Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [226]
We have only switched prohibitions and hypocrisies with them. We blink pain and death, they blinked nudity and human sex, or rather, talk about sex. They deplored violations of the marriage bond and believed in the responsibilities of the unitary family and thought female virginity before marriage a guarantee of these, or at least a proper start. But wild boys and young bachelors they winked at because they must, and both wandering husbands and unfaithful wives they understood, and girls who “got in trouble” they pitied as much as they censured. They could tell a good woman from a bad one, which is more than I can do any more. And they managed to be fertile in times when fertility meant inevitable sorrow, when women had six or eight children in order to be sure of three or four.
So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from the casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy? One thing that happened was platonic friendship, another was breakage. The first always risked the second.
Frank Sargent was deeply in love. He had to be, to have hung around as he did for eight or nine years. He would have thought it the act of a cad to take advantage of her friendship or betray the confidence of Oliver, but in those nine years he would have learned to mistrust his own self control. The thing he most prided himself on, his hopeless faithfulness, was precisely his greatest danger. As for Susan, though she knew that danger, she was disappointed in her husband and her hopes, bruised in her domestic sentiments, distraught with uncertainties and with the sense of how much she had lost and might still lose. She had always made a companion of Frank. He loved books, loved talk, was altogether readier and more romantic and more enthusiastic than the man she was married to.
What might have happened? I guess they would have found plenty to talk about, after nearly three years. I guess I think it would not have taken Frank long to discover that the object of his hopeless devotion–Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am–was in a mood of serious disillusionment with Caesar. I guess I think that after greeting Nellie, and kissing Betsy, and shaking hands with Wan, he would have looked around the hill spotted with spring flowers, and sniffed the wind that blew down the canyon, and listened to the river heavy and incessant with the spring runoff, and suggested a walk up on the bluffs.
And now I can’t avoid it any longer, I have to put words in their mouths. Not very personal words at first. Questions and answers. Probes. Time-fillers.
They were climbing up the gulch road, steep and full of loose stones. He helped her along by the hand. When the pitch leveled off he said, “I gather the canal boat is really on the rocks.”
“Who told you that? Somebody in town?”
“Yes.”
“I despise those people!” she cried. “They’re so eager to write our obituary.”
“Why? Aren’t they right?”
“That’s the trouble. But if one or two or three of them had had enough faith at the right time, we’d have . . .”
He sprang up a boulder that the trail had straddled, and reaching down a hand, helped her up. He said, “Must be hard on Oliver.”
“Terribly.”
“You too.”
Shrug. “All of us.”
They rested, getting their breath. He said,