Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [66]
But Oliver was not only handy, which as an engineer he probably should have been. He revealed also the most unexpected sensibility. His suggestions about the decoration of the house astonished her, they were so often right. Without making anything of it, even being a little em barrassed by it, he could assemble a bouquet of wildflowers with a careless effectiveness that put her own most painstaking arrangements to shame. He had a touch with plants: everything he brought home from the woods grew as if it had only been awaiting the opportunity of their yard.
Even literature. She wanted to talk to him about Daniel Deronda, about which she and Augusta had been having a chatty and I must say tedious correspondence as they read it simultaneously. But he was impatient with George Eliot. He said she wanted to be both writer and reader–she barely got a character created before she started responding to him and judging him. Turgenev, on the other hand, stayed out of his stories, he let you do your own responding. Meekly, after that conversation, Susan adjusted her opinion in her next letter to Augusta.
They had visitors, a few, enough. Mr. Hamilton Smith, one of Conrad Prager’s associates, and the consulting engineer for the mine, stopped off for dinner, sending her scurrying in panic up to Mexican Camp for a steak, for Mr. Smith was one of those formidable dining out San Franciscans. It was “rich” day–pay day–and the whole camp was drunk. The butcher’s assistant, lured from the Hosteria de los Mineros, cut her a steak with profuse assurances that this was a holiday steak, and he did not charge her for a holiday steak. Oliver, when he heard where she had been by herself, was upset, but her dinner was a success, and after dinner Mr. Smith called upon Oliver to bring out his notebooks, his maps, his drawings of pump stations, everything he had been doing, and they pored over them for two hours “much as you might show your year’s work to Mr. La Farge if he were kinder and more generous.” If Mr. Smith had been manager instead of Mr. Kendall, they would have gone more often to the Hacienda.
In late February, when the hillsides were patched with lupine, poppies, and blue-eyed grass, Mary Prager spent a few days. I quote from Grandmother’s reminiscences: “She thought the place ideal. The valley, changing from hour to hour, battle-fronts of clouds forming along the bases of the mountains, charging, breaking, scattering in tatters and streamers wildly flying ; tops of the mountains seen with ineffable colors on them at sunset and the nearer hills like changeable cut velvet. She walked the piazza smiling to herself; she laid soft hands on my housekeeping. I think our simple routine rested her after the conventional perfection she had set herself to achieve in her marriage to a man whose life demanded it; for she had been a farmer’s daughter, too, and I daresay had to ask her husband what wines to serve with what courses when she gave her exquisite little dinners . . . She and Oliver sassed each other in the Ward family way; and when she saw the artist-wife in her digging hours–more really at home than in the city where she was inclined toward excess of participation under the influence of evening clothes and evening company–I think whatever misgivings she may have had were satisfied. She knew that, in the words of her father when he read that Quaker marriage contract, ‘it would hold.”’
Leaving, Mary Prager held their hands and hoped they would be spared the footloose life common to the profession. Why should they ever leave New Almaden? He could be manager here one day; he had a great opportunity to succeed without making his wife into a wanderer.
As for the young men from Mother Fall’s who drifted up to the Wards’ veranda on chilly spring evenings, they thought Oliver Ward’s clover very deep indeed. To a man they were in love with Susan, pregnant or not. One of them, a boy from the University of California with loads of undigested information in his head and a word of kindly unasked advice