Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [25]
“A drawing, is it? I know you’re an artist.”
“Who told you that?”
“Emma.”
“Emma flatters me.”
He had not once smiled. Now he laid a hand on the doorknob. “No, really. If you don’t go back to work I’ll have to leave. I don’t want to disturb you. I was just looking for a quiet corner. That much talk wears me out.”
She could not help saying, fairly tartly, “Some people admire your cousin’s talk.”
His only answer was an odd, half-questioning, half-surprised glance. With his hand on the doorknob he waited. “Couldn’t you just go ahead, without paying any attention to me?”
He had an air of quiet such as she had known in men like her father, men who worked with animals. He did not look like one who was easily upset, or talked too much, or thought he had to be entertaining. “All right,” she said, “if you’ll pay no attention to me.”
“That’ll be harder,” he said gravely. “I’ll try.”
At once he turned away and began reading the spines of books in the shelves. Convinced that she could not draw a line with him in the room, she found that she could; he was simply absorbed in the library’s dusk. Once she looked up and saw him standing with head bent, reading, his back to her.
Her drawing was of three girls raking the dooryard of a farm. For models she had used her sister Bessie and two Milton girls, and by their tucked-up skirts and mobcaps, and by the scrub bucket visible through the open door, she had meant to suggest that they had escaped from their tedious inside chores and fallen upon the wooden rakes in a spirit of play. I have a print of the picture, and it suggests just that. It is a gay, old-fashioned rural snapshot. The likeness of Bessie, whom Grandmother used about as often as Abbott Thayer used Katy Bloede, is one of the best.
After a time she was aware that Mr. Ward was standing behind her looking over her shoulder. Looking challengingly upward, expecting to feel irritated, she found that she did not: she wanted him to praise the drawing. But he only said, “It must be wonderful to do what you like and get paid for it.”
“Why? Don’t you?”
“I’m not doing anything. Not getting paid either.”
“But you’ve been doing something. Somewhere in the sun.”
“Florida. I was trying to grow oranges.”
“And couldn’t?”
“The chills and fever flourished a little better.”
“Oh, do you have that!” Susan said. “So do I, or used to. If there’s anything I utterly despise, it’s malaria. The fever leaves you so stupid and depressed, and you think you’ve worn it out and back it comes. I feel sorry for you.”
“Why that’s nice,” he said. She saw his face—he had quite a nice face, rugged and brown and with plenty of jaw, and his eyes were very blue—break into ripples and wrinkles of laughter, and she said foolishly, “I’m sorry about the oranges, too.”
He blew through his lips, his eyes were narrowed to crescents. So he was not half as earnest and solemn as she had thought him. He said, “That was only a stop-gap. Now you get back to your drawing. I promised not to disturb you, and I did.”
But she put aside her pad and said, “Stop-gap for what? What do you want to do?”
“I started out to be an engineer.”
“And at an advanced age gave it up?”
No smile. “I was at Yale, at the Sheffield Scientific School. My eyes went bad. I was supposed to be going blind.”
She was contrite, but Oliver Ward jingled the small change in his pocket, took three or four steps in a circle, and came back facing her. He pulled from the inner pocket of his coat a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles and hooked them over his ears, aging himself about a decade. “They made a mistake,” he said. “I found out just the other day. There’s nothing wrong with the optic nerve. I’m astigmatic, farsighted, plenty of other things, but all I needed was these.”
She found him boyishly engaging. Maybe she felt motherly. She said, “So now you can go back to Yale.”
“I’ve lost two years,” said young Oliver Ward. “All my class is graduated. I’m going out West and make myself into an engineer.”
Susan began to giggle. Ward looked dismayed. “Excuse me,” Susan said. “It just struck me as funny