Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [264]
“Not new,” I said. “Ancient. But fun, I believe it. ”
Shelly threw the broken rubber band in the wastebasket by the wall. “Well, what do I do? Should I try it up there–I know what you’ll say–or should I tell him no dice and go back and finish my stupid degree and enter a teaching intern program and start grinding wild life through the education machine?”
“There’s another alternative,” I said. “You could go on doing what you’ve been doing. Thousands of letters still to go, years and years of them. Don’t miss tomorrow’s exciting episode.”
At certain times her eyes, wide and gray, get smoky and warm. They went that way then. She said, smiling, “Would you keep me on?”
“I’d like it very much.”
“I’d like it too. I’ve really enjoyed working for you. Only . . .”
“Only,” I said. I had subsided, that fleeting foolish dream was gone. “O.K. You know what you want to do.”
“I wish to hell I did.” She got up and walked, pushing chairs, adjusting things on tables. “I don’t know–I think I’ve got to get out. There’s nothing here, this is only a pause, sort of. The only lively times I have are at work, talking to you. You know–” She stopped, looking at me with her head bent. “Why couldn’t I come down from San Juan–” She looked at me again. “No. You wouldn’t like that.”
“No,” I said, “I guess I wouldn’t.”
She sighed, she looked at me with those wide gray smoky eyes overflowing with female, troubling warmth. “What’ll you do?”
“What I’m doing now. Not so pleasantly, not so fast.”
“Can you manage?”
“Of course.”
“I know you don’t think I should go live with Larry in his commune.”
Live with half a dozen fellows in their commune, I felt like saying. Be on service to the community. No, I don’t think you should. Aloud I said, “You’ll have to excuse me, Shelly. All I said was that I wouldn’t want to. How do I know what you should do? You’ll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you’re very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.”
“Yeah,” she said vaguely. “I suppose.” Her smile erupted, her spread hand clawed back the hanging hair. “Tell me something.”
“If I know the answer.”
“You said this kind of commune will be full of aggressively unfeminine and aggressively female women. Which am I?”
But I evaded that one. “I haven’t heard of you joining the Women’s Liberation Front,” I said.
She came up behind my chair, she bent over me and put her arms around me and hugged my rigid head against her uninhibited bosom. She loudly kissed the top of my head. “You’re a gas, Mister Ward,” she said. “You’re O.K.” She went on upstairs to work and left me there, looking out into the rose garden and across Grandfather’s acres of lawn, and feeling bleak, bleak, bleak.
7
Up to now, reconstructing Grandmother’s life has been an easy game. Her letters and reminiscences have provided both event and interpretation. But now I am at a place where she hasn’t done the work for me, and where it isn’t any longer a game. I not only don’t want this history to happen, I have to make it up, or part of it. All I know is the what, and not all of that; the how and the why are all speculation.
For one thing, there is a three-month blank in Grandmother’s correspondence with Augusta. From July 2 until the end of September 1890 there is only one brief note mailed between trains in the Chicago station. If other letters from that period ever existed, they have been destroyed, either by Augusta or by Grandmother herself after the correspondence was sent back to her. As for the reminiscences, they pass over those months of disaster and desolation in one sentence, and not a revealing sentence either.
As one who loved her, I am just as glad not to have to watch her writhe. As her biographer, and a biographer moreover with a personal motive, probing toward the center of a woe that I always knew about but never understood, I am frustrated. Just where there should be illumination, there is ambiguous