Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [225]
“Frank, Frank! Oh, how wonderful! What are you doing here? You’re almost too late–we’re leaving.”
His long brown hands, with a turquoise ring from Arizona on the ring finger of the left, held hers tightly. He was panting from his rush up the hill, he laughed and talked and smiled all at once. She had told him once he was the only man she knew who could talk while smiling.
“Oliver . . . wrote me. I came to get my stuff.”
“Ah, is that all?”
“No. To see you, mostly. How are you? Let me look at you.”
Still holding her hands, he turned her into the bald sunlight, and she shrank a little, remembering the last time he had looked at her, steadily. It seemed to her that what he saw was wan, weathered, and rebellious, and her good sense told her that at forty-one a woman should neither be looked at in that way by a man not her husband, nor should accept such a look with so much willingness.
Then his eyes left her and saw Agnes, round-eyed and hostile in the doorway. “And this is . . . ?”
“Agnes.”
Out of my body. What you saw as an ugly swelling, and an ugly reminder of the secrets of marriage, the last time you spoke to me. Before she was born she was more than you could stand. My poor unwanted child, my poor excluded lover!
“I don’t like you,” Agnes said.
“Agnes, child! What are you saying?”
Frank’s smile faded but did not go entirely away. His hands hung onto Susan’s. His glowing brown eyes looked at Agnes for a long quiet time; he made no attempt to win her, he only looked. “She’s like you,” he said without taking his eyes off her scowling face. “She’s like what you must have been.”
“Heavens, I hope not, with that face!” But some sort of elation came over her; in one remark he wiped away the bitterness in which they had parted. Having accepted the fruit of her womb–even when it looked at him with suspicion–he moved in some way closer to her, awkwardness was lifted off her as a cover might be lifted off a parrot’s cage, releasing all that pent-up garrulity. Belatedly, with a laugh that was half embarrassed and half playful, she looked down at her imprisoned hands until he let them go.
What would Susan Ward and Frank Sargent have said to each other in the two hours before Oliver and Ollie returned from town? Having brought them together, I find it difficult to put words in their mouths. Their words, like their actions, would have been hedged by a hundred restraints. She was incorrigibly a lady, he was self-consciously honorable. The novels of their time, to which they were both addicted, were full of hopeless and enduring loves too lofty for treacherous thoughts or acts. Their training urged them toward self control, not toward “naturalness” or “self-expression.” Those contemporaries of Shelly’s, those young men hot as he-dogs, those antic maidens who yank off their blouses and dance around maypoles in the People’s Park, or couple with a series of partners on somebody’s parlor rug, would find Susan and Frank as amusing as all the other Victorians. What a hangup about bare skin! What a hypocritical refusal to acknowledge the animal facts of life! The Victorians were a race without biology.
Horsefeathers. Grandmother grew up on a farm and lived much of her life on crude frontiers. She knew the animal facts of life as few of us are likely to again. Without embarrassment she accepted the animal functions of, say, buggy horses that would bring giggles and hooraws from emancipated moderns. Until she and Grandfather built Zodiac Cottage in 1906, she habitually used a privy, and no gussied-up