Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [169]
“More than Oliver does.” She looked for a moment or two into his shrewd light-lashed eyes. She liked him. Perhaps one day he would be Oliver’s collaborator. She might be entertaining him at dinners when he came down to consult, or to make periodic inspections. By then would they all be wearing Mexican clothes and taking all this Mexican courtliness for granted, acting like Don Gustavo, who had been in Mexico twenty years and wished it to appear that he had been there two hundred? The worst thing she knew about Don Gustavo had to do with blue eyes: despite his Mexican pretensions, he took pains to make it clear that the blue eyes of his wife and daughter and Emelita derived from a superior strain related to his own. They might be Spanish, but they were really Visigoths. By such means he excused himself for having married into an inferior race.
“It could become a bad habit,” Susan said drily. “Good-bye, Mr. Simpson. I hope you find what you came looking for.”
“What we all came looking for,” Simpson said. “Next time I kiss your hand on a balcony I’ll be loaded down with silver like one of Don Pedro’s horses.”
Now Oliver. Not only did he not feel his own awkwardness, she saw, but he was enormously tickled by the whole circus. He took her hand with formality, as if just being introduced, and shook it up and down. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “And I thought we were going camping.”
“You’re a little underdressed for the parade,” she couldn’t help saying.
In surprise he looked down at himself: corduroy pants, leather shirt, revolver, bowie, big iron spurs. “Why, it’s authentic Colorado. And the spurs are authentic Chihuahua.”
“Iron, though. Not silver.”
Laughing, he hugged an arm around her shoulders, making her self-conscious. “Isn’t it nice that something isn’t silver? Would you like me to look like Don Pedro? He makes Clarence King look like a piker, doesn’t he?” In front of them all he leaned and kissed her lightly, and when she pulled back, frowning, he looked at her with his smile hanging on his lips as if he had just made a joke. “Just be yourself,” he said softly. “Don’t let all the grandeur buffalo you.”
His good sense released her from some inhibition or pretense that had been trying to establish itself. Looking from him to Don Gustavo she comprehended how foolish she had been about to be. She did not want Oliver to be a pretender, she didn’t want to be one herself.
“I’ll try.”
“Get a lot of sketches.”
“I’ve already made three times more than I can use. I’ll have to see if Thomas won’t print more than one article.”
“Write it so he has to. Get rich.”
“You too. Find a mine richer than the Little Pittsburgh.”
“Or the Adelaide,” he said, and pulled his mouth down. “You keep your eyes open, eh? Maybe we could do worse than Michoacán.”
“I’ll know by the time you get back. I’m pretty sure already.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, darling. Be careful.”
The laugh bubbled out of him again. “The worst that could happen to me would be that I’d fall out of that brass bed.”
“Do you get to use that?”
“I don’t know. I can’t wait to find out. Certainly it’s not for Don Pedro. He wouldn’t put a guest on the ground and sleep in splendor himself. So who is it for? Don Gustavo? Simpson? Me? It’s a protocol problem.”
The others were standing, men in one group, women in another, waiting. Susan kissed him quickly again, impropriety or no impropriety. The men clanked and jingled down the stairs, mounted, rode single file to the gate. Don Pedro looked an imperceptible message to the mozo there, and the gate opened. The ladies were fluttering handkerchiefs from the balustrade. Don Pedro bowed from the saddle, Don Gustavo bowed from the saddle, Simpson bowed from the saddle, not without being amused at himself. Oliver touched his hatbrim, looking upward specifically at her.
He was tall, fair, sober, shabby in his worn field clothes, and he slouched as he rode. He could not have been pompous like