Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [108]
“I’m not going to put any of that in,” I say.
“You’re not? Why not? You know all about it. You’re writing a book about Western history. Why leave out the colorful stuff?”
“I’m not writing a book of Western history,” I tell him. “I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?”
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually–I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. 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.
In my peripheral vision I am aware that he is looking at me steadily, but I don’t turn. I look a while at the gun and bowie and spurs above the desk, where Grandmother put them. Then I turn a half circle and look at Grandmother’s downcast, pensive portrait. Up here in the study it is beginning to be hot.
“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. I don’t give a damn if he once saw Wild Bill plain. He couldn’t have, anyway, because Wild Bill was killed at least a year before Grandfather blew into Deadwood. I’m much more interested in quirky little things that most people wouldn’t even notice. Why, for instance, did he send the Christmas presents he did from Deadwood–a bundle of raw beaver pelts and an elk head the size of a good-sized woodshed? What would he do that for? It’s as nutty as Shelly Rasmussen’s nutty husband sending her twenty-four canaries.”
“He did?” Rodman says, delighted.
“Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about now. I’m talking about Grandfather, who wasn’t a kook, but who still sent those things, as if he was insisting on something. It’s like that horse pistol up there that he brought to his courting and laid out on her Quaker dresser. He wanted to be something she resisted. She was incurably Eastern-genteel, what she really admired was a man of sensibility like Thomas Hudson.”
“Who he?”
“Never mind. Augusta’s husband, you know. Fragile and a little effeminate and very cultivated. Grandfather was something totally different. What held him and Grandmother together for more than sixty years? Passion? Integrity? Culture? Convention? Inviolability of contract? Notions of possession? By some standards they weren’t even married, they just had a paper signed by some witnesses. The first dozen years they knew each other, they were more apart than together. These days, that marriage wouldn’t have lasted any longer than one of these hippie weddings with homemade rituals. What made that union of opposites hold them?”
Too late, I realize that I have been vehement. Rodman has quietly laid the stereoscope down on the desk. My stump is twitching and my seat is numb from four or five hours in the chair. I take out the aspirin bottle and shake two into my hand.
“Want some water?” Rodman says.
“No, I can take them without.”
“Works better if it’s diluted and dissolved.”
“O.K.”
He brings a glass of water from the bathroom. There is a constraint as thick as gelatin in the air between us. A linnet looks us over from the window ledge, but when I turn my chair to face Rodman I hear the thrrrt! of its wings and in the corner of my eye see its dark blip disappear.
“Pop, I suppose I better tell you,” Rodman says. “Mother was over yesterday.”
There are certain advantages to being made of stone. I sit there, and I don’t think I quiver. “She was?”
“She asked about