Angle of Repose (25 page)

“Even in a place of our own, they’d feel obligated. I don’t want them obligated. Anyway, we couldn’t afford a place of our own in San Francisco.”

“Then where?”

“I’ll have to go there,” he said. “It’s the only place I’d have a chance to find another job. For you and the baby, I was wondering if Mrs. Elliott could find you a nice room in Santa Cruz, somewhere cheap and quiet and on the shore.”

“You mean-
separate?
”

“I could come down on weekends sometimes.”

“Oliver,” she said, “we mustn’t! You forget the six hundred dollars I made from
The Scarlet Letter,
and what I’ll get from Mr. Howells and from Thomas.”

“Which I won’t let you spend.”

“But if it will keep us all together!”

“Even so.”

That backed her straight out of his arm to a distance of two paces, a better arguing distance. “You’d rather have us live away from you, in some fumished room, than spend my perfectly good money for a house where we could be a family?”

That mulish, proud face. It looked as if it would take a crowbar to open his mouth. Finally it did open. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “It would only be until I locate something.”

She stared wildly into his clouded eyes, her voice came out of her high and stammering. “Maybe thee can keep me from spending what thee calls my money on thee,” she said, “but thee can’t keep me from spending it on the baby!”

He shook his head, hangdog, suffering, and immovable. “No,” he admitted. “But you’d shame me if you did.”

They glared like enemies. She bit her lips to stop their trembling, she felt the color leave her face, she saw him begin to melt and blur through her tears. It took a great effort, it was a wrench like renuncia tion of something precious, to submit to his pride. “All right,” she said, and again, on an in-caught breath, “All right. If that’s the way thee must have it.”

In her agitation she walked up and down the veranda, head down, sucking her knuckle. One turn, two, three, while he stood watching, saying nothing; and each time, at the end of the veranda, her head lifted and her eyes swept down across the view, and each time she turned she passed the hammock. It was a bitter irony to her that now she could hardly bear to think of leaving this place where only a year ago she had sat with her hand clenched in Oliver’s, fighting desolate tears, sick for home and Augusta, and torn by feelings which distance made as irrecoverable as they were incurable. Out of the corner of her eye as she passed the door she saw the black front of the Franklin stove which had been their hearthstone.

Gone, and as painful now as the thought of a stillborn child. Sentimental ? Of course. Riddled with the Anglo-American mawkishness about home, quicksandy with assumptions about monogamy and Woman’s Highest Role, buttery with echoes of the household poets. All that. But I find that I don’t mind her emotions and her sentiments. 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? What loss would hurt more? So I don’t snicker backward ninety years at poor Grandmother pacing her porch and biting her knuckle and hating the loss of what she had never quite got over thinking her exile. I find her moving. She is Massaccio’s Eve, more desolate than Adam because he can invent the bow and arrow and the spear, but she can only try to reassemble outside Eden an imperfect copy of what she has lost. And not guiltless, either. She buries that acknowledgment under disgust and fury at Kendall and his toadies, but she makes it, then or later: she has been guilty of pride, she has held herself apart, and so has contributed to the fall.

So there she is with her two hands clenched in the front of Oliver’s shirt, shaking him in her passion and her earnestness. “I’ll do what thee wants, or whatever we must, but
please
, Oliver, not two weeks more here! The air is poisoned, it’s all spoiled, I couldn’t bear it. How long will the map take thee? A week? Two weeks? Why can’t thee do it in Santa Cruz? I can finish my drawings there, there are only three more blocks, and I’ve done the sketches. Why not at Santa Cruz? We could work in the mornings and spend the afternoons on the shore. Thee has worked so hard, why must thee run right out and find more work? Couldn’t thee go to see Mrs. Elliott tomorrow and find a place?”

He looked down at her almost absently. He blew cold into her bangs and bent his head and kissed the forehead his breath had exposed. “I could,” he said. “But that wouldn’t support the family.”

“We have enough for a while.”

“Sure. And when it’s gone, then what?”

“Then there’s my drawing money.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Listen,” he said, “I’m supposed to be the reckless one in this family.”

“No,
thee
listen. Maybe Mrs. Elliott can find a place for Lizzie. She’s a jewel, there’s nothing so good on this coast. We won’t need her if we’re boarding. But we can keep Marian, so we can do things together again, and so I can work. And since she’ll be freeing my hands, I’ll pay her.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Oh, what does it matter?” Susan cried. ‘“Thee can pay her as long as thee has anything, and then I will. But let’s go just as soon as we can.”

Again he blew into her bangs and kissed where his breath was cold. “All right. For two weeks. Then I’ll have to go to the City.” He looked down at Stranger, sprawled on the boards with his chin on his big feet. “Eh, lad,” he said, like a sad Cousin Jack. “It’s back to they boardin’ ’ouses for both of us. And we’ll never know ’ow that ’oist works.”

Shelly Rasmussen’s shabby little soap opera is now playing at my house. I don’t like being a garbage can for her kind of troubles, but considering what I owe to Ed and Ada I couldn’t do anything but make the offer when the crisis blew up yesterday.

There have been better secretaries than Shelly, also worse. She isn’t stupid, and she has put the files in order faster than I thought she could, and learned them in the process. Occasionally she can anticipate what I’ll need, sometimes she comes up with something I’ve overlooked or forgotten. It doesn’t matter that she’s not much of a typist, because I decided very quickly not to let her transcribe my tapes–that would inhibit my mouth. If the tapes are ever transcribed I’ll send them down to some steno pool in Berkeley or the City. But Shelly is good at typing off illegible letters; she is just nearsighted enough to be able to read handwriting that baffles me. Altogether, she has saved me some time and a lot of the bone-ache I used to get trying to work in the files from my chair.

A considerable improvement on Miss Morrow. But she has a ribald streak that I don much like. She is a card-carrying member of this liberated generation, and though I am hardly one to go around clucking my tongue and asking Is nothing sacred, I find myself wondering about the state of mind that holds nothing worth the respect of unhumorous suspended judgment. Me, for instance. Once or twice I have caught her studying me as if I were somehow amusing, and that shocks me. At the very least I claim to be pitiful, grotesque, or appalling.

The interest she takes in the job we are doing is about as disconcerting as her interest in me. She is amused by the Victorian reticences and sentiments we uncover in Grandmother. That letter recording Grandmother’s discovery of the “cundrum” had her in stitches–the discrepancy between decorum and vile necessity was irresistible. Until she began to guffaw, I had thought that letter a rather touching footnote to the Genteel Female’s biological vulnerability, and I found it a little unseemly–I wasn’t shocked, I simply found it unseemly–that a girl of twenty or so should exploit that kind of joke–about his grandmother! –to her fifty-eight-year-old employer, and a man of stone at that.

Many things that I think human and touching in Grandmother’s life and character, she thinks comic. Many things that, even as a biographer, I am inclined to treat as private and essentially none of my business, she examines with that modern “frankness” which makes me nervous.

Ada has a version of Shelly’s experiences in Berkeley which seems to me unduly protective of her daughter. It may be, as she has told me, that Larry Rasmussen when Shelly met him was a nice clean boy from upstate New York who came out to Berkeley to get a degree in anthropology, and fell in with the wrong companions, and learned to live on hash and guitar music and vegetables marketed by the Street People’s Co-op, and left school without a degree and devoted himself, like an old-time I.W.W., to creating the new society within the shell of the old. I suggested the I.W.W. parallel to Ada, who being a miner’s daughter knew about the Wobblies. She fails to see the connection. She implies, though she is not as free in such discussions as her daughter, that Rasmussen made out with every amenable chick he met in the pads and communes where they lived, and that he tried to make Shelly live as loosely as he did. To hear Ada tell it, he wanted to pimp her off for money, or utilize her as bait in wife trading, or something of the sort. Even when I taught at Berkeley there was a girl who put herself through graduate school by selling two illegitimate babies to adoption agencies. Nothing that happens at Berkeley could possibly surprise me, and so I don’t necessarily doubt Ada’s version of Shelly’s bust-up with her husband.

Yet I don’t necessarily believe it, either. In all this truth-and-freedom-seeking I doubt that Shelly was very far behind her mate. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that while he was making out with somebody, she was around the corner not doing too badly herself. She has, on considered acquaintance, a bold eye and an uninhibited tongue and a body that flops and lounges. If she didn’t wear pants most of the time at work, even great stone Homer might nod and kink his neck. I cannot see her as an innocent victim of a nasty and dissolute hippie. When I was young there was a joke about the difference between dignified acquiescence and enthusiastic cooperation. I think I know where Shelly would belong. I feel sorry for Ada and Ed, who are small-town middle-class people, and not equipped to absorb these changes. Maybe Shelly rebelled against the life her husband was leading her into, maybe on the other hand, she simply got tired of supporting him.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon about four I was over by the window looking through a biography of Thomas Hudson by his daughter, checking out the references to Grandmother. Shelly was pulling out of the files all the Santa Cruz papers I was going to need for today: the letters, the illustrated article called “A Seaport on the Pacific,” some maps, some local histories. The sprinkler was going down on the lawn where Ed had set it when he came back from his tire shop–one of those golf-course sprinklers with a kicker bar and a pulse like the panting of a hard-run dog, a comfortable afternoon sound. Coolness drifted in the window, and a fragrance of wet grass. Every three or four minutes the jet of water, having marched clear to the edge of the pines, would start marching back. I heard it getting closer with each
pst pst pst
of the sprinkler until a volley of drops stormed the wistaria. Then away again,
pst pst pst.

Downstairs the door opened and closed. Ada, earlier than usual. But instead of going to the kitchen she came up the stairs. I knew she was in a hurry not only by the sound of her feet but by the fact that she didn’t take the lift, which saves her legs but is pretty slow. Before she reached the top I turned my chair toward the door. At the file, Shelly turned too. We were both looking toward the door when Ada arrived there and stood, one hand spread on her bosom, getting her breath.

“He’s here,” she said.

For a second Shelly looked at her almost musingly, through her hair; then she put up a hand and lifted the hair over her shoulder. “Where?”

“Down at the house. Talkin’to your dad.”

“Does he know I’m here?”

“He pretended he did. We swore you wasn’t.”

“But he didn’t go away.”

“Not him. He says, Where is she, then? I’ve checked out Berkeley and the City, nobody’s seen her.’ ” Ada kept her hand spread on her chest and breathed carefully with her mouth open. She is overweight, and smokes a lot of cigarettes, and she hasn’t got a lot of wind. She looked upset, angry, accusing, and her hair was half down with hurrying. “So then Dad says, ‘Wherever she is, it’s no business of yours unless she wants it to be. She’s had about all of you she needs.’ ”

“Yeah,” Shelly said, standing by the file. The study was quiet, like a classroom after a hard question. Outside, the sprinkler walked toward the house,
pst pst pst
, and drops hit the wistaria with a gravelly spatter. Ada’s eyes jumped to the window. She touched her crooked knuckles to her lips and took them away again like someone tenderly curious about a cold sore. The sprinkler walked away.

“What’d Larry say then?” Shelly said.

“Oh, you know what he’d say! He’s slick as a new cowpie. It’s all a misunderstanding. He can explain. You didn’t understand something. You didn’t wait to talk to him before you took off. ‘I know you never approved of me,’ he says, but I want to tell you, I
love
that girl. I want to help her.’ Help you, he says! Help you spend your paycheck! With that band around his head and them moccasins and some kind of purple pants. I wanted to stick a feather in his hair and make a real Indian of him. Honest to John, how you ever . . .”

“Mom, not again,” Shelly said. “How was he? Was he high? Did he act drunk or crazy or anything? Wild? You know-broken connections?”

“How would I know? No, I don’t suppose. He was just this slick smooth buttery same old thing like a salesman, only with all that hair and those clothes. He scares me, Shelly. He’s sick. He ought to be in an asylum.”