Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [285]
“But he never forgave her,” I said. “She broke something she couldn’t mend. In all the years I lived with them I never saw them kiss, I never saw them put their arms around each other, I never saw them touch!”
I was strangling on my words, my tongue was three times too big for my mouth. Weeping, I wheeled into the bathroom and slammed the door.
For a long time I heard nothing. I sat in the bathroom’s reflective dazzle of light and glared at the one-legged poltroon–from Italian poltrona, a large chair–in the mirror above the washbowl. Stains of tears on the face, a gritting impotent anguish around the mouth, eyes that burned, hair that was gray, thin, and mussed. Napkin still spread in his lap from his invalid’s tray, and under the napkin a jerky, spasmodic twitching, as if a monstrous phallus were being moved by fitful satyriasis in its sleep.
I saw him grow alert, not by cocking his head as an ordinary man might do, but by swinging the chair a little way around. He left contemplating himself in the mirror and rolled silently, a wheel’s turn across the tiles, to listen at the door.
“Where is he?” I heard Shelly’s deep voice say.
“In the bathroom,” said the other voice. “How’s your mother?”
“All right, I guess. They’ve given her digitalis.”
“Her heart, is it?”
“I guess. A lot of pain in her chest and down her arm, and her pulse all irregular, way up and racing one second, and the next so faint you could hardly feel it. Arrhythmia, they call it. It isn’t necessarily so serious, but it’s scary. She really had us panicked.”
Careful female voices, a dark and a light, carefully friendly, carefully open. They came on invisible waves through the hollow-core door to the rigid head, the listening ear. The light one said, “It must have been frightening. You shouldn’t have tried to come over here.”
“Oh, no trouble,” said the dark one. “She’s all right now. But she was worried about Mr. Ward. Has he had anything to eat?”
“I fixed him a tray.”
“Oh. How about his bath?”
“His bath?”
“He has to have a hot bath every night, to soak out the pain so he can sleep.”
“Yes. Well, I’ll see that he takes it.”
“He can’t take it. He has to be given it. He can’t climb in and out of a bath tub with one leg.”
“All right, then I’ll give it to him.”
“I’d better do it. I know the routines.”
I could not see the face of the man in the chair, listening behind the door, but I could feel the sweat that had been greasy on his skin ever since the woman arrived on the porch. The politeness was still there in the women’s voices, but it was under a strain, it could crack any minute.
“Have you . . . given him his bath before?” said Light.
“Not usually. Mom does it,” said Dark.
“Ever?” said Light.
“What does it matter?” said Dark. “I know how it’s done, you don’t.”
Pause. Finally Light said, “Since you haven’t given it to him before, I think I could do it quite as well, and a little more appropriately. There’s really no need of your staying, Miss . . .”
“Rasmussen,” said Dark. “Mrs. And I don’t know about that appropriateness. Where have you been all summer, while we’ve been taking care of him? If he didn’t want us to take care of him he wouldn’t have hired us.”
But he didn’t! said the man listening ratlike behind the door.
“I understood that he had hired you as a secretary,” said Light.
That’s right! said the man behind the door. Your mother ran you out the one time you tried to come in! You stay out of here!
To his horror the door burst open, she came in, rolling him back. She seemed to have grown two feet, she was huge and broad-shouldered in a turtle-necked jersey within which her unconfined