Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [230]
I am ashamed to bother you, knowing how full your days are, but I am so far from everything, and can think of no other way. Could you somehow get me the addresses of several of the best schools–St. Paul’s, Kent, Phillips-Exeter, Deerfield-what others are there?–together with the names of their headmasters if possible? I wish to write and see what I can do for Ollie. He is not a brilliant boy, and I am afraid his difficulty with reading will be a handicap, though Nellie works with him constantly. But he is very steady, and in most subjects sound. Before long he shall have gone beyond that Nellie can give him, and I am determined he shall have his chance.
No hint in these Victoria letters of her marital difficulties. The implication is always that as soon as Oliver finishes the field work of his survey they will be reunited. Yet she stayed on through the summer and fall of 1888, when Oliver was locating damsites on the Snake and its tributaries, and through the winter, when he was working out of a Boise hotel room, classifying irrigable lands in the Snake River Valley, and through the spring of 1889, when he was off to the mountains again. Ollie did not go East to school. She was unsuccessful in getting him any scholarship aid, and she hadn’t the money to send him herself.
Like a widow, she was, grim and diligent to support her brood. She does not sound unhappy, but in two separate letters she refers to herself as one “who wants above all to be alone.” She did for Vancouver Island the sort of illustrated travel sketch she had previously done for New Almaden, Santa Cruz, Mexico, and the canyon, but except for that impersonal geography her work did not reflect her life closely. The confessional mode was no more common in genteel fiction than in genteel lives.
What she wrote was a version of her old story of the upright engineer torn between love for a young lady and opposition to her wicked father; and a story about a dissolute but charming cavalryman who came to a bad end; and a story about romance that blossomed during two days when a transcontinental train was snowbound in Wyoming. Only one thing she wrote in Victoria seems to me revealing, in the way the Lochinvar-Frank story was revealing. It is the story of a young and promising singer, married to an engineer in the West, who finds that in the harsh Western climate her voice is cracked and destroyed, so that she must reconcile herself, nobly, to live within her deprivations.
She was a factory-a lonely factory, depressed, bravely industrious, afflicted with worry and insomnia, perhaps a little poisoned with self pity. Yet she stayed away. She neither went back to visit Bessie and the Hudsons (money? pride?) nor did she return at once when Oliver’s telegram arrived. I don’t have the telegram, only the letter in which Susan reported it to Augusta.
Victoria, May 14, 1889
Dearest Augusta–
Wonder of wonders, the irrigation scheme is not dead after all! I have had a telegram from Oliver, who had barely begun his summer’s work in the Salmon River Mountains when word followed him that General Tompkins has at last succeeded in finding new backers. The canal has been named the London and Idaho Canal, in deference to the source of the funds, which is English. The Syndicate’s representative, a Mr. Harvey, was out more than a year and a half ago, but he moved so quietly and seemed so little excited by what he saw that we gave him up almost as soon as he arrived. Now it appears that he was greatly impressed, thought Oliver’s surveys and plans superb, liked the country, liked the prospects, liked everything about us, in short.
And of course, having waited so long to make up its mind, the Syndicate now wants water flowing within weeks, and wheat