Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [179]
“We met no one but Indians,” she writes. “Once it was a young man who had given his straw hat to the woman behind him and went bareheaded himself, his coarse thatch of hair shining like shoe blacking in the sun. She carried a sleeping child swaying heavily in the folds of her rebozo. With one hand, which also carried her shoes of light-colored sheepskin, she held the end of the rebozo across her face. In the other hand she carried a rude guitar. Over the blue cotton cloth held across her face she stared at us fixedly out of her great black eyes.
“I wondered at her look of awed curiosity, until I realized that I was riding with my hands clasped behind me, to rest them from holding in my rosillo, while Oliver had taken my bridle and was leading me along. I was wearing the black silk mask that Emelita had given me. To that Indian woman I must have looked like a captive, bound and masked, being led away to the mountains.”
I hear you, Grandmother. Entiendo.
VI
ON THE BOUGH
1
“Susan,” said Thomas Hudson from his William Morris chair, looking at her over his tented fingers, “do you have any idea how remarkable you are?”
“Oh my goodness!” Susan said. “Here we sit, just the three of us, the perfect leftovers of a perfect evening. Don’t spoil the best part with flattery.”
“Look at her, Augusta,” Thomas said. “Isn’t she beautiful? As rosy as one of her father’s apples. You absolutely charmed Godkin, you know. It’s a pity Mr. James was indisposed, he’d have found a new model for the American girl.”
“Girl! Anyway I’m not sure I could stand being attenuated in Mr. James’s fashion. I was half glad he didn’t appear, isn’t it awful? I’d have been terrified to find myself talking to him. And he would have distracted my attention from you two.”
She felt warm, tired, cherished. Before the fire’s warmth she positively blinked. It had been the kind of evening that heightened her color and loosened her tongue. First dinner at the house of E. L. God-kin, the editor of The Nation, to meet his houseguest Henry James, who didn’t appear–sent down his apologies because of an earlier indiscretion with coffee. So she had to put up with being seated between Mr. Godkin and Joseph Jefferson. Then Patience, with Godkin on one side of her and Thomas on the other, laughing themselves weak. Then oysters and champagne for eight here at the studio, and praise for her Mexican sketchbooks, spread out on display. Now this sweet and intimate late half hour of low fire and warm eyes. She would have to go back to Milton and work hard for a week to take the bubbles out of her blood.
Thomas’s smiling, narrow face watched her from the shadowy chair. All around, on walls, mantel, whatnot, highboy, were mementoes of the Hudsons’ rich life–the sort of life she had shared all evening: photographs of the famous, a drawing of Augusta by Homer, a pair of china lions, the gift of Raphael Pumpelly, a whole wall of Japanese prints, a Malay kris with a wavy blade, an Australian boomerang, a lugubrious wooden saint from a Burgundian church. They gathered objects as they gathered friends; the richness of their accumulations was an index of the open-handedness of their giving. They made the wildest incongruities harmonious. They took Susan Ward, a country cousin, and blended her with Jefferson, Godkin, themselves–could even have blended her with Henry James if he had appeared. Now they sat and looked at her with such love and approval that her warm face grew warmer. It was joy to hear them praise her; she could not resist.
“All right,” she said, “you may tell me in what way I’m remarkable.”
Augusta from her hassock–soft face, dark hair, shining brown eyes, said, “As if you didn’t know.”
Thomas slid farther into his chair with his elbows propped and his fingers tented before his mouth and talked to the weathered saint on his pedestal