Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  He held out his hand, and gazing at it with admiration he appeared to write on his extended palm. “I think he’d like to see your drawing,” Lizzie said.

  Reluctantly, hoping he would not take hold of it with his hands, she turned the pad down toward him so that he could see. His arm would not stretch so far, he craned and squinted with the sun in his eyes. Impulsively Susan tore the sheet off the pad, and with gestures that he was to keep it, dropped it down toward him. It planed on the wind, and he pursued it with agility, captured it in a clump of coyote brush. He admired it extravagantly, all but kissing his fingers. A masterpiece.

  “Por nada,” she knew enough to say in response to his multiple thanks, and she gave him her best adios when he roused Sancho and the other mules and they circled back up the hill and around the house to the trail. The last she saw of the old man he was holding the picture against his chest as tenderly as if it had been a holy relic.

  She had a warm glow at having done something gracious for one of the poor; she liked his admiration even while she smiled at it; she had the feeling of having made a friend. The fact was, she had been somewhat nettled by the comment of one of the Cornish wives, repeated to her by amused Lizzie: “Mister Ward’s missus can picture anything, but what else is she able for?” She told herself that Mexicans, themselves more picturesque than the whey-faced Cornish, better understood the value of picturing.

  But what would she have done if she had not had Lizzie? The thought of picking up that handkerchief gave her gooseflesh.

  “Let’s rest a minute, Lizzie,” she said, and leaned back against the tree. Lizzie, sitting on the bulging root of a bay tree with her dark hair down and a makeshift A of red ribbon on her breast, gave up the effort to stare with an expression of guilty passion at an invisible Arthur Dimmesdale. She had a womanly body and a handsome face, with high cheekbones and a straight nose and straight, heavy, severe brows. But her expression was naturally impassive. She had trouble simulating Hester Prynne’s pride and recklessness, and Susan could not instruct her too explicitly without risking reflections on Lizzie’s closed past. The figure she had drawn satisfied her, and she had transformed the bay root into something appropriate to Hawthorne’s dark wood, but the face wouldn’t come right. In the last two hours it had been through every expression from Lizzie’s native stoniness to a horrible leer, and it was now rubbed out for the fourth or fifth time.

  She did not feel like drawing, but felt she must. She had signed a contract, they needed the money, she ought to keep her hands and mind occupied—there were a dozen reasons. Yet she would rather have sat torpidly and let dim thoughts coil through her head. The air was oppressive, as if it might rain, though she knew it could not rain for weeks or months yet. She drew it down to the bottom of her lungs, with its freight of dust and mold and the herb-cupboard smells of these woods, and she would have given anything for the breath of a hay meadow or the dank mossy air around the spring above Long Pond. Even the sounds here were dry and brittle; she longed for sounds that were sponged up by green moss. She felt half sick again.

  Brooding, she watched Lizzie take advantage of the rest to change Georgie’s diaper. The little man-thing squirmed and rolled and gurgled, grabbing for the ribbon pinned on his mother’s breast, but she took hold of his ankles and yanked his bottom into the air and efficiently shoved under it a dry flour-sack diaper with the faded word EXCELSIOR on it. With two swift motions she pinned him. She made one unsmiling tickling poke at his exposed navel and laid him back in his box. No nonsense with that fatherless mite, who already seemed to have learned some of Lizzie’s stoicism. He took what life handed him and did not complain. Susan had heard him cry only five or six times.

  There was something tragic about Lizzie. Was it a disastrous marriage or the betrayal of a good girl? For Lizzie was a good girl-Grandmother was not so genteel as to deny it, however Georgie was fathered. But once when she had asked Lizzie if it would help her to talk about her life, Lizzie had only said briefly, “Best not get into it ”

  Thousands of miles from friends or kin, with no husband to look after her, she bore her life patiently. When she worked she often sang to Georgie, sounding entirely happy; but once, starting to sing him to sleep, she started “Bye Baby Bunting,” and stopped as if someone had knocked on the door.

  She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. Yet she was much liked by the Cornish women who came visiting, and apparently needed no other company, was less obviously lonely than Susan. Susan wondered if her own discontent was a weakness or if it was only a manifestation of greater sensibility. Was there something gnarly and tough about working-class people that kept them from feeling all that more delicately organized natures felt? If Georgie died, would Lizzie be prostrated, apathetic, and despairing, as Augusta still was, or would she rise in the morning, supported by some coarse strength, and build her fire and make breakfast and go on as before?

  Susan could not imagine how it would be to know your husband for a brute, and determine to leave him. She would not even attempt to imagine being the victim of a seducer. She could not conceive the feelings of a woman who carried the child of a man she despised. But she had some inkling of how it felt to carry a child, for she had missed her last two periods. Nausea hung along the edge of her awareness like the fogfall that hung along the ridge but never rolled over.

  What if she had no husband? All to go through alone, out here in this crude camp away from everything dear and safe? Like a magic-lantern slide the magnified image gleamed in her mind: Oliver’s fair head, touched with the reddish early sun, sinking into the hole at the Kendall shaft to the groaning of the slow wheels. What if he never came back from one of those trips underground? A broken cable, a cave-in, an explosion, black damp, any of a dozen dangers he risked every day, could snuff him out. Then what? Oh, back home, back home! At once. Poor Susan, she went West with her husband and it was hardly three months before he was killed. No, I don’t believe she’ll marry again -she married rather late as it was, and she was much in love. I believe she will return to her career, live quietly at Milton in her father’s house and have her old friends down from New York as before. Her dear friend Augusta, who also suffered a terrible personal loss, will have another baby, only a few months older than Susan’s. Her sister Bessie now has two, less than a half mile down the lane. The children can grow up together, they will be inseparable.

  The element of longing in her fantasy appalled her. He was too dear to her, she could never survive his loss. But how lovely it would be, all the same, to be back home, to have a woman to talk to-her mother, Bessie, best of all Augusta. She almost envied Lizzie the crude companionship of the Cornish wives.

  Lizzie glanced up, and for a moment Susan saw in her face the expression she had been trying for all morning-the question that gleamed from the up-glancing eyes, the recklessness of the falling hair. “Wait,” she said. “Stay just as you are.” But she had barely picked up pencil and pad when Lizzie said, looking down through the woods, “Here comes Mr. Ward with somebody.”

  “We’ll stop,” Susan said, and stood up. “My goodness, I wonder what ... ?”

  Fearing emergency, she hurried, but when she met him at the gate she saw that he was relaxed and cheerful, in his mine clothes but not smeared with mud as he always was if he had been underground. The dark young man with him was Baron Starling, an Austrian engineer. They had only come to let Starling change into mine clothes.

  Going up the steps, Susan gave Oliver a meaningful look. “Not in my bedroom,” she meant it to say. “The spare room, even if it is full of trunks.” But he led the baron straight to the bedroom door and showed him in and shut the door behind him.

  “Oh, why did you take him in there!” she said to him, low-voiced.

  Oliver looked surprised. “Where else could I take him?”

  “But my bedrooml”

  He looked at her, frowning. The mulish look was gathering in his face, but she was too annoyed to care. “I’m sorr
y,” he said at last. “I guess I was thinking of it as our bedroom.”

  Rebuked and angry, she was facing him on the veranda when the baron came out, ridiculous in Oliver’s too-large clothes, sleeves rolled up and trouser cuffs turned up, like a girl dressed up as a man. He had thick brown hair and great brown girl’s eyes, and he gave her what she supposed he supposed was a winning smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Now I am better prepared.”

  “You’re very welcome.” She turned her eyes on Oliver, sulky on the veranda rail, and since she was condemned to this sort of hospitality in which her privacy was invaded and her home at the command of every stray engineer or geologist, she said, “Aren’t you going to eat before you go down?”

  “We’ll share my lunch pail. We have to be down there when the labor isn’t being worked in, when the men are eating.” His eyes locked with hers, he smiled as if he knew his smile would be misinterpreted. “Maybe tea when we come out?”

  “Of course.”

  They went off down the trail toward the Kendall shaft house, and she flew inside to write indignantly to Augusta. I cannot tell you how it offended me to have a strange man taken into my bedroom. We must furnish our spare room at once if this sort of thing is to happen often.

  Oliver and the baron returned late in the afternoon, soggy from the hot mine and the hotter trail. They sat on the veranda and had a glass of ale, and she drank with them because she would not be less than polite and also because she had been told that ale was good for queasiness.

  For a while the two men were talking techniques of timbering in different kinds of rock, and she was silent. But then the baron made an effort to bring her into the conversation, broke off and turned to her to praise the house and the view, and to remark respectfully that he had heard she was a splendid artist, and to apologize for being so ill-educated as not to know her work. Oliver went and got The Skeleton in Armor and The Hanging of the Crane and some old copies of Scribner’s and St. Nicholas and laid them in Starling’s lap. Starling was charmed. He praised the quality of sentiment she was able to convey in a mere posture, the tilt or lowering of a head. She brought out her Scarlet Letter blocks, and Starling was amused to find in Oliver and Lizzie the recognizable originals of Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. Pressed for criticism, he ventured to point out a certain stiffness in one of the figures, a criticism that she accepted almost with enthusiasm.

  It was Oliver’s turn to sit outside the conversation. She and the baron were eagerly tracing the relations of the Dusseldorf painters to the Hudson River school, and discussing the advantages and disadvantages of studying art abroad, in the midst of cultural traditions different from and of course much richer than your own. Susan regretted never having had the opportunity, not yet; and the baron kept assuring her that the only thing an American could learn abroad was technique, that he must deal with New World subject matters if his art was to have integrity. As hers had. Those drawings could not have been made by anyone but an American artist. The understanding. The sensitivity to local character and landscape and costume and, yes, even physiognomy.

  At a certain point Susan lifted her eyes to Oliver, realizing it was quite late, and asked a silent question that got a silent answer. “Won’t you stay to supper—a very simple supper?” she asked the baron. The baron was delighted A brief trip inside, a word to Lizzie, and she was back on the porch, talking.

  Supper was a rattle and volley of opinions, reminders, acknowledgments, and discoveries of shared tastes. Starling was not only posted on art, he had read books. He was keen on Mr. James, he could quote Goethe, he had theories that the American tale was an indigenous form, quite different from the German Novelle. He was quick to shift the topic from Theodor Storm, whom Susan had not read, to Turgenev, whom she had. He tried to explain to her the precise meaning of the German term Stimmung. Listening to him, she was humiliated to see that Oliver had not properly washed his hands for supper: there was a dark smudge on one thumb.

  When Lizzie had cleared away they tried the veranda again, but found it chilly. So silent Oliver lit a fire in the Franklin stove and they sat for two more hours talking about the Turco-Serbian difficulties that might involve Austria-Hungary, and hence the baron, in war; and of the reputation of Wagner, whom Starling thought overpraised by people more intent on being fashionable than in listening to music.

  Oliver sat listening, nearly silent. When the baron finally, regretfully, rose to leave, he lighted a lantern and prepared to escort him down to Mother Fall’s. On the veranda steps Starling took Susan’s hand and kissed it. “Never,” he said to her earnestly in his almost-perfect English, “never in the world would I have dreamed that an evening like this could be spent in an American mining camp.”

  When Oliver returned, Susan was still by the fire. She had been thinking unhappily how far out of the conversation Oliver was, just as he had been out of it during his one evening at the studio with Augusta and Thomas. How limitedly practical his talents were! His brother-in-law Conrad Prager, by contrast, would have risen gracefully to such an evening, would have been able to talk about books, art, and music, would probably have read Theodor Storm, would have quoted the baron back some Goethe. But Oliver, in such circumstances, fell silent, over-matched. No sooner had she had that treasonable thought than she was flooded with contrite affection, and determined to bring her old boy into things and not let him be shut out. But when he opened the door and stepped in and levered up the lantem’s glass and blew out the flame and came to sit beside her, and she opened her mouth to say something, what did she say? She praised the baron.

  “Wasn’t he charming?” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve found anyone easier to talk to.”

  With his legs outstretched before the fire, he seemed to ponder. Finally he said, “Kendall wants to make him my assistant ”

  “Oh, good!” But he did not answer, only cocked his eyebrow, and so she said, “It would be good, wouldn’t it?”

  “Good for supper parties. Not for the mine.”

  “Why, what’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s too soft.”

  “Soft? He’s cultivated!”

  “I wasn’t talking about his culture, I was talking about his capacities down the mine.” He unlaced his fingers from across his chest and showed her the back of one hand. What in the candlelight at supper she had thought a smudge at the base of the thumb was a scraped, swollen, discolored bruise. “See that? If I didn’t have that, he’d probably be dead.”

  It seemed all he was going to say. He looked sleepy and inert with the firelight on his face. Resentfully she waited. Finally she gave in. “Tell me.”

  “Just a symptom. We were in the labor—you know, the stope, where they’re getting out ore, a sort of hollowed-out room along the vein. There’s a lot of loose rock, it isn’t timbered. You have to keep your eyes open. He leaned over to examine the face, and I saw dirt and pebbles fall out of the ceiling onto his shoulder. He should have felt it, too. I yelled at him, Back!‘, something like that, and what did he do? He turned around with those big deer’s eyes soft and wondering, and said, Pardon?’ When a man hollers at you down a mine and says jump, you’d better jump, not ask questions.”

  He sat blinking at the fire. “Then what?” Susan said. “How did you hurt yourself? I’m sorry, I never noticed.”

  “I pushed him. A slab fell right where he’d been leaning. Just nicked me.” He put the bruise to his mouth as if kissing it.

  “You saved his life. At the risk of your own!”

  “Nothing quite that heroic. The point is I shouldn’t have had to push him. You just can’t work with a man who turns around and wonders why you’re yelling at him.”

  She sat quietly. She did not doubt Oliver’s judgment of Starling, not now. She was only rebellious against the conditions of their life, which excluded, except perhaps in positions of control such as Conrad Prager had, men sensitive enough to appreciate the finer things. She knew without any question, no matter what he said,
that Oliver’s act had been heroic; but she still wished he were more competent in cultivated conversation.

  Then he hoisted his eyebrows at the fire, looking across the hands he had folded under his chin, and said through his mustache, with the edge of sullenness in his voice, “Maybe you think I’m going to recommend against him because he fell in love with you. That isn’t so.”

  “Oh, fell in love!”

  “Of course he did. At first sight. Bang.” He turned his sleepy face. “Why wouldn’t he? So did I.”

  It was precisely the right thing to say. It absolved him of jealousy and spread balm on her irritations and reassured her that she had not the slightest regret. If Thomas Hudson himself were available, she would still choose Oliver Ward. They sat up together—close together-by the open fire until the coals had fallen into ash, and all was reaffirmed and renewed. Grandmother had her identity back, having had the baron to reflect it for an evening. He was the first young man with a genteel education to encounter her in the camps and backwoods that framed much of her life. He would not be the last, nor the last to fall in love with her rosy animated face and her interest in anything that moved, especially anything that talked.

  I doubt that she reopened the matter of her violated bedroom. Instead, I would guess that she took advantage of the renewed tenderness between them to tell him, with all the hesitancy demanded by her times and training, that he was going to have an heir, a fact that Augusta had known for a month.

  What did he say? I am utterly unable to guess. He was not one to say much under any circumstances. He was too concerned about her safety and comfort to be very pleased that it was to happen in that mining camp, and too pinched economically to be pleased it was to happen so soon. But he was too much in love not to be awed and grateful at what she had done for him, or what they had done together.

  What was there for a young husband of 1876 to say? Something ineffable, something like what William Clark wrote in his notebook when he and Meriwether Lewis saw the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia (O! the joy!)? Certainly not what I heard my son Rodman say when Leah telephoned him from her gynecologist’s office. (Shit!)