Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [267]
And not a change in that boy all the way across. In the daytime he sat with his forehead against the glass, indifferent and slack. He would not meet her eyes–and for that she was half thankful, for when by accident her glance brushed across his reflected eyes in the glass it was as if she had been lashed by thorns.
She did what she thought she should, or what she could. She called the children’s attention to things they passed, she got out a sketch pad and let Betsy draw, she asked them when the news butcher came through if they wanted candy, wanted magazines, wanted oranges. Betsy sometimes did, Ollie never did. When lunchtime or dinnertime came he ate, dutifully, and came back and sagged into his corner and put his forehead against the glass. He sat facing her all those five days, and she could not meet his eyes without grief and panic; and at night he crawled up into his upper berth with a word of good night and lay there silent and unreachable through all the dark rocking hours, while she hugged Betsy to herself down below, and once or twice had to waken her from a screaming nightmare and, her own face wet and anguished, soothe away the fear.
The boy was wordless, he was his father all over again; and she felt that there was no forgiveness in him. Her own numb grief, her sluggish guilt, could be held down in the daytime, when the eyes could be fixed on something outside, when blind words could be read out of books or magazines, when the details of washing and eating could be clung to like rafts. But at night she lay and heard her daughter’s breathing beside her, and thought, and remembered, and wept, and contorted her face and buried it in the pillow and clenched her arms over it to shut out things that came. And in the morning when she came out through the green curtains, there was the ladder already placed for Ollie, and there was Ollie coming in from the washroom with his great burned-out eyes in which she read everything, everything, she had thought during the night.
So (I think) she made up her mind during that trip that if she was to survive at all she must unload him, for his sake and her own. She was the sort that survives–how else do you live to be ninety-one?–and by the time they reached Poughkeepsie she had had nearly three weeks to bring herself to accept total calamity. Very well, she would have to bear what she had to bear–her life was destroyed, but it was not over. Being who she was, she knew it would not be over until she had somehow expiated her weakness, guilt, sin, whatever it was she charged herself with.
Apparently, after delivering my father to Dr. Rhinelander, she returned to Milton, where that saintly Bessie was looking after Betsy, her namesake. She intended to go into New York, take rooms, put Betsy in a school, and turn herself in grim earnest–and grim is the right word–to the career that she had tried to combine with marriage to a Western pioneer.
One thing, the year before, she had told Augusta she would give anything to experience for ten minutes: the sight of her boy’s browny head down among the other heads in the St. Paul’s chapel, listening to grave wise words, soaking up wisdom. She never had that experience. Her last experience, and her only one, at St. Paul’s was to part with her son there in the headmaster’s study, to stoop and hug his unresponsive stiff body, to cry at him to learn, to study, to love her, to write. He stared at her with his great burned-out eyes and said a reluctant word or two, and watched her go.
She intended to go into New York and take rooms and go to work at her writing and drawing; this much is clear from some of her later letters. But she never did. She started. She took poor forlorn little Betsy away from the Milton farm and steered her toward that new, meager life; but something happened in her head and in her feelings. She winced aside, she refused the jump. With Augusta and Thomas waiting for her in there, with the whole life that she had given up to marry Oliver Ward open again to her ambition, and she not old–at