Angle of Repose (10 page)

She told things like that as jokes on herself, but Oliver Ward on his powder keg in his tar-papered shack could not miss the Great Name that had come to her door seeking her. She hung it up there like a jack-o’-lantern.

Snowbound
fell through, but shortly she was busy on forty drawings and a dozen vignettes for Longfellow’s
The Hanging of
the
Crane,
and a year and a half after she began that, she reported its considerable success in the Christmas trade, and a little later still she wrote that Osgood and Company had mysteriously invited her to Boston, and there surprised her with a dinner at which the whole Brahmin population of New England was present. Mr. Whittier was there, still chuckling over the floor-mopping episode. Mr. Lowell paid her a flattering amount of attention. Mr. Holmes was very witty. Mr. Longfellow held her hand quite a long time and told her he was astonished that one so talented should also be so young and charming. He made her promise to illustrate
The Skeleton in Armor—which,
it turned out, was what the publishers had brought her to Boston to discuss. Mr. Howells, the new editor of the
Atlantic,
praised her realism. Mr. Bret Harte, the celebrated California author, answered her questions about the Sierra Nevada, in which she had expressed an interest.

She was barely twenty-four, and she admits she boasted, “ungenerously.” But that young man in the West was as steady as a lighthouse. He applauded her successes, he never expressed jealousy of the young men whose luck he must have envied, he accepted her ambiguous relationship with Augusta and her almost equally ambiguous relationship with Thomas Hudson, now the third of an intimate threesome.

Grandmother implies that he won her over by his cheerful confidence, so that an understanding gradually grew up between them. I doubt the understanding, and I doubt Grandfather’s confidence. What did he have to be confident about? Trapped for three years in that litigated tunnel, he must have known that if it was ever finished, a junior engineer without a degree would emerge into the old barren sunlight beating on the old sterile mountains, and that if he wanted a chance at Susan Burling he would have to emerge with more than experience.

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 on 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.

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.