Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [99]
At six o’clock a waitress coming to open the lunchroom found her there and was thrown into a passion of sympathy. She lit a fire, made tea, warmed milk for the baby. At seven old Mr. Treadwell, who had driven the hack ever since Susan had been a student at the Poughkeepsie Female Academy, arrived and took her to the hotel. But she was too close now to take a room and sleep. She ate something, gave Ollie some oatmeal and softened toast, cleaned him up, washed her face and hands. At eight thirty they were on their way to the ferry, at a quarter of nine they were aboard. One disappointment–Mr. Drew had died. She had been hoping to talk to him about Howie and hence about the West. She felt cheated; she was ready to chatter about her Western experiences to fascinated listeners.
New Paltz Landing approached angling across the high spring current. At nine thirty a neighbor farmer who had brought eggs to the ferry for market dropped her at her father’s door.
As in all pictures in the American Cottage tradition, there was a welcoming thread of smoke from the chimney. The crocuses and grape hyacinths were out under the porch, the trumpet vine had begun to leaf out in green as fresh as a newly discovered color. Behind it in the summer dark she had sat up late on how many evenings with the old Scribner crowd. Inside were the known rooms, the woodwork that loved fingers had worn and polished.
Tired to death, leg weary, her eyes full of tears, her baby a load on her arm, her back aching with carrying him, she climbed the two steps. The door opened and her mother looked out.
I find it hard to make anything of Grandmother’s parents. They take me too far back, I have no landmarks in their world. They were Quaker, kind, loving, getting old, simple people but by no means simple minded. They probably thought their daughter more talented and adventurous than anyone could be. I can’t see them as individuals, I can only type-cast them, a pair of character actors with white hair and Granny glasses. Leave them as a sort of standardized family welcome-tight clutch of hugs, tearful kisses, exclamations, smell of orris root from Great-grandmother’s hair, scamper of Bessie’s feet in from the kitchen –she here too!–calls to the barn for Father to come, Susan’s home.
The April sun shone in through the net curtains, Susan thought she could smell apple blossoms even through a nose stuffy with weeping. There was so much talk, so much laughter, such an outburst of praise for her baby, so many fond minutes of watching him get acquainted with Bessie’s two, that it was an hour later, and they were sitting somewhat exhausted around the kitchen table with their empty tea cups before them, before Susan thought to say, “Oh, all it lacks is Augusta! Can I invite her out, Mother? Have we room?”
“But doesn’t thee know? Didn’t she write thee?”
“Write me what?”
“No, I suppose she couldn’t, thee would have left Santa Cruz before. That must be what the letter upstairs for thee is.”
“But what’s happened? Where is she?”
“Thomas has broken down,” her mother said. “He’s been very ill. He’s been told if he wants to recover he must rest for at least a year. Augusta took him abroad last week.”
7
May 28, I see by the calendar. The brief and furious spring of these foothills is over, summer is here before I saw it coming. The wildflowers along the fence are dried up, the wild oats are gold, not green, the pine openings no longer show the bloody purple of Judas trees, the orchard and the wistaria are in fruit and pod, not blossom. From now until the November rains, the days will be so unchanging that without the Saturday ballgame I won’t be able to tell week from weekend. Who wants to? When I was a boy here, summer was narcosis. I am counting on it to be what it always was.
I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts.