Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [95]
“I don’t know that cement’s any easier to see through than fog.”
But she was too happy to be teased. They stood, she thought, the quintessential family, looking out from their sanctuary into the vague but hopeful unknown. Undoubtedly she thought of the window they stood at as a magic casement. Couldn’t she hear the perilous seas? It is difficult to imagine Grandmother having to respond to the great moments of her life without all that poetry that she and Augusta had read together.
A drop as heavy as a ball bearing fell on the wet shingles. Beyond the ghostly edge of the roof there were only the faintest, tentative charcoal lines of form-suggested roses, vague mounds of shrubs down below, a tall dimness that would become a tree. From right, left, above, below, so pervasive that it seemed to tremble in the sill under her hand, she heard the Santa Cruz sound, at once laboring and indolent, a sound that both threatened and soothed, that could not make up its mind whether to become clearly what it was, or to go on muttering as formlessly as summer thunder too lazy for lightning. “Hear the sea?” she said.
“If Mrs. Elliott’s right that should be good for your soul.”
“Mrs. Elliott is always right. That’s the trouble with Mrs. Elliott.”
He was surprised. “Why, aren’t you getting along?”
“Oh, of course. She’s as generous and thoughtful as can be. But she helps me whether I want help or not. Her suggestions are commands.”
“You don’t have to take them. You’re a boarder, not a guest.”
“Just try not taking them! She’s got a theory about everything. When I’m not looking she gives the baby pieces of raw steak to suck on.”
“Does he suck on them?”
“Yes, that’s what’s so provoking. He loves it.”
She could feel rather than hear him laughing.
“You can laugh,” she said. “It’s not you she’s after all the time. There isn’t a woman she knows that she hasn’t told how to raise or wean or prevent her children. And with her own such examples. You should hear her in a group of women–she talks about the most impossibly intimate things. Birth control is what she’s on just now. She wants to liberate women from their biological slavery. She was never in doubt about one single thing in her entire life. Don’t tell me you like that sort of person, so good and unselfish and insufferable.”
“I find her very disagreeable,” Oliver said, still laughing.
“Do you think a woman ought to be contemptuous of her husband?”
“Heaven forbid. Is she?”
“Oh, she has the sharpest tongue! She tells me about the offers she had when she first came out here. It’s hard to believe, she’s so dowdy and blunt, but I suppose she may have, women were scarce. ‘So I took the little tanner,’ she says to me, as flippant as that, as if she’d been picking out a saucepan.”
“What’s wrong with Elliott? He looks like a perfectly good catch to me.”
“He’s not a New England intellectual,” Susan said. “He’s not enough like George William Curtis. He never washed dishes with Margaret Fuller. But wash dishes by himself, that’s another matter. They have an agreement,’ as she puts it. She cooks, he cleans up. The poor man is in his tan vats all day and in the dishpan all night, while those great slangy girls fool away at the piano or play whist.”
Oliver’s hand was moving on her stomach. “I know how the poor devil feels. I’ve had a lot of experience marrying women smarter than I am.”
“Oh, how you . . . Who invented cement?” She let herself be pulled within his tightening arm, and said with a kind of desperation, “We’ve got to plan and plan and plan.”
“No matter how we plan, we’re in for some more of Mrs. Elliott, I’m afraid. I could be months finding backing.”
“I don’t care now. We can wait.”
“Maybe you’d like to come up to the City with me.”
“Oh dear, I wonder . . . It would