Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [265]
Ed was politer than Ada. He stood up to shake hands, his face as creased and imperturbable as an old boot. One of the blessed things about Ed is his quietness. He is unflappable. He does not doubt, question, judge, or blame. He knows what he can do and lets others do what they can do. He deals with what is. It must have been that quality in his father that led Oliver Ward to make a driver and companion of him.
“This is Shelly,” I said. “She’s helping me with the book.”
“Ah, yes!” Nothing that I could have specified changed in her face, fixed for friendliness, and yet as she leaned and shook Shelly’s hand I saw her take in the revealing jersey pullover, the hair, the sprawl, the sloppy loafers, the shorts, the exposure of brown legs. She snapped that girl up as a bird snatches an insect on a lawn, and settled back with the expression of careful goodwill on her face and her mind made up that Shelly was wrong, impossible, would not do. “I’ve heard how you all look after him,” she said. “My son says it’s like a summer camp with one camper and three counselors.”
It was a remark that we all resented; we let it fall without an answer. I gloried in the solidarity with which my gang met her–they were as stony as cliffs. But then I saw Al still standing, bereft of chair and ease, and I said, “This is Al Sutton, an old friend from away back in junior high school.”
He wagged like a dog, he showed her his wart, he let her look up his nostrils clear to the back of his head. She was considerably shaken by what she saw, and turned away as soon as she politely could, and found herself facing me. When she first came in, she had taken me in stride. Now I saw her eyes widen. An expression of pain and revulsion grew in her face, and I became aware that my stump was flipping and flopping as if someone had just landed a salmon in my lap.
Protective and angry, I put both hands on it. “It does that sometimes,” I said. I felt like saying, It recognizes you.
Everyone was watching and trying not to. Ellen sent me a beseeching urgent message with her eyebrows. I grew more and more confused, the stump twitched and jerked. Oh, do something! my ex-wife’s face was saying. It’s horrible!
Eventually I grabbed the newspaper from the side pocket of my chair and fumbled and flattened it out in my lap. The paper leaped and rustled. I put both hands on it, and through it took hold of that anguished stub of meat and bone and choked it down. When I dared, I took one hand away and shook two aspirins from the bottle into my palm, and threw them into my mouth and swallowed them without water. Immediately I was sorry I had done it. They had all watched every move, my gang protectively, she with a narrow-eyed, flinching interest. I sat there before her a hopeless case, twitched by spastic reflexes, pouring down pills. They made a hard, pebbly obstruction in my throat that I could not swallow.
And of course my two handmaidens, seeing me choked and watery-eyed from those dry pills, put on an act to prove that indeed they did take care of me. Ada grabbed off the cover of the Styrofoam cooler and reached out a beer and was about to pull the aluminum tab, but I waved my hands and stopped her, unable yet to speak.
“Ah, yeah,” Ada said disgustedly, “I forgot you was on the wagon.”
Shelly was on her feet. “Glass of water?”
I got the pills past the obstructing place and said, “Oh, sit down, quit fussingl Watch the ballgame.”
We watched the ballgame.
Matty Alou walked on four straight pitches. Roberto Clemente on a 3-1 count hit one of Gaylord Perry’s spitters to the base of the flagpole in centerfield, and Alou came all the way around. Out on the lawn the sprinkler kicked out its traveling arc of water. Our eyes were careful not to stray from the television screen. Under my hands I felt the leap and tension of the stump like the physical embodiment of my panic at seeing her there, a threat or a premonition.