Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [153]
He sat inert.
“If we didn’t go there, we’d just mildew here,” she said. “When will that suit come up, do you think?”
“Not before winter. Maybe spring.”
“And Frank could hold the fort here, if we went.”
“Why not?”
“If Thomas would commission an article, we might make more by going there than by staying here. We could leave Ollie with Mother and Bessie, I know they’re better for him than I am.”
“You mean you could make more,” Oliver said, steadily watching her.
“Oh, Oliver, please!”
“Two questions. Will you leave him? And would you like to go? If the answer is yes to both, I’ll write Ferd. He has to pay me whether I stay here or go there. I imagine he’d just as soon get some work out of me.”
The dove cooed again, distant and sorrowful, and was answered from a great distance by another. She laughed shakily and stretched the salt-stiffened skin of her cheeks. “Oliver, let’s! I keep thinking it’s morning. I keep thinking it’s a fine sunny morning after a spell of bad weather. I feel like popping out of bed and being energetic and cheerful.”
“All right,” Oliver said. “You pop out of bed and be energetic and cheerful. I’ll go down to the office and see how Frank’s doing, and maybe write a letter.”
“What if I wrote Waldo Drake too? Would that help?”
“I don’t know. Would it?”
“It might. I’ve known him a long time.”
He looked at her. He shrugged. “O.K., if you want.”
“Would it seem like . . . taking advantage of a connection?”
“I suppose it might.”
“Even if it does!” she said. “I don’t care.”
V
MICHOACÁN
1
My mother died when I was two, my father was a silent and difficult man: I grew up my grandparents’ child. As those things went in Grass Valley, I also grew up privileged, son of the superintendent of the Zodiac and grandson of the general manager. Every child I played with came from a family that worked for mine.
Grandmother deferred to my father, seemed almost to fear him. Certainly she assumed the blame for the taciturnity that made him formidable to deal with, and certainly she saw in me a second chance to raise up an ideal gentleman. Rough and dangerous play, adventures into old mine shafts, long hikes and rides, those her life in the West had led her to accept and even encourage: Let me be tried in manliness. But honesty, uprightness, courtesy, consideration for others, cleanliness of body and mouth, sensibility to poetry and nature–those she took as her personal obligation. Never severe, she was often intense. She instructed me as if out of bitter personal experience, she brooded along the edges of my childhood like someone living out a long Tennysonian regret. My lapses from uprightness troubled her, I thought, out of all proportion to the offense.
Once in a while, when she had a visitor she liked, some old tottering friend such as Conrad Prager, I might hear her chattering on the porch or in the pergola, long since torn down, that used to be a part of Grandfather’s prize rose garden. On those occasions I sometimes heard her laugh aloud, a clear, giggly laugh like a flirting girl’s; and I was surprised, for around my father, my grandfather, and me she seldom laughed. Instructing me, especially in moral matters, she used to shake me by the shoulders, slowly and earnestly, looking into my eyes. It was as if she were trying to yearn me into virtue, like Davy Crockett grinning a coon out of a tree. I was never never never to behave beneath myself. She had known people who did, and the results were calamitous. The way to develop and deserve self-respect, which was the thing most worth seeking in life, was to guide myself always by the noblest ideals that the race had evolved through the ages.
Somewhere back in her mind lurked the figure of Thomas Hudson, in shining mail. His example dictated my training as it had dictated my father’s. In some ways, Grandmother hadn’t learned a thing since the time when she sent my poor scared twelve-year-old father out of Boise to attend St. Paul’s School and become an Eastern gentleman. When my time came around she sent me too to St. Paul