Angle of Repose (28 page)

“What?”

“I made cement.”

“What!”
In her excitement she lost the baby off her nipple, and had to put him back. If she had not been so involved in her motherly functions she would have flown to the bed and kissed that sleepy, smiling face. “Oh, I knew thee could, I knew all the time thee could!”

Oliver tossed the pillow to the ceiling and caught it. “I did it three times. Even old Ashburner admits it, and he’s so cautious he has to put his finger in the fire before he’ll say it’s still hot.”

“Now we can buy our promontory.”

“Now we can sit and wait. All I’ve done is
make
it. What would you say if some green twenty-nine-year-old engineer without a degree came into your office and said he could make hydraulic cement and needed about a hundred thousand to start a plant?”

“I’d give it to him at once.”

“Yeah, but you’re the engineer’s wife. No San Francisco banker is going to cave in that easy. I’m not very good at the talkee-talkee.”

“But thee can do it. Oh, isn’t it wonderful? I’m proud of thee. I knew thee could do it. Isn’t thee glad now we didn’t go to Potosí?” The baby sighed and slobbered at her breast. “Wait,” she whispered. “Let me get him taken care of.”

He hung from her breast like a ripe fruit ready to fall. His eyes were closed, then open, then closed again. When she detached him, milk bubbled over his chin, and she wiped him off, scolding him for a piggy. He threw up so easily, not like an adult retching and covered with cold sweat. His wasn’t sickness at all, things came up as easily as they went down. It was as if he were still used to the forward and backward flow of his mother’s blood washing his food into him the way the sea washed food into an anemone on a rock. And her blood still remembered him: Was it perhaps his
hunger
that had awakened her this morning, and not his cry? She hated the thought that he must become a separate, uncomfortable metabolism cursed with effort and choice.

As she spread a dry diaper on her shoulder and hoisted him up, she sent toward Oliver, still watching her, a look that she meant should express her triumph and encouragement. Excelsior! But his eyes shone at her, his face was full of a not-too-patient waiting. Another hunger to be appeased. She felt a dismayed wonder at how strangely nature has made us. She thought she would prefer to remain posed there before him as the idealized figure of protective motherhood, but her skin was prickly with the touch of his eyes as she walked the baby up and down, she felt the pliancy of the uncorseted body under her nightgown, she fully understood the sensuousness of her barefoot walk.

The baby squirmed, and she leaned back to look into his eyes. Dark blue. Did they know her? Of course they did; he smiled. Or was it a gas pain? He lifted his head on its wobbling neck and tried to focus over her shoulder at where he had just been. (That early, the historical perspective.) A great belch burst out of him, his head wobbled with the recoil. “There!” she laughed softly. “Now we’re comfortable.” She took him to the window to show him the morning, and to delay what awaited her when she turned around.

As usual, the casement opened on fog as white and blind as sleep. Beyond the wet shingles whose edge was overflowed by the ghost of a climbing rose, there were no shapes, solidities, directions, or distances. The world as far as she could see it, which was about fifteen feet, was soaking; she breathed something halfway between water-sodden air and air-thinned water. There was a slow, dignified dripping. A geranium leaf pasted to the raised and weathered grain of the sill had condensed in its cup a tiny lens as bright as mercury, in which, moving, she saw her own face tiny as a grass seed. Another face appeared beside it, an arm came around her waist. She shivered.

“Hello, Old Timer,” Oliver said to the baby. He bent to look out the window. “Thick out there.”

“I love it,” Susan said. “In a way, I love it. It scares me a little. It’s as if every morning the world had to create itself all new. Everything’s still to do, the word isn’t yet spoken. It’s like standing in front of a whited block that you have to make into a picture. No matter how many times I watch it happen, I’m never sure it will happen next time. I keep thinking I’m looking into our life, and it’s as vague and unclear as that. And now cement’s going to change everything.”

“I don’t know that cement’s any easier to see through than fog.”

But she was too happy to be teased. They stood, she thought, the quintessential family, looking out from their sanctuary into the vague but hopeful unknown. Undoubtedly she thought of the window they stood at as a magic casement. Couldn’t she hear the perilous seas? It is difficult to imagine Grandmother having to respond to the great moments of her life without all that poetry that she and Augusta had read together.

A drop as heavy as a ball bearing fell on the wet shingles. Beyond the ghostly edge of the roof there were only the faintest, tentative charcoal lines of form-suggested roses, vague mounds of shrubs down below, a tall dimness that would become a tree. From right, left, above, below, so pervasive that it seemed to tremble in the sill under her hand, she heard the Santa Cruz sound, at once laboring and indolent, a sound that both threatened and soothed, that could not make up its mind whether to become clearly what it was, or to go on muttering as formlessly as summer thunder too lazy for lightning. “Hear the sea?” she said.

“If Mrs. Elliott’s right that should be good for your soul.”

“Mrs. Elliott is always right. That’s the trouble with Mrs. Elliott.”

He was surprised. “Why, aren’t you getting along?”

“Oh, of course. She’s as generous and thoughtful as can be. But she helps me whether I want help or not. Her suggestions are commands.”

“You don’t have to take them. You’re a boarder, not a guest.”

“Just try not taking them! She’s got a theory about everything. When I’m not looking she gives the baby pieces of raw steak to suck on.”

“Does he suck on them?”

“Yes, that’s what’s so provoking. He loves it.”

She could feel rather than hear him laughing.

“You can laugh,” she said. “It’s not you she’s after all the time. There isn’t a woman she knows that she hasn’t told how to raise or wean or prevent her children. And with her own such examples. You should
hear
her in a group of women–she talks about the most impossibly intimate things. Birth control is what she’s on just now. She wants to liberate women from their biological slavery. She was never in doubt about one single thing in her entire life. Don’t tell me
you
like that sort of person, so good and unselfish and insufferable.”

“I find her very disagreeable,” Oliver said, still laughing.

“Do you think a woman ought to be contemptuous of her husband?”

“Heaven forbid. Is she?”

“Oh, she has the sharpest tongue! She tells me about the offers she had when she first came out here. It’s hard to believe, she’s so dowdy and blunt, but I suppose she may have, women were scarce. ‘So I took the little tanner,’ she says to me, as flippant as that, as if she’d been picking out a saucepan.”

“What’s wrong with Elliott? He looks like a perfectly good catch to me.”

“He’s not a New England intellectual,” Susan said. “He’s not enough like George William Curtis. He never washed dishes with Margaret Fuller. But wash dishes by himself, that’s another matter. They have an agreement,’ as she puts it. She cooks, he cleans up. The poor man is in his tan vats all day and in the dishpan all night, while those great slangy girls fool away at the piano or play whist.”

Oliver’s hand was moving on her stomach. “I know how the poor devil feels. I’ve had a lot of experience marrying women smarter than I am.”

“Oh, how you . . . Who invented cement?” She let herself be pulled within his tightening arm, and said with a kind of desperation, “We’ve got to plan and plan and plan.”

“No matter how we plan, we’re in for some more of Mrs. Elliott, I’m afraid. I could be months finding backing.”

“I don’t care now. We can wait.”

“Maybe you’d like to come up to the City with me.”

“Oh dear, I wonder . . . It would be lovely, but I wonder about Ollie.”

“Or find another boardinghouse here, if Mrs. Elliott gets to be more than you can stand.”

“It would be a slap in the face, she’s been so kind, according to her lights.”

“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.”

“And meantime we’ll all be dead of pleurisy from standing in front of the window. Let’s get back to bed.”

He engulfed her, but the baby was between them; his soft snore bubbled under her ear. “Don’t,” she whispered, “you’ll wake him.”

“Put him back in his crib.”

“What if Marian is awake?”

“Let her take care of him.”

“What if she knocks?”

“Let her knock. Lock the door.”

“Then she’d think . . .”

“Let her think.” His hand was lifting under the weight of her breast, his lips were on the top of her head.

“But it’s so light!”

“Then you won’t need a lamp to put him in his crib,” Oliver said. “After that you can shut your eyes.”

“Susan,” said Mrs. Elliott, “I must give you a piece of advice.”

She flapped the reins on the round haunches that worked in the shafts below. “Come on, Old Funeral Procession.” Her worn shoes–she had not changed them even for Christmas dinner and Christmas calls –were propped against the dash. The hands that held the lines were freckled like tortillas. Instead of a hat she wore a bandeau or clout around her head; from under it sprouted twists of rusty wire. Her face was brown leather. She looked to Susan, setting her teeth against a headache and desperate to be home, like something put together in the harness room, like one of her own impromptu dolls.

Even the people to whom they had just delivered generous Christmas baskets–a Chinese washerman, a truck farmer with a flock of children still sun-browned in this backward Christmas weather that felt more like April, and two fishermen’s families–had probably mocked her after she left. An odd, brusque, offensive sort of gift-giving. Here: this is for you. No grace in it, and no patience to wait for thanks, even ironic thanks. The town character. And she did not permit Susan to ask what the advice might be. She gave it before Susan could open her mouth.

“Let that man of yours drop this cement business. Let him find a job where he can build things. That’s what he wants.”

Susan took her time about replying. They were passing along the wall of the ruined mission, which she had drawn for Thomas Hudson with its climbing roses entangled among the thorny blades of a prickly pear, like the red rose ’round the briar in the old ballad. The gate opened and dressed-up children spilled into the street, bright beads from a broken string. Two nuns smiled from the archway. Old Funeral Procession pulled the dogcart past.

“You’re mistaken, Mrs. Elliott,” Susan said, as pleasantly as she could. “He’s very interested in cement. Why else would we be staking our future on it? It’s just that times are bad, and no one is willing to risk his money until he’s very sure. Anyway, it’s up to Oliver to decide if it has to be given up. I don’t make that sort of decision.”

“Oh yes you do,” said Mrs. Elliott.

“But Mrs. Elliott, really!”

“Of course you make the decisions. You tell him how your life is to go. If you didn’t, you’d be up in the Andes right now.”

“And you think we should be?”

Mrs. Elliott laughed like a crow. “You’d be together. You keep saying you want to be.”

“Not in a place that would be dangerous for Ollie.”

“All right,” said Mrs. Elliott. “So
you
made that decision. Let me tell you something. Any place is dangerous. Did you read about that boy and his father that were drowned at Pigeon Point the other day, after abalones at low tide? I’ve known children in this sleepy town who have died of eating lye, and children who have fallen down wells, and children who have been killed in runaways, and children who have died of scarlet fever. 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.”

Susan told herself to keep her temper. The woman was well-meaning, however eccentric, and it was not Susan alone who felt her urge to dominate. She treated her husband like a hired man. She could no more keep her fingers out of other people’s affairs than Ollie could help reaching for a rattle or a red ribbon. She could no more keep her opinions to herself than the gull that coasted over them just then could keep from jawing at them for not being edible. The proper response was a light laugh and a phrase that turned the advice aside. But she was too close to anger either to laugh or to find a properly light phrase. Mrs. Elliott, having said her say, drove grimly ahead.

After a minute of uncomfortable silence, Susan said, “If cement doesn’t work out, of course he’ll go back to mining.”

“He should go back now,” said Mrs. Elliott. “He hates this waiting on rich men, as if he were some swindling promoter.”

Susan felt the color surging into her face. “Excuse me, Mrs. Elliott, I think he knows what he wants to do, and is doing it.”

“I think he knows what you want him to do,” Mrs. Elliott said.

“He
agrees
with me!”

“He convinces himself that he does.”

“Well,” said Susan, thoroughly annoyed, “what should a wife in my position do, since we’re on this interesting personal subject?”