Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [181]
Susan laughed and felt herself coloring. “Oh, she’s much more attractive than her author, and the hero isn’t Oliver Ward. Actually he’s more like Frank Sargent, your old Staten Island neighbor. He’s a perfectly beautiful young man.”
“In love with you, like everyone else,” Augusta said.
The color would not go down in Susan’s cheeks, though she willed it down. She laughed again. “Frank? Why do you say that? Well, yes, I suppose he was, in a harmless way. I sistered him. It was Oliver he worshipped, and he hated the Highland Chief crowd so, because of Pricey, that he’d have stayed there for years just to beat them. But of course as soon as Oliver won the Adelaide’s case for it, the wretched Syndicate let them both go. Frank’s down in Tombstone, the last I heard.”
“I never can keep Western places straight,” Augusta said. “Tombstone–really, what a name! Is that where Oliver is, too?”
Her interest was false; she did not care where Oliver was. Susan read in her half-flippant exclamation every sort of half-contemptuous dismissal: anyone who was associated with the West, and in particular Oliver Ward, brought a new tone to Augusta’s voice, the tone she used for troublesome tradesmen, tedious women, boring men. Her brother Waldo was a member of the Syndicate to which Oliver had made his disappointing report: there was ill opinion confirmed. Susan understood that her husband’s name was to be mentioned and passed by, not dwelt upon; he was to be walked around like something repulsive on a sidewalk.
She shot Augusta a hot look and said, “Not Tombstone. After he sold the cabin in Leadville he went up to look into a gold strike in the Coeur d’Alene country of Idaho. Now that winter has shut things down, he’s in Boise, the territorial capital.”
“My dear,” said Augusta, and bent her glowing glance on Susan and seemed to forget for a moment, in that searching, half-smiling, meaningful look, what it was she had started to say. “Coeur d‘Alene,” she said after a moment. “He was well advised to choose that over Tombstone. Coeur d’Alene, that’s charming.”
“The mine he’s interested in is called the Wolf Tooth,” Susan said.
Lovers and antagonists, they stared at each other. “My friend whom you do not intend to like” was between them as solidly as if he stood warming his coattails at Augusta’s fire. Susan read in Augusta’s face her opinion of men who followed gold strikes and wound up wintering among the seedy politics of territorial capitals. Her own chest was tight, she felt overcorseted and smothered. She might in a moment jump up and leave the room, or fly to Augusta and throw her arms about her and cry that it made no difference, no matter what direction her life had taken, no matter whom she was married to, Augusta would always have her place. But he’s not what you think him, he’s not! she felt like saying. Why must you always pull back from touching even his name? Why must you act as if I had married a leper or a cad or a ne’er-do-well?
Because the silence was growing tense, she withdrew her eyes from Augusta’s and looked at Thomas. Sleepy-eyed, without untenting his fingers, he said, “How does your story end?”
“Not the way ours did,” Susan said, and made a face and laughed. “The villain has to die, I think. I think he has his men set a powder charge in the hero’s drift, to blow up that entrance to the mine and shut the right people out. The men beat up Pricey when he stumbles on them setting the charge. Then the hero finds Pricey, and goes hunting them with a Winchester. He finds the dynamite and carries it into the enemy’s tunnel before it explodes, and the villain, coming down to check on his villainy, is killed by it.”
Again she made a face, threw a look at Thomas and then, for a flickering instant, at Augusta, and then looked down at her hands. She felt embarrassed, all her pleasure in the evening was gone. In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then