Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [32]
I don’t think she was protecting herself from an attachment she feared might leave her on the bough. I don’t think there was that much of an attachment, not on her part. He kept writing, and she didn’t have the heart to shut him off. And he was a reserve possibility, a hole card that she didn’t look at because she didn’t want to risk breaking up the beautiful sequence of hearts face-up in her hand.
At that stage I don’t see her looking for a husband. She didn’t really want a fifth card any more than she wanted to look at her hole card. She had her career, she had Augusta and the marriage of true minds, and she had Thomas, whom she admired and idealized. She probably hoped their threesome could go on indefinitely. Though she was no bohemian, she was willing to be unconventional if the conventions could be broken without impropriety; and quite apart from her devotion to Augusta and Thomas, she had a tough and unswerving dedication to her art. She might even have accepted spinsterhood as the price of her career if the cards had fallen that way. And if the cards fell wrong, if Augusta should marry or move away, if art should fail, if her career should be disappointing and she should be exposed to the chilly fear that in the 1870s paled the cheek and weakened the knees of unmarried girls over twenty-four, then why wouldn’t she have looked toward Thomas Hudson rather than toward an unliterary, unartistic, not-too-successful engineer, a mere pen pal a continent away?
I think she did.
A relatively poor girl making her own way—what Rodman would call “upward mobile”—she put a higher value on gentility than most who were bred to it, and a higher value on art and literature than those frail by-products of living can possibly support. She had the zeal of a convert or an aspirant. And Thomas Hudson, born as poor as herself and just as upward mobile, was gentility personified, sensibility made flesh.
Not yet thirty, he was already a reputation and an influence. He charmed both the literary and the social. Poems dropped from him as blossoms blew off the Burling apple trees in a spring breeze. He wrote a monthly department, “The Old Cupboard,” in Scribner’s magazine, that the literary waited for and discussed. Ostensibly the assistant of Scribner’s editor, Dr. Holland, he in fact did all of Holland’s work and made most of Holland’s decisions and found all the livelier contributors that Holland got credit for.
Susan was his discovery, and he hers. Most of her friends she met through Augusta, but Augusta met Thomas through her. Within a few weeks they were an inseparable trio. In that Edith Wharton version of New York they ran around safe, platonic, and happy to galleries, theaters, and concerts. I have no idea whether or not the 1870s provided editors with expense accounts, but Thomas acted as if they did. I have no idea, either, whether Thomas was courting Susan, or Augusta, or both, or neither. I doubt that any of them knew. If you are genteel enough, that sort of imprecision is possible.
It is hard for me to be just to Thomas Hudson, for I had him held up to me all through my childhood, and he was an impossible ideal. But I have heard former colleagues, American literature professors who study such things, call him the greatest editor the country ever had. Recently I was looking through a file of the Century, which he edited after Scribner’s closed up, and in the single issue of February 1885 I found, in addition to the Susan Burling Ward story that had led me to it, the final installment of a book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the ninth and tenth chapters of a novel by William Dean Howells called The Rise of Silas Lapham, and the opening installment of a novel by Henry James called The Bostonians. I wouldn’t be surprised if he found and published two thirds of the best literature of four decades. He was nearly as good as Grandmother thought him—a man of taste, intelligence, and integrity. He was one of the group of New York liberals who at various times cleaned up