Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [35]
Do you know, Sir, until you came I believe she loved me almost as girls love their lovers—I know I loved her so. Don’t you wonder that I can bear the sight of you? I don’t know another man who could make it seem right. You must have been born to make her future complete, and she was born to kindle your Genius. Isn’t it wonderful how it flamed up at her touch? It was there, but as unborn crystals are . . .
All right, Grandmother. Generously said. Maybe your emotions and your good-loser response were learned from novels, but they worked, and they lasted. Thenceforward you were a loving sister to Thomas, and dearest friend, without ambiguities, to Augusta. You never expressed to them or to anyone any feeling of betrayal or disappointment. I suspect that you were able to manage yourself so well because by a stroke of luck you were able just then to look at your hole card. The ace-high straight flush you had coming didn’t work out, but at the last minute that buried nine filled a king-high straight.
Within two days after she heard of the engagement of Augusta and Thomas, Oliver Ward wrote that he was coming home from the West.
He arrived on a night of hard rain. She and her brother-in-law John Grant waited in the shelter of the landing and watched the three blurred lights of the ferry creep closer, separating themselves from the lights of the Poughkeepsie side. John’s lantern shone back liquid yellow from the puddles, another lantern at the end of the landing threw a streak over the moving river that was roughened every minute or two by gusts. I suspect that Susan’s skin was like the river, chilled by gusts of uncertainty, pebbled with the gooseflesh of anticipation. She knew his intentions; he had warned her.
What did a girl of 1873 feel, waiting for the stranger whom she had never taken quite seriously but whom she had now, in her mind, half resolved to marry? The meeting had all the dramatics of one of her more romantic drawings—shine of lantern light on the oilskins of the ferryman, a tall figure that jumped ashore carrying a carpetbag. And what was he wearing? Some great hooded cloak or ulster that made him like a figure out of a conspiratorial opera. The ferryman’s lantern threw his huge shadow down the landing. She was in suspense to see his face, for she might remember him all wrong. Then he was before them throwing back the hood, shaking her hand with his big wet hand, saying some sort of greeting and in the same breath apologizing for the ulster—it was his field coat, his town coat was stolen in San Francisco.
He arrived looking suitably outlandish, a traveler from a far place, someone to be cautiously investigated. Yet intimate too, because of what had been said between the lines of letters, or what he had said and she had not denied. They jammed into the buggy and the intimacy was physically enforced. Between the two bundled men she could hardly move. They rode turning their faces away from the spitting dark, and she smelled his unfamiliar odors of pipe and wet wool, and said whatever she would say, while her taciturn brother-in-law listened. He had a tendency to be critical of people. She wondered how he rated this young man from the West against the writers and painters and editors he had been driving up from the landing for the last four years.
Her parents were standing in the hall to welcome him and exclaim about the wet, and after the introductions—with what shyness, with what a weight of unspoken implication—Susan guided him upstairs to his room, the one they called Grandmother’s room. There he set his carpetbag inside the door and shook himself out of the ulster, and she watched him lay on the dresser, which had never seen anything rougher than a Quaker bonnet or a book of poems in limp leather,