Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [170]
4
Casa Walkenhorst
Morelia, Michoacán
September 12, 1880
Dearest Augusta–
It is now over a week since Oliver went off with the owners and the engineer of the prospective buyers to inspect the mine. They departed like a Crusade–but I shall save that for when I see you. It seems too good to be true that this letter can be mailed to the dear old studio address, and that when we return next month you and Thomas will be back in New York. After how many?–four long years when I have been deprived of the sight of you! My darling, we shall have more than Oliver’s Crusade to talk about.
I am settled as happy as a worm in an apple at the Casa Walkenhorst, the home of Morelia’s Prussian banker. With my norteamericana habits I am probably almost as disconcerting as a worm, or half a worm as Bessie would say, giggling–to Emelita, the sister-in-law who keeps Don Gustavo’s house. But she is such a sweet and gentle nature, and such a model of consideration, that she would never let me know, no matter how much I disrupted her household. I could go around on stilts, and wearing a bearskin, and she would keep her countenance and her sweetness, convinced that these were the whims and eccentricities, or perhaps the native customs, of an American woman artist. For I am an artist here –my reputation is greatly enlarged by their inability to consult any of my work. But once when I made my own bed (having been brought up my mother’s helper and having been maid of all work in a log cabin on a ditch) I heard her afterward scolding the maid for not being prompt, and so I have subsided not unwillingly into luxury, laziness, and daily drawing.
I have a double reason for soaking myself in this walled, protected domestic life. It provides me many sketches, and it gives me a model for what may become my own future. Oliver told me before be left that there is a good chance, providing the mine turns out well, that he will be asked to come back and run it. I will then have the problem of making a home here that we can live in according to our own habits, but that will not offend against Mexican conventions, which have little give in them.
You can imagine how such a house as Emelita’s, beautifully run and hypnotically comfortable, affects my thwarted home-making instincts. I love the peace of this house, which was once a priests’ college and retains its cloistered air. In the mornings there is a most satisfying sense of women’s work going on, the hum of voices in far rooms, the chuckling of doves on their high ledges, old Ascención’s broom scratching down the corredor, and from the rear court the slap and flop of clothes being washed, and whiffs of woodsmoke, strong soap, and steam. The other morning, coming past the work room off the kitchen, I stopped still, smitten by such a lovely smell of fresh ironing that I was instantly melted into a housewife. I make Emelita write me out the receipt for every unusual dish we eat–whether we stay or go, such things are beyond price.
I am as intimate here as a sister, as privileged as a guest, and I tag around after Emelita on her morning rounds, carrying my sketch pad and stool. The salas are uninteresting-overdecorated, with too much crystal and heavy furniture, but the kitchen is a treasure, hung with copper pots above its charcoal fires, and a thin, peevish cook who would be dismissed in a minute if she were not capable of such mouth-watering food. So we all praise and placate her instead, and she takes our praise and turns it instantly sour, and I draw her in her sourness and get a picture that I think Thomas and even you will like.
I draw everything–Ascención watering his flower pots, Soledad making up one of the great lit du roi beds,