Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [282]
“Is this your grandmother?”
“Susan Burling Ward. You ought to remember her, from pictures.”
“I guess I never paid much attention. But she looks the way I sort of imagined her.”
“Good.”
“Sensitive and high-minded.”
“She was all of that.”
“But not happy.”
“Well, that was painted when she was close to sixty.”
She turned, and there they were side by side, my ex-grandmother and my ex-wife, two women upon whom I have expended a lot of thought and feeling, the one pensive, with downcast eyes, in a wash of side lighting, the other pale, dark-haired, sober, with a pucker in her brows and the eyes of a hurt and wondering child. Female animals, wives, mothers, civilized women. Ellen said, “Can’t a woman of sixty be happy?”
“Why ask me?” I said. “As Grandmother’s biographer, I’d have to guess she was never really happy after, say, her thirty-seventh year, the last year when she lived an idyll in Boise Canyon.”
Her eyes troubled me. Why should the Gorgon have to drop his lids?
“But she lived a long time after that,” Ellen said.
“She lived to be ninety-one. My grandfather lived to be eighty-nine. She had practically no time to be senile and alone.”
“But she wasn’t happy.”
“She wasn’t unhappy, either. Do you have to be one or the other?”
I focused into the middle of her dark blue, wondering glance. I focused, actually, between her eyes, and I was thinking as I appeared to look at her, Why does an unblinking, wide-eyed, questioning look always strike me as unintelligent? Is it? Or is it possible it is only open, willing?
My brief exhilaration had passed. Out the window, the sky was losing its light, there was no sun on the pines. Where on earth was Ada? It was away past the time she should have come to start my dinner. The dread came back and squatted like a toad on my heart. Suddenly, before the woman could question or stop me, I had wheeled to the side of the bed and was dialing the telephone. On the fourth ring it was answered: Shelly, sounding as usual like a longshoreman.
“Hello,” I said. “Is your mother there?”
“I was just going to call you,” she said. “We’ve had a kind of time. She’s sick–some sort of seizure. Dad’s taking her in to the hospital right now. I probably ought to go along. Do you think you could wait supper till I get back? Maybe an hour?”
Heavy and coarse as a man’s, her voice boomed and crackled in my ear. She sounded excited and hurried and breathless, as if she had had to run to the phone.
“Of course,” I said. “My Lord, yes. You do whatever she needs, don’t worry about me. I can make a sandwich. Give her my love.”
“O.K.,” said her breathless baritone. “I guess that’s . . . I’ll be over later, then. Don’t try to fix your own, I’ll be there. O.K.?”
“O.K.” I hung up.
“What is it?” Ellen said, though I was sure she had heard it all–Shelly’s voice came out of the earpiece as if out of a megaphone. What luck! Ellen’s face said. Just what we were hoping for! It was bound to happen sooner or later, she was really too decrepit.
Her shoes were still in her hand, her head was on one side. “You need a drink,” she said. “You look sunk.” Bending, she slipped on her pumps, one, then the other. “Where’s there a bottle? You don’t want to go on with that nonsense about being on the wagon. This is an emergency. I’ll fix you a drink and then I’ll go see what I can find for you to eat.”
“I can wait. Shelly’ll be over in an hour.”
“No, no. Why should you?”
She came in like a reserve quarterback hot to prove the injustice of his being kept out of the game. Helpless and troubled, I stared at her, unable to find the words that would stop her. I let her fix the drink, popping two aspirins into my mouth while her back was turned. I put out a cold and sweating hand and took the cold, sweating glass.
“Would you like the television up here, for news or anything?”
I felt