Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [27]
Whose face? Oliver Ward’s naturally, my grandfather’s. She made him look rather like a Crusader—all he needs is a helmet, and a gorget of chain mail. His face is young, strong, resolute in profile: which is probably the way she saw it.
And why was he sitting so that his face was in line with her view? Because he was already more than half in love with Susan Burling, and after returning her sketch pad to her he had neither the social ease to make further excuses for talking to one so popular, nor the courage to tear himself away. So he sat at a little distance as if in deep thought about his coming adventure in the West, and hardened his jaw at difficulties and dangers, and hoped that he looked quietly heroic.
And why did she draw his face? Not simply because it was there, I think. He had at the least made her notice him.
On that minimum contact they came together; it is as if you should bond two whole houses together with one dab of glue. Within a week he had left for California, and for nearly five years they did not see each other again. Clearly he went with the notion of “proving himself”—that was Grandfather’s character—and stayed on a long time because he had as yet no proofs. Clearly, though, he wrote to her, and she replied, for the reminiscences speak of the “understanding” that gradually established itself between them.
But not entirely of her volition, perhaps not even with her full consent. I find it interesting that in the more than one hundred surviving letters that Susan wrote Augusta Drake during those five years, there is no mention of the name or existence of Oliver Ward until more than a week after his return.
3
A bad three days, full of irritation and wasted effort. I should have my head examined for hiring that woman from the Argus. She couldn’t bag oranges without making bonehead errors. What is worse, I let her upset me as much as I obviously upset her—it obviously made her nervous to work with a freak.
Nothing right all the time she was here—raining outside, no sun in the room, no brightness in the mornings, no warmth on my neck, no pleasure or progress in the work. Feeling with her goose-pimpled feelings, I was aware all the time of all the bare empty closed-off rooms of this house, and the Gothic strangeness of this corner where a death’s-head freak fumbles around among old papers and mumbles into a microphone. She watched me with something like horror. I could feel her eyes on my back, and hear her breathing, and whenever I wheeled around in my chair and caught her eyes, they skittered away in desperate search for something they might have been looking at. I couldn’t help wondering if her lamentable lacks, both secretarial and personal, were her own, or only a manifestation of the modern inability to do anything right. All the time I was trying to work with this Miss Morrow I kept imagining what a pleasure it would be to have someone like Susan Burling to sort pictures and file papers and transcribe faded and barely legible letters.
Instead of mishearing instructions, mistyping copy, losing things, dropping things, watching the clock, taking coffee breaks down in the kitchen, hitting the bathroom every half hour, and getting ready to leave before she had half arrived, Susan Burling would have been quick, neat, thorough. She would have been fascinated by the drawings instead of handling them like the kitchen silver being sorted into a drawer, the knives with the spoons and the forks among the knives. She would have been intrigued by the clothes of another period instead of finding them comical. She would have noted the humanness of faces lost in time.
In one of her letters, speaking of a family portrait she saw in the Ward house in Guilford, Grandmother exclaims that the subject has “such a charming last-century face!” Her own pictures should evoke the same comment now. But what does