Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [222]
I notice that so long as Ellen had her surgical playmate there were no suggestions of forgiveness or reconciliation. How unfortunate for her that he took a walk out from their cabin on Huntington Lake and never came back. What anxiety, what uncertainty, not unlike mine. Had he left her? Committed suicide? Run off with someone else? Lost his mind? Chosen to disappear like those quiet thousands of men who every year walk out on obligations they can’t support? I suppose she was frantic. With some interest I followed the search in the newspapers. Posses, Boy Scouts, forest rangers, helicopters, combed the area for two weeks, until the first storm dumped two feet of snow on the Sierra and made them give up. It wasn’t until the following summer that some fisherman found his bones in a ravine. By that time I was in the convalescent hospital, the only one there who was going to convalesce.
Now, after all her woe, Ellen comes back and lets her haggard face be seen, she takes an apartment in Walnut Creek and renews acquaintance with the son she probably hasn’t written to in two years. (Or would she have? I haven’t any idea. We have never discussed her except on that one visit of his up here.) She perhaps gives him to understand–he no great believer in orthodox marriage anyway–that she is willing to forgive and forget, and naturally take care of poor old Dad if only he will make an attempt to understand, and put the past behind him.
Those two poor old crocks need each other, Rodman is probably telling Leah and himself. They’re better off together. Why not? It’s the most reasonable solution for them and all of us.
I have thought about all this. How could I help it? Forgiving I have considered, though like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can’t help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary. I don’t want her punished, I want no eye for an eye, I hope I don’t gloat over her misfortunes. I just can’t feel about her as I once did. She broke something. I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue. Also I remember the terms of the bond: in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, till death do us part.
Death, the word is, something not quite a matter of whim or choice. It could be she thought I was going to be permanently disabled, and she had better make alternative arrangements. (No matter how I try, I can’t believe that, though I can believe that her medical adviser may have given her that prognosis.) My family have all been notably long-lived; maybe she foresaw thirty fading years as nurse of a hopeless case. Or maybe she was simply victimized by an unseemly post-menopausal itch. I’d rather think it was that, not calculation.
It is even possible she couldn’t bear to see me day after day, a gargoyle that was once a man. Does a woman ever leave a man out of intolerable pity? Or because she fears what pity may do to her and him?
If she had left me when I was still a man, with two legs to stand on and a head that could turn aside in shame or sorrow, I would have hunted among my own acts and in my own personality for her justifications, and would have found them. I did take her for granted, I did neglect her for history, I did bend her life to fit the curve of mine, we did have our share of quarrels. But she didn’t leave me after a quarrel. She left me when I was helpless, and she knew she cut such a shameful figure that she didn’t dare tell me to my face, but left that note by me as I slept my two-Nembutal sleep. She laid no charges against me, and so I have to conclude that what finally led her to break away from me was my misfortunes–missing leg, rigid neck, solidifying skeleton.
The hell with her. She earned my contempt, and contempt doesn’t yield to Rodman’s social antibiotics or the doctrine of King’s X.
Grandmother, I want to say to Susan Ward as she nurses her grudge through the winter