Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [229]
She wrenched her hand free of Frank’s, she swerved to put space between them. Almost without hesitation she waved a greeting, and she heard the whish of Frank’s coat as he swung it around his head. Oliver pulled in the team and waited. They came on down the trail shouting and accepting shouts: Look who’s here! Look who came back for a looksee! Hey, you old rascal! Hi, Ollie! What’s the idea, abandoning the old ranch? We’ve just been up taking a last look at it.
There was handshaking and arm-punching, some exuberant expressions of friendship and reunion. It had all the outward signs of warmth. But Susan, climbing into the seat while Ollie and Frank piled into the back, rocked and bumped down the canyon in silence, wondering if her tears had marked her face, if they had seen her pull her hand free from Frank’s, if Oliver’s friendliness was forced, if the expression on Ollie’s face was illusory, part of her own guilt, or if it expressed what he felt, or sensed, when he looked up and saw his mother and Frank Sargent walking close together with locked hands, coming down the trail with guilty distress written all over them.
VIII
THE MESA
1
Grandmother says she submitted to that separation; I think she created it. My only evidence is the letters to Augusta, and those are careful. They mention Oliver only in the most matter-of-fact way, and they mention Frank Sargent not at all. She was absorbed in her children and herself, like a widow mending a torn life.
. . . struck me how often in the past dozen years I have had this feeling of suspension and unreality. Each move leaves me less myself. One can grow used to the security even of a wild canyon, and feel uneasy and afraid outside it. Here in this quiet very respectable very English place I am not Susan Ward at all, or at best I am Susan Ward bewildered and fuzzy-headed, as if after a bout of malaria.
Yet it is charming, and people are kind. We have taken a cottage out by the strait, in the James Bay district, on a lane called Bird Cage Walk. The weather is beautifully mild and soft after our sunstruck gulch. I have a girl who comes by the day, and Nellie is as always perfection–her life would look as beautiful hung on the wall as one of her father’s watercolors. She is more the mother of my children than I can afford to be, for I must work long hours, and can only lift my head at evening for a brief walk. I renew myself religiously every Sunday by taking the children for a picnic on the shore.
They are such good children! I am blessed. Ollie is growing into a manly boy, quiet and steady, not handsome as his pictures show Rodman to be, but my own good boy, and a strength to me. He misses his pony and the canyon more than I anticipated, but as he makes more acquaintances here, and grows used to the place, I expect him to enjoy it as the rest of us do. It will do him no harm to hear accents more cultivated than those of Idaho, where they speak of “airigation,” and call a closet a “cubby,” and “wrench” the soap out of their wash, or “worsh.”
Betsy at seven is a little mother, a little housekeeper in love with brooms and silverware and dishwashing. It is touching to see what jealous care both she and Ollie take of their little sister, who is another kind altogether.
She charms us, makes us laugh, awes us, frightens us almost. How she came among us on our crude frontier I shall never know. It is that double rainbow she was born under. She comes from a better world than this, and she has moments of remembering it. She speaks with the fairies. Sometimes I sit and watch her playing quietly in my workroom when the other two are at their lessons, and I see pass over her sweet little face reflections of some pure life she lives within herself. She conducts conversations with invisible playmates, sings songs that she makes up herself, draws pictures with a confidence and imagination that her mother, at least thinks utterly remarkable for a three-year-old.