Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [243]
One thing in Oliver’s letter made me feel like crying with an odd mixture of feelings. It seems that after talking with Dr. Rhinelander and saying good-bye to Ollie, Oliver slipped up into the balcony of the chapel and watched unseen during the chapel service, which he says was impressive, and the boys well behaved. Oh, I would give anything I own to do that same thing, only for ten minutes–to look down from my hiding place in that dim, scholarly light, with solemn noble words on the air, and see my own boy’s brown head down there among the others, absorbing it and gathering in wisdom and the sense of what it means to be civilized!
Instead, I look out my window and see thin, rippled snow, and sagebrush that bends stiffly in a bitter northwest wind. Our hope of restoring our old community of saints here has not quite been gratified. The men have been frantically busy, Frank and Wiley have been up in the canyon most of the time. Now Oliver is away and Frank is about to go East and visit his parents for the first time in five years. I shall give him a letter to you, for I want you to know each other. If he expresses himself freely to you, please listen, and do not judge him or me too harshly. It will be the next best thing to talking to you myself. We are all right–life continues, the old bonds hold–and if there is a certain unhappiness, a real regret, why that is what man, and even more woman, is born to. I repeat, I am all right.
The Mesa
March 1, 1890
Darling Augusta–
You have been much with me for the past two or three days. The other evening I was rereading The Freshening Day, that first book of Thomas’s poems, and our wedding-present copy from you, with the date of my wedding day fourteen years ago. You remember you painted a rose spray across the silk-lined fly leaf, and daisies in the back. Two of the sonnets Thomas wrote in Milton, on one of those summer weekends that seem more and more wonderful as time tries to efface them. I felt strangely, miraculously preserved as I read, and yet oh! so melancholy and sad! The book of life turned back in my hands to that time of maidenhood and expectation.
Who could have foreseen for the bride of that day the picture that is and has been–the shall be is still to be unfolded. Sometimes it chills my heart to think about the future almost as much as it warms it to think about the past. I believe that I can foresee my life to come much better than I could, and I feel that I have the strength to bear it, whatever it may be. And yet, bear it! What of a future of which it can even be thought, it might have to be borne!
It is a sort of insanity not to be happy, when one has reasonable health and good children and a true, energetic husband who is doing something extraordinary, drawing in the outlines of civilization on the blank page of a desert. I tell myself it is true happiness to be still the friend of the most blessed of women. And yet I cannot boast that I am very happy, or even encourage you to think that some day I might be. I feel as stiff and frozen and ungainly as the sagebrush out there in the wind. But I suppose that, like the sagebrush, I shall at least endure–unless some Hi Mallett should come with a sulky plow and plow me quite up.
That, without your intending it, was nearly the effect of your letter reporting your visit with Frank. I knew you would like him at once. He is truly noble, with the loftiest ideals and the most sensitive understanding. I know he must have found it a relief to talk with you, for among us, in our entangled and encumbered situation, there are no opportunities to speak out. And yet how it shook me to have you report his words about his “incurable disease”! How wretched, how wretched, for him, for me, for Oliver, for all of us, that a boy so clean and fine should be torn between loyalty to the friend he most values in the world, and this incurable disease! And yet his dilemma and