Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [31]
Studying her drawings in the magazines he managed to lay hands on, Oliver might have been reassured that she was still the lively little Quaker girl he had fallen for at the Beach house. Her pictures were likely to show girls in Watteau dresses hanging over a banister to see who is ringing the doorbell, or young men standing up in rowboats to part the willows that might brush their bonneted girls, or children shutting the gates at twilight on their pet lambs, or young ladies pensively reading in dusky attics. But her letters made it plain that there was already more glitter in her life than Oliver Ward could ever hope to provide.
John La Farge had spent the afternoon at Augusta’s 15th Street studio, and had read them parts of a poem called The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám. Thomas Moran, encountered in the Scribner office, had been flattering about Susan’s drawings, and had wished that he could draw, as she could, directly on the block, so as to be less at the mercy of engravers. The Scribner crowd had just left Milton after a weekend of picnics, boat rides, and cider parties, and the Scottish novelist George MacDonald had read from his latest book, and George Washington Cable had then been prevailed upon to read a Creole story he had just completed, and the actress Ella Clymer had bewitched them all on the midnight piazza with a song, “I Love to See Her Slipping Down a Stair.” Thomas Hudson, the young Scribner editor, had left the company for a bare half hour and returned with a magnificent sonnet. And hardly had the Scribner crowd gone back down to New York than a Boston editor brought John Greenleaf Whittier around to discuss illustrations for a gift edition of Snowbound. They caught her scrubbing the dining room, and she had to seat them in the parlor and talk to them through the door while she finished mopping up.
She told things like that as jokes on herself, but Oliver Ward on his powder keg in his tar-papered shack could not miss the Great Name that had come to her door seeking her. She hung it up there like a jack-o’-lantern.
Snowbound fell through, but shortly she was busy on forty drawings and a dozen vignettes for Longfellow’s The Hanging of the Crane, and a year and a half after she began that, she reported its considerable success in the Christmas trade, and a little later still she wrote that Osgood and Company had mysteriously invited her to Boston, and there surprised her with a dinner at which the whole Brahmin population of New England was present. Mr. Whittier was there, still chuckling over the floor-mopping episode. Mr. Lowell paid her a flattering amount of attention. Mr. Holmes was very witty. Mr. Longfellow held her hand quite a long time and told her he was astonished that one so talented should also be so young and charming. He made her promise to illustrate The Skeleton in Armor—which, it turned out, was what the publishers had brought her to Boston to discuss. Mr. Howells, the new editor of the Atlantic, praised her realism. Mr. Bret Harte, the celebrated California author, answered her questions about the Sierra Nevada, in which she had expressed an interest.
She was barely twenty-four, and she admits she boasted, “ungenerously.” But that young man in the West was as steady as a lighthouse. He applauded her successes, he never expressed jealousy of the young men whose luck he must have envied, he accepted her ambiguous relationship with Augusta and her almost equally ambiguous relationship with Thomas Hudson, now the third of an intimate threesome.
Grandmother implies that he won her over by his cheerful confidence, so that an understanding gradually grew up between them. I doubt the understanding, and I doubt Grandfather’s confidence. What did he have to be confident about? Trapped for three years in that litigated tunnel, he must have known that if it was ever finished, a junior engineer without a degree would emerge into the old barren sunlight beating on the old sterile mountains, and that if he wanted a chance at Susan Burling he would have