Angle of Repose (51 page)

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SUE

Propped by bolster and pillows, shoeless, stockingless, corsetless, clothed only in her shift, she was asleep in the big carved bed. She had been looking through her journal, rewriting incidents and observations into coherent paragraphs for her article, but the siesta hour, the shuttered dusk, the trance of quiet that held room and house and city, had been seductive. The notebook was flat on her stomach, the pencil had fallen from her slack hand.

She was in a quandary, for the guests she had been expecting, the poet and editor Thomas Hudson and his brilliant wife, had arrived simultaneously with an appalling dozen of others. Her entrance hall and
sala
were like a hotel lobby at convention time. The American ambassador was there with his wife and several aides. She saw Ferd Ward with a bowler hat in his hand, Clarence King in white buckskin, her sister Bessie trying to calm her daughter Sarah Birnie, who cried and cried. She saw a famous general with gray, sad, streaked eyes, whom she recognized but could not place. Pricey and Frank looked hopefully smiling in the door. They all waited to be taken to their rooms, but there were not rooms for all of them, there was only one pitiful room, the one she had prepared for the Hudsons. The house was too small, as Emelita had warned her–fatally small. She saw signs of exasperation and impatience in every face. Augusta, as always when angry, had grown regal and cool.

Out of her desperate dilemma her eyes popped open. A tapping on her door.

A servant voice, a male servant voice, whined,
“Con permi-i-i-so.”
The door handle rattled, the door began to open.

“No, no!” she cried, or screamed, and snatched at the trailing spread to cover herself. The door swung on open and Oliver put his head in.

“Uh huh. Caught you napping.”

“Oh, Oliver, you
idiot!
You scared me to death.” She bounded off the bed, he hugged her hard, kicking the door shut behind him. His clothes smelled of horse, leather, sweat, dust. “Did you just get in?”

“Foolish question number one. Did you think I might have got in yesterday and stopped at the hotel?”

“I didn’t hear any noise.”

“We left the caravan at Don Pedro’s and walked over.”

“I was dreaming,” Susan said. “A dreadful dream. We had a dozen guests and only one room. I suppose it may have been something that brass bed suggested. Who slept in it?”

“Nobody. We were all too polite.”

“Isn’t that ridiculous. So was my dream, because, you know, I’ve
found
us a house, and it doesn’t have just one spare bedroom, it has five, nice big ones. There’s an enclosed court, and stabling for six horses . . .” She was stopped by the look on his face. “What’s the matter? Isn’t the mine any good?”

The horseplay of his entrance had meant nothing. She saw now that he was tired, disappointed, and grouchy. He moved his shoulders as if shrugging off a persistent insect.

“It may be some good, it may not. More likely not. At least I know Kreps wasn’t right. What he thought was the lost vein
isn’t.
You could work it, but it wouldn’t make you rich.”

For the moment, all her disappointment was frozen into quiet Almost carelessly she said, “So you’ll have to turn in a bad report.”

“I don’t see how it can be very enthusiastic.”

What a moment before she had taken quietly now hit her like a slap. It was the corroboration, not the news, that weakened her legs and stiffened the muscles of her mouth. Her eyes were stretched, glaring at him, and as she stared she was blinded with sudden water, she could not control her breath, which gulped and caught in her throat. “Oh . . .
damn!”
she cried, and hid her face in his chest.

He laughed. She could feel the laughter in his chest and it infuriated her. “What?” he said with callous lightness. “Cussing? You?”

She reared back against his arm and knuckled at her wet eyes. “I don’t care, that’s just the way I feel! Thee can think me a fishwife if thee wants.”

“Sue, I’m sorry. I had no idea you were that set on it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever . . . wanted anything . . . more!”

He was frowning down into her face as if she were written in Sanskrit. “I’m astonished. Why?”

“Why! Because! A million reasons. Because I work so well here. Because it’s beautiful. Because we could all be together in a pleasant house. Because it would have given thee a chance to show what thee can do.”

“I suppose it might have been good, in a way,” he said. “But look, it isn’t quite the paradise you make out. Once you get under the surface a little . . .”

She barked at him, wanting no sour grapes comfort, and pulled away to sit down violently on the bed. “Does Simpson agree with you?”

“More or less. He’s a little more bullish. He might even recommend that his people take a chance, if they can get the option cheap enough. He knows they haven’t found the old rich vein, but he’s half inclined to think they might break even with this one, and hit the old one later.”

“What you’ve been doing in the Adelaide.”

“More or less.”

“Why would you do it there and recommend not doing it here?”

“The Syndicate didn’t send me down here to find another Adelaide.”

“But if Mr. Simpson is willing! Isn’t it just what his people were hoping for? It looks better to them than to you? So they can buy cheap?”

“I don’t know he’s willing, I’m only guessing.” He frowned, and a sort of slow meanness came into his face. “What are you suggesting? That I sweeten the report? Make it more encouraging? Tell ’em what they want to hear?”

They stared at each other almost in anger, until she rose and touched his arm. “I know thee can’t. But if Mr. Simpson reports favorably his people will want to buy, won’t they?”

“Depending on what the Syndicate wants for its option.”

“And if they bought, wouldn’t they ask thee to run it?”

Sulky, resistant to what she was edging toward, he grunted. “After I’ve said I don’t really believe in the mine?”

“But why do they have to see your report at all? You won’t be reporting to them. Why do Mr. Simpson’s people even have to know what you said?”

“Because I’ve talked it over with Simpson.”

“You just . . . blurted it out?”

He watched her with his head slightly turned. Almost absently he unbuckled the belt and tossed it, heavy with revolver and bowie, onto the bed. His eyes were on hers as if he were concentratedly bending something. “I just blurted it out,” he said. “I’m just a big green boy too honest for his own good. I’m not smart enough to play these poker games with grown men. I don’t know when to keep my mouth shut profitably.”

“Oliver, I didn’t mean . . . !”

He was stooping, unbuckling the spurs. One after the other they lit on the bed beside the revolver belt. He pulled over his head the buckskin shirt, releasing a stronger odor of sweat and dust, but when his face and rumpled hair emerged he would not look at her. She felt like shaking that closed, mulish expression off his face.

Tightly she said, “Won’t it look odd if the Syndicate’s engineer turns in a negative report and the other people’s engineer is more favorable?”

Blue and cold, his eyes touched hers and went indifferently away. She felt that somehow he blamed
her
for this. And he would refuse to talk about it, he would retreat into wooden silence. “Yeah,” he said. “I expect Ferd may think it’s kind of odd.”

“So it’s certain that
he
at least isn’t going to ask you to do any more in Mexico.”

“I guess you’ve got it about right.”

He sat on the bed, pulled the bootjack from under it, fitted a heel into the jack, and pulled. The boot came off. He wiggled his stockinged toes. Everything about him, from his sulky face to his animal odor, was offensive to her. Under his eyebrows he looked up, groping absently with the other foot for the jack. “I’ll tell you something else. If the Adelaide ever settles its troubles with the Argentina and the Highland Chief and gets to be a working mine again, I’m not likely to be running that, either.”

For a moment she took that in. “You mean we not only can’t stay here, we can’t go back to Leadville either.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Then where
do
we go?”

“Honey, I don’t know.”

He pulled loose the handkerchief knotted around his throat. He concentrated on the bootjack until the second boot slid off. In her bare feet Susan went quietly around the room. She touched with her fingertips the cool carved wood of the footboard, the embossed leather of the chest, the tipped edges of the shutters, the mantel’s cold stone. “I wonder,” she said.

She turned and saw him sitting on the bed, still feeling criticized. And he would not bend, that was what made her so resentful. He would not defend himself or justify himself. When she questioned him, wanting to be on his side, wanting to help work out a future for them both, he acted as if she were accusing him of deliberately, out of some stupid notion of honesty, throwing away their chance. His honesty was not stupid, that was not what she meant at all. Only . . .

“Is it fate?” she said, more bitterly than she intended. “Is it just bad luck? What is it? Why are you always having to take a stand that hurts us or loses you your job? Doesn’t honesty ever get rewarded?”

Her tone, she recognized, was the intimate tone that would normally have brought the Quaker “thee” to her tongue. Yet she called him “you.” Perhaps he noticed, perhaps he didn’t.

He shrugged, sitting there in his undershirt and stockinged feet (and I in my shift, she thought. Like a pair of quarreling shopkeepers).

“I have to do what I have to do,” he said.

She stood at the mantel, and after a moment she said, “Yes. And all of us have to take the consequences.”

Now she touched him. His head came up, his stare was full of disbelief and resentment. He heard, registered, acknowledged, what had come out of her mouth, but he would not answer. She would have liked to be comforted for hurting him, but he would not bend, and they spent the evening in bruised silence, one-word questions, monosyllabic answers.

It did not occur to her, apparently, though it occurs to me, that he was more frustrated and sore than she was, and mainly for her sake.
She
thought he was unfeeling.

The Casa Walkenhorst had overnight become a different place. The air was full of tension, Don Gustavo’s looks were full of barely controlled dislike, as if, in coming to an unfavorable conclusion about the mine, Oliver had abused his hospitality. From the
corredor,
Susan witnessed a little episode in the courtyard in which Don Gustavo lashed the gate
mozo
across the back with his quirt. Emelita, every time Susan tried to talk with her, escaped with timid, hurried smiles that begged understanding. Time they were gone, taking with them their private breakage.

With Don Pedro there was no such chill; he was a grandee to the end. Just before they were to leave, he sent over for the use of Señora Ward one of his personal horses, a
rosillo,
a strawberry roan with a light mane and tail, which he hoped she would find easier-gaited than any of the broncos they might hire.

Not to be outdone in courtesy, Susan sent back the sketch she had made of the Señora Gutierrez y Salarzano at the head of her splendid stairway. It was one of her best, one she had counted on transferring to a block for the
Century,
but she did not hesitate. If Don Gustavo had made any friendly gesture, she would have felt obligated by her dislike to respond threefold. She atoned for accepting his hospitality by giving Emelita drawings of herself, of Enriqueta, of the poodle Enrique, and of the parrot Pajarito.

The evening before they were to leave they went early to their room, where Oliver worked at his field notes and his geological map that corrected the map of Kreps; Susan got out their bags for packing, and dumped them onto the bed. At the bottom of one carpetbag were her Colorado riding clothes, never used since she had packed them in Leadville. As she shook them out, there rose out of their wrinkles the smells of horse and woodsmoke, the styptic odors of spruce and bitter cottonwood, the witch hazel smell of willows. She stood holding the divided skirt to her nose, caught by recollection as strong as pain.

Her best rides were in that complex smell–mountain water, the sky whose light hurt the eyes. Pricey was in it–not the beaten disfigured Pricey but the diminutive rocker with his nose in a book, the smiler from the saddle he sat so uncomfortably. Ah, Pricey, how tenderly the haughty day! The circle around her Franklin stove was in it–Helen Jackson, King and Janin and Prager and Emmons, the laughter and the talk and the sense of empires being hewn out of raw creation, all the hope and excitement of that new country. Frank Sargent was in it, his tall limberness rising to anticipate some wish of hers, his eyes across the room as brown and glowing as the eyes of an adoring dog.

She saw him on the morning of their departure, when the two of them stood among the boxes and bags in the cabin whose door stood open on the fume of Leadville and the front-lighted Sawatch. Oliver had taken Ollie into town on a last minute errand. In the litter of departure Susan and Frank looked at one another, and Susan made a wincing, regretful face. She was close to tears.

“You won’t be back,” Frank said somberly. “I feel it in my bones.”

“I think so. I hope so. Who could know for sure?”

“I suppose you’re glad to be getting away.”

“In a way. Not altogether.” She laid her hand on his wrist. “We’ll miss you, Frank. You’ve been a dear, true friend.”

As if a butterfly had alighted on his wrist and might be scared away by a movement, Frank stood still. She knew precisely what froze him there. His eyes on her face, his strained smile, made her want to hug him and rock his head against her breast.