Angle of Repose (76 page)

“Look, Shelly,” I said, “I didn’t start this discussion. It doesn’t make that much difference to me what they do. You asked me what I thought.”

“I’d really like to know.”

“Is that it?” I said. “I thought you were trying to convert me. That’d be hopeless. I wouldn’t live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn’t want it next door. I’m not too happy it’s within ten miles.”

“Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they’d spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don’t think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like anarchy, I don’t even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation–not better, different. I don’t like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it”

“Now you’re talking,” Shelly said. “Tell me.”

“All right. I have no faith in free-form marriage. It isn’t marriage, it’s promiscuity, and there’s no call for civilization to encourage promiscuity. I cite you the VD statistics for California as one small piece of evidence. I’m very skeptical about the natural-credit Communist economy: how does it fare when it meets a really high-powered and ruthless economy such as ours? You can’t retire to weakness–you’ve got to learn to control strength. As for gentleness and love, I think they’re harder to come by than this sheet suggests. I think they can become as coercive a conformity as anything Mr. Hershey or Mr. Hoover ever thought up. Furthermore, I’m put off by the aggressively unfeminine and the aggressively female women that would be found in a commune like this. I’m put off by long hair, I’m put off by irresponsibility, I never liked Whitman, I can’t help remembering that good old wild Thoreau wound up a tame surveyor of Concord house lots.”

It was quite a harangue. About the middle of it she began to grin, I think to cover up embarrassment and anger. “Well,” she said when I ran down, “I stirred up the lions. What’s that supposed to mean, that about Thoreau?”

As long as I had gone that far, I thought I might as well go the rest of the way. “How would I know what it means?” I said. “I don’t know what anything means. What it
suggests
to me is that the civilization he was contemptuous of–that civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation–was stronger than he was, and maybe righter. It outvoted him. It swallowed him, in fact, and used the nourishment he provided to alter a few cells in its corporate body. It grew richer by him, but it was bigger than he was. Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they’re a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can’t remodel society by day after tomorrow–haven’t the wisdom to and shouldn’t be permitted to–I’d have more respect for them. Revolutionaries and sociologists. God, those sociologists! They’re always trying to reclaim a tropical jungle with a sprinkling can full of weed killer. Civilizations grow and change and decline-they aren’t remade.”

She was watching me steadily, discreetly and indulgently smiling. “But your grandfather needed the bottle.”

“What does that . . . ?” I started to say. Then, “Quiet desperation, you mean? It may be the best available alternative.”

I have not had a drink for a week, Ada is upset and confused when in the evening after my bath I make her take a drink but won’t take one myself. Her generosity makes her uneasy. And I don’t need her daughter to remind me of the strength, maybe even the necessity, of human weakness, and the harshness of the pressures civilized living can put on a man. In the land of heart’s desire, up in North San Juan, these things don’t apply.

The rubber band that Shelly was running through her teeth broke, and snapped her on the lip. Wincing, she put her fingers to her mouth, but her frown didn’t leave her face. Through her fingers she said, “You think Larry is a kook.”

“I never met him,” I said. “Sight unseen, I’d say he bites off more than I think he can chew.”

“He’s very bright, you know.”

“I haven’t the slightest doubt. So was Bronson Alcott.”

“Who was he, Brook Farm?”

“Fruitlands. One I forgot to mention.”

“Oh.”

Probably she didn’t hear what I said. She was thinking about her husband, boy friend, mate, whatever he was–the man she used to travel with–and her words came out of her thinking, not as a reply to me. “He can be so damned convincing. He could convince even you.”

“I doubt that. But he seems to have convinced you.”

“I don’t know. He’s got me all up in the air.”

I had myself turned askance, as usual, and my eyes fell onto the pile of papers I’d brought down when I came to lunch. One was a letter from Rudyard Kipling, another a letter from Kipling’s father. I couldn’t see the dates, but I knew they were both from July 1890. Right in that time of disintegration and collapse Grandmother had finished the illustrations for something of Kipling’s, and had those warm letters of thanks. How many lines an alert life has its hands on at once, even in exile! Grandmother sat like a spider with her web all around her, spun out of her insides. Probably she read those Kipling letters hastily, with a brief pleasurable surprise, while the rest of her attention went out on trembling threads to the Big Ditch, or Frank Sargent, or Agnes, or Oliver, or Ollie in his far-off school, or Bessie, or Augusta, or the odious Burns. I had left her in a disturbed state of mind, and I wanted to get back, the old werewolf craved cool historical flesh to live in and refrigerated troubles to deal with. I felt a certain irritation at Shelly Rasmussen, very brown from lying in her family’s back yard, sitting in Grandmother’s old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life. I thought it would serve her right to go to that nut-farm and become a den mother, head of a matrilineal line in a natural-credit Communist economy.

“I gather you’ve patched things up,” I said.

She shrugged, a gesture at once loose and irritable. “Maybe. If I could be sure he’d stay the way he is now. He’s a lot better off when he’s got something to be enthusiastic about. Then he doesn’t sit around and think up ways to take your skin off.”

“Have you been seeing him?”

“Couple times.”

“Been up to San Juan?”

“I was up this last weekend.”

“And you like it.”

Her gray eyes met mine, she closed them deliberately, puckered up her rosebud mouth. “Oh, you know me. I’m soft headed, I ignore history and human nature. But it was sort of nice, you know? I mean–pine woods and a clearing. Off from everything. Part of it’s just a gravel pile, they worked all that country with monitors. But there are some old mine buildings they’re fixing up. Eight people so far, two kids. Later, as more come in, they’ll build geodesic domes. What’s the matter?”

I had only made the sign of the cross. How many times lately has the future perfect been framed in geodesic domes?

“They’ve got chickens that roost in the trees and lay eggs under the porch,” Shelly said. “None of this scientific egg culture that never lets a hen set foot to ground in her whole life. It’s
obscene,
the way they keep them on chicken wire. They got there too late to plant a garden, but they’re putting in berry bushes, and they’re going to plow a patch for winter wheat. They’ll grind their own wheat and corn. Can you see me with a
metate
between my knees?”

She laughed her hoarse laugh, rocking back and forth.
Ohne Büstenhalter.
Her breasts were very live under her thin pullover, her erect nipples made dents and dimples, appeared and disappeared again as flesh met cloth. Every now and then, in her careless unconscious (is it?) way, she makes me aware that I am only fifty-eight years old, not as old as I look, not old enough to have lost everything else when I lost my leg. I felt a hot erection rising from my mutilated lap, and fumbled my sweater over myself, though it was not cool on the porch. Maybe she noticed, maybe she understood. She stretched in her wicker chair and reached her arms over her head, yawning, with her eyes shut. The other eyes looked at me boldly from her expanded chest.

Her arms fell, she flopped back. “I don’t know,” she said almost crossly. “You’re skeptical. But it was sort of good–no poisons, no chemicals, no gadgets. Healthy, sort of. Fun. All the time I was up there I kept thinking it was the way it must have felt to your grandmother in Boise Canyon, when they were doing everything for themselves and making something new.”

“Not new,” I said. “Ancient. But fun, I believe it. ”

Shelly threw the broken rubber band in the wastebasket by the wall. “Well, what do I do? Should I try it up there–I know what you’ll say–or should I tell him no dice and go back and finish my stupid degree and enter a teaching intern program and start grinding wild life through the education machine?”

“There’s another alternative,” I said. “You could go on doing what you’ve been doing. Thousands of letters still to go, years and years of them. Don’t miss tomorrow’s exciting episode.”

At certain times her eyes, wide and gray, get smoky and warm. They went that way then. She said, smiling, “Would you keep me on?”

“I’d like it very much.”

“I’d like it too. I’ve really enjoyed working for you. Only . . .”

“Only,” I said. I had subsided, that fleeting foolish dream was gone. “O.K. You know what you want to do.”

“I wish to hell I did.” She got up and walked, pushing chairs, adjusting things on tables. “I don’t know–I think I’ve got to get out. There’s nothing here, this is only a pause, sort of. The only lively times I have are at work, talking to you. You know–” She stopped, looking at me with her head bent. “Why couldn’t I come down from San Juan–” She looked at me again. “No. You wouldn’t like that.”

“No,” I said, “I guess I wouldn’t.”

She sighed, she looked at me with those wide gray smoky eyes overflowing with female, troubling warmth. “What’ll you do?”

“What I’m doing now. Not so pleasantly, not so fast.”

“Can you manage?”

“Of course.”

“I know you don’t think I should go live with Larry in his commune.”

Live with half a dozen fellows in their commune, I felt like saying. Be on service to the community. No, I don’t think you should. Aloud I said, “You’ll have to excuse me, Shelly. All I said was that
I
wouldn’t want to. How do I know what you should do? You’ll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you’re very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.”

“Yeah,” she said vaguely. “I suppose.” Her smile erupted, her spread hand clawed back the hanging hair. “Tell me something.”

“If I know the answer.”

“You said this kind of commune will be full of aggressively unfeminine and aggressively female women. Which am I?”

But I evaded that one. “I haven’t heard of you joining the Women’s Liberation Front,” I said.

She came up behind my chair, she bent over me and put her arms around me and hugged my rigid head against her uninhibited bosom. She loudly kissed the top of my head. “You’re a gas, Mister Ward,” she said. “You’re O.K.” She went on upstairs to work and left me there, looking out into the rose garden and across Grandfather’s acres of lawn, and feeling bleak, bleak, bleak.

Up to now, reconstructing Grandmother’s life has been an easy game. Her letters and reminiscences have provided both event and interpretation. But now I am at a place where she hasn’t done the work for me, and where it isn’t any longer a game. I not only don’t want this history to happen, I have to make it up, or part of it. All I know is the
what,
and not all of that; the
how
and the
why
are all speculation.

For one thing, there is a three-month blank in Grandmother’s correspondence with Augusta. From July 2 until the end of September 1890 there is only one brief note mailed between trains in the Chicago station. If other letters from that period ever existed, they have been destroyed, either by Augusta or by Grandmother herself after the correspondence was sent back to her. As for the reminiscences, they pass over those months of disaster and desolation in one sentence, and not a revealing sentence either.

As one who loved her, I am just as glad not to have to watch her writhe. As her biographer, and a biographer moreover with a personal motive, probing toward the center of a woe that I always knew about but never understood, I am frustrated. Just where there should be illumination, there is ambiguous dusk. Right at Susan Ward’s core, behind the reticence and the stoicism, where I hoped to see her plain and learn from her, there is nothing but a manila envelope of Xeroxed newspaper clippings that raise more questions than they answer. I fight my way through all the giants and wizards, I cross to her castle on the swordedge bridge, I let myself down hand over hand into her dungeon well, and instead of my reward, a living woman, there is a skeleton with a riddle between its ribs.

“Don’t tell me too much,” Henry James is supposed to have said, when some anecdote vibrated his web and alerted him to the prospect of a story. “Don’t tell me too much!” But he was not writing biography, and he had no personal stake in what he did. He could invent within the logic of a situation. I have to invent within a body of inhibiting facts that I wish were otherwise. If I had had Shelly put them in chronological order I might be able to start in on those clippings in some business-like way, but I have not shown them to Shelly. I ran through them with the avidity of a thief counting his loot when they first came, and then I stuffed them back into their envelope, unwilling to do the peephole detective work they seemed to demand.