But oh, Ada, Ada, get over here, it’s already past nine.
And there, like a bell tardily ringing the hour, is her key in the lock downstairs.
2
Morning, the room full of sun. I wheel to the window and watch the robins digging worms in Grandfather’s lawn. The grass is blue-wet in the open, green-dry under the pines. 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. On the long desk my grandparents’ lives are spread out in files and folders, not as orderly as I would like them, and not fully understood, but waiting with a look of welcome. The loose folders I have been working on are weighted down with Grandfather’s rock samples—high-grade mostly, with varicose veins of gold through it, but also other things: a piece of horn silver, carbonate ore from Leadville, a volcanic bomb sawed in two to reveal the nest of olivine inside, some jasper geodes, an assortment of flaked flint arrow and spearheads.
The solidity and weight of these relics I have several times blessed, for if my papers blow off on the floor I have a bad time retrieving them, and may have to wait until Ada comes, by which time the wind has undone all my careful order. A night or two ago, after a gust had scattered a whole day’s patient sorting around the room, I dreamed I was a rodeo cowboy riding my jet-powered chair in figure eights through the place, swooping from the saddle with my vest pocket scooping dust and snatching up papers one by one like ladies’ handkerchiefs. Rodman would have something to say about juvenile fantasies of self-reliance if I told him that one.
This is the best time, from eight to noon. Later I begin to hurt more, I get querulous, my mind wanders. 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.
I thank my stars that I have no such commitments to the present as Ada was telling me about last night—a daughter at home resting up from her husband, who is apparently a head of some sort, one of the Berkeley Street People, a People’s Park maker, a drop-out and a cop-out whose aim is to remake the world closer to the heart’s desire. I know him, I have seen him a hundred times—his mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. He brings his dog to classes, or did when he was attending classes. He eats organically grown vegetables and lives in communes and admires American Indians and takes his pleasure out of tribal ceremonials and loves the Earth and all its natural products. He thinks you can turn the clock back. He is not so different from me, actually, except in the matters of skepticism and a sense of history. Ada, naturally, finds him pretty repulsive. What’s the matter with kids these days? she asks me. What kind of a loony bin have they got down there in Berkeley, anyway? What kind of a fellow is it that will let his wife support him for two years, living around in those pigpen places, everybody scrambled in together? Honest to John, when I look at TV and see them down there breaking windows and throwing rocks at police and getting tear-gassed, all dressed up in their kookie clothes, with their hair down to their shoulders! You were there. Did it use to be that way? When Shelly went down there to go to school she was the brightest girl in Grass Valley High. Two years later she’s a drop-out, working to support that . . . She’d been better off if she’d stayed right here and gone to secretarial school and got a job here at home.
Well, I have no confused young to look after. Rodman takes care of himself, I’ll give him that. My problem is to keep him from taking care of
me
. As for Rodman’s mother, she no longer lies in wait for me as I go from kitchen to study and study to porch or garden. She has no associations with this house. I bypass her, somewhere on the stairs, on my way to the strenuousness, aspiration, and decorum of my grandmother’s life, and the practicality and masculine steadiness of my grandfather’s.
The West began for Susan Burling on the last day of 1868, more than a century ago. It had not figured in her plans. She was in love with Art, New York, and Augusta Drake. So long as I have quoted Augusta on Susan, I may as well quote Susan on Augusta. This is from her unpublished reminiscences, written when she was in her eighties.
And then Augusta dawned on my nineteenth year like a rose-pink winter sunrise . . . sweet and cold from her walk up from the ferry: Staten Island was her home. A subsidiary aunt had taken me in that winter who lived on Long Island, and I crossed by an uptown ferry and walked down. Across the city we came together, and across the world in some respects. She was a niece of Commodore De Kay and a granddaughter of Joseph Rodman Drake. Her people belonged to the old aristocracy of New York. My people belonged to nothing except the Society of Friends and not even that any longer in good standing. She had spent her girlhood abroad and spoke three languages, I “one imperfectly.” She had lived in one of the famous capitals of Europe and walked its galleries among the Old Masters while I was walking the old green hills of the Hudson and wandering the Long Pond woods, and my longest journey at that time had been to Rochester, New York.
She said she was a professional, but her friends were New York society girls and private pupils; she was in the painting class, I in Black and White, but we both stayed in the afternoons and had 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 all one great window on the water side, and from its bluff overlooked the whole Upper Bay with its waterbug activity of tugs and ferries and barges. Governors Island, as I imagine that last day of December, would have floated like dirty ice out in the bay; the Jersey shore would have fumed with slow smokes.
The Doppler Effect is very apparent in my imagining of that afternoon. I hear it as it was now and as it is then. Nemesis in a wheelchair, I could roll into that party and astonish and appall the company with the things I know. The future is inexorable for all of them; for some it is set like a trap.
Thanks to the prominence of the people Augusta had introduced Susan to, I can find some of them in the histories of art and others in memoirs and reminiscences. The view from Columbia Street I have seen, but much obstructed and changed. As she saw it a hundred years ago there were no grimy warehouses thrusting up from the waterfront, there was no Brooklyn Bridge, no Statue of Liberty, no New York skyline. Somewhere I have read that in 1870 the tallest building in Manhattan was ten stories. But I am like the Connecticut Yankee who has foreknowledge of an eclipse. I know that in a few years the Roeblings, who will build Brooklyn Bridge, will buy the Walter house. I could depress young Dickie Drake, Augusta’s moody and poetic brother, with the story of the Statue of Liberty, for on its base will one day be inscribed a poem by a girl named Emma Lazarus, with whom Dickie will fall in love after he gets over Susan Burling, but whom he will not marry. She is Jewish. Augusta will write Grandmother all about it, and Grandmother, though she likes Emma Lazarus, will agree with the family’s judgment that such a marriage would not do.
So many things I know. Young Abbott Thayer, whom I have looked up in the art histories, was at that party, monopolizing a love seat in the second parlor with Katy Bloede, one of Grandmother’s Cooper friends. The Thayer painting I have here on the desk, the one called
Young Woman
from the Metropolitan collection, is undoubtedly Katy Bloede, the “typical tall, handsome, almost sexless female for which he was famous.” She was not quite sexless—she had serious “female troubles”—and Thayer will marry her shortly and paint her a hundred times. As Grandmother said, “Her face was his fortune.” When she dies young, Thayer will marry Emma Beach, currently playing the piano for a Portland Fancy in the other room.
Among those dancing was George Haviland, altogether the most sophisticated and charming man Susan Burling had ever seen. She admired his courtesy and his grace, though he was said to drink. She worshipped his beautiful young wife. Ah, there, George Haviland. In a few years you will blow your brains out, a bankrupt.
Or Elwood Walter, Jr., several times my grandmother’s escort in those years, a man she said gave her her first lessons in flirtation. A volatile, talkative, ugly, attractive man “capable of any sacrifice that did not last too long,” he will have a fate less predictable than Haviland’s. He will die in the sandals and brown robe of a Franciscan monk.
Or Henry Ward Beecher, the great man of that district, pastor of Plymouth Church, late thunderer of ferocious war sermons. He was sitting with an attentive group around him in the parlor off the dining room, and the boom of his voice filled the house when Emma Beach stopped playing and the dancers paused. “Born conspicuous,” Grandmother said of him, “the most naturally self-conscious man in the world.” His only mode of conversation was the monologue, and his version of the monologue was declamation. Many Friends disliked him for his bloody sermons. Women on Columbia Street told each other privately that he had been seen letting himself out of the Beach house, whose library he used as a sanctuary, at late and compromising hours. Grandmother disliked him for his sermons, thought the stories of his indiscretions mere gossip, and despised his arrogance. And what a collapse is coming to that whited sepulcher of a reputation!
Mene mene tekel upharsin.
Only a little, and Theodore Tilton will bring it all down with his charge that Beecher committed adultery with Tilton’s wife.
On days like this, the young ladies stayed at home and received, the young men circulated from house to house. Grandmother thought them “almost too boastful” about the number of houses they must visit before night, and found some of them almost too far gone to dance by the time they reached the Beaches’. Her own callers were few and left early. Augusta herself was receiving on Staten Island and would not be at this party. The dancing had broken up as a group of young men prepared to depart. She went into the main parlor, got herself a glass of punch, and stood by the west window watching the sun embed itself in long flat clouds. In the small parlor the Reverend Beecher was defending, against no opposition that Susan could hear, the practice of selling church pews. Through the doorway Mrs. Beach, buoyant upon her bustle, caught her eye and beckoned.