Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [224]
Susan thought about it. If she stayed on, what would her staying imply? What would she be staying for? How long could her children go on living in an isolated canyon without growing up eccentric or barbarian? How long could she herself give up contact with all culture without loss of herself? Anyway, it was hope that had held them there, and that was gone. She gave a simple answer to a complicated question. “No. It wouldn’t do.”
“Then we’ve got to clear it out. If we locked it up and left it, the first sheepherder that passed through would be sleeping in your bed and lighting fires with pages of your books.”
“I suppose,” she said. “What about the books? What about Frank’s and Wiley’s?”
“I wrote and told them last week where their stuff would be.”
“There are dozens,” she said. “And all those leather bindings they worked so hard over. They wouldn’t want to lose those.”
A little later, Oliver and Ollie took a load of things to town for storage. Betsy helped Nellie clear her room. Agnes, who was sick with summer complaint and some form of the bronchial trouble she seemed to be susceptible to, lay in a window seat while her mother put books in a box. She was pale, big-eyed, and languid. Nellie, passing by, smiled and shook her head at her and said in her North Country voice, “Little wist-faced baby!”
“This climate isn’t good for her,” Susan said. “I hope the sea air will be better. She’s never well.”
Nellie went back to her room, and Agnes lay and watched her mother stow in the box their Household Poets, the cover read completely off and replaced with calf; and War and Peace, and Fathers and Sons, and some Dickens and Thackeray and Howells and James, and some Constance Fenimore Woolson, and some Kate Chopin, and some Cable. She insisted on having each one pass through her hands, so that she could pat it and brush it neat, before it was put away.
Then a volume in limp leather, tooled and stamped in gold: Tennyson’s Idyls of the King, bound for her by Frank Sargent as a gift on her thirty-eighth birthday. She let it fall open, and of course what did it open to? “The old order changes, yielding place to new.” She flipped to the title page and read the inscription. “To Susan Ward, on her birthday.” But she knew it came with love. Nellie had told her he had worked on it for a month, and spoiled two other books, before he got one he was willing to give her.
She rubbed her palm across the rough, inside-out leather, thinking about that devoted young man. Young man? He was thirty-two; she was forty-one. In a story written that spring, in desperation for money and out of the voiceless longing of the canyon April, she had made him into a Lochinvar who rode in to an isolated ranch and carried off the daughter of an embittered solitary–once a gentleman–and rescued her for society, the world, fulfillment. But the maiden of that story had been twenty.
In forlorn amazement at herself she laughed aloud, a sound so harsh that Agnes looked at her curiously, reaching for the book to give it her housekeeper’s pats. Wist-faced baby indeed, and more in need of rescue than any fictitious maiden designed for the pages of Century. Susan let her have the book, and lifted a hand to the little girl’s forehead, feeling for fever or the clamminess of debility. As she did so she glanced out the window, down across the hill and the river with its parabola of bridge, and by one of those coincidences that happen all the time in Victorian novels, but that nevertheless sometimes happen in life too, there was Frank Sargent unsaddling his sorrel horse Dan at the corral gate.
It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood. Gladness and guilt hit her like waves meeting at an angle on a beach. She hung a moment, half inclined to slip out the back and not be findable