Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [217]
Oliver and Susan, talking it over, understood perfectly that taking a two-year leave from the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company meant giving it up forever. They also understood that if Oliver signed with the Survey their life would drastically change. Susan and the children and Nellie could not stay alone in the canyon. She would not move into Boise, which she despised.
“Maybe you could make a visit home,” Oliver said. But she folded her arms across her breast and stood frowning at the floor. Her parents were both dead. The old house was up for sale. There were only Bessie, who hadn’t room for them in her little house, and Augusta, before whom she would be ashamed. When she lifted her eyes and said something, it came out as something cheap that she didn’t really mean-a thing near the surface that she seized on as an excuse. “In the same old dress I left in?” she said. “Eight years out of style, with dams in the elbows?”
She saw him consider, and understand, and forgive what she had said. He didn’t even suggest that it was now not impossible to get a new dress. He only said, “Well, then, what do you do if I take it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but you must take it.”
“Give up.”
“You wouldn’t be giving up everything. All your work would be useful for this government survey. Maybe when that’s done, irrigation will be better understood and you’ll get your backing and can go on.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you?”
“No.”
“Still . . . !”
“Still I ought to take it.”
“I think so, yes.”
“And what do you and the children do?”
“It doesn’t matter what we do! I’d be happy anywhere if I thought you were working and . . . satisfied with yourself. I can support the children. Haven’t I been doing it?”
It was not the thing to say. She knew it, but could not help saying it. The steady, heavy stare of his eyes told her that he resented her and hardened himself against her, and the moment she saw his reaction, she resented him.
“It will do you good to get away from those people and that town,” she said. “You’ll be out in the mountains doing what you like to do. I want you to take this job and I want you to promise me you’ll stop drinking. If you’re working, there’s no excuse, is there?”
“No,” Oliver said.
At his tone she flared up. “Is there? Is there? I’ve tried to understand, I’ve excused you, because I know how . . . But now if you’re working again there isn’t any excuse. You’ve got to promise me!”
“You’d better let me work that out for myself,” he said. “I do better when nobody is pushing or pulling.”
“You think I’m pushing and pulling?”
He looked at her and said nothing.
“If that’s what it is,” she said, close to crying, “if you think I’m a bossy managing woman, it might be better if I took the children away somewhere and never came back.”
He was exactly like a balky mule. She could see his hind quarters settle and his ears lie back. Aghast at what she had said, more than half afraid she meant it, she stared into his frowning face.
“That’s what I mean by pushing and pulling,” he said. He walked away from her and sat on the table, looking out the window down toward the bridge and Arrow Rock. He talked to the window, or to her reflection in it. “You’re a lot better than I am,” he said. “You think I don’t know that?” In the glass his eyes found and held hers. “You think I don’t know what I’ve put you through? Or that I don’t care? But I tell you, Sue, I’m not going to do any better because anybody, even you, is hauling at me. I’m doing my best right now.”
Wordless, hugging herself, letting the tears run down her cheeks, she watched his angled face ghostly on the glass, with the opposite rim and the sky beyond it.
“If a promise means anything, I have to make it to myself,” Oliver said. “Then if I break it I’ll be