Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [269]
She came along, but she stayed back so that I could not see her. I had the sense that she watched me, and her silence worked on me like a poultice. I babbled, telling her how Grandfather had started this rose garden even before Zodiac Cottage was built, back when he and Grandmother and Betsy lived in the little house where Ed and Ada Hawkes lived now. How he spent all his evenings and weekends puttering, developing his own hybrids. I showed her some of them, or the descendants of some of them, cuttings made by my father, or by Ed Hawkes after Father began to lose his buttons. A real family rose garden, three generations old, some of the varieties unique. I took pride in it, more than I had all summer. It seemed to me then that my own position was more secure if that rose garden was important to me. I told her that until Father got so eccentric that he drove people away, rose fanciers used to come from all over to see that garden, and beg or buy plants or cuttings.
To all of my babble she made no response except an occasional murmur. I couldn’t tell whether I was boring her, or whether she was using the rose garden tour as an excuse to study me from behind. I hoped I bored her stiff, I hoped she could make not one thing out of the unmoving back of my head. I wanted her to go away, I wanted to wear her out. Purposely I led her around the paths that were still in the sun, where it was baking hot. But she came along, murmuring, invisible, and I went before her like a man with a gun in his back, scared to turn around, until we came to the old arched arbor at the far end, covered with the small dark glossy foliage of a climber rose. There I stopped.
“That’s one of his hybrids,” I said. “He never sold or gave away that one. Privately he called it the Agnes Ward, for my aunt who died in childhood. He crossed some sort of moss rose with the old Harison yellow climber they used to have in Idaho, and got this climber with red blooms tipped with yellow. In certain lights they’re like flames.”
I sat aimed through the arbor like a key about to enter a keyhole. From behind me she said, “I wish it was in bloom,” and then a moment later, “What a lovely idea, to make a rose in memory of someone!”
“It was about the only way he had,” I said. “As far as I know, he and Grandmother never mentioned her name. You know the old Cockney ballad–‘Now ’er picture’s turned fyce to the wall’. That sort of thing.”
“Really? My goodness, what did she do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “She was a sort of fairy child, and she died. Isn’t that enough?”
“No. It isn’t enough to explain why they’d just–wipe her out.”
“They didn’t wipe her out. They just never spoke of her. But they didn’t wipe her out. After all, Grandfather made a rose. He made a dozen roses, in fact, trying for just the right one. You know how long it takes to cross and fix a hybrid rose? Two or three years. He could never get just what he wanted. He liked these blooms, but he couldn’t get them in a repeater. If he got one that would go on blooming, something was wrong with the color, or it didn’t have any odor. If he hung onto the color he wanted, it bloomed in May and was done for the season. Eventually he had to give up and accept a brief, early blooming.”
She stood behind me, silent. I had the unpleasant sensation that her hand was resting on the back of my chair, as if she were my keeper or nurse ready to push me further around on my dull afternoon airing. I gave the chair some power and moved two feet, but felt no drag from a hand. Under the arbor the air was dense and warm, and came thickly into my lungs. I heard the woman say, “How do you know all this about the rose, if he never talked about her?”
“Oh, he talked to me.”
“But not to your grandmother?”
“No.”
“Why?”
It was a moment I had been half-consciously maneuvering for. “Because my grandfather was a man who couldn’t forget,” I said. “Forget or forgive.”
Her feet stirred in the gravel. In a voice that I listened to intently–it sounded small and swallowed–she said, “He sounds like a hard man.”
“On the contrary, he was soft. People imposed on him. Grandmother always said he was too trusting. Actually he never expected much of people, and so he wasn