Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [26]
Suspended in the act of removing his ridiculous spectacles, he stood with both hands at his ears and the glasses down on his nose. He looked annoyed. “I have no Beecher blood.”
“But somebody said . . .”
Susan Burling was a pretty girl, small and cleanly made. As Augusta says in her article, “she had the dainty precision that has always seemed to me the mark of a true lady.” And she had that rosy complexion and that fatal tendency to blush. I find her as attractive as Oliver Ward obviously did.
Like one patiently explaining incriminating circumstances, he said, “My father’s sister married Lyman Beecher. She’s the mother of that whole brood—Henry Ward, Thomas, Catherine, Mrs. Stowe, and Cousin Mary Perkins, the best of the litter.” He folded his glasses and put them back in his pocket. His teeth gleamed under his mustache— he was really quite attractive when he looked playful. “The other night she was telling me the story of her life. She said she grew up the daughter of Lyman Beecher, and then became the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and finally hit rock bottom as the mother-in-law of Edward Everett Hale. She’s the only one of the whole outfit that can laugh.”
He demonstrated that he could laugh too, this earnest young man. They were laughing together very contentedly when the door opened and Emma Beach put her head in. “Susan? Oh, Mr. Ward. Well my goodness, aren’t you two sly! What are you doing, studying art?”
“Discussing the Beecher blood,” Oliver said.
Emma had sharp brown eyes and a nose for romance. She almost sniffed. But then the sound of the piano began again in the far rooms. “Susan, I’m sorry, but here’s Dickie Drake, and he’s got to go on, but he says he won’t go till he dances one square with you, and Waldo swears he’ll have at least as much of you, to the minute. They’ve been drinking.”
Susan was already off the window seat, looking for a place to tuck her sketch pad. Said my grandfather, quite untroubled by the rush on his companion, and revealing that he could smile as well as laugh, “Leave it with me, I’ll look after it.”
So she passed him the pad and went off to dance with the Drake boys, who were somewhat fast but who were safe because they were Augusta’s brothers. Years later, out of simple good nature or some lingering interest in his sister’s friend, Waldo will help rescue Susan’s husband from a bad situation by getting him a commission to inspect a Mexican silver mine; and Augusta’s husband will make it possible for Susan to go along by commissioning some travel articles. I am impressed with how much of my grandparents’ life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. Contrary to the myth, the West was not made entirely by pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun.
Among the belles in that house Susan went relatively unnoticed, and could escape the dancing when she chose. She chose to as soon as the Drakes left. Many years later, when she reported that evening in her reminiscences, she was hearing the Doppler Effect of time, as I am now. She was looking back more than sixty years, I am looking back more than a century, but I think I hear the same tone, or tones, that she did: the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four.
The parlors that New Year’s Evening were filled with a large company of persons moving about and changing places, and but few were in the room by the window. Dark had fallen outside. I was sitting close to the great pane and I saw in it, as in a mirror, all the persons assembled within the rooms; we were there reflected on that background of night starred with specks and clusters of lights, but these did not obtrude. Our images were softened and mysteriously beautified—it was charming. One face in the foreground showed distinct on the darkness of the world outside. I had my drawing pad with me and I made an attempt to draw it—it was the face in line with