Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [234]
Just today I heard from Oliver, who has taken his Irrigation Survey report east (Major Powell is in difficulties with a certain clique of Senators, and wants all possible ammunition for this session of Congress). Before going to Washington, Oliver found time to run up to Concord. All is not quite as I had hoped. Ollie is struggling, keeping afloat in his studies but only barely. He is somewhat lonesome and isolated, Oliver says. He feels his difference, and resents the allusions of his schoolmates to it. Shortly after he arrived last fall, he appears to have got into an actual fist fight with a boy who sneered at the place he came from. “Idaho is my home!” he told Dr. Rhinelander, as if that justified everything. And he wears a sprig of sage in his jacket buttonhole, as a Scotch lassie might wear a sprig of heather!
I am miserable at the thought of his homesickness and his fighting–he is not a rude or brawling boy. It makes me doubt the wisdom of my plans for him. Yet he has come to know you and Thomas and your children, he has traveled by himself like a grown man, he is studying with the finest teachers, among the finest Eastern boys. I know he will thank me in the end for forcing this on him.
In his letter he asks for a photograph of his sisters to put up in his room, and also one of his pony. Evidently the information that he has a pony has helped gain him prestige among his schoolmates, and he has always been very manly and protective about his sisters, especially Agnes. I have asked Wiley, who owns a camera, to bring it next time he rides this way, so that we may send Ollie what he wants.
One thing in Oliver’s letter made me feel like crying with an odd mixture of feelings. It seems that after talking with Dr. Rhinelander and saying good-bye to Ollie, Oliver slipped up into the balcony of the chapel and watched unseen during the chapel service, which he says was impressive, and the boys well behaved. Oh, I would give anything I own to do that same thing, only for ten minutes–to look down from my hiding place in that dim, scholarly light, with solemn noble words on the air, and see my own boy’s brown head down there among the others, absorbing it and gathering in wisdom and the sense of what it means to be civilized!
Instead, I look out my window and see thin, rippled snow, and sagebrush that bends stiffly in a bitter northwest wind. Our hope of restoring our old community of saints here has not quite been gratified. The men have been frantically busy, Frank and Wiley have been up in the canyon most of the time. Now Oliver is away and Frank is about to go East and visit his parents for the first time in five years. I shall give him a letter to you, for I want you to know each other. If he expresses himself freely to you, please listen, and do not judge him or me too harshly. It will be the next best thing to talking to you myself. We are all right–life continues, the old bonds hold–and if there is a certain unhappiness, a real regret, why that is what man, and even more woman, is born to. I repeat, I am all right.
The Mesa
March 1, 1890
Darling Augusta–
You have been much with me for the past two or three days. The other evening I was rereading The Freshening Day, that first book of Thomas’s poems, and our wedding-present copy from you, with the date of my wedding day fourteen years ago. You remember you painted a rose spray across the silk-lined fly leaf, and daisies in the back. Two of the sonnets Thomas wrote in Milton, on one of those summer weekends that seem more and more wonderful as time tries to efface them. I felt strangely, miraculously preserved as I read, and yet oh! so melancholy and sad! The book of life turned back in my hands to that time of maidenhood and expectation.
Who could have foreseen for the bride of that day the picture that is and has been–the shall be is still to be unfolded. Sometimes it chills my heart to think about the future almost as much as it warms it to think about the past. I believe that I can foresee my life to come much better than I could, and I feel that I have the strength to bear it, whatever it may be. And yet, bear it! What of a future of which it can even be thought, it might have to be borne!