Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [184]
“You’re crazy. You ought to be in bed.”
“After nearly three weeks? I’m perfectly well.”
But she went up the stairs slowly, helping herself by the rail, stepping up one step and bringing the other foot after. Coming behind her, he was not persuaded by the bright smile she threw over her shoulder. “Should you be climbing stairs?”
“As long as I take them slowly.”
“Let me carry you.”
“My goodness, you’d really put me back to bed!”
“You don’t look after yourself.”
“I’ve got better advice than yours, Mr. Ward. Mother and Bessie would have me in bed if they thought I belonged there.”
Up in her room he stood above the basket, lifting the corner of the pink blanket to get a look. He studied his daughter quietly. Susan had the conviction that if the baby awoke and found his strange face looking down on her, she would not cry.
“You’ve named her Elizabeth.”
“After Father’s mother and Bessie. But it isn’t final, if you’d prefer something else.”
“Elizabeth’s fine. Only we’ll have to call her Lizzie or Betsy or something to keep her sorted out.” Softly he let the blanket down. His eyes, very blue, came up to meet hers. “Hecho en Mejico,” he said.
“Yes. She’s one thing we got out of that.”
Wind rattled through the maple outside, and the curtains blew inward from the open window and snagged on the basket. Susan lifted them off and pushed down the window a few inches. When she looked up again, Oliver was still watching her. “Susie, didn’t I deserve to know?”
“What could you have done? It would only have upset you.”
“Don’t you think it upsets a man to get a letter saying his wife has had a baby he never even knew was coming?”
“I’m sorry. I suppose I was wrong. I just . . .”
Her mind was darting into corners, her feelings were confused. She both granted his right to blame her, and resented his doing so. She knew perfectly well why she had more than once stopped herself in the act of writing him. He was a threat to Milton’s placid domesticity, to her restored intimacy with Augusta and Thomas, to her position as an artist and writer known and acknowledged by a public. The demands he might make on her were demands she wanted to postpone. For months he had been hardly more than the photograph of someone loved and absent and not miserably missed; she could take him out when she chose, and cry over him, and put him back. And then when she might have told him, when she had fully intended to tell him in time for him to come home if he could, then had come his letter, with his own news. Her mouth, opened to apologize, stiffened in resentment and anger; from being pliable and loving, she found herself throwing his blame back at him with a stammering tongue.
“I’m at fault, yes. I should have written. Thee has a r-right to be upset. But haven’t I too? D-doesn’t it upset a wife who is staying home and working and h-holding things together to hear that her h-husband isn’t doing at all what she–what she thought he was doing, what they’d agreed he’d do, but is out, is off in some wild impossible scheme to bring water to two, three, what is it, three hundred thousand? acres of desert. Didn’t I deserve to know?”
“That wasn’t quite the same thing.”
“But it concerned us all, just as much.”
“Sue, I just had to be sure, first.”
“Sure!” she cried. “What kind of word is that? Sure! I didn’t write you about the baby because I thought you were hunting up just the right place, some deep mine where there would be a future and we could all live. I didn’t want you to be diverted. And all the time you . . .”
“I doubt there is any such place,” Oliver said. “You and the children couldn’t have lived in any of the camps I was in, and none of them have a future.”
“Then you should have written and told me. How long have you been–fooling around with this irrigation scheme? Months, apparently. And not a word to me. Were you afraid, or ashamed, or what?”
“I told you. I had to be sure.”
Angrily she stared at him. He stood before her filled with an idiotic confidence,