Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [94]
Mrs. Elliott turned on her a pair of faded, slightly bulging blue eyes that the wind had filled with tears without blurring their sharpness. “Go where your husband’s work takes him. Make him feel that what he can do is worth doing. Take your child along and let him eat his peck of dirt. He’ll be all the better for it, and he might have an interesting life. So might you. You won’t always live like a lady, but that won’t hurt you. You can help your man be somebody, and be somebody yourself. He ought to leave all this dealing and promoting to somebody like Elliott who can’t do anything else.”
The insufferable eye dug at Susan. Mrs. Elliott rubbed a knuckle across it, and when she took the knuckle away the eye was redder, but just as sharp.
“Thank you,” said Susan furiously. “I’ll think about it.”
She gave her attention to a yard where some young people were playing the newly popular game called croquet. Obviously they were trying out a Christmas present. The lawn they knocked the striped balls around on had rose bushes in bloom along one side, and on the other a ten-foot pine tree hung with paper chains and strings of cranberries and popcorn that the birds were after. Her headache skewered her from temple to temple. She knew this as the worst Christmas of her life. Dinner among strangers, she and Ollie and Marian almost pensioners at the table made rowdy by the Elliotts’ three romping daughters, and Oliver not there, tied up by a last-minute job he didn’t think he could afford to turn down. She had been remembering all day how Christmas used to be at Milton, and how the whole week between Christmas and New Year used to be spent at receptions and house parties in New York. She had been remembering that it was now almost exactly ten years since she had met Oliver sitting on a stiff gilt chair under the controlling eye of Mrs. Beach and listening to the harangue of his unpleasant famous cousin.
“You are not to be angry with me,” said the nasal New England voice at her side. “Your Aunt Sarah was my good friend. I feel an obligation to look after you.”
“I’m not angry.”
“Stuff. You’re furious. But I’m very sure I’m right. Your husband hates promoting cement. His interest was in solving the problem of how to make it. He’s got the head for doing important things.”
“I believe I appreciate him almost as much as you do.”
“I wonder if you do,” said Mrs. Elliott, not in the least downed. “He’s not a type you were trained to understand.”
The horse lifted his tail and dumped a bundle on the doubletree, and for a blazing unladylike second Susan felt that he had made Mrs. Elliott the only possible answer.
A freckled hand was laid on her arm. “As long as I’ve already made you mad, let me tell you the rest of what I think.” Susan moved her shoulders very slightly, looking straight ahead. “You’re an artist and a lady,” Mrs. Elliott said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if you weren’t maybe just a little too much of both, but my views may be peculiar. And it has nothing to do with being fond of you. I am fond of you, though you wouldn’t believe it right now. What bothers me is that Oliver thinks you’re better than he is, some sort of higher creature. He thinks what you do is more important than what he does. I don’t deny you’re special. You’re both special. But I’d hate to see you discourage him from doing what he’s special at, just so you can coddle some notions about dirt and culture. Do you follow me?”
Just for an instant Susan’s eyes flared aside at the craggy, brown, long-jawed face and the blue eyes with their fuzzy eyebrows and the impossible clout bound above them. “I think so,” she said. “But I can’t say I understand you. One day you talk about woman’s slavery and the next you talk like this. I don’t mind your taking my husband’s side against me–or what you think is my husband’s side. Sometimes I do myself. But I want you to know, Mrs. Elliott, that I don’t consider our marriage a slavery for either of us. We decide things together. You think he