Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [273]
“I don’t know yet. I was thinking of calling it Angle of Repose.”
Her sliding and pacing stopped; she considered what I had said. “Is that a very good title? Will it sell? It sounds kind of . . . inert.”
“How do you like The Doppler Effect? Is that any better?”
“The Doppler Effect ? What’s that?”
“Forget it. It doesn’t matter. The title’s the least of it. I might call it Inside the Bendix. It isn’t a book anyway, it’s just a kind of investigation into a life.”
“Your grandmother’s.”
“Yes.”
“Why she wasn’t happy.”
“That’s not what I’m investigating. I know why she wasn’t happy.”
She stopped halfway across the floor, her drink in her hand, her eyes bent down into the glass as if Excalibur, or a water baby, or a djinn, or something, might rise out of it.
“Why wasn’t she?”
I set my half-eaten sandwich down on the tray that boxed me into the chair, and took one shaking hand in the other, and cried, “You want to know why? You don’t know? Because she considered that she’d been unfaithful to my grandfather, in thought or act or both. Because she blamed herself for the drowning of her daughter, the one Grandfather made the rose for. Because she was responsible for the suicide of her lover–if he was her lover. Because she’d lost the trust of her husband and son. Does that answer your question?”
Her lowered head had come up, her half-shuttered eyes widened and stared. She looked ready to run. I had reached her, all right. That air of self-confidence was a mask, that insouciant way of sliding with arched foot around my rubbed plank floors was an act. Underneath, she was as panicky as I was. For a good second her deep eyes were fixed on mine, her face was tense and set. Then she lowered her head, dropped her lashes, backed away from the attack I had thrown at her unaware, arched her foot and slid it experimentally along a crack in the planks. As if indifferently, speaking to the floor, she said, “And this happened . . . when?”
“1890.”
“But they went on living together.”
“No they didn’t!” I said. “Oh, no! He left, pulled out. Then she left too, but she came back. She lived in Boise alone for nearly two years, while he was working in Mexico. Then his brother-in-law Conrad Prager, one of the owners of the Zodiac, brought him up here to devise pumps that would keep the lower levels from flooding. Prager and his wife, Grandfather’s sister, worked on him, and eventually got him to write my grandmother, and she came down. My father all this time was in school in the East–he never came home. He never came home, in fact, for years–Grandmother and Grandfather had been back together seven or eight years before Father ever showed his face here.”
Large and dark, looking black in that light, her eyes rested on me. She said nothing, but her mouth twitched, the sort of twitch that is extracted by a stomach cramp.
“So they lived happily-unhappily ever after,” I said. “Year after irrelevant year, half a century almost, through one world war and through the Jazz Age and through the Depression and the New Deal and all that; through Prohibition and Women’s Rights, through the automobile and radio and television and into the second world war. Through all those changes, and not a change in them.”
“That’s what you told your secretary, What’s-her-name, you weren’t interested in.”
“Exactly. It’s all over in 1890.”
“When they broke up.”
“Exactly.”
For a while she was silent, sliding her silken big toe down the crack between two planks, taking a step to follow it, sliding it again. Her head came up, the whites of her eyes flashed at me. “What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?”
“I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.”
“What?”
“Horizontal. Permanently.”
“Ah!” She moved her shoulders, half turned, looked at me and away. Talking to Grandmother’s portrait she said, “Death? Living death? Fifty years of it? No rest till they lay down? There must be something . . . short of that. She couldn’t have been doing penance for fifty years.”
I shrugged.