Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [284]
Large and dark, looking black in that light, her eyes rested on me. She said nothing, but her mouth twitched, the sort of twitch that is extracted by a stomach cramp.
“So they lived happily-unhappily ever after,” I said. “Year after irrelevant year, half a century almost, through one world war and through the Jazz Age and through the Depression and the New Deal and all that; through Prohibition and Women’s Rights, through the automobile and radio and television and into the second world war. Through all those changes, and not a change in them.”
“That’s what you told your secretary, What’s-her-name, you weren’t interested in.”
“Exactly. It’s all over in 1890.”
“When they broke up.”
“Exactly.”
For a while she was silent, sliding her silken big toe down the crack between two planks, taking a step to follow it, sliding it again. Her head came up, the whites of her eyes flashed at me. “What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?”
“I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.”
“What?”
“Horizontal. Permanently.”
“Ah!” She moved her shoulders, half turned, looked at me and away. Talking to Grandmother’s portrait she said, “Death? Living death? Fifty years of it? No rest till they lay down? There must be something . . . short of that. She couldn’t have been doing penance for fifty years.”
I shrugged.
Skating in her stockings, the nylon faintly hissing on the floor, she carried her drink over near the desk, where she stood a while inspecting the piles of letter folders, the books, the tape recorder, the manila envelope of Xeroxed news stories from Boise. I was afraid she might open that and read, but instead she opened a folder of letters. With her mouth ruefully pursed, she read a while, folded the folder shut. Then she lifted her chin and looked closely at the spurs, the bowie, and the revolver hanging in their broad leather on the wall.
“What’s this? Local color?”
I thought her manner veiled and unconvincing; it seemed to me that since my outburst I was in charge, not she; she had lost the initiative.
“Grandmother had them hanging there when I was a boy,” I said. “I found them and put them back.”
“I didn’t know she was the cowgirl type.”
Too flippant; patter words. I nailed her down.
“They were to remind her of whom she was married to.”
Her back was toward me, the shoulderblades showing through the thin green cotton. She did not turn even part way, but spoke to the wall. “You make it sound like such punishment. Didn’t they get along at all?”
“They got along,” I said. “They respected each other. They treated one another with a sort of grave infallible kindness.”
I saw her thin shoulders shrink and shiver. Still without turning, she said, “It sounds just . . . awful. And yet he must have been a warm and decent man, to think of making a rose in memory of his daughter. And he had been–you say–treated badly, and still he was big enough to take her back.”
“He was a warm and decent man,” I said. I stared in hatred at her thin narrow back, I felt my voice rising and could not keep it down. “He was as decent a man as ever lived!” I said furiously. “He was the kindest, most trusting, easiest-to-get-on-with man I ever knew. My father always made me uneasy, but my grandfather made me feel safe. All he had to do was take hold of my hand and I was in the King’s X place.”
Even yet she did not turn, though she must have heard the edge of hysteria cracking in my voice. Dully she said to the bowie and horse pistol and spurs, “But you were fond of her too.”
“I loved her. She was a lady.”
“A lady who made a terrible mistake.”
“And recognized it,” I said. “Admitted it, repented it, accepted the consequences, did her best to live it down. Her real mistake was that she never appreciated him enough until it was too late.”
The still, thin, bowed back never moved; she seemed hypnotized by the belted weapons on the wall. Her voice was small when it came. “What makes you think . . .”
I moved the tray aside, tipping over