Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [255]
She came up behind my chair, she bent over me and put her arms around me and hugged my rigid head against her uninhibited bosom. She loudly kissed the top of my head. “You’re a gas, Mister Ward,” she said. “You’re O.K.” She went on upstairs to work and left me there, looking out into the rose garden and across Grandfather’s acres of lawn, and feeling bleak, bleak, bleak.
7
Up to now, reconstructing Grandmother’s life has been an easy game. Her letters and reminiscences have provided both event and interpretation. But now I am at a place where she hasn’t done the work for me, and where it isn’t any longer a game. I not only don’t want this history to happen, I have to make it up, or part of it. All I know is the what, and not all of that; the how and the why are all speculation.
For one thing, there is a three-month blank in Grandmother’s correspondence with Augusta. From July 2 until the end of September 1890 there is only one brief note mailed between trains in the Chicago station. If other letters from that period ever existed, they have been destroyed, either by Augusta or by Grandmother herself after the correspondence was sent back to her. As for the reminiscences, they pass over those months of disaster and desolation in one sentence, and not a revealing sentence either.
As one who loved her, I am just as glad not to have to watch her writhe. As her biographer, and a biographer moreover with a personal motive, probing toward the center of a woe that I always knew about but never understood, I am frustrated. Just where there should be illumination, there is ambiguous dusk. Right at Susan Ward’s core, behind the reticence and the stoicism, where I hoped to see her plain and learn from her, there is nothing but a manila envelope of Xeroxed newspaper clippings that raise more questions than they answer. I fight my way through all the giants and wizards, I cross to her castle on the swordedge bridge, I let myself down hand over hand into her dungeon well, and instead of my reward, a living woman, there is a skeleton with a riddle between its ribs.
“Don’t tell me too much,” Henry James is supposed to have said, when some anecdote vibrated his web and alerted him to the prospect of a story. “Don’t tell me too much!” But he was not writing biography, and he had no personal stake in what he did. He could invent within the logic of a situation. I have to invent within a body of inhibiting facts that I wish were otherwise. If I had had Shelly put them in chronological order I might be able to start in on those clippings in some business-like way, but I have not shown them to Shelly. I ran through them with the avidity of a thief counting his loot when they first came, and then I stuffed them back into their envelope, unwilling to do the peephole detective work they seemed to demand.
But if I don’t do it, what do I do? Stop? She has kept me alive all summer, that woman. I have been her private werewolf. I know, furthermore, that my reluctance to expose her trouble is calculated to spare myself, not her. What point is there in sparing a woman who has been dead more than thirty years? So I will do it like fortune telling. I will start at the top of that little stack of clippings and read down through them and see what they tell me.
The first one is a very brief notice, a pencil-encircled paragraph from the “Of Local Interest” column for July 22, 1890. It says that Mrs. Oliver Ward, accompanied by her son Oliver junior and her daughter Elizabeth, left on that day to visit relatives at the East, and to put young Oliver in school in New Hampshire.
Either because his readers would all have been full of the affairs of the Oliver Wards and the London and Idaho Canal Company, or out of some feeling of charity or compassion, the editor says no more than that–nothing about the events that for two weeks have been the sensation of the town. And at once, with his bare notice of Susan’s departure, he presents me with a question that is unanswerable by reference to any of the known facts.