Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [253]
She was watching me steadily, discreetly and indulgently smiling. “But your grandfather needed the bottle.”
“What does that . . . ?” I started to say. Then, “Quiet desperation, you mean? It may be the best available alternative.”
I have not had a drink for a week, Ada is upset and confused when in the evening after my bath I make her take a drink but won’t take one myself. Her generosity makes her uneasy. And I don’t need her daughter to remind me of the strength, maybe even the necessity, of human weakness, and the harshness of the pressures civilized living can put on a man. In the land of heart’s desire, up in North San Juan, these things don’t apply.
The rubber band that Shelly was running through her teeth broke, and snapped her on the lip. Wincing, she put her fingers to her mouth, but her frown didn’t leave her face. Through her fingers she said, “You think Larry is a kook.”
“I never met him,” I said. “Sight unseen, I’d say he bites off more than I think he can chew.”
“He’s very bright, you know.”
“I haven’t the slightest doubt. So was Bronson Alcott.”
“Who was he, Brook Farm?”
“Fruitlands. One I forgot to mention.”
“Oh.”
Probably she didn’t hear what I said. She was thinking about her husband, boy friend, mate, whatever he was–the man she used to travel with–and her words came out of her thinking, not as a reply to me. “He can be so damned convincing. He could convince even you.”
“I doubt that. But he seems to have convinced you.”
“I don’t know. He’s got me all up in the air.”
I had myself turned askance, as usual, and my eyes fell onto the pile of papers I’d brought down when I came to lunch. One was a letter from Rudyard Kipling, another a letter from Kipling’s father. I couldn’t see the dates, but I knew they were both from July 1890. Right in that time of disintegration and collapse Grandmother had finished the illustrations for something of Kipling’s, and had those warm letters of thanks. How many lines an alert life has its hands on at once, even in exile! Grandmother sat like a spider with her web all around her, spun out of her insides. Probably she read those Kipling letters hastily, with a brief pleasurable surprise, while the rest of her attention went out on trembling threads to the Big Ditch, or Frank Sargent, or Agnes, or Oliver, or Ollie in his far-off school, or Bessie, or Augusta, or the odious Burns. I had left her in a disturbed state of mind, and I wanted to get back, the old werewolf craved cool historical flesh to live in and refrigerated troubles to deal with. I felt a certain irritation at Shelly Rasmussen, very brown from lying in her family’s back yard, sitting in Grandmother’s old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life. I thought it would serve her right to go to that nut-farm and become a den mother, head of a matrilineal line in a natural-credit Communist economy.
“I gather you’ve patched things up,” I said.
She shrugged, a gesture at once loose and irritable. “Maybe. If I could be sure he’d stay the way he is now. He’s a lot better off when he’s got something to be enthusiastic about. Then he doesn’t sit around and think up ways to take your skin off.”
“Have you been seeing him?”
“Couple times.”
“Been up to San Juan?”
“I was up this last weekend.”
“And you like it.”
Her gray eyes met mine, she closed them deliberately, puckered up her rosebud mouth. “Oh, you know me. I’m soft headed, I ignore history and human nature. But it was sort of nice, you know? I mean–pine woods and a clearing. Off from everything. Part of it’s just a gravel pile, they worked all that country with monitors. But there are some old mine buildings they