Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [67]
She was posing, of course. She was thirty. Oliver, whom she sometimes called Sonny, and bossed around, was twenty-eight. It was impossible that they could have been happier. Though the weekly letters still poured back to New York, the tone of them is serene, excited, amused, anything but homesick or desperate. And now and then the East reached out a hand to her and made her realize how much she had changed in barely more than half a year.
Here came Howie Drew, a boy from Milton bent on finding his fortune in the West, and spent a weekend investigating the possibilities of New Almaden, and was advised by Oliver to move on. Because Oliver was busy, Susan took Howie around, and one morning they walked along the new road that Chinese coolies were building to the Santa Isabel tunnel. As they walked, talking about home, she looked past his red head and saw the nameless local flowers looking down at them from the bank. They passed blackened places where pig-tailed Chinese had built noon fires for their tea. The signal bells clinked from the shaft house and a tram car dumped with a rumbling roar off the platform of the Day tunnel. And here was Howie Drew from down the road, the son of the ferryman, a boy she used to look after for his mother when she was fifteen. And here was herself, Mrs. Oliver Ward, no longer Susan Burling, barrel-shaped with child, only walking at all because she had Howie to go along, only appearing with Howie because he was an old friend, almost family. Familiar and unfamiliar swam and blended into a strangeness like dreaming as she saw Howie Drew’s face out of her girlhood against the mountainside of her present life. A wash of confused feeling went over her like wind across a sweating skin, for the identity that Howie took for granted and talked to and reflected back at her was not the identity it used to be, not the one that had signed all her past drawings, not the one she knew herself. Then what was it now? She didn’t know.
Or here was another echo from home, a Mrs. Elliott, a friend of her Aunt Sarah’s, who came up from Santa Cruz all uninvited and planted herself among them for four days. In her youth she too had had another identity: she had been Georgiana Bruce, and she was one of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. All her life she had been saving the world. She had burned for Abolition, for Woman’s Suffrage, for Spiritualism, for Phrenology, for heaven knew what. She possessed, and quoted from, what Grandmother assumed to be the only copy of Leaves of Grass in California.
In those surroundings she was stranger than Howie Drew, for she sat in Susan’s parlor and talked about Bradford, Curtis, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne–Hawthorne, while just over in the corner cupboard ten feet from her, was a pile of blocks on which Susan had been trying for months to make Hawthorne’s prose into pictures. Mrs. Elliott’s talk was full of names and books and causes that Susan had been brought up to think worth reverence-and a few, such as Whitman, worth a pang of excited alarm–but in person she looked more like this careless coast than like intellectual New England. She could not have bought a new pair of shoes since Brook Farm.
Though it was Susan, in love with talk and ideas, who ought to have responded to this apparition, this gray-haired, leather-faced, shining-eyed Cassandra, it was Oliver, who liked “characters,” who found her amusing. Mrs. Elliott bothered Susan because for all her ideas she was not genteel; she delighted Oliver because she was as odd as Dick’s hatband.
One evening she read their heads. Susan she granted sensibility and delicacy of feeling, but Oliver who had what she called the big top, was the one with the intellectual power. She forced him to admit that he had great headaches, and she instructed Susan to pour cold water, very slowly, on a certain spot–right here, this knob–when the