Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “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 bum 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. “Come on, Old Funeral Procession.” Her worn shoes—she had not changed them even for Christmas dinner and Christmas calls —were propped against the dash. The hands that held the lines were freckled like tortillas. Instead of a hat she wore a bandeau or clout around her head; from under it sprouted twists of rusty wire. Her face was brown leather. She looked to Susan, setting her teeth against a headache and desperate to be home, like something put together in the harness room, like one of her own impromptu dolls.

  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 g
rimly 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, “what should a wife in my position do, since we’re on this interesting personal subject?”

  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’s slaving in the City at something he dislikes, just to keep us in comfort down here, but let me tell you, I work too. It’s my money that pays our board.”

  “Is that so?” said Mrs. Elliott. “Then it’s worse than I thought.”

  5

  January 4, 1878

  Dearest Augusta—

  Christmas was such an utter failure for us that we have not quite recovered our hope for the future, which we planned in the crazy way people do ‘when hope looks true and all the pulses glow.’ Ten years on this coast and then home. Is ten years an eternity? Will you all be changed or dead; will we be ‘Western’ and brag about ’this glorious country’ and the general superiority of half-civilized to civilized societies?

  That sounds bitter. There are such good people here, but I simply can’t care for them! I fear I am too old to be transplanted. The part of me which friendship and society claim must wait, or perish in waiting.

  This is the way I feel when Oliver is in S.F. When he comes down, it is like high tide along the shore—all the wet muddy places sparkle with life and motion. I have discovered that I am not a serene person at all. I am fearfully down or else soaring. Perhaps I may reach a level resting-place in time. But this little bright town is a desert to me. I go about vacantly smiling upon people and feeling like a ghost....

  Good-bye, my darling other woman. It would not be well for one of us to be unmarried. It is better to go hand in hand, babies and all. But oh! it would be lovely to see you!

  February 6, 1878

  Dearest Augusta -

  Miss P. has just brought in little Oliver with his bib on and a chunk of beefsteak in his fat fist-raw steak. Do you approve? I didn’t when Mrs. Elliott first started it, but he seems to enjoy it immensely—any kind of food. His four front teeth are through and two more in the upper jaw are pressing. The gum looks clear over them and they will soon be through. He is so well. What a blessing it is. What should I do—what might I have done —with a sick baby and no doctor I could trust.

  It is an awfully hard winter in S.F. and Oliver’s negotiations continue to hang fire. Money is very tight and capitalists are holding on until better times. Oliver thought last week all was settled, but still he is obliged to wait in the most exasperating way. His patience is wonderful, it passeth my understanding. I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten. If he is beaten finally, I have made up my mind that I shall try to come home, for he will almost certainly have to take a place in some remote mine. I try to console myself for the injustice of what may happen with the fact that it may at least return me to where I may see you.

  February 15, 1878

  Dear Thomas—

  I sent you yesterday the large block and the vignette for my Santa Cruz article. Others will come shortly. I am working on them as hard as I can, for the immediate future seems more and more uncertain. Things are so crazy out here—the madman Denis Kearny is shouting that the Chinese must go, and many workingmen are unemployed and surly, so that men with capital, fearing the disaster that may occur to their existing plants if a full-scale anti-Chinese riot breaks out, hesitate to erect anything new. For of course the erection of anything new would involve Chinese labor. It is cheaper.

  You should be scolded for working so hard. Augusta writes that between converting old lovely Scribby into the new Century, and sitting on
commissions, and fighting Tammany, you are seldom in your bed before two or three. You must stop this, sir. You are too valuable a citizen to be allowed to destroy your health in however good a cause.

  March 4, 1878

  Darling Augusta—

  If nothing happens, I shall spend the apple blossom time in Milton, and the summer around generally, and not rejoin Oliver until at least the fall.

  We shall have to postpone cement, and with it our lighthouse on that windy point. It is such a hard year and they all say Oliver looks so young—and when they ask him how much it will cost to make cement he hasn’t the cheek to show a balance sheet with startling immediate profits, but says the plain truth, that he don’t know. However, there are men who say they will go in on it next year. Meantime we must live. So Oliver takes up the shovel and the hoe and tells me privately that he is glad enough to lay down the fiddle and the bow. He enjoyed the wrestle with rock and clay and the triumph of finally uniting them in an insoluble marriage, but he has hated the tedious and humiliating waiting on rich men, and all the talk.

  Mr. Prager has been appointed one of the commissioners to the Paris Exposition. My journey East will probably be made with them. If Oliver can only come part of the way with us it will not seem so cruel. He is at present negotiating about a place in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, the wildest of the wilds, where I cannot possibly take Ollie. But if he can come with us as far as Cheyenne, that will be four days together. I never thought that when I came back to you I would come hesitantly, but you will forgive me if I admit that coming back without Oliver will not be an unmixed blessing. But then I think of seeing you, and the long nights of talk. I am so restless with it all that I cannot write a decent letter. And I daren’t take a walk, I dare hardly look out the window, for fear of being reminded of that windy point overlooking the sweep of the Pacific. Who would have thought that the prospect of leaving this place could make me want to weep! Oliver takes it far better than I, though the hard work and the disappointment were mainly his.