Angle of Repose Read online

  The Doppler Effect is very apparent in my imagining of that afternoon. I hear it as it was now and as it is then. Nemesis in a wheelchair, I could roll into that party and astonish and appall the company with the things I know. The future is inexorable for all of them; for some it is set like a trap.

  Thanks to the prominence of the people Augusta had introduced Susan to, I can find some of them in the histories of art and others in memoirs and reminiscences. The view from Columbia Street I have seen, but much obstructed and changed. As she saw it a hundred years ago there were no grimy warehouses thrusting up from the waterfront, there was no Brooklyn Bridge, no Statue of Liberty, no New York skyline. Somewhere I have read that in 1870 the tallest building in Manhattan was ten stories. But I am like the Connecticut Yankee who has foreknowledge of an eclipse. I know that in a few years the Roeblings, who will build Brooklyn Bridge, will buy the Walter house. I could depress young Dickie Drake, Augusta’s moody and poetic brother, with the story of the Statue of Liberty, for on its base will one day be inscribed a poem by a girl named Emma Lazarus, with whom Dickie will fall in love after he gets over Susan Burling, but whom he will not marry. She is Jewish. Augusta will write Grandmother all about it, and Grandmother, though she likes Emma Lazarus, will agree with the family’s judgment that such a marriage would not do.

  So many things I know. Young Abbott Thayer, whom I have looked up in the art histories, was at that party, monopolizing a love seat in the second parlor with Katy Bloede, one of Grandmother’s Cooper friends. The Thayer painting I have here on the desk, the one called Young Woman from the Metropolitan collection, is undoubtedly Katy Bloede, the “typical tall, handsome, almost sexless female for which he was famous.” She was not quite sexless—she had serious “female troubles”—and Thayer will marry her shortly and paint her a hundred times. As Grandmother said, “Her face was his fortune.” When she dies young, Thayer will marry Emma Beach, currently playing the piano for a Portland Fancy in the other room.

  Among those dancing was George Haviland, altogether the most sophisticated and charming man Susan Burling had ever seen. She admired his courtesy and his grace, though he was said to drink. She worshipped his beautiful young wife. Ah, there, George Haviland. In a few years you will blow your brains out, a bankrupt.

  Or Elwood Walter, Jr., several times my grandmother’s escort in those years, a man she said gave her her first lessons in flirtation. A volatile, talkative, ugly, attractive man “capable of any sacrifice that did not last too long,” he will have a fate less predictable than Haviland’s. He will die in the sandals and brown robe of a Franciscan monk.

  Or Henry Ward Beecher, the great man of that district, pastor of Plymouth Church, late thunderer of ferocious war sermons. He was sitting with an attentive group around him in the parlor off the dining room, and the boom of his voice filled the house when Emma Beach stopped playing and the dancers paused. “Born conspicuous,” Grandmother said of him, “the most naturally self-conscious man in the world.” His only mode of conversation was the monologue, and his version of the monologue was declamation. Many Friends disliked him for his bloody sermons. Women on Columbia Street told each other privately that he had been seen letting himself out of the Beach house, whose library he used as a sanctuary, at late and compromising hours. Grandmother disliked him for his sermons, thought the stories of his indiscretions mere gossip, and despised his arrogance. And what a collapse is coming to that whited sepulcher of a reputation! Mene mene tekel upharsin. Only a little, and Theodore Tilton will bring it all down with his charge that Beecher committed adultery with Tilton’s wife.

  On days like this, the young ladies stayed at home and received, the young men circulated from house to house. Grandmother thought them “almost too boastful” about the number of houses they must visit before night, and found some of them almost too far gone to dance by the time they reached the Beaches’. Her own callers were few and left early. Augusta herself was receiving on Staten Island and would not be at this party. The dancing had broken up as a group of young men prepared to depart. She went into the main parlor, got herself a glass of punch, and stood by the west window watching the sun embed itself in long flat clouds. In the small parlor the Reverend Beecher was defending, against no opposition that Susan could hear, the practice of selling church pews. Through the doorway Mrs. Beach, buoyant upon her bustle, caught her eye and beckoned.

  Susan, blushing pink, went in obediently and took a chair. Nods and smiles acknowledged the youthful sobriety that would rather listen to uplifting conversation than dance. Beecher’s ophidian glance rested on her briefly, Mrs. Beach widened her lips in the premonition of a smile, she got an earnest, frowning regard from an unseasonably sun-blackened boy too big for the gilt chair he was perched on. She had met him, barely: one of Beecher’s cousins, newly arrived from somewhere. He had a sandy mustache and fair short hair that clustered on his forehead. He looked outdoorish and uncomfortable and entrapped, and his hands were very large, brown, and fidgety.

  With her own hands in her lap she sat and let Beecher’s opinions reverberate around her. Her blush faded; she made herself prim. Then through the window she saw a cab draw up outside and three young men in overcoats and high hats get out. Two of them were Augusta’s brothers Dickie and Waldo. Impulsively she started to rise.

  Mrs. Beach said, “Susan Burling, sit down!”

  The monologuist halted; all eyes were on. Burning, she said, “I saw someone coming. I thought ...”

  “Minnie will let them in.” Mrs. Beach returned her attention to the great one, and Susan sat on, telling herself she would never again accept an invitation to this house. When the newcomers came in to pay their respects she barely shook hands with the Drake boys, both of whom smelled of toddy and cigars and were very willing to share her company. (“A complicated young man,” she wrote to Augusta once. “I think I shall not reply to his letter after all.” It isn’t clear which brother she referred to; both took a considerable interest.)

  “Excuse me,” she said breathlessly to the room at large, and escaped.

  She went up the stairs in a furious rustle of taffeta, wishing that every tread were paved with the face of Henry Ward Beecher. To do what? Read? She was too upset. Better to work at her drawing. But her room offered neither work surface nor adequate light. The library, then. Nobody would be there with the party filling the other rooms. Downstairs again, and along the hall (skating on her little feet like a swallow flying?) to the heavy oak door. A peek—no one inside. She popped in.

  I see her there like one of her own drawings, or like the portrait by Mary Curtis Richardson on the wall behind me: a maiden in a window seat, flooded with gray afternoon. But where her drawings usually suggest maidenly yearning, and her portrait suggests some sort of pensive and rueful retrospection, this window-seat maiden suggests only concentration. She had the faculty of sinking herself in whatever she was doing. In five minutes the Reverend Beecher was forgotten with a thoroughness that he would have found insulting.

  Some time later the door opened, letting in a wave of party noise. Hoping that whoever it was would see her working and go away, Susan did not look up. The door closed with a careful click, whereupon she did look up, and saw Mr. Beecher’s cousin, young Mr. What-was-his-name, Ward. He had such an earnest, inquiring face that she felt like throwing the drawing pad at it. “I hope I’m not intruding,” he said.

  She laid the pad face down beside her. “No, of course not.”

  “You were working.”

  “Nothing important.”

  “A drawing, is it? I know you’re an artist.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Emma.”

  “Emma flatters me.”

  He had not once smiled. Now he laid a hand on the doorknob. “No, really. If you don’t go back to work I’ll have to leave. I don’t want to disturb you. I was just looking for a quiet corner. That much talk wears me out.”

  She could not help saying, fairly tartly,
“Some people admire your cousin’s talk.”

  His only answer was an odd, half-questioning, half-surprised glance. With his hand on the doorknob he waited. “Couldn’t you just go ahead, without paying any attention to me?”

  He had an air of quiet such as she had known in men like her father, men who worked with animals. He did not look like one who was easily upset, or talked too much, or thought he had to be entertaining. “All right,” she said, “if you’ll pay no attention to me.”

  “That’ll be harder,” he said gravely. “I’ll try.”

  At once he turned away and began reading the spines of books in the shelves. Convinced that she could not draw a line with him in the room, she found that she could; he was simply absorbed in the library’s dusk. Once she looked up and saw him standing with head bent, reading, his back to her.

  Her drawing was of three girls raking the dooryard of a farm. For models she had used her sister Bessie and two Milton girls, and by their tucked-up skirts and mobcaps, and by the scrub bucket visible through the open door, she had meant to suggest that they had escaped from their tedious inside chores and fallen upon the wooden rakes in a spirit of play. I have a print of the picture, and it suggests just that. It is a gay, old-fashioned rural snapshot. The likeness of Bessie, whom Grandmother used about as often as Abbott Thayer used Katy Bloede, is one of the best.

  After a time she was aware that Mr. Ward was standing behind her looking over her shoulder. Looking challengingly upward, expecting to feel irritated, she found that she did not: she wanted him to praise the drawing. But he only said, “It must be wonderful to do what you like and get paid for it.”

  “Why? Don’t you?”

  “I’m not doing anything. Not getting paid either.”

  “But you’ve been doing something. Somewhere in the sun.”

  “Florida. I was trying to grow oranges.”

  “And couldn’t?”

  “The chills and fever flourished a little better.”

  “Oh, do you have that!” Susan said. “So do I, or used to. If there’s anything I utterly despise, it’s malaria. The fever leaves you so stupid and depressed, and you think you’ve worn it out and back it comes. I feel sorry for you.”

  “Why that’s nice,” he said. She saw his face—he had quite a nice face, rugged and brown and with plenty of jaw, and his eyes were very blue—break into ripples and wrinkles of laughter, and she said foolishly, “I’m sorry about the oranges, too.”

  He blew through his lips, his eyes were narrowed to crescents. So he was not half as earnest and solemn as she had thought him. He said, “That was only a stop-gap. Now you get back to your drawing. I promised not to disturb you, and I did.”

  But she put aside her pad and said, “Stop-gap for what? What do you want to do?”

  “I started out to be an engineer.”

  “And at an advanced age gave it up?”

  No smile. “I was at Yale, at the Sheffield Scientific School. My eyes went bad. I was supposed to be going blind.”

  She was contrite, but Oliver Ward jingled the small change in his pocket, took three or four steps in a circle, and came back facing her. He pulled from the inner pocket of his coat a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles and hooked them over his ears, aging himself about a decade. “They made a mistake,” he said. “I found out just the other day. There’s nothing wrong with the optic nerve. I’m astigmatic, farsighted, plenty of other things, but all I needed was these.”

  She found him boyishly engaging. Maybe she felt motherly. She said, “So now you can go back to Yale.”

  “I’ve lost two years,” said young Oliver Ward. “All my class is graduated. I’m going out West and make myself into an engineer.”

  Susan began to giggle. Ward looked dismayed. “Excuse me,” Susan said. “It just struck me as funny for someone of the Beecher blood to become an engineer in the wild West.”

  Suspended in the act of removing his ridiculous spectacles, he stood with both hands at his ears and the glasses down on his nose. He looked annoyed. “I have no Beecher blood.”

  “But somebody said...”

  Susan Burling was a pretty girl, small and cleanly made. As Augusta says in her article, “she had the dainty precision that has always seemed to me the mark of a true lady.” And she had that rosy complexion and that fatal tendency to blush. I find her as attractive as Oliver Ward obviously did.

  Like one patiently explaining incriminating circumstances, he said, “My father’s sister married Lyman Beecher. She’s the mother of that whole brood—Henry Ward, Thomas, Catherine, Mrs. Stowe, and Cousin Mary Perkins, the best of the litter.” He folded his glasses and put them back in his pocket. His teeth gleamed under his mustache— he was really quite attractive when he looked playful. “The other night she was telling me the story of her life. She said she grew up the daughter of Lyman Beecher, and then became the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and finally hit rock bottom as the mother-in-law of Edward Everett Hale. She’s the only one of the whole outfit that can laugh.”

  He demonstrated that he could laugh too, this earnest young man. They were laughing together very contentedly when the door opened and Emma Beach put her head in. “Susan? Oh, Mr. Ward. Well my goodness, aren’t you two sly! What are you doing, studying art?”

  “Discussing the Beecher blood,” Oliver said.

  Emma had sharp brown eyes and a nose for romance. She almost sniffed. But then the sound of the piano began again in the far rooms. “Susan, I’m sorry, but here’s Dickie Drake, and he’s got to go on, but he says he won’t go till he dances one square with you, and Waldo swears he’ll have at least as much of you, to the minute. They’ve been drinking.”

  Susan was already off the window seat, looking for a place to tuck her sketch pad. Said my grandfather, quite untroubled by the rush on his companion, and revealing that he could smile as well as laugh, “Leave it with me, I’ll look after it.”

  So she passed him the pad and went off to dance with the Drake boys, who were somewhat fast but who were safe because they were Augusta’s brothers. Years later, out of simple good nature or some lingering interest in his sister’s friend, Waldo will help rescue Susan’s husband from a bad situation by getting him a commission to inspect a Mexican silver mine; and Augusta’s husband will make it possible for Susan to go along by commissioning some travel articles. I am impressed with how much of my grandparents’ life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun.

  Among the belles in that house Susan went relatively unnoticed, and could escape the dancing when she chose. She chose to as soon as the Drakes left. Many years later, when she reported that evening in her reminiscences, she was hearing the Doppler Effect of time, as I am now. She was looking back more than sixty years, I am looking back more than a century, but I think I hear the same tone, or tones, that she did: the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four.

  The parlors that New Year’s Evening were filled with a large company of persons moving about and changing places, and but few were in the room by the window. Dark had fallen outside. I was sitting close to the great pane and I saw in it, as in a mirror, all the persons assembled within the rooms; we were there reflected on that background of night starred with specks and clusters of lights, but these did not obtrude. Our images were softened and mysteriously beautified—it was charming. One face in the foreground showed distinct on the darkness of the world outside. I had my drawing pad with me and I made an attempt to draw it—it was the face in line with my view—and, as it happened, it was the only one of all those mirrored in the window that has stayed with me in my own life. All the others are gone out of it years ago; most of them are out of the world.

  Whose face? Oliver Ward’s naturally, my grandfather’s. She made him look rather like a Cru
sader—all he needs is a helmet, and a gorget of chain mail. His face is young, strong, resolute in profile: which is probably the way she saw it.

  And why was he sitting so that his face was in line with her view? Because he was already more than half in love with Susan Burling, and after returning her sketch pad to her he had neither the social ease to make further excuses for talking to one so popular, nor the courage to tear himself away. So he sat at a little distance as if in deep thought about his coming adventure in the West, and hardened his jaw at difficulties and dangers, and hoped that he looked quietly heroic.

  And why did she draw his face? Not simply because it was there, I think. He had at the least made her notice him.

  On that minimum contact they came together; it is as if you should bond two whole houses together with one dab of glue. Within a week he had left for California, and for nearly five years they did not see each other again. Clearly he went with the notion of “proving himself”—that was Grandfather’s character—and stayed on a long time because he had as yet no proofs. Clearly, though, he wrote to her, and she replied, for the reminiscences speak of the “understanding” that gradually established itself between them.

  But not entirely of her volition, perhaps not even with her full consent. I find it interesting that in the more than one hundred surviving letters that Susan wrote Augusta Drake during those five years, there is no mention of the name or existence of Oliver Ward until more than a week after his return.