Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [160]
My father, despite his Idaho governess, had gone to St. Paul’s badly prepared, an inferior Western child. Grandmother was determined that I should not, and being past her working years, and with time to spare, she saw to my education personally. She read me poetry, she read me Scott and Kipling and Cooper, she read me Emerson, she read me Thomas Hudson. She listened to my practise recitations and helped me write my themes and do my numbers. My homework went in bound in neat blue legal covers, moreover, and a lot of it was illustrated by Susan Burling Ward. The quick little vignettes that ornamented the margins of themes and arithmetic papers looked as if they had been made by the brush of a bird’s wing. They delighted my teachers, who pinned them up on blackboards and told the class how fortunate Lyman was to have so talented a grandmother.
I accepted her help willingly, because it brought me praise, but I had no clear idea of who she was or what she had done. The bindings of her books in the library were not inviting, and I can’t recall ever reading one of her novels when I was young. I didn’t know her writings, apart from a few children’s stories, until years after her death, nor much of her art either, since most of that is buried in the magazines that published her. I would have been surprised to hear that some people considered her famous.
But I remember a day when I came home from school and told her I had to write a report on Mexico–how Mexicans live, or something about Mexican heroes, or some incident from Cortez and Montezuma or the Mexican War.
She put aside the letter she was writing and turned in her chair. “Mexico! Is thee studying Mexico?”
Yes, and I had to write this report. I was thinking Chapultepec, maybe, where all the young cadets held off the U. S. Army. Where were all those old National Geography?
“I had Alice take them up to the attic.” Her hand reached up and unhooked her spectacles, disentangling the earpieces from her side hair. I thought her eyes swam oddly; she smiled and smiled. “Did thee know thee might have been Mexican?”
It didn’t seem likely. What did she mean?
“Long ago we thought of living there. In Michoacán. If we had, thee’s father would probably have grown up and married a Mexican girl, and thee would be Mexican, or half.”
I had trouble interpreting her smile; I could feel her yearning toward some instructive conclusion. She took her eyes off me and looked out into the hall, where the light lay clean and elegant across the shining dark floor.
“How different it would all be!” she said, and closed her light-sensitive eyes a moment, and opened them again, still smiling. “I would have stayed. I loved it, I was crazy to stay. I had been married five years and lived most of that time in mining camps. Mexico was my Paris and my Rome.”
I asked why she hadn’t stayed, then, and got a vague answer. Things hadn’t worked out. But she continued to look at me as if I had suddenly become of great interest. “And now thee is studying Mexico. Would thee like to see what I wrote, and the pictures I drew, when I was studying it? It started out to be one article, but became three.”
So she led me up here to this room, and from her old wooden file brought out three issues of Century from the year 1881. There they are on the desk. I have just been rereading them.
As a boy I never came into this studio without the respectful sense of being among things that were old, precious, and very personal to Grandmother. She flavored her room the way her rose-petal sachet bags flavored her handkerchiefs. The room has not changed much. The revolver, spurs, and bowie hung then where they hang now, the light wavered through the dormer, broken by pines and wistaria, in the same way. Then, there was usually an easel with a watercolor clothespinned to it, and the pensive, downcast oil portrait of Susan Burling Ward that I have