Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [283]
“Anything else you need? Any pills or anything?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Well, you just sit and enjoy your drink. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
Her heels on the planks were brisk, she went down the stairs in a clatter–nimble, well-preserved, and vigorous. I sat by the window and let the bourbon wash around in my mouth–and why in hell had I let her subvert me, after a week of will power?–and warm the ball of cold putty in the middle of my chest. Every sound that came up from downstairs had my ears on end. Talk about a little Kafka animal sweating down its hole! Once I thought I heard her singing as she worked. I downed the drink in a few gulps, and quickly, before she could get back up the lift and prevent me with some female notion of what was good for me, wheeled over to the refrigerator and sloshed another couple of ounces onto the ice in my glass and wheeled back. I was waiting there with an empty glass, my chair turned so that I could look out the window and watch night come on, when she came upstairs with a tray.
“Tell me about your book,” she said while I sat eating the soup and sandwiches and fruit and milk she had brought. She herself was walking restlessly around the room, stocking-footed again, a drink in her hand. She seemed to dislike the sound of her heels on the bare floors–very different from her son. “What do you call it?”
“I don’t know yet. I was thinking of calling it Angle of Repose.”
Her sliding and pacing stopped; she considered what I had said. “Is that a very good title? Will it sell? It sounds kind of . . . inert.”
“How do you like The Doppler Effect? Is that any better?”
“The Doppler Effect ? What’s that?”
“Forget it. It doesn’t matter. The title’s the least of it. I might call it Inside the Bendix. It isn’t a book anyway, it’s just a kind of investigation into a life.”
“Your grandmother’s.”
“Yes.”
“Why she wasn’t happy.”
“That’s not what I’m investigating. I know why she wasn’t happy.”
She stopped halfway across the floor, her drink in her hand, her eyes bent down into the glass as if Excalibur, or a water baby, or a djinn, or something, might rise out of it.
“Why wasn’t she?”
I set my half-eaten sandwich down on the tray that boxed me into the chair, and took one shaking hand in the other, and cried, “You want to know why? You don’t know? Because she considered that she’d been unfaithful to my grandfather, in thought or act or both. Because she blamed herself for the drowning of her daughter, the one Grandfather made the rose for. Because she was responsible for the suicide of her lover–if he was her lover. Because she’d lost the trust of her husband and son. Does that answer your question?”
Her lowered head had come up, her half-shuttered eyes widened and stared. She looked ready to run. I had reached her, all right. That air of self-confidence was a mask, that insouciant way of sliding with arched foot around my rubbed plank floors was an act. Underneath, she was as panicky as I was. For a good second her deep eyes were fixed on mine, her face was tense and set. Then she lowered her head, dropped her lashes, backed away from the attack I had thrown at her unaware, arched her foot and slid it experimentally along a crack in the planks. As if indifferently, speaking to the floor, she said, “And this happened . . . when?”
“1890.”
“But they went on living together.”
“No they didn’t!” I said. “Oh, no! He left, pulled out. Then she left too, but she came back. She lived in Boise alone for nearly two years, while he was working in Mexico. Then his brother-in-law Conrad Prager, one of the owners of the Zodiac, brought him up here to devise pumps that would keep the lower levels from flooding. Prager and his wife, Grandfather’s sister, worked on him, and eventually got him to write my grandmother, and she came down. My father all this time was in school in the East–he never came home. He never came home, in fact, for years–Grandmother and Grandfather had been back together seven or eight years before Father ever showed