You see the things that my mind plays with, mostly at siesta time when everything hushes and even the city outside shuts its doors and stills its bells. I am no better sleeper than I ever was, and so I lie and let the exciting and troubling possibilities buzz around in my head. Or I write you, which is more profitable.
Things are beginning to stir in the house. That means it will soon be time for our afternoon drive, our “airing” as it is called, though we never open the carriage windows. It is during this hour of freedom, such as it is, that I realize how close to imprisonment is the life of a Mexican woman. I watch Emelita and learn discretion. She being the head of a household and I being married, we may acknowledge the bows of gentlemen, but only of certain gentlemen. The young men riding their English thoroughbreds so proudly around the zocolo stare at all the ladies, but the ladies do not stare back, or bow. If they are marriageable, they may hardly acknowledge the existence of anyone male, or even of the female relative of a possible suitor. Inferences would instantly be drawn. So we go around the park every afternoon, getting neither exercise nor air, fluttering our fingers at balconies and carriages, while all around us the gentlemen are walking or riding and getting their blood flowing in the cool of the afternoon, and Indian girls in embroidered chemises—they look as if they had gone happily out of doors without putting on their dresses—swing up and down, and use their rebozos not to hide their faces but to enhance their eyes, and giggle and hug one another and cast slant eyes at passing boys. Respectability is a burden perhaps greater than I want to bear. Unless I can be forgiven my habitual freedoms I shall find it hard to be a Morelia wife!
This afternoon I shall know more about the possibilities. Emelita tells me of the house of the town advocate—I believe there is only one—who is in Germany seeking relief for his gout. It is a small house, only twelve rooms! She will have Ysabel drive us past when we take our airing.
I can’t tell you whether I hope it will suit or not, whether I want to stay or not. But I believe I do. I miss my little Ollie, of whom we have not heard since we sailed. I know he is safer with Mother and Bessie than he would be with me, but I wish we had him here just the same. After all that sickness in Leadville, and all the moving he has done in his short life, he deserves a safe home.
More later. I hear Ysabel bringing out the mules.
Next day. I have seen the house—white stucco around a central patio, with a white wall around it all, and a bougainvillea swarming over the wall. Very definitely it will do. The rooms are good, and the arrangement of square within square, a wall around the house and the house around a court, will let us live as we please. It is very near the park, so that the three of us could ride there together, assuming that I can ride without shocking the citizens. Oliver will not mind, I know. He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.
Even when he is at the mine, which he will surely have to be half the time, Ollie and I might ride, accompanied by some Rubio or Bonifacio, once we had accustomed people to our irregularities. It gives me a delightful sense of wickedness to contemplate it, though I wouldn’t think of being so cavalier with the proprieties at home.
I think it will do, I honestly think it will. You and Thomas can visit us here, instead of at that lighthouse on the Pacific to which I once confidently invited you. Morelia isn’t Paris, but it is gorgeously picturesque. Much of it is made of a soft pink stone that in certain lights, or when wetted by a shower, glows almost rose. I think you would find subjects for your brush, as I find them for my pencil, on every corner.
Today, as we were returning from looking at the house, we passed the market, which I had never seen. It was thronging with Indians, the men in white pyjamas, the women with their heads and infants wrapped in rebozos, the children often in nothing at all except a little shirt. And the things spread out there on the ground, under the matting roofs! Oranges, lemons, watermelons, little baby bananas, camotes (sweet potatoes), ears of their funny particolored corn, strange fruits, strange vegetables, chickens hanging by the legs like so many bouquets of Everlasting drying in an attic. Turkeys, pigs, beans, onions, vast fields of pottery and baskets, booths where were sold tortillas and pulque and mysterious sweets and coarse sugar like cracked corn. Such a colorful jumble, such a hum of life, such bright hand-woven cottons and embroidered chemises! Over one side soared the arches of the aqueduct, and in the center was a fountain from which girls were drawing water, gathered around its bright splashing as bright as flowers. (In this place, the poor look like flowers, the rich like mourners-at least the women.)
I cried out at once that I must come and draw it in the morning, when the sun would be on the other side of the aqueduct and would throw its looped shadow across the market, and give me a chance to hold down the boil of all that human activity with some architectural weight. I asked Emelita if I could be spared Soledad or Concepción, to accompany me for a couple of hours. She never quivered. Of course. ¿Como no?
To her, I am sure it seemed a reckless and dangerous and improper request, for in the streets of this fascinating city no respectable woman walks, even accompanied by a maid. My stilts and bearskins were showing, but no one would have known from Emelita’s face that I had asked anything at all out of the ordinary.
Later. What day? I lose track of time. I have been keeping back this letter for the post that leaves tomorrow for Mexico City. Every day is like the day before, but every day there is something that to me is new, too.
When I spoke to you last, I was planning to go and draw the market. I went. In the morning Emelita came to me, dressed in her black silk, while I was drawing Enriqueta at her lessons with Fräulein Eberl, and said that Soledad was free to go with me whenever I was ready. I was ready very soon, for I didn’t want to miss the proper light, and went into the courtyard to find an expedition prepared that rivaled Oliver’s Crusade. There was Ysabel with the carriage and the white mules. There was Soledad with a French gilt chair and a black umbrella. There was Emelita in her black silk. I had come down in my usual morning dress, and for once Emelita’s resolution to notice none of my improprieties was not up to the occasion. Her look told me that I would embarrass her. Of course I made an excuse and went back and changed. But even when I was in proper costume, you cannot possibly imagine the consternation I caused—I on my gilt chair with pad and pencil, Soledad standing and holding the umbrella over me, Emelita bravely out of the carriage, but not too far, and looking as if every moment were not only mortal sin, but its punishment. It was all Ysabel could do to keep back the curious.
I could not bear to stay more than twenty minutes, keeping Emelita there in the sun scorning even to lift her hem from the dust, and my sketch was very sketchy. But the morning taught me two things. One is that it is perfectly safe to do most of the things that propriety frowns on, the other is that I won’t again embarrass my Mexican friends by making them share my indiscretions.
Today one of the mozos returned from the Crusade, reporting that all were well and that they would be back as scheduled. He came for a fresh supply of wine, one of the mules having fallen and crushed his hamper. Don Pedro is not the sort to make his guests do without their luxuries, though it means sending a servant on a two-hundred-mile round trip.
In a week, therefore, I shall be seeing Oliver, and we shall be planning the shape of our future. My darling, I wish I could tell you now, but I must await Oliver’s news. I shall have to tell you in New York—and how can we get around to the future, with all that past to catch up on?
Good night, darling Augusta. I have just been out in the corredor prowling up and down. The house is black and still. The starlight doesn’t penetrate the shadows under the arcade, and does only a little to lighten the sunken court. It seemed profoundly peaceful and undangerous, strange but at the same time familiar, and I thought of summer nights at Milton, everyone else asleep, when we used to creep out in our night dres
ses and run barefoot on the wet grass. I fear I am a strange creature, my two great loves are of such different kinds. When Oliver is away from me I miss him and am restless until he returns, but isn’t it strange, his absence makes me think so much more acutely of you.
Will you visit us in our white house with the bougainvillea, away down here in Michoacán? I mean to keep tempting you with my little exotic sweetmeats until you fall. But first I shall see you in that loved studio where we were girls and art students together a thousand years ago. Even if we are to stay here, as I now truly hope we will, we shall have to be in New York for a considerable time getting prepared.
Good night, good night. The church bells are solemn across the Plaza of the Martyrs. I feel smothered, lonely, eager, I don’t know what. The future is as dark as the corredor out there, but might be every bit as charming once light comes on it. One thing I do know—it must have you in it, somehow, somewhere.
Your own
SUE
5
Propped by bolster and pillows, shoeless, stockingless, corsetless, clothed only in her shift, she was asleep in the big carved bed. She had been looking through her journal, rewriting incidents and observations into coherent paragraphs for her article, but the siesta hour, the shuttered dusk, the trance of quiet that held room and house and city, had been seductive. The notebook was flat on her stomach, the pencil had fallen from her slack hand.
She was in a quandary, for the guests she had been expecting, the poet and editor Thomas Hudson and his brilliant wife, had arrived simultaneously with an appalling dozen of others. Her entrance hall and sala were like a hotel lobby at convention time. The American ambassador was there with his wife and several aides. She saw Ferd Ward with a bowler hat in his hand, Clarence King in white buckskin, her sister Bessie trying to calm her daughter Sarah Birnie, who cried and cried. She saw a famous general with gray, sad, streaked eyes, whom she recognized but could not place. Pricey and Frank looked hopefully smiling in the door. They all waited to be taken to their rooms, but there were not rooms for all of them, there was only one pitiful room, the one she had prepared for the Hudsons. The house was too small, as Emelita had warned her—fatally small. She saw signs of exasperation and impatience in every face. Augusta, as always when angry, had grown regal and cool.
Out of her desperate dilemma her eyes popped open. A tapping on her door.
“¿Quien es?”
A servant voice, a male servant voice, whined, “Con permi-i-i-so.” The door handle rattled, the door began to open.
“No, no!” she cried, or screamed, and snatched at the trailing spread to cover herself. The door swung on open and Oliver put his head in.
“Uh huh. Caught you napping.”
“Oh, Oliver, you idiot! You scared me to death.” She bounded off the bed, he hugged her hard, kicking the door shut behind him. His clothes smelled of horse, leather, sweat, dust. “Did you just get in?”
“Foolish question number one. Did you think I might have got in yesterday and stopped at the hotel?”
“I didn’t hear any noise.”
“We left the caravan at Don Pedro’s and walked over.”
“I was dreaming,” Susan said. “A dreadful dream. We had a dozen guests and only one room. I suppose it may have been something that brass bed suggested. Who slept in it?”
“Nobody. We were all too polite.”
“Isn’t that ridiculous. So was my dream, because, you know, I’ve found us a house, and it doesn’t have just one spare bedroom, it has five, nice big ones. There’s an enclosed court, and stabling for six horses...” She was stopped by the look on his face. “What’s the matter? Isn’t the mine any good?”
The horseplay of his entrance had meant nothing. She saw now that he was tired, disappointed, and grouchy. He moved his shoulders as if shrugging off a persistent insect.
“It may be some good, it may not. More likely not. At least I know Kreps wasn’t right. What he thought was the lost vein isn’t. You could work it, but it wouldn’t make you rich.”
For the moment, all her disappointment was frozen into quiet Almost carelessly she said, “So you’ll have to turn in a bad report.”
“I don’t see how it can be very enthusiastic.”
What a moment before she had taken quietly now hit her like a slap. It was the corroboration, not the news, that weakened her legs and stiffened the muscles of her mouth. Her eyes were stretched, glaring at him, and as she stared she was blinded with sudden water, she could not control her breath, which gulped and caught in her throat. “Oh ... damn!” she cried, and hid her face in his chest.
He laughed. She could feel the laughter in his chest and it infuriated her. “What?” he said with callous lightness. “Cussing? You?”
She reared back against his arm and knuckled at her wet eyes. “I don’t care, that’s just the way I feel! Thee can think me a fishwife if thee wants.”
“Sue, I’m sorry. I had no idea you were that set on it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever ... wanted anything ... more!”
He was frowning down into her face as if she were written in Sanskrit. “I’m astonished. Why?”
“Why! Because! A million reasons. Because I work so well here. Because it’s beautiful. Because we could all be together in a pleasant house. Because it would have given thee a chance to show what thee can do.”
“I suppose it might have been good, in a way,” he said. “But look, it isn’t quite the paradise you make out. Once you get under the surface a little...”
She barked at him, wanting no sour grapes comfort, and pulled away to sit down violently on the bed. “Does Simpson agree with you?”
“More or less. He’s a little more bullish. He might even recommend that his people take a chance, if they can get the option cheap enough. He knows they haven’t found the old rich vein, but he’s half inclined to think they might break even with this one, and hit the old one later.”
“What you’ve been doing in the Adelaide.”
“More or less.”
“Why would you do it there and recommend not doing it here?”
“The Syndicate didn’t send me down here to find another Adelaide.”
“But if Mr. Simpson is willing! Isn’t it just what his people were hoping for? It looks better to them than to you? So they can buy cheap?”
“I don’t know he’s willing, I’m only guessing.” He frowned, and a sort of slow meanness came into his face. “What are you suggesting? That I sweeten the report? Make it more encouraging? Tell ’em what they want to hear?”
They stared at each other almost in anger, until she rose and touched his arm. “I know thee can’t. But if Mr. Simpson reports favorably his people will want to buy, won’t they?”
“Depending on what the Syndicate wants for its option.”
“And if they bought, wouldn’t they ask thee to run it?”
Sulky, resistant to what she was edging toward, he grunted. “After I’ve said I don’t really believe in the mine?”
“But why do they have to see your report at all? You won’t be reporting to them. Why do Mr. Simpson’s people even have to know what you said?”
“Because I’ve talked it over with Simpson.”
“You just ... blurted it out?”
He watched her with his head slightly turned. Almost absently he unbuckled the belt and tossed it, heavy with revolver and bowie, onto the bed. His eyes were on hers as if he were concentratedly bending something. “I just blurted it out,” he said. “I’m just a big green boy too honest for his own good. I’m not smart enough to play these poker games with grown men. I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut profitably.”
“Oliver, I didn’t mean ... !”
He was stooping, unbuckling the spurs. One after the other they lit on the bed beside the revolver belt. He pulled over his head the buckskin shirt, releasing a stronger odor of sweat and dust, but when his face and rumpled hair emerged he would not look at her. She felt like sha
king that closed, mulish expression off his face.
Tightly she said, “Won’t it look odd if the Syndicate’s engineer turns in a negative report and the other people’s engineer is more favorable?”
Blue and cold, his eyes touched hers and went indifferently away. She felt that somehow he blamed her for this. And he would refuse to talk about it, he would retreat into wooden silence. “Yeah,” he said. “I expect Ferd may think it’s kind of odd.”
“So it’s certain that he at least isn’t going to ask you to do any more in Mexico.”
“I guess you’ve got it about right.”
He sat on the bed, pulled the bootjack from under it, fitted a heel into the jack, and pulled. The boot came off. He wiggled his stockinged toes. Everything about him, from his sulky face to his animal odor, was offensive to her. Under his eyebrows he looked up, groping absently with the other foot for the jack. “I’ll tell you something else. If the Adelaide ever settles its troubles with the Argentina and the Highland Chief and gets to be a working mine again, I’m not likely to be running that, either.”
For a moment she took that in. “You mean we not only can’t stay here, we can’t go back to Leadville either.”
“That’d be my guess.”
“Then where do we go?”
“Honey, I don’t know.”
He pulled loose the handkerchief knotted around his throat. He concentrated on the bootjack until the second boot slid off. In her bare feet Susan went quietly around the room. She touched with her fingertips the cool carved wood of the footboard, the embossed leather of the chest, the tipped edges of the shutters, the mantel’s cold stone. “I wonder,” she said.
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