Angle of Repose (19 page)
It seemed all he was going to say. He looked sleepy and inert with the firelight on his face. Resentfully she waited. Finally she gave in. “Tell me.”
“Just a symptom. We were in the
labor–you
know, the stope, where they’re getting out ore, a sort of hollowed-out room along the vein. There’s a lot of loose rock, it isn’t timbered. You have to keep your eyes open. He leaned over to examine the face, and I saw dirt and pebbles fall out of the ceiling onto his shoulder. He should have felt it, too. I yelled at him, ‘Back!’, something like that, and what did he do? He turned around with those big deer’s eyes soft and wondering, and said, ‘Pardon?’ When a man hollers at you down a mine and says jump, you’d better jump, not ask questions.”
labor–you
know, the stope, where they’re getting out ore, a sort of hollowed-out room along the vein. There’s a lot of loose rock, it isn’t timbered. You have to keep your eyes open. He leaned over to examine the face, and I saw dirt and pebbles fall out of the ceiling onto his shoulder. He should have felt it, too. I yelled at him, ‘Back!’, something like that, and what did he do? He turned around with those big deer’s eyes soft and wondering, and said, ‘Pardon?’ When a man hollers at you down a mine and says jump, you’d better jump, not ask questions.”
He sat blinking at the fire. “Then what?” Susan said. “How did you hurt yourself? I’m sorry, I never noticed.”
“I pushed him. A slab fell right where he’d been leaning. Just nicked me.” He put the bruise to his mouth as if kissing it.
“You saved his life. At the risk of your own!”
“Nothing quite that heroic. The point is I shouldn’t have
had
to push him. You just can’t work with a man who turns around and wonders why you’re yelling at him.”
had
to push him. You just can’t work with a man who turns around and wonders why you’re yelling at him.”
She sat quietly. She did not doubt Oliver’s judgment of Starling, not now. She was only rebellious against the conditions of their life, which excluded, except perhaps in positions of control such as Conrad Prager had, men sensitive enough to appreciate the finer things. She knew without any question, no matter what he said, that Oliver’s act had been heroic; but she still wished he were more competent in cultivated conversation.
Then he hoisted his eyebrows at the fire, looking across the hands he had folded under his chin, and said through his mustache, with the edge of sullenness in his voice, “Maybe you think I’m going to recommend against him because he fell in love with you. That isn’t so.”
“Oh, fell in love!”
“Of course he did. At first sight. Bang.” He turned his sleepy face. “Why wouldn’t he? So did I.”
It was precisely the right thing to say. It absolved him of jealousy and spread balm on her irritations and reassured her that she had not the slightest regret. If Thomas Hudson himself were available, she would still choose Oliver Ward. They sat up together–close together–by the open fire until the coals had fallen into ash, and all was reaffirmed and renewed. Grandmother had her identity back, having had the baron to reflect it for an evening. He was the first young man with a genteel education to encounter her in the camps and backwoods that framed much of her life. He would not be the last, nor the last to fall in love with her rosy animated face and her interest in anything that moved, especially anything that talked.
I doubt that she reopened the matter of her violated bedroom. Instead, I would guess that she took advantage of the renewed tenderness between them to tell him, with all the hesitancy demanded by her times and training, that he was going to have an heir, a fact that Augusta had known for a month.
What did he say? I am utterly unable to guess. He was not one to say much under any circumstances. He was too concerned about her safety and comfort to be very pleased that it was to happen in that mining camp, and too pinched economically to be pleased it was to happen so soon. But he was too much in love not to be awed and grateful at what she had done for him, or what they had done together.
What was there for a young husband of 1876 to say? Something ineffable, something like what William Clark wrote in his notebook when he and Meriwether Lewis saw the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia (O! the joy!)? Certainly not what I heard my son Rodman say when Leah telephoned him from her gynecologist’s office. (Shit!)
New Almaden, Dec. 2, 1876
My dear girl–
Your last letter came to us on our way from the mine to San Francisco for our Thanksgiving excursion. It is an all-day journey and only 75 miles. I enjoyed the ride on top of the stage through the fog to San Jose, and our lunch at the La Moille House was made doubly pleasant by the letters which Eugene the stage driver handed us just as we entered the hotel. There was one from you, one from home, one from Dickie. I felt as if we were all going to San Francisco by the afternoon train.
Mr. Prager met us with a carriage–I enjoyed the disgust of the disappointed hack-men–howling fiends looking and acting as if ready to devour you. Mr. Prager’s name does not suggest the sort of man he is. His friend Ashburner and he should change names . . . Mr. Prager was educated at Freiburg and, pleasantly enough, two or three of his fellow students–Ashburner, Janin, etc.–are now in San Francisco. They are a very clever cosmopolitan sort of men–not easily enthusiastic–do not reveal themselves very much but draw out other people. They have been in strange countries–Japan, Mexico, South America, and those queer islands which it is so hard to remember geographically. Mr. Janin is the cynic of the trio. He is the most difficult to understand, and therefore the most fascinating. Mr. Prager is very handsome and has great harmoniousness–he never jars.
We were not in the gay set of San Francisco, but we were what seemed to me gay, after the mine. We drove on the sands below the Cliff House and through the Park. I greatly enjoyed being whirled past the long lines of spray, flashing in the sun. The water came to the horses’ feet, the sea line was dark keen blue against the sky. The weather was perfect all the while we were there, the evenings very lovely, moonlight softened by fog. We were out a good deal–receptions, dinners, etc. They are very learned about cooking in San Francisco-people seem to expect as a matter of course things which we consider luxurious. Oliver and I spent all our money immediately, and only stopped because we had no more to spend.
Pray give my love to your dearest mother. She was very kind to think of me. We cannot help thinking it natural that we should be forgotten. You cannot think what a bond it was between me and the ladies I met in San Francisco–our loving remembrance of our old homes. They are all young married women who followed their husbands out here. All had a certain general line of experience–all could tell the same story of homesickness, of the return, and, alas, of the strange change which made the old seem new and unfamiliar. It made me feel like crying to hear them speak of it.
“We
do not forget,” they all said, “but
they
have no place for us when we return. We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again. We have lost our life in the East–we must make a new life for ourselves here.” They were charming women, well-bred, gentle, and very adaptable. They would go anywhere in the world where their husbands’ businesses made it necessary, and make a home. But I fancied in all of them a lingering sentiment for the old home, a pathetic sense of being aliens in the new. I am determined not to share their misfortune. I should feel lost if I thought this country would see me old.
“We
do not forget,” they all said, “but
they
have no place for us when we return. We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again. We have lost our life in the East–we must make a new life for ourselves here.” They were charming women, well-bred, gentle, and very adaptable. They would go anywhere in the world where their husbands’ businesses made it necessary, and make a home. But I fancied in all of them a lingering sentiment for the old home, a pathetic sense of being aliens in the new. I am determined not to share their misfortune. I should feel lost if I thought this country would see me old.
I know that you and Thomas are both growing in ways both deep and broad. It makes me tremble a little, for I am not conscious of any growth in myself, and I cannot let you grow away from me. I am so afraid when you see me again you will find me poor and common.
New Almaden, Dec. 11, 1876
Darling Augusta–
Unless your eyes trouble you, dear Augusta, please read this to yourself.
I have followed your advice in one of the two ways in which you recommended me to be anticipating the evil day that is coming –as to the hardening of the nipples–but I do not know what you mean by using oil. Is it the abdomen that is to be rubbed? I begin to have a painfully stretched feeling–would oil relieve that?
I spoke to you about the advice Mrs. Prager gave me about the future. Of course I know nothing about it practically, and it sounds dreadful–but every way is dreadful except the one which it seems cannot be relied on.
Mrs. P. said that Oliver must go to a physician and get shields of some kind. They are to be had at some druggists’. It sounds perfectly revolting, but one must face anything rather than the inevitable results of nature’s methods. At all events there is nothing injurious about this. Mrs. Prager is a very fastidious woman and I hardly think would submit to anything very bad–and yet, poor thing, it is an absolute necessity for her. She is magnificently womanly and strong looking, but really very frail. These things are called “cundrums” and are made either of rubber or skin.
May I tell you of a queer thing that happened in San Francisco? I went to church with Mr. Prager on Thanksgiving morning–Oliver had an appointment with some men in town. Mrs. P. did not feel well enough to go. It was a mild, soft morning, the hill was very steep, the air very relaxing, like our first mild weather in spring, when the damp sea winds blow. We sat through the first part of the service but the organ made me feel strangely. Its throbbing seemed to stifle me and for the first time that pulse within me woke and throbbed so strongly it took away my breath. Mr. Prager sat on one side of me and Mr. Ashburner on the other. I thought I should faint and leaned against the seat. Everything grew dark and I did not know anything for a minute–I don’t know how long, but I came to myself with great drops of perspiration on my lips and forehead. Mr. Ashburner was looking at me very closely.
Both Mr. Prager and Mr. Ashburner were delicate enough not to allude to it, but Mr. Hall joined us on our way home and cheerfully exclaimed, “Weren’t you ill in church? You looked as if you were going to faint. Didn’t you notice it, Prager?” Mr. P. said, “I thought she looked a little pale, but the church was very close,” and changed the subject.
It seems absurd to talk so much about an experience common to all women–but I think it one of the
strangest
feelings–that double pulse, that life within a life. . . .
strangest
feelings–that double pulse, that life within a life. . . .
4
Now ensued a blissful time for my grandmother. Many things contributed to it, not the least of which was that double pulse. She floated listening on the placid amniotic tides. But there were other things too.
The rainy season came on and restored her to time and change. Her days had variety and excitement, the sun that had been inescapable for months was now out of sight for sometimes a week on end, wild gusts of rain beat against her house and filled her veranda with twigs and leaves, the mountain was lost and revealed and lost again in stormy roils of cloud, the hills emerged under the slashes of reasserted sun a magical fresh green. The long dry hot winter, as Oliver said, was over. The dust was laid in the trails, the smells of ripe summer garbage that had once drifted across them from the camps were replaced by clean woodsmoke. In the woods and along the trail sides marvels appeared, unexpected flowers, maidenhair. The smells of the woods were no longer dusty and aromatic, but as damp and rich as those of the Long Pond woods at home.
When it stormed, her house was the sanctuary she thought a house should be. On those days Oliver could not see to work in his dark little office past four thirty. She sat now, not on the veranda exposed to the tumble of mountains, but inside by the fire in her little redwood parlor, waiting in dreamy security for the click of the gate latch and the sound of boots on the porch. Sometimes they had a whole hour before dinner to be idle in, read
Scribner’s
or Turgenev or
Daniel Deronda
aloud, fix things, talk.
Scribner’s
or Turgenev or
Daniel Deronda
aloud, fix things, talk.
In January Augusta had her child without trouble, and thereafter her letters appear to have lost their despondency as the living child began to replace the dead one. Freed from anxiety about her friend, Susan was more open to knowing her husband. She discovered in him unexpected capacities. He could make or fix anything from the broken handle of a carving knife to the sinking props under the veranda. Without their discussing reasons, he built a bed, a bench, and a bureau for the spare room, and he began on a cradle that would swing from the porch ceiling. From Mexican Camp he brought home coyote and wildcat skins, and tanned them and sewed them together into a rug for beside their bed. The baby could roll and play on it when the time came.
But Oliver was not only handy, which as an engineer he probably should have been. He revealed also the most unexpected sensibility. His suggestions about the decoration of the house astonished her, they were so often right. Without making anything of it, even being a little em barrassed by it, he could assemble a bouquet of wildflowers with a careless effectiveness that put her own most painstaking arrangements to shame. He had a touch with plants: everything he brought home from the woods grew as if it had only been awaiting the opportunity of their yard.
Even literature. She wanted to talk to him about
Daniel Deronda,
about which she and Augusta had been having a chatty and I must say tedious correspondence as they read it simultaneously. But he was impatient with George Eliot. He said she wanted to be both writer and reader–she barely got a character created before she started responding to him and judging him. Turgenev, on the other hand, stayed out of his stories, he let you do your own responding. Meekly, after that conversation, Susan adjusted her opinion in her next letter to Augusta.
Daniel Deronda,
about which she and Augusta had been having a chatty and I must say tedious correspondence as they read it simultaneously. But he was impatient with George Eliot. He said she wanted to be both writer and reader–she barely got a character created before she started responding to him and judging him. Turgenev, on the other hand, stayed out of his stories, he let you do your own responding. Meekly, after that conversation, Susan adjusted her opinion in her next letter to Augusta.
They had visitors, a few, enough. Mr. Hamilton Smith, one of Conrad Prager’s associates, and the consulting engineer for the mine, stopped off for dinner, sending her scurrying in panic up to Mexican Camp for a steak, for Mr. Smith was one of those formidable dining out San Franciscans. It was “rich” day–pay day–and the whole camp was drunk. The butcher’s assistant, lured from the Hosteria de los Mineros, cut her a steak with profuse assurances that this was a holiday steak, and he did not charge her for a holiday steak. Oliver, when he heard where she had been by herself, was upset, but her dinner was a success, and after dinner Mr. Smith called upon Oliver to bring out his notebooks, his maps, his drawings of pump stations, everything he had been doing, and they pored over them for two hours “much as you might show your year’s work to Mr. La Farge if he were kinder and more generous.” If Mr. Smith had been manager instead of Mr. Kendall, they would have gone more often to the Hacienda.
Other books
Hotel Mirador by Rosalind Brett
After Darkness Fell by David Berardelli
Unknown by Dayanara Sanar Ryelle
The Resort by Bentley Little
Far From Home: The Complete Series by Tony Healey
Zoe in Wonderland by Brenda Woods
Are You Loathsome Tonight? by Poppy Z. Brite
Santa Fe Rules by Stuart Woods
Love and Demons by J.L. Oiler
In the Season of the Sun by Kerry Newcomb