“They got along,” I said. “They respected each other. They treated one another with a sort of grave infallible kindness.”
I saw her thin shoulders shrink and shiver. Still without turning, she said, “It sounds just ... awful. And yet he must have been a warm and decent man, to think of making a rose in memory of his daughter. And he had been-you say—treated badly, and still he was big enough to take her back.”
“He was a warm and decent man,” I said. I stared in hatred at her thin narrow back, I felt my voice rising and could not keep it down. “He was as decent a man as ever lived!” I said furiously. “He was the kindest, most trusting, easiest-to-get-on-with man I ever knew. My father always made me uneasy, but my grandfather made me feel safe. All he had to do was take hold of my hand and I was in the King’s X place.”
Even yet she did not turn, though she must have heard the edge of hysteria cracking in my voice. Dully she said to the bowie and horse pistol and spurs, “But you were fond of her too.”
“I loved her. She was a lady.”
“A lady who made a terrible mistake.”
“And recognized it,” I said. “Admitted it, repented it, accepted the consequences, did her best to live it down. Her real mistake was that she never appreciated him enough until it was too late.”
The still, thin, bowed back never moved; she seemed hypnotized by the belted weapons on the wall. Her voice was small when it came. “What makes you think ...”
I moved the tray aside, tipping over half a glass of milk, and set it on the table by the window. The very way she stood, facing away from me, submissive but reproachful, made me mad. I hit the power button, I rolled over behind her. It was all I could do to keep from raising my hands and hitting her on her frail shoulderblades. I wanted to slap her until she turned around and cowered and listened, really listened. I heard my voice let go in shouting, my stump flopped around my lap.
“But he never forgave her,” I said. “She broke something she couldn’t mend. In all the years I lived with them I never saw them kiss, I never saw them put their arms around each other, I never saw them touch!”
I was strangling on my words, my tongue was three times too big for my mouth. Weeping, I wheeled into the bathroom and slammed the door.
For a long time I heard nothing. I sat in the bathroom’s reflective dazzle of light and glared at the one-legged poltroon-from Italian poltrona, a large chair—in the mirror above the washbowl. Stains of tears on the face, a gritting impotent anguish around the mouth, eyes that burned, hair that was gray, thin, and mussed. Napkin still spread in his lap from his invalid’s tray, and under the napkin a jerky, spasmodic twitching, as if a monstrous phallus were being moved by fitful satyriasis in its sleep.
I saw him grow alert, not by cocking his head as an ordinary man might do, but by swinging the chair a little way around. He left contemplating himself in the mirror and rolled silently, a wheel’s turn across the tiles, to listen at the door.
“Where is he?” I heard Shelly’s deep voice say.
“In the bathroom,” said the other voice. “How’s your mother?”
“All right, I guess. They’ve given her digitalfs.”
“Her heart, is it?”
“I guess. A lot of pain in her chest and down her arm, and her pulse all irregular, way up and racing one second, and the next so faint you could hardly feel it. Arrhythmia, they call it. It isn’t necessarily so serious, but it’s scary. She really had us panicked.”
Careful female voices, a dark and a light, carefully friendly, carefully open. They came on invisible waves through the hollow-core door to the rigid head, the listening ear. The light one said, “It must have been frightening. You shouldn’t have tried to come over here.”
“Oh, no trouble,” said the dark one. “She’s all right now. But she was worried about Mr. Ward. Has he had anything to eat?”
“I fixed him a tray.”
“Oh. How about his bath?”
“His bath?”
“He has to have a hot bath every night, to soak out the pain so he can sleep.”
“Yes. Well, I’ll see that he takes it.”
“He can’t take it. He has to be given it. He can’t climb in and out of a bath tub with one leg.”
“All right, then I’ll give it to him.”
“I’d better do it. I know the routines.”
I could not see the face of the man in the chair, listening behind the door, but I could feel the sweat that had been greasy on his skin ever since the woman arrived on the porch. The politeness was still there in the women’s voices, but it was under a strain, it could crack any minute.
“Have you ... given him his bath before?” said Light.
“Not usually. Mom does it,” said Dark.
“Ever?” said Light.
“What does it matter?” said Dark. “I know how it’s done, you don’t.”
Pause. Finally Light said, “Since you haven’t given it to him before, I think I could do it quite as well, and a little more appropriately. There’s really no need of your staying, Miss ...”
“Rasmussen,” said Dark. “Mrs. And I don’t know about that appropriateness. Where have you been all summer, while we’ve been taking care of him? If he didn’t want us to take care of him he wouldn’t have hired us.”
But he didn’t! said the man listening ratlike behind the door.
“I understood that he had hired you as a secretary,” said Light.
That’s right! said the man behind the door. Your mother ran you out the one time you tried to come in! You stay out of here!
To his horror the door burst open, she came in, rolling him back. She seemed to have grown two feet, she was huge and broad-shouldered in a turtle-necked jersey within which her unconfined breasts bulged like eggplants, like melons. The man in the chair tried to dart past her out into the studio, but she blocked his way, shut the door, and put it on the chain.
“All right,” she said cheerfully. “No tricks, now.”
Like a bug trapped in a matchbox he darted from comer to corner. The door opened an inch, all the chain would allow, and he saw Ellen Ward’s face peering in. She was pounding angrily on the door with her fists. The bathroom was as hollow as a drum.
“Now,” said Shelly Rasmussen, turning on the hot water. Steam billowed up, half concealing her. Stooping to flop a hand in the rising water, she had to turn her face. Her hand clawed back her wet hair. With an impatient grunt she sat back from the tub and hauled the jersey over her head and threw it aside and bent back in, testing. Her great breasts hung into the tub, steam rose around her. Terribly smiling, nine feet tall, she stood up in the cloud of steam and put her fists on her hips. The eyes of her breasts looked at him insolently. As if amused by his fascinated, terrified, hypnotized gaze, she did a little bump and grind.
“Come on!” she cried. “Let’s have a look at you. Off with those clothes.”
She approached, he retreated, darted, got his hand on the chain, had to let go as she lunged. Ellen was pounding on the outside of the door, the tub was filling, the room was white with steam. For a wild instant his face raced across the mirror, a smear of terror, and then she had him. Her hands were at his fly, unzipping, tugging—the pants were gone. He clung to his shirt until it was torn from his back. He sat exposed in his underwear, his urine bottle strapped to his leg, its tube disappearing inside the slit of his shorts.
“Ah-ha!” cried Shelly Rasmussen. “You old dickens! Come on now, no secrets from me!”
Leaning over his chair, her great breasts hanging like water-filled balloons inches from his nose, she tried to tear his protecting hands away. He fought her off but she was back at once. He fought her off again, and she got hold of the tube and pulled, so that he had to spread his hands to cover his emerging organ, yanked like a fish out of water. “Ha ha!” she said. “You old dickens, look at that!”
To his horror, he felt the stump of his leg begin to swell and lift, filling with pleasurable war
mth. It rose until it lifted clear out of his lap like a fireplace log, its stitched and cicatriced end red and swollen. He saw Shelly Rasmussen’s admiration. She laughed, softly and hoarsely, and reached again.
“No!” he cried. “No!”
Weakly he pissed down the tube, and at once the great stump subsided, sank, went flabby, collapsed into his lap. Shelly Rasmussen took one disgusted look and grabbed up her turtleneck and left. She didn’t bother to shut the door, and now Ellen Ward stood above him looking down. Her eyes were dark, and their edges were red with crying, she touched the deflated stump with tenderness. “You see?” she said. “It wasn’t right to let her. It’s my job.”
Her face was close to his, so close that he could see the mottled coloring of the irises and the smudged skin under the tight curly hair of her brows where she had darkened them. She bent closer still, her mouth tender, her eyes sad. The eyes grew enormous, widened until they filled the whole field of his vision, shutting out the glare of light on white tile, the aseptic porcelain, the blank mirror. Closer and larger grew her eyes until, blurred by proximity, inches from his own, they were the eyes that a lover or a strangler would have seen, bending to his work.
That was the dream I woke from half an hour ago, my pajamas soaked with sweat, my bottle full—it was a piss-the-bed dream if I ever had one, but confusingly like a wet dream of adolescence too. It took me, in fact, all of five minutes to persuade myself that it was all a dream, that I had really pissed the bottle full instead of having an emission, that none of those women had been there, that Ada had had no heart attack, that Shelly had not come in brawling like a drunken logger to rape me in my bath. It made me think, I tell you. I am not so silly as to believe that what I dream about other people represents some sort of veiled or occult truth about them, but neither am I so stupid as to reject the fact that it represents some occult truth about me.
For a while I lay here feeling pretty bleak-old, washed-up, helpless, and alone. It was as black as a coalmine, there was no sound through the open window, not the slightest threshing or singing of the pines. Then I heard a diesel coming on the freeway, taking a full-tilt run at the hill. In my mind I could see it charging up that empty highway like Malory’s Blatant Beast, its engine snorting and bellowing, its lights glaring off into dark trees and picking up the curve of white lines, a blue cone of flame riding six inches above its exhaust stack, its song full of exultant power. I listened to it and felt the little hairs rise on the back of my neck, tickling me where my head met the pillow.
Then the inevitable. The song of power weakened by an almost imperceptible amount, and no sooner had that sound of effort come into it than the tone changed, went down a full third, as the driver shifted. Still powerful, still resistless, the thing came bellowing on, and then its tone dropped again, and almost immediately a third time. Something was out of it already; confidence was out of it. I could imagine the driver, a midget up in the dim cab, intent over his web of gears, three sticks of them, watching the speedometer and the steepening road and the cone of fire above his stack, and tilting his ear to the moment when the triumphant howl of his beast began to waver or shrink. Then the foot, the hand, and for a few seconds, a half minute, the confident song of power again, but lower, deeper, less excited and more determined. Down again where the grade stiffened past Grass Valley, and then down, down, down, three different tones, and finally there it was at the dutiful bass growl that would take it all the way over the range, and even that receding, losing itself among the pines.
I reached the microphone off the bed table and told my dream onto tape, for whatever it may be worth, and now I lie here on my back, wide awake, cold from my sweating, the plastic microphone lying against my upper lip and my thumb on the switch, and wonder if there is anything I want to say to myself.
“What do you mean, ’Angle of Repose?” she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother’s life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet it was not that that I hoped to find when I began to pry around in Grandmother’s life. I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
It will do to think about. For though Ellen Ward was not here this afternoon and evening, I am sure she will be here, or her representatives will be here, sooner or later. If she does not come of her own volition, or at Rodman’s urging, I can even conceive, in this slack hour, that I might send for her. Could I? Would I?
Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.
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ANGLE OF REPOSE
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In the novel that marked his literary debut, Stegner depicts the dramatic, moving story of an Iowa farm wife whose spirit is tested by a series of events as cruel and inevitable as the endless prairie winters.
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Essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches, written over a period of twenty-five years, which expound upon the rapid changes in the West’s cultural and natural heritage.
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THE SPECTATOR BIRD
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Sixteen brilliant essays about the people, the land, and the art of the American West.
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