Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [247]
It is easier these days than it was in Grandmother’s time, faster, more direct. Ellen Ward’s seduction took only weeks, and was total. Susan Ward’s, if it was really seduction, took eleven years, and may never have translated impulse into act. I know none of the intimate circumstances; I only guess backward from the consequences.
But when Frank’s hand closed around her foot hanging over the taut edge of the hammock, her body was not encased in its usual armor; it was free and soft in a dressing gown. She was in no danger of swooning, as many genteel ladies did swoon, from being simply too tightly laced for deep-breathing emotions. She was aware of night air, darkness, the dangerous scent of roses, the tension of importunate demand and imminent opportunity. Come into the garden, Maud. If one were a young woman entertaining her betrothed, it would be easy: only hold onto propriety and restraint until marriage let down the barriers. If one were a bad woman, it would be equally easy: ten minutes, who would know?
She was neither a young woman entertaining her betrothed nor a bad woman. She was a decent married woman forty-two years old–a lady, moreover, fastidious, virtuous, intelligent, talented. But also romantic, also unhappy, also caught suddenly by the foot in intimate darkness.
What went on on that piazza? I don’t know. I don’t even know they were there, I just made up the scene to fit other facts that I do know. But the ghosts of Tepetongo and Queréndaro and Tepetitlán, of the Casa Walkenhorst and the Casa Gutierrez haunted that dark porch, both as achieved grace and as failed imitation, and perhaps as offered possibility as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the perfumed darkness of her barren piazza flooded her with memories of the equally perfumed darkness of Morelia, and if the dangerous impossible possibility Frank suggested brought back the solemnity of bells, the grace and order of a way of life as longed-for as the nostalgias of Milton, and as far as possible from the pioneering strains of Idaho. I wouldn’t be surprised, that is, if she was tempted. To flee failure, abandon hopelessness, disengage herself from the stubborn inarticulate man she was married to, and the scheme he was married to, would have been a real temptation. And of course, in 1890, for Susan Burling Ward, utterly unthinkable.
What went on? I don’t know. I gravely doubt that they “had sex,” in Shelly’s charming phrase. Some, even in the age of gentility, did make a mockery of the faithfulness pledged in marriage. The rich often did, she knew some who did; and the poor probably did, out of the sheer brutishness of their condition. Grandmother’s middle class kind did not, or did so with awful convictions of sin and a shameful sense of having lowered and dirtied themselves. I cannot imagine such a complete breakdown in my grandmother, who believed that a woman’s highest role was to be wife and mother, who conceived the female body to be a holy vessel, and its union with a man’s–the single, chosen man’s–woman’s highest joy and fulfillment.
I cannot imagine it, I say. I do not believe it. Yet I have seen the similar breakdown of one whose breakdown I couldn’t possibly have imagined until it happened, whose temptations I was not even aware of.
So I don’t know what happened. I only know that passion and guilt happened, in some form. In their world, their time, their circumstances, and given their respective characters, there could have been no passion without guilt, no kisses without tears, no embrace without despair. I suppose they clung to one another on the dark veranda in a convulsion of love and woe, their passion no sooner ignited by touch than it was put out by conscience.
And I approve. For all my trying, I can only find Victorian solutions to these Victorian problems. I can’t look upon marriage as anything but serious, or upon sex as casual or comic. I feel contempt for those who do so look upon it. Shelly would say I’ve got a hangup on sex. It seems to me of an almost demoralizing importance; I guess I really think that it is either holy or unholy, and that the assurances of marriage are not unrelated to its holiness. I even respect Victorian rebels and fornicators more than the casual screwers and fornicators of our time, because they risked something, because they understood the seriousness of what they did. Well. Whatever Grandmother did, I take it seriously, because I know she did.