Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [159]
Once in a while, when she had a visitor she liked, some old tottering friend such as Conrad Prager, I might hear her chattering on the porch or in the pergola, long since torn down, that used to be a part of Grandfather’s prize rose garden. On those occasions I sometimes heard her laugh aloud, a clear, giggly laugh like a flirting girl’s; and I was surprised, for around my father, my grandfather, and me she seldom laughed. Instructing me, especially in moral matters, she used to shake me by the shoulders, slowly and earnestly, looking into my eyes. It was as if she were trying to yearn me into virtue, like Davy Crockett grinning a coon out of a tree. I was never never never to behave beneath myself. She had known people who did, and the results were calamitous. The way to develop and deserve self-respect, which was the thing most worth seeking in life, was to guide myself always by the noblest ideals that the race had evolved through the ages.
Somewhere back in her mind lurked the figure of Thomas Hudson, in shining mail. His example dictated my training as it had dictated my father’s. In some ways, Grandmother hadn’t learned a thing since the time when she sent my poor scared twelve-year-old father out of Boise to attend St. Paul’s School and become an Eastern gentleman. When my time came around she sent me too to St. Paul’s, my father silently consenting. Gentility is inherited through the female line like hemophilia, and is all but incurable.
The children of Grass Valley, who were far from genteel, might have made things difficult for a little gentleman except for two things. One was the affection the town felt for my grandfather and the respect it had to pay my father. Any boy who picked on me would have been whaled, out of policy or principle or both. The other reason was that I opened up special opportunities.
For example, my grandfather might take a bunch of us down the mine, or he might let us pile into the Hupmobile, driven by Ed Hawkes’s father, and ride through town like blackbirds in an open pie. He might let us help him in the orchard where he fooled with Burbank hybrids and developed hybrids of his own, and when fruits were ripe he was not stingy with them. Many a taste bud in Grass Valley and Nevada City, blunted by sixty years of greasy french fries, ketchup, and bourbon, must remember as mine do the taste of sun-warmed nectarines and Satsuma plums up there in the end of the orchard where I now take my eight hard laps on crutches.
Likewise many a fat or tired or sick or otherwise diminished man and woman in this town must remember afternoons when Lyman Ward, the rich kid, had them over to the big house, where they played run-sheep-run among the pines on Grandfather’s three acres of lawn, or hide-and-seek through the servants’ wing, by that time unused, with its dozen dark closets and cupboards, its twisty back stairs, and its narrow hall whose floorboards betrayed hider and seeker alike. Afterward, the Chinese cook would prepare and the Irish maid serve sandwiches and lemonade and ice cream and cake; and the little barbarians, sweating from their games and abruptly quelled, would sit like little ladies and gentlemen, and cast slant eyes at my grandmother, in long gown and choker collar (she was sensitive about what age did to a lady’s throat), her thinning hair in its bangs and Grecian knot, moving