Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [89]
“Oh,” he said, smiling. “Thee does, does thee?”
“Yes, and you know what else? I want you to discover cement, and get your capital, and build your plant and machinery, and start selling cement to everybody in this country, and then I want us to buy this laguna and this promontory and build a house that looks right straight out at Japan. We can get Lizzie back from her rancher, and bring Stranger down from Mother Fall’s. Can’t you see him on this beach, chasing sandpipers and getting his big feet wet? Can’t you see Ollie growing up into the healthiest sort of outdoor boy and maybe learning to become a scientist or naturalist like Agassiz, studying tide pools? He can go to a good Eastern school, and then to Yale or Boston Tech, so he won’t suffer from growing up in an out-of-the-way place. Oliver, thee absolutely must work on cement!”
Still smiling, squinting his eyes to crescents in the brightness, he said, “I intend to. In my spare time. Without any expectation of getting rich. Don’t get your face fixed for that mansion right away.”
“And yet it might happen. Mightn’t it?”
“I don’t suppose it’s out of the question.”
“Then that’s what thee should work for. What if there aren’t any jobs? Thee can do this, and it won’t keep us apart as Potosí would have.”
The surf boomed against the point, the air was full of turnstones, gulls, tattlers, plovers, screams and cries and the keen smells of salt and iodine. She put her hands to her cheeks, hot with sun and wind and exhortation. Oliver was watching her closely.
“Suppose I don’t make it work.”
“Then I’ll go wherever thee must. I’ll leave Ollie with Mother or Bessie if I have to, until he’s old enough to come along. But thee will make it work, I have the most blissfully confident feeling. And we’ll build our house on this promontory and watch the whales go by.”
Indulgent, sleepy-eyed, he watched her. “I thought you wanted to move back East.”
“Eventually. But Oliver, if thee can make this work, I’d be willing to stay here ten years. Maybe until Ollie is ready to go back to school. I could go home on visits, I wouldn’t ask for more. We could lure our families and friends out for visits in our lighthouse.”
His hand came out and took hold of her ankle, gave it a squeeze and a shake. He was laughing. She could see how she charmed him.
Perhaps he remembered holding her by that ankle while she hung over the waterfall above Big Pond. Perhaps he thought, though I do not believe that he did, that on that picnic afternoon of his courting he might just as well have put his hand on the pan of a bear trap.
3
In the fashion of the nineteenth-century theater, let Marian Prouse push across the stage the perambulator with a placard on its side: TWO MONTHS LATER. That will make it November 1877.
She awoke as if at some signal from her own flesh, a tickling or a pain. For a minute she lay listening, locating herself, identifying Oliver’s warm weight beside her, strange in that stranger’s bed. It made her tender to have him there, breathing softly, with a little whiffle through his mustache. Only the fear of waking him and spoiling his rest kept her from touching him.
More by memory than by sight she filled the darkness with the shapes that three and a half months had made familiar without making them dear. Mrs. Elliott’s back room: there the commode, there the dresser, there the Boston rocker, there the barely outlined windows. The air was soft and stale. Would Oliver agree with Mrs. Elliott that it was unhealthy to sleep with the windows open to the night fog, or would he call that an old wives’ tale, and open them up? She hoped he would. She wanted his authority asserted against Mrs. Elliott’s infallibility. Three and a half months of boarding had made her want, above anything she could remember or imagine, her own house, with her husband in it instead of working himself to death in someone else’s office or on someone else’s survey, and running every night experiments that failed and failed.
Again the weak bleating that her ears had been tuned for. Her ghost moved in the invisible dresser mirror as she slipped out of bed. Groping, she found the doorknob. The adjoining darkness was acid with diaper odors. Bedsprings squeaked.