Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [40]
I do get some hint of her feelings from her Guilford letters, describing walks along the shore amid tempests of wind and rain, with a fire and a cup of tea and the sure affections of a sheltered house afterward. Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
She watched Oliver’s family for signs in which she could take comfort.
The father calls me “young lady” and holds my hand in both of his when I bid him good night. He is called all manner of affectionate and ridiculous names by his frisky children, who worship him and treat him as tenderly as if each day were his last, but always with a kind of surface playfulness. This is a family peculiarity—a reticence in expressing sentiment or deep feeling. It is all hidden under a laugh or a gay word. Kate calls her father “you permiscus old parient” with her eyes shining across the card table at him as he gathers up the odd trick and her last trump with it. Oliver calls his father “Old Dad,” but follows him around the house with his chair, and listens with the most respectful attention to his views on dikes and sluices, founded on the ideas of fifty years ago.
That’s better, Grandmother. No apologies or doubts there. It was nice of you to draw the old couple so that Oliver could take their picture West. And it clearly pleased you to look through the family papers and find there evidence of the sort of respectability and continuity you thought American life too often lacked: such memorabilia as a letter from George Washington to Oliver’s ancestor General Ward, and a love letter to his great-great-grandmother, beginning “Honored Madame.” You thought it amusing that though she rejected the suitor she kept the letter, only tearing off the signature—retaining the admiration, as it were, and obliterating the admirer.
Two weeks after Oliver arrived to be married, he was gone again to prepare their house at New Almaden. Before he left, Augusta brought herself to have the two of them to dinner. I am sure she was charming, I am sure Thomas was a friendly and assiduous host. I am equally sure that Oliver found it impossible to “exploit” himself, and sat silent, diffident, and inferior, listening to the literary and artistic jargon and the flow of public names. I am sure that Susan was a little hysterical with satisfaction and apprehension at finally getting into one room the people she most loved. She probably talked too much and made too much of Augusta’s baby, who like anything of Augusta’s was the most perfect on earth. Let her speak for herself.
It seems almost impertinent to tell you that Oliver was just as impressed by you and Thomas, the house and all belonging to you, as I wished him to be . . . If he hadn’t admired you I would have been very much surprised and a good deal disgusted. But it is quite different about Oliver. I should not be surprised if you did not like him much, or disgusted with your taste. He is not an ideal type in the sense that you and Thomas are, but nothing now can shake my utter content and faith in him. So, dear girl, don’t feel bound to admire him for my sake. Don’t try to like him. It will come all the easier to like him by and by when we are all together.
There she goes again, incorrigible.
Her version of the marriage was that for perhaps two years she and Oliver would live in the West while he established himself. Then they would return, and somehow or other the discrepancies between Oliver’s personality and Western leanings and the social and artistic brilliance of the Hudsons’ circle would all be smoothed away. They would trade evenings, their children would be inseparable. Of course it would take a little time.
Oliver wrote that he had found a cottage, once inhabited by a mine captain’s family, which with renovations would make them a pleasant and secluded home. The manager had agreed to