Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [65]
Or here was another echo from home, a Mrs. Elliott, a friend of her Aunt Sarah’s, who came up from Santa Cruz all uninvited and planted herself among them for four days. In her youth she too had had another identity: she had been Georgiana Bruce, and she was one of the Brook Farm transcendentalists. All her life she had been saving the world. She had burned for Abolition, for Woman’s Suffrage, for Spiritualism, for Phrenology, for heaven knew what. She possessed, and quoted from, what Grandmother assumed to be the only copy of Leaves of Grass in California.
In those surroundings she was stranger than Howie Drew, for she sat in Susan’s parlor and talked about Bradford, Curtis, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne–Hawthorne, while just over in the corner cupboard ten feet from her, was a pile of blocks on which Susan had been trying for months to make Hawthorne’s prose into pictures. Mrs. Elliott’s talk was full of names and books and causes that Susan had been brought up to think worth reverence-and a few, such as Whitman, worth a pang of excited alarm–but in person she looked more like this careless coast than like intellectual New England. She could not have bought a new pair of shoes since Brook Farm.
Though it was Susan, in love with talk and ideas, who ought to have responded to this apparition, this gray-haired, leather-faced, shining-eyed Cassandra, it was Oliver, who liked “characters,” who found her amusing. Mrs. Elliott bothered Susan because for all her ideas she was not genteel; she delighted Oliver because she was as odd as Dick’s hatband.
One evening she read their heads. Susan she granted sensibility and delicacy of feeling, but Oliver who had what she called the big top, was the one with the intellectual power. She forced him to admit that he had great headaches, and she instructed Susan to pour cold water, very slowly, on a certain spot–right here, this knob–when the big top ached. Oliver hooted. Why not put a pistol to his head and be done with it?
An eccentric but not a fool, she whipped their quiet routine into a froth. Totally humorless, she made them collapse in laughter. As unkempt as a hermit, she had innumerable suggestions on dress and housekeeping. Obviously a careless mother, she dwelt on the Coming Event and irritated Susan by knowing everything that should be done in preparation and in the way of upbringing. She cast her bright enameled blue eye on Georgie, known as Buster because he busted everything within reach, and told dismayed Lizzie that he was destructive because his latent tenderness had not been appealed to. Boys should play with dolls, to teach them care for others and to stimulate their later parental responsibility–brickbats and tiles they would find for themselves.
Demanding rags, she made in a jiffy a rag baby which she laid in Buster’s arms with sounds of transcendental love. Georgie took it, a wonder. Then he crawled to the edge of the veranda and threw it into the chaparral. He would come to it, Mrs. Elliott said. Give him time. He had been let to get too good a start on a wrong path. But when she left at the end of four days Buster was still throwing the rag doll into the chaparral, and Lizzie confessed to Susan that she didn’t mind. It proved to her that he was all boy.
Come, come to Santa Cruz! Mrs. Elliott said as she departed. When the Great Event had happened, and Susan was rested, and wanted quiet in which to concentrate on the proper influences for that little unformed soul, she should bring him to Santa Cruz where he could wake and sleep to the sound of the sea. It would soothe his harsh masculine temperament if he was male, and reinforce her capacity for love and devotion if she was female.