Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [47]
“You didn’t just forget, then.”
“No, I didn’t forget.”
“But why, then?”
He looked over her head, he was interested in the valley. She could see shrugging impatience in his shoulders. “It isn’t the money,” she said. “I had the money, and there was nothing I would rather have spent it for than coming to you. But your letter never even mentioned it. I thought perhaps . . . I don’t know. It shamed me before Father. I hated it that he had to send me off to someone he would think didn’t know . . .”
“What my duty was?” Oliver said, almost sneering. “I knew.”
“Then why?”
Impatiently he turned, he looked down at her directly. “Because I didn’t have it.”
“But you said you had something saved.”
He swung an arm. “There it is.”
“The house? I thought the mine agreed to pay for that.”
“Kendall did. The manager. He changed his mind.”
“But he promised!”
“Sure,” Oliver said. “But then somebody overspent on one of the Hacienda cottages and Kendall said no more renovations.”
“But that’s unfair!” she said. “You should have told Mr. Prager.”
His laugh was incredulous. “Yes? Run crying to Conrad?”
“Well then you should just have stopped. We could have lived in it as it was.”
“I could have,” Oliver said. “You couldn’t. I wouldn’t have let you.”
“Oh I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t understand. I’ve been such an expense to you.”
“It seems to me I’ve been an expense to you. How much did you spend for those tickets?”
“I won’t tell you.”
They stared at each other, near anger. She forgave him everything except that he hadn’t explained. One word, and she would have been spared all her doubts about him. But she would certainly not let him pay her back. The hardship would not be all his. He was looking at her squarely, still mulish. She wanted to shake him. “You great . . . Why couldn’t you have told me?”
She saw his eyebrows go up. His eyes, as they did when he smiled, closed into upside-down crescents. Young as he was, he had deep fans of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that gave him a look of always being on the brink of smiling. And now he was smiling. He was not going to be sullen. They were past it.
“I was afraid you’d be sensible,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the thought of this place sitting here all ready for you and you not in it.”
Supper was no more than bread and butter, tea from Augusta’s samovar, and a left-over bar of chocolate. (Ah, sweet linkage! Are you thinking of me, dear friend back there in New York, as I am thinking of you? Do you comprehend how happy I am, am determined to be? Didn’t I tell you he knew how to look after me?) The dog lay at their feet on the veranda. Along the ridge with its silvery comb of fog the sky faded from pale blue to steely gray, and then slowly flushed the color of a ripe peach. The trees on the crest–redwoods, Oliver said–burned for a few seconds and went black. Eastward down the plunging mountainside the valley fumed with dust that was first red, then rose, then purple, then mauve, then gray, finally soft black. Discreet and quiet, Lizzie came out and got the tray and said good night and went in again. They sat close together in the hammock, holding hands.
“I don’t believe this is me,” Oliver said.
“Thee mustn’t doubt it.”
“Theeing?” he said. “Now I know I’m one of the family.”
A shiver went through her from her hips up to her shoulders. At once he was solicitous. “Cold?”
“Happy, I think.”
“I’ll get a blanket. Or do you want to go in?”
“No, it’s beautiful out here.”
He got a blanket and tucked her into the hammock as if into a steamer chair. Then he sat down on the floor beside her and smoked his pipe. Far down below, in the inverted sky of the valley, lights came on, first one, then another, then many. “It’s like sitting in the warming oven and watching corn pop down on the stove,” Susan said.
Sometime later she held up her hand and said, “Listen!” Fitful on the creeping wind, heard and lost and heard again, came a vanishing sound of music–someone sitting on porch or balcony up in the Mexican camp and playing the guitar for his girl or his children. Remembering nights when Ella Clymer had sung to them at Milton, Susan all but held her breath, waiting for the rush of homesickness. But it never came, nothing interrupted this sweet and resting content. She put out a hand to touch Oliver