Angle of Repose (26 page)

“You don’t understand him,” Shelly said. “He’s got a thing about gentleness. He wasn’t, wild though? He talked straight enough?”

“I don’t suppose what you’d call wild, no,” Ada said.

“Did he say anything else? What was it he could explain, did he say?”

Ada shook her head.

“He didn’t say anything about the night I left.”

“He knows better than to try explainin’ to Dad and me, I guess.”

With her hip Shelly shoved the file drawer shut. Her hoarse voice had been toned down, almost hushed, while she questioned Ada. Now she said in a full bass-baritone, “Oh, Christ, I guess I might as well go down and see him and be done with it.”

Ada moved her bulk dramatically across the doorway. “Shelly, don’t you do it! That man’s dangerous.”

“Yes, Ma,” Shelly said with resignation, and to me, flashing a little grin, “Mom thinks he’s dangerous because he threatened to cut my throat once.”

“I thought he had a thing about gentleness.”

“He does. When he lets the bennies alone he’s really nice. He
thinks
, you know? He isn’t taken in by all the shit.”

“
Look
what he’s done to you!” Ada said, furious. “I wash my hands of it.”

Shelly regarded her mother, started to say something, swallowed it, shrugged, said to me, “I never took the threat seriously. He was on a black crazy trip. I don’t think he’d slept for three nights. He never even remembered it when he came back.”

I sat thinking how little I needed any of this. I said, “I can call the police if you’d like.”

Shelly was truly surprised. “What for? All he’s done is come asking where I am.”

“I was assuming you’d left him for some reason. It wasn’t threats, then.”

“I told you, I never took that seriously.”

“You better,” Ada said. “If you listen to me, you sure better.”

“Oh, I don’t know!” Shelly said violently. “Maybe I shouldn’t have left him. Maybe it was just my middle-class indoctrination blowing back in my face. I just . . . Yakh. I guess I wish he’d just go away. Maybe he’ll go quicker if I see him than if I don’t.”

“Do you think that?”

“I don’t know. I guess not To her mother she said, ”Did he see you come up here?”

“He saw me go out. I went right past him, he’d have been blind if he didn’t. I told him I had to go look after Mr. Ward, and I hoped he’d just swallow that you’d left him, and not make any trouble.”

“He’s still down there then.”

“Unless Dad’s run him off.”

“Dad shouldn’t mess with him. He might try to get even.”

“That’s what I said, he’s dangerous.”

“Oh, not by attacking anybody. He just has these really maniacal notions of what’s funny. He plays they’re jokes, but they draw blood. And he doesn’t respect property at all, he thinks the earth ought not to be owned. He’s bound to hang around if he thinks I’m here. He’ll pop up from behind bushes, he’ll leave these cannibal tracks in the sand for us to see, he’ll get us all looking over our shoulders. I won’t dare walk the Goddamned path.”

I reached into the saddlebag and got out the aspirin bottle and shook two pills into my hand and washed them down with the dregs of a bottle of Coke on the window sill. “I agree with Ada,” I said. “I don’t think you should see him.”

“But he really
isn’t
the way I just said,” Shelly said, and scowled at me, thinking. “I mean, he’s really O.K., he’s got a good head, he has these theories of a better system and he isn’t afraid to live by them. And I guess he’s fond of me. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have come hunting me.”

“But you’re scared hell hang around and leave cannibal tracks,” I said. “If he does, if he practices any philosophical trespass around here, I
will
call the cops. I haven’t got time to spend on cannibal tracks, and I doubt you have.”

“Don’t you even get mixed up in it the teeniest bit,” Ada said. “We’ll just have to find a way of cleanin’ up our own mess.”

“I was just going to say maybe she should stay up here till he goes.”

“It’ll bother you.”

“Why should it? There are all those extra rooms, she can take her pick. If she really wants to stay out of his way.”

I made that offer strictly for Ada’s sake, not Shelly’s. I suppose we
will
be peeking from behind the shutters every time a jaybird drops an acorn. I’ll be reaching for Grandfather’s horse pistol every time the house creaks. The thought of that speed freak prowling around in my woods and spying on us doesn’t thrill me. Neither am I happy to have a visitor in one of my many guest rooms. I like it better when I am alone, or with nobody in the house except Ada. So I hoped I would be thanked and my offer rejected.

But all Shelly said was, “Wow. I almost hope he does stick around. Wouldn’t it bug him to find out I’m shacked up in the big house with the boss.”

“Watch your mouth!” Ada said, furious.

“All right, Mom. J-o-k-e, joke.”

“About as funny as one of his.”

As I think it over, remembering the little incident last evening, I wonder if it
isn’t
like one of his. A cannibal track for me to find and stare at. This is the ribald streak I referred to.

And what in hell could have been in her mind last night? Ada was getting me ready for bed, she had me undressed and out of the chair, standing on my one unsteady peg with my underwear around my foot and my arms around her neck, when I heard the sloppy slap of Shelly’s loafers in the study, and Shelly’s voice said, “Need any help, Mom?”

Ada clutched me to her bosom and turned her furious back on the door. Her blast of outrage went past my ear. “Don’t you come in here!”

Once she turned, I was turned too: I stared right over Ada’s shoulder, through the bathroom door and into the study, where Shelly leaned against the doorjamb in her turtle-necked sweater with the sleeves pushed up. I got a very good look at her, as she did at us. I observed that she was
ohne Büstenhalter,
and pretty opulent. I also could not help seeing very clearly what she saw–her mother in her white nurse’s nylon clutching the naked freak to her breast.

“Well, I’m
sorry
,” Shelly said. She looked me in the eye, she almost winked, there was a secret little smirk on her face. She pushed her shoulder away from the jamb and turned and slip-slopped across the bare study floor.

Ada said not a word, aside from her usual encouraging grunts, while she bathed me and got me to bed. When she got out the bottle for our nightcap I could see her contemplate the notion of asking me if we shouldn’t ask Shelly in, and reject it. Shelly had borrowed my transistor radio right after supper, and we could hear it going, rock with a beat like a flat tire, off in the east wing where she had taken up residence. We sipped our drink and spoke of other things and ignored everything that had happened.

Finally Ada heaved to her feet and picked up the glasses and looked me over to see that I had everything I needed. She breathed through her nose and compressed her lips, wheezing. “Well, grin and bear it, I guess,” she said.

“I guess.”

“Get you a good sleep now.”

“Thanks. You too. Don’t let this business bother you. He’s probably gone.”

“He don’t bother me as much as some other things. Well, good night now.”

“Good night.”

She went out, heavy and discouraged. I heard the lift’s metabolism going, then it stopped. The front door opened and closed, was rattled hard in a testing of the lock. The thumping of the amplified guitars went on, deep in the house. Maybe, I thought, she keeps it on for reassurance, because she really may be scared. Maybe she came in at bath time because being alone in her empty wing spooked her.

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.

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 they were right.”

“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!”