Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [83]
“But you know what he’ll say!”
“Sure. Insubordination, stirring up unrest among the men. I flew into a rage and quit. Too bad a promising young fellow should have dangerous opinions and a bad temper. I don’t care what he says.”
“You’d let him lie about you?”
“I’d rather let him lie about me than have to deal with him or even think about him another five minutes. If they don’t know me well enough to know he’s lying, that’s too bad.” With an eye as cold as Kendall’s own he squinted along the veranda roof. “I wonder if he’ll tear this house down too? Maybe I should beat him to it. I could take this porch off in an afternoon. It’s ours, we paid for it.”
Though she knew it was only a sour joke, it turned her cold, for it brought up the problem of their own moving. How long? Forty-eight hours, like Tregoning? But she did not dare ask until Oliver was calmer. She said; “Let him have his petty triumph. Thee can leave knowing thee has done everything thee was asked to do, and done it well, and more besides.”
Oh, that was Grandmother. What though the world be lost? All is not lost. Honor is not lost.
Miss Prouse came to the door with the baby draped across a napkin on her shoulder, saw them in their intimate conversation, and discreetly withdrew. But the sight of her brought home to Susan such a tangle of responsibilities and complications that she could not keep from saying, “What about Marian? Certainly we can’t afford to keep her now.”
Gloomily he looked at her, saying nothing.
“And Lizzie too. Where will Lizzie go?”
“And Stranger,” Oliver said. “Stranger’s the luckiest, he can go back to Mother Fall’s.”
“Oh, Oliver, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She flew against him, in tears. She felt his lips on the top of her head.
“I’m the one who ought to be sorry,” he said. “I did it. It’s not the way we planned it.”
She would not let him blame himself, she shook her head with her face against his chest. “Thee couldn’t have done anything else.”
“I could have done what Chepe’s doing.”
Now she reared back to look into his face. “Not you! You’re too fine!” Immediately she added, in justice to poor trapped Hernandez, “And we’re not that poor.”
His eyes, looking down into hers, wavered almost as if in embarrassment or shame, and he broke the look by hugging her against himself again. “You’re all right, Susan,” he said. “You’re pure gold.”
Again she leaned back to look into his face. “How long will we have? Will he try to evict us?”
“He knows better. No, we’ll take exactly as much time as we need. You still have a picture or two to do, and it will be at least two weeks before I can finish the map.”
“The map! You aren’t going to finish that!”
“Oh yes I am.”
“But why? After all he’s . . .”
“For my own satisfaction,” Oliver said. She understood at once that on that point he was immovable. She could argue, he would not argue back. But he would complete the map which he owed no one, which he had done on his own time, for experience, and on the day they left New Almaden he would drop it on Kendall’s desk–no, not that far, he would mail it to Mr. Smith or Mr. Prager, more likely. She could not understand that stubbornness in him which led him to punish himself. But whatever he was, he was not small, and that she took pride in.
“Where will we go?” she asked. “San Francisco?”
“Conrad and Mary, you mean? I don’t think we want to embarrass them with this.”
“I didn’t mean to live with them.”
“Even in a place of our own, they’d feel obligated. I don’t want them obligated. Anyway, we couldn’t afford a place of our own in San Francisco.”
“Then where?”
“I’ll have to go there,” he said. “It’s the only place I’d have a chance to find another job. For you and the baby, I was wondering if Mrs. Elliott could find you a nice room in Santa Cruz, somewhere cheap and quiet and on the shore.”
“You mean-separate?”
“I could come down on weekends sometimes.”
“Oliver,” she said, “we mustn’t! You forget the six hundred dollars I made from The Scarlet Letter, and what I’ll get from Mr. Howells and from Thomas.”
“Which I won’t let you