Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [281]
I fled her along the bare redwood walls dark with age, past the bare fieldstone fireplaces, under the high beamed ceilings, through doorways where the plank floors gathered light in dim long pools. Any ordinary passage through those rooms reverberated, but I on my rubber wheels and she in her stockinged feet passed through as silently as spiders spin their webs, or dust settles. In the library the pale square on the wall where Grandmother’s portrait used to hang stared at us. The books were dead in their shelves.
In that stagnant air the oppression of her soundless inescapable unspeaking presence grew on me, and by the time we were back in the front hall I was sweating; my hands stuck to the arms of the chair as I turned it, at bay, at the bottom of the lift.
“Well,” I said, “that’s it.” I was facing her full on, doing my best to be Gorgon but feeling cornered rat. “This is where I live. I live very comfortably, as you can see. I’ve got good help. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.”
But she did not go away like a dismissed student. She stood in front of me, her eyes questioning and her mouth faintly smiling, and I heard my ridiculous speech die out in the hall. There was not a sound anywhere in the house-no pans or dishes or running water in the kitchen, no typing or footsteps upstairs. Sometime while we were inspecting the grounds, Ed must have returned and shut off the sprinkler. I wiped a hand across my greasy face. “Ada?” I called into the stillness. “Shelly?”
Whimpers, made all the worse by the fact that I was holding my Gorgon gaze on her and she was unaffected. It splintered against hers, which was, so far as I could see, only soft and sad and thoughtful. I couldn’t talk past or around her, I had to talk at her.
“Good-bye,” I said. “I’d be lying if I said I’d enjoyed your visit, but I don’t wish you any harm. Go with God.”
I actually used that phrase. Vaya con Dios, mi alma, vaya con Dios mi amor. Go with God? Go with my curse, go with my spittle on your face and dress, I surely meant to say. In my confusion I fumbled the chair around and backed it onto the lift and finally locked it on and pressed the switch.
To my horror she came along beside me, floating up the stairs in her stockinged feet as if she had been filled with helium: she had stepped onto the lift beside the locked wheel of the chair. For the first time I began to fear that I would never get rid of her at all; her beak would never be out of my heart or her form off my door. Helpless, backward, unable to draw ahead or fall behind, helpless even to turn my head and look at my succubus, I was dragged upward.
And yet when we reached the top, and I found myself intact, untouched, and was able to unlock myself and roll free into the broad hall, my sweating fear was eased. I could look at her, and she looked harmless, even humble. I felt exhilarated; I could hardly wait to show off my arrangements, I wanted her to see the private center of my independent life. Rolling down toward the study’s open door, I ran my hand along the satiny redwood wainscot. I pointed out the beauty of the rubbed plank floors, such floors as you couldn’t find short of Japan. One of the earliest Maybeck houses, this–a landmark. A pity if they should ever tear it down. It ought to be turned over, and I would see that it was, to the National Trust.
I stopped and made her go into the study ahead of me. She went willingly, and I had to wonder if I had imagined all that implacable pursuit that had seemed to follow me around the garden and through the downstairs.