Wild Life (10 page)

 

For the trip one needs to be as unhampered by clothes as possible. Men always seem to know what to wear; or at least, they never confess that they are uncomfortable; but all women have not learned the lesson yet. An active woman can get along well for a month's tramp with two short skirts and one jacket of some stout material, as corduroy or denim; bloomers and leggins of the same goods, or at least the same color; strong shoes, not too heavy, but with a thick sole containing Hungarian nails, for tramping, and a lighter pair to rest one's feet in camp; a sunbonnet and a soft canvas hat; a few darkish shirt waists of cotton crepe which will wash easily and not need ironing; some stout gloves; two changes of underwear; one flannelette nightgown, and a golf cape, or a heavy shawl. She will need hairpins galore to keep tidy and all the necessities of a workbag.

“HOUSEKEEPING IN THE SUMMER CAMP,”
Sunset Magazine,
May 1902

 

Wesley

 

The man put his folded newspaper in the pocket of his coat and his hands into his trousers pockets and stood with his shoulders hunched, waiting for his wife to stop fiddling with the boy's shoelaces. The wife had released her infant son into the arms of her eldest, and then, to guard against the possibility of the boy stumbling with the baby, she had squatted to tie up the muddy laces trailing rearward
from his muddy shoes. The boy was ten. He twisted his shoulders anxiously, shifting his eyes up and down the wharf in fear of being seen while his mother, with her skirts gathered around her knees, was crouched at his feet.

Their other sons were with them on the boat landing. The youngest—that is, the one who had been youngest before the birth of this last child—stood between his next-older brothers, gripping a hand of each. His brothers, who might usually have squeezed and twisted his fingers until he cried, assumed an uncommon attitude of nervous solemnity, and all three stood in a tableau, shifting their feet restlessly, watching the wood go aboard, and the transfer of the mail, eyeing the pilot and the passengers. Their manner was fueled by a kind of foreboding. Sometime in the dim and distant past—months ago—their father had used to take a boat regularly, but the boys viewed those earlier days as if through a long lens, and understood their father's departure now to be unusual and exotic, a cause for gravity and formality.

The restless dignity of his children made the man anxious to be gone. He wished to jump straight over this moment so that he might be sitting in the stove heat of the
Hassalo,
unfolding his newspaper, arguing mildly with other men about the coming currency crisis, the dogs of Wall Street, the doings of Harriman and James J. Hill. He fingered the coins in his trousers pocket and gazed off across the water to the cloud mass dragging past the mountain slopes, its rooster tails of mist. The river was ridged with whitecaps in the path of a wind slanting eastward into the gorge.

“Do you have your sandwich?” his wife said to him, standing finally between her oldest son and her husband. Dinner on the
Hassalo
was lavish and cheap—Jerusalem artichokes and smoked chicken, plums, peppered steak—an entire smorgasbord for four bits; but he and his wife were guarding their money, and his coat pockets were weighty with Grape-Nuts and cheese. “Yes,” he said irritably, and his small bristling-up caused his wife to tighten her smile. She touched his sleeve, which she meant as a kind of apology.

In a moment he pulled his hands from his trousers and took her hands in them. He had, in the days before this, helped his neighbor with dressing his hogs, had traded this labor for hams, and the work had coarsened his palms. He was conscious of it, and of his wife's
palms, smooth and cold and slightly damp. She had held on to her housekeeper through the months of their money troubles, which he understood was necessary; he didn't understand why his wife's hands, which were not work-roughened, caused him to feel bitterly used.

“All right,” he said irrelevantly, and she mistook this for
I'll write.
“No novels, please. I shouldn't want the competition.” Her teasing of him was ineluctable, one of the wry and clever things that had endeared her to him and now was sometimes a provocation. The man was glad to be escaping his wife for these several days. But he understood, also, that he would inevitably begin to yearn for her opinion of things, and that he would begin to save up the small events of his days in order to share them with her.

“Whether they hire me or don't, I'll get home on the Sunday boat,” he said. They had been over this, and he could see that she was unwilling to go over it again. He had meant it as a kind of signal, an indication of his affection for her, and so he understood her impatience as a kind of signal too, and realized suddenly that his eyes had filled with tears. She found his tears amusing, or shameful, and kissed him with a light laugh. “It's not the ends of the earth,” she said.

Marriage, the woman had discovered, was nothing close to what she had imagined when she had been newly wed: was less romantic, more mundane, made up of small compromises and irritations, agreements and misunderstandings, and a gradual accumulation of common memories. They were both romantically inclined, but her husband had a more sentimental nature than her own, and he viewed their marriage as having lost a good deal of its passion. The woman was not aware of his feeling and considered the loss of passion in their marriage to be the natural and unregrettable order of things.

He picked up each of the younger boys in turn and squeezed him to his chest; he touched his lips tenderly to the infant's cheek. He and his wife had lately agreed that their oldest son was too well grown for his father's embraces, and so he only cupped the boy's head briefly, a hand around his cold ear. Then he put his arms around his wife and briefly placed his mouth against her temple, before escaping over the planks onto the steamer.

The
Hassalo
was wallowy and slow in foul weather but nicely fitted out with brass lamps and Brussels carpets, polished chrome stoves, stewards in white coats. Bundles of dead grouse and pheasant
hung in the cool shadows of the boat gangways. He pushed up the stair and through the warm, smoky air of the men's cabin, out to the afterdeck, where he stood watching while the mooring lines were cast off. His wife had taken the baby into her arms, and their oldest son now stood with the bunch of littler boys, affecting a manly posture of hands in pockets. When the boat began to slide away from the landing, his wife shifted the infant's weight in her arms, holding the baby more upright as if displaying it for him, or allowing the baby to send him her last greeting. He looked away over the choppy water, distracted by a flurry of birds hoisting their bodies into the damp air, and when he looked again his sons were scattering up the wharf, running and shouting, but his wife was still standing with the baby, watching after the boat. The wind had brought some of her hair down from its chignon, and she bent her head to one side slightly, attempting to capture the loose lock against her collar. It was already impossible for him to see the features of her face, but this gesture was so particular to her that his throat swelled suddenly with familiar, abiding affection. She swayed a bit, and then he realized that she had freed her arm, was lifting it to him, waving; and after just a moment he raised his own.

There was a cold wind on the afterdeck, and as he straightened, gathering himself to go in the cabin, he realized he was basely happy—delivered, briefly, from the strains of ordinary living, which in recent months had been not ordinary but in extremis.

The woman went on standing on the pier after her husband had taken himself inside the cabin of the
Hassalo.
This was not due to any inkling or premonition, but from a wish to put off returning to the house—the five boys demanding her continual attention. She was a spirited young woman who enjoyed solitude and reading and writing but found herself engulfed by the demands of her children. She considered herself an unnatural mother, lacking in the native affections and patience she believed to be given to other women. She had only recently come through the tiring, insistent first weeks of caring for the baby, the physical absorption of it, and had fallen into—not suffering, really, but feeling unloved and put-upon and irritable. At night, with the baby crying and miserable with colic, she had grown tireder and tireder, and the anguish of having no time for herself, not even the time necessary to keep a diary—of finding her day cut into small and smaller pieces—this anguish visited her at night. She was half inclined
to cry at being unable to devote herself entirely to her work, though she considered the work only a means to an end, which was the support of her family. In later years she would discover that the work was everything to her—everything—but now she tossed and tossed, trying to explain and defend something that shifted and was elusive; and at such times she had secretly—horrifyingly—wished for a calamity that would free her of the weight, the otherwise inescapable burden, of her maternity.

She believed that she had lately carried another weight, which was her husband—as if he were drowning and she must save him; as if she were swimming hard toward a distant shore with both her husband and her children depending from her arms and shoulders, and her legs scissoring through the water as she labored to keep all of them above the chop of the waves.

 

My mother was a single-woman homesteader for twelve years after her husband's death and knew a thing or two about independence, which prepared me to take an uncustomary view of women's roles. And after all, I lived far back on the frontier, very far from the artificial restraints by which most girls are hedged in. I had the good fortune to “run wild,” which is exactly the activity that develops a good physique and an unconventional mind.

Of course, after my mother's death my life as an unbroken colt was brought to its end; I was sent out east to live with my mother's sister. I recall little of the rail trip save that I was bridled and saddled in cumbrous long skirts, corsets, and high heels, my hair bound up with pins, and so forth; and that I spent a good deal of energy in tirades against fate, and in daydreams which I suppose were despairing attempts to find some outlet for my wildness. I would flee to Paris, or to Alaska. Run off to the Territories and marry an Apache. “If only I were a man,” I wrote in my diary, “I would mount an expedition and conquer the South Pole.
”

In my first days and weeks in New York, I lay on my bed at night and imagined myself captured by Indians, and through my bravery and derring-do winning a place as their woman chief. When I explained the Indian political view to the white generals, they were moved to tears and set aside the richest lands as a sovereign Indian nation. My photograph
appeared in Eastern newspapers above the caption “She likes to ride hard and speak her mind.” And then I was in love. The man I loved was a Frenchman come west to study the Indian languages, and for his health. He placed himself in my tutelage and was soon bewitched by my prowess as a horsewoman, as a leader of my adopted peoples, and as a communicator with animals and the spirit world. When I had overseen his return to health, we were married, though shortly afterward he was killed by men who had meant their bullets for me.

Then I went to New Orleans and surrounded myself with intelligent men—artists and writers—with whom I talked, discussed, and argued, and female friends who were my confidantes in matters of romantic love. What is the meaning of love? we asked one another, and the answer was always: Suffering. Love means sorrowing and suffering. My friends cast meaningful looks in my direction; my poor dead Frenchman qualified me to speak in this manner.

As things fell out, I discovered New York to be a center for Freethinkers, women's rights, muckraking journalism, artistic and musical experiments of all kinds. My aunt ran a shelter for battered wives and in those days surrounded herself with militant suffragists—women who were the lesser-known habitués of New York's literary and cultural worlds and devoted themselves to intellectual clubs and social reform. In their early lives, as in my mother's, these women had had more control over their own destinies. They had not been (as now) a class of idle women supported by wealthy husbands, but had worked hard, and therefore had expected and received the right to be eccentric, to smoke and play cards and tell stories, and to make fun of hypocrisy.

By all rights I should have become a bluestockinged wildwoman—an artist of pseudonymous fame and freakish habits; but it is a notoriously difficult thing to throw over the chains of the world's expectations of females. I had seen my own mother as an example of what a woman could accomplish without a man, and my outrageous notions of male and female relations were cemented at the feet of those wildwomen friends of my aunts. If I had been born a man, I would have created for myself a world full of work and egoism and imagined that my whole life belonged to me. But since I was born a woman, I suffered the usual girlish desires and aspirations; and I believed that my life should eventually be joined to a husband's. It went on seeming to me that the whole aim of Feminism must be
to get the vote and to place a woman in the free position to marry whom she will—to ensure that her marriage relation never was one of owner and chattel but a partnership between agreeable companions.

I meant to wait before marrying, to be clearheaded and rational, to consider coolly the pros and cons of (doubtless) several proposals; but of course that was all thrown over when I met Wes. I was nineteen. In a manner somewhat like Edith and Otto Eustler, we had spent our childhoods rowing up and down the same rivers and sloughs but never had stood face-to-face until three thousand miles from the lower Columbia, seated at a Thinking Club of the New York Public Library. I should remember this meeting—what we were Thinking about—but do not, beyond the astonishment of learning that Wesley Drummond's home and mine lay nearly within gunshot of each other.