Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [228]
“So have we all,” she said into the wind. “So have you. Have you taken to drink?”
“I haven’t staked my whole life on that canal the way he has.”
Now she did turn. “Haven’t you? I thought you’d staked a good bit of it.”
“You know what I’ve staked my life on. And how much good it’ll do me.”
He moved, straightened, picked up the hand on which he had been bracing himself, and brushed off the lava pebbles and showed her with a laugh, in explanation of his suddenness, the dented and bruised palm. Somehow the sight of his punished hand broke her quite down. She said to the bulge of her knees under the long white dress, “Frank, what am I going to do? I can’t trust the children’s future to him. He’ll go on trying and trying, and failing and failing, and the more he fails the more his . . . weakness . . . will control him. The children will grow up like Willa Olpen’s, they’ll be savages! I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried.”
“I know.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Without his propping hand, he was leaning awkwardly ahead and away. He leaned back, tensed against the awkward position and the wind, and their eyes met. Hers were full of tears. Her teeth bit down on the trembling of her lips. His left hand went behind her, to brace him. With an exclamation he circled it clear around her and pulled her into his arms.
Tears, kisses, passionate and despairing words. Hands? Perhaps. I find it hard to conceive in relation to my grandmother, and to judge by her photographs from that period, there were an awful lot of clothes. Nevertheless. She had been bottled up a long time.
But in the end she pulled herself free and stood up from the sweet and fatal embrace–stood up with her hands to her streaming eyes, and flung her hands, wet with her tears, groundward in a gesture of utter woe–Massaccio’s Eve, I have called her that before–and walked away from him, fighting for composure, and stood with her back to him on the trail.
For some time he sat where she had left him. Then he stood up and followed, touched her on the shoulder. She did not turn.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
The wind pushed them, flattening his shirt against his back, shaping her legs under her skirts and petticoats. There was wild pink phlox spreading in a mat from near her feet into a bay of the sage.
“I don’t know what we can do,” she said, speaking away from him, down the wind. “But I know one thing we mustn’t do.”
He waited.
“Any more of this.”
He did not speak.
“Any more of this!” she said violently, and turned and faced him. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes were reddened, but she was calmer. She stared into his eyes, she put out a hand in love and pity to touch his. “I must take the children and go away just as soon as I can. Tomorrow. Next day at the latest.”
“And that leaves me . . . ?” Frank said.
She bent her head and bit down hard on her quivering lip; she turned and looked away from him across the blowing sage.
They would have looked very small, to anyone on a high place, as they walked the trail back to the gulch road. From the photographs in her old album, I should judge she was probably wearing one of those dresses with a half bustle, several years out of style by then; but it would cost me more research than it is worth to know for sure. I know that her skirts would have brushed the dust, that her throat was choked in a high collar, that her arms were covered in leg-of-mutton sleeves that came to the wrist. Only her woeful face and her hands were exposed. The face looked straight ahead. One of the hands was clenched at her side. The other was wound tightly–oh, tightly, with spasmodic squeezings and convulsions of feeling–in Frank Sargent’s.
That was the way they were walking when they came to the gulch road and quite suddenly–the