Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [146]
When stories ran out, she amused Ollie by helping him find pictures in the frosted window. A forest of ferny shapes grew upward from the bottom sash, and with her fingernail she drew into it half-revealed faces of deer and foxes, and peering from behind the thickest frost a mustached face wearing a look of astonishment. “That’s Daddy,” she said. “Looking for us. He thinks we’re lost.” They giggled together.
But at the moment of arrival at Buena Vista she did not see him as plainly as she had drawn him on the glass. She had herself and Ollie bundled up long before the train stopped, and she was the first one down the step into a whirl of steam, wind, and blowing snow. Turning, half blinded, from helping Ollie down, she saw the familiar height, the gleam of eyes and teeth from the face nearly obscured by fur hat and sheepskin collar. With a cry she threw herself into the figure’s arms, and found herself kissing Frank Sargent.
“Oh, my goodness!” Aghast and laughing, she fell back, grabbing for Ollie’s hand to keep him from blowing away. Frank, who had responded to her embrace with enthusiasm, was laughing harder than she was. His eyes looked at her with delight. The touch of his mustache –that was new, he didn’t use to have one–prickled on her lips. “Oh, Frank, I’m glad to see you! I thought you were Oliver, that’s why . . . Where is he? Isn’t he here? Is something wrong?”
“You’re darned right something’s wrong,” Oliver said out of the whirling air behind her. “Man comes to meet his wife and finds her kissing the hired man.”
She was muffled in arms and cold cloth, her lips prickled with another mustache. They held hands hard while they looked at each other. She saw that he was thinner even than last year. Despite the cheerful good nature of his expression, he looked to her in his hooded coat like an El Greco ascetic. And she realized why she had made her mistake. Frank had modeled himself so completely on Oliver in dress, mannerisms, walk, mustache, everything, that they might have been brothers, a lighter and a darker.
Oliver squeezed her hands and dropped them. Very quietly he knelt down beside Ollie in the cinders and snow. She saw how unfrighteningly he moved, how reassuringly he came down to the child’s size. The love in his face could not have been misunderstood or undervalued. He had always been that way with the child. Even when Ollie was an infant, he would see his father across a room and chortle and beam and kick and hold out his arms. She had been faintly jealous of that baby love affair–her child took her for granted but loved his father with a passion. Now, watching them meet gravely in the blowing snow, she saw that there was going to be no period of reacquaintance such as she had had to go through last November. After two years Ollie might not know his father, but he trusted him instantly.
“Ah, now!” Oliver said, squatting. “Here’s a young fellow I want to meet. Is your name Oliver Ward?”
Not quite certain of his ground–after all, his mother had kissed the other man first–Ollie said, “Yes?”
“You know something? That’s my name too. Do you suppose you’re my little boy? I’ve got one, somewhere. Ollie Ward. You suppose you’re the one?”
The child’s grin wavered, his eyes moved over his father’s face. “Aw, you know!” he said. An arm and a gust of laughter lifted him up. He perched triumphant. “I said good-bye to the elk,” he said. “We rode on a train.”
“You did? I’ll tell you something else you’re going to do. You’re going to take a buggy ride all wrapped up in a buffalo robe, with a hot sadiron to keep you warm. Frank’s been heating a couple on the stove in the station there for an hour.”
“Ah, Frank, you haven’t forgotten how to be thoughtful,” Susan said. “I remember last time you had a fire burning for me.”
“I had to