Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [256]
From later letters, I know that Grandmother delivered my father to St. Paul’s sometime around the first of August, a good month before school opened. Since they left Boise on July 22, and would have taken the best part of a week crossing the continent, she could have paused in Milton only two or three days before taking him on to Concord.
Why that haste? They were all stunned, distracted, grieving, shot to bits. Why wouldn’t that mother have kept the remains of her family around her? Wouldn’t her silent manly boy have been a comfort to her, wouldn’t she have felt that she should be near to comfort him? I suppose she may have felt uncomfortable about throwing herself on the mercy of Bessie and John, after the loss and disappointment those two had had on account of her and hers. But Bessie was the warmest and most affectionate of sisters; in the circumstances she would have opened every door and room and heart in her house to Susan and her children. And even if Susan felt that she herself shouldn’t or couldn’t stay, why wouldn’t she have left Ollie to have a healthy and healing time with his cousins on the farm? He was big enough and handy enough to be a help to John, and he would certainly have been happier there than moping around in a deserted school with his loneliness and misery. Yet his mother snatched him away from Milton after barely forty-eight hours, and took him up to Concord and unloaded him on Dr. Rhinelander as she might have sped an unwelcome visitor.
Why?
All her life she spoke of Dr. Rhinelander with gratitude, because that summer and two summers thereafter he took Ollie in with his own family, carried him along to a Maine island, found scholarship money to support him through St. Paul’s, and when he graduated, got him a scholarship to MIT. Reasons enough for gratitude. But put that kindness of Dr. Rhinelander’s against the fact that my father did not come home again for ten years. Until he graduated from St. Paul’s, he spent every summer vacation with the Rhinelanders; after he started at MIT he took summer jobs. One of them brought him out on a surveying crew to the Idaho mountains where his father had worked years before. By then his family were living here in Grass Valley, but their son did not come the rest of the way west to see them. He saw his father once or twice a year in New York. His mother he saw not at all. When he graduated from MIT he found a job in Korea–and sailed from Seattle without a visit home–and he stayed in Korea until the Russo-Japanese War drove him out. Then, and only then, he accepted Grandfather’s offer to become superintendent of the Zodiac when Grandfather became general manager.
Ten years. What am I to make of that? Especially when I remember the lifelong taciturnity that was more like a disease than a mere quality of his temperament? Especially when I remember how Grandmother deferred to him, and feared his silences? Especially when I remember her frantic haste to get rid of him in the summer of 1890? I have to conclude that he knew something, or suspected something, or had seen something, or thought her to blame for the catastrophes that within three or four days had shaken down his world. I have to believe that in her distraction and self-loathing–he could not have blamed her more than she blamed herself–she could not bear the look in her son’s eyes. And though I could probably make up some episode to corroborate what I suspect, I think I shall not. Let it go at the fact that from that time on he had an aversion, all but incurable, against his mother; and that she read his mind before they left Idaho, and could not stand what she saw.
So there they go again on a transcontinental train, this time not merely in defeat but in utter rout–a sullen white-faced boy, a scared little girl not quite ten, a mother strung up like a piano string, turning a white blank smile toward people who came up to her or called from the platform–Boise was a town that met the through trains. But it all came apart when Nellie broke down into terrible weeping, grabbed the children and hugged them and wet them with her tears, clung to Susan with sobs that shook and shattered them both. They were all crying. With streaming eyes Nellie stood back, tried to say something, strangled, looked at them all piteously for a moment with her weak English chin trembling, and pressed her handkerchief to her mouth and put her head down and fled. Susan herded the children aboard, a sympathetic porter found their seats and brought their bags and left them, they huddled in the high Pullman plush and hid from the eyes of the curious. It was like coming into a room full of people with all their desolation plain upon them. They could hear the rustling of newspapers. For some reason the man across the aisle chose that moment to pick up the orange skins and litter on the seat and floor around him. They turned their faces away from his peeping. Susan took Betsy