Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [268]
My own darling–
Forgive me if you can. At the last minute I could not come, I lacked the courage. To visualize myself knocking at your door and waiting for the sight of your face turned me faint with panic. Too much has happened, I am too deep in another life. It would not have been me!
I am going back. Behind all this anguish, I believe, has been my refusal to submit. I do not mean to my husband only. I have held myself above my chosen life, with results that I must repent and grieve for the rest of my days. I have not been loyal. If there is ever a chance that our lives may be patched together, it must be in the West, since that is where I failed.
I will write you when I am in control of myself. Good-bye, dearest Augusta, my ideal woman. I am not worth your sympathy or your tears, and yet I am weak enough to hope that not all the love you once had for me is effaced. I am not likely to see you, ever again. It is one of the saddest of my many sad thoughts. Good-bye, my dearest.
SBW
That’s it, that’s all. When the letters begin again at the end of September, she is in control of herself, stoically making headway toward a patched-up life. None of her subsequent letters bothers to explain to Augusta, who presumably knows anyway, exactly what happened in July. She puts that behind her. Almost as if she were a bystander–and her letters repeat some of the things reported in that stack of Xeroxed clippings–she records through the next six months the death throes of the canal company, the lawsuits, the receivership. Matter-of-factly she reports her efforts to keep Mesa Ranch alive through a dry fall with no man to help except John on Sundays. I find it hard to imagine my grandmother and Nellie Linton, a pair of Victorian gentlewomen, hitching a team to the hose cart, filling the cart at the windmill, and creeping, stopping, creeping, stopping again, along the lane of dying Lombardies in the brass of a desert evening. Whether I can imagine them or not, it is what they did. Not even the Malletts were left them–gone back to the Camas to raise horses.
Most of her hours were filled with the literary and artistic drudgery by which she supported them. Till mid-afternoon she wrote or drew. At three she gave herself over to drawing lessons for Nellie’s six pupils, most of them daughters of the pick-and-shovel millionaires she had despised. They came in a surrey every morning and were called for every afternoon. Some of the parents grumbled at the driving, and suggested to Nellie that she move her school into town, where it could easily double its size, but she would not leave Susan or Mesa Ranch.
Even in her own house, Susan humbled herself to teach those girls. She knew well enough that some of their mothers sent them not so much to make them into ladies as to patronize the lady who had failed to return their calls. One or two, she thought, craved the pleasure of pitying her, but she was impenetrable, she turned on them the bright face of self-sufficiency.
Yet she allowed Betsy to make friends with them (for who else was available to poor Betsy now?), and she did her best to help Nellie teach that buggyload of shaggy dogs to modulate their voices, to pronounce words properly, to sit with their knees together, to walk as if they were women and not muckers in a mine. She gave them the rudiments of drawing and perspective, the beginnings of a taste in literature.
I am bothered by the thought of her reading aloud to those children. It is a measure of her humbling, for household reading had been one of their chief pleasures when they were all a company of saints out in the canyon, and Frank, Wiley, the children one by one, herself, Nellie, even Grandfather, picked a favorite poem and read it. Everyone