Angle of Repose Read online

  I don’t think she was protecting herself from an attachment she feared might leave her on the bough. I don’t think there was that much of an attachment, not on her part. He kept writing, and she didn’t have the heart to shut him off. And he was a reserve possibility, a hole card that she didn’t look at because she didn’t want to risk breaking up the beautiful sequence of hearts face-up in her hand.

  At that stage I don’t see her looking for a husband. She didn’t really want a fifth card any more than she wanted to look at her hole card. She had her career, she had Augusta and the marriage of true minds, and she had Thomas, whom she admired and idealized. She probably hoped their threesome could go on indefinitely. Though she was no bohemian, she was willing to be unconventional if the conventions could be broken without impropriety; and quite apart from her devotion to Augusta and Thomas, she had a tough and unswerving dedication to her art. She might even have accepted spinsterhood as the price of her career if the cards had fallen that way. And if the cards fell wrong, if Augusta should marry or move away, if art should fail, if her career should be disappointing and she should be exposed to the chilly fear that in the 1870s paled the cheek and weakened the knees of unmarried girls over twenty-four, then why wouldn’t she have looked toward Thomas Hudson rather than toward an unliterary, unartistic, not-too-successful engineer, a mere pen pal a continent away?

  I think she did.

  A relatively poor girl making her own way—what Rodman would call “upward mobile”—she put a higher value on gentility than most who were bred to it, and a higher value on art and literature than those frail by-products of living can possibly support. She had the zeal of a convert or an aspirant. And Thomas Hudson, born as poor as herself and just as upward mobile, was gentility personified, sensibility made flesh.

  Not yet thirty, he was already a reputation and an influence. He charmed both the literary and the social. Poems dropped from him as blossoms blew off the Burling apple trees in a spring breeze. He wrote a monthly department, “The Old Cupboard,” in Scribner’s magazine, that the literary waited for and discussed. Ostensibly the assistant of Scribner’s editor, Dr. Holland, he in fact did all of Holland’s work and made most of Holland’s decisions and found all the livelier contributors that Holland got credit for.

  Susan was his discovery, and he hers. Most of her friends she met through Augusta, but Augusta met Thomas through her. Within a few weeks they were an inseparable trio. In that Edith Wharton version of New York they ran around safe, platonic, and happy to galleries, theaters, and concerts. I have no idea whether or not the 1870s provided editors with expense accounts, but Thomas acted as if they did. I have no idea, either, whether Thomas was courting Susan, or Augusta, or both, or neither. I doubt that any of them knew. If you are genteel enough, that sort of imprecision is possible.

  It is hard for me to be just to Thomas Hudson, for I had him held up to me all through my childhood, and he was an impossible ideal. But I have heard former colleagues, American literature professors who study such things, call him the greatest editor the country ever had. Recently I was looking through a file of the Century, which he edited after Scribner’s closed up, and in the single issue of February 1885 I found, in addition to the Susan Burling Ward story that had led me to it, the final installment of a book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the ninth and tenth chapters of a novel by William Dean Howells called The Rise of Silas Lapham, and the opening installment of a novel by Henry James called The Bostonians. I wouldn’t be surprised if he found and published two thirds of the best literature of four decades. He was nearly as good as Grandmother thought him—a man of taste, intelligence, and integrity. He was one of the group of New York liberals who at various times cleaned up the Grant pigpen and put down Tammany Hall. A man any period could use. Thomas, thou shouldst be living at this hour. So I must curb my tendency to speak of him with condescension or amusement, simply because Grandmother used his perfection as a stick to beat me with.

  In the 1870s he was gentle, thoughtful, amusing, a spirit that glowed through a frail, almost epicene body. He had come out of the war with wounds that kept him sickly, but he still managed to do the work of three. His hands were pale and attenuated, his smile was of great sweetness. He loved talk, and he assumed the stance of noble idealism as naturally as water fills a hole in beach sand. In one of her letters, Susan told him that he had a “truly feminine talent for saying lovely, sweet things, with a little pang in them.” Many of her letters address him playfully as “Cousin Thomas.” Over a span of several years he gave her a number of little presents—a Japanese teapot, a miniature Madonna, certain volumes of poetry—that she clung to while other things, Grandfather’s letters for instance, were getting lost. The volumes of poetry and the Madonna are down in the library right now, salted away like Grandmother’s rose petals.

  Her editorial champion, her closest male friend, the beau ideal of genteel letters, Thomas had to suggest himself to Susan as a potential husband. Naturally no expression of that shows through the decorous playfulness of her letters to him. The closest thing I find is a discussion of Friendship, roughly at the level of Cicero: “When you are away from your friends, do you think of their words or of their sudden awful thrilling soul-revealing looks? There is something awful about a sensitive human face. What a brute that man must be who said that the finest instrument to play upon was a sensitive impressionable woman! I don’t believe he could make that intense music and dare to boast of it afterward.”

  I wonder what she thought she was doing. Surely she was not subtly accusing Thomas of playing on her heartstrings, but she could well have been subtly letting him know that she vibrated. Was she a little afraid her own face might have worn, in his presence, some sudden awful thrilling soul-revealing look?

  The more I study Grandmother at that age, the more complicated that Quaker girl seems. She has a passion for Augusta, a crush that has lasted now for four or five years. She admires, idealizes, perhaps is in love with Thomas Hudson. She is sought by several young men, including Augusta’s two brothers, who could offer her (and Dickie at least seems to have) a social position to which she is not indifferent. She is dedicated to art, and works hard at it. At the same time, if we accept what she says in the reminiscences, she has been coming to an understanding with Oliver Ward, an engineer two years her junior, whom she has known for one evening and whose existence she has never mentioned to her other friends.

  Then in the summer of 1873 she began to be aware that it was on Augusta, not herself, that the uncertain needle of Thomas’s affections was settling. I am guessing, but not wildly. She went back to Milton abruptly, instead of moving permanently to New York as she had been planning to do. There is a marked slackening in the flow of letters. There are no more six-page effusions—only brief notes, and those evasive. The importunity was evidently on the part of Augusta. Susan kept pleading the demands of Longfellow’s Vikings. She said New York stimulated her too much. To the claim that she should not bury herself in the country she replied that if she had great genius, as Augusta had, she might think it legitimate to sacrifice parents and home to it. But her talent was humble and minor, and if it couldn’t be carried on in the house of the parents who had done everything for her, it wasn’t worthy of being carried on.

  Such mournful dutifulness and self-depreciation. I suppose she was bruised, poor thing, for in the worst tradition of the sentimental song she saw herself losing both lover and friend. She could not have the satisfaction of charging either with treachery, and she would have reproached herself for ever dreaming of being Augusta’s rival. A perfect match, an ideal couple, she would have been the first to say. Yet it left her out. In bitter moods she may have wondered if he chose Augusta because she was wealthy and well-born and could give him a social base for his career. I suppose she wept for lost gladness and the relinquishment of true friends. The letters mention bouts of sleeplessness and facial neuralgia.

  Somehow she brought o
n a quarrel. I have no idea what about, for key letters are missing, perhaps destroyed in anger or in the passion of reconciliation. Augusta had been planning to visit Milton, and Susan with at least part of her sensibility had been anticipating a love feast. But she must have written some note that infuriated dark-browed Augusta, already pretty impatient with Susan’s defection. At the last minute she wrote curtly that she must accompany her parents to Albany, and could not come, and she signed herself “Very truly your friend.”

  One letter of Susan’s tells me all I know about it.

  Fishkill Landing

  Tuesday night

  My dear dear girl—

  Your note came this afternoon just after Bessie and I had been getting your room ready and making your bed—oMr bed where I thought I should lie tonight with my dear girl’s arm under my head. It gave me a queer little sick trembly feeling that I’ve had only once or twice in my life—and then I thought I must see you, not to “talk things over”—I don’t care about things, I only want you to love me.

  So I hurried after supper and changed my dress and pulled my ruffle down low in front to please my girl [what, Grandmother?] and rushed into the garden for a bunch of roses—your June roses, blooming late just for you (we have been hoarding them and begging buds to wait a few days longer for your coming)—and then down to the night boat. I thought I’d either coax you to land or go with you as far as West Point. And oh! what a sick sunk feeling to see the Mary Powell’s lights already out in the river, going every second farther away! I was distracted. I stood on this landing and wept, and then I walked, and it is only now, two hours later, that I have enough control of myself to huddle here on the bench and write you this by starlight and ask you to forgive me.

  I so want to put my arms around my girl of all the girls in the world and tell her that whether I move to New York or stay home, whether she sign herself “Very truly your friend” or “Your ownest of girls,” I love her as wives love their husbands, as friends who have taken each other for life. You believe that love has its tides. Well, there was a strong ebb tide this summer. I can’t explain all that caused it-several things combined—but it only shows me how much you are to me. Little streams don’t have tides, do you mind that?

  Now please don’t call yourself truly my friend again. I can stand arguments and scoldings, but—truly your friend! And then to miss you by only that widening gap of water! I should have run, dark lane or no dark lane, and next time shall. As for the chill, I’m a donkey. If I didn’t love you do you suppose I’d care about anything or have ridiculous notions and panics and behave like a fool, and quite break down on this landing? But I feel now as if a storm has passed. I’m going to hang onto your skirts, young woman, genius though you may be. You can’t get away from the love of your faithful

  SUB

  Like some of Grandmother’s other letters, that one makes me feel like a Peeping Tom. And I don’t know whether to smile or to be obscurely shocked to think of her panting and distracted and tearing her hair on Fishkill Landing, with her ruffle pulled down low to please her girl and a rose wilting in her frantic bosom. If I had to make a guess, I should guess that neither Thomas nor my grandfather ever stirred that amount of turmoil in her breast.

  But that episode marked a turning point, and that it did suggests a strength of character in Grandmother that I must admire. Right then, apparently, she put away any pre-emptive right to either Augusta or Thomas. The tide of love, as these romantic girls put it, never came full again in the same way. After her summer of unrest, she relinquished one sort of possibility; and when a month later Augusta and Thomas told her about their engagement, she took the word gamely. I have the note she wrote Thomas.

  Do you know, Sir, until you came I believe she loved me almost as girls love their lovers—I know I loved her so. Don’t you wonder that I can bear the sight of you? I don’t know another man who could make it seem right. You must have been born to make her future complete, and she was born to kindle your Genius. Isn’t it wonderful how it flamed up at her touch? It was there, but as unborn crystals are ...

  All right, Grandmother. Generously said. Maybe your emotions and your good-loser response were learned from novels, but they worked, and they lasted. Thenceforward you were a loving sister to Thomas, and dearest friend, without ambiguities, to Augusta. You never expressed to them or to anyone any feeling of betrayal or disappointment. I suspect that you were able to manage yourself so well because by a stroke of luck you were able just then to look at your hole card. The ace-high straight flush you had coming didn’t work out, but at the last minute that buried nine filled a king-high straight.

  Within two days after she heard of the engagement of Augusta and Thomas, Oliver Ward wrote that he was coming home from the West.

  He arrived on a night of hard rain. She and her brother-in-law John Grant waited in the shelter of the landing and watched the three blurred lights of the ferry creep closer, separating themselves from the lights of the Poughkeepsie side. John’s lantern shone back liquid yellow from the puddles, another lantern at the end of the landing threw a streak over the moving river that was roughened every minute or two by gusts. I suspect that Susan’s skin was like the river, chilled by gusts of uncertainty, pebbled with the gooseflesh of anticipation. She knew his intentions; he had warned her.

  What did a girl of 1873 feel, waiting for the stranger whom she had never taken quite seriously but whom she had now, in her mind, half resolved to marry? The meeting had all the dramatics of one of her more romantic drawings—shine of lantern light on the oilskins of the ferryman, a tall figure that jumped ashore carrying a carpetbag. And what was he wearing? Some great hooded cloak or ulster that made him like a figure out of a conspiratorial opera. The ferryman’s lantern threw his huge shadow down the landing. She was in suspense to see his face, for she might remember him all wrong. Then he was before them throwing back the hood, shaking her hand with his big wet hand, saying some sort of greeting and in the same breath apologizing for the ulster—it was his field coat, his town coat was stolen in San Francisco.

  He arrived looking suitably outlandish, a traveler from a far place, someone to be cautiously investigated. Yet intimate too, because of what had been said between the lines of letters, or what he had said and she had not denied. They jammed into the buggy and the intimacy was physically enforced. Between the two bundled men she could hardly move. They rode turning their faces away from the spitting dark, and she smelled his unfamiliar odors of pipe and wet wool, and said whatever she would say, while her taciturn brother-in-law listened. He had a tendency to be critical of people. She wondered how he rated this young man from the West against the writers and painters and editors he had been driving up from the landing for the last four years.

  Her parents were standing in the hall to welcome him and exclaim about the wet, and after the introductions—with what shyness, with what a weight of unspoken implication—Susan guided him upstairs to his room, the one they called Grandmother’s room. There he set his carpetbag inside the door and shook himself out of the ulster, and she watched him lay on the dresser, which had never seen anything rougher than a Quaker bonnet or a book of poems in limp leather, a curved pipe, and a great wooden-handled revolver.

  Was he showing off? I suppose so. God knows why else a man would bring a pistol to his courting. His character and his role were already Western, he had only that way of asserting himself against the literary gentility with which her house was associated in his mind.

  I don’t care about that, and I don’t care whether she was astonished, impressed, shocked, or amused. What I find myself held by, in imagination, is their tentativeness, their half-awkward half-willingness to admit their understanding, as they faced each other in the doorway by the light of the lamp she carried. That too is like one of her drawings —narrative, sidelighted, suffused with possibility.

  5

  She was quickly reassured that he was not impossible, at least for any society short of Au
gusta’s. He was most admiring of her talent and respectful of her friends, he was as big and restful as she had found him in the library in Brooklyn Heights, he had a way of speaking lightly of things without persuading her that he felt them lightly. He was not talkative, but once wound up he charmed them all with his stories of life in California. Her parents sat up late to hear him, though when her New York friends visited they went early to bed. He could play chess—that promised cozy evenings. Her father said he had never seen a man pick a basket of apples faster. And when he took hold of the oars of a rowboat, the rowboat nearly jumped out of the water.

  But she puzzled where to take him on some excursion. Long Pond and Black Pond, liked by New York visitors, were not enough for a man who had seen the Yosemite and ridden the length of the San Joaquin Valley through square miles of wildflowers. So she and Bessie and John took him to Big Pond, eight miles back in the woods, a wild romantic place where a waterfall poured into a marble pool and then fell through diminishing pools to the lake.

  It was incorrigibly Hudson River school—brown light, ragged elms, romantic water. There they sat on the grass confronting nature. When they had eaten, they did what poets and philosophers did outdoors in the early years of the picturesque—strolled, picked early autumn leaves or late gentians. Susan sketched a little while he stood admiring by. They did not spoon, though Bessie strategically led her husband away so the two could be alone. Having no acceptable way of expressing their feelings directly, they probably vented them on nature. I can see a lot of tableaux while she is struck speechless by a view or a flaming swamp maple, and he stands there with his hat in his hand before the purity of her sensibility.