Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [38]
In God’s name, Grandmother, I feel like saying to her, what was the matter with him? Did he have a harelip? Use bad language? Eat with his knife? You can do him harm, constantly adjusting his tie and correcting his grammar and telling him to stand up straight. Augusta has got you buffaloed.
It is all Victorian, as Rodman says, all covered up with antimacassars, all quivering with sensibility and an inordinate respect for the genteel. And not a word about that great plunge into sex, from a virginity so absolute that it probably didn’t know the vocabulary, much less the physiology and the emotions. Not the faintest hint, even to Augusta, of how she felt in the room at Brevoort House, dark except for the fluttering of gaslight from the street below, when the near-stranger she was married to touched the fastenings of her gown, or laid a hand charged with 6000 volts on her breast.
If I were a modern writing about a modern young woman I would have to do her wedding night in grisly detail. The custom of the country and the times would demand a description, preferably “comic,” of foreplay, lubrication, penetration, and climax, and in deference to the accepted opinions about Victorian love, I would have to abort the climax and end the wedding night in tears and desolate comfortings. But I don’t know. I have a good deal of confidence in both Susan Burling and the man she married. I imagine they worked it out without the need of any scientific lubricity and with even less need to make their privacies public.
I do get some hint of her feelings from her Guilford letters, describing walks along the shore amid tempests of wind and rain, with a fire and a cup of tea and the sure affections of a sheltered house afterward. Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
She watched Oliver’s family for signs in which she could take comfort.
The father calls me “young lady” and holds my hand in both of his when I bid him good night. He is called all manner of affectionate and ridiculous names by his frisky children, who worship him and treat him as tenderly as if each day were his last, but always with a kind of surface playfulness. This is a family peculiarity—a reticence in expressing sentiment or deep feeling. It is all hidden under a laugh or a gay word. Kate calls her father “you permiscus old parient” with her eyes shining across the card table at him as he gathers up the odd trick and her last trump with it. Oliver calls his father “Old Dad,” but follows him around the house with his chair, and listens with the most respectful attention to his views on dikes and sluices, founded on the ideas of fifty years ago.
That’s better, Grandmother. No apologies or doubts there. It was nice of you to draw the old couple so that Oliver could take their picture West. And it clearly pleased you to look through the family papers and find there evidence of the sort of respectability and continuity you thought American life too often lacked: such memorabilia as a letter from George Washington to Oliver’s ancestor General Ward, and a love letter to his great-great-grandmother, beginning “Honored Madame.” You thought it amusing that though she rejected the suitor she kept the letter, only tearing off the signature—retaining the admiration, as it were, and obliterating the admirer.
Two weeks after Oliver arrived to be married, he was gone again to prepare their house at New Almaden. Before he left, Augusta brought herself to have the two of them to dinner. I am sure she was charming, I am sure Thomas was a friendly and assiduous host. I am equally sure that Oliver found it impossible to