Those five years at Wisconsin, fighting for a promotion which in the Depression years was about as likely as male parturition—were those arid and empty years for her? Oh no. Rodman was born there, we had firm close friends, we had money enough to get along and so were spared the attic apartments and the peanut butter sandwiches of many of our contemporaries. Of the friends we had then, some are dead, a few are famous, some are lost sight of, hardly any are rich; but all were once close in ways that only Ellen Ward and I, almost secretly, as a couple, understand.
Does all that, and the years afterward at Dartmouth and Berkeley —does it stick in her head? Mean anything? A wasted life? Does she remember as I do the years right after the war when I was beginning to get noticed, when all the saturation in books began to pay off for us? Does her mind’s eye ever get caught by the image of me coming out of the study after a good four-hour morning? Does she ever set up in her mind the iron table out in the garden on Arch Street where we lunched nearly every day the sun shone? Sentimental images like that? I suppose not. I suppose all the time the life that I thought sane and quiet and good was too quiet for her. It must have made her restless to see me with endless things to do, a lifetime full, and herself with only household routines. She was never one for the Faculty Dames, or bridge, or the PTA, or causes, or playing store at the Co-op. A reader, a walker, a rather still woman. I thought we had a good life.
I will never understand it. Maybe toward the end I might have noticed something if I hadn’t been preoccupied with my stiffening skeleton. What might I have noticed? I don’t know, unless that she simply wasn’t happy. But she looked after me with anxiety. I know she worried. She soaked her pillow the night after they told me I’d have to have the leg off.
Yet only a few months after that, she a woman of fifty, and a quiet woman at that, and I a new amputee immobilized in the hospital, she leaves that note on my bedtable saying she is leaving me. And whom does she pick? The surgeon who has just removed my leg, a man with a reputation maybe a little bigger than mine, not much, and no youngster himself, at least as old as she, once divorced, with grown children. Give him credit, he had the consideration to turn my case over to a colleague and go on a long leave. It might have embarrassed both of us to have him taking care of me while he was living with my wife. Though I suppose they could have arranged to call on me separately.
Why? How? By what dissatisfied whim or out of what smolder of long dislike? Hanging onto her youth? Trying to pretend it wasn’t already gone? She never gave any sign of that sort of vanity. A belated ambition to be something in her own right? But what greater freedom did she have as the wife of a surgeon than she had had as the wife of a scholar? A lot fewer evenings at home together, for sure. Perhaps the menopause frightened her, perhaps it unsettled her. They can write on my tombstone that I was undone by female bodily chemistry. But if that was it, why did she stay away? That sort of upset lasts only a little while, and anyway can be taken care of with pills.
Whatever brought it on, her romance couldn’t have been unluckier. And now I, Ahab, dismasted and with tunnel vision, seeing the back of my own head through the curved lens of space-time, had better watch out. Conspiracy begins to hatch. Her desperation fertilizes Rodman’s decision-making capacity. More data for the punch cards. I would bet plenty that Rodman has put up Dr. Hines to scaring me with the possibilities of winter difficulties and accidents.
What does winter weather matter to me? I can live inside. I will take my walks around the empty downstairs rooms. I will install a gymnasium, with a whirlpool bath and a sauna, and spend my principal on a battery of nurses and an athletic director, before I let them persuade or force me off my mountain into some place where they can back me against the wall and thumbscrew Christian forgiveness out of me.
I notice that so long as Ellen had her surgical playmate there were no suggestions of forgiveness or reconciliation. How unfortunate for her that he took a walk out from their cabin on Huntington Lake and never came back. What anxiety, what uncertainty, not unlike mine. Had he left her? Committed suicide? Run off with someone else? Lost his mind? Chosen to disappear like those quiet thousands of men who every year walk out on obligations they can’t support? I suppose she was frantic. With some interest I followed the search in the newspapers. Posses, Boy Scouts, forest rangers, helicopters, combed the area for two weeks, until the first storm dumped two feet of snow on the Sierra and made them give up. It wasn’t until the following summer that some fisherman found his bones in a ravine. By that time I was in the convalescent hospital, the only one there who was going to convalesce.
Now, after all her woe, Ellen comes back and lets her haggard face be seen, she takes an apartment in Walnut Creek and renews acquaintance with the son she probably hasn’t written to in two years. (Or would she have? I haven’t any idea. We have never discussed her except on that one visit of his up here.) She perhaps gives him to understand-he no great believer in orthodox marriage anyway-that she is willing to forgive and forget, and naturally take care of poor old Dad if only he will make an attempt to understand, and put the past behind him.
Those two poor old crocks need each other, Rodman is probably telling Leah and himself. They’re better off together. Why not? It’s the most reasonable solution for them and all of us.
I have thought about all this. How could I help it? Forgiving I have considered, though like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can’t help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary. I don’t want her punished, I want no eye for an eye, I hope I don’t gloat over her misfortunes. I just can’t feel about her as I once did. She broke something. I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue. Also I remember the terms of the bond: in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, till death do us part.
Death, the word is, something not quite a matter of whim or choice. It could be she thought I was going to be permanently disabled, and she had better make alternative arrangements. (No matter how I try, I can’t believe that, though I can believe that her medical adviser may have given her that prognosis.) My family have all been notably long-lived; maybe she foresaw thirty fading years as nurse of a hopeless case. Or maybe she was simply victimized by an unseemly post-menopausal itch. I’d rather think it was that, not calculation.
It is even possible she couldn’t bear to see me day after day, a gargoyle that was once a man. Does a woman ever leave a man out of intolerable pity? Or because she fears what pity may do to her and him?
If she had left me when I was still a man, with two legs to stand on and a head that could turn aside in shame or sorrow, I would have hunted among my own acts and in my own personality for her justifications, and would have found them. I did take her for granted, I did neglect her for history, I did bend her life to fit the curve of mine, we did have our share of quarrels. But she didn’t leave me after a quarrel. She left me when I was helpless, and she knew she cut such a shameful figure that she didn’t dare tell me to my face, but left that note by me as I slept my two-Nembutal sleep. She laid no charges against me, and so I have to conclude that what finally led her to break away from me was my misfortunes—missing leg, rigid neck, solidifying skeleton.
The hell with her. She earned my contempt, and contempt doesn’t yield to Rodman’s social antibiotics or the doctrine of King’s X.
Grandmother, I want to say to Susan Ward as she nurses her grudge through the winter of 1887 and into the spring of 1888, and finally decides to take Nellie and the children off to Vancouver Island while Oliver leads a party into Jackson Hole-Grandmother, take it easy. Don’t act like a stricken Victorian prude. Don’t lose your sense of proportion. Ask yourself whether his unhappy drinking has really hurt you, or your children, or him. Don’t get impatient with the man’s bad luck. You risk too much.
Naturally Grandmother didn’t hear m
y warning blowing backward out of the fog of consequences that is her future and my past. She was not a brooder, but she had had her disappointments and her grievances and her anxieties, and she believed in the aspirations, refinements, and pretenses of gentility. She had watched her hopes recede, had had her pride humiliated. Her ambitions for her children seemed certain to be frustrated. The life she had given up lay far off and far back in time, unbelievable as a mirage. She had a reputation and enjoyed a certain fame, but all by mail, all from a distance, or else among the ladies of Boise whose opinion she did not choose to value.
By then her parents were both dead; one of the bitterest results of their poverty was that she had been unable to go back, either time, to help Bessie lay Father or Mother in loved Milton ground. If she dreamed of going back to renew however briefly her intimacy with Augusta and Thomas, she had to remind herself that her friends were now close to the very great indeed. Stanford White had recently built them a grand house on Staten Island. Their casual guests were cabinet ministers and political leaders and ambassadors and millionaires and internationally famous artists. Their closest friends, the couple with whom they slipped away for quiet weekends at their cottage on the Jersey shore, were President Grover Cleveland and his wife.
Imagine her feelings. The First Lady of the Land had stolen her place in her friend’s heart, a place she might still occupy if she had not married exile and failure. If it gave her a mournful pride to know her dear ones valued in such high places, it only made all the more insufferable the worry she felt every time Oliver went moodily into town.
Her reminiscences are not quite candid about the breakup; they reduce what was complicatedly personal to simple economics. “Since I could not march with my beaten man,” she wrote, “I preferred to march alone somewhere down to sea level and have my children to myself for a little while and learn to know my silent boy of eleven, who if I could possibly arrange it would be leaving us for an eastern school in the fall.”
Closing up the canyon camp was like closing up a house after a death. (“It is easier to die than to move,” she wrote Augusta once; “at least for the Other Side you don’t need trunks.”) She went about the long packing with a tight face and a knot in her solar plexus and a sense of disaster in her mind. Wan was mutely expressing his distress by washing everything-blankets, linen, dishes, clothes—before it was put away. Everything he hung on the line, every article she packed or threw away, every object that met her eye, every meal they ate at the trestle table the juniors had built under the cooktent fly, assaulted her sensibilities with its testimony of lost felicity and abandoned hope.
After one day of it, as they sat eating their noon soup and sandwiches, she burst out, “Oh, why must we pack everything? Can’t we just lock it up and leave?”
The way he chewed, thoughtfully, with his head down, struck her as wary; he seemed to be sorting possible replies. Finally he said, “You have to expect to be back if you do that.”
“Don’t you?”
Tough of eyes, the sort of look a man under orders might have given his superior, a look in which there was acquiescence but no agreement. “Yes,” he said, “but I didn’t think you did.”
She in turn meant her own look to be plain as day to him. She meant it to mean Yes, if.
He held his sandwich in both hands and looked at her over it. “You don’t have to leave at all, really. John can move up to the shack and look after you. I can get back once or twice during the summer. In the winter we can rent the place to the Survey as an office, and stay on.”
Susan thought about it. If she stayed on, what would her staying imply? What would she be staying for? How long could her children go on living in an isolated canyon without growing up eccentric or barbarian? How long could she herself give up contact with all culture without loss of herself? Anyway, it was hope that had held them there, and that was gone. She gave a simple answer to a complicated question. “No. It wouldn’t do.”
“Then we’ve got to clear it out. If we locked it up and left it, the first sheepherder that passed through would be sleeping in your bed and lighting fires with pages of your books.”
“I suppose,” she said. “What about the books? What about Frank’s and Wiley’s?”
“I wrote and told them last week where their stuff would be.”
“There are dozens,” she said. “And all those leather bindings they worked so hard over. They wouldn’t want to lose those.”
A little later, Oliver and Ollie took a load of things to town for storage. Betsy helped Nellie clear her room. Agnes, who was sick with summer complaint and some form of the bronchial trouble she seemed to be susceptible to, lay in a window seat while her mother put books in a box. She was pale, big-eyed, and languid. Nellie, passing by, smiled and shook her head at her and said in her North Country voice, “Little wist-faced baby!”
“This climate isn’t good for her,” Susan said. “I hope the sea air will be better. She’s never well.”
Nellie went back to her room, and Agnes lay and watched her mother stow in the box their Household Poets, the cover read completely off and replaced with calf; and War and Peace, and Fathers and Sons, and some Dickens and Thackeray and Howells and James, and some Constance Fenimore Woolson, and some Kate Chopin, and some Cable. She insisted on having each one pass through her hands, so that she could pat it and brush it neat, before it was put away.
Then a volume in limp leather, tooled and stamped in gold: Tennyson’s Idyls of the King, bound for her by Frank Sargent as a gift on her thirty-eighth birthday. She let it fall open, and of course what did it open to? “The old order changes, yielding place to new.” She flipped to the title page and read the inscription. “To Susan Ward, on her birthday.” But she knew it came with love. Nellie had told her he had worked on it for a month, and spoiled two other books, before he got one he was willing to give her.
She rubbed her palm across the rough, inside-out leather, thinking about that devoted young man. Young man? He was thirty-two; she was forty-one. In a story written that spring, in desperation for money and out of the voiceless longing of the canyon April, she had made him into a Lochinvar who rode in to an isolated ranch and carried off the daughter of an embittered solitary—once a gentleman—and rescued her for society, the world, fulfillment. But the maiden of that story had been twenty.
In forlorn amazement at herself she laughed aloud, a sound so harsh that Agnes looked at her curiously, reaching for the book to give it her housekeeper’s pats. Wist-faced baby indeed, and more in need of rescue than any fictitious maiden designed for the pages of Century. Susan let her have the book, and lifted a hand to the little girl’s forehead, feeling for fever or the clamminess of debility. As she did so she glanced out the window, down across the hill and the river with its parabola of bridge, and by one of those coincidences that happen all the time in Victorian novels, but that nevertheless sometimes happen in life too, there was Frank Sargent unsaddling his sorrel horse Dan at the corral gate.
It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood. Gladness and guilt hit her like waves meeting at an angle on a beach. She hung a moment, half inclined to slip out the back and not be findable when he came up the hill. But only a moment. Then she was at the door, waving and calling from the top step. He could not have heard her for the river, but he must have been unsaddling with his eye on the house. She saw his teeth flash in his dark face, he waved exuberantly, flapping a long arm; he spatted the horse into the corral, rammed the gate poles home, and came running. The bridge slowed him no more than if it had been a rigid sidewalk; he came up the hill in great long-legged strides. She met him with both hands outstretched.
“Frank, Frank! Oh, how wonderful! What are you doing here? You’re almost too late—we’re leaving.”
His long brown hands, with a turquoise ring from
Arizona on the ring finger of the left, held hers tightly. He was panting from his rush up the hill, he laughed and talked and smiled all at once. She had told him once he was the only man she knew who could talk while smiling.
“Oliver ... wrote me. I came to get my stuff.”
“Ah, is that all?”
“No. To see you, mostly. How are you? Let me look at you.”
Still holding her hands, he turned her into the bald sunlight, and she shrank a little, remembering the last time he had looked at her, steadily. It seemed to her that what he saw was wan, weathered, and rebellious, and her good sense told her that at forty-one a woman should neither be looked at in that way by a man not her husband, nor should accept such a look with so much willingness.
Then his eyes left her and saw Agnes, round-eyed and hostile in the doorway. “And this is ... ?”
“Agnes.”
Out of my body. What you saw as an ugly swelling, and an ugly reminder of the secrets of marriage, the last time you spoke to me. Before she was born she was more than you could stand. My poor unwanted child, my poor excluded lover!
“I don’t like you,” Agnes said.
“Agnes, child! What are you saying?”
Frank’s smile faded but did not go entirely away. His hands hung onto Susan’s. His glowing brown eyes looked at Agnes for a long quiet time; he made no attempt to win her, he only looked. “She’s like you,” he said without taking his eyes off her scowling face. “She’s like what you must have been.”
“Heavens, I hope not, with that face!” But some sort of elation came over her; in one remark he wiped away the bitterness in which they had parted. Having accepted the fruit of her womb—even when it looked at him with suspicion—he moved in some way closer to her, awkwardness was lifted off her as a cover might be lifted off a parrot’s cage, releasing all that pent-up garrulity. Belatedly, with a laugh that was half embarrassed and half playful, she looked down at her imprisoned hands until he let them go.
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