Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [90]
“Of course they’re right. They know you, even if you wouldn’t tell what happened with Kendall.”
“All right,” he said, pouring sand. “Entirely competent. Plenty of people would give a lot for those two words from those two men. I wonder if they’d still think so if I turned this Bolivian thing down.”
“But how can you accept it?” Susan cried. “Potosí, where on earth in Potosí? The end of the world, the highest town in the Andes, and the mine a day’s mule ride out from it!”
He was absorbed by his stream of sand. He stopped it, let it run, stopped it, ran out of sand and scooped up more.
“Is there even a doctor?”
“I suppose there’d have to be. I can find out.”
A young couple, the only people on that beach except themselves, slogged by through heavy stand, staring impertinently. When they were out of earshot she said, being reasonable, “Why would you be interested in it at all?”
A shrug, a blind blue squint. “Experience. Every mining engineer needs a chance to show what he can do on his own. Conrad’s done it, Janin, Ashburner, Smith, all of them.”
Silent and rebellious, she brooded about how crossed their purposes now seemed. In Augusta’s life no such choices as this needed to be made. Thomas would shortly become editor of the new magazine The Century, and everything he had been building for years would go with him-friends, contributors, reputation, influence, wife, and family. His career was incremental, nothing needed to be stopped, there was no starting all over from the beginning. He didn’t have to ask Augusta to accompany him to the top of the Andes and risk raising her children in a barefoot Indian village. She and Thomas did good in civilized ways, they had position and money, their days and nights were filled with art, literature, theater, music, good talk. Saint-Gaudens and Joseph Jefferson were their intimates, Whitman had visited their studio. Why could not her own life have taken that turn, instead of the turn that apparently led to constant uprootings and new exiles in raw unformed places, among people she tried to like but couldn’t be quite interested in? She had never put permanently out of her mind Augusta’s doubts about Oliver Ward.
But when she finally did speak, all she said was, “Did Conrad take Mary and the children along?”
“They weren’t married till he came back.”
“Mr. Janin?”
“Janin’s wife is in an asylum in Delaware.”
“Maybe because he did take her,” she said, and immediately contrite, burst out, “I’m sorry we’re such a millstone around your neck!”
“You’re no millstone.”
“But if it weren’t for us you’d go. Maybe you should go. I did without you all that time when you were getting started. I suppose I could take Boy back to Milton.” In defeat, she thought, justifying all of Augusta’s doubts.
“That’s not the answer.”
“You know I’d go to Potosí if it weren’t for the baby. I’d probably love it. I’m not afraid of roughing it, you know I’m not. But how could we take him to such a place? Even if there’s a doctor he’s bound to be like Dr. Furness at the Hacienda, who’d treat a caved-on miner with three broken ribs for liver trouble. Knowing he’d been caved on.”
“I don’t suppose Ollie’s likely to get either broken ribs or liver trouble. You keep saying he’s the healthiest child in the world.”
“Because I take care of him!”
He had sifted some larger pebbles from the sand and was throwing them absently at the dike of drift and kelp. His eyes followed with stubborn inattention the playful swoops of the perambulator at the sea’s edge. “I wasn’t going to ask you to rough it. I don’t think you should have to. I was thinking you could live in La Paz, where it’s civilized. I could get in every few weeks.”
“The way we are now?” she said with bitterness. “I’ve seen you once in two weeks. Have you enjoyed being apart?”
His eyes were lidded and unrevealing. “No,” he said without looking at her. “Not one minute of it. Our trouble is, I picked a bad profession for a home life. I don’t know what we can do about that, not till we get established.” Now his eyes did meet hers. “Anyway I thought