Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [64]
They had visitors, a few, enough. Mr. Hamilton Smith, one of Conrad Prager’s associates, and the consulting engineer for the mine, stopped off for dinner, sending her scurrying in panic up to Mexican Camp for a steak, for Mr. Smith was one of those formidable dining out San Franciscans. It was “rich” day–pay day–and the whole camp was drunk. The butcher’s assistant, lured from the Hosteria de los Mineros, cut her a steak with profuse assurances that this was a holiday steak, and he did not charge her for a holiday steak. Oliver, when he heard where she had been by herself, was upset, but her dinner was a success, and after dinner Mr. Smith called upon Oliver to bring out his notebooks, his maps, his drawings of pump stations, everything he had been doing, and they pored over them for two hours “much as you might show your year’s work to Mr. La Farge if he were kinder and more generous.” If Mr. Smith had been manager instead of Mr. Kendall, they would have gone more often to the Hacienda.
In late February, when the hillsides were patched with lupine, poppies, and blue-eyed grass, Mary Prager spent a few days. I quote from Grandmother’s reminiscences: “She thought the place ideal. The valley, changing from hour to hour, battle-fronts of clouds forming along the bases of the mountains, charging, breaking, scattering in tatters and streamers wildly flying ; tops of the mountains seen with ineffable colors on them at sunset and the nearer hills like changeable cut velvet. She walked the piazza smiling to herself; she laid soft hands on my housekeeping. I think our simple routine rested her after the conventional perfection she had set herself to achieve in her marriage to a man whose life demanded it; for she had been a farmer’s daughter, too, and I daresay had to ask her husband what wines to serve with what courses when she gave her exquisite little dinners . . . She and Oliver sassed each other in the Ward family way; and when she saw the artist-wife in her digging hours–more really at home than in the city where she was inclined toward excess of participation under the influence of evening clothes and evening company–I think whatever misgivings she may have had were satisfied. She knew that, in the words of her father when he read that Quaker marriage contract, ‘it would hold.”’
Leaving, Mary Prager held their hands and hoped they would be spared the footloose life common to the profession. Why should they ever leave New Almaden? He could be manager here one day; he had a great opportunity to succeed without making his wife into a wanderer.
As for the young men from Mother Fall’s who drifted up to the Wards’ veranda on chilly spring evenings, they thought Oliver Ward’s clover very deep indeed. To a man they were in love with Susan, pregnant or not. One of them, a boy from the University of California with loads of undigested information in his head and a word of kindly unasked advice for anyone he talked to, stumbled off the porch one evening and blurted to Oliver that Mrs. Ward was more an angel than a woman. “Which amused both of us,” Susan wrote, “but made one of us feel sad and old.”
She was posing, of course. She was thirty. Oliver, whom she sometimes called Sonny, and bossed around, was twenty-eight. It was impossible that they could have been happier. Though the weekly letters still poured back to New York, the tone of them is serene, excited, amused, anything but homesick or desperate. And now and then the East reached out a hand to her and made her realize how much she had changed in barely more than half a year.
Here came Howie Drew, a boy from Milton bent on finding his fortune in the West, and spent a weekend investigating the possibilities of New Almaden, and was advised by Oliver to move on. Because Oliver was busy, Susan took Howie around, and one morning they walked along the new road that Chinese coolies were building to the Santa Isabel tunnel. As they walked, talking about home, she looked past his red head and saw the nameless local flowers looking down at them from the bank. They passed blackened places where pig-tailed Chinese had built noon fires for their tea. The signal bells clinked from the shaft house and a tram car dumped with a rumbling roar off the platform of the Day tunnel. And here was Howie Drew from down the road, the son of the ferryman, a boy she used to look after for his mother when she was fifteen. And here was herself, Mrs. Oliver Ward, no longer Susan Burling, barrel-shaped with child, only walking at all because she had Howie to go along, only appearing with Howie because he was an old friend, almost family. Familiar and unfamiliar swam and blended into a strangeness like dreaming as she saw Howie Drew