Angle of Repose (68 page)

She closed her stinging eyes, held them painfully shut, opened them, said, “The Lord hates busybodies and people who do too much.” Then she burst out, “But the
money!
How will we pay for it?”

The children in the back were clamoring, “Is this ours? Is this our place?” and Ollie, twisting to look into his father’s face, was saying, “Aren’t we going to live in the canyon?” Both she and Oliver ignored them. He said over Ollie’s head, holding her eyes, “For a start I used the money the company paid you for the canyon place. It was the first check I signed.”

“You sold it!”

“For twice what it cost. That was the bargain. I took a chance you’d agree it ought to go into this.”

“Dad, don’t we own the canyon any more?”

“Not exactly. But you can go there. All you want.”

“Even twice what the canyon house cost wouldn’t pay for this,” Susan said.

“I sold some of our canal stock to John and Bessie.”

She was appalled. “Oh, Oliver, you haven’t led
them
into this! You haven’t tied
them
to our canal boat?”

“They wanted in,” Oliver said. “They had the money from your family’s house. I’ve filed a timber claim and a desert claim for them, down under the Susan.” His stare was level and steady. “Wouldn’t you like Bessie living out here?”

“Oh,” she said, distracted, “they shouldn’t risk their poor little money! And you never said a word. Neither did Bessie. Why?”

“I asked her not to,” he said, with his sidelong, ambiguous, searching smile. “I wanted to spring it on you that they’d be moving out. Along with the house, you know. A bouquet of surprises.”

“Well, of course, it’ll be wonderful to . . . but . . .”

“So now you have to make up your mind whether you want to camp out here in the dirt or stay in a boardinghouse in town. Because I didn’t get it done in time.”

The wheels ground in sand, dust hung over them, she saw the wind whip a whirl of dust around the bare corner of the house, and turn it into a half-formed dust devil that spun eastward past a lumber pile and a stark privy.

“Here, I should think,” she managed to say. “There’s no sense in spending money on a boardinghouse when we have our own place.”

“It’s pretty primitive yet.”

“Is that anything new for us?” she said.

Her tone was sharper than she intended. But he did not reply– only studied her a moment and then heaved around to say, “Nellie? How does it strike you?”

“Why it seems nice,” Nellie said comfortably. “With all of us to help it shouldn’t take long.”

“Is Patch here?” Ollie said, and Betsy, hammering on her father’s shoulders, said, “May I have a pony too, Father? I’m nearly eight,” and Agnes stood up in Nellie’s grasp and said, “Me too! I’m four!”

“You’ll all have ponies,” Oliver said, and took the reins out of Ollie’s hands and stopped them in the raw yard.

Susan sat with her hands tight in her lap, knowing she should force some enthusiasm, however false. While she held herself apart in Victoria he had driven himself every spare hour to prepare this place for her–the place they had sketched and erased and redrawn through dozens of shut-in evenings in the canyon. She knew with precision, to a decimal point, what he hoped to make it, and she could have wept for the premature trees and the transplanted yellow rose that had put out its first blooms the summer Agnes was born. Yet the exposed yard, a scab on the sagebrush mesa, made her feel like weeping in another key. In homesick hours she had dreamed of the soft dry wind of this valley, but she had dreamed it clean, not with these dust devils that whipped across skinned land, and the haze of dust that she supposed arose from the ditch construction along the edge of the mountain. She had dreamed the valley clean and wild, not made ugly with such raw beginnings as this. So many years must pass before it could be made into anything beautiful or civilized, so much of their lives would have to be spent in the hard preparations to live. The canyon house had been one thing, a temporary camp. This house was where she would spend the rest of her life.

Oliver hopped down. Over the wheel, a little grimly, he said, “You might as well see the worst. She’ll be dirty in the dry and muddy in the wet, and there’s nothing to break the wind. But I call your attention to the view.”

She did not look at the view; she looked into his eyes. “Yes,” she said, almost under her breath. She was aware of the children, still sitting uncertainly as if unwilling to get down in this totally strange place.

Then a ranch dog came wagging out from a shed, and after her four fat puppies. The children piled out and went to her and squatted down where she cowered and wagged in the dust. The puppies attacked their fingers and rolled on their backs, exposing naked bellies to be tickled.

Tentatively, Agnes put out a hand to one of the pups. It seized her fingers in its mouth, and she yanked her hand back, frowning. The pup got hold of her shoe buckle and tugged, backing, with fierce growls. Agnes let him tug, her face breaking up into smiles, and then suddenly, squeezing her eyes gleefully shut, her arms stuck out from her shoulders, her skirts lifting to expose her nimble black-stockinged legs, she twirled away. The pup pursued her, fat and ferocious, as gleeful as she. Her sailor hat came off and flew behind her, held by the elastic under her chin. Across the yard, around the lumber pile, around the shed, she went like a baby dust devil, spinning with some happiness as privately her own as her silvery hair. The pup, nearsighted, got lost and stopped, looking and sniffing around him until here she came spinning back, and wound herself into a tangle as she neared him, and fell in the dust. The pup dove for her exposed ears and she shrieked, covering them. Dust rose.

“Oh my goodness,” Susan said. “She’ll be
filthy!
”

Ollie and Betsy were rescuing Agnes and diverting the pup. Oliver stood by the wheel laughing. Many summers of sun and wind had roughened and seamed his skin. His jaw seemed to have grown heavier, his mustache hid his mouth. To Susan he looked as impenetrable as a rock, and older than his thirty-nine years.

“She seems to be in great shape,” he said.

“Yes. All of them.”

Nellie got down and went to dust Agnes off. For the moment the two were alone, with nothing to divert them from looking at each other straight. She looked for signs of dissipation in his face–How had he been living with her not there to save him from his weaker self?–and could see only a rude outdoor strength. He had the kind of face, she realized, that John had. Put him on a frontier ranch and he could not be distinguished from the cowboys. But she thought she was entitled to some sort of assurance that she had not come home to a repetition of their old quarrel. “Oliver . . .”

His look, bright blue, direct, fully comprehending, warned her off. He refused to be put in the position of defending himself or justifying himself or taking any oath. He did the best he knew how, his look said. He was himself, for better or worse. He did not grant her the supervision of his habits. “You married
me,”
his look said. “Maybe that was a mistake. But you didn’t marry what you could make out of me. I wouldn’t be much good remodeled.”

Something in her that had been trembling to open, closed again.

“Aren’t you coming down?” he said, with his hand up.

“Yes.”

His big calloused hand closed on hers, she stepped from the step to the ground. Nodding, he said, “I put that veranda all along the west side to keep the sun out of our eyes till the trees grow up.”

“That was thoughtful,” she said. “I hate a room full of glaring sun.”

The back door had opened, and Wan stood in it, wildly flapping a dishtowel. She stood on tiptoe to wave, calling, “Oh, Wan, hello, hello! I didn’t know you were here! This is wonderful! Just a minute . . .”

Betsy and Ollie left the puppies and bolted to greet him. Agnes, dusted off, hung back, not quite sure who he was.

“She doesn’t remember him,” Susan said. “But how wonderful you could get him back. It broke my heart to see him go. It’ll be almost like old times, with Wiley and Wan and all of us. And John? Is John with us?”

“He’s filling the water wagon down at the windmill. I saw him as we drove in.”

“Oh,
really
like old times!”

There was another name that hung between them unspoken. She saw it in Oliver’s eyes as plainly as if it had been spelled there. Unsmiling, dry, calculatedly expressionless, he stood by her in the dusty yard. Then he moved his head, indicating something to the north, up toward the canyon. “The whole tribe,” he said. “Here comes Frank, I expect, to say hello.”

She turned, as much to hide her face as to look, and saw a small moving dust midway between her and the hazed mountain front. The appropriate words, the appropriate feelings, tangled in her throat and breast. Anything less than gladness would be noticed, too much gladness would be marked. She was not sure, anyway, whether what she felt, what had made her heart jump at that name, was gladness or panic.

In a voice that to her own ears was brittle and false she said, “Frank? He too? Oh, good. I didn’t know he’d come back.” She continued to look at the moving dust, since that kept her from having to look at Oliver.

“After he invested three years in this ditch?” Oliver said. “I brought him back first thing. He’s bossing the diversion dam and the Big Ditch, while Wiley bosses the Susan.” He took her arm. “Come on, don’t you want to see your house?”

She came along, feeling obscurely rebuked. Old friends to greet, the whole canyon family restored as a surprise for her, everything as it was. She heard the children shrieking inside as they explored the house, and she shook Wan’s hand with both her own in fierce, overdone enthusiasm. She hurt her face with smiling, she examined the rooms with the eagerness of a housekeeper.

But her mind went steadily on something else, bubbling along like dark water under sunlit ice. Just now she had searched Oliver’s face for signs of drink, prying at him to discover if she had made a mistake to return, all but asking him outright what he had done and what he intended to do. Had he, when he mentioned Frank, been searching her face for an answer to a question of his own? Had he seen an answer? For her heart had leaped at the name, the gladness had come before the fear, and before the furtive, alert sense of how dangerous it was to show what she really felt. Had he seen that?

She almost wished he would ask, so that they could have it out, so that she could promise and therefore demand a promise from him: she thought of it as a sort of trade, in which each must give up something. She was shaken and in danger; she was also determined to lie in the bed she had made when she married him.

As she walked from room to unfinished room making pleased or judgmental noises, she was resenting her husband’s wordlessness, she smoldered with grievance that he would not submit to talking their problems out. It was harder to get words from him than it was to get gold from rock. He tortured her with his silence. What did he mean, bringing Frank back on the project? Was he testing her? Tempting her? Was he so dense that he did not feel the undercurrent in his house?

Why don’t you come out with it? she felt like saying to him in anger. I’m sure you think there’s something. Why don’t you say it, so I can tell you there isn’t?

I am going to have to ask myself a question not too different from the one Grandmother wanted to ask Grandfather. What does it mean for my future, such as it is, that I sit at my desk at ten-thirty in the morning with a half-emptied bourbon and water at my elbow? For quite a while it has been getting easier to put down the old aching bones by a little roll over to the liquor cupboard. What am I to infer from the fact that every day for the past two weeks I have been half stoned before lunch?

I know perfectly well what I am to infer. I’m close, I’m maybe over the line. Pain, is that the reason? Am I a pathetic broken creature becoming a juicehead, as Shelly puts it, to dull my agonies? Nothing so dramatic. My kind of pain isn’t the screaming kind, it’s only the tooth-gritting kind.

Am I beginning to draw the dividends on my investment in isolation? Stir crazy? Rodman might think so. Sit out on that mountain doing nothing but read his grandmother’s letters, it’d drive anybody to drink.

Or am I feeling my isolation threatened? Do I hear Rodman and Ellen and that cat’s-paw of a doctor conspiring to move in and capture me? Am I some Kafka creature sweating in its hole?

Maybe all of those reasons, maybe none of them. I have never been a very social type: age and infirmity only confirm what youth and health used to crave. For years I have spent every morning in the study, just as I do now. It is true I used to be pulled out by classes, meetings, examinations, visitors, trips to the library, and a lot else. My afternoons used to have more in them than eight laps on the crutches and a little conversation with Shelly or her mother. My evenings used to go, as they do now, to reading, but very often they went to dinners, friends, concerts, shows. I used to think I lived a good old-fashioned scholarly life. What I don’t have now that I had then is friends. Some of those dropped away, out of embarrassment, when Ellen left and I became a gargoyle; the others I simply moved away from when I came up here. I don’t think their absence is enough to explain that glass there.

I was always one whose arm twisted easily. I have always felt better and talked better when I was a little high. My grandfather in me? Why not? What begins as safety-valve binges and gestures toward social ease ends as habit. I have no reason to be surprised if I have by now picked up a physiological craving that has nothing to do with pain, boredom, reticence, tension, lack of friends, or anything else.

But it’s too risky. If I let myself go that way I give them a handle, I lose it all. Suppose I do have pain? I can put up with it, or go back to cortisone; and if cortisone blows me up with water retention and gives me insomnia, why then I have taken what I want and paid for it. I’d rather be sleepless, and even more a Gorgon than I am, than turn into a helpless old stewbum that Rodman can handle as he pleases.