Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [41]
Help would be a problem. Oliver insisted that she look around for a servant girl to bring along, for the only local product in the servant line was Chinamen. So she found a handsome, rather sullen girl with a seven-months’ baby, a girl who said she had left a brutal husband but who might never have had a husband at all. That was a chilling thought, to bring someone like that into the house. But she was quiet and respectful, and she was eager to go West. When Susan obtained a commission to illustrate a gift edition of The Scarlet Letter, that settled it: she would have a very adequate model for Hester Prynne in her own kitchen. But there would have to be a room for her. She wrote Oliver asking if he would mind an infant in the house, and if it was possible to add a room. He wrote back gamely that he didn’t if she didn’t, and that he would put a lean-to off the kitchen. Give him another couple of weeks.
In July he wrote her to come along, the cottage would be ready as soon as she could get there. She shook the envelope, looking for a money order or a bank draft, but there was none. She waited several days, thinking he had probably put the letter in the mail without the check, and would remember and send it on shortly. No word. She contemplated wiring him and was embarrassed to think how such a telegram would look to Mr. Sanderson at the station in Poughkeepsie.
By the fourth day her agitation was extreme. Should she wait longer, and so delay the reunion for which Oliver was obviously impatient, or should she assume that somehow his money order had gone astray and that the best course was to buy the tickets herself and let Oliver straighten the situation out after she got there? Her parents advised her to wait; she could see doubt in their eyes. But after two more sleepless nights she consulted her feelings and decided not to wait. Worried and ashamed, she crossed the river and bought the tickets out of her savings, and on July 20, 1876, in the hundredth year of the republic and the seventh of the transcontinental railroad, she started West.
It was a difficult parting. Custer’s cavalry had been destroyed on the Little Big Horn less than a month before, and her parents imagined Indians ambushed the length of the transcontinental rails. There was also that uncertainty about the train fare. She read their unspoken fear that she had tied herself to an unreliable man. Their silence about him she could only answer by a false cheerfulness and an artificial excitement about the journey.
How she managed to part from Augusta, God knows. I imagine them coming apart like two of the great sheets of flypaper, stuck glue to glue, that I used to separate and set out for summer flies. I know it is not a reverent way to speak of the parting of true minds, but I can’t help it. Obviously I think Susan was better off in the care of Oliver Ward, train fare or no train fare, than under the influence of that glamorous and arty socialite.
Distance, of course, was not enough to keep their true minds apart. Susan was barely to Chicago before she scribbled her first postcard, and a delay in Omaha gave her opportunity to write a five-page letter. Not a word in it about Oliver Ward, no expressed anticipations or worries about California. Those were scabs she would not pick, especially when her confidence was shaken.
But there are passages that I read as shadowy forecasts of her future. She found Omaha “Western in the worst sense of the word. There is one building—the Omaha Stock Market—plaided, my dear, in squares of red, white, and blue!” She was depressed by the repetitive ugly barren little towns across the sod house country, and it could be she felt a shiver of premonition as she described the “lonely little clusters of settlers’ houses with the great monotonous