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In my mind I write letters to the newspapers, saying Dear Editor, As a modern man and a one-legged man, I can tell you that the conditions are similar. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair.
I am on my grandparents’ side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.
That’s Rodman’s idea of history. Every fourth-rate antiquarian in the West has panned Lola’s poor little gravel. My grandparents are a deep vein that has never been dug. They were people.
Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”? I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer.” But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don’t mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it.
There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you—a train, say, or the future —has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds.
The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. Those I don’t have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.
Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of—that is what I most want. I would not trade the daily trip it gives me for all the mind-expanders and mind-deadeners the young are hooked on.
Many years later, when she reported that evening in her reminiscences, she was hearing the Doppler Effect of time, as I am now. She was looking back more than sixty years, I am looking back more than a century, but I think I hear the same tone, or tones, that she did: the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four.
I don’t care about that, and I don’t care whether she was astonished, impressed, shocked, or amused. What I find myself held by, in imagination, is their tentativeness, their half-awkward half-willingness to admit their understanding, as they faced each other in the doorway by the light of the lamp she carried. That too is like one of her drawings —narrative, sidelighted, suffused with possibility.
Long Pond and Black Pond, liked by New York visitors, were not enough for a man who had seen the Yosemite and ridden the length of the San Joaquin Valley through square miles of wildflowers.
It is all Victorian, as Rodman says, all covered up with antimacassars, all quivering with sensibility and an inordinate respect for the genteel. And not a word about that great plunge into sex, from a virginity so absolute that it probably didn’t know the vocabulary, much less the physiology and the emotions.
These poor little flowers will all be crushed and withered when they reach you, but they are better than words. They grow along the roadside and keep their meek little faces white and pure in the midst of the dust
What was there for a young husband of 1876 to say? Something ineffable, something like what William Clark wrote in his notebook when he and Meriwether Lewis saw the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia (O! the joy!)? Certainly not what I heard my son Rodman say when Leah telephoned him from her gynecologist’s office. (Shit!)
I know that you and Thomas are both growing in ways both deep and broad. It makes me tremble a little, for I am not conscious of any growth in myself, and I cannot let you grow away from me. I am so afraid when you see me again you will find me poor and common.
Come, come to Santa Cruz! Mrs. Elliott said as she departed. When the Great Event had happened, and Susan was rested, and wanted quiet in which to concentrate on the proper influences for that little unformed soul, she should bring him to Santa Cruz where he could wake and sleep to the sound of the sea. It would soothe his harsh masculine temperament if he was male, and reinforce her capacity for love and devotion if she was female.
There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses. Another is that it was rough, ready, and unkempt, and ribald about anything not as unkempt as itself, whereas in fact there was never a time or place where gentility, especially female gentility, was more respected.
Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier?
“Then all the planning we can do leaves us right where we are.” She heard the noise of Elliott shaking down the kitchen range, and in the dripping stillness that followed, distant bird cries cut through the mutter of the sea. “But not where we were,” she said. “Because now there’s a future. We can look out into fog as thick as cream and be certain it will burn away. We can hear all those lost squawks and know that as soon as Creation says the right word, they’ll be birds.”
If you try to protect that boy from everything, you may wind up balking his father from ever doing what he’s got it in him to do.”
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
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It all looks as it looked in my boyhood, when I was back from school for the summer. My eyes have not changed, the St. Paul’s boy is still there. I feel sorry for him, imprisoned in nearly sixty years of living, chained to a chair, caged in a maimed and petrified body. For an instant the familiar grounds glare and tremble, the prisoner rages at his bars. It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take
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I suppose in a way we deserve the people we marry.
What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.
“A marriage,” I say. “A masculine and a feminine. A romantic and a realist. A woman who was more lady than woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman.
And that made her think, with failing nerve, that whatever it was, it was to be her life. It was what she had deliberately chosen.
The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration.
“Maybe. I hate all this lawing and claim jumping and swearing to false affidavits and all this playing expert in a game where both sides are crooked. It’d be nice to do a job that just expanded knowledge.”
“Look at her picture,” I said. “What’s in that face? Hypocrisy? Dishonesty? Prudery? Timidity? Or discipline, self-control, modesty? Modesty, there’s a word 1970 can’t even conceive. Is that a woman I want to show making awkward love on a camp cot? Do you want to hear her erotic cries? Is that a woman to snicker at because she was a lady, and fastidious?”
“I think you’re describing a kind of hell,” I said. “You’re talking about people who have become sub-human. Sub-mammal. Sub-worm. I wonder if even bilharzia worms, which are locked in copulation all their lives, ever sit around and watch other bilharzia worms copulate? I think our sickness has gone so far we aren’t even sure it’s sickness.”
She stood up and slapped the seat of her pants as if the floor had been a dusty roadside. “Anyway I take it back about the sex scene. Even if you’d spelled it out, I guess it wouldn’t have been a climax to much of anything.” “Is it ever?” I said. “No, it was just sort of like everything else.”
The delusion lasted perhaps five seconds before realism wiped it out. Busy as a Breughel, the vision filled her head: the men jostling up and down plank sidewalks that thrummed under their boots like bridges, overdressed women strolling past open doors of assay and law offices within which men in shirtsleeves argued or smoked or watched the street, wall-eyed teams plunging by, teamsters rising to lay the whip to quivering haunches, the band playing, the smoke of smelters streaming from the stacks, the earth trembling to the vibration of stamp mills, the whole place leaning as if in a strong
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Gentility is inherited through the female line like hemophilia, and is all but incurable.
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.
They sat and ate hungrily, smiling foolishly into each other’s faces as they gobbled, craning their necks to search the corners of their great room. Night blew in on them in soft gusts from the balcony’s open french doors.
Respectability is a burden perhaps greater than I want to bear.
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
Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence, a county-fair Moses with his sleeves rolled up, ready to smite the rock. If he didn’t throw away his foolish staff and quit dreaming, he would humiliate her and himself, and justify every doubt her friends had ever had of him.
Oliver knew, in that quiet way he has of knowing, that if I once saw it I would feel about it as he does. It is a great idea, difficult of accomplishment but not impossible. I have become half a believer, and though I cannot say I am fully reconciled to the life it will lead us, I am no longer fearful of failure.
I would rather be picturesquely uncomfortable than comfortably dull.
As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong. Hope was
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“All right,” Oliver said. He sat a moment with his lips compressed and his eyes on the fire. “Frank and Wiley to stay on and get their reward in Heaven, or some time in the future. Susan to make her pound of flesh out of the company. All of us to be in the same boat-the canal boat. Maybe we can even keep Wan. Is that what we all want? All right, we’ll build the best damned house in Idaho. I get to be architect and chief engineer.” He stood up and swung the lantern around his head. They cheered.
Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
Think of us-continue to think of us–in this far canyon. But do not think of us as unhappy. Do you remember Bishop Ripley, or whoever it was–“By God’s grace, we shall light such a fire. . .
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. It is a law I take advantage of, and bless, but then I am not young, ambitious, and balked.
“Your wife isn’t interested in rainbows,” the doctor said. “You’ve got a daughter three minutes old.”
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.
Forgiving I have considered, though like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man.
Does a woman ever leave a man out of intolerable pity? Or because she fears what pity may do to her and him?
My kind of pain isn’t the screaming kind, it’s only the tooth-gritting kind.
We are all right–life continues, the old bonds hold–and if there is a certain unhappiness, a real regret, why that is what man, and even more woman, is born to. I repeat, I am all right.
