Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [97]
But he had no options, having married a lady with a talent and having so far demonstrated his inability to keep her as he believed she should be kept. It was clear to him that, however she tried to reassure him, Susan carried his failure home in her baggage. She returned East poorer than she had come West, still homeless, and with a remoter chance of being soon settled. And she paid her own fare again, a thing that galled him.
Probably Susan consoled herself with the thought that she brought at least one good thing home: her baby. Perhaps she also had in some private corner of her mind the satisfaction of knowing that in spite of marriage, motherhood, and economic uncertainty she had not ceased to exist as an artist.
If she felt regret at having to leave Lizzie and Marian Prouse out on the edge of the half-civilized world, she shouldn’t have; she could have done them no greater favor. Whatever the West of 1878 was for young mining engineers, it was the land of opportunity for unmarried women. Lizzie shortly would marry her rancher, and before she was through would give Buster five brothers and sisters. Marian Prouse, that large, soft, surprisingly adventurous young woman, would go on even farther west, to the Sandwich Islands, and there would marry a sugar planter and live on a beach more romantic than the one Grandmother coveted in Santa Cruz–a beach of silvery sand above Lahaina, on Maui, where coconut palms lean to frame the hump of Lanai across the Auau Channel.
It is odd to think, as I sit here in Grandmother’s study imagining a future that is already long past, that I have walked that Lahaina beach with Marian’s grandchildren, and found them, as they perhaps found me, only pleasant strangers. Irrationally, at the time, I couldn’t help thinking that because their grandmother’s life was briefly entangled with that of Susan and Oliver Ward, we owed each other something more than casual politeness.
No sign of failed hope showed on their trip East, for Conrad Prager had a princely way with money, food, wine, cigars, conversation, and Pullman porters, and their party included not only the Pragers and their two children, but a Scotch nurse who seemed to manage three as easily as two. It was a pleasure trip in the company of rich friends. They did not eat out of any basket; they dined largely. The talk was the kind Susan had been hungry for, the wine was picked by an expert, there were hours on the observation platform while the gentlemen smoked and the ladies watched the scenery.
Nevertheless, Susan had a spasm of utter panic, a black, blinding bolt of despair, when the train started out of the Cheyenne station leaving Oliver on the platform with his carpetbag and his rolled tent at his feet, his hat in his hand, the spring sun in his eyes. He seemed to be smiling, but he might have been only squinting against the light. She pressed her frantic face to the glass and kept her handkerchief fluttering as he walked, then trotted, beside the train. The platform ended and he stopped abruptly, began to go backward. Susan seized Ollie from his basket and held him so harshly to the window for a parting sight of his father that she made him cry. Immediately she began to cry herself, hugging him to her and straining for a last glimpse backward. He had passed from sight, the track-side ditch was full of muddy water out of which rose the stark poles of the telegraph line. It all swam and drowned in her tears. She felt the nurse taking the baby, and let him go. She heard Mary Prager say something savingly matter-of-fact, she heard Conrad murmur that he guessed he would go back on the platform and smoke a cigar.
Later it began to rain. Protected by the Pragers’ consideration, she sat by herself and brooded out upon empty plains that winter had barely left and spring hardly touched. Miles of brown grass, raw cutbanks, flooded creeks coming down into the flooded bottoms of the Platte where bare cottonwoods seemed to grow out of a slough, and the benches of the flood plain, seen through rain that swept along the train and rattled on the windows, were the banks of a dreary lake. Now and then a stark, muddy little settlement