Angle of Repose Read online

  Not that she made a fetish of her gifts, or held herself above anyone. She plunged into things with energy, she was never afraid of work. John Greenleaf Whittier said she was the only girl he knew who could conduct a serious discussion of the latest North American Review while scrubbing her mother’s floor. She endured, and even enjoyed, considerable physical hardship on occasion. In Leadville she kept house in a one-room cabin, and in that one room presided over talk that she insisted (and she would have known) was as good as the best in America. All her life she loved conversation, discussion, company. When I was a child we were always being visited by people like the president of Yale College and the American Ambassador to Japan. They sat on the piazza and talked with Grandmother while Grandfather listened, working quietly among his roses.

  But that was after she had reached, or appeared to have reached, the angle of repose. I can remember her as Susan Burling Ward, an old lady. It is harder to imagine her as Susan Burling, a girl, before the West and all the West implied had happened to her.

  Ever since Ada left me eating supper, and went home to get supper for Ed, I have been looking through the papers covering her early years. Among them is an article that Augusta wrote, sometime after 1900, for a magazine called The Booklover. It is as good a thing to start with as any.

  Botanists tell us that the blossom is an evolution of the leaf-but they cannot say just why that particular bud should take from the same air and sunshine a fairer substance, a deeper color, a more permanent existence, and become something at which each passerby pauses, and goes on his way happier for the sight. Why on the sturdy stem of farmers and merchants should one girl blossom into a story-teller in pencil and in words?

  Susan Burling comes from a line of farmers, on the father’s side, who have lived at Milton on the Hudson for many generations; on the mother’s side from the Mannings, merchants; but on both sides members of the Society of Friends.

  Growing up the youngest and darling of the family, always surrounded by the atmosphere of love and duty where harsh words and looks were unknown, she gained a certain discipline of independence by being sent to New York to study art. She was still a very young girl, having only gone through a high school in Poughkeepsie where she had distinguished herself in mathematics. She had from babyhood tried to draw, and the little compositions of her twelfth year have quite an idea of “placing” and story.

  The School of Design for Women at the Cooper Institute was the only place, at that time, where anything approaching an art education could be had for a girl. The Academy of Design schools were hedged about by all sorts of restraints, and the Art Students’ League was not yet in existence. It was here that I first saw her—very youthful in figure, delicate yet full of vigor. She rode well; an accomplishment that stood her in good stead in Mexico and the West, where indeed no one is really respected who cannot manage a horse. She skated on her little feet like a swallow flying, and danced with the same grace and lightness. She could outskate and outdance us all.

  And that’s enough. Skating, dancing. It tires me to think of all that young vitality, and makes me unaccountably sad to look at her there on the wall, an old woman who has given up vivacity for resignation. But still presenting the clean profile, the small neat cameo head, that her earliest pictures show, and lighted—I am sure she imposed this on the painter—by a dùsky radiance from above and to one side. Despite the downcast eyes, there is something intractable about you, Grandmother, but I am too tired and sore to deal with it. I have been at this desk too long, and Rodman’s visit was no help. Ada, come on, hurry up. I ache all over—neck, shoulders, back, wrists, stump. I want your key in the door, I will you to clatter my supper dishes into the sink and start laboring up the stairs.

  This house creaks and shifts in the dark. It is even older than I am, and nearly as warped, and it may ache as much. Come on, Ada, before I begin to think Rodman and Leah are right. Too long a day. I must never go this long again. Tomorrow, with the sun in the room, it will be better. Mornings, and maybe an hour or two in the evening, that’s enough. Ada, come on, come on. Appear in that doorway. Let me hear your gravelly Cousin Jack voice. “Eh, Mister Ward, ain’t you about ready for bed?”

  Mister Ward, she will say, not Lyman. Fifty years ago we used to play together, never quite with Grandmother’s approval. What would she have said if she’d seen us with our pants down in the dusty loft of Attles’ barn? But Ada never presumes on childhood acquaintance. None of the legendary Western democracy operated in our relations, only the democracy of childhood. Her grandfather worked for mine, and her father for my father, in this same old Zodiac whose mole holes riddle the hill under us (that’s why the house has settled so crookedly). Three generations of Trevithicks and Hawkeses working for three generations of Wards. The West is not so new as some think.

  Bless God, she is six feet tall and strong as a man. She is cheerful, dependable, common. She deals with my person and my problems as matter-of-factly as she would change a baby’s diaper. I suppose I am her baby, as my father was in his last years. Does she wish all the Wards would die off and give her a rest, or would she be empty without one of us to look after? Does the sight of my nakedness trouble her when she undresses and bathes me? Is she given cold shivers by my stump? Turned to stone by my rigid Gorgon head? Does she think of me as an old friend, as poor Lyman, as that unlucky Mister Ward, as a grotesque, or simply as an object to be dealt with, like a caked saucepan?

  Whatever you think, come on, Ada. I need that bath and that bed and that bedtime bourbon. Whatever you think, I have learned to think nothing. I run by routine, I accept from hired women services that I would never have accepted from my wife before I became a grotesque. When you block the doorway with your bulk, and shuffle in On your bunioned arthritic feet making comfortable noises, my soul rushes out of me with gratitude.

  Already we have a comfortable rut, we go through habitual motions whose every stage is reassuring. While she starts the bath water I wheel my chair into the bedroom, just beside the bathroom door. We don’t bother with the crutches. She helps her grotesque doll to stand up, and it clings to her while her gnarled hands, the end joints twisted almost at right angles, fumble with zippers and buttons. She has never complained of her arthritis to me—thinks it amounts to nothing beside mine. Grunting with effort she lifts me—she would say “hefts” me—off the chair’s step, and I cling there, in pain as always, naked, helpless, while she flops a testing hand in the water. Then she returns and hefts her maimed doll bodily into the air until the last clothing falls from its foot, and lowers it with grunts and sighs into the tub.

  The water is so hot that it makes the cicatriced stump prickle and smart, but it must be that hot if it is to ease the aches away enough to permit sleep. Painfully she wallows down on her knees and without diffidence soaps and rinses me all over. Her crooked fingers drag across the skin stiff as twigs. Her doll sits stiffly, pointed straight ahead at the fixtures that emerge from the wall. When she is finished she bends far over and guides its arms around her neck. Then she rears upward, and up it comes, naked and pink, her hairy baby, its stump bright red. Its dripping wets the front of her dress, its rigid head glares over her shoulder.

  Holding it, clucking and murmuring as she works, she towels it down as far as the knees, and then she takes it around the waist and tilts it upon her great bosom and rotates until its leg, bent to miss the tub’s rim, can straighten down on the mat. Pressing it against her as intimate as husband, she towels the rest of it and eases it into the chair and wheels it to the bed. Another lift—the buttocks sink in softness. It sits there shivering in its damp towel until she comes with urine bottle and tube. When I have attached them she checks the hookup with a casual tug.

  Now the pajamas, delicious to the chilling skin, and the ease backward until the body that has been upright too long is received by mattress and pillows. She sets the telephone close, she tucks up the covers. Finally she waddles over to the cabinet by the desk and gets the bottle
and two glasses, and we have a comfortable nightcap together like cronies.

  Oh, hurry, Ada Hawkes. I don’t want to telephone. That would demonstrate something that I don’t want demonstrated.

  My grandfather, long before your grandfather Trevithick knew him, before he put on weight and fell in love with flowers and learned to take his consolation from a lonely bottle, was an indefatigable worker. He often rode a horse a hundred miles a day, four hundred miles in a week, accepting the testing that such journeys implied. Despite bad eyes and migraines, he used sometimes to work all night on maps and reports. When he was making an underground survey of the New Almaden mine he stayed underground for twenty hours at a stretch. He would not understand, any more than my grandmother would, this weakness that yearns for a motherly bosom and a pair of warped gentle hands.

  “Best egg in the basket,” he used to say of me when I was a small boy and wanted to help him plant and prune and prop and espalier his Burbank fruit freaks. I would like to be that kind of egg. I refer my actions to his standards even yet. If I were talking to anyone but myself I would have shut up long ago. Probably it’s a mistake to complain even to myself. I won’t do it.

  But oh, Ada, Ada, get over here, it’s already past nine.

  And there, like a bell tardily ringing the hour, is her key in the lock downstairs.

  2

  Morning, the room full of sun. I wheel to the window and watch the robins digging worms in Grandfather’s lawn. The grass is blue-wet in the open, green-dry under the pines. The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.

  Those I don’t have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on. On the long desk my grandparents’ lives are spread out in files and folders, not as orderly as I would like them, and not fully understood, but waiting with a look of welcome. The loose folders I have been working on are weighted down with Grandfather’s rock samples—high-grade mostly, with varicose veins of gold through it, but also other things: a piece of horn silver, carbonate ore from Leadville, a volcanic bomb sawed in two to reveal the nest of olivine inside, some jasper geodes, an assortment of flaked flint arrow and spearheads.

  The solidity and weight of these relics I have several times blessed, for if my papers blow off on the floor I have a bad time retrieving them, and may have to wait until Ada comes, by which time the wind has undone all my careful order. A night or two ago, after a gust had scattered a whole day’s patient sorting around the room, I dreamed I was a rodeo cowboy riding my jet-powered chair in figure eights through the place, swooping from the saddle with my vest pocket scooping dust and snatching up papers one by one like ladies’ handkerchiefs. Rodman would have something to say about juvenile fantasies of self-reliance if I told him that one.

  This is the best time, from eight to noon. Later I begin to hurt more, I get querulous, my mind wanders. Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of—that is what I most want. I would not trade the daily trip it gives me for all the mind-expanders and mind-deadeners the young are hooked on.

  I thank my stars that I have no such commitments to the present as Ada was telling me about last night—a daughter at home resting up from her husband, who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People’s Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the world closer to the heart’s desire. I know him, I have seen him a hundred times—his mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. He brings his dog to classes, or did when he was attending classes. He eats organically grown vegetables and lives in communes and admires American Indians and takes his pleasure out of tribal ceremonials and loves the Earth and all its natural products. He thinks you can turn the clock back. He is not so different from me, actually, except in the matters of skepticism and a sense of history. Ada, naturally, finds him pretty repulsive. What’s the matter with kids these days? she asks me. What kind of a loony bin have they got down there in Berkeley, anyway? What kind of a fellow is it that will let his wife support him for two years, living around in those pigpen places, everybody scrambled in together? Honest to John, when I look at TV and see them down there breaking windows and throwing rocks at police and getting tear-gassed, all dressed up in their kookie clothes, with their hair down to their shoulders! You were there. Did it use to be that way? When Shelly went down there to go to school she was the brightest girl in Grass Valley High. Two years later she’s a drop-out, working to support that ... She’d been better off if she’d stayed right here and gone to secretarial school and got a job here at home.

  Well, I have no confused young to look after. Rodman takes care of himself, I’ll give him that. My problem is to keep him from taking care of me. As for Rodman’s mother, she no longer lies in wait for me as I go from kitchen to study and study to porch or garden. She has no associations with this house. I bypass her, somewhere on the stairs, on my way to the strenuousness, aspiration, and decorum of my grandmother’s life, and the practicality and masculine steadiness of my grandfather’s.

  The West began for Susan Burling on the last day of 1868, more than a century ago. It had not figured in her plans. She was in love with Art, New York, and Augusta Drake. So long as I have quoted Augusta on Susan, I may as well quote Susan on Augusta. This is from her unpublished reminiscences, written when she was in her eighties.

  And then Augusta dawned on my nineteenth year like a rose-pink winter sunrise ... sweet and cold from her walk up from the ferry: Staten Island was her home. A subsidiary aunt had taken me in that winter who lived on Long Island, and I crossed by an uptown ferry and walked down. Across the city we came together, and across the world in some respects. She was a niece of Commodore De Kay and a granddaughter of Joseph Rodman Drake. Her people belonged to the old aristocracy of New York. My people belonged to nothing except the Society of Friends and not even that any longer in good standing. She had spent her girlhood abroad and spoke three languages, I “one imperfectly.” She had lived in one of the famous capitals of Europe and walked its galleries among the Old Masters while I was walking the old green hills of the Hudson and wandering the Long Pond woods, and my longest journey at that time had been to Rochester, New York.

  She said she was a professional, but her friends were New York society girls and private pupils; she was in the painting class, I in Black and White, but we both stayed in the afternoons and had time for many talks, comparing our past lives and dreams for the future. We sat together in Anatomy lectures and Friday composition class and scribbled quotations and remarks to each other on the margins of our notebooks. I still keep one of those loose pages of my youth with “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” copied in pencil in her bold and graceful hand, and on the other side in the same hand the words which began our life correspondence, not gushingly nor lightly. We wrote to each other for fifty years.

  She came up to Milton that following summer and every summer after till there was no Milton for me—not that Milton! Her sharings in books and friends were the stored honey of my girlhood. The strings were tuned high for us in those years, but after we became wives and mothers, and had lost our own mothers (she loved mine and I loved hers), a settled, homely quality took the place of that first passion of my life. Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

  Several things interest me in that passage. For one thing, it tells me the source of Rodman’s name. It was Grandmother’s dearest wish that we give our child that label. He would never forgive me if he learned that we named him after the author of The Culprit Fay. Augusta’s son was also named Rodman, so you might say the name has been made to run in both families.

  What is more eyebrow-raising is the suggestion of lesbianism in this friendship, a suggestion that in some early letters is uncomfortably explicit. (Good night, sweetheart. When you are here some stiflin
g night like this we will creep out in the darkness and lave ourselves in the fountain.) The twentieth century, by taking away the possibility of innocence, has made their sort of friendship unlikely; it gets inhibited or is forced into open sexuality. From a dozen hints, beginning with Augusta’s “bold and graceful hand,” we might conclude that Susan’s friend was an incipient dike. Grandmother herself, outskating and out-dancing them all on her little feet, could not have been more feminine. Her color was always rosy. She blushed easily, even as an old woman.

  It looks like a standard case, but despite the stigmata I elect to join her in innocence. Instead of smiling at her Victorian ignorance of her own motives, I feel like emphasizing her capacity for devotion. The first passion of her life lasted all her life.

  At the end of 1868 she was twenty-one, and had been in New York four winters. She was studying illustration with W. J. Linton, an English artist much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and she was beginning to get small commissions. Her latest and most important was a farm scene for the cover of Hearth and Home, a new magazine sponsored by Edward Eggleston, Frank R. Stockton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  And observe the continuities of a life like hers, despite the years of exile. She will have a connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe—will marry Mrs. Stowe’s cousin. Linton’s daughter will become a governess in the shacks and tents where Grandmother will live, and will help Grandmother in the sacred task of making my father and his sisters fit to live in Augusta’s world.

  Now the New Year reception I have been leading up to. The place was the Moses Beach house on Columbia Street in Brooklyn Heights, then a street inhabited by great merchant families—Thayers, Merritts, Walters, Havilands “of the china Havilands.” Grandmother’s feckless brother Ned had married the daughter of Elwood Walter; during her first year as an art student Grandmother had lived in the Walter house down the street. She moved in this atmosphere not quite as an equal, but not quite as a poor relation, either. She was that nice young friend of Emma’s from the Cooper, the pretty little one with the high coloring, the one who draws so nicely. She knew and loved the Beach house. It was all one great window on the water side, and from its bluff overlooked the whole Upper Bay with its waterbug activity of tugs and ferries and barges. Governors Island, as I imagine that last day of December, would have floated like dirty ice out in the bay; the Jersey shore would have fumed with slow smokes.