Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [223]
Naturally Grandmother didn’t hear my warning blowing backward out of the fog of consequences that is her future and my past. She was not a brooder, but she had had her disappointments and her grievances and her anxieties, and she believed in the aspirations, refinements, and pretenses of gentility. She had watched her hopes recede, had had her pride humiliated. Her ambitions for her children seemed certain to be frustrated. The life she had given up lay far off and far back in time, unbelievable as a mirage. She had a reputation and enjoyed a certain fame, but all by mail, all from a distance, or else among the ladies of Boise whose opinion she did not choose to value.
By then her parents were both dead; one of the bitterest results of their poverty was that she had been unable to go back, either time, to help Bessie lay Father or Mother in loved Milton ground. If she dreamed of going back to renew however briefly her intimacy with Augusta and Thomas, she had to remind herself that her friends were now close to the very great indeed. Stanford White had recently built them a grand house on Staten Island. Their casual guests were cabinet ministers and political leaders and ambassadors and millionaires and internationally famous artists. Their closest friends, the couple with whom they slipped away for quiet weekends at their cottage on the Jersey shore, were President Grover Cleveland and his wife.
Imagine her feelings. The First Lady of the Land had stolen her place in her friend’s heart, a place she might still occupy if she had not married exile and failure. If it gave her a mournful pride to know her dear ones valued in such high places, it only made all the more insufferable the worry she felt every time Oliver went moodily into town.
Her reminiscences are not quite candid about the breakup; they reduce what was complicatedly personal to simple economics. “Since I could not march with my beaten man,” she wrote, “I preferred to march alone somewhere down to sea level and have my children to myself for a little while and learn to know my silent boy of eleven, who if I could possibly arrange it would be leaving us for an eastern school in the fall.”
Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. (“It is easier to die than to move,” she wrote Augusta once; “at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.”) She went about the long packing with a tight face and a knot in her solar plexus and a sense of disaster in her mind. Wan was mutely expressing his distress by washing everything–blankets, linen, dishes, clothes–before it was put away. Everything he hung on the line, every article she packed or threw away, every object that met her eye, every meal they ate at the trestle table the juniors had built under the cooktent fly, assaulted her sensibilities with its testimony of lost felicity and abandoned hope.
After one day of it, as they sat eating their noon soup and sandwiches, she burst out, “Oh, why must we pack everything? Can’t we just lock it up and leave?”
The way he chewed, thoughtfully, with his head down, struck her as wary; he seemed to be sorting possible replies. Finally he said, “You have to expect to be back if you do that.”
“Don’t you?”
Tough of eyes, the sort of look a man under orders might have given his superior, a look in which there was acquiescence but no agreement. “Yes,” he said, “but I didn’t think you did.”
She in turn meant her own look to be plain as day to him. She meant it to mean Yes, if.
He held his sandwich in both hands and looked at her over it. “You don’t have to leave at all, really. John can move up to the shack and look after you. I can