Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [174]
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SUE
5
Propped by bolster and pillows, shoeless, stockingless, corsetless, clothed only in her shift, she was asleep in the big carved bed. She had been looking through her journal, rewriting incidents and observations into coherent paragraphs for her article, but the siesta hour, the shuttered dusk, the trance of quiet that held room and house and city, had been seductive. The notebook was flat on her stomach, the pencil had fallen from her slack hand.
She was in a quandary, for the guests she had been expecting, the poet and editor Thomas Hudson and his brilliant wife, had arrived simultaneously with an appalling dozen of others. Her entrance hall and sala were like a hotel lobby at convention time. The American ambassador was there with his wife and several aides. She saw Ferd Ward with a bowler hat in his hand, Clarence King in white buckskin, her sister Bessie trying to calm her daughter Sarah Birnie, who cried and cried. She saw a famous general with gray, sad, streaked eyes, whom she recognized but could not place. Pricey and Frank looked hopefully smiling in the door. They all waited to be taken to their rooms, but there were not rooms for all of them, there was only one pitiful room, the one she had prepared for the Hudsons. The house was too small, as Emelita had warned her–fatally small. She saw signs of exasperation and impatience in every face. Augusta, as always when angry, had grown regal and cool.
Out of her desperate dilemma her eyes popped open. A tapping on her door.
“¿Quien es?”
A servant voice, a male servant voice, whined, “Con permi-i-i-so.” The door handle rattled, the door began to open.
“No, no!” she cried, or screamed, and snatched at the trailing spread to cover herself. The door swung on open and Oliver put his head in.
“Uh huh. Caught you napping.”
“Oh, Oliver, you idiot! You scared me to death.” She bounded off the bed, he hugged her hard, kicking the door shut behind him. His clothes smelled of horse, leather, sweat, dust. “Did you just get in?”
“Foolish question number one. Did you think I might have got in yesterday and stopped at the hotel?”
“I didn’t hear any noise.”
“We left the caravan at Don Pedro’s and walked over.”
“I was dreaming,” Susan said. “A dreadful dream. We had a dozen guests and only one room. I suppose it may have been something that brass bed suggested. Who slept in it?”
“Nobody. We were all too polite.”
“Isn’t that ridiculous. So was my dream, because, you know, I’ve found us a house, and it doesn’t have just one spare bedroom, it has five, nice big ones. There’s an enclosed court, and stabling for six horses . . .” She was stopped by the look on his face. “What’s the matter? Isn’t the mine any good?”
The horseplay of his entrance had meant nothing. She saw now that he was tired, disappointed, and grouchy. He moved his shoulders as if shrugging off a persistent insect.
“It may be some good, it may not. More likely not. At least I know Kreps wasn’t right. What he thought was the lost vein isn’t. You could work it, but it wouldn’t make you rich.”
For the moment, all her disappointment was frozen into quiet Almost carelessly she said, “So you’ll have to turn in a bad report.”
“I don’t see how it can be very enthusiastic.”
What a moment before she had taken quietly now hit her like a slap. It was the corroboration, not the news, that weakened her legs and stiffened the muscles of her mouth. Her eyes were stretched, glaring at him, and as she stared she was blinded with sudden water, she could not control her breath, which gulped and caught in her throat. “Oh . . . damn!” she cried, and hid her face in his chest.
He laughed. She could feel the laughter in his chest and it infuriated her. “What?” he said with callous lightness. “Cussing? You?”
She reared back against his arm and knuckled at her wet eyes. “I don’t care, that’s just the way I feel! Thee can think me a fishwife if thee wants.”
“Sue, I’m sorry. I had no idea you were that set on it.”
“I don’t think