Angle of Repose (64 page)

Shelly was looking at me with her head on one side. Her eyes, which are normally a cool skeptical gray, warmed nearly to brown. “You liked him a lot.”

“I suppose I liked him-trusted him-more than I’ve ever trusted anyone.”

“I think he must have been a lot like you,” she said, still with her head on one side and that smiling look of speculation on her face. “He understood human weakness, wasn’t that it? He didn’t blame people. He had this kind of magnanimity you’ve got.”

“Oh my dear Shelly,” I said. “My dear Shelly.”

I think that her impulses are mainly confessional. She would love it if every afternoon we could start up one of these truth parties. It must puzzle her that since my one look at her private life I have not explored it further. It may annoy her that I don’t solicit her opinions on the problems of human conduct (she would call it behavior). She has her little drama, poor thing, and she would like to play it to a packed house. She would also not mind being the audience for my confessional moments. Her discussions of Oliver and Susan Ward have this torque in them, they twist toward Lyman Ward too often.

I could tell her, and may have to, that if there is one thing above all others that I despise, it is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.

So I fumbled a couple of aspirin out of the bottle in my saddlebag, and eased my good leg out to a full stretch, and rubbed a little on my twitching stump, and said, “Would you bring me a glass of water, Shelly, please?”

She brought it, but she didn’t get the message. When I had downed the pills she took the glass and said, “How do you know he was a drunk away back in 1887?”

“Not a drunk. A drinker. Don’t make the mistake Grandmother did.”

“A drinker, then.”

“From some of Grandmother’s letters.”

“Where she says she’s upset about his drinking.”

“That and some other things.”

“That’s funny. I don’t remember any letters like that, and I’ve been through nearly everything up to the time they came down here.”

“Those letters aren’t in the files.”

“Really? Why not? Where are they?”

“Because they’re the most private things I know about her,” I said. “All of a sudden that poor Victorian lady is stripped bare, and it’s kind of awful. She found herself having to deal with emotions that a genteel education hadn’t prepared her for.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly. That’s why we wrote a while back to the Idaho Historical Society, to see if someone could search the Boise papers for us.”

Shelly studied me with a frown. She was sitting on one foot, and her corduroy pants were stretched tight on her thighs. The loose loafer flapped up and down as she wiggled her toes inside it. “It seems to me she made an awful lot of fuss because her husband took a few drinks.”

“I didn’t say that was all.”

Finally she began to feel the chill. “Well, you’re very mysterious. What was it? Did she really get mixed up with Frank Sargent? Do I get to see those letters?”

I didn’t answer. I swung the chair and looked over her head to where Grandmother sat in her gilt frame, looking down in a sidelong wash of light. Somehow I don’t want anybody messing around in her guts any more than I want anybody messing in mine.

Why then am I spending all this effort trying to understand my grandparents’ lives? What am I talking and organizing all this for? Why do I hire this girl to make my talking real by typing it off the tapes? Why do I drive my drifts and tunnels toward the hidden lode of Susan Ward’s woe? Is it love and sympathy that makes me think myself capable of reconstructing these lives, or am I, Nemesis in a wheelchair, bent on proving something–perhaps that not even gentility and integrity are proof against the corrosions of human weakness, human treachery, human disappointment, human inability to forget?

My stump was twitching, I felt upset, cornered, and angry. “Maybe sometime,” I said. “I’ll have to hunt them up.”

 

Time is not on my side. I am distressed by the slow progress I have made. Here it is nearly September. I have used up the spring and summer getting Susan Ward to the age of forty, and she doesn’t die until she is ninety-one. If Shelly goes back to Berkeley next month, as she makes noises about doing, I shall have more privacy and probably make even slower progress.

Furthermore, my little general practitioner in Nevada City now wonders if I should risk staying through the winter without a proper nurse. What he means is two shifts of nurses, and he knows as well as I do that I can’t afford them and don’t want them. Like Grandfather, I do a little better without any pushing and pulling. Ada is all the nurse I want. She will come when I holler, but not try to run me. Dr. Hines, when I suggested this, said she had troubles of her own, bad arthritis in the winter, a lot of respiratory trouble, and might not be dependable. I will face that problem when it arises. Meantime all his concern is unconvincing. I smell an Afro in the woodpile, and his name is Rodman Ward. Behind him is another Afro whose name is Ellen Hammond Ward. My son, I believe, has given me all the playtime he thinks is reasonable, and in his growing conviction that something must be done, he has become an ally of his mother, the woman I was married to for twenty-six years.

How would I explain, if I were susceptible to Shelly’s truth parties, or even if I were writing a book about myself instead of about my grandmother, my relations with Ellen Ward? All that long history of intense couple-ship during graduate school in Cambridge, was that all falsehood and waste? I can’t think so. Did she harbor all those years a resentment at giving up her own degree and her own career? It was not I who persuaded her. She said herself that if she wasn’t going to have a professional career there was no point in preparing for one; and she had no interest in being a faculty-wife amateur trusted with the details of teas in the art museum.

Those five years at Wisconsin, fighting for a promotion which in the Depression years was about as likely as male parturition–were those arid and empty years for her? Oh no. Rodman was born there, we had firm close friends, we had money enough to get along and so were spared the attic apartments and the peanut butter sandwiches of many of our contemporaries. Of the friends we had then, some are dead, a few are famous, some are lost sight of, hardly any are rich; but all were once close in ways that only Ellen Ward and I, almost secretly, as a couple, understand.

Does all that, and the years afterward at Dartmouth and Berkeley –does it stick in her head? Mean anything? A wasted life? Does she remember as I do the years right after the war when I was beginning to get noticed, when all the saturation in books began to pay off for us? Does her mind’s eye ever get caught by the image of me coming out of the study after a good four-hour morning? Does she ever set up in her mind the iron table out in the garden on Arch Street where we lunched nearly every day the sun shone? Sentimental images like that? I suppose not. I suppose all the time the life that I thought sane and quiet and good was too quiet for her. It must have made her restless to see me with endless things to do, a lifetime full, and herself with only household routines. She was never one for the Faculty Dames, or bridge, or the PTA, or causes, or playing store at the Co-op. A reader, a walker, a rather still woman. I thought we had a good life.

I will never understand it. Maybe toward the end I might have noticed something if I hadn’t been preoccupied with my stiffening skeleton. What might I have noticed? I don’t know, unless that she simply wasn’t happy. But she looked after me with anxiety. I know she worried. She soaked her pillow the night after they told me I’d have to have the leg off.

Yet only a few months after that, she a woman of fifty, and a quiet woman at that, and I a new amputee immobilized in the hospital, she leaves that note on my bedtable saying she is leaving me. And whom does she pick? The surgeon who has just removed my leg, a man with a reputation maybe a little bigger than mine, not much, and no youngster himself, at least as old as she, once divorced, with grown children. Give him credit, he had the consideration to turn my case over to a colleague and go on a long leave. It might have embarrassed both of us to have him taking care of me while he was living with my wife. Though I suppose they could have arranged to call on me separately.

Why? How? By what dissatisfied whim or out of what smolder of long dislike? Hanging onto her youth? Trying to pretend it wasn’t already gone? She never gave any sign of that sort of vanity. A belated ambition to be something in her own right? But what greater freedom did she have as the wife of a surgeon than she had had as the wife of a scholar? A lot fewer evenings at home together, for sure. Perhaps the menopause frightened her, perhaps it unsettled her. They can write on my tombstone that I was undone by female bodily chemistry. But if that was it, why did she stay away? That sort of upset lasts only a little while, and anyway can be taken care of with pills.

Whatever brought it on, her romance couldn’t have been unluckier. And now I, Ahab, dismasted and with tunnel vision, seeing the back of my own head through the curved lens of space-time, had better watch out. Conspiracy begins to hatch. Her desperation fertilizes Rodman’s decision-making capacity. More data for the punch cards. I would bet plenty that Rodman has put up Dr. Hines to scaring me with the possibilities of winter difficulties and accidents.

What does winter weather matter to me? I can live inside. I will take my walks around the empty downstairs rooms. I will install a gymnasium, with a whirlpool bath and a sauna, and spend my principal on a battery of nurses and an athletic director, before I let them persuade or force me off my mountain into some place where they can back me against the wall and thumbscrew Christian forgiveness out of me.

I notice that so long as Ellen had her surgical playmate there were no suggestions of forgiveness or reconciliation. How unfortunate for her that he took a walk out from their cabin on Huntington Lake and never came back. What anxiety, what uncertainty, not unlike mine. Had he left her? Committed suicide? Run off with someone else? Lost his mind? Chosen to disappear like those quiet thousands of men who every year walk out on obligations they can’t support? I suppose she was frantic. With some interest I followed the search in the newspapers. Posses, Boy Scouts, forest rangers, helicopters, combed the area for two weeks, until the first storm dumped two feet of snow on the Sierra and made them give up. It wasn’t until the following summer that some fisherman found his bones in a ravine. By that time I was in the convalescent hospital, the only one there who was going to convalesce.

Now, after all her woe, Ellen comes back and lets her haggard face be seen, she takes an apartment in Walnut Creek and renews acquaintance with the son she probably hasn’t written to in two years. (Or would she have? I haven’t any idea. We have never discussed her except on that one visit of his up here.) She perhaps gives him to understand–he no great believer in orthodox marriage anyway–that she is willing to forgive and forget, and naturally take care of poor old Dad if only he will make an attempt to understand, and put the past behind him.

Those two poor old crocks
need
each other, Rodman is probably telling Leah and himself. They’re better
off
together. Why not? It’s the most reasonable solution for them and all of us.

I have thought about all this. How could I help it? Forgiving I have considered, though like my father and grandfather before me, I am a justice man, not a mercy man. I can’t help feeling that if justice is observed, mercy is forever unnecessary. I don’t want her punished, I want no eye for an eye, I hope I don’t gloat over her misfortunes. I just can’t feel about her as I once did. She broke something. I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue. Also I remember the terms of the bond: in
sickness
and in health,
for
richer or
for
poorer,
till
death do us part.

Death, the word is, something not quite a matter of whim or choice. It could be she thought I was going to be permanently disabled, and she had better make alternative arrangements. (No matter how I try, I can’t believe that, though I can believe that her medical adviser may have given her that prognosis.) My family have all been notably long-lived; maybe she foresaw thirty fading years as nurse of a hopeless case. Or maybe she was simply victimized by an unseemly post-menopausal itch. I’d rather think it was that, not calculation.

It is even possible she couldn’t bear to see me day after day, a gargoyle that was once a man. Does a woman ever leave a man out of intolerable pity? Or because she fears what pity may do to her and him?

If she had left me when I was still a man, with two legs to stand on and a head that could turn aside in shame or sorrow, I would have hunted among my own acts and in my own personality for her justifications, and would have found them. I did take her for granted, I did neglect her for history, I did bend her life to fit the curve of mine, we did have our share of quarrels. But she didn’t leave me after a quarrel. She left me when I was helpless, and she knew she cut such a shameful figure that she didn’t dare tell me to my face, but left that note by me as I slept my two-Nembutal sleep. She laid no charges against me, and so I have to conclude that what finally led her to break away from me was my misfortunes–missing leg, rigid neck, solidifying skeleton.

The hell with her. She earned my contempt, and contempt doesn’t yield to Rodman’s social antibiotics or the doctrine of King’s X.

 

Grandmother, I want to say to Susan Ward as she nurses her grudge through the winter of 1887 and into the spring of 1888, and finally decides to take Nellie and the children off to Vancouver Island while Oliver leads a party into Jackson Hole-Grandmother, take it easy. Don’t act like a stricken Victorian prude. Don’t lose your sense of proportion. Ask yourself whether his unhappy drinking has really hurt you, or your children, or him. Don’t get impatient with the man’s bad luck. You risk too much.