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Authors: Wallace Stegner

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Angle of Repose (66 page)

BOOK: Angle of Repose
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What might have happened? I guess they would have found plenty to talk about, after nearly three years. I guess I think it would not have taken Frank long to discover that the object of his hopeless devotion–Noli me
tangere,
for
Caesar’s
I
am–
was in a mood of serious disillusionment with Caesar. I guess I think that after greeting Nellie, and kissing Betsy, and shaking hands with Wan, he would have looked around the hill spotted with spring flowers, and sniffed the wind that blew down the canyon, and listened to the river heavy and incessant with the spring runoff, and suggested a walk up on the bluffs.
And now I can’t avoid it any longer, I
have
to put words in their mouths. Not very personal words at first. Questions and answers. Probes. Time-fillers.
 
They were climbing up the gulch road, steep and full of loose stones. He helped her along by the hand. When the pitch leveled off he said, “I gather the canal boat is really on the rocks.”
“Who told you that? Somebody in town?”
“Yes.”
“I despise those people!” she cried. “They’re so eager to write our obituary.”
“Why? Aren’t they right?”
“That’s the trouble. But if one or two or three of them had had enough faith at the right time, we’d have . . .”
He sprang up a boulder that the trail had straddled, and reaching down a hand, helped her up. He said, “Must be hard on Oliver.”
“Terribly.”
“You too.”
Shrug. “All of us.”
They rested, getting their breath. He said, “I’m anxious to see Ollie. He must be a big boy by now.”
“Big and silent. It hasn’t been good for him to grow up in the canyon. He hasn’t seen enough boys and girls his own age.”
“I always thought he loved it.”
“He does, but it hasn’t been good for him. He ought to be sent East to school.”
“Don’t you plan to?”
“With what? What would we use for money?”
They started again, pulled up through the shallowing gulch until it flattened out onto the sagebrush plateau. The wind, blowing erratically from the west, moved in the sage and chilled their warm skins. She burst out, “And yet he
must
be exposed to cultivated people somehow, he
must
see plays and hear operas and go to galleries and listen to good talk! He mustn’t grow up as silent as his father!”
Brief and questioning, his glance touched her, and then went far off over the valley to the southern mountains, very high-looking from up there, their slopes hazy jade, their peaks hazy lavender crowned with hazy white. He said, “His father’s the best man in Idaho, with the biggest ideas.”
“All of which have failed.”
“Oh, now, Susan, where’s the faith?”
“Gone. Withered away. Dried up.”
“I can’t believe it.” Again he took her hands, and bent down on her a look that was puzzled, frowning, and intent. She felt like someone trying to hold down blowing papers in a wind; everything was flying away in confusion. “That just won’t do,” Frank said. “You’ve got to have faith in the Chief and in the canal.”
Her eyes would not lift to his. They fixed themselves on the tops of the blowing sage behind him. She felt her mouth twist with bitterness. “Faith in the canal I might manage, even yet,” she said.
For a long time he stood facing her, holding her hands, not answering; and she, appalled at what she had said, stole a swift glance upward, a moment’s flick of the eyes. His face was thoughtful and closed. Finally he said, “Tell me about it?” and started her walking along the bluff trail. But he retained one of her hands.
Later they were sitting on the lava rim where more than once he had sat for her as a model. She had his Norfolk corduroy jacket folded under her to save her dress. Before them opened the gulf of air, with swallows swimming in it. Below them the river was busy digging itself deeper in the lava. They could see how the lava had capped the foothills, or created them, and how the river, coming from the big mountain valley above, had cut down through the dam. (The big valley above would one day all be under water, her engineers had assured her.) They could look down into the top of the slot where the river had cut through (a potential damsite, but not so good as the Arrow Rock site below) but their first sight of the river was where it boiled out, white as a ruffled shirt front, into their pool. On the knoll above the side gulch, Wan’s wash, hung on two lines, waved like a double line of prayer flags.
She sat so close to Frank that their arms brushed when they moved, and she was acutely conscious of every slightest contact. Looking down that steep perspective to the little drawing at the bottom, she said, still in the tone of bitterness, “There lie the most wasted years of our lives.”
Frank, braced back on the hand farthest from her, did not answer. The little scene on which her eyes were fixed had the clarity of a miniature imprisoned in a lens. The cottonwoods in the hole across the river were bright and twinkling, the gulch was thinly washed with green. The wind gusted from the west, and the swallows tilted in it. Under her dangling feet they were either building or serving nests in crannies and pockets of the cliff. She could hear the river, or the wind, or both, a steady murmuring; and now in a momentary hush the long, sad
wheeoooo hoo hoo hoo
of a dove.
“Yes,” she said. “Mourn!”
Frank moved, bumping her shoulder. He muttered an apology, but she did not reply, or look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the shrunken image of their communal life, her heart was sick with the dove’s calling.
“Sue,” Frank said.
Her mournful preoccupation was both compulsive and somewhat theatrical, half false, for through it she took alert notice of the name he called her by. He had always called her Susan; before strangers, Mrs. Ward. But she did not turn. “Sue, it’s not for me to tell you this, but he’s had to sit through six years of nothing but disappointment.”
“So have we all,” she said into the wind. “So have you. Have you taken to drink?”
“I haven’t staked my whole life on that canal the way he has.”
Now she did turn. “Haven’t you? I thought you’d staked a good bit of it.”
“You know what I’ve staked my life on. And how much good it’ll do me.”
He moved, straightened, picked up the hand on which he had been bracing himself, and brushed off the lava pebbles and showed her with a laugh, in explanation of his suddenness, the dented and bruised palm. Somehow the sight of his punished hand broke her quite down. She said to the bulge of her knees under the long white dress, “Frank, what am I going to do? I can’t trust the children’s future to him. He’ll go on trying and trying, and failing and failing, and the more he fails the more his . . . weakness . . . will control him. The children will grow up like Willa Olpen’s, they’ll be savages! I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried.”
“I know.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Without his propping hand, he was leaning awkwardly ahead and away. He leaned back, tensed against the awkward position and the wind, and their eyes met. Hers were full of tears. Her teeth bit down on the trembling of her lips. His left hand went behind her, to brace him. With an exclamation he circled it clear around her and pulled her into his arms.
Tears, kisses, passionate and despairing words. Hands? Perhaps. I find it hard to conceive in relation to my grandmother, and to judge by her photographs from that period, there were an awful lot of clothes. Nevertheless. She had been bottled up a long time.
But in the end she pulled herself free and stood up from the sweet and fatal embrace–stood up with her hands to her streaming eyes, and flung her hands, wet with her tears, groundward in a gesture of utter woe–Massaccio’s Eve, I have called her that before–and walked away from him, fighting for composure, and stood with her back to him on the trail.
For some time he sat where she had left him. Then he stood up and followed, touched her on the shoulder. She did not turn.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
The wind pushed them, flattening his shirt against his back, shaping her legs under her skirts and petticoats. There was wild pink phlox spreading in a mat from near her feet into a bay of the sage.
“I don’t know what we can do,” she said, speaking away from him, down the wind. “But I know one thing we mustn’t do.”
He waited.
“Any more of this.”
He did not speak.
“Any more of this!” she said violently, and turned and faced him. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes were reddened, but she was calmer. She stared into his eyes, she put out a hand in love and pity to touch his. “I must take the children and go away just as soon as I can. Tomorrow. Next day at the latest.”
“And that leaves me . . . ?” Frank said.
She bent her head and bit down hard on her quivering lip; she turned and looked away from him across the blowing sage.
They would have looked very small, to anyone on a high place, as they walked the trail back to the gulch road. From the photographs in her old album, I should judge she was probably wearing one of those dresses with a half bustle, several years out of style by then; but it would cost me more research than it is worth to know for sure. I know that her skirts would have brushed the dust, that her throat was choked in a high collar, that her arms were covered in leg-of-mutton sleeves that came to the wrist. Only her woeful face and her hands were exposed. The face looked straight ahead. One of the hands was clenched at her side. The other was wound tightly–oh, tightly, with spasmodic squeezings and convulsions of feeling–in Frank Sargent’s.
That was the way they were walking when they came to the gulch road and quite suddenly–the wind was blowing sounds away from them–met Oliver and Ollie in the buggy, just turning off the mountain road into the gulch.
She wrenched her hand free of Frank’s, she swerved to put space between them. Almost without hesitation she waved a greeting, and she heard the whish of Frank’s coat as he swung it around his head. Oliver pulled in the team and waited. They came on down the trail shouting and accepting shouts: Look who’s
here!
Look who came
back
for a look
see!
Hey, you old rascal! Hi,
Ollie!
What’s the idea, abandoning the old
ranch?
We’ve just been up taking a last
look
at it.
There was handshaking and arm-punching, some exuberant expressions of friendship and reunion. It had all the outward signs of warmth. But Susan, climbing into the seat while Ollie and Frank piled into the back, rocked and bumped down the canyon in silence, wondering if her tears had marked her face, if they had seen her pull her hand free from Frank’s, if Oliver’s friendliness was forced, if the expression on Ollie’s face was illusory, part of her own guilt, or if it expressed what he felt, or sensed, when he looked up and saw his mother and Frank Sargent walking close together with locked hands, coming down the trail with guilty distress written all over them.
VIII
THE MESA
1
Grandmother says she submitted to that separation; I think she created it. My only evidence is the letters to Augusta, and those are careful. They mention Oliver only in the most matter-of-fact way, and they mention Frank Sargent not at all. She was absorbed in her children and herself, like a widow mending a torn life.
. . . struck me how often in the past dozen years I have had this feeling of suspension and unreality. Each move leaves me less myself. One can grow used to the security even of a wild canyon, and feel uneasy and afraid outside it. Here in this quiet very respectable very English place I am not Susan Ward at all, or at best I am Susan Ward bewildered and fuzzy-headed, as if after a bout of malaria.
Yet it is charming, and people are kind. We have taken a cottage out by the strait, in the James Bay district, on a lane called Bird Cage Walk. The weather is beautifully mild and soft after our sunstruck gulch. I have a girl who comes by the day, and Nellie is as always perfection–her life would look as beautiful hung on the wall as one of her father’s watercolors. She is more the mother of my children than I can afford to be, for I must work long hours, and can only lift my head at evening for a brief walk. I renew myself religiously every Sunday by taking the children for a picnic on the shore.
They are such good children! I am blessed. Ollie is growing into a manly boy, quiet and steady, not handsome as his pictures show Rodman to be, but my own good boy, and a strength to me. He misses his pony and the canyon more than I anticipated, but as he makes more acquaintances here, and grows used to the place, I expect him to enjoy it as the rest of us do. It will do him no harm to hear accents more cultivated than those of Idaho, where they speak of “airigation,” and call a closet a “cubby,” and “wrench” the soap out of their wash, or “worsh.”
Betsy at seven is a little mother, a little housekeeper in love with brooms and silverware and dishwashing. It is touching to see what jealous care both she and Ollie take of their little sister, who is another kind altogether.
She charms us, makes us laugh, awes us, frightens us almost. How she came among us on our crude frontier I shall never know. It is that double rainbow she was born under. She comes from a better world than this, and she has moments of remembering it. She speaks with the fairies. Sometimes I sit and watch her playing quietly in my workroom when the other two are at their lessons, and I see pass over her sweet little face reflections of some pure life she lives within herself. She conducts conversations with invisible playmates, sings songs that she makes up herself, draws pictures with a confidence and imagination that her mother, at least thinks utterly remarkable for a three-year-old. There is no doubt which of my children will be the artist of the family. When she looks up at me and laughs it is as if someone had thrown open the windows of a stuffy house and let the clean sea air rush in. And the sea air is making her bloom. She has a rosy color, and none of the bronchial troubles that Idaho’s dust and wind induced.
I am ashamed to bother you, knowing how full your days are, but I am so far from everything, and can think of no other way. Could you somehow get me the addresses of several of the best schools–St. Paul’s, Kent, Phillips-Exeter, Deerfield-what others are there?–together with the names of their headmasters if possible? I wish to write and see what I can do for Ollie. He is not a brilliant boy, and I am afraid his difficulty with reading will be a handicap, though Nellie works with him constantly. But he is very steady, and in most subjects sound. Before long he shall have gone beyond that Nellie can give him, and I am determined he shall have his chance.
BOOK: Angle of Repose
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