Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  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.

  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....

  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.

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.

  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.

  In late February, when the hillsides were patched with lupine, poppies, and blue-eyed grass, Mary Prager spent a few days. I quote from Grandmother’s reminiscences: “She thought the place ideal. The valley, changing from hour to hour, battle-fronts of clouds forming along the bases of the mountains, charging, breaking, scattering in tatters and streamers wildly flying ; tops of the mountains seen with ineffable colors on them at sunset and the nearer hills like changeable cut velvet. She walked the piazza smiling to herself; she laid soft hands on my housekeeping. I think our simple routine rested her after the conventional perfection she had set herself to achieve in her marriage to a man whose life demanded it; for she had been a farmer’s daughter, too, and I daresay had to ask her husband what wines to serve with what courses when she gave her exquisite little dinners ... She and Oliver sassed each other in the Ward family way; and when she saw the artist-wife in her digging hours-more really at home than in the city where she was inclined toward excess of participation under the influence of evening clothes and evening company-I think whatever misgivings she may have had were satisfied. She knew that, in the words of her father when he read that Quaker marriage contract, ‘it would hold.”’

  Leaving, Mary Prager held their hands and hoped they would be spared the footloose life common to the profession. Why should they ever leave New Almaden? He could be manager here one day; he had a great opportunity to succeed without making his wife into a wanderer.

  As for the young men from Mother Fall’s who drifted up to the Wards’ veranda on chilly spring evenings, they thought Oliver Ward’s clover very deep indeed. To a man they were in love with Susan, pregnant or not. One of them, a boy from the University of California with loads of undigested information in his head and a word of kindly unasked advice for anyone he talked to, stumbled off the porch one evening and blurted to Oliver that Mrs. Ward was more an angel than a woman. “Which amused both of us,” Susan wrote, “but made one of us feel sad and old.”

  She was posing, of course. She was thirty. Oliver, whom she sometimes called Sonny, and bossed around, was twenty-eight. It was impossible that they could have been happier. Though the weekly letters still poured back to New York, the tone of them is serene, excited, amused, anything but homesick or desperate. And now and then the East reached out a hand to her and made her realize how much she had changed in barely more than half a year.

  Here came Howie Drew, a boy from Milton bent on finding his fortune in the West, and spent a weekend investigating the possibilities of New Almaden, and was advised by Oliver to move on. Because Oliver was busy, Susan took Howie around, and one morning they walked along the new road that Chinese coolies were building to the Santa Isabel tunnel. As they walked, talking about home, she looked past his red head and saw the nameless local flowers looking down at them from the bank. They passed blackened places where pig-tailed Chinese had built noon fires for their tea. The signal bells clinked from the shaft house and a tram car dumped with a rumbling roar off the platform of the Day tunnel. And here was Howie Drew from down the road, the son of the ferryman, a boy she used to look after for his mother when she was fifteen. And here was herself, Mrs. Oliver Ward, no longer Susan Burling, barrel-shaped with child, only walking at all because she had Howie to go along, only appearing with Howie because he was an old friend, almost family. Familiar and unfamiliar swam and blended into a strangeness like dreaming as she saw Howie Drew’s face out of her girlhood against the mountainside of her present life. A wash of confused feeling went over her like wind across a sweating skin, for the identity that Howie took for granted and talked to and reflected back at her was not the identity it used to be, not the one that had signed all her past drawings, not the one she knew herself. Then what was it now? She didn’t know.

  Or here was another echo from home, a Mrs. Elliott, a friend of her Aunt Sarah’s, who came up from Santa Cruz all uninvited and planted herself among them for four days. In her youth she too had had another identity: she had been Georgiana Bruce, and she was one of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. All her life she had been saving the world. She had burned for Abolition, for Woman’s Suffrage, for Spiritualism, for Phrenology, for heaven knew what. She possessed, and quoted from, what Grandmother assumed to be the only copy of Leaves of Grass in California.

  In those surroundings she was stranger than Howie Drew, for she sat in Susan’s parlor and talked about Bradford, Curtis, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne-Hawthorne, while just over in the comer cupboard ten feet from her, was a pile of blocks on which Susan had been trying for months to make Hawthorne’s prose into pictures. Mrs. Elliott’s talk was full of names and books and causes that Susan had been brought up to think worth reverence-and a few, such as Whitman, worth a pang of excited alarm—but in person she looked more like this careless coast than like intellectual New England. She could not have bought a new pair of shoes since Brook Farm.

  Though it was Susan, in love with talk and ideas, who ought to have responded to this apparition, this gray-haired, leather-faced, shining-eyed Cassandra, it was Oliver, who liked “characters,” who found her amusing. Mrs. Elliott bothered Susan because for all her ideas she was not genteel; she delighted Oliver because she was as odd as Dick’s hatband.

  One evening she read their heads. Susan she granted sensibility and delicacy of feeling, but Oliver who had what she called the big top, was the one with the intellectual power. She forced him to admit that he had great headaches, and she instructed Susan to pour cold water, very slowly, on a certain spot-right here, this knob-when the big top ached. Oliver hooted. Why not put a pistol to his head and be done with it?

  An eccentric but not a fool, she whipped their quiet routine into a froth. Totally humorless, she made them collapse in laughter. As unkempt as a hermit, she had innumerable suggestions on dress and housekeeping. Obviously a careless mother, she dwelt on the Coming Event and irritated Susan by knowing everything that should be done in preparation and in the way of upbringing. She cast her bright enameled blue eye on Georgie, known as Buster because he busted everything within rea
ch, and told dismayed Lizzie that he was destructive because his latent tenderness had not been appealed to. Boys should play with dolls, to teach them care for others and to stimulate their later parental responsibility-brickbats and tiles they would find for themselves.

  Demanding rags, she made in a jiffy a rag baby which she laid in Buster’s arms with sounds of transcendental love. Georgie took it, a wonder. Then he crawled to the edge of the veranda and threw it into the chaparral. He would come to it, Mrs. Elliott said. Give him time. He had been let to get too good a start on a wrong path. But when she left at the end of four days Buster was still throwing the rag doll into the chaparral, and Lizzie confessed to Susan that she didn’t mind. It proved to her that he was all boy.

  Come, come to Santa Cruz! Mrs. Elliott said as she departed. When the Great Event had happened, and Susan was rested, and wanted quiet in which to concentrate on the proper influences for that little unformed soul, she should bring him to Santa Cruz where he could wake and sleep to the sound of the sea. It would soothe his harsh masculine temperament if he was male, and reinforce her capacity for love and devotion if she was female.

  Though Susan would not have called the assortment of people who passed through her house a society of a stimulating kind, she was neither lonely nor bored. Though she affected to view with dismay Mary Prager’s suggestion that they plan to stay their lives in New Almaden, she took great satisfaction in how well Oliver did his job. His survey had spotted the Santa Isabel tunnel within a foot, his map grew by tiny meticulous increments and had the praise of Mr. Smith, who said there was no finer thing of its kind. Without glancing at the implications, Susan praised him to Augusta for having taken the measure of the largest and most difficult mine on the continent in a single year. She tried not to begrudge him the time he spent working at night and on Sundays, and when his eyes gave out on him or one of his headaches came on, she willingly read aloud to him the things he felt he should study-treatises on the construction of arches, reports on Colorado mining districts, technical journals full of the grimmest algebra. While she had him there helplessly listening, she generally managed to work in Thomas Hudson’s latest poem of Old Cupboard essay, and she always reported him to Augusta as deeply moved.