Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [270]
I started the chair, talking straight out ahead of myself, through the arbor and around the corner of the house. Hurrying, almost running, her feet caught up with me and came close along behind.
Maybe I addled my brains, running around out there in the late sun. I felt confused, and also I felt a wicked compulsion to show that woman every leaf of every pole bean, every cluster of green and ripe on the tomato plants, every ear on every comstalk. Show me the place, she said. All right, she would see it. I led her around in every corner, I lost track of time, and when, worn out myself, I brought her back up the ramp and onto the veranda, it seemed so late and dusky that I called to Ada, expecting her to be in the kitchen. No one answered. I called again. In the hollow house my voice hummed as if I had shouted into a cello. As I listened for some reply I became aware that the porch screen had not slammed shut behind me. Ellen must still be in the doorway, half in, half out, the screen door held by her hand or caught on her thrust-back heel. Reluctantly, more to break the listening stillness of the house than to make her welcome, I moved ahead. In a moment I heard the screen click shut. She was in there with me, absolutely alone.
“May I see the house?” she said. “I’d like to see where you live and do your work.”
Still looking away from her into the shadowy house-who dares look behind him, what child walking under dark trees has the courage to do anything but look straight ahead and put one foot after another and try to keep from breaking into a panicky run?–I said, “I live and work upstairs. We don’t use any of the downstairs at all except the kitchen and once in a while the library.”
“Show me the upstairs, then.”
She was implacable. She stood behind me and insisted on wedging herself back into my life. But the thought of her upstairs in my intimate rooms filled me with dread. I listened. I called once more for Ada, and the house gulped that one little living word as a big fish gulps a minnow; I could hear it, or feel it, quivering after it was down. The thought that they had all gone and left me, given me up to this woman, blackened my sight with terror. I needed to get a look at her, I wanted to know what her face showed as she stood behind me, hooked as close to me as my shadow, but I did not dare turn my chair around. And so I said, “Well, you might as well see it down here. It used to be quite a place,” and rolled over the ramped sill and into the hall.
As we rolled or floated through the rooms and I turned through doorways I got a glimpse or two of her coming along, serious, pale, wearing a slight knitted frown. She was carrying her shoes in her hand, and in her stockinged feet she followed me without a sound. It infuriated me all afresh to see her take that liberty, as if she belonged. Holding the pantry door open for her, I watched her pass briefly in front of me, blank as some Blessed Damozel, moving as if some wind blew her; and nothing would serve but that I should put myself again in front of her before she would move on.
I fled her along the bare redwood walls dark with age, past the bare fieldstone fireplaces, under the high beamed ceilings, through doorways where the plank floors gathered light in dim long pools. Any ordinary passage through those rooms reverberated, but I on my rubber wheels and she in her stockinged feet passed through as silently as spiders spin their webs, or dust settles. In the library the pale square on the wall where Grandmother’s portrait used to hang stared at us. The books were dead in their shelves.
In that stagnant air the oppression of her soundless inescapable unspeaking presence grew on me, and by the time we were back in the front hall I was sweating; my hands stuck to the arms of the chair as I turned it, at bay, at the bottom of the lift.
“Well,” I said, “that’s it.