Angle of Repose
Page 16
Her own work did not satisfy her, but the closer she came to her time the harder she worked, though she could hardly sit in a chair for ten consecutive minutes. She was always one to clean her desk. Work, progress, and the inviolability of contract, three of the American gospels, met and fused in her with the doctrines of gentility and the cult of the picturesque. She was some sort of cross between a hummingbird and an earth mover. The Scarlet Letter blocks went off in March.
It would be pleasant to find that these pictures, though done in exile and against difficulties, triumphantly justify her as an artist. They don’t. They are fairly routine illustrations of a kind now rendered almost obsolete by facsimile reproduction processes. However she attenuated Grandfather, who was her only male model, she couldn’t make him come out looking like a guilty and remorseful preacher. As for Lizzie, she looks more propped-up than passionate.
Nevertheless, done, packed up, sent off, the contract satisfied, the money assured. Hardly had she had Oliver turn the package over to Eugene the stage driver than he brought her a letter from Thomas Hudson. He said that he and Augusta had found her Almaden letters so colorful and interesting that he thought Scribner’s readers should share in the pleasure. Would she want to try putting them together into an article? If she could not (he was too delicate to hint why she perhaps could not), Augusta had said she would be glad to do the little arranging necessary. And did she have any drawings that could be used as illustrations?
“Good heavens,” she said to Oliver, “I can’t think Scribby is in such a bad way that it has to fall back on me for its Western correspondent. He ought to get Mr. Harte or Mark Twain or someone.”
“Harte and Mark Twain don’t live in New Almaden,” Oliver said. “If he didn’t want you to do it he wouldn’t have asked you. Wait till you’re rested after the baby and do it then.”
“But I’m not a writer!”
“He seems to think you are.”
She brooded. That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. “It’s all right,” he said. “But I’d take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about used up, I should think.”
Meekly, astonished at herself, she took it out, rewrote the sketch as much in the spirit of discovery as possible, and sent it in. She put in Mother Fall, and her cook China Sam, who had murdered a rival and been reprieved from the rope because he was too good a cook to hang. He had a fourteen-year-old mail-order bride-sent, rumor said, by his real wife in China, who did not want to risk herself when Sam sent for her. She put in the Christmas custom of the Cornish miners, who visited the house and sang carols, those “rude uncultivated people” singing parts as if they had been born the children of choir masters. She put in every rag of local color she could think of about New Almaden, but she still mistrusted what she had done, and she still was afraid that Thomas would take it out of friendship and not for its own merits.
I have no evidence, but I think Grandmother must have been set up to be asked to write that piece. She would have loved to think it was good. It would demonstrate that marriage had not shrunk her career, but broadened it. She wanted to grow, as she imagined Thomas and Augusta growing, and as she was sure that Oliver grew, in his own way, through his work at the mine. Yet to think of herself appearing page to page with Cable or Nadal or any of the Scribner’s writers left her cold with the fear that her sketch would show up as a lame and embarrassing thing.
She had to know. So in two evenings she wrote another little story about the fiesta on Mexican Independence Day in September, with double heroines in Mr. Hernandez’s languid and beautiful sisters. This she sent off smoking hot to Mr. Howells at the Atlantic, submitting herself to a less partial judge than Thomas. That gave her three things to wait for.
5
Late afternoon, a soft spring day, the hills so green and soft she thought she would like to roll down them as she and Bessie used to roll down the pasture hill in Milton when they were children. Instead, she moved from the chair on the valley side of the porch to the bench on the trail side. The hammock she had given up weeks ago; she could not have got out of it if she had got in. Lizzie’s noises in the kitchen, and a banging that was probably Buster among the stovewood, might have been the sounds from her mother’s kitchen. The smells of damp and mold from below the porch were so familiar that it seemed her family must be just over the hill, to be visited in a ten-minute walk. Across on a blue, lupine-covered saddle two white mules were grazing, as peaceful as two white clouds in a summer sky.
Stranger scrambled out from under the porch and went off up the trail. That should mean Oliver was coming. In a minute he appeared, so much like a farmer returning from the fields in his corduroy pants and blue shirt that he might have been her father, or John Grant. He made a pass at Stranger’s ears, the dog bounced around him like a playful plowhorse. She saw a letter in Oliver’s shirt pocket. His forehead and nose were red from working all day Sunday in the yard. She sat still, placid and waiting, until he was clear up the steps. Then she lifted her smiling face to be kissed.
“Oh,” she said, “it’s been so beautiful I hated to think of you down that grim old mine.”
“I came out at noon and had a good mule ride over to Guadalupe.”
“Good, I’m glad. What for?”
“Remember that hoisting machinery Kendall was going to put in at the Santa Isabel, the rig he saw in the Sierra, that I didn’t like the looks of?”
“I guess I don’t remember.”
“Oh, sure you remember. Kendall wasn’t pleased when I questioned it. I told you.”
“If you did it didn’t penetrate. I haven’t much of a head for things like that ”
“I guess your head will do. Well, anyway. I knew it wouldn’t work here because-never mind. He thought it would. So I proved it to him. Captain Smith and I have been redesigning it; and when Smith was down last I showed it to him. So they’re going to try it out over at Guadalupe, and if it works there, which it will, they’ll install it in the Santa Isabel.”
For him, it was a speech. She could tell what it meant to him by the words it forced out of him. He succeeded in everything he did. She could see him broadening down, like freedom, from precedent to precedent, and because she was proud of him, and wanted his value acknowledged by his employers, she said, “Shouldn’t you get something from that? Couldn’t you take out a patent?”
She made him laugh. “What is it about Quakers? My time belongs to the company.”
“Even Sundays? I’ll bet that’s not what Mr. Smith would say.”
“Maybe not, but Kendall does. He also said something else today. He may not like to have me prove him wrong, but he just told me I’ve got a three-hundred-dollar raise.”
“Which you’ve earned and a lot more. You’re such a child anybody could take advantage of you. You’ve probably saved them thousands. Aren’t you going to give me my letter?”
He touched his pocket. “This? It’s not yours.”
“Oh, pshaw. Who’s it from?”
“My mother.”
“Mayn’t I read it?”
“It’s private.”
“Well, you are queer,” she said, disappointed. Then she saw slyness in his face. “What are you up to?”
“Can’t a man have private letters from his mother? You have private letters from your old beau Dickie Drake.”
“Oh, Oliver, thee may read them if thee wants! Anyway he’s fallen preposterously in love with a Jewish poetess named Emma Lazarus.”
“Good for him, she can help raise him from the dead. After she does, I’ll read his letters. What I really want to talk about is you having some decent help when the baby comes.”
“Yes?” she said. “Who? You know what Mrs. Kendall pays that clumsy girl she has? Her Chinamen are better servants.”
“I wasn’t thinking of getting you a Chinaman.”
“I should think not. You’re not going to get me anyone. Lizzie can manage.”
“Tell me this instant,” she said. “You’re up to some extravagance. We can’t throw away what little we’ve saved, just on some ...”
Looking comfortably unpersuaded, Oliver sat on the steps scratching Stranger’s ears. “It’s no extravagance. I told you I wasn’t going to bring you West to live in a shack, and I didn’t, quite, only I spoiled it by not having the money for your fare. I didn’t intend you should have a child in this camp, either, but here we are. So the least we can do is see you’re looked after. Mother’s found somebody who’s willing to come out.”
“Oliver...”
“Wait a minute. Not a servant, a lady. Mother guarantees her. Something happened to her man, or maybe she never had one. She’s sort of aground there in New Haven. She’ll come for her fare and servant’s wages. If you don’t turn everything upside down.”
“Oliver ...”
She labored to her feet. He handed her his mother’s letter. “And we can afford it,” he said. “We can afford anything you need. We could afford it before Kendall raised me and we can afford it better now.”
She felt tears coming, compelled somehow out of her very physical dependency; she flung her arms around him from behind, stooping over him, and he rose awkwardly, turning to meet her. Distractedly she cried into the sweaty wool of his shirt, “Oliver Ward, thee has spoiled me!”
Her family and Augusta, anxiously awaiting word of Susan’s lying-in, which despite her letters they probably visualized as happening on the dirt floor of a log cabin, might have saved their worry. As childbirth went in 1877, my father’s was well organized and well at tended.
Marian Prouse arrived on April 22, and within a day had proved herself a pleasant, soft, sensible, and helpful young woman. The day after her arrival there came a letter from Thomas Hudson enthusiastically buying the New Almaden sketch, with whatever illustrations Susan could provide. Three days after that came a letter from William D. Howells, buying Susan’s Mexican fiesta piece and asking for two illustrations, on subjects to be selected by herself, as fast as she could send them. He recalled their pleasant meeting of a few years ago, and hoped that this would be the first of many contributions from her pen and pencil to the pages of the Atlantic. The letter is on the wall over there, framed: the beginning of Grandmother’s literary career.
In the midst of general applause and admiration Susan sat down and wrote a dismayed, apologetic note to Thomas Hudson, lamely ex plaining how it had happened that her first published writing, and her first drawings of New Almaden, might be appearing in Atlantic rather than in Scribnes. She had been searching for reassurance and had found an embarrassment. But at least she now had confidence that if he and Augusta would help, she might make of the Scribner’s article something that none of them need be ashamed of.
She had barely licked the envelope before she had her first pains. Oliver, who had had a mule tied outside for three days, rode over to Guadalupe and brought back Dr. McPherson, not the camp doctor but one he had known on the Comstock, and trusted. McPherson stayed the night, the next day, and part of the next night, and at long length delivered a boy who weighed a humiliating eleven pounds.
There is a whole folder of correspondence about that birth, its stages, difficulties, damages, and emotional exhaustions and satisfactions. Not even an admiring grandson can deal with it. For one thing, Susan wrote those letters with her eyes firmly closed, having been warned that use of the eyes after childbirth might damage them. For another, they are anciently, mystically, impenetrably female: their sentiments are as opaque to me as their handwriting is illegible. Among other things, she referred to my father then and for a good year afterward as “Boykins.” Ugh.
So I will content myself with my grandfather’s note.
April 29, 1877
My dear Thomas and Augusta, April 29, 1877
Oliver Burling Ward sends his greetings to you this morning, or rather he did some time since and is now sleeping quietly by the side of his mother, who says she is ridiculously well and “too happy to be comfortable.”
She had a little trouble from the long labor, Dr. McPherson had to make some repairs, her convalescence was somewhat extended. Though children might be born among the Cousin Jacks and the Mexicans as casually and as stoically as calves are born in pastures, the camp rallied round for this one. China Sam sent a silk Chinese flag to wrap this Baby Bunting in. A Cornish wife brought over a horrible quilt, quilted by her husband in his off hours, which Susan laughed over and nearly wept over and put firmly away where it could never be seen. But she kept it all her life—it’s probably somewhere in a cupboard in this house right now. Mother Fall’s young men opened so much champagne that they sent her a bouquet of corks surrounded by wild flowers, and before that joke had settled for five minutes, followed it with an armful of roses.
Lying in the parlor, which had been selected as the warmest and least drafty room in the house, Susan could look through the arch, under the pendant bowie, spurs, and revolver, and see her household going on: Miss Prouse hopping up, sitting down, hopping up again like a helpful younger sister, Lizzie serving, Oliver presiding, Buster whipping his homemade high chair. Miss Prouse was smooth and efficient and gentle with Boykins (ugh) when she bathed or changed him. She was modest, soft, and sisterly with Susan. Distracted by the test of the new hoist, Oliver was driven and divided, and away more than either of them liked, but she loved to have him stretch out beside her in the evening and talk, and not even his habit of smoking his pipe in her bed made her want to send him away. He looked upon the baby with awe, and handled him as if he might break.
Within three weeks Boykins was swinging in his cradle from the veranda ceiling-long, easy swings that they thought Mrs. Elliott would have to approve of. None of your jerky ordinary cradle motions. Cosmic tides. Susan was resolved that he was to be the world’s healthiest infant. Never so much as a cold, if care could prevent it. She bragged to her mother and Augusta that he had napped outside from the age of two weeks. (A little Western boastfulness? You, Grandmother?) Studying him, she decided that he was not pretty (beauty was reserved for Augusta’s children), but that his face already showed character. His eyes, she reluctantly reported to ox-eyed Augusta, were fatally blue.
While she was recovering among the letters, gifts, and attentions of those who loved and looked after her, Thomas Hudson with his delicate sense of timing requested three illustrations for a ballad by the Norwegian poet Hjalmar Boyesen. He said with tongue in cheek that her experience of drawing Longfellow Vikings ought to let her do these without models, and she might find them a pleasant diversion from the duties of motherhood. She understood him perfectly: he believed in her not only as a woman, but as an artist. So there she sat, drawing burros and senoritas for the New Almaden sketch with one hand, and with the other producing the synthetic stuff that gentility thought virile. Give her credit, she laughed at herself.
She laughed even harder when she was well enough to go out sketching in the open air, hunting the local color of Mexican Camp, Cornish Camp, and the mine. Miners and miners’ wives meeting her on the trails must have clutched their brows. Here came the engineer’s missus in a serge walking costume and a big hat. Behind her came Miss Prouse, almost as authentically a lady, pushing Boykins in his perambulator through the cinnabar-colored dust. (He had to go along with the chuck wagon, so to speak.) Behind Miss Prouse came an urchin, Cornish or Mexican, lugging drawing materials, a stool, and an umbrella. People got clear off the trail to let them pass. Some may have laughed when it was safe to do so. But not all, and none without some sort of acknowledged respect that was less for Susan’s art than for her quality.
There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fiste
d bosses. Another is that it was rough, ready, and unkempt, and ribald about anything not as unkempt as itself, whereas in fact there was never a time or place where gentil ity, especially female gentility, was more respected. Not if it was the real thing, and no one in New Almaden doubted that Susan’s was. The camps all but doffed their caps to Susan Ward, as if she had been a lady from a castle instead of from a cottage.
6
After the warm walk down the trail they stood talking at the door of the shaft house. Tregoning the hoist man sent out his window a smile from which all the upper front teeth had been extracted. Ordinarily he would have punctuated the smile with a spurt of tobacco juice from its dark center, but today he had his company manners on: bigwigs going down. Oliver went inside and leaned his elbows on the railing and talked across the machinery at him, easy and familiar.
Looking heavy, soft, and excited, Miss Prouse pushed the perambulator out of the trampled, dusty sunlight and under the shade of the nearest oak. But when Susan made some bright sound of questioning farewell and moved as if to join her, Conrad Prager said with his indulgent smile, “Susan, have you ever been down the mine?”
“Never.” Her eyes went to Mr. Kendall, who was watching Oliver and Tregoning as they talked inside the shaft house. Kendall’s head turned, and her eyes bounced off his impassive face like pebbles off a cliff. Mr. Kendall was the reason she had never been underground. He did not believe in women going down into mines. Mines were for the production of ore.