For buying some stovepipe outside the company store! somebody says.
Exactly. A bad mistake. He knew the rules.
When Oliver came in the gate before noon, she knew by his face what he was going to tell her. He walked with a hard, pounding haste, and he started talking, or stammering, before he was to the bottom of the steps. “Well,” he said, “are you ... I guess we... are you ready to move?”
“You resigned.”
“I quit. Resigning would have been too polite. It was all I could do to keep from knocking him down.”
“Oh, Oliver, I’m glad!” she said. She was sure she was. Her spirits surged up as if to an insult or a challenge. She would have walked off the mountain with her baby in her arms and no more possessions than the clothes on her back-but they would have been impeccable—rather than yield one inch or even acknowledge the existence of Lawrence Kendall. “I couldn’t have respected you if you hadn’t,” she said shakily, and took hold of his arm above the elbow. It was as hard as an oak branch. He kept looking around him in an odd, furious way as if he were looking for a place to spit. “What happened?”
“Ha!” he said. “What happened! He came down and ordered me to take a construction crew up by Day tunnel and tear down Tregoning’s house.”
“What?”
“Can you believe it? That’s exactly what he wanted. There’s a crew doing it right now, poor Chepe’s bossing it.”
“But tear down his house? Why? What earthly good ... He was already fired.”
“Oh, sure!” he said. “Sure, sure. He was fired, he wasn’t allowed to sell anything. That isn’t enough, the lesson isn’t rubbed in yet. Tregoning owned his own house, the manager before Kendall let him build it on company land for a dollar a year rent. That was to encourage a skilled man to stay. So now Kendall’s tearing it down and scorching the earth. There are already thirty Chinamen scavenging boards and stuff, and a crowd of Cornish women just standing on the hill watching. Not a word out of them, they’re like people watching a hanging. It’s a wonder he didn’t hang the whole family, or drive them off the mountain with dogs. They’re off by themselves watching too. None of their neighbors dares even speak to them.”
“I hope thee spoke to them. Did thee?”
“Yes,” he said, and gave her a crooked, apologetic, impatient look that tightened her insides with pity and sympathy for him. She had never seen him upset. He was the laconic one who was always in command of himself. This outrage unmanned him, he shook like a dog. She could have taken his head against her breast and rocked him and told him never mind, never mind, it’s not your fault, you did all you could, it’s the way this brutal place is. “I hope you don’t mind,” Oliver said. “I gave them all the money I had, twenty dollars or so.”
“Oh, Oliver, of course thee should have! It was generous.” She hung onto his arm, huddling against his rigid body that moved in twitches and jerks. His eyes were stretched wide like those of a man trying to see in the dark, he whistled through his teeth.
“I wish I knew,” he said. “Hell, I do know. He wouldn’t go that far just to enforce a company rule or scare grumblers into line. Unless he was making an absolutely calculated move against me, he wouldn’t have the gall to come to me and tell me to do his dirty work. I hate it that poor Tregoning gets it this bad just because of me.”
“I almost wish thee had knocked him down.”
“Ahhh!” He jerked and twitched; she hung on.
“At least,” she said, “now thee’ll explain everything to Mr. Smith and Mr. Prager.”
But he made a face of disgust and distaste. “Let Kendall do the explaining.”
“But you know what he’ll say!”
“Sure. Insubordination, stirring up unrest among the men. I flew into a rage and quit. Too bad a promising young fellow should have dangerous opinions and a bad temper. I don’t care what he says.”
“You’d let him lie about you?”
“I’d rather let him lie about me than have to deal with him or even think about him another five minutes. If they don’t know me well enough to know he’s lying, that’s too bad.” With an eye as cold as Kendall’s own he squinted along the veranda roof. “I wonder if he’ll tear this house down too? Maybe I should beat him to it. I could take this porch off in an afternoon. It’s ours, we paid for it.”
Though she knew it was only a sour joke, it turned her cold, for it brought up the problem of their own moving. How long? Forty-eight hours, like Tregoning? But she did not dare ask until Oliver was calmer. She said; “Let him have his petty triumph. Thee can leave knowing thee has done everything thee was asked to do, and done it well, and more besides.”
Oh, that was Grandmother. What though the world be lost? All is not lost. Honor is not lost.
Miss Prouse came to the door with the baby draped across a napkin on her shoulder, saw them in their intimate conversation, and discreetly withdrew. But the sight of her brought home to Susan such a tangle of responsibilities and complications that she could not keep from saying, “What about Marian? Certainly we can’t afford to keep her now.”
Gloomily he looked at her, saying nothing.
“And Lizzie too. Where will Lizzie go?”
“And Stranger,” Oliver said. “Stranger’s the luckiest, he can go back to Mother Fall’s.”
“Oh, Oliver, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She flew against him, in tears. She felt his lips on the top of her head.
“I’m the one who ought to be sorry,” he said. “I did it. It’s not the way we planned it.”
She would not let him blame himself, she shook her head with her face against his chest. “Thee couldn’t have done anything else.”
“I could have done what Chepe’s doing.”
Now she reared back to look into his face. “Not you! You’re too fine!” Immediately she added, in justice to poor trapped Hernandez, “And we’re not that poor.”
His eyes, looking down into hers, wavered almost as if in embarrassment or shame, and he broke the look by hugging her against himself again. “You’re all right, Susan,” he said. “You’re pure gold.”
Again she leaned back to look into his face. “How long will we have? Will he try to evict us?”
“He knows better. No, we’ll take exactly as much time as we need. You still have a picture or two to do, and it will be at least two weeks before I can finish the map.”
“The map! You aren’t going to finish that!”
“Oh yes I am.”
“But why? After all he’s ...”
“For my own satisfaction,” Oliver said. She understood at once that on that point he was immovable. She could argue, he would not argue back. But he would complete the map which he owed no one, which he had done on his own time, for experience, and on the day they left New Almaden he would drop it on Kendall’s desk—no, not that far, he would mail it to Mr. Smith or Mr. Prager, more likely. She could not understand that stubbornness in him which led him to punish himself. But whatever he was, he was not small, and that she took pride in.
“Where will we go?” she asked. “San Francisco?”
“Conrad and Mary, you mean? I don’t think we want to embarrass them with this.”
“I didn’t mean to live with them.”
“Even in a place of our own, they’d feel obligated. I don’t want them obligated. Anyway, we couldn’t afford a place of our own in San Francisco.”
“Then where?”
“I’ll have to go there,” he said. “It’s the only place I’d have a chance to find another job. For you and the baby, I was wondering if Mrs. Elliott could find you a nice room in Santa Cruz, somewhere cheap and quiet and on the shore.”
“You mean-separate?”
“I could come down on weekends sometimes.”
“Oliver,” she said, “we mustn’t! You forget the six hundred dollars I made from The Scarlet Letter, and what I’ll get from Mr. Howells and from Thomas.”
“Which I won’t let you spend.”
/> “But if it will keep us all together!”
“Even so.”
That backed her straight out of his arm to a distance of two paces, a better arguing distance. “You’d rather have us live away from you, in some fumished room, than spend my perfectly good money for a house where we could be a family?”
That mulish, proud face. It looked as if it would take a crowbar to open his mouth. Finally it did open. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “It would only be until I locate something.”
She stared wildly into his clouded eyes, her voice came out of her high and stammering. “Maybe thee can keep me from spending what thee calls my money on thee,” she said, “but thee can’t keep me from spending it on the baby!”
He shook his head, hangdog, suffering, and immovable. “No,” he admitted. “But you’d shame me if you did.”
They glared like enemies. She bit her lips to stop their trembling, she felt the color leave her face, she saw him begin to melt and blur through her tears. It took a great effort, it was a wrench like renuncia tion of something precious, to submit to his pride. “All right,” she said, and again, on an in-caught breath, “All right. If that’s the way thee must have it.”
In her agitation she walked up and down the veranda, head down, sucking her knuckle. One turn, two, three, while he stood watching, saying nothing; and each time, at the end of the veranda, her head lifted and her eyes swept down across the view, and each time she turned she passed the hammock. It was a bitter irony to her that now she could hardly bear to think of leaving this place where only a year ago she had sat with her hand clenched in Oliver’s, fighting desolate tears, sick for home and Augusta, and torn by feelings which distance made as irrecoverable as they were incurable. Out of the corner of her eye as she passed the door she saw the black front of the Franklin stove which had been their hearthstone.
O fortunate, o happy day
When a new household finds its place
Among the myriad homes of earth
Gone, and as painful now as the thought of a stillborn child. Sentimental ? Of course. Riddled with the Anglo-American mawkishness about home, quicksandy with assumptions about monogamy and Woman’s Highest Role, buttery with echoes of the household poets. All that. But I find that I don’t mind her emotions and her sentiments. Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more? So I don’t snicker backward ninety years at poor Grandmother pacing her porch and biting her knuckle and hating the loss of what she had never quite got over thinking her exile. I find her moving. She is Massaccio’s Eve, more desolate than Adam because he can invent the bow and arrow and the spear, but she can only try to reassemble outside Eden an imperfect copy of what she has lost. And not guiltless, either. She buries that acknowledgment under disgust and fury at Kendall and his toadies, but she makes it, then or later: she has been guilty of pride, she has held herself apart, and so has contributed to the fall.
So there she is with her two hands clenched in the front of Oliver’s shirt, shaking him in her passion and her earnestness. “I’ll do what thee wants, or whatever we must, but please, Oliver, not two weeks more here! The air is poisoned, it’s all spoiled, I couldn’t bear it. How long will the map take thee? A week? Two weeks? Why can’t thee do it in Santa Cruz? I can finish my drawings there, there are only three more blocks, and I’ve done the sketches. Why not at Santa Cruz? We could work in the mornings and spend the afternoons on the shore. Thee has worked so hard, why must thee run right out and find more work? Couldn’t thee go to see Mrs. Elliott tomorrow and find a place?”
He looked down at her almost absently. He blew cold into her bangs and bent his head and kissed the forehead his breath had exposed. “I could,” he said. “But that wouldn’t support the family.”
“We have enough for a while.”
“Sure. And when it’s gone, then what?”
“Then there’s my drawing money.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Listen,” he said, “I’m supposed to be the reckless one in this family.”
“No, thee listen. Maybe Mrs. Elliott can find a place for Lizzie. She’s a jewel, there’s nothing so good on this coast. We won’t need her if we’re boarding. But we can keep Marian, so we can do things together again, and so I can work. And since she’ll be freeing my hands, I’ll pay her.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” Susan cried. ‘“Thee can pay her as long as thee has anything, and then I will. But let’s go just as soon as we can.”
Again he blew into her bangs and kissed where his breath was cold. “All right. For two weeks. Then I’ll have to go to the City.” He looked down at Stranger, sprawled on the boards with his chin on his big feet. “Eh, lad,” he said, like a sad Cousin Jack. “It’s back to they boardin’ ‘ouses for both of us. And we’ll never know ’ow that ’oist works.”
III
SANTA CRUZ
1
Shelly Rasmussen’s shabby little soap opera is now playing at my house. I don’t like being a garbage can for her kind of troubles, but considering what I owe to Ed and Ada I couldn’t do anything but make the offer when the crisis blew up yesterday.
There have been better secretaries than Shelly, also worse. She isn’t stupid, and she has put the files in order faster than I thought she could, and learned them in the process. Occasionally she can anticipate what I’ll need, sometimes she comes up with something I’ve overlooked or forgotten. It doesn’t matter that she’s not much of a typist, because I decided very quickly not to let her transcribe my tapes—that would inhibit my mouth. If the tapes are ever transcribed I’ll send them down to some steno pool in Berkeley or the City. But Shelly is good at typing off illegible letters; she is just nearsighted enough to be able to read handwriting that baffles me. Altogether, she has saved me some time and a lot of the bone-ache I used to get trying to work in the files from my chair.
A considerable improvement on Miss Morrow. But she has a ribald streak that I don much like. She is a card-carrying member of this liberated generation, and though I am hardly one to go around clucking my tongue and asking Is nothing sacred, I find myself wondering about the state of mind that holds nothing worth the respect of un-humorous suspended judgment. Me, for instance. Once or twice I have caught her studying me as if I were somehow amusing, and that shocks me. At the very least I claim to be pitiful, grotesque, or appalling.
The interest she takes in the job we are doing is about as disconcerting as her interest in me. She is amused by the Victorian reticences and sentiments we uncover in Grandmother. That letter recording Grandmother’s discovery of the “cundrum” had her in stitches—the discrepancy between decorum and vile necessity was irresistible. Until she began to guffaw, I had thought that letter a rather touching footnote to the Genteel Female’s biological vulnerability, and I found it a little unseemly—I wasn’t shocked, I simply found it unseemly—that a girl of twenty or so should exploit that kind of joke—about his grandmother! —to her fifty-ieight-year-old employer, and a man of stone at that.
Many things that I think human and touching in Grandmother’s life and character, she thinks comic. Many things that, even as a biographer, I am inclined to treat as private and essentially none of my business, she examines with that modem “frankness” which makes me nervous.
Ada has a version of Shelly’s experiences in Berkeley which seems to me unduly protective of her daughter. It may be, as she has told me, that Larry Rasmussen when Shelly met him was a nice clean boy from upstate New York who came out to Berkeley to get a degree in anthropology, and fell in with the wrong companions, and learned to live on hash and guitar music and vegetables marketed by the Street People’s Co-op, and left school without a degree and devoted himself, like an old-time I.W.W., to creating the new society within the she
ll of the old. I suggested the I.W.W. parallel to Ada, who being a miner’s daughter knew about the Wobblies. She fails to see the connection. She implies, though she is not as free in such discussions as her daughter, that Rasmussen made out with every amenable chick he met in the pads and communes where they lived, and that he tried to make Shelly live as loosely as he did. To hear Ada tell it, he wanted to pimp her off for money, or utilize her as bait in wife trading, or something of the sort. Even when I taught at Berkeley there was a girl who put herself through graduate school by selling two illegitimate babies to adoption agencies. Nothing that happens at Berkeley could possibly surprise me, and so I don’t necessarily doubt Ada’s version of Shelly’s bust-up with her husband.
Yet I don’t necessarily believe it, either. In all this truth-and-freedom-seeking I doubt that Shelly was very far behind her mate. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that while he was making out with somebody, she was around the comer not doing too badly herself. She has, on considered acquaintance, a bold eye and an uninhibited tongue and a body that flops and lounges. If she didn’t wear pants most of the time at work, even great stone Homer might nod and kink his neck. I cannot see her as an innocent victim of a nasty and dissolute hippie. When I was young there was a joke about the difference between dignified acquiescence and enthusiastic cooperation. I think I know where Shelly would belong. I feel sorry for Ada and Ed, who are small-town middle-class people, and not equipped to absorb these changes. Maybe Shelly rebelled against the life her husband was leading her into, maybe on the other hand, she simply got tired of supporting him.
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