Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [97]
Susan told herself to keep her temper. The woman was well-meaning, however eccentric, and it was not Susan alone who felt her urge to dominate. She treated her husband like a hired man. She could no more keep her fingers out of other people’s affairs than Ollie could help reaching for a rattle or a red ribbon. She could no more keep her opinions to herself than the gull that coasted over them just then could keep from jawing at them for not being edible. The proper response was a light laugh and a phrase that turned the advice aside. But she was too close to anger either to laugh or to find a properly light phrase. Mrs. Elliott, having said her say, drove grimly ahead.
After a minute of uncomfortable silence, Susan said, “If cement doesn’t work out, of course he’ll go back to mining.”
“He should go back now,” said Mrs. Elliott. “He hates this waiting on rich men, as if he were some swindling promoter.”
Susan felt the color surging into her face. “Excuse me, Mrs. Elliott, I think he knows what he wants to do, and is doing it.”
“I think he knows what you want him to do,” Mrs. Elliott said.
“He agrees with me!”
“He convinces himself that he does.”
“Well,” said Susan, thoroughly annoyed, “what should a wife in my position do, since we’re on this interesting personal subject?”
Mrs. Elliott turned on her a pair of faded, slightly bulging blue eyes that the wind had filled with tears without blurring their sharpness. “Go where your husband’s work takes him. Make him feel that what he can do is worth doing. Take your child along and let him eat his peck of dirt. He’ll be all the better for it, and he might have an interesting life. So might you. You won’t always live like a lady, but that won’t hurt you. You can help your man be somebody, and be somebody yourself. He ought to leave all this dealing and promoting to somebody like Elliott who can’t do anything else.”
The insufferable eye dug at Susan. Mrs. Elliott rubbed a knuckle across it, and when she took the knuckle away the eye was redder, but just as sharp.
“Thank you,” said Susan furiously. “I’ll think about it.”
She gave her attention to a yard where some young people were playing the newly popular game called croquet. Obviously they were trying out a Christmas present. The lawn they knocked the striped balls around on had rose bushes in bloom along one side, and on the other a ten-foot pine tree hung with paper chains and strings of cranberries and popcorn that the birds were after. Her headache skewered her from temple to temple. She knew this as the worst Christmas of her life. Dinner among strangers, she and Ollie and Marian almost pensioners at the table made rowdy by the Elliotts’ three romping daughters, and Oliver not there, tied up by a last-minute job he didn’t think he could afford to turn down. She had been remembering all day how Christmas used to be at Milton, and how the whole week between Christmas and New Year used to be spent at receptions and house parties in New York. She had been remembering that it was now almost exactly ten years since she had met Oliver sitting on a stiff gilt chair under the controlling eye of Mrs. Beach and listening to the harangue of his unpleasant famous cousin.
“You are not to be angry with me,” said the nasal New England voice at her side. “Your Aunt Sarah was my good friend. I feel an obligation to look after you.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Stuff. You’re furious. But I’m very sure I’m right. Your husband hates promoting cement. His interest was in solving the problem of how to make it. He’s got the head for doing important things.”
“I believe I appreciate him almost as much as you do.”
“I wonder if you do,” said Mrs. Elliott, not in the least downed. “He’s not a type you were trained to understand.”
The horse lifted his tail