Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [39]
6
No minister married them. According to the Friends’ service, Oliver met her at the foot of the stair and escorted her into the parlor, where in the presence of forty-four witnesses, all of whom signed the marriage paper, they pledged themselves to each other, “she according to the custom of marriage assuming the name of the husband.” There went the rising young artist Susan Burling.
And no one stood up with her. Augusta, only a month out of child-bed, said she was not well enough—“and if I can’t have you I won’t have anyone,” Susan wrote her. Faithful friendship, the old warmth. But in that same note there is a reference to “my friend whom you don’t want to like.” She knew very well why Augusta stayed away; she may have half-granted Augusta’s reasons.
Susan Burling I historically admire, and when she was an old lady I loved her very much. But I wish I could take her by the ear and lead her aside and tell her a few things. Nemesis in a wheelchair, knowing the future, I could tell her that it is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
While they were honeymooning at the Brevoort House, Thomas called on them, alone. Susan watched his face and estimated his decent politeness for what it was. Later, from Oliver’s home in Guilford, she wrote to Augusta:
I haven’t an anxiety in the world at present, except perhaps lest you may not like my boy when you finally meet him. They tell me stories about his boyhood which please me very much. He was such a plucky boy—hardy, enterprising, generous, and truthful. I shall have to be very weak and praise him to you, for he does not “exploit” himself . . . I am sure Thomas was a little disappointed, and so will you be at first.
In another letter—she wrote too many on her honeymoon—she expressed a confidence that to a critical ear sounds a little shrill:
I might have spared myself all my past misgivings. He has not only the will to spare me and keep me safe in every way but he knows how to do so. I ought to have had more faith in him. I knew he would do all he understood to be a man’s duty to his wife, but I didn’t know how far his understanding of his duty reached. I am left literally nothing to worry about except that he will work too hard. He is very ambitious and will work on his nerve more than is right. It frightens me to hear him quietly tell of the way he has lived these years past—with one object—and the devious, hard, and dangerous ways and places in which he has steadily pursued it. I know this is very weak of me and bad policy too—for you have not seen my boy and all this praise may deepen your first disappointment.
In God’s name, Grandmother, I feel like saying to her, what was the matter with him? Did he have a harelip? Use bad language? Eat with his knife? You can do him harm, constantly adjusting his tie and correcting his grammar and telling him to stand up straight. Augusta has got you buffaloed.
It is all Victorian, as Rodman says, all covered up with antimacassars, all quivering with sensibility and an inordinate respect for the genteel. And not a word about that great plunge into sex, from a virginity so absolute that it probably didn’t know the vocabulary, much less the physiology and the emotions. Not the faintest hint, even to Augusta, of how she felt in the room at Brevoort House, dark except for the fluttering of gaslight from the street below, when the near-stranger she was married to touched the fastenings of her gown, or laid a hand charged with 6000 volts on her breast.
If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferably “comic,” of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax, and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don’t know. I have a good deal of confidence in