Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [275]
“You remember Ed and Ada Hawkes.”
“Yes, of course. I think we met once, years ago. How do you do?”
Ada did not stand up or take the cigarette out of her mouth, but when Ellen stood and leaned and reached out her hand, Ada gave her three reluctant crooked fingers like Grendel’s claw. She has never discussed my former wife with me, but I know what she thinks. She thinks I was callously abandoned when I was sick and helpless. With certain qualifications, that is what I think myself. I watched her in her city clothes, her face carefully friendly, that middle-aged well-kept composed American woman, break up and dominate our comfortable Saturday afternoon, and I was filled with hatred and terror. And curiosity. I looked for the signs in her of what Rodman had suggested–She doesn’t look good, she’s shaky, she’s had a bad time–and couldn’t see them, any more than I had seen, before her treachery, the signs of her growing intention.
Ed was politer than Ada. He stood up to shake hands, his face as creased and imperturbable as an old boot. One of the blessed things about Ed is his quietness. He is unflappable. He does not doubt, question, judge, or blame. He knows what he can do and lets others do what they can do. He deals with what is. It must have been that quality in his father that led Oliver Ward to make a driver and companion of him.
“This is Shelly,” I said. “She’s helping me with the book.”
“Ah, yes!” Nothing that I could have specified changed in her face, fixed for friendliness, and yet as she leaned and shook Shelly’s hand I saw her take in the revealing jersey pullover, the hair, the sprawl, the sloppy loafers, the shorts, the exposure of brown legs. She snapped that girl up as a bird snatches an insect on a lawn, and settled back with the expression of careful goodwill on her face and her mind made up that Shelly was wrong, impossible, would not do. “I’ve heard how you all look after him,” she said. “My son says it’s like a summer camp with one camper and three counselors.”
It was a remark that we all resented; we let it fall without an answer. I gloried in the solidarity with which my gang met her–they were as stony as cliffs. But then I saw Al still standing, bereft of chair and ease, and I said, “This is Al Sutton, an old friend from away back in junior high school.”
He wagged like a dog, he showed her his wart, he let her look up his nostrils clear to the back of his head. She was considerably shaken by what she saw, and turned away as soon as she politely could, and found herself facing me. When she first came in, she had taken me in stride. Now I saw her eyes widen. An expression of pain and revulsion grew in her face, and I became aware that my stump was flipping and flopping as if someone had just landed a salmon in my lap.
Protective and angry, I put both hands on it. “It does that sometimes,” I said. I felt like saying, It recognizes you.
Everyone was watching and trying not to. Ellen sent me a beseeching urgent message with her eyebrows. I grew more and more confused, the stump twitched and jerked. Oh, do something! my ex-wife’s face was saying. It’s horrible!
Eventually I grabbed the newspaper from the side pocket of my chair and fumbled and flattened it out in my lap. The paper leaped and rustled. I put both hands on it, and through it took hold of that anguished stub of meat and bone and choked it down. When I dared, I took one hand away and shook two aspirins from the bottle into my palm, and threw them into my mouth and swallowed them without water. Immediately I was sorry I had done it. They had all watched every move, my gang protectively, she with a narrow-eyed, flinching interest. I sat there before her a hopeless case, twitched by spastic reflexes, pouring down pills. They made a hard, pebbly obstruction in my throat that I could not swallow.
And of course my two handmaidens, seeing me choked and watery-eyed from those dry pills, put on an act to prove that indeed they did take care of me. Ada grabbed off the cover of the Styrofoam