Read Online Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner - Free Book Online
Authors: Wallace Stegner
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time for many talks, comparing our past lives and dreams for the future. We sat together in Anatomy lectures and Friday composition class and scribbled quotations and remarks to each other on the margins of our notebooks. I still keep one of those loose pages of my youth with “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments” copied in pencil in her bold and graceful hand, and on the other side in the same hand the words which began our life correspondence, not gushingly nor lightly. We wrote to each other for fifty years.
She came up to Milton that following summer and every summer after till there was no Milton for me—not that Milton! Her sharings in books and friends were the stored honey of my girlhood. The strings were tuned high for us in those years, but after we became wives and mothers, and had lost our own mothers (she loved mine and I loved hers), a settled, homely quality took the place of that first passion of my life. Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
Several things interest me in that passage. For one thing, it tells me the source of Rodman’s name. It was Grandmother’s dearest wish that we give our child that label. He would never forgive me if he learned that we named him after the author of The Culprit Fay. Augusta’s son was also named Rodman, so you might say the name has been made to run in both families.
What is more eyebrow-raising is the suggestion of lesbianism in this friendship, a suggestion that in some early letters is uncomfortably explicit. (Good night, sweetheart. When you are here some stifling night like this we will creep out in the darkness and lave ourselves in the fountain.) The twentieth century, by taking away the possibility of innocence, has made their sort of friendship unlikely; it gets inhibited or is forced into open sexuality. From a dozen hints, beginning with Augusta’s “bold and graceful hand,” we might conclude that Susan’s friend was an incipient dike. Grandmother herself, outskating and out-dancing them all on her little feet, could not have been more feminine. Her color was always rosy. She blushed easily, even as an old woman.
It looks like a standard case, but despite the stigmata I elect to join her in innocence. Instead of smiling at her Victorian ignorance of her own motives, I feel like emphasizing her capacity for devotion. The first passion of her life lasted all her life.
At the end of 1868 she was twenty-one, and had been in New York four winters. She was studying illustration with W. J. Linton, an English artist much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and she was beginning to get small commissions. Her latest and most important was a farm scene for the cover of Hearth and Home, a new magazine sponsored by Edward Eggleston, Frank R. Stockton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
And observe the continuities of a life like hers, despite the years of exile. She will have a connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe—will marry Mrs. Stowe’s cousin. Linton’s daughter will become a governess in the shacks and tents where Grandmother will live, and will help Grandmother in the sacred task of making my father and his sisters fit to live in Augusta’s world.
Now the New Year reception I have been leading up to. The place was the Moses Beach house on Columbia Street in Brooklyn Heights, then a street inhabited by great merchant families—Thayers, Merritts, Walters, Havilands “of the china Havilands.” Grandmother’s feckless brother Ned had married the daughter of Elwood Walter; during her first year as an art student Grandmother had lived in the Walter house down the street. She moved in this atmosphere not quite as an equal, but not quite as a poor relation, either. She was that nice young friend of Emma’s from the Cooper, the pretty little one with the high coloring, the one who draws so nicely. She knew and loved the Beach house. It was
She came up to Milton that following summer and every summer after till there was no Milton for me—not that Milton! Her sharings in books and friends were the stored honey of my girlhood. The strings were tuned high for us in those years, but after we became wives and mothers, and had lost our own mothers (she loved mine and I loved hers), a settled, homely quality took the place of that first passion of my life. Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
Several things interest me in that passage. For one thing, it tells me the source of Rodman’s name. It was Grandmother’s dearest wish that we give our child that label. He would never forgive me if he learned that we named him after the author of The Culprit Fay. Augusta’s son was also named Rodman, so you might say the name has been made to run in both families.
What is more eyebrow-raising is the suggestion of lesbianism in this friendship, a suggestion that in some early letters is uncomfortably explicit. (Good night, sweetheart. When you are here some stifling night like this we will creep out in the darkness and lave ourselves in the fountain.) The twentieth century, by taking away the possibility of innocence, has made their sort of friendship unlikely; it gets inhibited or is forced into open sexuality. From a dozen hints, beginning with Augusta’s “bold and graceful hand,” we might conclude that Susan’s friend was an incipient dike. Grandmother herself, outskating and out-dancing them all on her little feet, could not have been more feminine. Her color was always rosy. She blushed easily, even as an old woman.
It looks like a standard case, but despite the stigmata I elect to join her in innocence. Instead of smiling at her Victorian ignorance of her own motives, I feel like emphasizing her capacity for devotion. The first passion of her life lasted all her life.
At the end of 1868 she was twenty-one, and had been in New York four winters. She was studying illustration with W. J. Linton, an English artist much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and she was beginning to get small commissions. Her latest and most important was a farm scene for the cover of Hearth and Home, a new magazine sponsored by Edward Eggleston, Frank R. Stockton, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
And observe the continuities of a life like hers, despite the years of exile. She will have a connection with Harriet Beecher Stowe—will marry Mrs. Stowe’s cousin. Linton’s daughter will become a governess in the shacks and tents where Grandmother will live, and will help Grandmother in the sacred task of making my father and his sisters fit to live in Augusta’s world.
Now the New Year reception I have been leading up to. The place was the Moses Beach house on Columbia Street in Brooklyn Heights, then a street inhabited by great merchant families—Thayers, Merritts, Walters, Havilands “of the china Havilands.” Grandmother’s feckless brother Ned had married the daughter of Elwood Walter; during her first year as an art student Grandmother had lived in the Walter house down the street. She moved in this atmosphere not quite as an equal, but not quite as a poor relation, either. She was that nice young friend of Emma’s from the Cooper, the pretty little one with the high coloring, the one who draws so nicely. She knew and loved the Beach house. It was
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