Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [270]
Oh, there are times when this place opens before me as if I saw it for the first time, and saw it all–all its possibilities, all its bad luck and failure and tragic mistakes, and then I want to turn my back on it and run away beyond any reminder. But I know I must stay here. It is poor Ollie’s only inheritance, and in spite of what happened to him here, I know he loves it.
I said I waited for spring, and feared it. The blasted rose garden is one reason for my fear, for every time my eye lights on it I will remember everything. Yet the one rose that remains, the old Harison’s yellow on the piazza corner, has the power to disturb me more with its promise of life than all the others with their reminder of death. I can hardly wait for it to bloom again, though I know that when it does I shall cry myself sick. As you know, it came into its first blooming in the canyon the summer Agnes was born. When I came out into the sun for the first time, and she lay in her cradle in the entry, that golden profuseness yellowed the air all above her face, and scented the whole yard.
My God, Augusta, how could I ever, what blindness of discontent could have made me responsible for so much bitterness in those I most love! In punishment I have lost three of them–four, for Ollie writes only the letters the school compels him to, and they are as cold, as cold, as a stone at the bottom of a river.
Do you ever think how death may be? I do. I think of it as dusky and cool, a room with a door open to the outside, and a soft wind coming in as cool as if it blew off the stars. In the doorway, which faces away-in these visions I am never looking back–may at any moment appear the faces that one has wholly loved, and the dear voices that one remembers will be saying softly, like a blessing, We love you, we forgive you.
I have already turned away from what I started to do, which was to look at those newspaper stories and discover what they can tell me beyond the raw happenings. I must remember who I am. I am a historical pseudo-Fate, I hold the abhorréd shears. I have set myself the task of making choral comment on a woman who was a perfect lady, and a lady who was a feeling, eager, talented, proud, snobbish, and exiled woman. And fallible. And responsible, willing to accept the blame for her actions even when her actions were, as I suppose all actions are, acts of collaboration. For her, conduct was like marriage–private. She held herself to account, and she was terribly punished. And now I really must get down to it. No more of this picking a random card. Let me find the crucial one–the first crucial one. Here it is.
It says that on the evening of July 7 Agnes Ward, daughter of the chief engineer of the London and Idaho Canal, drowned in the Susan ditch after becoming separated from her mother while taking a walk. There is a lot more, but that is the essential part. Who what where, and to the extent that people were able to piece it out, how. The why is more difficult.
That’s the first one. It is accompanied by three or four lesser items–funeral and all that–which tell me nothing I really want to know. But now comes the second crucial one, front page and two-column like the first, which reports that on July 11 (the day after Agnes’s funeral, though the story does not say so) Frank Sargent, thirty-three, son of General Daniel M. Sargent of New York City, was found dead in his bed at the London and Idaho’s engineering camp in Boise Canyon. He had put the muzzle of a .30-.30 saddle gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his thumb. Associates said he had been despondent over the financial difficulties of the canal company, of which he was assistant chief engineer.
The reporter made no connection between the drowning of Agnes Ward and the suicide of Frank Sargent, except to remark that for the unlucky London and Idaho people tragedy came in bunches. But Susan Ward and Oliver Ward, and probably Ollie Ward too, made such a connection, and so must I.
I know that Frank Sargent was out of a job and intending to go away.