Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [89]
The radio went on for a long time; it kept me awake until after midnight. For the last hour, after I had got past being annoyed at her characteristic lack of consideration, I concentrated on forgetting all about her and her speed freak and the new world he wants to create and she seems to doubt. I am not going to get sucked into this, I’ll call the cops in a minute if I have to. And this is all, absolutely all, I am going to think about it. I am going back to Grandmother’s nineteenth century, where the problems and the people are less messy.
One thing I did decide to do, and I did it the first thing this morning, was to go through the Idaho file and pull out a few of the letters. She hasn’t got that far yet, but she’ll be there soon. There is no use exposing Grandmother to the kind of scrutiny Shelly would give her.
2
Among the papers that Shelly laid out for me the other afternoon is the February 1879 issue of Century containing Grandmother’s article on Santa Cruz, with ten woodcut illustrations by the author. It is useful to have her pictures. They make it easier to visualize that sleepy town before it was made over by a midway, and then by pious retired couples, and then by a branch of the University of California. Without the pictures I could never have imagined it as it was when they came down to it from New Almaden. Let me try out one particular morning.
They sat in a cove in the yellow cliffs, a place open to sun and sheltered from wind, their backs against a drift log. The sand was dry and pale, peppered with the charcoal of beach fires and webbed with a vine bearing perfumed purple flowers. Below where they sat, the highest reach of the tide had left a dike of kelp, whitened boards, sodden feathers of seabirds, trash; below that the beach was dark, smooth, and firm. Marian was pushing the perambulator along it, leaving a shine of crooked wheel tracks.
Left and right were promontories blackened with mussels and tide plants to high-tide mark, yellow from there to their furzy tops. Between them the sea came in from two directions, sending a constantly renewed chevron of breakers toward the beach. Out on the points where the surf broke with heavy thumps and thunders, spray flew higher than the cliffs, and above each explosion of spray burst up an explosion of black and white as the turnstones feeding on the rocks flew upward to escape being soused. Southward, toward Monterey and the sun, the sea went from white foam to heaving green glass to the mirror-like glitter of floating kelp. Far out, the bay had a glaze like celadon.
There were windows in the right-hand promontory through which, as the seas fell away, they saw glimpses of sunlit heaving sea and black rocks lashed with white. The sky was tumultuous with clearing, the world glittered. Down on the packed sand Marian was now playing sandpiper, pushing the perambulator to the lowest edge of the retreating foam, and flying up the sand ahead of the next wave. Susan could see the flash of her teeth, laughing, and the waving of the baby’s legs from the buggy.
“You know what I wish?” she said.
“What do you wish?”
“I wish there were a mine in Santa Cruz that wanted an engineer with exactly your qualifications.”
Sitting cross-legged and pouring sand from one hand to the other, Oliver squinted at her with what she read as irony. “What are my qualifications?”
She felt challenged. Once or twice he had dropped remarks about his “failure” at New Almaden. She would not permit it to be anything of the kind. “Honesty?” she said. “Inventiveness? Thoroughness? Ten years’ experience? Didn’t that cable of Conrad’s and Janin’s say ‘entirely competent’?”
“It would be nice to think