Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [92]
“If Mrs. Elliott’s right that should be good for your soul.”
“Mrs. Elliott is always right. That’s the trouble with Mrs. Elliott.”
He was surprised. “Why, aren’t you getting along?”
“Oh, of course. She’s as generous and thoughtful as can be. But she helps me whether I want help or not. Her suggestions are commands.”
“You don’t have to take them. You’re a boarder, not a guest.”
“Just try not taking them! She’s got a theory about everything. When I’m not looking she gives the baby pieces of raw steak to suck on.”
“Does he suck on them?”
“Yes, that’s what’s so provoking. He loves it.”
She could feel rather than hear him laughing.
“You can laugh,” she said. “It’s not you she’s after all the time. There isn’t a woman she knows that she hasn’t told how to raise or wean or prevent her children. And with her own such examples. You should hear her in a group of women–she talks about the most impossibly intimate things. Birth control is what she’s on just now. She wants to liberate women from their biological slavery. She was never in doubt about one single thing in her entire life. Don’t tell me you like that sort of person, so good and unselfish and insufferable.”
“I find her very disagreeable,” Oliver said, still laughing.
“Do you think a woman ought to be contemptuous of her husband?”
“Heaven forbid. Is she?”
“Oh, she has the sharpest tongue! She tells me about the offers she had when she first came out here. It’s hard to believe, she’s so dowdy and blunt, but I suppose she may have, women were scarce. ‘So I took the little tanner,’ she says to me, as flippant as that, as if she’d been picking out a saucepan.”
“What’s wrong with Elliott? He looks like a perfectly good catch to me.”
“He’s not a New England intellectual,” Susan said. “He’s not enough like George William Curtis. He never washed dishes with Margaret Fuller. But wash dishes by himself, that’s another matter. They have an agreement,’ as she puts it. She cooks, he cleans up. The poor man is in his tan vats all day and in the dishpan all night, while those great slangy girls fool away at the piano or play whist.”
Oliver’s hand was moving on her stomach. “I know how the poor devil feels. I’ve had a lot of experience marrying women smarter than I am.”
“Oh, how you . . . Who invented cement?” She let herself be pulled within his tightening arm, and said with a kind of desperation, “We’ve got to plan and plan and plan.”
“No matter how we plan, we’re in for some more of Mrs. Elliott, I’m afraid. I could be months finding backing.”
“I don’t care now. We can wait.”
“Maybe you’d like to come up to the City with me.”
“Oh dear, I wonder . . . It would be lovely, but I wonder about Ollie.”
“Or find another boardinghouse here, if Mrs. Elliott gets to be more than you can stand.”
“It would be a slap in the face, she’s been so kind, according to her lights.”
“Then all the planning we can do leaves us right where we are.”
She heard the noise of Elliott shaking down the kitchen range, and in the dripping stillness that followed, distant bird cries cut through the mutter of the sea. “But not where we were,” she said. “Because now there’s a future. We can look out into fog as thick as cream and be certain it will burn away. We can hear all those lost squawks and know that as soon as Creation says the right word, they’ll be birds.”
“And meantime we’ll all be dead of pleurisy from standing in front of the window. Let’s get back to bed.”
He engulfed her, but the baby was between them; his soft snore bubbled under her ear. “Don’t,” she whispered, “you’ll wake him.”
“Put him back in his crib.”
“What if Marian is awake?”
“Let her take care of him.”
“What if she knocks?”
“Let her knock. Lock the door.”
“Then she’d think . . .”
“Let her think.” His hand was lifting under the weight of her breast, his lips were on the top of her head.
“But it’s so light!”
“Then you won’t need a lamp to put him in his crib,” Oliver said. “After that you can shut your eyes.”
4
“Susan,” said Mrs. Elliott, “I must give you a piece of advice.”
She flapped the reins on the round haunches that worked in the shafts below.