Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “I don’t suppose Ollie’s likely to get either broken ribs or liver trouble. You keep saying he’s the healthiest child in the world.”

  “Because I take care of him!”

  He had sifted some larger pebbles from the sand and was throwing them absently at the dike of drift and kelp. His eyes followed with stubborn inattention the playful swoops of the perambulator at the sea’s edge. “I wasn’t going to ask you to rough it. I don’t think you should have to. I was thinking you could live in La Paz, where it’s civilized. I could get in every few weeks.”

  “The way we are now?” she said with bitterness. “I’ve seen you once in two weeks. Have you enjoyed being apart?”

  His eyes were lidded and unrevealing. “No,” he said without looking at her. “Not one minute of it. Our trouble is, I picked a bad profession for a home life. I don’t know what we can do about that, not till we get established.” Now his eyes did meet hers. “Anyway I thought you might be enjoying yourself. I thought you liked this place.”

  “When you’re here I love it. Look at it, who wouldn’t? It’s wonderful for Ollie. But when you’re gone I go crazy with boredom and loneliness.”

  He threw the last pebble and brushed the sand from his hands, looking away down the beach, across the trickle of water that came from the lagoon behind them, cut through the dike of drift, and braided across the sand to meet the incoming foam. The water against the foot of the promontory was uneasy and sinking, and Susan looked past her husband to the windows in the cliff, and through them to the heaving sea beyond, pure and sunlit and brightly focused and small like a view through reversed binoculars. As she watched, the whole sea lifted, a green billow rose and drowned the cave and lashed against the rock. Over the promontory’s furzy top she saw an explosion of tumstones tossed up just above the burst of spray. They were like sandpipers at the edge of the surf—they lived inches from the water and their feet were never wet.

  The spray fell back, the turnstones settled out of sight, the hollow shore boomed, the green water was sucked away from the inside of the cliff, the rock streamed, the windows opened, pouring, and through them she saw again the miniature, bright, far glimpse of whitecapped sea, and a line of horizon marked in dark blue.

  Oliver took his eyes off the tumultuous embrace of land and sea, and turned them on her. He smiled without showing his teeth, a rubbery lip-smile. Then, as if the attempt had generated the reality, he was really smiling. He shook his head, shrugged, banged his hands on his thighs and threw them into the air like a little explosion of spray or seabirds. “All right. I’ll tell Conrad. Potosí is out .”

  His magnanimity nearly broke her down. In a choking voice she managed to say, “I’m sorry. I know what it costs you.”

  “It doesn’t cost me much. Some excitement I’d probably have enjoyed. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the separation. I needed to be reminded that you and Ollie can’t really live in places like that.”

  “Something else is sure to show up.”

  “I suppose. But that’s the only thing in a month. Every mining engineer in San Francisco is sitting in his empty office playing solitaire.”

  “We can hold out a long time yet.”

  “If I don’t find something we can hold out about three more weeks.”

  “We haven’t touched my money. I’ve got the commission for that Boyesen ballad, and I’ve been drawing Santa Cruz. I’m sure I can sell Thomas another article...”

  “That’s fine,” Oliver said. “I’m proud of you. It’s not your success we have to worry about. Meantime it’s my job to support my family. Next time we move I want to have the train fare.”

  “Will you never let me forget that?” she said, and send him a smiling, pleading, puckered face. When he got that mulish look there was no talking to him. She had only herself to blame. So in a pretense of relaxation and freedom from care she leaned back against the driftwood log and sighed as if happily and tipped her face upward toward the sky scoured by the sea wind.

  “You mustn’t worry,” she said. “Your chance will come. I didn’t mean it when I said this place drove me crazy. How could it, it’s so beautiful. I’ve missed you, that’s all. Now you’re back, and Ollie is so healthy and happy, and it’s lovely.” He did not answer, and she had to lie there stiffly relaxing until her back began to hurt. She straightened. “I gather nothing came of your experiment with cement.”

  “When I got through with it it was still limestone and clay. It never even made clinker.”

  “Couldn’t you try again?”

  “Sure. I’ll take some more samples back tomorrow. I’ve got to have something to do besides walk from office to office and sit with my feet on other people’s desks. But that’s just an experiment, not a job.”

  “You say there’s a big demand for hydraulic cement if anyone in this country could learn how to make it.”

  “Demand? Sure. It’s all shipped in from England now.”

  “It might be profitable.”

  “What are you dreaming about?” Oliver said. “Suppose I did succeed in making it. To make it profitable you’d have to build a plant from scratch—land leases, buildings, machinery, cooperage, shipping, God knows what else. Money. Big money.”

  “You could get someone to back you.”

  Now she had got his full attention. He stared at her out of the corners of his eyes, suspicious and ready to laugh. “Are you suggesting I go into the cement business? I’m an engineer, not a capitalist ”

  “But if you could get someone to back you, couldn’t you design the machinery, and do all that construction that you like so, and maybe be manager or superintendent or something?”

  “You’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Why couldn’t you?”

  “Recipe for rabbit pie,” he said. “First catch rabbit.”

  “Oliver, I’m absolutely sure thee can do it!”

  “And while chasing rabbits, find some way to support family.”

  “The family can support itself.”

  “Not while head of family is healthy,” Oliver said. “I’ll find something, surveying or something else.”

  “But I want thee to experiment with cement!”

  “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 tumstones, 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 pr
omontory 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 add with diaper odors. Bedsprings squeaked. “Yes?” said Marian’s voice.

  “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 Potosi?” The baby sighed and slobbered at her breast. “Wait,” she whispered. “Let me get him taken care of.”

  He hung from her breast like a ripe fruit ready to fall. His eyes were closed, then open, then closed again. When she detached him, milk bubbled over his chin, and she wiped him off, scolding him for a piggy. He threw up so easily, not like an adult retching and covered with cold sweat. His wasn’t sickness at all, things came up as easily as they went down. It was as if he were still used to the forward and backward flow of his mother’s blood washing his food into him the way the sea washed food into an anemone on a rock. And her blood still remembered him: Was it perhaps his hunger that had awakened her this morning, and not his cry? She hated the thought that he must become a separate, uncomfortable metabolism cursed with effort and choice.

  As she spread a dry diaper on her shoulder and hoisted him up, she sent toward Oliver, still watching her, a look that she meant should express her triumph and encouragement. Excelsior! But his eyes shone at her, his face was full of a not-too-patient waiting. Another hunger to be appeased. She felt a dismayed wonder at how strangely nature has made us. She thought she would prefer to remain posed there before him as the idealized figure of protective motherhood, but her skin was prickly with the touch of his eyes as she walked the baby up and down, she felt the pliancy of the uncorseted body under her nightgown, she fully understood the sensuousness of her barefoot walk.

  The baby squirmed, and she leaned back to look into his eyes. Dark blue. Did they know her? Of course they did; he smiled. Or was it a gas pain? He lifted his head on its wobbling neck a
nd tried to focus over her shoulder at where he had just been. (That early, the historical perspective.) A great belch burst out of him, his head wobbled with the recoil. “There!” she laughed softly. “Now we’re comfortable.” She took him to the window to show him the morning, and to delay what awaited her when she turned around.

  As usual, the casement opened on fog as white and blind as sleep. Beyond the wet shingles whose edge was overflowed by the ghost of a climbing rose, there were no shapes, solidities, directions, or distances. The world as far as she could see it, which was about fifteen feet, was soaking; she breathed something halfway between water-sodden air and air-thinned water. There was a slow, dignified dripping. A geranium leaf pasted to the raised and weathered grain of the sill had condensed in its cup a tiny lens as bright as mercury, in which, moving, she saw her own face tiny as a grass seed. Another face appeared beside it, an arm came around her waist. She shivered.

  “Hello, Old Timer,” Oliver said to the baby. He bent to look out the window. “Thick out there.”

  “I love it,” Susan said. “In a way, I love it. It scares me a little. It’s as if every morning the world had to create itself all new. Everything’s still to do, the word isn’t yet spoken. It’s like standing in front of a whited block that you have to make into a picture. No matter how many times I watch it happen, I’m never sure it will happen next time. I keep thinking I’m looking into our life, and it’s as vague and unclear as that. And now cement’s going to change everything.”

  “I don’t know that cement’s any easier to see through than fog.”

  But she was too happy to be teased. They stood, she thought, the quintessential family, looking out from their sanctuary into the vague but hopeful unknown. Undoubtedly she thought of the window they stood at as a magic casement. Couldn’t she hear the perilous seas? It is difficult to imagine Grandmother having to respond to the great moments of her life without all that poetry that she and Augusta had read together.

  A drop as heavy as a ball bearing fell on the wet shingles. Beyond the ghostly edge of the roof there were only the faintest, tentative charcoal lines of form-suggested roses, vague mounds of shrubs down below, a tall dimness that would become a tree. From right, left, above, below, so pervasive that it seemed to tremble in the sill under her hand, she heard the Santa Cruz sound, at once laboring and indolent, a sound that both threatened and soothed, that could not make up its mind whether to become clearly what it was, or to go on muttering as formlessly as summer thunder too lazy for lightning. “Hear the sea?” she said.