Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [140]
“Times change,” I said, not without irony. “Why didn’t you and your husband stay on the road, if it was so great?”
She was at her knuckle again. Slurp. Sidelong flash of eyes. “He’s not my husband, of course. That’s for the family only.”
“All right,” I said. “The man you travel with, then. Why aren’t you still traveling?”
She threw her hands up in the air and leaned back, stretching, arching her chest upward. Ohne Büstenhalter again. “Yakh!” she said. “It did get a little hairy, sleeping in the washrooms of Canadian tourist parks in the rain. But I’d do it again. I mean, you’re never that free again.” She stood up and slapped the seat of her pants as if the floor had been a dusty roadside. “Anyway I take it back about the sex scene. Even if you’d spelled it out, I guess it wouldn’t have been a climax to much of anything.”
“Is it ever?” I said. “No, it was just sort of like everything else.”
7
Grandmother wanted her son to grow up, as she had, knowing some loved place down to the last woodchuck hole. The rural picturesque was not only an artistic manner with her, it was a passionate conviction. She had been weaned on the Romantic poets and the Hudson River school, and what the West had so far taught her was an extension of those: beyond Bryant lay Joaquin Miller, beyond Thomas Cole spread a vast wild grandeur supervised by Bierstadtian peaks. It was never the West as landscape that she resisted, only the West as transience and social crudity. And those she might transform.
There was a real nester in that woman. When she got flirting around with a twig or piece of string in her bill she was not to be balked. In September they began the addition to the cabin–a kitchen, bedroom, and vast rock fireplace designed more for social evenings than for domestic comfort. “Ye’ll have no hate in the house,” said the reluctant Irish mason who laid up the stones, and delighted her with his omen in brogue.
The curtained bedroom angle that Conrad Prager had called the upstairs was decurtained and christened Pricey’s Corners. It held the bookcase, the rocker, and a small table equipped with a stereopticon and two hundred frontier views, the bread and butter gift of Thomas Donaldson. I have the views here, or most of them–brown, mounted on stiff cardboard with beveled and gilded edges, the twin photographs curving in a little like weakly crossing eyes: the early West as caught in the lenses of O’Sullivan, Hillers, Savage, Haynes, Jackson–a little musty, spotted with time, but still, when I hold one of them to that binocular viewer, touched with the wonder and excitement of a new country. Along with them in their box is Donaldson’s ponderous report on the Public Domain, a work as neglected by the Congress that commissioned it as King predicted it would be, but a benchmark in the nation’s understanding of itself, the sort of contribution to disinterested knowledge that my grandfather would have liked to make. These things are about all that is left of the Leadville years.
Early in November, their eyes watchful of a leaden sky that dusted them with snow, a characteristic Leadville buggy-full went over the pass, accompanied by a half dozen riders. The riders were of the class of young, well-born, and well-trained men who had recently contributed twenty-seven graduates of top technical schools to the procession carrying General Vinton, son of Dr. Vinton of Trinity Church, to his Leadville grave. The buggy contained, besides Susan and Oliver, his remote cousin W. S. Ward, W.S.’s older brother Ferd, called the Wizard of Wall Street, and Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., a man who has no historical personality for me except for the somehow awful fact that as a boy of twelve or so he was posted on a hill by his father so that he could watch the slaughter at Shiloh.
If Grant had been equipped