Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [220]
“That and some other things.”
“That’s funny. I don’t remember any letters like that, and I’ve been through nearly everything up to the time they came down here.”
“Those letters aren’t in the files.”
“Really? Why not? Where are they?”
“Because they’re the most private things I know about her,” I said. “All of a sudden that poor Victorian lady is stripped bare, and it’s kind of awful. She found herself having to deal with emotions that a genteel education hadn’t prepared her for.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I don’t know, exactly. That’s why we wrote a while back to the Idaho Historical Society, to see if someone could search the Boise papers for us.”
Shelly studied me with a frown. She was sitting on one foot, and her corduroy pants were stretched tight on her thighs. The loose loafer flapped up and down as she wiggled her toes inside it. “It seems to me she made an awful lot of fuss because her husband took a few drinks.”
“I didn’t say that was all.”
Finally she began to feel the chill. “Well, you’re very mysterious. What was it? Did she really get mixed up with Frank Sargent? Do I get to see those letters?”
I didn’t answer. I swung the chair and looked over her head to where Grandmother sat in her gilt frame, looking down in a sidelong wash of light. Somehow I don’t want anybody messing around in her guts any more than I want anybody messing in mine.
Why then am I spending all this effort trying to understand my grandparents’ lives? What am I talking and organizing all this for? Why do I hire this girl to make my talking real by typing it off the tapes? Why do I drive my drifts and tunnels toward the hidden lode of Susan Ward’s woe? Is it love and sympathy that makes me think myself capable of reconstructing these lives, or am I, Nemesis in a wheelchair, bent on proving something–perhaps that not even gentility and integrity are proof against the corrosions of human weakness, human treachery, human disappointment, human inability to forget?
My stump was twitching, I felt upset, cornered, and angry. “Maybe sometime,” I said. “I’ll have to hunt them up.”
Time is not on my side. I am distressed by the slow progress I have made. Here it is nearly September. I have used up the spring and summer getting Susan Ward to the age of forty, and she doesn’t die until she is ninety-one. If Shelly goes back to Berkeley next month, as she makes noises about doing, I shall have more privacy and probably make even slower progress.
Furthermore, my little general practitioner in Nevada City now wonders if I should risk staying through the winter without a proper nurse. What he means is two shifts of nurses, and he knows as well as I do that I can’t afford them and don’t want them. Like Grandfather, I do a little better without any pushing and pulling. Ada is all the nurse I want. She will come when I holler, but not try to run me. Dr. Hines, when I suggested this, said she had troubles of her own, bad arthritis in the winter, a lot of respiratory trouble, and might not be dependable. I will face that problem when it arises. Meantime all his concern is unconvincing. I smell an Afro in the woodpile, and his name is Rodman Ward. Behind him is another Afro whose name is Ellen Hammond Ward. My son, I believe, has given me all the playtime he thinks is reasonable, and in his growing conviction that something must be done, he has become an ally of his mother, the woman I was married to for twenty-six years.
How would I explain, if I were susceptible to Shelly’s truth parties, or even if I were writing a book about myself instead of about my grandmother, my relations with Ellen Ward? All that long history of intense couple-ship during graduate school in Cambridge, was that all falsehood and waste? I can’t think so. Did she harbor all those years a resentment at giving up her own degree and her own career? It was not I who persuaded her. She said herself that if she wasn’t going to have a professional career there was no point in preparing for one; and she had no interest in being a faculty-wife amateur trusted with the details