Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [68]
“Oh, pshaw. Who’s it from?”
“My mother.”
“Mayn’t I read it?”
“It’s private.”
“Well, you are queer,” she said, disappointed. Then she saw slyness in his face. “What are you up to?”
“Can’t a man have private letters from his mother? You have private letters from your old beau Dickie Drake.”
“Oh, Oliver, thee may read them if thee wants! Anyway he’s fallen preposterously in love with a Jewish poetess named Emma Lazarus.”
“Good for him, she can help raise him from the dead. After she does, I’ll read his letters. What I really want to talk about is you having some decent help when the baby comes.”
“Yes?” she said. “Who? You know what Mrs. Kendall pays that clumsy girl she has? Her Chinamen are better servants.”
“I wasn’t thinking of getting you a Chinaman.”
“I should think not. You’re not going to get me anyone. Lizzie can manage.”
“Lizzie’s got all she can do to cook and keep house and look after Buster. You need somebody just for you and the baby.”
“Tell me this instant,” she said. “You’re up to some extravagance. We can’t throw away what little we’ve saved, just on some . . .”
Looking comfortably unpersuaded, Oliver sat on the steps scratching Stranger’s ears. “It’s no extravagance. I told you I wasn’t going to bring you West to live in a shack, and I didn’t, quite, only I spoiled it by not having the money for your fare. I didn’t intend you should have a child in this camp, either, but here we are. So the least we can do is see you’re looked after. Mother’s found somebody who’s willing to come out.”
“Oliver . . .”
“Wait a minute. Not a servant, a lady. Mother guarantees her. Something happened to her man, or maybe she never had one. She’s sort of aground there in New Haven. She’ll come for her fare and servant’s wages. If you don’t turn everything upside down.”
“Oliver . . .”
She labored to her feet. He handed her his mother’s letter. “And we can afford it,” he said. “We can afford anything you need. We could afford it before Kendall raised me and we can afford it better now.”
She felt tears coming, compelled somehow out of her very physical dependency; she flung her arms around him from behind, stooping over him, and he rose awkwardly, turning to meet her. Distractedly she cried into the sweaty wool of his shirt, “Oliver Ward, thee has spoiled me!”
Her family and Augusta, anxiously awaiting word of Susan’s lying-in, which despite her letters they probably visualized as happening on the dirt floor of a log cabin, might have saved their worry. As childbirth went in 1877, my father’s was well organized and well at tended.
Marian Prouse arrived on April 22, and within a day had proved herself a pleasant, soft, sensible, and helpful young woman. The day after her arrival there came a letter from Thomas Hudson enthusiastically buying the New Almaden sketch, with whatever illustrations Susan could provide. Three days after that came a letter from William D. Howells, buying Susan’s Mexican fiesta piece and asking for two illustrations, on subjects to be selected by herself, as fast as she could send them. He recalled their pleasant meeting of a few years ago, and hoped that this would be the first of many contributions from her pen and pencil to the pages of the Atlantic. The letter is on the wall over there, framed: the beginning of Grandmother’s literary career.
In the midst of general applause and admiration Susan sat down and wrote a dismayed, apologetic note to Thomas Hudson, lamely ex plaining how it had happened that her first published writing, and her first drawings of New Almaden, might be appearing in Atlantic rather than in Scribner’s. She had been searching for reassurance and had found an embarrassment. But at least she now had confidence that if he and Augusta would help, she might make of the Scribner’s article something that none of them need be ashamed of.
She had barely licked the envelope before she had her first pains. Oliver, who had had a mule tied outside for three days, rode over to Guadalupe and brought back Dr. McPherson, not the camp doctor but one he had known on the Comstock, and trusted. McPherson stayed the night, the next day, and part of the next night, and at long length delivered a boy who weighed a humiliating eleven pounds.