Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [37]
On the long ride home they did not talk much. They jolted and rocked and smiled, intensely aware of every time their bodies were bumped together. Susan agreed without question when Oliver suggested to John Grant that there was no need of driving them clear to the Burling house. They could get off at the Grant house and walk the last half mile—there was a young moon. So they walked the last dark reach between stone walls that her great-grandfather had laid, along the lane felty with dust, through night air cool with coming fall, tannic with early cured leaves.
Somewhere along the lane they settled it. Two days later Oliver left for Connecticut to see his parents for a few days before going back West to hunt a job and prepare a place for her.
Coming emptyhanded, with nothing to support his suit but hope, he could not have timed his arrival more perfectly or found Susan in a more receptive frame of mind. If the threesome was to be split by marriage (though Augusta and Thomas swore it would not be) New York might be a less happy place, and a Western adventure looked attractive. And if Augusta, despite all her vows, found herself ready to give up art for housekeeping, perhaps her defection demonstrated that after all marriage was woman’s highest role. And if Thomas Hudson was to be firmly given up, the eye might do worse than wander to a man of an altogether different kind, attractive in his own way but in no sense a rival of the lost paragon.
But what a confrontation when she told Augusta. I have to imagine it, but there are hints through years of letters to let me know their respective feelings. I imagine it in the studio on 15th Street where they had worked and slept together for four years in their sublimated dream of art’s bachelorhood, and where Susan, looking up from her drawing, had often found Augusta’s dark eyes devouring and caressing her.
No caressing in this scene now. Lovers of a kind, cats of a kind, they would have shown their claws. Augusta was incredulous, aghast, and accusatory; Susan stubborn, perhaps just a shade triumphant. You see? I am not defenseless, I am not to be left out after all. There they sat, burning under their serge and bombazine with emotions hotter than gentility could quite allow.
“Oliver Ward? Who on earth is he? Have I met him? You’re joking.”
“No, I’m quite serious. You haven’t met him. He’s been in California.”
“Then where did you meet him?”
“At Emma’s, one New Year’s Eve.”
“And he’s been gone since? How long?”
“Four years, nearly five.”
“But you’ve been writing to him.”
“Yes, regularly.”
“And now he’s proposed and you’ve accepted, all by mail!”
“No, he’s back. He’s been visiting at Milton for a week.”
Augusta, sitting with her head lowered, found a loose thread in the trimming of her gown and pulled it out. Her fingers smoothed the ruffled rickrack braid. Her dark angry eyes touched Susan’s and looked away. “Doesn’t it seem to you odd—it does to me—that you wouldn’t ever have mentioned this man’s name to me?”
“I didn’t know he was going to become so important.”
“But now after a week’s visit you know.”
“I do know, yes. I love him. I’m going to marry him.”
Augusta rose and paced the room, stopped and put the heels of both palms against her temples. “I thought there were no secrets between us.”
Susan could not resist sinking a claw in the carelessly exposed flesh. “Now that there’s something to tell, I am telling you. Just as you told me when there was something to tell about you and Thomas.”
Augusta stared with her hands to her head. “Ah, that’s it!”
Her cheeks hot, Susan held her ground. “No, that’s not it. But just as you have every right to fall in love and marry, so have I. One doesn’t always know—does one?—when things are headed that way.”
Augusta was shaking her head. “I never expected to see you fall in love like a shopgirl with the first handsome stranger.”
“You’re forgetting yourself!”
“Sue, I think you’re forgetting yourself. What does this young man do?”
“He’s an