Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [98]
The Platte Valley slid by for a whole day before they even got to Omaha. Omaha, which less than two years before had struck her as the absolute dropping-off place, the western edge of nowhere. She remembered her bright scorn at the stockyards building, “plaided, my dear, in red, white, and blue!”, and shrank at the image of the postman delivering that postcard to a crepe-hung door. Now here she came back, already five days on her homeward journey, and she was barely breaking over the rim of the Eastern world (how far she had been away!) bringing her excuses for her husband, her homeless baby, while Oliver fell every minute farther back among the endless plains and badlands.
She planned cunningly how she would tell her story. Deadwood was an opportunity he could not afford to give up, and so she seized the chance for a visit home. She polished phrases that would make his four-day stage ride and his leaky tent and his job for George Hearst seem an adventure. And in the process of framing the West and her husband in words, she began to leave them behind.
She was like a traveler still on the road on one of those evenings when sun and moon, one rising as the other sets, face each other across the world. Once she passed Omaha, Oliver grew steadily more remote in space and time, Milton and Augusta grew nearer. Home was more precious, and her impatience more intense, every hour. She would not let Conrad send a telegram from Chicago to announce her arrival, because she did not want to make her father or John Grant spend a night in Poughkeepsie to meet her late train. She would go to the hotel for what was left of the night, and take the ferry in the morning.
It reconstructed itself in her mind like the lines of a familiar poem: the shabby waiting room, the recognized cabman, the countrified hotel where she would be able to bathe her baby and herself properly for the first time in a week. In confidential whispers she told Ollie how she would show him the apple blossoms on the way down to the ferry, and introduce him to the ferryman, Howie Drew’s father. At New Paltz Landing they would leave their luggage for John to pick up in the buggy, and they would walk up the lane that ran through her childhood, between fields familiar from the time she learned to walk. She would let him smell the dew-heavy hemlocks in the glen, and watch the birds busy in the trees, the chipmunks in the stone walls. They would stop to see how the dogwood hung outward from the woods as if to surprise a passer-by.
But their train, delayed by the universal floods, pulled into Poughkeepsie at four o’clock in the morning. Susan had insisted that the others go to bed, but had not been able to keep Conrad from staying up with her. He wanted her to come on with them to New York, take a room there, and come back rested the next day, but she would not. She motioned the porter to unload her bags, she broke away from Conrad’s restraining hand and stepped down with Ollie. There was a lantern burning above the station agent’s door, a lamp inside the waiting room, but not a soul in sight. Conrad was upset. “Thank you!” Susan cried brightly. “Thank you for everything, you’ve been so kind and good! I’ll be fine, don’t worry. I know this place like my own home.”
The brakeman’s lantern circled, down at the end of the dark train. The porter waited. More agitated than she had ever seen him, Conrad jumped up, the porter picked up his step and swung aboard, the train jerked and bumped and moved. She waved from amid her baggage, leaning back against the baby’s weight, and turned, and found herself alone.
The station agent’s office was dark. There was not a hack to be found. The waiting room was open, dim, empty, and the stove was cold. Susan laid the baby on a bench and tucked his blanket so that he would not roll off. Then, staggering under the weight, she carried her suitcases into the waiting room and sat down beside Ollie. The clock said fourteen minutes past four. She would have lain down except that the benches had iron arms every two feet. Her eyes smarted, her mind was numb, her feet cold. She sat shivering, dozing off: home, or nearly.