Angle of Repose (74 page)

“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.

 

When Frank had gone, already furtive, already thinking how to evade or avoid his returning friend and boss, slipping out back to his tied saddlehorse before the sounds of the buggy should be heard in the lane, I can imagine her walking barefooted and distracted around the sopping lawn and along the border of the rose garden, smelling that heavy night-distilled fragrance and torturing herself with the thought of how Oliver had searched through half of Connecticut for some of those new hybrids, and transported them twenty-five hundred miles, to try to make her feel at home in her exile. She was assaulted alternately by anger at his presumption that she could make her home in this place, and by gusts of pity for him, and love, and the will to heal and comfort, and by exasperation over his trustingness and his lapses of judgment, and by despair over the future, and by misery over what she must write Bessie, and by loathing of her own lack of control–a woman of forty-two, with three children, swept off her feet like a seminary girl. And intruding into all that web of complicated and contradictory feeling, the tense memory of straining kisses only minutes ago, and the hands to which she had lifted and tightened her breast, and guilt, guilt, guilt for just those treacherous kisses, and something like awe at what she had been proved capable of.

But when she heard the creak and rattle of dried-out buggy wheels coming down the lane through the starlit dark, she pressed her palms upward along her cheeks to rub and stretch away the stiffness of tears, and ran soft-footed to the door, and slipped in. She was in bed, with a cloth over her eyes to signify headache, when she heard her door open softly, and then after a listening time close, just as softly. She could hear Nellie’s exaggerated North Country voice croaking, “Coom, children, to bed, to bed!”

The house settled, the noises went behind thick adobe walls. Through the open window she heard the hose cart groan as Oliver dragged it off the grass; he never left it overnight because its wheels would dent the new lawn. Then for a time she heard him walking up and down the veranda, slow and steady on the tiles, thinking the bleakest thoughts, no doubt, looking into the lightless future. Poor fellow, poor fellow! to see everything come down, every hope and ambition destroyed. She half sat up, impulsively ready to go out to him and hook her arm in his and walk out his failure with him.

And lay back down, thinking of the failure he had brought about for her, and staring blankly into the failure she had made for herself, her teeth set in her lower lip, her ears spying on him. When his pacing paused, the house was intensely quiet; it rang with silence. Outside, the great western night had closed in, with only distant, widely spaced pops of gun or firecracker from the town.

After a long time he came in–carrying his shoes, evidently, so as not to waken her. He undressed in the dark, his careful weight sagged the bed; she moved as if in restless sleep to give him all the room there was. He lay on his back, and she could hear, or feel, the faint rustle and movement of his breathing, slow and steady. Finally, without turning his head, he said softly up into the dark, “Asleep?”

The impulse to go on pretending was only momentary. “No. How were the fireworks?”

“Fine. The kids enjoyed them. We didn’t go clear in, we watched from the road.”

“I was hoping you would.”

“Couldn’t you see them from here?”

“Pretty well.”

“What did Frank want?”

“What? Frank?” She thought the bound of her heart must have shaken the bed; she lay breathing shallowly through her mouth.

“He was here, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” she managed to say, giving up another possible lie. But her heart was now beating against her chest wall like a bird caught in a room. It was unbearably hot, she could not stand his warmth so close, and shifted her body and flung the light blanket impatiently off. “I guess he wanted to talk to you,” she said. “His life is all torn up too. He didn’t stay. We sat on the piazza and watched the fireworks for a little while. He said he’d see you tomorrow.”