Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [84]
“But if it will keep us all together!”
“Even so.”
That backed her straight out of his arm to a distance of two paces, a better arguing distance. “You’d rather have us live away from you, in some fumished room, than spend my perfectly good money for a house where we could be a family?”
That mulish, proud face. It looked as if it would take a crowbar to open his mouth. Finally it did open. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “It would only be until I locate something.”
She stared wildly into his clouded eyes, her voice came out of her high and stammering. “Maybe thee can keep me from spending what thee calls my money on thee,” she said, “but thee can’t keep me from spending it on the baby!”
He shook his head, hangdog, suffering, and immovable. “No,” he admitted. “But you’d shame me if you did.”
They glared like enemies. She bit her lips to stop their trembling, she felt the color leave her face, she saw him begin to melt and blur through her tears. It took a great effort, it was a wrench like renuncia tion of something precious, to submit to his pride. “All right,” she said, and again, on an in-caught breath, “All right. If that’s the way thee must have it.”
In her agitation she walked up and down the veranda, head down, sucking her knuckle. One turn, two, three, while he stood watching, saying nothing; and each time, at the end of the veranda, her head lifted and her eyes swept down across the view, and each time she turned she passed the hammock. It was a bitter irony to her that now she could hardly bear to think of leaving this place where only a year ago she had sat with her hand clenched in Oliver’s, fighting desolate tears, sick for home and Augusta, and torn by feelings which distance made as irrecoverable as they were incurable. Out of the corner of her eye as she passed the door she saw the black front of the Franklin stove which had been their hearthstone.
O fortunate, o happy day
When a new household finds its place
Among the myriad homes of earth
Gone, and as painful now as the thought of a stillborn child. Sentimental ? Of course. Riddled with the Anglo-American mawkishness about home, quicksandy with assumptions about monogamy and Woman’s Highest Role, buttery with echoes of the household poets. All that. But I find that I don’t mind her emotions and her sentiments. Home is a notion that only the nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more? So I don’t snicker backward ninety years at poor Grandmother pacing her porch and biting her knuckle and hating the loss of what she had never quite got over thinking her exile. I find her moving. She is Massaccio’s Eve, more desolate than Adam because he can invent the bow and arrow and the spear, but she can only try to reassemble outside Eden an imperfect copy of what she has lost. And not guiltless, either. She buries that acknowledgment under disgust and fury at Kendall and his toadies, but she makes it, then or later: she has been guilty of pride, she has held herself apart, and so has contributed to the fall.
So there she is with her two hands clenched in the front of Oliver’s shirt, shaking him in her passion and her earnestness. “I’ll do what thee wants, or whatever we must, but please, Oliver, not two weeks more here! The air is poisoned, it’s all spoiled, I couldn’t bear it. How long will the map take thee? A week? Two weeks? Why can’t thee do it in Santa Cruz? I can finish my drawings there, there are only three more blocks, and I’ve done the sketches. Why not at Santa Cruz? We could work in the mornings and spend the afternoons on the shore. Thee has worked so hard, why must thee run right out and find more work? Couldn’t thee go to see Mrs. Elliott tomorrow and find a place?”
He looked down at her almost absently. He blew cold into her bangs and bent his head and kissed the forehead his breath had exposed. “I could,” he said. “But that wouldn’t support the family.”
“We have enough for a while.”
“Sure. And when it’s gone, then what?