Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [109]
“Did you give her the dope?”
His look splinters on mine. Even Rodman has difficulty with my immobility, and now he obviously suffers from embarrassment–for himself or for me I can’t tell. But after that moment’s cringing he holds my eye. “Yes.”
“All right.”
“She doesn’t look good,” he says. “She’s shaky. She’s had a bad time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’s taken an apartment in Walnut Creek.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Pop . . .”
I take the hand that he mashed in greeting me, and work the knuckles with the fingers of my other hand. I can feel the bone hard and resistant and enlarged. Rodman is standing by the desk, so that I have to look upward at him under my eyebrows. God damn, it would be a pleasure to live among people four feet high, or as considerate as Al Sutton.
“I think she’d like to see you,” Rodman says. “I think she feels very bad.”
I do not answer. The ache which has never gone away since he shook my hand spreads up the wrist and arm, I feel it stiffening my shoulder and solidifying down my spine. Everything in me is congealing –guts, glands, blood vessels, organs, bones. My stump, as it always does when I get upset, jerks like a fish on a line. I lay the aching hand on top of it and sit, too rigid for my own comfort.
“Don’t you think, maybe–” Rodman says.
“She made her bed.”
He stands looking down at me; I look past him.
“Why not get us a drink?” I say. “In the cabinet, there. There’s ice in the little refrigerator under the far end of the desk.”
He goes away from me and I sit in the midst of my own petrefaction, hating him, hating her, hating it, hating myself. He brings the drinks silently and hands me a glass. Lifting my eyes upward through my eyebrows, excruciatingly conscious of the rigidity of my neck, I raise the glass an inch. “To you.”
“Prosit.”
But he is not going to leave it at that. He stands there bending me with his eyes, and with an expression on his bearded face that I have to read as pained, diffident, everything that Rodman normally is not.
“If I brought her up,” he says, “would you see her?”
For an instant it is touch and go, the stone threatens to become weak flesh again. For the half breath that I feel that weakness, I want it, yearn for it, would willingly turn to mush if only some of the old warmth would come back. My mind darts like a boy who has stolen something and wants to get to a safe place to examine his prize. Then I am aware that throughout this instant of weakness I have been sitting there as rigid as ever. There is too much of Grandfather in me.
“You may as well understand,” I say. “I don’t hate her. I don’t blame her. I think I understand her temptation. I’m sorry about her bad luck and her suffering. But I have nothing to say to her. Tell her so.”
2
At first light she pulled her curtains aside and saw sunrise pink on distant snow peaks. Breakfasting, she sat on the left side of the dining car to watch the mountains come nearer, and she was getting her things together when the train was still racketing across empty plains. When it finally crawled between lines of side-tracked boxcars and died with a hiss at the Denver platform, she was on tiptoe behind the porter in the vestibule. But at the last moment, when he opened the door on a pandemonium of hatted heads, bearded faces, shouting mouths, blowing papers, Mexicans, Indians, frock coats, buckskins, and a ten-foot sign that said “Lunch Pails Filled 25 c. Passengers for the Mines Take Notice,” she pulled back with a hollowness in her stomach and let others go first. Her eyes flew up and down, hunting him.
At once she saw him, not pushing forward but back against the station wall, using his height to see over heads. The first thing she thought was that he must not be called Sonny any more. The lines of his thinned-down face were severe, his skin looked weather-beaten except where the pink edge of a new haircut showed on his neck when he turned his head. Expressionlessly his eyes picked up and discarded one by one the passengers