Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [199]
They stood awkwardly, each one a point of a triangle that they all understood and were determined to ignore. “You’ll be back,” Oliver said. “What about your stuff? Want to leave it here with Wiley’s?”
“I guess. I’d better tear the tent down.”
“I’ll help you.” His eyes touched Susan’s, steady and uninsistent. It was as if he were reassuring her about something. “Where’s Ollie?”
“Down in the drafting room, I think.”
“He’ll want to give us a hand, I expect.”
He ducked his head to the low door and went out. They heard him calling, his voice receding toward the shack. How understanding he was, and how decent, Susan thought; how characteristic of him to make an excuse to give them a minute alone. She was standing by the table where she had been drawing; Frank was by the door. He was looking at her very steadily.
“Well, Frank,” she said.
“Well, Mrs. Ward.”
“We’ll miss you.”
“Will you?”
“Must you ask? It will be poor and shabby without you. The children are going to be lonesome.”
“Only the children?”
“We too-I too.” She laughed, a mere catch of the breath. “I’ll miss the sound of your mandolin down by the river.”
“Well, if that’s all you’ll miss.”
She tried to coax his sullen unhappiness with a smile. “I’ll miss our talks–who else is there around here I can talk books with? I’ll miss our drawing sessions. Oh, we have had fun, haven’t we? We’ve had happy times. We will again.”
He took a step toward her, and in some sort of panic at what his feelings-his only, or hers too?-might lead to, she snatched up from the table the half-finished drawing she had been working on. It was a picture of Frank and Ollie watering horses at the river. Frank’s limber length was bent a little as he listened to the boy, who with face upturned was telling or asking him something. There was an intimation of trust and confidence between the two figures. Their horses stretched their necks to suck water from the stream. It might have been any casual moment from more than two years. Interposing the pad between herself and Frank, ready to-what? Divert him with it? Ask his judgment? Give it to him as a parting gift? Hold him away with it?–she stared at him in confusion that was almost fear.
He stopped at long arm’s length. She had drawn him so often that she could have drawn him blindfold. Dozens of times she had labored to communicate in a drawing the peculiar warm intensity of his eyes. Now they literally burned at her. She expected him to kiss her; she expected to kiss him back in some sort of affectionate, half-gratifying relinquishment.
His hands were at his sides. He said, “It’s time I was getting out. Past time.”
“Don’t say that. You’ll be back.”
“I wonder.”
“Oh, Frank, of course you will! You must! When it finally works out you’ll be back and you’ll all build the canal and we’ll be a happy family again.”
“Happy family,” Frank said. His eyes shifted, and she became aware, with acute embarrassment, that he was looking directly at her swollen belly. “Increased by one,” he said.
The blood spread quick and hot into her face. She had taken him–Wiley too–so much as a part of the family that she had not tried, as a modest woman would do in town, to hide her pregnancy from him. How could she have, anyway, seeing him constantly, eating three meals a day with him, drawing him? She lowered her head and said to his booted feet, “That’s the only ungentlemanly thing you ever said to me.”
It took him a while to answer. “Then I’m sorry,” he said finally. “Only–do you think it’s easy for a man–a man with an incurable disease, to . . .”
Her eyes came up. His glance burned and withered her, but she could not help saying, “To what?”
“To see you,” Frank said. “To see this . . . evidence . . . of how much you belong to someone else.”
“I have other children.”
“I didn’t have to watch them born!”
She put one hand to her flaming face, she turned her back, as it were snatching her bulging belly from the brutality of his eyes. In a few seconds his steps went toward the door. She did not turn or speak, but stood with her head bent,