Angle of Repose (32 page)

He lowers the stereoscope and regards me with a smile behind which things are going on like shadows passing across a drawn blind. “You’re really full of it, aren’t you?”

“What’s the antecedent of ‘it’?”

He throws back his head and roars with laughter. I can see the strong cords in his neck where his beard thins out. “O.K., Pop, I wasn’t trying to put you down. I think it’s great you’ve got something that interests you this much. I’m glad Great-grandpa got to Deadwood, too. It’ll add some zing to your book.”

“I’m not going to put any of that in,” I say.

“You’re not? Why not? You
know
all about it. You’re writing a book about Western history. Why leave out the colorful stuff?”

“I’m not writing a book of Western history,” I tell him. “I’ve written enough history books to know this isn’t one. I’m writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?”

Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually–I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That’s where the meaning will be if I find any.

In my peripheral vision I am aware that he is looking at me steadily, but I don’t turn. I look a while at the gun and bowie and spurs above the desk, where Grandmother put them. Then I turn a half circle and look at Grandmother’s downcast, pensive portrait. Up here in the study it is beginning to be hot.

“A marriage,” I say. “A masculine and a feminine. A romantic and a realist. A woman who was more lady than woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman. I don’t give a damn if he once saw Wild Bill plain. He couldn’t have, anyway, because Wild Bill was killed at least a year before Grandfather blew into Deadwood. I’m much more interested in quirky little things that most people wouldn’t even notice. Why, for instance, did he send the Christmas presents he did from Deadwood–a bundle of raw beaver pelts and an elk head the size of a good-sized woodshed? What would he do that for? It’s as nutty as Shelly Rasmussen’s nutty husband sending her twenty-four canaries.”

“He did?” Rodman says, delighted.

“Yes, but that’s not what I’m talking about now. I’m talking about Grandfather, who wasn’t a kook, but who still sent those things, as if he was insisting on something. It’s like that horse pistol up there that he brought to his courting and laid out on her Quaker dresser. He wanted to be something she resisted. She was incurably Eastern-genteel, what she really admired was a man of sensibility like Thomas Hudson.”

“Who he?”

“Never mind. Augusta’s husband,
you
know. Fragile and a little effeminate and very cultivated. Grandfather was something totally different. What held him and Grandmother together for more than sixty years? Passion? Integrity? Culture? Convention? Inviolability of contract? Notions of possession? By some standards they weren’t even married, they just had a paper signed by some witnesses. The first dozen years they knew each other, they were more apart than together. These days, that marriage wouldn’t have lasted any longer than one of these hippie weddings with homemade rituals. What made that union of opposites hold them?”

Too late, I realize that I have been vehement. Rodman has quietly laid the stereoscope down on the desk. My stump is twitching and my seat is numb from four or five hours in the chair. I take out the aspirin bottle and shake two into my hand.

“Want some water?” Rodman says.

“No, I can take them without.”

“Works better if it’s diluted and dissolved.”

“O.K.”

He brings a glass of water from the bathroom. There is a constraint as thick as gelatin in the air between us. A linnet looks us over from the window ledge, but when I turn my chair to face Rodman I hear the
thrrrt!
of its wings and in the corner of my eye see its dark blip disappear.

“Pop, I suppose I better tell you,” Rodman says. “Mother was over yesterday.”

There are certain advantages to being made of stone. I sit there, and I don’t think I quiver. “She was?”

“She asked about you–where you were, what you were doing, how your health is, who’s taking care of you.”

“Did you give her the dope?”

His look splinters on mine. Even Rodman has difficulty with my immobility, and now he obviously suffers from embarrassment–for himself or for me I can’t tell. But after that moment’s cringing he holds my eye. “Yes.”

“All right.”

“She doesn’t look good,” he says. “She’s shaky. She’s had a bad time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s taken an apartment in Walnut Creek.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Pop . . .”

I take the hand that he mashed in greeting me, and work the knuckles with the fingers of my other hand. I can feel the bone hard and resistant and enlarged. Rodman is standing by the desk, so that I have to look upward at him under my eyebrows. God
damn
, it would be a pleasure to live among people four feet high, or as considerate as Al Sutton.

“I think she’d like to see you,” Rodman says. “I think she feels very bad.”

I do not answer. The ache which has never gone away since he shook my hand spreads up the wrist and arm, I feel it stiffening my shoulder and solidifying down my spine. Everything in me is congealing –guts, glands, blood vessels, organs, bones. My stump, as it always does when I get upset, jerks like a fish on a line. I lay the aching hand on top of it and sit, too rigid for my own comfort.

“Don’t you think, maybe–” Rodman says.

“She made her bed.”

He stands looking down at me; I look past him.

“Why not get us a drink?” I say. “In the cabinet, there. There’s ice in the little refrigerator under the far end of the desk.”

He goes away from me and I sit in the midst of my own petrefaction, hating him, hating her, hating it, hating myself. He brings the drinks silently and hands me a glass. Lifting my eyes upward through my eyebrows, excruciatingly conscious of the rigidity of my neck, I raise the glass an inch. “To you.”

“Prosit.”

But he is not going to leave it at that. He stands there bending me with his eyes, and with an expression on his bearded face that I have to read as pained, diffident, everything that Rodman normally is not.

“If I brought her up,” he says, “would you see her?”

For an instant it is touch and go, the stone threatens to become weak flesh again. For the half breath that I feel that weakness, I want it, yearn for it, would willingly turn to mush if only some of the old warmth would come back. My mind darts like a boy who has stolen something and wants to get to a safe place to examine his prize. Then I am aware that throughout this instant of weakness I have been sitting there as rigid as ever. There is too much of Grandfather in me.

“You may as well understand,” I say. “I don’t hate her. I don’t blame her. I think I understand her temptation. I’m sorry about her bad luck and her suffering. But I have nothing to say to her. Tell her so.”

At first light she pulled her curtains aside and saw sunrise pink on distant snow peaks. Breakfasting, she sat on the left side of the dining car to watch the mountains come nearer, and she was getting her things together when the train was still racketing across empty plains. When it finally crawled between lines of side-tracked boxcars and died with a hiss at the Denver platform, she was on tiptoe behind the porter in the vestibule. But at the last moment, when he opened the door on a pandemonium of hatted heads, bearded faces, shouting mouths, blowing papers, Mexicans, Indians, frock coats, buckskins, and a ten-foot sign that said “Lunch Pails Filled 25 c. Passengers for the Mines Take Notice,” she pulled back with a hollowness in her stomach and let others go first. Her eyes flew up and down, hunting him.

At once she saw him, not pushing forward but back against the station wall, using his height to see over heads. The first thing she thought was that he must not be called Sonny any more. The lines of his thinned-down face were severe, his skin looked weather-beaten except where the pink edge of a new haircut showed on his neck when he turned his head. Expressionlessly his eyes picked up and discarded one by one the passengers who descended and stood for the porter’s whisking, or bolted up the windy platform. He might have been expecting a freight shipment, not a wife he had not seen for more than a year.

Had he done without her for so long he was indifferent to her coming? Did he blame her, as she blamed herself, for that empty year? Did he think she was insane to force herself on him now, just when he was getting on his feet but before he felt Leadville was prepared for her? She thought he looked closed-in, watchful, perhaps resigned.

Then the expressionless eyes found her, and she saw them change. All at once unbearably excited, she waved a black mitt. Foolishly they beamed at each other across forty feet of bedlam, and then here he came, and down she went to meet him. Folded up against him and lifted off the ground, she heard him say, “Ah, Susie, you made it! I was afraid it was another false alarm.”

“I couldn’t do that to you twice. You’re so thin! Are you well?”

“Tiptop shape. But the altitude’s not fattening. Neither is the Clarendon’s food.” He was holding her out to look her over. “You’re a little thin yourself. How was the trip? How’s Ollie?”

“I’m fine,” she said, out of breath. “The trip was fine. The conductor even invited me to ride in the locomotive, but I didn’t. Ollie’s much better. He’ll get well fast, now I’m gone. I was bad for him.”

“Come on.”

“Oh, I was!” She was all to pieces. In the middle of bumping shoulders and clumping boots, in all the dust that swirled around them, she wanted to confess her mistakes and get started right again. No more foolish protectiveness about Ollie, no more timorous holding-back from sharing her husband’s life, no more–ever–of these meetings and partings at the steps of transcontinental trains. “I was always at him,” she said. “It scared me so to see him delirious that I couldn’t let the poor child rest, and the ague fits and the sweating fits were almost as bad as the fever. Mother and Bessie finally shut me out of his room. That’s when I decided that even if he wasn’t fully well, I was coming out to you. I won’t be in your road, I promise.”

“I guess you won’t,” he said, and laughed.

“Oh, isn’t it ironic?” Susan cried. “I wouldn’t take him to Deadwood because I was afraid in a rough camp like that he’d get sick and I’d be lonely. So I take him home to Milton and he gets the old Milton malaria and I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been anywhere. But I’m sorry about last month. I was all ready to come when he fell ill, and I was so upset I left it to Mr. Vail to telegraph you. I thought he could be trusted, since he was coming West on the same train I’d have taken.”

“He could be trusted, all right,” Oliver said. “He just wanted to save me a dollar, so he didn’t send his telegram until Chicago. By that time I’d already left Leadville to meet you. So he saves me a dollar and costs me two hundred, and leaves me standing on this platform gnashing my teeth. I met the train for three days before Frank finally got word to me. On the way back over the range I said a few things to myself about Mr. Vail.”

“Ah, but
now,”
she said, and let herself be wagged back and forth between his big hands. “Now we can have a good trip in, together. It’ll be like going in to New Almaden for the first time.”

He was indulgent and paternal; she could see that every move she made and every word she spoke fascinated him. “Well, not exactly,” he said. ”Getting over there is no picnic, and you won’t have my special satisfactions to compensate for the discomforts.”

“What are your special satisfactions?”

“Upon arrival, I will instantly be one of the two most envied men in Leadville. Horace Tabor’s got all the money and I’ve got the only wife.”

“Really? Aren’t there
any
women?”

“Some women. No wives. There are some widows, as they call themselves, and some boardinghouse keepers, and a couple of hard cases who wear pants and dig all day in prospect holes. Well, maybe one wife. Her German husband herded her over Mosquito Pass with sixty pounds on her back.”

“Mercy,” she said, between real and comic dismay. “It sounds like a social summer.”

“You’ll have to do all your talking to me.”

“Poor you.”

“I can put up with it.” He had not let go of her arms, he waggled her shoulders with a slow, insistent motion. She had forgotten how warm a smile he had. The thinness of his face accentuated the fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. The crowd thinning around them, the wind that blew dust and papers past could not interrupt their looking at each other.

Then the porter picked up her bags and carried them a few feet closer and set them down. Oliver let go of her to lay a silver dollar in the pink palm, and picked up both bags in one hand and steered her with his left arm. “Tell me about Mosquito Pass,” she said. “Is it as horrible as it looked in
Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper?
Dead horses and wrecked wagons and frightful precipices?”

“Horrible,” he agreed. “You’ll be paralyzed with fright. But it won’t be quite as bad for you as for German Hausfraus and
Leslie’s
correspondents.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, I shouldn’t have to put more than forty-fifty pounds on you. For another, you know all about those people who draw terrific Western pictures to scare Eastern dudes.”

 

She had taken it for granted that they would spend the night in Denver. Even a genteel Quaker lady, after a year’s separation, may dream of a second honeymoon, especially if she arrives all braced with resolves about being a model wife. But they had no time even for a proper dinner. The Denver, South Park & Pacific narrow gauge that would take them to Fairplay would leave in less than an hour. Waiting for a lunch to be put up for them, they almost missed it, and came panting aboard to find only one seat unoccupied–a broken one. Oliver spread his field coat over it and braced it from underneath with her carpetbag, and she sat eating a great sandwich of tough beef and too much mustard while the train dug into the mountain beside a torrent that Oliver said was the South Platte. The roadbed was rough, the train’s grip on the rails precarious. She was thrown around, bouncing between Oliver and the window and having trouble getting the sandwich to her mouth.