Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “Are you talking about Frank or yourself?”

  “All right,” he said. “I’m not exactly friendly with them. And I don’t like to lose.”

  “You need a vacation, that’s what you need.”

  “So do you.”

  “So does Ollie. We all do. It hasn’t been good here, Oliver. Helen was right. Grass won’t grow, cats can’t live, chickens won’t lay. We were mistaken to think we could make a home on this mountain. We ought to get out ”

  He had out his knife again, digging at his horny palm. She saw the V between thumb and forefinger thick and yellow with callus. In the absence of money to hire a crew, he and Frank and Jack Hill had been mucking in the mine like common laborers, hoping to turn up something that would persuade the New York office to commit itself and its money. Carefully, without looking up, he said, “Would you consider Mexico?”

  “Consider it?” she said suspiciously. “Why? Have you had an offer?”

  “Not exactly. But I could, I think.”

  “Where is it? Off on some mountaintop, like Leadville or Potosi?”

  She saw his forehead pucker. His eyes returned from outdoors and met hers steadily. His head was up so that the pupils sat in the middle, riot up against the upper lids, and there was not that sinister half-moon of white below them. “Sue,” he said, “it’s my profession.”

  She was contrite. She hadn’t meant to sneer. “I know. Tell me.”

  “Letter came a week or so ago—ten days, two weeks, I don’t know. The Syndicate’s given up on the Adelaide until the suit’s settled. We’re just sitting here. They’ve got an option on a mine in Michoacán. There was this sort of question, if it worked out that way would I be interested in inspecting it.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we’d come back here, assuming the Adelaide wins its suit.”

  “What about Ollie?”

  “He couldn’t go, not on this inspection trip.”

  “Back to Milton?”

  “Milton or Guilford. Milton’s more his home than anywhere else.”

  “How long?”

  “How long?”

  “You say you’d have to inspect it. How long would that take?”

  “I don’t know. Two months, maybe more.”

  “Could I go along?”

  “I wouldn’t go otherwise.”

  Absently her hand came out and settled on top of his. He was being scrupulous not to influence her, he simply laid out possibilities. “I hate to think of Ollie,” she said. “Just barely well, if he is.”

  He said nothing. He watched her.

  “I wonder if I could get Thomas to commission an article,” she said. “Mexico might be exciting to draw.”

  He sat inert.

  “If we didn’t go there, we’d just mildew here,” she said. “When will that suit come up, do you think?”

  “Not before winter. Maybe spring.”

  “And Frank could hold the fort here, if we went.”

  “Why not?”

  “If Thomas would commission an article, we might make more by going there than by staying here. We could leave Ollie with Mother and Bessie, I know they’re better for him than I am.”

  “You mean you could make more,” Oliver said, steadily watching her.

  “Oh, Oliver, please!”

  “Two questions. Will you leave him? And would you like to go? If the answer is yes to both, I’ll write Ferd. He has to pay me whether I stay here or go there. I imagine he’d just as soon get some work out of me.”

  The dove cooed again, distant and sorrowful, and was answered from a great distance by another. She laughed shakily and stretched the salt-stiffened skin of her cheeks. “Oliver, let’s! I keep thinking it’s morning. I keep thinking it’s a fine sunny morning after a spell of bad weather. I feel like popping out of bed and being energetic and cheerful.”

  “All right,” Oliver said. “You pop out of bed and be energetic and cheerful. I’ll go down to the office and see how Frank’s doing, and maybe write a letter.”

  “What if I wrote Waldo Drake too? Would that help?”

  “I don’t know. Would it?”

  “It might. I’ve known him a long time.”

  He looked at her. He shrugged. “O.K., if you want.”

  “Would it seem like ... taking advantage of a connection?”

  “I suppose it might.”

  “Even if it does!” she said. “I don’t care.”

  V

  MICHOACÁN

  1

  My mother died when I was two, my father was a silent and difficult man: I grew up my grandparents’ child. As those things went in Grass Valley, I also grew up privileged, son of the superintendent of the Zodiac and grandson of the general manager. Every child I played with came from a family that worked for mine.

  Grandmother deferred to my father, seemed almost to fear him. Certainly she assumed the blame for the taciturnity that made him formidable to deal with, and certainly she saw in me a second chance to raise up an ideal gentleman. Rough and dangerous play, adventures into old mine shafts, long hikes and rides, those her life in the West had led her to accept and even encourage: Let me be tried in manliness. But honesty, uprightness, courtesy, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and mouth, sensibility to poetry and nature—those she took as her personal obligation. Never severe, she was often intense. She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience, she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret. My lapses from uprightness troubled her, I thought, out of all proportion to the offense.

  Once in a while, when she had a visitor she liked, some old tottering friend such as Conrad Prager, I might hear her chattering on the porch or in the pergola, long since torn down, that used to be a part of Grandfather’s prize rose garden. On those occasions I sometimes heard her laugh aloud, a clear, giggly laugh like a flirting girl’s; and I was surprised, for around my father, my grandfather, and me she seldom laughed. Instructing me, especially in moral matters, she used to shake me by the shoulders, slowly and earnestly, looking into my eyes. It was as if she were trying to yearn me into virtue, like Davy Crockett grinning a coon out of a tree. I was never never never to behave beneath myself. She had known people who did, and the results were calamitous. The way to develop and deserve self-respect, which was the thing most worth seeking in life, was to guide myself always by the noblest ideals that the race had evolved through the ages.

  Somewhere back in her mind lurked the figure of Thomas Hudson, in shining mail. His example dictated my training as it had dictated my father’s. In some ways, Grandmother hadn’t learned a thing since the time when she sent my poor scared twelve-year-old father out of Boise to attend St. Paul’s School and become an Eastern gentleman. When my time came around she sent me too to St. Paul’s, my father silently consenting. Gentility is inherited through the female line like hemophilia, and is all but incurable.

  The children of Grass Valley, who were far from genteel, might have made things difficult for a little gentleman except for two things. One was the affection the town felt for my grandfather and the respect it had to pay my father. Any boy who picked on me would have been whaled, out of policy or principle or both. The other reason was that I opened up special opportunities.

  For example, my grandfather might take a bunch of us down the mine, or he might let us pile into the Hupmobile, driven by Ed Hawkes’s father, and ride through town like blackbirds in an open pie. He might let us help him in the orchard where he fooled with Burbank hybrids and developed hybrids of his own, and when fruits were ripe he was not stingy with them. Many a taste bud in Grass Valley and Nevada City, blunted by sixty years of greasy french fries, ketchup, and bourbon, must remember as mine do the taste of sun-warmed nectarines and Satsuma plums up there in the end of the orchard where I now take my eight hard laps on crutches.

  Likewise many a fat or tired or sick or otherwise diminished man and woman in this town must remembe
r afternoons when Lyman Ward, the rich kid, had them over to the big house, where they played run-sheep-run among the pines on Grandfather’s three acres of lawn, or hide-and-seek through the servants’ wing, by that time unused, with its dozen dark closets and cupboards, its twisty back stairs, and its narrow hall whose floorboards betrayed hider and seeker alike. Afterward, the Chinese cook would prepare and the Irish maid serve sandwiches and lemonade and ice cream and cake; and the little barbarians, sweating from their games and abruptly quelled, would sit like little ladies and gentlemen, and cast slant eyes at my grandmother, in long gown and choker collar (she was sensitive about what age did to a lady’s throat), her thinning hair in its bangs and Grecian knot, moving up the polished hall or across the library’s bearskins, or standing in the doorway coercing from them the handshake and muttered thanks-good-bye that were their first instruction in manners.

  My father, despite his Idaho governess, had gone to St. Paul’s badly prepared, an inferior Western child. Grandmother was determined that I should not, and being past her working years, and with time to spare, she saw to my education personally. She read me poetry, she read me Scott and Kipling and Cooper, she read me Emerson, she read me Thomas Hudson. She listened to my practise recitations and helped me write my themes and do my numbers. My homework went in bound in neat blue legal covers, moreover, and a lot of it was illustrated by Susan Burling Ward. The quick little vignettes that ornamented the margins of themes and arithmetic papers looked as if they had been made by the brush of a bird’s wing. They delighted my teachers, who pinned them up on blackboards and told the class how fortunate Lyman was to have so talented a grandmother.

  I accepted her help willingly, because it brought me praise, but I had no clear idea of who she was or what she had done. The bindings of her books in the library were not inviting, and I can’t recall ever reading one of her novels when I was young. I didn’t know her writings, apart from a few children’s stories, until years after her death, nor much of her art either, since most of that is buried in the magazines that published her. I would have been surprised to hear that some people considered her famous.

  But I remember a day when I came home from school and told her I had to write a report on Mexico-how Mexicans live, or something about Mexican heroes, or some incident from Cortez and Montezuma or the Mexican War.

  She put aside the letter she was writing and turned in her chair. “Mexico! Is thee studying Mexico?”

  Yes, and I had to write this report. I was thinking Chapultepec, maybe, where all the young cadets held off the U. S. Army. Where were all those old National Geography?

  “I had Alice take them up to the attic.” Her hand reached up and unhooked her spectacles, disentangling the earpieces from her side hair. I thought her eyes swam oddly; she smiled and smiled. “Did thee know thee might have been Mexican?”

  It didn’t seem likely. What did she mean?

  “Long ago we thought of living there. In Michoacán. If we had, thee’s father would probably have grown up and married a Mexican girl, and thee would be Mexican, or half.”

  I had trouble interpreting her smile; I could feel her yearning toward some instructive conclusion. She took her eyes off me and looked out into the hall, where the light lay clean and elegant across the shining dark floor.

  “How different it would all be!” she said, and closed her light-sensitive eyes a moment, and opened them again, still smiling. “I would have stayed. I loved it, I was crazy to stay. I had been married five years and lived most of that time in mining camps. Mexico was my Paris and my Rome.”

  I asked why she hadn’t stayed, then, and got a vague answer. Things hadn’t worked out. But she continued to look at me as if I had suddenly become of great interest. “And now thee is studying Mexico. Would thee like to see what I wrote, and the pictures I drew, when I was studying it? It started out to be one article, but became three.”

  So she led me up here to this room, and from her old wooden file brought out three issues of Century from the year 1881. There they are on the desk. I have just been rereading them.

  As a boy I never came into this studio without the respectful sense of being among things that were old, precious, and very personal to Grandmother. She flavored her room the way her rose-petal sachet bags flavored her handkerchiefs. The room has not changed much. The revolver, spurs, and bowie hung then where they hang now, the light wavered through the dormer, broken by pines and wistaria, in the same way. Then, there was usually an easel with a watercolor clothespinned to it, and the pensive, downcast oil portrait of Susan Burling Ward that I have moved up from the library is no proper substitute for Grandmother’s living face; but reading her articles this morning I might have been back there, aged twelve or so, conspiring with her to write a paper called “My Grandmother’s Trip to Mexico in 1880,” illustrated with her woodcuts scissored from old copies of Century Magazine.

  Her traveler’s prose is better than I expected—lively, perceptive, full of pictures. The wood engravings are really fine, as good as anything she ever did. Our scissors left holes in both text and pictures, but from what remains I get a strong impression of the excitement with which she did them.

  I remember excitement in her face, too, or think I do, and in her leaning figure, and her fine old hands, when we resurrected those drawings forty years after she had drawn them. She chattered to me, explaining things. She excited herself just by talking, she remembered Spanish words forgotten for decades, she laughed the giggly laugh she usually reserved for safe old friends. Her agitation was too violent for her, it was close to hysteria and not far from pain. She got the giggles; she ended by bursting into tears.

  Her Paris and her Rome, her best time, the lost opportunity that she may have regretted more than any of the other lost opportunities of her life. She would never have admitted it, she would have denied it with vehemence, she kept up all her life the pretense that Augusta was a superior Genius, but Grandmother was a much better artist than her friend, and she would have profited from, and certainly couldn’t help envying a little, Augusta’s opportunities for travel and study. Probably she nursed a secret conviction, which she would have suppressed as Unworthy, that in marrying Oliver Ward she had given up her chance to be anything more than the commercial illustrator she pretended she was. That sort of feeling would have grown as she felt her powers growing.

  She came before the emancipation of women, and she herself was emancipated only partly. There were plenty of women who could have provided her the models for a literary career, but hardly a one, unless Mary Cassatt, whom she apparently never met, who could have shown her how to be a woman artist. The impulse and the talent were there, without either inspiring models or full opportunity. A sort of Isabel Archer existed half-acknowledged in Grandmother, a spirit fresh, independent, adventurous, not really prudish in spite of the gentility. There was an ambitious woman under the Quaker modesty and the genteel conventions. The light foot was for more than dancing, the bright eye for more than flirtations, the womanliness for more than mute submission to husband and hearth.

  The conventions of her time and place never inhibited her, I think, because it never occurred to her to rebel against them. The penalties, the neurasthenia and breakdowns of the genteel female, she never experienced either. But the ambitions that gave her purpose and the talents that helped fill a life not otherwise satisfying, she never fully realized or developed. That she never got off the North American continent, and lived most of her life in the back comers of that, was a handicap she couldn’t help feeling. Once she turned down a commission to illustrate a novel of F. Marion Crawford’s because, as she said, she didn’t even know the kind of chairs they sat on in the great European houses and palazzi where the story took place. She could infuse with her own special emotion anything she could draw, but she could draw only what she had seen.

  Mexico was indeed her Paris and her Rome, her Grand Tour, her only glimpse of the ancient and exotic civilizations that in her innocent
nineteenth-century local-colorish way she craved to know. Now for once she traveled not away from civilization but toward it, and thanks to the Syndicate’s desire to present a confidently prosperous front she traveled first class. Among her baggage were twenty-four whited blocks hastily prepared at the Century office, and in her portmanteau was a cabled commission from Thomas in Geneva—a commission that had arrived along with two dozen long-stemmed roses.

  To Susan’s eye, the island ports they touched at on the way down were unbearably picturesque. They wore the patina of romantic time, their fortresses had been guarding the approaches to the Americas when her own home on the Hudson knew nothing but wild men dancing feast dances. She begrudged sleep, stayed up late to watch the lights and listen to the sounds from shore, and to see the moon set behind palms, got up before dawn to see the light grow across the perfumed open sea. As if on a honeymoon cruise, she and Oliver danced, dined, drank champagne at the captain’s table, listened to Spanish love-songs from the Cubans down in steerage, sat up half one moonlit night to hear a fantastic recitation of the Frithjof Saga in the original by a young Swedish engineer on his way to build a Mexican railroad.

  He reminded her of themselves; she liked the way he took his tradition with him into cultural strangeness. She herself, who thought herself an especially understanding audience because of all the Vikings she had drawn for Thomas, Longfellow, and Boyesen, went to bed that night and reassembled her own somewhat dispersed inheritance, resolved not to let it be weakened by whatever Mexico should provide. One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism-not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future, as the U.S.A.

  Then after five days they went on deck one morning and saw a rosy snow-peak floating high on a white bed of cloud: Orizaba. A little later they steamed into the harbor of Veracruz, and Mexico rose before Susan Ward like something rubbed up out of a lamp, as different from the false fronts, cowhide boots, flapping vests, and harsh disappointments of Leadville as anything could possibly have been. Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.