Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [255]
“Maybe yet,” Frank said.
“No. Never.”
“You don’t think so?” he said, and then, “Maybe not,” and then, after a second, “I suppose not,” and then after quite a long pause, “So I’ll be on my way again.”
She was silent for longer than he had been; she could find no answer except to deny what she knew was true, to quote him Oliver’s hope in which she had no faith at all. “It might . . . maybe they can reorganize. Oliver thinks . . . He can surely find some way to keep us all together.”
“How?” Frank said. He sat against the pillar with his legs drawn up and softly slapped his gloves into the palm of one hand. His profiled silhouette remained still, near, and troubling against the sky restless with light. “Even if he could,” he said.
“Please don’t,” she said to his indifferent profile. “Please try to find a way to stay. If you go, where will I get my comfort?”
“If I stay, where will I get mine?”
Bowed in the hammock, pressing with her right-hand fingers against the ache above her eyes, she closed her eyes as if to do so would be to shut off the pain. “Poor Frank,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s the way it must be.”
“Is it?”
The two words hissed out of the darkness, so bitter and challenging that she opened her eyes and pressed even harder against the ache that lay above them. Her muscles were tense; she had to take charge of both her muscles and her breathing. Relax, inhale, exhale, smooth away the engraved trouble from her forehead. Kinked like a carved bookend against the pillar, Frank sat still, looking away from her with an apparent indifference utterly at odds with the harshness of his tone. Above the fiery mist of the torchlight procession the sky was now empty of everything except its own shabby stars.
“Thee knows it is,” Susan said.
His silhouette changed; his face had turned toward her. “That’s the first time you ever thee’d me.”
“It’s the way I often think of thee.”
“Is it?”
“Does thee doubt it?”
“Then you renounce too easily,” he said through his teeth.
A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone. Her skin was pebbled with gooseflesh. “Not easily,” she said with a catch of the breath. “Not easily.”
“Then come with me!”
“Come with you?” she said in a tiny strangled voice. “Where?”
“Anywhere. Tepetitlán, if you like. There are always jobs for an engineer in Mexico. I know people, I could get something. I’ll get you an estancia where you can have the things you ought to have. You can be the lady you ought to be. In another country, nobody’s going to . . .”
“Frank, Frank, what are you asking? Some sort of disgraceful elopement?”
“Disgraceful? Is that what you’d call it?”
“The world would.”
“Who cares about the world? Do you? Do you care about Boise?”
“That’s different,” she said. “What about the children?”
“Ollie’s set. The girls are young.”
Her laugh was wire-edged. In her own ears it sounded like a screech. “So they wouldn’t understand about their change of fathers?”
In his silence there was something tense and sullen and explosive.
“What about their father?” Susan said. “Would you do that to your best friend?”
“For you I’d do it to anybody. Not because I’d like it. Because I can’t help myself.”
“Oh, oh,” she said, and took her face in her hands, and laughed through her fingers. “Even if I were that reckless, what would the world say to a woman who would leave a bankrupt promoter for his unemployed assistant, and jump with her children from poverty to pure uncertainty?”
“Is it money that holds you back?” he said. She heard the sneer, and then the soft spat of the gloves being slapped into his palm. “I’ll go out and get some. Give me three months. I’ll come back for you, or send for you.”
“And meantime I should live with Oliver, planning all the time to leave him? I live enough of a lie as it is. It isn’t money, you know it isn’t. I only said that to . . .”
“To what?”
“Frank . . .”
“Susan.”
His shadow moved, his boot hit the tiles, he reached