Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [33]
In the 1870s he was gentle, thoughtful, amusing, a spirit that glowed through a frail, almost epicene body. He had come out of the war with wounds that kept him sickly, but he still managed to do the work of three. His hands were pale and attenuated, his smile was of great sweetness. He loved talk, and he assumed the stance of noble idealism as naturally as water fills a hole in beach sand. In one of her letters, Susan told him that he had a “truly feminine talent for saying lovely, sweet things, with a little pang in them.” Many of her letters address him playfully as “Cousin Thomas.” Over a span of several years he gave her a number of little presents—a Japanese teapot, a miniature Madonna, certain volumes of poetry—that she clung to while other things, Grandfather’s letters for instance, were getting lost. The volumes of poetry and the Madonna are down in the library right now, salted away like Grandmother’s rose petals.
Her editorial champion, her closest male friend, the beau ideal of genteel letters, Thomas had to suggest himself to Susan as a potential husband. Naturally no expression of that shows through the decorous playfulness of her letters to him. The closest thing I find is a discussion of Friendship, roughly at the level of Cicero: “When you are away from your friends, do you think of their words or of their sudden awful thrilling soul-revealing looks? There is something awful about a sensitive human face. What a brute that man must be who said that the finest instrument to play upon was a sensitive impressionable woman! I don’t believe he could make that intense music and dare to boast of it afterward.”
I wonder what she thought she was doing. Surely she was not subtly accusing Thomas of playing on her heartstrings, but she could well have been subtly letting him know that she vibrated. Was she a little afraid her own face might have worn, in his presence, some sudden awful thrilling soul-revealing look?
The more I study Grandmother at that age, the more complicated that Quaker girl seems. She has a passion for Augusta, a crush that has lasted now for four or five years. She admires, idealizes, perhaps is in love with Thomas Hudson. She is sought by several young men, including Augusta’s two brothers, who could offer her (and Dickie at least seems to have) a social position to which she is not indifferent. She is dedicated to art, and works hard at it. At the same time, if we accept what she says in the reminiscences, she has been coming to an understanding with Oliver Ward, an engineer two years her junior, whom she has known for one evening and whose existence she has never mentioned to her other friends.
Then in the summer of 1873 she began to be aware that it was on Augusta, not herself, that the uncertain needle of Thomas’s affections was settling. I am guessing, but not wildly. She went back to Milton abruptly, instead of moving permanently to New York as she had been planning to do. There is a marked slackening in the flow of letters. There are no more six-page effusions—only brief notes, and those evasive. The importunity was evidently on the part of Augusta. Susan kept pleading the demands of Longfellow’s Vikings. She said New York stimulated her too much. To the claim that she should not bury herself in the country she replied that if she had great genius, as Augusta had, she might think it legitimate to sacrifice parents and home to it. But her talent was humble and minor, and if it couldn’t be carried on in the house of the parents who had done everything for her, it wasn’t worthy of being carried on.
Such mournful dutifulness and self-depreciation. I suppose she was bruised, poor thing, for in the worst tradition of the sentimental song she saw herself losing both lover and friend. She could not have the satisfaction of charging