Angle of Repose (79 page)

“The roses are simply gorgeous,” Aunt Betsy said. “So many kinds, and all out at once.”

“Mmm,” Grandfather said around his pipe.

“You’ve been working on them. They weren’t like this when I lived here.”

“No. I suppose not.”

“You’ve got a real knack.”

He straightened, smiled, laid his pipe aside, took out his pocket knife, and honed it on a little stone he kept lying on the bench. Aunt Betsy sprawled in a broken-backed lawn chair made of wooden slats, and sniffed her rosebud, a talisman, one of the sweetest smelling kind. “Daddy,” she said.

Grandfather answered only with his eyebrows, holding them up in a welcoming sort of way, testing the knife’s edge against his thumb.

“You remember the rose garden on the Mesa.”

Now his old eyes were on her, the whites faded and a little coffee-colored, the blue bright and watery. He said nothing, he only waited.

“You pulled it up,” Betsy said. “One after the other. I saw you.”

Pleasantly inquiring, his eyes rested on her. She seemed upset by his silence. Her eyes came up and fell again, her face reddened. “Why?” she said. “It was years ago, but I’ve never forgotten it. I couldn’t imagine why you’d do it. I loved those roses, they were so opulent in that desert-y place. I never got over wondering why you did it.”

Grandfather squinted across the bench at her. His heavy face was without any particular expression, the wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes. In the V of his open shirt I could see the softened flaps of his neck.

Absently he clicked his knife shut and put it in his pocket. His heavy body squeezed past the end of the bench and came around into the path past where she sat with her legs stretched out and her face flushed and her eyes searching his face for some sort of answer. He had his pipe in one hand. Now he put it in his mouth, reached a hand to touch her shoulder briefly, and went heavily on past her, out through the orchard toward the back lot, shambling along aimlessly as if he had forgotten where he was going or what he was going for.

“Why did he pull up all the roses?” I said to my Aunt Betsy. But she only shook her head at me, hurriedly, as if embarrassed or annoyed, and bent her nose to her talisman bud and went on into the house. I thought she was a little crazy. Why should Grandfather, who would putter all afternoon on one rose bush, pull up a whole garden?

But now I think he did. “A reminder,” Grandmother said in that miserable letter while she waited for spring in the first year of her widowhood on the Mesa.

I see it as very early morning. The windows, screened with cheesecloth, are wide open. The cheesecloth stirs in no wind. There is a sense of suspended time, suspended heat, as if the whole night has been used up radiating away the heat of yesterday, and now it is all to start over again, the heat of today is ready to burst over the horizon and dry up this interval of cool twilight.

Susan Ward lies in the double brass bed, flat on her back, wide awake, staring straight upward with eyes that are dark and cried-out. In a week she seems to have aged years; she is a worn, tense woman. The pillow beside hers has not been slept on.

Her head lifts slightly, she listens. In a moment she slips out of her bed in her nightgown and goes quickly to the window. Things outside, seen through the cheesecloth, look like an illustration, cool black and white and gray, patterned with the cheesecloth web like a fine-screen half tone.

Central in the picture is a horse, Oliver’s blood bay gelding, standing with trailing reins in the middle of the lawn–that tender lawn on which even the children have been told to walk barefoot or not at all. Oliver himself is standing farther on, at the edge of the rose garden. He looms above the blooming bushes, he looks taller than the Lombardies along the western edge of the yard. The sky behind him is clear pale green; the sage that begins just outside the line of Lombardies sweeps away clear to the mountains, up the slopes and over them, spilling over the edge of the world.

Oliver stands with bent head, as if thinking. Then he leans, and with his bare hand takes hold of the white rose called the Blanc Double de Coubert. He pulls, and with a slow tough resistance the bush comes up by the roots. He drops it, takes two steps, and leans to take hold of the Mareschal Niel.

“Mother!”

Susan whirls around, and there is Betsy in the doorway. She has seen, she is already crying. It is all they have done for a week, cry.

“What’s he
doing?”

“Shh.” Susan puts out her arm and takes the thin little nightgowned figure against her. Together they stand behind the cheesecloth screen and watch him go heavily, impassively, expressionlessly, up the row. One by one he tears the bushes from the ground and leaves them lying–Jacqueminot, American Beauty, Paul Fontaine–rose-pink, black-crimson, rich red. One by one, not yanking in a fury but tugging thoughtfully, almost absent-mindedly, he destroys one row and comes back along the other, down the long narrow bed. At the end, when it is all done, he stands inspecting his bloody hand, and then steps across the lawn and picks up the reins of the standing horse.

“Mother . . .”

“Shhhl” says Susan harshly, and sets her teeth in her lip.

The left hand gathers the reins over the neck, the bloody right hand turns the stirrup, the worn boot slips in, the weight swings up. The horse leaves deep hoofprints in the tender lawn. Not hurrying, he rides across through the sage and into the lane. He diminishes, not hurrying. His right hand is cradled against his stomach. He has not once looked at the house.

 

That was when she bundled her family together, or what was left of it, and fled eastward. That was about July 21, 1890. She thought then that her marriage, her hope, and her exile had all ended together, but in less than a month she was back in the ruins, trying to hold things together while she waited for something she didn’t dare name.

She never blamed her husband for abandoning her in her grief and guilt, she never questioned the harshness of his judgment, she did not turn away from those dead roses that he left her for a sign. She thought he had suffered as much as she, and she knew that for his suffering she was to blame.

Nevertheless I, who looked up to him all his life as the fairest of men, have difficulty justifying that bleak and wordless break; and that ripping-up of the rose garden, that was vindictive and pitiless. I wish he had not done that. I think he never got over being ashamed, and never found the words to say so.

I didn’t hear any car, I didn’t hear footsteps on the gravel or up the ramp, I caught sight of no movement through the wistaria. Just, suddenly she opened the screen and was standing there, white-skinned in a green summer dress, behind our half circle of Grandmother’s old wicker chairs drawn up in front of the television.

I was on the extreme right, she materialized on the left. It was all under my eye. In our abrupt immobility, the kinetic nervousness of our small arrested movements, we were like something out of an art movie, the camera focusing on mouths, hands, heads stopped in the motion of turning–successive images made portentous by the obsessiveness with which they were seen and the persistence with which they were returned to. Squashed scorpions on a white wall, two people talking, intensely unaware of being watched, in a parked car–Robbe-Grillet, that sort of thing.
Last Year at Marienbad,
revolving views around statues, moving views down halls, frozen and hypnotic and with held breath, and all the time the television screen jittering with meaningless motion as the Giant pitcher took his warmup throws for a new inning, and the catcher pegged down to second and the infielders peppered it around.

Ada, next to me, had twisted around and was sending out a squinted glare through the smoke of the cigarette that dangled between her lips. She knew who the woman was. So did Ed, in the next chair with a beer can between his feet. His eyes canted upward and sideward, he leaned and dropped his butt with a hiss into the can–a steady man getting his hands free in anticipation of trouble. Shelly had been interrupted in the act of clawing her hair back–a gesture which does not cease to trouble me, it is so like a deliberate provocation. Her liberation from the bra, which earlier in the summer was an occasional thing, seems now to be complete, an insistence, part of a life style that says take it or leave it. I have seen Ada eying her, disapproving, fascinated, and puzzled. I thought the visitor might note and misinterpret her costume; her arrogant nipples poked at the thin jersey, and her arm was raised as if to accentuate them. On her face the realization of who the visitor was came like a wind that turns up the underside of leaves in a tree.

Al Sutton, behind whom the woman had appeared, had leaped nimbly to his feet to offer his chair, and remained with his hand on the wicker back, while ten complicated responses went visibly through his computer, neutralizing each other. For a moment the only sound was the breath in his flat nostrils and the crowd noise of the ballgame. The wart flickered tentatively between his lips.

As for Lyman Ward, he twitched his chair around to face her, thinking furiously, above the pounding of his heart,
She’s been sneaking around, spying.

“Hello, Ellen,” I said.

“Hello, Lyman.”

Her skin was pale and pure. There was no gray in her hair–though that means nothing. Her eyes were still her best feature–dark blue, large, inquiring, like the eyes of a rather solemn child. They flashed around us once, she smiled and slipped into the chair that Al pushed toward her, sitting with her knees together and her hands holding her white summer handbag in her lap. Her skirt was short enough to be fashionable but not so short it looked frivolous. The exposed thigh looked firm. I saw it–I saw all of her–with the eyes of these curious, cautious others, and I observed that Mr. Ward’s ex-wife, while not a beauty exactly, was an attractive older woman, well-preserved, well-dressed, citified in our slovenly country circle. How old? I am fifty-eight. That makes her fifty-three.

“You remember Ed and Ada Hawkes.”

“Yes, of course. I think we met once, years ago. How do you do?”

Ada did not stand up or take the cigarette out of her mouth, but when Ellen stood and leaned and reached out her hand, Ada gave her three reluctant crooked fingers like Grendel’s claw. She has never discussed my former wife with me, but I know what she thinks. She thinks I was callously abandoned when I was sick and helpless. With certain qualifications, that is what I think myself. I watched her in her city clothes, her face carefully friendly, that middle-aged well-kept composed American woman, break up and dominate our comfortable Saturday afternoon, and I was filled with hatred and terror. And curiosity. I looked for the signs in her of what Rodman had suggested–She doesn’t
look
good, she’s shaky, she’s had a bad
time–
and couldn’t see them, any more than I had seen, before her treachery, the signs of her growing intention.

Ed was politer than Ada. He stood up to shake hands, his face as creased and imperturbable as an old boot. One of the blessed things about Ed is his quietness. He is unflappable. He does not doubt, question, judge, or blame. He knows what he can do and lets others do what they can do. He deals with what is. It must have been that quality in his father that led Oliver Ward to make a driver and companion of him.

“This is Shelly,” I said. “She’s helping me with the book.”

“Ah, yes!” Nothing that I could have specified changed in her face, fixed for friendliness, and yet as she leaned and shook Shelly’s hand I saw her take in the revealing jersey pullover, the hair, the sprawl, the sloppy loafers, the shorts, the exposure of brown legs. She snapped that girl up as a bird snatches an insect on a lawn, and settled back with the expression of careful goodwill on her face and her mind made up that Shelly was wrong, impossible, would not do. “I’ve heard how you all look after him,” she said. “My son says it’s like a summer camp with one camper and three counselors.”

It was a remark that we all resented; we let it fall without an answer. I gloried in the solidarity with which my gang met her–they were as stony as cliffs. But then I saw Al still standing, bereft of chair and ease, and I said, “This is Al Sutton, an old friend from away back in junior high school.”

He wagged like a dog, he showed her his wart, he let her look up his nostrils clear to the back of his head. She was considerably shaken by what she saw, and turned away as soon as she politely could, and found herself facing me. When she first came in, she had taken me in stride. Now I saw her eyes widen. An expression of pain and revulsion grew in her face, and I became aware that my stump was flipping and flopping as if someone had just landed a salmon in my lap.

Protective and angry, I put both hands on it. “It does that sometimes,” I said. I felt like saying, It recognizes you.

Everyone was watching and trying not to. Ellen sent me a beseeching urgent message with her eyebrows. I grew more and more confused, the stump twitched and jerked. Oh, do something! my ex-wife’s face was saying. It’s horrible!

Eventually I grabbed the newspaper from the side pocket of my chair and fumbled and flattened it out in my lap. The paper leaped and rustled. I put both hands on it, and through it took hold of that anguished stub of meat and bone and choked it down. When I dared, I took one hand away and shook two aspirins from the bottle into my palm, and threw them into my mouth and swallowed them without water. Immediately I was sorry I had done it. They had all watched every move, my gang protectively, she with a narrow-eyed, flinching interest. I sat there before her a hopeless case, twitched by spastic reflexes, pouring down pills. They made a hard, pebbly obstruction in my throat that I could not swallow.

And of course my two handmaidens, seeing me choked and watery-eyed from those dry pills, put on an act to prove that indeed they did take care of me. Ada grabbed off the cover of the Styrofoam cooler and reached out a beer and was about to pull the aluminum tab, but I waved my hands and stopped her, unable yet to speak.