The Spectator Bird (30 page)

The same question I had asked myself. I gave her the same answer. “I don't mean it was easy. I mean there just was never any real choice. There was no question. I don't deny I was smitten. I wanted to do something for her. I hated leaving her behind. I would have liked her company the rest of my life. In other circumstances, if you hadn't existed, I'd certainly have tried to marry her, and I think she might have had me. But those circumstances didn't exist, and I never really fought you about coming home. I left all that behind, and eventually I forgot her. There have been stretches of two or three years when I haven't thought of her, not once, and if her postcard hadn't sent me looking for that diary, I probably wouldn't have thought of her yet. That's kind of sad, I'm sorry about that. But I'll tell you something else. If I'd played the game the way people seem to expect, and jumped into the Baltic, all for love and the world well lost, and cut myself off from you and what you and I have had together, I couldn't have forgot teu you that way. I'd have regretted you the rest of my life.”

She hugged my arm. I put it around her. We took another turn up the drive.

“For a long time after that, I hated myself,” she said. “I should have had more pride. I shouldn't have tried to hang onto you if you wanted to go. I should have been thinking about you, not myself. But I just couldn't. I decided that even if I was only your obligation I'd rather be your obligation than your ex-wife.”

“There was never any danger of your being either.”

“I'm very lucky.”

“We're both lucky. And she was terribly unlucky. God distributes with an uneven hand.”

It seemed a good idea to kiss her, there in the open moonlight between the oaks, in sight of the ghostly daffodils. She crowded against me and kissed me like a passionate girl. “Oh, Joe,” she said, “don't be unhappy! Don't be depressed! We are lucky. Think if one of us were alone. Think if we were like Tom and Edith.”

“That's for later.”

“Don't say such things.”

Off in the hills one of the dogs that had been barking erratically ever since the St. Bernard had roared now left off barking and began to howl. En
hund hyler i natten. Absit omen.
Under the heavy sweater she wore I felt Ruth shiver.

“You're cold, we'd better go in.”

“I'll walk longer if you need to.”

“I've walked about five miles as it is.”

“You scared me in there.”

“I kind of scared myself.”

“But isn't it better to have it all talked out, and over?”

“Marvelous. Like after a sauna, all wrapped up in towels.”

In a gesture of half-embarrassed playfulness she reached up and rubbed her hand around on my sterile skull. “Joe, your head is freezing! You really must come in. Come along and I'll fix you a nightcap to warm your head. Would you like a hot toddy? Or a brandy?”

One of the nice things about getting something talked out is that it brings on a spell of pampering.

We walked back toward the house, and through the dark up-welling of juniper that borders the walk, and under the three birch trees, their trunks slim and white and their twigs, against the light-filled sky, lacy with the first tiny formings of leaves. The entrance was damp, and sweet with the smell of daphne. Two young people with quite a lot the matter with us, we stood for a moment, breathing it in.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something—it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.

“I wonder how it is on the other side of the house?” Ruth said. “Remember that night when we came home from a party, a night like this, moonlight, with a ground mist, and when we walked out on the terrace there was a lunar rainbow arched clear across the valley?”

“I remember.”

“It was just such a night as this. The moon was about in the same position. Do you suppose there's a lunar rainbow out there now?”

“They're pretty rare. I never saw but that one in my life.”

“Let's go look.”

“There won't be one.”

“How can you be sure? The conditions ought to be just right. Let's go look, at least.”

So, arm in arm, we went and looked. Of course there wasn't one.

In every corner of the world, on every subject under the sun, Penguin represents quality and variety—the very best in publishing today.

For complete information about books available from Penguin-including Penguin Classics, Penguin Compass, and Puffins-and how to order them, write to us at the appropriate address below. Please note that for copyright reasons the selection of books varies from country to country.

 

In the United States:
Please write to
Penguin Group (USA), P.O. Box 12289 Dept. B, Newark, New Jersey 07101-5289
or call 1-800-788-6262.

In the United Kingdom:
Please write to Dept.
EP, Penguin Books Ltd, Bath Road, Harmondsworth, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 ODA.

In Canada:
Please write to
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 90 Eglinton Avenue East,
Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3.

In Australia:
Please write to
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, P.O. Box 257, Ringwood, Victoria 3134.

In New Zealand:
Please write to
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902,
North Shore Mail Centre, Auckland 10.

In India:
Please write to
Penguin Books India Pvt
Ltd, 11
Panchsheel Shopping Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017.

In the Netherlands:
Please write to
Penguin Books Netherlands bv, Postbus 3507, NL- 1001 AH Amsterdam.

In Germany:
Please write to
Penguin Books Deutschland GmbH, Metzlerstrasse 26, 60594 Frankfurt am Main.

In Italy
:
Please write to Penguin Italia s.r.l., Via Benedetto Croce 2, 20094 Corsico,
Milano.

In France
:
Please write to Penguin France, Le Carré Wilson, 62 rue Benjamin Baillaud, 31500 Toulouse.

In South Africa :
Please write to Penguin Books South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Private Bag X14, Parkview, 2122 Johannesburg
.

Read more Wallace Stegner in Penguin

The sequel to the National Book Award-winning
Spectator Bird
finds Joe Allston and his wife in California, scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s.

 

Introduction
by Jackson J.
Benson

Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece—the story of a century in the life of an American family and America itself.

 

A fascinating look at the old American West and the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it.

 

Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this harrowing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

ISBN 0-14-013939-7

 

Thirty-one stories, written over half a century, demonstrate why Stegner is acclaimed as one of America's master storytellers.

ISBN 0-14-014774-8

 

This story of the remarkable friendship between the Langs and the Morgans explores such things as writing for money, solid marriages, and academic promotions.

 

Blending fact with fiction, Stegner creates a full-bodied portrait of Joe Hill, the Wobbly labor organizer who became a legend after he was executed for murder in 1915.

 

Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City not to perform the perfunctory arrangements for his aunt's funeral but to exorcise the ghosts of his past.

 

In the novel that marked his literary debut, Stegner depicts the dramatic, moving story of an Iowa farm wife whose spirit is tested by a series of events as cruel and inevitable as the endless prairie winters.

 

Sabrina Castro follows a downward spiral of moral disintegration as she wallows in regret over her dissatisfaction with her older and successful husband.

 

Essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches, written over a period of twenty-five years, which expound upon the rapid changes in the West's cultural and natural heritage.

 

Stegner's National Book Award-winning novel portrays retired literary agent Joe Allston, who passes through life as a spectator—until he rediscovers the journals of a trip he took to his mother's birthplace years before.

 

Sixteen brilliant essays about the people, the land, and the art of the American West.

 

In a recollection of his boyhood in southern Saskatchewan, Stegner creates a wise and enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of the modern world.