Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [93]
Even the people to whom they had just delivered generous Christmas baskets–a Chinese washerman, a truck farmer with a flock of children still sun-browned in this backward Christmas weather that felt more like April, and two fishermen’s families–had probably mocked her after she left. An odd, brusque, offensive sort of gift-giving. Here: this is for you. No grace in it, and no patience to wait for thanks, even ironic thanks. The town character. And she did not permit Susan to ask what the advice might be. She gave it before Susan could open her mouth.
“Let that man of yours drop this cement business. Let him find a job where he can build things. That’s what he wants.”
Susan took her time about replying. They were passing along the wall of the ruined mission, which she had drawn for Thomas Hudson with its climbing roses entangled among the thorny blades of a prickly pear, like the red rose ’round the briar in the old ballad. The gate opened and dressed-up children spilled into the street, bright beads from a broken string. Two nuns smiled from the archway. Old Funeral Procession pulled the dogcart past.
“You’re mistaken, Mrs. Elliott,” Susan said, as pleasantly as she could. “He’s very interested in cement. Why else would we be staking our future on it? It’s just that times are bad, and no one is willing to risk his money until he’s very sure. Anyway, it’s up to Oliver to decide if it has to be given up. I don’t make that sort of decision.”
“Oh yes you do,” said Mrs. Elliott.
“But Mrs. Elliott, really!”
“Of course you make the decisions. You tell him how your life is to go. If you didn’t, you’d be up in the Andes right now.”
“And you think we should be?”
Mrs. Elliott laughed like a crow. “You’d be together. You keep saying you want to be.”
“Not in a place that would be dangerous for Ollie.”
“All right,” said Mrs. Elliott. “So you made that decision. Let me tell you something. Any place is dangerous. Did you read about that boy and his father that were drowned at Pigeon Point the other day, after abalones at low tide? I’ve known children in this sleepy town who have died of eating lye, and children who have fallen down wells, and children who have been killed in runaways, and children who have died of scarlet fever. If you try to protect that boy from everything, you may wind up balking his father from ever doing what he’s got it in him to do.”
Susan told herself to keep her temper. The woman was well-meaning, however eccentric, and it was not Susan alone who felt her urge to dominate. She treated her husband like a hired man. She could no more keep her fingers out of other people’s affairs than Ollie could help reaching for a rattle or a red ribbon. She could no more keep her opinions to herself than the gull that coasted over them just then could keep from jawing at them for not being edible. The proper response was a light laugh and a phrase that turned the advice aside. But she was too close to anger either to laugh or to find a properly light phrase. Mrs. Elliott, having said her say, drove grimly ahead.
After a minute of uncomfortable silence, Susan said, “If cement doesn’t work out, of course he’ll go back to mining.”
“He should go back now,” said Mrs. Elliott. “He hates this waiting on rich men, as if he were some swindling promoter.”
Susan felt the color surging into her face. “Excuse me, Mrs. Elliott, I think he knows what he wants to do, and is doing it.”
“I think he knows what you want him to do,” Mrs. Elliott said.
“He agrees with me!”
“He convinces himself that he does.”
“Well,” said Susan, thoroughly annoyed,