Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [137]
Need for her husband, like worry over him, was tuned low, and Augusta’s continued absence aroused only an infrequent, pleasant wistfulness. They had not seen each other in nearly four years. Absorbed in her child and her book, sunk in her affection for home, she could go whole days without mentioning or thinking Augusta’s name.
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. I doubt that anyone of Rodman’s generation could comprehend the home feelings of someone like Susan Ward. Despite her unwillingness to live separately from her husband, she could probably have stayed on indefinitely in Milton, visited only occasionally by an asteroid husband. Or she could have picked up the old home and remade it in a new place. What she resisted was being the wife of a failure and a woman with no home.
When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization : what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced; in that sense our pioneer women were always more realistic than our pioneer men. The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called “merely cultural,” not even living in traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!
Oliver’s letters told her little–she wondered often how she had happened to marry a man for whom words were so difficult. A few crumbs of news leaked through. Ferd Ward’s son, sent out to work at the Adelaide, had been spending more time at the monte tables than at the office. He had borrowed two hundred dollars from Oliver and smaller sums from Frank. Now last payday Pricey had found the cash box short by more than a hundred, and young Ward, challenged, had admitted “borrowing” it. Oliver had written his father. Nothing else to report except that the DR&G was making progress up the valley of the Arkansas. She wouldn’t have to come over Mosquito Pass when she came. Frank and Pricey sent regards.
She was provoked with him for letting himself be imposed upon, though she could not have said how he should have avoided lending money to Ferd Ward’s scapegrace son. She wrote him telling him to make an immediate claim on the father, to let no time elapse. There had been rumors in the papers that the Wizard of Wall Street was shaky. She told him how well Ollie had been, how she was coming on with her novel. She reported scraps of Augusta’s travels in Sicily. She walked to the post office to mail her letter, and returned to work through the afternoon. It gave her a miser’s pleasure to watch the pile of manuscript grow. Her grandfather’s life absorbed hers.
For a long time. She had finished the novel and sold it to Century as a five-part serial, and the orchards were beginning to pop their buds, by the time his letter came saying she could now get in by rail. At once, like a milldam opened, her ponded life began to flow again.