Angle of Repose (81 page)

To all of my babble she made no response except an occasional murmur. I couldn’t tell whether I was boring her, or whether she was using the rose garden tour as an excuse to study me from behind. I hoped I bored her stiff, I hoped she could make not one thing out of the unmoving back of my head. I wanted her to go away, I wanted to wear her out. Purposely I led her around the paths that were still in the sun, where it was baking hot. But she came along, murmuring, invisible, and I went before her like a man with a gun in his back, scared to turn around, until we came to the old arched arbor at the far end, covered with the small dark glossy foliage of a climber rose. There I stopped.

“That’s one of his hybrids,” I said. “He never sold or gave away that one. Privately he called it the Agnes Ward, for my aunt who died in childhood. He crossed some sort of moss rose with the old Harison yellow climber they used to have in Idaho, and got this climber with red blooms tipped with yellow. In certain lights they’re like flames.”

I sat aimed through the arbor like a key about to enter a keyhole. From behind me she said, “I wish it was in bloom,” and then a moment later, “What a lovely idea, to make a rose in memory of someone!”

“It was about the only way he had,” I said. “As far as I know, he and Grandmother never mentioned her name. You know the old Cockney ballad–‘Now ’er picture’s turned fyce to the wall’. That sort of thing.”

“Really? My goodness, what did she do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “She was a sort of fairy child, and she died. Isn’t that enough?”

“No. It isn’t enough to explain why they’d just–wipe her out.”

“They didn’t wipe her out. They just never spoke of her. But they didn’t wipe her out. After all, Grandfather made a rose. He made a dozen roses, in fact, trying for just the right one. You know how long it takes to cross and fix a hybrid rose? Two or three years. He could never get just what he wanted. He liked these blooms, but he couldn’t get them in a repeater. If he got one that would go on blooming, something was wrong with the color, or it didn’t have any odor. If he hung onto the color he wanted, it bloomed in May and was done for the season. Eventually he had to give up and accept a brief, early blooming.”

She stood behind me, silent. I had the unpleasant sensation that her hand was resting on the back of my chair, as if she were my keeper or nurse ready to push me further around on my dull afternoon airing. I gave the chair some power and moved two feet, but felt no drag from a hand. Under the arbor the air was dense and warm, and came thickly into my lungs. I heard the woman say, “How do you know all this about the rose, if he never talked about her?”

“Oh, he talked to
me.”

“But not to your grandmother?”

“No.”

“Why?”

It was a moment I had been half-consciously maneuvering for. “Because my grandfather was a man who couldn’t forget,” I said. “Forget or forgive.”

Her feet stirred in the gravel. In a voice that I listened to intently–it sounded small and swallowed–she said, “He sounds like a hard man.”

“On the contrary, he was soft. People imposed on him. Grandmother always said he was too trusting. Actually he never expected much of people, and so he wasn’t upset if they turned out to be shysters or chiselers or crooks. But a few people he trusted absolutely. It was when they betrayed him that he turned to rock. Come on, I’ll show you the vegetable garden.”

I started the chair, talking straight out ahead of myself, through the arbor and around the corner of the house. Hurrying, almost running, her feet caught up with me and came close along behind.

Maybe I addled my brains, running around out there in the late sun. I felt confused, and also I felt a wicked compulsion to show that woman every leaf of every pole bean, every cluster of green and ripe on the tomato plants, every ear on every comstalk. Show me the place, she said. All right, she would see it. I led her around in every corner, I lost track of time, and when, worn out myself, I brought her back up the ramp and onto the veranda, it seemed so late and dusky that I called to Ada, expecting her to be in the kitchen. No one answered. I called again. In the hollow house my voice hummed as if I had shouted into a cello. As I listened for some reply I became aware that the porch screen had not slammed shut behind me. Ellen must still be in the doorway, half in, half out, the screen door held by her hand or caught on her thrust-back heel. Reluctantly, more to break the listening stillness of the house than to make her welcome, I moved ahead. In a moment I heard the screen click shut. She was in there with me, absolutely alone.

“May I see the house?” she said. “I’d like to see where you live and do your work.”

Still looking away from her into the shadowy house-who dares look behind him, what child walking under dark trees has the courage to do anything but look straight ahead and put one foot after another and try to keep from breaking into a panicky run?–I said, “I live and work upstairs. We don’t use any of the downstairs at all except the kitchen and once in a while the library.”

“Show me the upstairs, then.”

She was implacable. She stood behind me and insisted on wedging herself back into my life. But the thought of her upstairs in my intimate rooms filled me with dread. I listened. I called once more for Ada, and the house gulped that one little living word as a big fish gulps a minnow; I could hear it, or feel it, quivering after it was down. The thought that they had all gone and left me, given me up to this woman, blackened my sight with terror. I needed to get a look at her, I wanted to know what her face showed as she stood behind me, hooked as close to me as my shadow, but I did not dare turn my chair around. And so I said, “Well, you might as well see it down here. It used to be quite a place,” and rolled over the ramped sill and into the hall.

As we rolled or floated through the rooms and I turned through doorways I got a glimpse or two of her coming along, serious, pale, wearing a slight knitted frown. She was carrying her shoes in her hand, and in her stockinged feet she followed me without a sound. It infuriated me all afresh to see her take that liberty, as if she belonged. Holding the pantry door open for her, I watched her pass briefly in front of me, blank as some Blessed Damozel, moving as if some wind blew her; and nothing would serve but that I should put myself again in front of her before she would move on.

I fled her along the bare redwood walls dark with age, past the bare fieldstone fireplaces, under the high beamed ceilings, through doorways where the plank floors gathered light in dim long pools. Any ordinary passage through those rooms reverberated, but I on my rubber wheels and she in her stockinged feet passed through as silently as spiders spin their webs, or dust settles. In the library the pale square on the wall where Grandmother’s portrait used to hang stared at us. The books were dead in their shelves.

In that stagnant air the oppression of her soundless inescapable unspeaking presence grew on me, and by the time we were back in the front hall I was sweating; my hands stuck to the arms of the chair as I turned it, at bay, at the bottom of the lift.

“Well,” I said, “that’s it.” I was facing her full on, doing my best to be Gorgon but feeling cornered rat. “This is where I live. I live very comfortably, as you can see. I’ve got good help. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.”

But she did not go away like a dismissed student. She stood in front of me, her eyes questioning and her mouth faintly smiling, and I heard my ridiculous speech die out in the hall. There was not a sound anywhere in the house-no pans or dishes or running water in the kitchen, no typing or footsteps upstairs. Sometime while we were inspecting the grounds, Ed must have returned and shut off the sprinkler. I wiped a hand across my greasy face. “Ada?” I called into the stillness. “Shelly?”

Whimpers, made all the worse by the fact that I was holding my Gorgon gaze on her and she was unaffected. It splintered against hers, which was, so far as I could see, only soft and sad and thoughtful. I couldn’t talk past or around her, I had to talk at her.

“Good-bye,” I said. “I’d be lying if I said I’d enjoyed your visit, but I don’t wish you any harm. Go with God.”

I actually used that phrase.
Vaya con Dios, mi alma, vaya con Dios mi amor.
Go with God? Go with my curse, go with my spittle on your face and dress, I surely meant to say. In my confusion I fumbled the chair around and backed it onto the lift and finally locked it on and pressed the switch.

To my horror she came along beside me, floating up the stairs in her stockinged feet as if she had been filled with helium: she had stepped onto the lift beside the locked wheel of the chair. For the first time I began to fear that I would never get rid of her at all; her beak would never be out of my heart or her form off my door. Helpless, backward, unable to draw ahead or fall behind, helpless even to turn my head and look at my succubus, I was dragged upward.

And yet when we reached the top, and I found myself intact, untouched, and was able to unlock myself and roll free into the broad hall, my sweating fear was eased. I could look at her, and she looked harmless, even humble. I felt exhilarated; I could hardly wait to show off my arrangements, I
wanted
her to see the private center of my independent life. Rolling down toward the study’s open door, I ran my hand along the satiny redwood wainscot. I pointed out the beauty of the rubbed plank floors, such floors as you couldn’t find short of Japan. One of the earliest Maybeck houses, this–a landmark. A pity if they should ever tear it down. It ought to be turned over, and I would see that it was, to the National Trust.

I stopped and made her go into the study ahead of me. She went willingly, and I had to wonder if I had imagined all that implacable pursuit that had seemed to follow me around the garden and through the downstairs. Inside, she looked over my desk, the pictures and framed letters on the walls, the files, the folders of still-unordered letters, the dormer with its squared glimpse of pine tops and evening sky. She stood before Susan Ward’s portrait a good while.

“Is this your grandmother?”

“Susan Burling Ward. You ought to remember her, from pictures.”

“I guess I never paid much attention. But she looks the way I sort of imagined her.”

“Good.”

“Sensitive and high-minded.”

“She was all of that.”

“But not happy.”

“Well, that was painted when she was close to sixty.”

She turned, and there they were side by side, my ex-grandmother and my ex-wife, two women upon whom I have expended a lot of thought and feeling, the one pensive, with downcast eyes, in a wash of side lighting, the other pale, dark-haired, sober, with a pucker in her brows and the eyes of a hurt and wondering child. Female animals, wives, mothers, civilized women. Ellen said, “Can’t a woman of sixty be happy?”

“Why ask me?” I said. “As Grandmother’s biographer, I’d have to guess she was never really happy after, say, her thirty-seventh year, the last year when she lived an idyll in Boise Canyon.”

Her eyes troubled me. Why should the Gorgon have to drop his lids?

“But she lived a long time after that,” Ellen said.

“She lived to be ninety-one. My grandfather lived to be eighty-nine. She had practically no time to be senile and alone.”

“But she wasn’t happy.”

“She wasn’t unhappy, either. Do you have to be one or the other?”

I focused into the middle of her dark blue, wondering glance. I focused, actually, between her eyes, and I was thinking as I appeared to look at her, Why does an unblinking, wide-eyed, questioning look always strike me as
unintelligent?
Is it? Or is it possible it is only open,
willing?

My brief exhilaration had passed. Out the window, the sky was losing its light, there was no sun on the pines. Where on earth was Ada? It was away past the time she should have come to start my dinner. The dread came back and squatted like a toad on my heart. Suddenly, before the woman could question or stop me, I had wheeled to the side of the bed and was dialing the telephone. On the fourth ring it was answered: Shelly, sounding as usual like a longshoreman.

“Hello,” I said. “Is your mother there?”

“I was just going to call you,” she said. “We’ve had a kind of time. She’s sick–some sort of seizure. Dad’s taking her in to the hospital right now. I probably ought to go along. Do you think you could wait supper till I get back? Maybe an hour?”

Heavy and coarse as a man’s, her voice boomed and crackled in my ear. She sounded excited and hurried and breathless, as if she had had to run to the phone.

“Of course,” I said. “My Lord, yes. You do whatever she needs, don’t worry about me. I can make a sandwich. Give her my love.”

“O.K.,” said her breathless baritone. “I guess that’s . . . I’ll be over later, then. Don’t try to fix your own, I’ll be there. O.K.?”

“O.K.” I hung up.

“What is it?” Ellen said, though I was sure she had heard it all–Shelly’s voice came out of the earpiece as if out of a megaphone. What luck! Ellen’s face said. Just what we were hoping for! It was bound to happen sooner or later, she was really too decrepit.

Her shoes were still in her hand, her head was on one side. “You need a drink,” she said. “You look sunk.” Bending, she slipped on her pumps, one, then the other. “Where’s there a bottle? You don’t want to go on with that nonsense about being on the wagon. This is an emergency. I’ll fix you a drink and then I’ll go see what I can find for you to eat.”

“I can wait. Shelly’ll be over in an hour.”

“No, no. Why should you?”

She came in like a reserve quarterback hot to prove the injustice of his being kept out of the game. Helpless and troubled, I stared at her, unable to find the words that would stop her. I let her fix the drink, popping two aspirins into my mouth while her back was turned. I put out a cold and sweating hand and took the cold, sweating glass.