Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [274]
Skating in her stockings, the nylon faintly hissing on the floor, she carried her drink over near the desk, where she stood a while inspecting the piles of letter folders, the books, the tape recorder, the manila envelope of Xeroxed news stories from Boise. I was afraid she might open that and read, but instead she opened a folder of letters. With her mouth ruefully pursed, she read a while, folded the folder shut. Then she lifted her chin and looked closely at the spurs, the bowie, and the revolver hanging in their broad leather on the wall.
“What’s this? Local color?”
I thought her manner veiled and unconvincing; it seemed to me that since my outburst I was in charge, not she; she had lost the initiative.
“Grandmother had them hanging there when I was a boy,” I said. “I found them and put them back.”
“I didn’t know she was the cowgirl type.”
Too flippant; patter words. I nailed her down.
“They were to remind her of whom she was married to.”
Her back was toward me, the shoulderblades showing through the thin green cotton. She did not turn even part way, but spoke to the wall. “You make it sound like such punishment. Didn’t they get along at all?”
“They got along,” I said. “They respected each other. They treated one another with a sort of grave infallible kindness.”
I saw her thin shoulders shrink and shiver. Still without turning, she said, “It sounds just . . . awful. And yet he must have been a warm and decent man, to think of making a rose in memory of his daughter. And he had been–you say–treated badly, and still he was big enough to take her back.”
“He was a warm and decent man,” I said. I stared in hatred at her thin narrow back, I felt my voice rising and could not keep it down. “He was as decent a man as ever lived!” I said furiously. “He was the kindest, most trusting, easiest-to-get-on-with man I ever knew. My father always made me uneasy, but my grandfather made me feel safe. All he had to do was take hold of my hand and I was in the King’s X place.”
Even yet she did not turn, though she must have heard the edge of hysteria cracking in my voice. Dully she said to the bowie and horse pistol and spurs, “But you were fond of her too.”
“I loved her. She was a lady.”
“A lady who made a terrible mistake.”
“And recognized it,” I said. “Admitted it, repented it, accepted the consequences, did her best to live it down. Her real mistake was that she never appreciated him enough until it was too late.”
The still, thin, bowed back never moved; she seemed hypnotized by the belted weapons on the wall. Her voice was small when it came. “What makes you think . . .”
I moved the tray aside, tipping over half a glass of milk, and set it on the table by the window. The very way she stood, facing away from me, submissive but reproachful, made me mad. I hit the power button, I rolled over behind her. It was all I could do to keep from raising my hands and hitting her on her frail shoulderblades. I wanted to slap her until she turned around and cowered and listened, really listened. I heard my voice let go in shouting, my stump flopped around my lap.
“But he never forgave her,” I said. “She broke something she couldn’t mend. In all the years I lived with them I never saw them kiss, I never saw them put their arms around each other, I never saw them touch!”
I was strangling on my words, my tongue was three times too big for my mouth. Weeping, I wheeled into the bathroom and slammed the door.
For a long time I heard nothing. I sat in the bathroom’s reflective dazzle of light and glared at the one-legged poltroon–from Italian poltrona, a large chair–in the mirror above the washbowl. Stains of tears on the face, a gritting impotent anguish around the mouth, eyes that burned, hair that was gray, thin, and mussed. Napkin still spread in his lap from his invalid’s tray, and under the napkin a jerky, spasmodic twitching, as if a monstrous phallus were being moved by fitful satyriasis in its sleep.
I saw him grow alert, not by cocking his head as an ordinary man might do, but by swinging the chair a little way around. He left contemplating himself in the mirror and rolled silently, a wheel