Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [30]
John La Farge had spent the afternoon at Augusta’s 15th Street studio, and had read them parts of a poem called The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám. Thomas Moran, encountered in the Scribner office, had been flattering about Susan’s drawings, and had wished that he could draw, as she could, directly on the block, so as to be less at the mercy of engravers. The Scribner crowd had just left Milton after a weekend of picnics, boat rides, and cider parties, and the Scottish novelist George MacDonald had read from his latest book, and George Washington Cable had then been prevailed upon to read a Creole story he had just completed, and the actress Ella Clymer had bewitched them all on the midnight piazza with a song, “I Love to See Her Slipping Down a Stair.” Thomas Hudson, the young Scribner editor, had left the company for a bare half hour and returned with a magnificent sonnet. And hardly had the Scribner crowd gone back down to New York than a Boston editor brought John Greenleaf Whittier around to discuss illustrations for a gift edition of Snowbound. They caught her scrubbing the dining room, and she had to seat them in the parlor and talk to them through the door while she finished mopping up.
She told things like that as jokes on herself, but Oliver Ward on his powder keg in his tar-papered shack could not miss the Great Name that had come to her door seeking her. She hung it up there like a jack-o’-lantern.
Snowbound fell through, but shortly she was busy on forty drawings and a dozen vignettes for Longfellow’s The Hanging of the Crane, and a year and a half after she began that, she reported its considerable success in the Christmas trade, and a little later still she wrote that Osgood and Company had mysteriously invited her to Boston, and there surprised her with a dinner at which the whole Brahmin population of New England was present. Mr. Whittier was there, still chuckling over the floor-mopping episode. Mr. Lowell paid her a flattering amount of attention. Mr. Holmes was very witty. Mr. Longfellow held her hand quite a long time and told her he was astonished that one so talented should also be so young and charming. He made her promise to illustrate The Skeleton in Armor—which, it turned out, was what the publishers had brought her to Boston to discuss. Mr. Howells, the new editor of the Atlantic, praised her realism. Mr. Bret Harte, the celebrated California author, answered her questions about the Sierra Nevada, in which she had expressed an interest.
She was barely twenty-four, and she admits she boasted, “ungenerously.” But that young man in the West was as steady as a lighthouse. He applauded her successes, he never expressed jealousy of the young men whose luck he must have envied, he accepted her ambiguous relationship with Augusta and her almost equally ambiguous relationship with Thomas Hudson, now the third of an intimate threesome.
Grandmother implies that he won her over by his cheerful confidence, so that an understanding gradually grew up between them. I doubt the understanding, and I doubt Grandfather’s confidence. What did he have to be confident about? Trapped for three years in that litigated tunnel, he must have known that if it was ever finished, a junior engineer without a degree would emerge into the old barren sunlight beating on the old sterile mountains, and that if he wanted a chance at Susan Burling he would have to emerge with more than experience.
I don’t think she was protecting herself from an attachment she feared might leave her on the bough. I don’t think there was that much of an attachment, not on her part. He kept writing, and she didn’t have the heart to shut him off. And he was a reserve possibility, a hole card that she didn’t look at because she didn’t want to risk breaking up the beautiful sequence of hearts face-up in her hand.
At that stage I don’t see her looking for a husband. She didn’t really want a fifth card any more than she wanted to look at her hole card. She had her career, she had Augusta and the marriage of true minds, and she had Thomas, whom she admired and idealized. She probably hoped their threesome could go on indefinitely. Though she was no bohemian, she was willing to be unconventional if the conventions could be broken without impropriety; and quite apart from her devotion to Augusta and Thomas, she had a tough and unswerving dedication to her art. She might even have accepted spinsterhood as the price of her career if the cards had fallen that way. And if the cards fell wrong, if Augusta should marry or move away, if art should fail, if her career should be disappointing and she should be exposed to the chilly fear that in the 1870s paled the cheek and weakened the knees of unmarried girls over twenty-four, then why wouldn