Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [20]
Holding it, clucking and murmuring as she works, she towels it down as far as the knees, and then she takes it around the waist and tilts it upon her great bosom and rotates until its leg, bent to miss the tub’s rim, can straighten down on the mat. Pressing it against her as intimate as husband, she towels the rest of it and eases it into the chair and wheels it to the bed. Another lift—the buttocks sink in softness. It sits there shivering in its damp towel until she comes with urine bottle and tube. When I have attached them she checks the hookup with a casual tug.
Now the pajamas, delicious to the chilling skin, and the ease backward until the body that has been upright too long is received by mattress and pillows. She sets the telephone close, she tucks up the covers. Finally she waddles over to the cabinet by the desk and gets the bottle and two glasses, and we have a comfortable nightcap together like cronies.
Oh, hurry, Ada Hawkes. I don’t want to telephone. That would demonstrate something that I don’t want demonstrated.
My grandfather, long before your grandfather Trevithick knew him, before he put on weight and fell in love with flowers and learned to take his consolation from a lonely bottle, was an indefatigable worker. He often rode a horse a hundred miles a day, four hundred miles in a week, accepting the testing that such journeys implied. Despite bad eyes and migraines, he used sometimes to work all night on maps and reports. When he was making an underground survey of the New Almaden mine he stayed underground for twenty hours at a stretch. He would not understand, any more than my grandmother would, this weakness that yearns for a motherly bosom and a pair of warped gentle hands.
“Best egg in the basket,” he used to say of me when I was a small boy and wanted to help him plant and prune and prop and espalier his Burbank fruit freaks. I would like to be that kind of egg. I refer my actions to his standards even yet. If I were talking to anyone but myself I would have shut up long ago. Probably it’s a mistake to complain even to myself. I won’t do it.
But oh, Ada, Ada, get over here, it’s already past nine.
And there, like a bell tardily ringing the hour, is her key in the lock downstairs.
2
Morning, the room full of sun. I wheel to the window and watch the robins digging worms in Grandfather’s lawn. The grass is blue-wet in the open, green-dry under the pines. The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.
Those I don’t have, but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on. On the long desk my grandparents’ lives are spread out in files and folders, not as orderly as I would like them, and not fully understood, but waiting with a look of welcome. The loose folders I have been working on are weighted down with Grandfather’s rock samples—high-grade mostly, with varicose veins of gold through it, but also other things: a piece of horn silver, carbonate ore from Leadville, a volcanic bomb sawed in two to reveal the nest of olivine inside, some jasper geodes, an assortment of flaked flint arrow and spearheads.
The solidity and weight of these relics I have several times blessed, for if my papers blow off on the floor I have a bad time retrieving them, and may have to wait until Ada comes, by which time the wind has undone all my careful order. A night or two ago, after a gust had scattered a whole day’s patient sorting around the room, I dreamed I was a rodeo cowboy riding my jet-powered chair in figure eights through the place, swooping from the saddle with my vest pocket scooping dust and snatching up papers one by one like ladies’ handkerchiefs. Rodman would have something