Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [245]
Almost to herself she said, “I know.”
“I came down hoping they’d all be gone to town but you.”
“Yes,” she said, though she felt she should not.
“I never see you any more.”
“But Frank, you see me all the time!”
“In a crowd. With the family. Always managing a houseful.”
“There’s been so much to do.”
“Well that will be changed, at least.”
His laugh was so short and unpleasant that it wrung her heart. The wretched ditch had changed him as it had changed them all.
Beyond his lean profile the lights were coming less thickly, as if both enthusiasm and ammunition had run out. The booming and crackling were dying down, but the reddish mist still hung above the town. Speaking away from her, indifferently watching the dying-down of the fire fountains, he said, “I miss the rides, do you? I miss sitting while you draw me. I miss talking to you. I could stand it if I could just be alone with you once in a while, the way it used to be.”
“But there were three whole years when you didn’t see me at all, and then more than a year when I was in Victoria.”
“Yes. And I’m a dead pigeon the minute I see you again, no matter how long it’s been. Remember that day in the canyon, just when you were getting ready to leave? I had myself all persuaded. You were a friend, no more. Then I looked up from that corral and saw you waving from the doorway and I blew down like an old shed. The whole place was abandoned, there was nothing but failure in sight, and there you were in your white dress looking as cool and immaculate as if you were just about to call on somebody. Going down with all flags flying, the way you would. I don’t know, you looked so brave and untouched up there on the hill, I . . .”
“Brave?” she said in a weak voice. “Untouched? Oh no!”
“Oh yes. You’re one thing I am an expert on.”
“There are no flags flying now.”
“Plenty in Boise. Hip hip hurrah. Statehood.”
She had to laugh. “Isn’t it ridiculous? Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it pitiful, even. Years ago, when we left you in Leadville and went to Mexico, I fell in love with Mexican civilization, and the grace of their housekeeping, and the romantic medieval way they lived . . .”
“I know. I read your articles. Down in Tombstone.”
“Did you? Oh, that makes me feel good. I was talking to you without knowing it. Then you remember those great houses we stopped at coming home, Queréndaro, Tepetongo, Tepetitlán, and the others. That’s what Oliver’s dreamed of making here. He wanted to build me such a place. Even the tile floors–those are Mexican. The stone and adobe house, and the way it nearly encloses a courtyard. It was going to enclose it completely some day–well, you remember from the canyon, when we used to plan it so carefully–so from the outside rooms we could look outward on this reclaimed desert, and from the inner rooms we’d see only the protected center–flowers, and stillness, and the dripping of water, and the sound of Wan singing through his nose.”
“Maybe yet,” Frank said.
“No. Never.”
“You don’t think so?” he said, and then, “Maybe not,” and then, after a second, “I suppose not,” and then after quite a long pause, “So I’ll be on my way again.”
She was silent for longer than he had been; she could find no answer except to deny what she knew was true, to quote him Oliver’s hope in which she had no faith at all. “It might . . . maybe they can reorganize. Oliver thinks . . . He can surely find some way to keep us all together.”
“How?” Frank said. He sat against the pillar with his legs drawn up and softly slapped his gloves into the palm of one hand. His profiled silhouette remained still, near, and troubling against the sky restless with light. “Even if he could,” he said.
“Please don’t,” she said to his indifferent profile. “Please try to find a way to stay. If you go, where will I get my comfort?”
“If I stay, where will I get mine?”
Bowed in the hammock, pressing with her right-hand fingers against the ache above her eyes, she closed her eyes as if to do so would be to shut off the pain. “Poor Frank,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s the way it must be.”
“Is it?”