peeping. Susan took Betsy’s head in her lap and bent into the corner, stroking the child’s trembling back. Ollie put his forehead against the window and stared out, blind as a daytime owl. Eventually the train jerked and started.

Five days of it–a day of Idaho, a night of Wyoming, a day of Wyoming and Nebraska, a night of Nebraska, a whole morning of sitting at the platform in Omaha. An afternoon of Iowa, a night of undistinguishable dark prairies, another whole morning of sitting in the station in Chicago. An afternoon of Illinois and Indiana before they burrowed under the dense night heat. Their windows were open, their car was littered with papers and the remains of food, they were grimed with cinders, their hands came black off the plush, their beds, made up crisp and white in the evening, were wrinkled, damp, tossed nests by morning.

And not a change in that boy all the way across. In the daytime he sat with his forehead against the glass, indifferent and slack. He would not meet her eyes–and for that she was half thankful, for when by accident her glance brushed across his reflected eyes in the glass it was as if she had been lashed by thorns.

She did what she thought she should, or what she could. She called the children’s attention to things they passed, she got out a sketch pad and let Betsy draw, she asked them when the news butcher came through if they wanted candy, wanted magazines, wanted oranges. Betsy sometimes did, Ollie never did. When lunchtime or dinnertime came he ate, dutifully, and came back and sagged into his corner and put his forehead against the glass. He sat facing her all those five days, and she could not meet his eyes without grief and panic; and at night he crawled up into his upper berth with a word of good night and lay there silent and unreachable through all the dark rocking hours, while she hugged Betsy to herself down below, and once or twice had to waken her from a screaming nightmare and, her own face wet and anguished, soothe away the fear.

The boy was wordless, he was his father all over again; and she felt that there was no forgiveness in him. Her own numb grief, her sluggish guilt, could be held down in the daytime, when the eyes could be fixed on something outside, when blind words could be read out of books or magazines, when the details of washing and eating could be clung to like rafts. But at night she lay and heard her daughter’s breathing beside her, and thought, and remembered, and wept, and contorted her face and buried it in the pillow and clenched her arms over it to shut out things that came. And in the morning when she came out through the green curtains, there was the ladder already placed for Ollie, and there was Ollie coming in from the washroom with his great burned-out eyes in which she read everything, everything, she had thought during the night.

So (I think) she made up her mind during that trip that if she was to survive at all she must unload him, for his sake and her own. She was the sort that survives–how else do you live to be ninety-one?–and by the time they reached Poughkeepsie she had had nearly three weeks to bring herself to accept total calamity. Very well, she would have to bear what she had to bear–her life was destroyed, but it was not over. Being who she was, she knew it would not be over until she had somehow expiated her weakness, guilt, sin, whatever it was she charged herself with.

Apparently, after delivering my father to Dr. Rhinelander, she returned to Milton, where that saintly Bessie was looking after Betsy, her namesake. She intended to go into New York, take rooms, put Betsy in a school, and turn herself in grim earnest–and grim is the right word–to the career that she had tried to combine with marriage to a Western pioneer.

One thing, the year before, she had told Augusta she would give anything to experience for ten minutes: the sight of her boy’s browny head down among the other heads in the St. Paul’s chapel, listening to grave wise words, soaking up wisdom. She never had that experience. Her last experience, and her only one, at St. Paul’s was to part with her son there in the headmaster’s study, to stoop and hug his unresponsive stiff body, to cry at him to learn, to study, to love her, to write. He stared at her with his great burned-out eyes and said a reluctant word or two, and watched her go.

She intended to go into New York and take rooms and go to work at her writing and drawing; this much is clear from some of her later letters. But she never did. She started. She took poor forlorn little Betsy away from the Milton farm and steered her toward that new, meager life; but something happened in her head and in her feelings. She winced aside, she refused the jump. With Augusta and Thomas waiting for her in there, with the whole life that she had given up to marry Oliver Ward open again to her ambition, and she not old–at her very top, actually, in imagination and skill–she could not do it. She got on a train, but it was not a train headed downriver to New York. It was another transcontinental train headed West. At ten the next morning, August 6, “near Chicago,” she scribbled the note which is the only correspondence surviving out of those three months.

That’s it, that’s all. When the letters begin again at the end of September, she is in control of herself, stoically making headway toward a patched-up life. None of her subsequent letters bothers to explain to Augusta, who presumably knows anyway, exactly what happened in July. She puts that behind her. Almost as if she were a bystander–and her letters repeat some of the things reported in that stack of Xeroxed clippings–she records through the next six months the death throes of the canal company, the lawsuits, the receivership. Matter-of-factly she reports her efforts to keep Mesa Ranch alive through a dry fall with no man to help except John on Sundays. I find it hard to imagine my grandmother and Nellie Linton, a pair of Victorian gentlewomen, hitching a team to the hose cart, filling the cart at the windmill, and creeping, stopping, creeping, stopping again, along the lane of dying Lombardies in the brass of a desert evening. Whether I can imagine them or not, it is what they did. Not even the Malletts were left them–gone back to the Camas to raise horses.

Most of her hours were filled with the literary and artistic drudgery by which she supported them. Till mid-afternoon she wrote or drew. At three she gave herself over to drawing lessons for Nellie’s six pupils, most of them daughters of the pick-and-shovel millionaires she had despised. They came in a surrey every morning and were called for every afternoon. Some of the parents grumbled at the driving, and suggested to Nellie that she move her school into town, where it could easily double its size, but she would not leave Susan or Mesa Ranch.

Even in her own house, Susan humbled herself to teach those girls. She knew well enough that some of their mothers sent them not so much to make them into ladies as to patronize the lady who had failed to return their calls. One or two, she thought, craved the pleasure of pitying her, but she was impenetrable, she turned on them the bright face of self-sufficiency.

Yet she allowed Betsy to make friends with them (for who else was available to poor Betsy now?), and she did her best to help Nellie teach that buggyload of shaggy dogs to modulate their voices, to pronounce words properly, to sit with their knees together, to walk as if they were women and not muckers in a mine. She gave them the rudiments of drawing and perspective, the beginnings of a taste in literature.