Angle of Repose Read online

  3

  A bad three days, full of irritation and wasted effort. I should have my head examined for hiring that woman from the Argus. She couldn’t bag oranges without making bonehead errors. What is worse, I let her upset me as much as I obviously upset her—it obviously made her nervous to work with a freak.

  Nothing right all the time she was here—raining outside, no sun in the room, no brightness in the mornings, no warmth on my neck, no pleasure or progress in the work. Feeling with her goose-pimpled feelings, I was aware all the time of all the bare empty closed-off rooms of this house, and the Gothic strangeness of this comer where a death’s-head freak fumbles around among old papers and mumbles into a microphone. She watched me with something like horror. I could feel her eyes on my back, and hear her breathing, and whenever I wheeled around in my chair and caught her eyes, they skittered away in desperate search for something they might have been looking at. I couldn’t help wondering if her lamentable lacks, both secretarial and personal, were her own, or only a manifestation of the modem inability to do anything right. All the time I was trying to work with this Miss Morrow I kept imagining what a pleasure it would be to have someone like Susan Burling to sort pictures and file papers and transcribe faded and barely legible letters.

  Instead of mishearing instructions, mistyping copy, losing things, dropping things, watching the clock, taking coffee breaks down in the kitchen, hitting the bathroom every half hour, and getting ready to leave before she had half arrived, Susan Burling would have been quick, neat, thorough. She would have been fascinated by the drawings instead of handling them like the kitchen silver being sorted into a drawer, the knives with the spoons and the forks among the knives. She would have been intrigued by the clothes of another period instead of finding them comical. She would have noted the humanness of faces lost in time.

  In one of her letters, speaking of a family portrait she saw in the Ward house in Guilford, Grandmother exclaims that the subject has “such a charming last-century face!” Her own pictures should evoke the same comment now. But what does Miss Morrow say, bending in her miniskirt so that my peripheral vision is filled with a yard of fat thigh, her hair in a mound years out of style, her lips ghastly with colorless lipstick and her upper lids as green as shutters—what does she say, bending this mask over a row of photographs taken of Grandmother through many years, all showing her cameo profile and her indomitable elegance? She says, “Gee! Same hairdo all her life!”

  Yes, Miss Morrow. Same old hairdo: classic knot and bangs. Anything good was worth sticking with. Susan disliked what she called “too much forehead.” She liked two hair styles-the one that she had determined suited her own face, and the low, sweeping curve, with a deep wave, that Augusta wore. I can’t even imagine what she would say at the sight of this girl’s steep skull with hair piled on top of it like a packrat’s nest on a cliff.

  Good-bye, Miss Morrow, and thanks for your help, which I suppose I will recover from. Tomorrow I must make an effort to get started right with Ada’s daughter Shelly, for if she turns out wrong I can hardly let her go. I’ll be stuck with her until she settles her problem with the husband who doesn’t want to be unwanted. If her hair weren’t all loose down her back in the current fashion I would like her better, but having no machinery it might get caught in, I can hardly make her put it up. Also she has some of Ada in her, she might be all right.

  It was an odd interview we had yesterday afternoon. I was taking my airing in the garden, the first time I’ve been able to go out since the rain. The apple trees are in blossom, and I thought for a while I was hearing the traffic from the freeway that has split and ruined this town, but when I listened carefully it was the sound of thousands of bees up to their thighs in pollen.

  I was on my crutches, doing my eight laps up and down the path where the pines wall the garden in. It is level there, and I have had it paved. But eight laps are rough. Four are all I ever want, six I can barely manage, the last two I do with sweating hands. Every swing and peg hurts from my heel to my shoulders. When I finally crawl into the chair again it is as if all the blood in my body, at a temperature of 400° Fahrenheit, were concentrated in my miserable stump. It takes me half an hour to recover from what I am determined is going to do me good.

  So I was not displeased, in the middle of the fifth lap, to see this young woman come through the gate where the path from the Hawkes cottage enters the bottom of the yard. I knew who she was, and got to my chair and watched her as she came.

  She isn’t big like Ada—a sort of medium person, medium good figure, and that female way of pushing backward with her open hands as she walks. Hair down her back, and the habit of throwing it with a jerk of the head. Male or female, that gesture always irritated me when I lived down where one saw a lot of longhairs. If long hair is that much of a distraction, why not cut it off, or put it up in a classic knot and bangs? But when she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple trees, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wistaria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don’t, I prefer those who do.

  When she got within a hundred feet I could see that she has Ada’s gray eyes in Ed’s square face. Not pretty, not homely. A medium sort of girl, the sort who, compact in white nylon and white nurses’ shoes, might take your order in a busy lunchroom in Des Moines. Why Des Moines? I don’t know. She just looks that way. Not Bay Area, anyway. Not that knowing, in spite of the hair.

  Her voice surprised me, though—bass-baritone. “Hello. I’m Shelly Rasmussen.”

  “I know. Your mother told me you were home.”

  I could see her wondering how much else her mother had told me. I could also see that she found holding my gorgon gaze difficult, and to spare her I turned the chair a little, casually, so that we could talk past each other instead of head on.

  “She said you might need some help, the girl you had didn’t work out.”

  “She neither worked out nor worked. Do you type?”

  “Not very fast, but I’m pretty accurate.”

  “Ever transcribed tapes?”

  “No. I suppose I could learn.”

  “Are you discreet?”

  “What?”

  “Are you discreet?”

  A little smile, out of focus at the edge of my vision. “I think so.”

  “Because I’m not,” I said. “I tell myself I’m writing a book about my grandmother, and I am, too, but I sit up there sometimes and let my mouth go into that tape recorder and it gets all mixed up with Grandmother’s biography. I’m always saying things that would offend my relatives. Sometimes I might even say things that would offend yours. Plus a lot of stuff that would embarrass me if I played it back.”

  “Sounds great,” she said, and laughed, a real ho ho ho. If I’d heard it through a wall I would have sworn it was a man’s laugh.

  “Great is exactly what it isn‘t,” I said. “When I said ’discreet’ I meant discreet like a machine, something with fingers and no mind.”

  The little smile, while she clawed the hair back over one shoulder. “A good typist is supposed to type without reading,” she said. “I’m not a good typist, but I’m not a gossip either.”

  “Good.” I wasn’t very pleased with her, if the truth should be told—and I had better make sure she doesn’t get this tape to transcribe. That little smile was more knowing than I had first thought her. But who else would I get? I said, “Have you got a file clerk’s memory? Mainly what I want is somebody to learn the files and find me things when I need them. I have a little trouble working from the chair.”

  “Is there a lot of stuff?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “I’d need a little time to learn it.”

  “Of course. You can learn it while you put it in order.”


  I was looking past her, down over the apple trees into the tops of the pines, to where the old mine dump drops off into the valley, but I could see her studying me sidelong. Let her study—after all, she was going to have to get used to looking at me. Finally she said, “Didn’t I see you walking up and down just now?”

  “I guess you did. I was walking up and down.”

  “It’s none of my business, but should you be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shouldn’t somebody be with you?”

  “Somebody’s with me most of the time,” I said. “Now and then I like to do a little something by myself.”

  She heard the change in my tone, because hers changed too. As if I had rebuked her, and she had to defend herself, she said, “Mom thinks you try to do too much by yourself.”

  I said, “I depend on your mother as helplessly as if I were six months old. But even baby tries to crawl a little on his own.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “She didn’t mean it as a criticism. She thinks you’re just way out. She admires you more than anybody.”

  “Tell her it’s mutual,” I said, past her. But I was surprised. Old Ada, the strong-as-a-horse family retainer? It was friendship as much as pay or inherited obligation that brought her to my house? It struck me that I had been spending too much embarrassed effort being truly a man of stone while she performed her grunting and clucking services. I was not her troublesome doll, then, her grotesque duty. I remembered her waddling to the cupboard for the bottle when I was eased into bed. Friendship, then.

  “Mom’s all right,” Shelly said. “She wouldn’t criticize.”

  “I know she wouldn’t. She’s great.”

  “But she’d have a lot of quiet worms if she knew you were walking around by yourself.”

  “Then this is your chance to practice being discreet.”

  Ho ho ho, a department store Santa Claus. “Does that mean I’m hired?”

  There is a certain boldness about her; she strikes me as refusing to be put in any subordinate position. She gives me no odds for my age, my experience, my possible distinction, my near-helplessness. If I had been interviewing twelve girls for this job the other day, she probably wouldn’t have got it, I’d have tried to find someone who disappears easier. But having no choice, I said, “I guess it does, if you want to be.”

  “When do you want me, mornings?”

  “Not mornings, not at first anyway. That’s when I feel like talking into the machine, and I can’t do that with anyone around. How are the afternoons?”

  “Sure. I’m not doing anything else.”

  “Say two to five?”

  “Fine.”

  I sat still in the chair. Because I had slid back in in the middle of the fifth lap, I didn’t have so much of that bloated throbbing in the stump, and the ache in my shoulders wasn’t bad. But there is never any escaping—and this is especially true after exercise—the frantic, itching, lost feeling that the leg is still there. The minute I stir my stump at all, the whole leg comes back; I can feel the toes, the ankle hurts. So I wanted Shelly Rasmussen to go. I wanted to get back to the house and have my pre-dinner belt of bourbon and watch the television news and put those cut nerves back to sleep.

  She stood there, making no move to leave. I could see the outline but not the expression of her face. “We didn’t settle your salary,” I said. “How’s two fifty an hour?”

  “More than I’m worth.”

  “Not if you’re any good. But I live on annuities, it’s all I can afford.”

  “That’ll be fine. I’ll try to earn it.”

  I squirmed in the chair to ease the stump, I put down a casual hand and rubbed, wishing the fool would go. My bladder was beginning to be insistent, too, and though I was armed with my Policeman’s Friend, and would ordinarily have let fly with the secret pleasure of a bedwetter, I couldn’t see myself pissing down a tube with a lady standing six feet from me. Then I thought of poor aghast Miss Morrow, who had wandered all unknowing into the freak show, and I wondered if this one was held there by a sort of fascinated aversion. If she was, I had better find out right now. So I said to the apple trees and the tops of the far pines, “Does it bother you when I talk at you without looking at you?”

  “No, why?”

  “Does it bother you when I do look at you?”

  “No.”

  So I turned my chair directly toward her, and she was lying, it did bother her, though she made herself look at me steadily, pretending it didn’t.

  “Because I can’t help it,” I said. “I either have to talk past you or turn you to stone.”

  “I guess you wouldn’t turn anybody to stone.”

  “Sixty seconds is usually enough.” I turned the chair away again, just enough to take the heat off. “Maybe you can build up an immunity.”

  She had better. I don’t want her either petrified or fascinated, I want her helpful and if possible interested. For it struck me after she finally went away and I headed for the house that I really would like to talk to somebody about my grandparents, their past, their part in the West’s becoming, their struggle toward ambiguous ends. Of all the available people, I suppose I would most like to talk about them with Rodman, because next to me he has the largest stake in all this. But this Shelly Rasmussen with the Santa Claus laugh and the voice like the first mate of a lumber schooner—she has a little stake too. I rather like the idea that a fourth-generation Trevithick should help me organize the lives of the first-generation Wards.

  4

  No letters between my grandparents have been saved, and as I said, Susan’s early letters to Augusta do not mention Oliver Ward. To teach me how one evening’s acquaintance ripened into a tacit engagement through five years of absence, I have only the reminiscences, written in Grandmother’s old age, and I don’t believe in them.

  She says she didn’t want to be one of those girls who faded through long waiting while their young men chased fortune and excitement in the West. She says she wanted him to know she had other resources. So while he sweated on the hot mountains surveying the Southern Pacific’s Tehachapi Loop, and later while he boiled alive in the Sutro Tunnel, he kept receiving these letters that talked about the commissions she was getting, the flattering things people said about her drawings, the famous and interesting people she met, the young men among whom she and Augusta pursued the life of Art. Her letters were designed to let him know how well she got on without him.

  Studying her drawings in the magazines he managed to lay hands on, Oliver might have been reassured that she was still the lively little Quaker girl he had fallen for at the Beach house. Her pictures were likely to show girls in Watteau dresses hanging over a banister to see who is ringing the doorbell, or young men standing up in rowboats to part the willows that might brush their bonneted girls, or children shutting the gates at twilight on their pet lambs, or young ladies pensively reading in dusky attics. But her letters made it plain that there was already more glitter in her life than Oliver Ward could ever hope to provide.

  John La Farge had spent the afternoon at Augusta’s 15th Street studio, and had read them parts of a poem called The Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám. Thomas Moran, encountered in the Scribner office, had been flattering about Susan’s drawings, and had wished that he could draw, as she could, directly on the block, so as to be less at the mercy of engravers. The Scribner crowd had just left Milton after a weekend of picnics, boat rides, and cider parties, and the Scottish novelist George MacDonald had read from his latest book, and George Washington Cable had then been prevailed upon to read a Creole story he had just completed, and the actress Ella Clymer had bewitched them all on the midnight piazza with a song, “I Love to See Her Slipping Down a Stair.” Thomas Hudson, the young Scribner editor, had left the company for a bare half hour and returned with a magnificent sonnet. And hardly had the Scribner crowd gone back down to New York than a Boston editor brought John Greenleaf Whittier around to discuss illustrations for
a gift edition of Snowbound. They caught her scrubbing the dining room, and she had to seat them in the parlor and talk to them through the door while she finished mopping up.

  She told things like that as jokes on herself, but Oliver Ward on his powder keg in his tar-papered shack could not miss the Great Name that had come to her door seeking her. She hung it up there like a jack-o’ -lantern.

  Snowbound fell through, but shortly she was busy on forty drawings and a dozen vignettes for Longfellow’s The Hanging of the Crane, and a year and a half after she began that, she reported its considerable success in the Christmas trade, and a little later still she wrote that Osgood and Company had mysteriously invited her to Boston, and there surprised her with a dinner at which the whole Brahmin population of New England was present. Mr. Whittier was there, still chuckling over the floor-mopping episode. Mr. Lowell paid her a flattering amount of attention. Mr. Holmes was very witty. Mr. Longfellow held her hand quite a long time and told her he was astonished that one so talented should also be so young and charming. He made her promise to illustrate The Skeleton in Armor—which, it turned out, was what the publishers had brought her to Boston to discuss. Mr. Howells, the new editor of the Atlantic, praised her realism. Mr. Bret Harte, the celebrated California author, answered her questions about the Sierra Nevada, in which she had expressed an interest.

  She was barely twenty-four, and she admits she boasted, “ungenerously.” But that young man in the West was as steady as a lighthouse. He applauded her successes, he never expressed jealousy of the young men whose luck he must have envied, he accepted her ambiguous relationship with Augusta and her almost equally ambiguous relationship with Thomas Hudson, now the third of an intimate threesome.

  Grandmother implies that he won her over by his cheerful confidence, so that an understanding gradually grew up between them. I doubt the understanding, and I doubt Grandfather’s confidence. What did he have to be confident about? Trapped for three years in that litigated tunnel, he must have known that if it was ever finished, a junior engineer without a degree would emerge into the old barren sunlight beating on the old sterile mountains, and that if he wanted a chance at Susan Burling he would have to emerge with more than experience.