Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [71]
Her family and Augusta, anxiously awaiting word of Susan’s lying-in, which despite her letters they probably visualized as happening on the dirt floor of a log cabin, might have saved their worry. As childbirth went in 1877, my father’s was well organized and well at tended.
Marian Prouse arrived on April 22, and within a day had proved herself a pleasant, soft, sensible, and helpful young woman. The day after her arrival there came a letter from Thomas Hudson enthusiastically buying the New Almaden sketch, with whatever illustrations Susan could provide. Three days after that came a letter from William D. Howells, buying Susan’s Mexican fiesta piece and asking for two illustrations, on subjects to be selected by herself, as fast as she could send them. He recalled their pleasant meeting of a few years ago, and hoped that this would be the first of many contributions from her pen and pencil to the pages of the Atlantic. The letter is on the wall over there, framed: the beginning of Grandmother’s literary career.
In the midst of general applause and admiration Susan sat down and wrote a dismayed, apologetic note to Thomas Hudson, lamely ex plaining how it had happened that her first published writing, and her first drawings of New Almaden, might be appearing in Atlantic rather than in Scribner’s. She had been searching for reassurance and had found an embarrassment. But at least she now had confidence that if he and Augusta would help, she might make of the Scribner’s article something that none of them need be ashamed of.
She had barely licked the envelope before she had her first pains. Oliver, who had had a mule tied outside for three days, rode over to Guadalupe and brought back Dr. McPherson, not the camp doctor but one he had known on the Comstock, and trusted. McPherson stayed the night, the next day, and part of the next night, and at long length delivered a boy who weighed a humiliating eleven pounds.
There is a whole folder of correspondence about that birth, its stages, difficulties, damages, and emotional exhaustions and satisfactions. Not even an admiring grandson can deal with it. For one thing, Susan wrote those letters with her eyes firmly closed, having been warned that use of the eyes after childbirth might damage them. For another, they are anciently, mystically, impenetrably female: their sentiments are as opaque to me as their handwriting is illegible. Among other things, she referred to my father then and for a good year afterward as “Boykins.” Ugh.
So I will content myself with my grandfather’s note.
April 29, 1877
My dear Thomas and Augusta, April 29, 1877
Oliver Burling Ward sends his greetings to you this morning, or rather he did some time since and is now sleeping quietly by the side of his mother, who says she is ridiculously well and “too happy to be comfortable.”
She had a little trouble from the long labor, Dr. McPherson had to make some repairs, her convalescence was somewhat extended. Though children might be born among the Cousin Jacks and the Mexicans as casually and as stoically as calves are born in pastures, the camp rallied round for this one. China Sam sent a silk Chinese flag to wrap this Baby Bunting in. A Cornish wife brought over a horrible quilt, quilted by her husband in his off hours, which Susan laughed over and nearly wept over and put firmly away where it could never be seen. But she kept it all her life–it’s probably somewhere in a cupboard in this house right now. Mother Fall’s young men opened so much champagne that they sent her a bouquet of corks surrounded by wild flowers, and before that joke had settled for five minutes, followed it with an armful of roses.
Lying in the parlor, which had been selected as the warmest and least drafty room in the house, Susan could look through the arch, under the pendant bowie,