Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [85]
“Then there’s my drawing money.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Listen,” he said, “I’m supposed to be the reckless one in this family.”
“No, thee listen. Maybe Mrs. Elliott can find a place for Lizzie. She’s a jewel, there’s nothing so good on this coast. We won’t need her if we’re boarding. But we can keep Marian, so we can do things together again, and so I can work. And since she’ll be freeing my hands, I’ll pay her.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Oh, what does it matter?” Susan cried. ‘“Thee can pay her as long as thee has anything, and then I will. But let’s go just as soon as we can.”
Again he blew into her bangs and kissed where his breath was cold. “All right. For two weeks. Then I’ll have to go to the City.” He looked down at Stranger, sprawled on the boards with his chin on his big feet. “Eh, lad,” he said, like a sad Cousin Jack. “It’s back to they boardin’ ’ouses for both of us. And we’ll never know ’ow that ’oist works.”
III
SANTA CRUZ
1
Shelly Rasmussen’s shabby little soap opera is now playing at my house. I don’t like being a garbage can for her kind of troubles, but considering what I owe to Ed and Ada I couldn’t do anything but make the offer when the crisis blew up yesterday.
There have been better secretaries than Shelly, also worse. She isn’t stupid, and she has put the files in order faster than I thought she could, and learned them in the process. Occasionally she can anticipate what I’ll need, sometimes she comes up with something I’ve overlooked or forgotten. It doesn’t matter that she’s not much of a typist, because I decided very quickly not to let her transcribe my tapes–that would inhibit my mouth. If the tapes are ever transcribed I’ll send them down to some steno pool in Berkeley or the City. But Shelly is good at typing off illegible letters; she is just nearsighted enough to be able to read handwriting that baffles me. Altogether, she has saved me some time and a lot of the bone-ache I used to get trying to work in the files from my chair.
A considerable improvement on Miss Morrow. But she has a ribald streak that I don much like. She is a card-carrying member of this liberated generation, and though I am hardly one to go around clucking my tongue and asking Is nothing sacred, I find myself wondering about the state of mind that holds nothing worth the respect of unhumorous suspended judgment. Me, for instance. Once or twice I have caught her studying me as if I were somehow amusing, and that shocks me. At the very least I claim to be pitiful, grotesque, or appalling.
The interest she takes in the job we are doing is about as disconcerting as her interest in me. She is amused by the Victorian reticences and sentiments we uncover in Grandmother. That letter recording Grandmother’s discovery of the “cundrum” had her in stitches–the discrepancy between decorum and vile necessity was irresistible. Until she began to guffaw, I had thought that letter a rather touching footnote to the Genteel Female’s biological vulnerability, and I found it a little unseemly–I wasn’t shocked, I simply found it unseemly–that a girl of twenty or so should exploit that kind of joke–about his grandmother! –to her fifty-eight-year-old employer, and a man of stone at that.
Many things that I think human and touching in Grandmother’s life and character, she thinks comic. Many things that, even as a biographer, I am inclined to treat as private and essentially none of my business, she examines with that modern “frankness” which makes me nervous.
Ada has a version of Shelly’s experiences in Berkeley which seems to me unduly protective of her daughter. It may be, as she has told me, that Larry Rasmussen when Shelly met him was a nice clean boy from upstate New York who came out to Berkeley to get a degree in anthropology, and fell in with the wrong companions, and learned to live on hash and guitar music and vegetables marketed by the Street People’s Co-op, and left school without a degree and devoted himself, like an old-time I.W.W., to creating the new society within the shell of the old. I suggested the I.W.W. parallel