Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [44]
I looked at them. Four half-moons of magnification were ground into each lens. When I raised them and looked through them, the front of the building swam like hot taffy, and Al became a small crowd. “I thought I had a problem, having to look straight ahead,” I said. “What do you use them for?”
Tentatively, delicately, the wart emerged, touched the upper bow of Al’s smile, withdrew again. Al stood chuckling, scratching his elbow. “I don’t th’pothe a profethor would ever need anything like thethe. But I’m alwayth having to fixth the mathineth. Ever try to thee with your head inthide a Bendixth?”
I get the message. Space being curved, tunnel vision and the rigid neck could leave a man focused on the back of his own head. I don’t know what the effect of quadruple focals on a historian might be—nausea, maybe—but there might be virtue in trying them on.
Whose head isn’t inside a Bendix?
II
NEW ALMADEN
1
Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained. She anticipated her life in New Almaden as she had looked forward to the train journey across the continent–as a rather strenuous outdoor excursion. The day she spent resting with Oliver’s sister Mary Prager in San Francisco she understood to be the last day of the East, not the first of the West. That sort of house, full of Oriental art, and that hidden garden with its pampas grass and palms and exotic flowers, were not for her, not yet. Mary Prager was such a beauty, and Conrad Prager so formidably elegant, that she wished she could introduce them to Augusta as proof of the acceptability of Oliver’s connections. Because her trunks had not yet arrived, she had to wear Mary Prager’s clothes, which made her feel, in the strange garden in the strange chilly air, like someone else–Mrs. Oliver Ward, perhaps, wife of the young mining engineer who as soon as he had established himself in his profession would be able to provide such a house and life as this, preferably near Guilford, Connecticut, or Milton, New York.
Nothing on the trip to New Almaden next day modified her understanding that her lot at first would be hardship. It was intensely hot, the valley roads seen through the train windows boiled with white dust, Lizzie’s usually silent baby cried and would not be comforted. In San Jose a stage with black leather curtains waited; they were the only passengers. But her anticipation of a romantic Bret Harte stage ride lasted only minutes. Dust engulfed them. She had Oliver draw the curtains, but then the heat was so great that they suffered at a slow boil. After three minutes she had Oliver open the curtains again halfway. They were thus insured both heat and dust, and were almost entirely cut off from the view.
By that time Susan cared nothing about the view, she only wanted to get there. Whenever Oliver caught her eye she made a point of smiling bravely; when he said abusive things about the weather she looked at her perspiring hands, and made mute faces of comic endurance. Now and then, as the stage rocked and threw them around among their luggage, she looked up into Lizzie’s stony face and envied her patience.
It seemed a fantastically long twelve miles. Whatever conversation they attempted faded. They sat on, suffering. Susan was aware of brutal sun outside, an intolerable glare above and through their dust. Then after a long time–two hours?–she happened to glance out through the half-open curtains and saw the white trunk and pointed leaves of a sycamore going by. Their wheels were rolling quietly in sand. She thought the air felt cooler. “Trees?” she said.