Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [248]
When Frank had gone, already furtive, already thinking how to evade or avoid his returning friend and boss, slipping out back to his tied saddlehorse before the sounds of the buggy should be heard in the lane, I can imagine her walking barefooted and distracted around the sopping lawn and along the border of the rose garden, smelling that heavy night-distilled fragrance and torturing herself with the thought of how Oliver had searched through half of Connecticut for some of those new hybrids, and transported them twenty-five hundred miles, to try to make her feel at home in her exile. She was assaulted alternately by anger at his presumption that she could make her home in this place, and by gusts of pity for him, and love, and the will to heal and comfort, and by exasperation over his trustingness and his lapses of judgment, and by despair over the future, and by misery over what she must write Bessie, and by loathing of her own lack of control–a woman of forty-two, with three children, swept off her feet like a seminary girl. And intruding into all that web of complicated and contradictory feeling, the tense memory of straining kisses only minutes ago, and the hands to which she had lifted and tightened her breast, and guilt, guilt, guilt for just those treacherous kisses, and something like awe at what she had been proved capable of.
But when she heard the creak and rattle of dried-out buggy wheels coming down the lane through the starlit dark, she pressed her palms upward along her cheeks to rub and stretch away the stiffness of tears, and ran soft-footed to the door, and slipped in. She was in bed, with a cloth over her eyes to signify headache, when she heard her door open softly, and then after a listening time close, just as softly. She could hear Nellie’s exaggerated North Country voice croaking, “Coom, children, to bed, to bed!”
The house settled, the noises went behind thick adobe walls. Through the open window she heard the hose cart groan as Oliver dragged it off the grass; he never left it overnight because its wheels would dent the new lawn. Then for a time she heard him walking up and down the veranda, slow and steady on the tiles, thinking the bleakest thoughts, no doubt, looking into the lightless future. Poor fellow, poor fellow! to see everything come down, every hope and ambition destroyed. She half sat up, impulsively ready to go out to him and hook her arm in his and walk out his failure with him.
And lay back down, thinking of the failure he had brought about for her, and staring blankly into the failure she had made for herself, her teeth set in her lower lip, her ears spying on him. When his pacing paused, the house was intensely quiet; it rang with silence. Outside, the great western night had closed in, with only distant, widely spaced pops of gun or firecracker from the town.
After a long time he came in–carrying his shoes, evidently, so as not to waken her. He undressed in the dark, his careful weight sagged the bed; she moved as if in restless sleep to give him all the room there was. He lay on his back, and she could hear, or feel, the faint rustle and movement of his breathing, slow and steady. Finally, without turning his head, he said softly up into the dark, “Asleep?”
The impulse to go on pretending was only momentary. “No. How were the fireworks?”
“Fine. The kids enjoyed them. We didn’t go clear in, we watched from the road.”
“I was hoping you would.”
“Couldn’t you see them from here?”
“Pretty well.”
“What did Frank want?”
“What? Frank?” She thought the bound of her heart must have shaken the bed; she lay breathing shallowly through her mouth.
“He was here, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” she managed to say, giving up another possible lie. But her heart was now beating against her chest wall like a bird caught in a room. It was unbearably hot, she could not stand his warmth so close, and shifted her body and flung the light blanket impatiently off. “I guess he wanted to talk to you,” she said. “His life is all torn up too. He didn’t stay. We sat on the piazza and watched the fireworks for a little while. He said he