Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [90]
“I’ve got him,” Susan said. “I’ll have to light the lamp, I’m sorry. He’s messed.”
Her hands found lamp and matches by the habit of many dark mornings. In the light’s bloom, there he was: wide-open blue eyes, toothless smile, kicking legs. She talked to him in fierce soft disapproval, tweaking his toes and kissing his fingers, while she cleaned and changed him. Ohhhhh, such a baby! Such a baaaad baby! All uncovered and all messed! Icky! Such a messy baby. Thee hasn’t been a good boy at all!
With the dried, talcumed, wrapped, and fretful weight on her shoulder, protecting the little warm round head with her hand, she stooped and blew out the lamp. In pitch blackness hung with after-images of the lamp’s flame, a cloud of green moons the shape of ragged smiles, she found her way back to the other room. By the time she had located the rocker and sat down and opened her nightgown to let him nurse, she saw that the darkness had become dusk. The windows were gray, the furniture had acquired substance, the wallpaper all but revealed its pattern. Oliver’s face, down in the pillow, had one ear, one closed eye, half a mustache.
The baby’s sounds were so hungry he reminded her of some dry root in the first rains; her breast was wet and slippery with his mouthing. Creation, she thought. Emergence. Growth. Already he was a person, with his fat legs and his firm mottled flesh and his toothless smiles. He had never had a day of sickness, not so much as a cold. She was determined he never should. And he didn’t weigh eleven pounds at birth, that was an insulting error of Dr. McPherson’s scales. Oliver, figuring backward along his normal rate of growth, had estimated that he couldn’t have weighed more than eight. Yes, she told him, bending to nuzzle his silky hair. Yes, but! You eat like that and you’ll weigh as much as Mrs. Elliott’s horse.
Then she raised her eyes and saw that Oliver was lying on his side, wide awake in the gray light, watching them. It made her shy to be seen so, and she turned away a little, but he lay there with his eyes full of love and said, “Stay the way you were.”
So she turned back, but diffidently. She felt devoured, with his eyes on her and the baby making such animal noises at her breast. She said, “You got here so late, shouldn’t you sleep some more?”
“I’ve already slept more than I’m used to.”
“You’ve been working too hard. Is there anything new?”
“There isn’t a job in the world, apparently.”
“Well, I’ve got one thing to report,” she said. “Thomas has definitely commissioned the Santa Cruz article. I’ve been drawing every day. I even drew one of Mrs. Elliott’s dreadful daughters and made her look quite presentable.”
“Good. They could use a little outside help.” He looked at her with such shining eyes that it was all she could do not to turn her shoulder to hide her munched and kneaded breast. She made a protesting, abashed little face at him. “There’s one thing,” he said.
“What?”
“I made cement.”
“What!” In her excitement she lost the baby off her nipple, and had to put him back. If she had not been so involved in her motherly functions she would have flown to the bed and kissed that sleepy, smiling face. “Oh, I knew thee could, I knew all the time thee could!”
Oliver tossed the pillow to the ceiling and caught it. “I did it three times. Even old Ashburner admits it, and he’s so cautious he has to put his finger in the fire before he’ll say it’s still hot.”
“Now we can buy our promontory.”
“Now we can sit and wait. All I’ve done is make it. What would you say if some green twenty-nine-year-old engineer without a degree came into your office and said he could make hydraulic cement and needed about a hundred thousand to start a plant?”
“I’d give it to him at once.”
“Yeah, but you’re the engineer’s wife. No San Francisco banker is going to cave in that easy. I’m not very good at the talkee-talkee.”
“But thee can do it. Oh, isn’t it wonderful? I’m proud of thee. I knew thee could do it. Isn’t thee glad now we didn’t go to Potosí?” The baby sighed and slobbered at her breast.