Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  And something else: the sound of footsteps coming around the house, solid and heavy on the board walk.

  In one motion she snatched the dressing gown around her, crouched and jumped, soft-barefooted, and put herself back into the deeper dark of the hammock. The footsteps ceased, either because the walker had paused or because he had stepped off onto the lawn.

  “Anybody home?” his voice said.

  Tension flowed down her wrists and away. She breathed once, deeply. “Oh Frank! Come in, I’m on the piazza.”

  He stood above her, a troubling shadow, saying, “I thought everybody must have gone in for the celebration.”

  “Everybody else has. Wan and Sidonie and John left right after breakfast. Oliver celebrated the Fourth by doing John’s irrigating and I celebrated by cooking two meals.”

  He sniffed. “Smells like firecrackers.”

  “Can you still smell them? My nose is numb with gunpowder. We’ve been slapping out smoldering clothes and smearing lard on burned fingers all day. The children looked like the children of a charcoal burner.”

  “Wiley and I meant to come down, but his mare got cut up in the barbed wire, and we had to doctor her.”

  “You only missed a lot of noise and a headache. But the children were happy, and so they were good.”

  “I guess that’s what it takes.”

  “I guess.”

  “And now they’re all gone in to watch the pyrotechnics.”

  “They just left twenty minutes ago, they won’t have made it in time. I suppose they’re watching from the road.”

  His tall outline lounged across the opening, with the fountains of light playing on the sky behind it. She could barely see his face—couldn’t see it really, only the outline of his head and shoulders. Then he moved abruptly, pulling back against the pillar. “Excuse me, I’m cutting off your view.”

  “It’s all right. I’m not child enough to want to watch fireworks long.”

  “I was watching as I rode down the bench. Quite a show.”

  “Yes.”

  The distance rumbled and crackled with the bombardment, the lights flared and hung and died and flared again. “Did you want to see Oliver?” she said. “I’m afraid he won’t be back till quite late.”

  “I can see him tomorrow.”

  “How are things in the canyon?”

  “Glum.”

  “They’re no different here. Did you hear about that Burns?”

  “Oliver told me. He ought to be lynched.”

  From her darkness she studied his shape jackknifed against the sky frantic with bursting lights, and thought of the day she had entered Leadville, the day the man Oates who had jumped Oliver’s lot there had ended his life at the end of a rope in front of the jail. Frank had seen that—it had been an excitement that bulged his eyes and stammered on his lips when she first saw him. She thought also about the story they had heard from Tombstone-the murdered friend, the hard ride after the killer, the body swinging from a tree somewhere down in the Mexican desert. Frank had not only seen that, he had been one of the avengers. Perhaps his hand had knotted the rope or lashed the horse from under or cut the body down. It chilled her to think of. And yet in her present mood she was half inclined to think manly rage a better response to wrong than the self-blame of a man who trusted too much and then refused to condemn.

  “At the very least he should be taken to court,” she said. “Oliver won’t. He says it was his own carelessness.”

  “Everybody knows what Burns is. Court’s too good for him. A horsewhip might serve.”

  “But he’ll neither be horsewhipped nor sued,” Susan said. “He’ll be allowed to get away with it.”

  “Would you like me to horsewhip him? I’d love to.”

  “Ah,” she said, “you’re a loyal friend, Frank.” Then, because the feeling in her was like a boil that could have no relief except to burst, she burst. “Oh, when I think of Bessie and John I could simply diel To think that it’s our fault, and no cure for it!”

  Among the fountains of light that arched and showered down, intense green, red, yellow, and blue balls now burned in the air. Because he said nothing, and because she was ashamed of her outburst and afraid of silence, she said, shrugging out a little laugh, “How do they make all those colors?”

  “Colors?” Frank said. “Metallic salts. The yellow’s sodium, the white’s magnesium. Red’s calcium, I think, and the green may be copper salts, maybe barium. I don’t really know. I’m no fireworks expert.”

  “You’re an expert in so many things.” She felt almost as if she were going to vomit; she had to keep swallowing her Adam’s apple to keep it down. “I can’t imagine how a woman could have lived all those years in the canyon without her Corps of Engineers. That was the best time of all the West. I loved those years.”

  He made a small indeterminate noise, hm or mm or ha. The light of a rocket two and a half miles away brushed his face with ghastly green. She saw it shine and fade in his eyes. “I didn’t come down here to see Oliver, you know.”

  Almost to herself she said, “I know.”

  “I came down hoping they’d all be gone to town but you.”

  “Yes,” she said, though she felt she should not.

  “I never see you any more.”

  “But Frank, you see me all the time!”

  “In a crowd. With the family. Always managing a houseful.”

  “There’s been so much to do.”

  “Well that will be changed, at least.”

  His laugh was so short and unpleasant that it wrung her heart. The wretched ditch had changed him as it had changed them all.

  Beyond his lean profile the lights were coming less thickly, as if both enthusiasm and ammunition had run out. The booming and crackling were dying down, but the reddish mist still hung above the town. Speaking away from her, indifferently watching the dying-down of the fire fountains, he said, “I miss the rides, do you? I miss sitting while you draw me. I miss talking to you. I could stand it if I could just be alone with you once in a while, the way it used to be.”

  “But there were three whole years when you didn’t see me at all, and then more than a year when I was in Victoria.”

  “Yes. And I’m a dead pigeon the minute I see you again, no matter how long it’s been. Remember that day in the canyon, just when you were getting ready to leave? I had myself all persuaded. You were a friend, no more. Then I looked up from that corral and saw you waving from the doorway and I blew down like an old shed. The whole place was abandoned, there was nothing but failure in sight, and there you were in your white dress looking as cool and immaculate as if you were just about to call on somebody. Going down with all flags flying, the way you would. I don’t know, you looked so brave and untouched up there on the hill, I...”

  “Brave?” she said in a weak voice. “Untouched? Oh no!”

  “Oh yes. You’re one thing I am an expert on.”

  “There are no flags flying now.”

  “Plenty in Boise. Hip hip hurrah. Statehood.”

  She had to laugh. “Isn’t it ridiculous? Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t it pitiful, even. Years ago, when we left you in Leadville and went to Mexico, I fell in love with Mexican civilization, and the grace of their housekeeping, and the romantic medieval way they lived ...”

  “I know. I read your articles. Down in Tombstone.”

  “Did you? Oh, that makes me feel good. I was talking to you without knowing it. Then you remember those great houses we stopped at coming home, Queréndaro, Tepetongo, Tepetitlán, and the others. That’s what Oliver’s dreamed of making here. He wanted to build me such a place. Even the tile floors-those are Mexican. The stone and adobe house, and the way it nearly encloses a courtyard. It was going to enclose it completely some day-well, you remember from the canyon, when we used to plan it so carefully-so from the outside rooms we could look outward on this reclaimed desert, and from the inner rooms we’d see only the protected center—flowers, and stillness, and
the dripping of water, and the sound of Wan singing through his nose.”

  “Maybe yet,” Frank said.

  “No. Never.”

  “You don’t think so?” he said, and then, “Maybe not,” and then, after a second, “I suppose not,” and then after quite a long pause, “So I’ll be on my way again.”

  She was silent for longer than he had been; she could find no answer except to deny what she knew was true, to quote him Oliver’s hope in which she had no faith at all. “It might... maybe they can reorganize. Oliver thinks ... He can surely find some way to keep us all together.”

  “How?” Frank said. He sat against the pillar with his legs drawn up and softly slapped his gloves into the palm of one hand. His profiled silhouette remained still, near, and troubling against the sky restless with light. “Even if he could,” he said.

  “Please don’t,” she said to his indifferent profile. “Please try to find a way to stay. If you go, where will I get my comfort?”

  “If I stay, where will I get mine?”

  Bowed in the hammock, pressing with her right-hand fingers against the ache above her eyes, she closed her eyes as if to do so would be to shut off the pain. “Poor Frank,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s the way it must be.”

  “Is it?”

  The two words hissed out of the darkness, so bitter and challenging that she opened her eyes and pressed even harder against the ache that lay above them. Her muscles were tense; she had to take charge of both her muscles and her breathing. Relax, inhale, exhale, smooth away the engraved trouble from her forehead. Kinked like a carved bookend against the pillar, Frank sat still, looking away from her with an apparent indifference utterly at odds with the harshness of his tone. Above the fiery mist of the torchlight procession the sky was now empty of everything except its own shabby stars.

  “Thee knows it is,” Susan said.

  His silhouette changed; his face had turned toward her. “That’s the first time you ever thee’d me.”

  “It’s the way I often think of thee.”

  “Is it?”

  “Does thee doubt it?”

  “Then you renounce too easily,” he said through his teeth.

  A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone. Her skin was pebbled with gooseflesh. “Not easily,” she said with a catch of the breath. “Not easily.”

  “Then come with me!”

  “Come with you?” she said in a tiny strangled voice. “Where?”

  “Anywhere. Tepetitlán, if you like. There are always jobs for an engineer in Mexico. I know people, I could get something. I’ll get you an estancia where you can have the things you ought to have. You can be the lady you ought to be. In another country, nobody’s going to...”

  “Frank, Frank, what are you asking? Some sort of disgraceful elopement?”

  “Disgraceful? Is that what you’d call it?”

  “The world would.”

  “Who cares about the world? Do you? Do you care about Boise?”

  “That’s different,” she said. “What about the children?”

  “Ollie’s set. The girls are young.”

  Her laugh was wire-edged. In her own ears it sounded like a screech. “So they wouldn’t understand about their change of fathers?”

  In his silence there was something tense and sullen and explosive.

  “What about their father?” Susan said. “Would you do that to your best friend?”

  “For you I’d do it to anybody. Not because I’d like it. Because I can’t help myself.”

  “Oh, oh,” she said, and took her face in her hands, and laughed through her fingers. “Even if I were that reckless, what would the world say to a woman who would leave a bankrupt promoter for his unemployed assistant, and jump with her children from poverty to pure uncertainty?”

  “Is it money that holds you back?” he said. She heard the sneer, and then the soft spat of the gloves being slapped into his palm. “I’ll go out and get some. Give me three months. I’ll come back for you, or send for you.”

  “And meantime I should live with Oliver, planning all the time to leave him? I live enough of a lie as it is. It isn’t money, you know it isn’t. I only said that to...”

  “To what?”

  “Frank...”

  “Susan.”

  His shadow moved, his boot hit the tiles, he reached a long arm. His fingers closed around her bare foot.

  Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed, and betray others. It was probably touch, in some office or hallway, or in my own hospital room while I snored away the anesthetic and dreamed of manglings and dismemberments, that betrayed Ellen Ward—an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands, those surgeon’s hands laid on her shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lied like a thief, that took, not gave, that wanted, not offered, and that awoke, not pacified. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. And maybe pure accident, maybe she didn’t know she had been waiting. Or had that all been going on behind my back for a long time? So far as I knew, or know, she had no more than met him at a couple of dinner parties before I was referred to him for the amputation.

  Perhaps pure accident, perhaps an opportunity or willingness that both recognized at the first touch, and I absolutely unaware. There is a Japanese story called Insects of Various Kinds in which a spider trapped between the sliding panes of a window lies there inert, motionless, apparently lifeless, for many months, and then in spring, when a maid moves the window for a few seconds to clean it, springs once and is gone. Did Ellen Ward live that sort of trapped life? Released by the first inadvertent opportunity, was she? Seduced because she was waiting for the chance to be?

  It is easier these days than it was in Grandmother’s time, faster, more direct. Ellen Ward’s seduction took only weeks, and was total. Susan Ward’s, if it was really seduction, took eleven years, and may never have translated impulse into act. I know none of the intimate circumstances; I only guess backward from the consequences.

  But when Frank’s hand closed around her foot hanging over the taut edge of the hammock, her body was not encased in its usual armor; it was free and soft in a dressing gown. She was in no danger of swooning, as many genteel ladies did swoon, from being simply too tightly laced for deep-breathing emotions. She was aware of night air, darkness, the dangerous scent of roses, the tension of importunate demand and imminent opportunity. Come into the garden, Maud. If one were a young woman entertaining her betrothed, it would be easy: only hold onto propriety and restraint until marriage let down the barriers. If one were a bad woman, it would be equally easy: ten minutes, who would know?

  She was neither a young woman entertaining her betrothed nor a bad woman. She was a decent married woman forty-two years old-a lady, moreover, fastidious, virtuous, intelligent, talented. But also romantic, also unhappy, also caught suddenly by the foot in intimate darkness.

  What went on on that piazza? I don’t know. I don’t even know they were there, I just made up the scene to fit other facts that I do know. But the ghosts of Tepetongo and Queréndaro and Tepetitlán, of the Casa Walkenhorst and the Casa Gutierrez haunted that dark porch, both as achieved grace and as failed imitation, and perhaps as offered possibility as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the perfumed darkness of her barren piazza flooded her with memories of the equally perfumed darkness of Morelia, and if the dangerous impossible possibility Frank suggested brought back the solemnity of bells, the grace and order of a way of life as longed-for as the nostalgias of Milton, and as far as possible from the pioneering strains of Idaho. I wouldn’t be surprised, that is, if she was tempted. To flee failure, abandon hopelessness, disengage herself from the stubborn inarticulate man she was married to, and the scheme he was married to, would have been a real temptation. And of course, in 1890, for Susan
Burling Ward, utterly unthinkable.

  What went on? I don’t know. I gravely doubt that they “had sex,” in Shelly’s charming phrase. Some, even in the age of gentility, did make a mockery of the faithfulness pledged in marriage. The rich often did, she knew some who did; and the poor probably did, out of the sheer brutishness of their condition. Grandmother’s middle class kind did not, or did so with awful convictions of sin and a shameful sense of having lowered and dirtied themselves. I cannot imagine such a complete breakdown in my grandmother, who believed that a woman’s highest role was to be wife and mother, who conceived the female body to be a holy vessel, and its union with a man‘s-the single, chosen man’s—woman’s highest joy and fulfillment.

  I cannot imagine it, I say. I do not believe it. Yet I have seen the similar breakdown of one whose breakdown I couldn’t possibly have imagined until it happened, whose temptations I was not even aware of.

  So I don’t know what happened. I only know that passion and guilt happened, in some form. In their world, their time, their circumstances, and given their respective characters, there could have been no passion without guilt, no kisses without tears, no embrace without despair. I suppose they clung to one another on the dark veranda in a convulsion of love and woe, their passion no sooner ignited by touch than it was put out by conscience.

  And I approve. For all my trying, I can only find Victorian solutions to these Victorian problems. I can’t look upon marriage as anything but serious, or upon sex as casual or comic. I feel contempt for those who do so look upon it. Shelly would say I’ve got a hangup on sex. It seems to me of an almost demoralizing importance; I guess I really think that it is either holy or unholy, and that the assurances of marriage are not unrelated to its holiness. I even respect Victorian rebels and fornicators more than the casual screwers and fornicators of our time, because they risked something, because they understood the seriousness of what they did. Well. Whatever Grandmother did, I take it seriously, because I know she did.