Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [39]
It seems almost impertinent to tell you that Oliver was just as impressed by you and Thomas, the house and all belonging to you, as I wished him to be . . . If he hadn’t admired you I would have been very much surprised and a good deal disgusted. But it is quite different about Oliver. I should not be surprised if you did not like him much, or disgusted with your taste. He is not an ideal type in the sense that you and Thomas are, but nothing now can shake my utter content and faith in him. So, dear girl, don’t feel bound to admire him for my sake. Don’t try to like him. It will come all the easier to like him by and by when we are all together.
There she goes again, incorrigible.
Her version of the marriage was that for perhaps two years she and Oliver would live in the West while he established himself. Then they would return, and somehow or other the discrepancies between Oliver’s personality and Western leanings and the social and artistic brilliance of the Hudsons’ circle would all be smoothed away. They would trade evenings, their children would be inseparable. Of course it would take a little time.
Oliver wrote that he had found a cottage, once inhabited by a mine captain’s family, which with renovations would make them a pleasant and secluded home. The manager had agreed to let him go ahead with the remodeling. He sent a floor plan, onto which she sketched a veranda that went three quarters around, and into whose blank rooms she inserted things she wanted, corner cupboards and such. Their letters of planning went back and forth like installments of a serial.
Help would be a problem. Oliver insisted that she look around for a servant girl to bring along, for the only local product in the servant line was Chinamen. So she found a handsome, rather sullen girl with a seven-months’ baby, a girl who said she had left a brutal husband but who might never have had a husband at all. That was a chilling thought, to bring someone like that into the house. But she was quiet and respectful, and she was eager to go West. When Susan obtained a commission to illustrate a gift edition of The Scarlet Letter, that settled it: she would have a very adequate model for Hester Prynne in her own kitchen. But there would have to be a room for her. She wrote Oliver asking if he would mind an infant in the house, and if it was possible to add a room. He wrote back gamely that he didn’t if she didn’t, and that he would put a lean-to off the kitchen. Give him another couple of weeks.
In July he wrote her to come along, the cottage would be ready as soon as she could get there. She shook the envelope, looking for a money order or a bank draft, but there was none. She waited several days, thinking he had probably put the letter in the mail without the check, and would remember and send it on shortly. No word. She contemplated wiring him and was embarrassed to think how such a telegram would look to Mr. Sanderson at the station in Poughkeepsie.
By the fourth day her agitation was extreme. Should she wait longer, and so delay the reunion for which Oliver was obviously impatient, or should she assume that somehow his money order had gone astray and that the best course was to buy the tickets herself and let Oliver straighten the situation out after she got there? Her parents advised her to wait; she could see doubt in their eyes. But after two more sleepless nights she consulted her feelings and decided not to wait. Worried and ashamed, she crossed the river and bought the tickets out of her savings, and on July 20, 1876, in the hundredth year of the republic and the seventh of the transcontinental railroad, she started West.