Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [35]
It was incorrigibly Hudson River school—brown light, ragged elms, romantic water. There they sat on the grass confronting nature. When they had eaten, they did what poets and philosophers did outdoors in the early years of the picturesque—strolled, picked early autumn leaves or late gentians. Susan sketched a little while he stood admiring by. They did not spoon, though Bessie strategically led her husband away so the two could be alone. Having no acceptable way of expressing their feelings directly, they probably vented them on nature. I can see a lot of tableaux while she is struck speechless by a view or a flaming swamp maple, and he stands there with his hat in his hand before the purity of her sensibility.
Late in the afternoon they were back at their picnic spot at the top of the fall. She had always responded strongly to storms, rain in the face, wild winds, wild waters, exciting crossings of the Hudson through floating ice. On this day she lay down and hung her face over the cliff to see down the waterfall. At about the same time, and for similar reasons, John Muir was hanging over the brink of Yosemite Falls dizzying himself with the thunder of hundreds of tons of foam and green glass going by him. Muir had a good deal farther to look down, and the rush of water was far wilder past his ear, but Susan Burling had something her fellow romantic did not. She had Oliver Ward hanging onto her ankles to make sure she didn’t spill over.
Anxious? Not on your life. In these days when a girl goes to bed with anybody who will pat her in a friendly way on the rump, few will be able to imagine how Oliver Ward felt, holding those little ankles. He would not have let go if fire had swept the hilltop, if warrior ants had swarmed over him from head to foot, if Indians had sneaked from the bushes and hacked him loose from his hands. As for Susan Burling, upside down and with her world whirling, that strong grip on her ankles was more than physical contact made sweet by the fact that it came between the bars of an iron cage of propriety, touch asserting itself against a thousand conventions. It was the very hand of the protective male. When she came up out of her dizzying tête-a-tête with the waterfall she was in love.
On the long ride home they did not talk much. They jolted and rocked and smiled, intensely aware of every time their bodies were bumped together. Susan agreed without question when Oliver suggested to John Grant that there was no need of driving them clear to the Burling house. They could get off at the Grant house and walk the last half mile—there was a young moon. So they walked the last dark reach between stone walls that her great-grandfather had laid, along the lane felty with dust, through night air cool with coming fall, tannic with early cured leaves.
Somewhere along the lane they settled it. Two days later Oliver left for Connecticut to see his parents for a few days before going back West to hunt a job and prepare a place for her.
Coming emptyhanded, with nothing to support his suit but hope, he could not have timed his arrival more perfectly or found Susan in a more receptive frame of mind. If the threesome was to be split by marriage (though Augusta and Thomas swore it would not be) New York might be a less happy place, and a Western adventure looked attractive. And if Augusta, despite all her vows, found herself ready to give up art for housekeeping, perhaps her defection demonstrated that after all marriage was woman’s highest role. And if Thomas Hudson was to be firmly given up, the eye might do worse than wander to a man of an altogether different kind, attractive in his own way but in no sense a rival of the lost paragon.
But what a confrontation when she told Augusta. I have to imagine it, but there are hints through years of letters to let me know their respective feelings. I imagine it in the studio on 15th Street where they had worked and slept together for four years in their sublimated dream of art’s bachelorhood, and where Susan, looking up from her drawing, had often found Augusta’s dark eyes devouring and caressing her.