Angle of Repose Page 9

  Late in the afternoon they were back at their picnic spot at the top of the fall. She had always responded strongly to storms, rain in the face, wild winds, wild waters, exciting crossings of the Hudson through floating ice. On this day she lay down and hung her face over the cliff to see down the waterfall. At about the same time, and for similar reasons, John Muir was hanging over the brink of Yosemite Falls dizzying himself with the thunder of hundreds of tons of foam and green glass going by him. Muir had a good deal farther to look down, and the rush of water was far wilder past his ear, but Susan Burling had something her fellow romantic did not. She had Oliver Ward hanging onto her ankles to make sure she didn’t spill over.

  Anxious? Not on your life. In these days when a girl goes to bed with anybody who will pat her in a friendly way on the rump, few will be able to imagine how Oliver Ward felt, holding those little ankles. He would not have let go if fire had swept the hilltop, if warrior ants had swarmed over him from head to foot, if Indians had sneaked from the bushes and hacked him loose from his hands. As for Susan Burling, upside down and with her world whirling, that strong grip on her ankles was more than physical contact made sweet by the fact that it came between the bars of an iron cage of propriety, touch asserting itself against a thousand conventions. It was the very hand of the protective male. When she came up out of her dizzying tête-a-tête with the waterfall she was in love.

  On the long ride home they did not talk much. They jolted and rocked and smiled, intensely aware of every time their bodies were bumped together. Susan agreed without question when Oliver suggested to John Grant that there was no need of driving them clear to the Burling house. They could get off at the Grant house and walk the last half mile—there was a young moon. So they walked the last dark reach between stone walls that her great-grandfather had laid, along the lane felty with dust, through night air cool with coming fall, tannic with early cured leaves.

  Somewhere along the lane they settled it. Two days later Oliver left for Connecticut to see his parents for a few days before going back West to hunt a job and prepare a place for her.

  Coming emptyhanded, with nothing to support his suit but hope, he could not have timed his arrival more perfectly or found Susan in a more receptive frame of mind. If the threesome was to be split by marriage (though Augusta and Thomas swore it would not be) New York might be a less happy place, and a Western adventure looked attractive. And if Augusta, despite all her vows, found herself ready to give up art for housekeeping, perhaps her defection demonstrated that after all marriage was woman’s highest role. And if Thomas Hudson was to be finnly given up, the eye might do worse than wander to a man of an altogether different kind, attractive in his own way but in no sense a rival of the lost paragon.

  But what a confrontation when she told Augusta. I have to imagine it, but there are hints through years of letters to let me know their respective feelings. I imagine it in the studio on 15th Street where they had worked and slept together for four years in their sublimated dream of art’s bachelorhood, and where Susan, looking up from her drawing, had often found Augusta’s dark eyes devouring and caressing her.

  No caressing in this scene now. Lovers of a kind, cats of a kind, they would have shown their claws. Augusta was incredulous, aghast, and accusatory; Susan stubborn, perhaps just a shade triumphant. You see? I am not defenseless, I am not to be left out after all. There they sat, burning under their serge and bombazine with emotions hotter than gentility could quite allow.

  “Oliver Ward? Who on earth is he? Have I met him? You’re joking.”

  “No, I’m quite serious. You haven’t met him. He’s been in Califomia.”

  “Then where did you meet him?”

  “At Emma’s, one New Year’s Eve.”

  “And he’s been gone since? How long?”

  “Four years, nearly five.”

  “But you’ve been writing to him.”

  “Yes, regularly.”

  “And now he’s proposed and you’ve accepted, all by mail!”

  “No, he’s back. He’s been visiting at Milton for a week.”

  Augusta, sitting with her head lowered, found a loose thread in the trimming of her gown and pulled it out. Her fingers smoothed the ruffled rickrack braid. Her dark angry eyes touched Susan’s and looked away. “Doesn’t it seem to you odd—it does to me—that you wouldn’t ever have mentioned this man’s name to me?”

  “I didn’t know he was going to become so important.”

  “But now after a week’s visit you know.”

  “I do know, yes. I love him. I’m going to marry him.”

  Augusta rose and paced the room, stopped and put the heels of both palms against her temples. “I thought there were no secrets between us.”

  Susan could not resist sinking a claw in the carelessly exposed flesh. “Now that there’s something to tell, I am telling you. Just as you told me when there was something to tell about you and Thomas.”

  Augusta stared with her hands to her head. “Ah, that’s it!”

  Her cheeks hot, Susan held her ground. “No, that’s not it. But just as you have every right to fall in love and marry, so have I. One doesn’t always know—does one?—when things are headed that way.”

  Augusta was shaking her head. “I never expected to see you fall in love like a shopgirl with the first handsome stranger.”

  “You’re forgetting yourself!”

  “Sue, I think you’re forgetting yourself. What does this young man do?”

  “He’s an engineer.”

  “In California.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he wants to take you out there.”

  “As soon as he finds the right place, with some permanence in it.”

  “And you’ll go.”

  “When he sends for me, yes.”

  Augusta resumed her pacing, throwing her hands outward in little distracted gestures. She straightened a picture on the wall without stopping. She bent her head to gnaw on a knuckle. “What about your art? What about everything we’ve worked for?”

  “My art isn’t that important. I’ll never be anything but a commercial illustrator.”

  “You know that’s utterly wrongheaded!”

  “I know I want to marry him and go where his career takes him. It won’t be forever, but it may take some time. He’s not flashy, he’ll take a little while to establish himself. I can go on drawing. He wants me to.”

  “In some mining camp.”

  “I don’t know where.”

  Now Augusta’s agitation broke out. She stopped, she gripped her hands before her face and shook them. “Susan, Susan, you’re madl You’re throwing yourself away! Ask Thomas. He’d never agree this is right.”

  “In this,” said Susan, as if in a novel, “I can consult no one but myself.”

  “And make a mistake that will ruin your career and lead you a desolate life.”

  “Augusta, you’ve never even met him!”

  “And don’t want to. I loathe his very name. He can’t come in and overturn your life like this. What about us?”

  They looked, they fell into each other’s arms, they even laughed at the extremity of their disagreement. But though they patched up their difference, they did not change; they were both strong-minded women. Augusta did not abate her disapproval, Susan’s resolution did not weaken. Maybe she was trapped—she had given an impulsive promise, and promises with her were binding. But I think she had been stirred by Oliver Ward’s masculine strength, by his stories of an adventurous life, by his evenness of disposition, by his obvious adoration. I think she was for the first time physically in love with a man, and I like her courage in going where her emotions led her.

  But it was hard to know where that would be. For a while Oliver was surveying something for the Southern Pacific around Clear Lake. Then he was on the loose in San Francisco, refusing to take just anything, turning down the jobs with no future, looking for just the right place that would lead somewhere. He stayed
for several months with his sister Mary, who had married a prominent mining engineer named Conrad Prager, and at last he found, through Prager’s influence, a job that excited him. He wrote that he was to be Resident Engineer of the New Almaden mercury mine near San Jose, an ancient and famous mine that had furnished mercury for the reduction of the gold of the whole Gold Rush. In a few weeks he would come East and marry her and lead her West.

  Then he wrote saying that he was in the midst of an underground survey and couldn’t get away. He would have to finish it before he could leave.

  She waited while the river broke up and the old Mary Powell began again to lay her plume along the high spring water. Crocuses came and went, the apple trees exploded, lilacs drenched the air, summer came with its visitors and boarders. Before long it was a year since Oliver Ward had held her by the ankles over the waterfall at Big Pond. Augusta was pregnant, they were reconciled to some new relationship, they wrote each other a good deal about the contrary pulls upon a woman who was also an artist. Augusta was very strong that Susan should not let marriage destroy her career. It was as if, having all but given up painting herself, she wanted to force Susan to be their double justification. And give her credit—perhaps she recognized in Susan Burling a capacity that she herself did not have.

  But she never accepted Oliver Ward. They simply agreed not to talk about him any more than necessary.

  Susan waited, not unhappily, diligent in her work, dutiful in her daughterhood, refreshing herself occasionally in the old friendships at the 15th Street studio. Counting from New Year’s Eve, 1868, when she first met Oliver Ward, she had been waiting just a little longer than Jacob waited for Rachel when Oliver came back in February 1876 and they were married in her father’s house.

  6

  No minister married them. According to the Friends’ service, Oliver met her at the foot of the stair and escorted her into the parlor, where in the presence of forty-four witnesses, all of whom signed the marriage paper, they pledged themselves to each other, “she according to the custom of marriage assuming the name of the husband.” There went the rising young artist Susan Burling.

  And no one stood up with her. Augusta, only a month out of child-bed, said she was not well enough—“and if I can’t have you I won’t have anyone,” Susan wrote her. Faithful friendship, the old warmth. But in that same note there is a reference to “my friend whom you don’t want to like.” She knew very well why Augusta stayed away; she may have half-granted Augusta’s reasons.

  Susan Burling I historically admire, and when she was an old lady I loved her very much. But I wish I could take her by the ear and lead her aside and tell her a few things. Nemesis in a wheelchair, knowing the future, I could tell her that it is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

  While they were honeymooning at the Brevoort House, Thomas called on them, alone. Susan watched his face and estimated his decent politeness for what it was. Later, from Oliver’s home in Guilford, she wrote to Augusta:I haven’t an anxiety in the world at present, except perhaps lest you may not like my boy when you finally meet him. They tell me stories about his boyhood which please me very much. He was such a plucky boy—hardy, enterprising, generous, and truthful. I shall have to be very weak and praise him to you, for he does not “exploit” himself ... I am sure Thomas was a little disappointed, and so will you be at first.

  In another letter—she wrote too many on her honeymoon—she expressed a confidence that to a critical ear sounds a little shrill:I might have spared myself all my past misgivings. He has not only the will to spare me and keep me safe in every way but he knows how to do so. I ought to have had more faith in him. I knew he would do all he understood to be a man’s duty to his wife, but I didn’t know how far his understanding of his duty reached. I am left literally nothing to worry about except that he will work too hard. He is very ambitious and will work on his nerve more than is right. It frightens me to hear him quietly tell of the way he has lived these years past—with one object—and the devious, hard, and dangerous ways and places in which he has steadily pursued it. I know this is very weak of me and bad policy too—for you have not seen my boy and all this praise may deepen your first disappointment.

  In God’s name, Grandmother, I feel like saying to her, what was the matter with him? Did he have a harelip? Use bad language? Eat with his knife? You can do him harm, constantly adjusting his tie and correcting his grammar and telling him to stand up straight. Augusta has got you buffaloed.

  It is all Victorian, as Rodman says, all covered up with antimacassars, all quivering with sensibility and an inordinate respect for the genteel. And not a word about that great plunge into sex, from a virginity so absolute that it probably didn’t know the vocabulary, much less the physiology and the emotions. Not the faintest hint, even to Augusta, of how she felt in the room at Brevoort House, dark except for the fluttering of gaslight from the street below, when the near-stranger she was married to touched the fastenings of her gown, or laid a hand charged with 6000 volts on her breast.

  If I were a modem writing about a modem young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferably “comic,” of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax, and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don’t know. I have a good deal of confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.

  I do get some hint of her feelings from her Guilford letters, describing walks along the shore amid tempests of wind and rain, with a fire and a cup of tea and the sure affections of a sheltered house afterward. Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.

  She watched Oliver’s family for signs in which she could take comfort.

  The father calls me “young lady” and holds my hand in both of his when I bid him good night. He is called all manner of affectionate and ridiculous names by his frisky children, who worship him and treat him as tenderly as if each day were his last, but always with a kind of surface playfulness. This is a family peculiarity—a reticence in expressing sentiment or deep feeling. It is all hidden under a laugh or a gay word. Kate calls her father “you permiscus old parient” with her eyes shining across the card table at him as he gathers up the odd trick and her last trump with it. Oliver calls his father “Old Dad,” but follows him around the house with his chair, and listens with the most respectful attention to his views on dikes and sluices, founded on the ideas of fifty years ago.

  That’s better, Grandmother. No apologies or doubts there. It was nice of you to draw the old couple so that Oliver could take their picture West. And it clearly pleased you to look through the family papers and find there evidence of the sort of respectability and continuity you thought American life too often lacked: such memorabilia as a letter from George Washington to Oliver’s ancestor General Ward, and a love letter to his great-great-grandmother, beginning “Honored Madame.” You thought it amusing that though she rejected the suitor she kept the letter, only tearing off the signature—retaining the admiration, as it were, and obliterating the admirer.

  Two weeks after Oliver arrived to be married, he was gone again to prepare their house at New Almaden. Before he left, Augusta brought herself to have the two of them to dinner. I am sure she was charming, I am sure Thomas was a friendly and assiduous host. I am equally sure that Oliver found it impossible to “exploit” himself, and sat silent, diffident, and inferior, listening to the literary and artistic jargon and the flow of public names. I am sure that Susan was a little hysterical with satisfaction and apprehension at finally getting into one room the people she most loved. She probably talked too much and made too much of Augusta’s baby, who like anyth
ing of Augusta’s was the most perfect on earth. Let her speak for herself.

  It seems almost impertinent to tell you that Oliver was just as impressed by you and Thomas, the house and all belonging to you, as I wished him to be ... If he hadn’t admired you I would have been very much surprised and a good deal disgusted. But it is quite different about Oliver. I should not be surprised if you did not like him much, or disgusted with your taste. He is not an ideal type in the sense that you and Thomas are, but nothing now can shake my utter content and faith in him. So, dear girl, don’t feel bound to admire him for my sake. Don’t try to like him. It will come all the easier to like him by and by when we are all together.

  There she goes again, incorrigible.

  Her version of the marriage was that for perhaps two years she and Oliver would live in the West while he established himself. Then they would return, and somehow or other the discrepancies between Oliver’s personality and Western leanings and the social and artistic brilliance of the Hudsons’ circle would all be smoothed away. They would trade evenings, their children would be inseparable. Of course it would take a little time.

  Oliver wrote that he had found a cottage, once inhabited by a mine captain’s family, which with renovations would make them a pleasant and secluded home. The manager had agreed to let him go ahead with the remodeling. He sent a floor plan, onto which she sketched a veranda that went three quarters around, and into whose blank rooms she inserted things she wanted, corner cupboards and such. Their letters of planning went back and forth like installments of a serial.

  Help would be a problem. Oliver insisted that she look around for a servant girl to bring along, for the only local product in the servant line was Chinamen. So she found a handsome, rather sullen girl with a seven-months’ baby, a girl who said she had left a brutal husband but who might never have had a husband at all. That was a chilling thought, to bring someone like that into the house. But she was quiet and respectful, and she was eager to go West. When Susan obtained a commission to illustrate a gift edition of The Scarlet Letter, that settled it: she would have a very adequate model for Hester Prynne in her own kitchen. But there would have to be a room for her. She wrote Oliver asking if he would mind an infant in the house, and if it was possible to add a room. He wrote back gamely that he didn’t if she didn’t, and that he would put a lean-to off the kitchen. Give him another couple of weeks.