Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [30]
“When do you want me, mornings?”
“Not mornings, not at first anyway. That’s when I feel like talking into the machine, and I can’t do that with anyone around. How are the afternoons?”
“Sure. I’m not doing anything else.”
“Say two to five?”
“Fine.”
I sat still in the chair. Because I had slid back in in the middle of the fifth lap, I didn’t have so much of that bloated throbbing in the stump, and the ache in my shoulders wasn’t bad. But there is never any escaping—and this is especially true after exercise—the frantic, itching, lost feeling that the leg is still there. The minute I stir my stump at all, the whole leg comes back; I can feel the toes, the ankle hurts. So I wanted Shelly Rasmussen to go. I wanted to get back to the house and have my pre-dinner belt of bourbon and watch the television news and put those cut nerves back to sleep.
She stood there, making no move to leave. I could see the outline but not the expression of her face. “We didn’t settle your salary,” I said. “How’s two fifty an hour?”
“More than I’m worth.”
“Not if you’re any good. But I live on annuities, it’s all I can afford.”
“That’ll be fine. I’ll try to earn it.”
I squirmed in the chair to ease the stump, I put down a casual hand and rubbed, wishing the fool would go. My bladder was beginning to be insistent, too, and though I was armed with my Policeman’s Friend, and would ordinarily have let fly with the secret pleasure of a bedwetter, I couldn’t see myself pissing down a tube with a lady standing six feet from me. Then I thought of poor aghast Miss Morrow, who had wandered all unknowing into the freak show, and I wondered if this one was held there by a sort of fascinated aversion. If she was, I had better find out right now. So I said to the apple trees and the tops of the far pines, “Does it bother you when I talk at you without looking at you?”
“No, why?”
“Does it bother you when I do look at you?”
“No.”
So I turned my chair directly toward her, and she was lying, it did bother her, though she made herself look at me steadily, pretending it didn’t.
“Because I can’t help it,” I said. “I either have to talk past you or turn you to stone.”
“I guess you wouldn’t turn anybody to stone.”
“Sixty seconds is usually enough.” I turned the chair away again, just enough to take the heat off. “Maybe you can build up an immunity.”
She had better. I don’t want her either petrified or fascinated, I want her helpful and if possible interested. For it struck me after she finally went away and I headed for the house that I really would like to talk to somebody about my grandparents, their past, their part in the West’s becoming, their struggle toward ambiguous ends. Of all the available people, I suppose I would most like to talk about them with Rodman, because next to me he has the largest stake in all this. But this Shelly Rasmussen with the Santa Claus laugh and the voice like the first mate of a lumber schooner—she has a little stake too. I rather like the idea that a fourth-generation Trevithick should help me organize the lives of the first-generation Wards.
4
No letters between my grandparents have been saved, and as I said, Susan’s early letters to Augusta do not mention Oliver Ward. To teach me how one evening’s acquaintance ripened into a tacit engagement through five years of absence, I have only the reminiscences, written in Grandmother’s old age, and I don’t believe in them.
She says she didn’t want to be one of those girls who faded through long waiting while their young men chased fortune and excitement in the West. She says she wanted him to know she had other resources. So while he sweated on the hot mountains surveying the Southern Pacific’s Tehachapi Loop, and later while he boiled alive in the Sutro Tunnel, he kept receiving these letters that talked about the commissions she was getting, the flattering things people said about her drawings, the famous and interesting people she met, the young men among whom she and Augusta pursued the life of Art. Her letters were designed