Angle of Repose (82 page)

“Would you like the television up here, for news or anything?”

I felt like something stiff and rigid propped in the corner. “No thank you.”

“Anything else you need? Any pills or anything?”

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Well, you just sit and enjoy your drink. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

Her heels on the planks were brisk, she went down the stairs in a clatter–nimble, well-preserved, and vigorous. I sat by the window and let the bourbon wash around in my mouth–and why in hell had I let her subvert me, after a week of will power?–and warm the ball of cold putty in the middle of my chest. Every sound that came up from downstairs had my ears on end. Talk about a little Kafka animal sweating down its hole! Once I thought I heard her singing as she worked. I downed the drink in a few gulps, and quickly, before she could get back up the lift and prevent me with some female notion of what was good for me, wheeled over to the refrigerator and sloshed another couple of ounces onto the ice in my glass and wheeled back. I was waiting there with an empty glass, my chair turned so that I could look out the window and watch night come on, when she came upstairs with a tray.

“Tell me about your book,” she said while I sat eating the soup and sandwiches and fruit and milk she had brought. She herself was walking restlessly around the room, stocking-footed again, a drink in her hand. She seemed to dislike the sound of her heels on the bare floors–very different from her son. “What do you call it?”

“I don’t know yet. I was thinking of calling it Angle of Repose.”

Her sliding and pacing stopped; she considered what I had said. “Is that a very good title? Will it sell? It sounds kind of . . . inert.”

“How do you like
The Doppler Effect?
Is that any better?”

“The Doppler Effect ? What’s that?”

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter. The title’s the least of it. I might call it Inside the Bendix. It isn’t a book anyway, it’s just a kind of investigation into a life.”

“Your grandmother’s.”

“Yes.”

“Why she wasn’t happy.”

“That’s not what I’m investigating. I know why she wasn’t happy.”

She stopped halfway across the floor, her drink in her hand, her eyes bent down into the glass as if Excalibur, or a water baby, or a djinn, or something, might rise out of it.

“Why wasn’t she?”

I set my half-eaten sandwich down on the tray that boxed me into the chair, and took one shaking hand in the other, and cried, “You want to know why? You don’t know? Because she considered that she’d been unfaithful to my grandfather, in thought or act or both. Because she blamed herself for the drowning of her daughter, the one Grandfather made the rose for. Because she was responsible for the suicide of her lover–if he was her lover. Because she’d lost the trust of her husband and son. Does that answer your question?”

Her lowered head had come up, her half-shuttered eyes widened and stared. She looked ready to run. I had reached her, all right. That air of self-confidence was a mask, that insouciant way of sliding with arched foot around my rubbed plank floors was an act. Underneath, she was as panicky as I was. For a good second her deep eyes were fixed on mine, her face was tense and set. Then she lowered her head, dropped her lashes, backed away from the attack I had thrown at her unaware, arched her foot and slid it experimentally along a crack in the planks. As if indifferently, speaking to the floor, she said, “And this happened . . . when?”

“1890.”

“But they went on living together.”

“No they didn’t!” I said. “Oh, no! He left, pulled out. Then she left too, but she came back. She lived in Boise alone for nearly two years, while he was working in Mexico. Then his brother-in-law Conrad Prager, one of the owners of the Zodiac, brought him up here to devise pumps that would keep the lower levels from flooding. Prager and his wife, Grandfather’s sister, worked on him, and eventually got him to write my grandmother, and she came down. My father all this time was in school in the East–he never came home. He never came home, in fact, for years–Grandmother and Grandfather had been back together seven or eight years before Father ever showed his face here.”

Large and dark, looking black in that light, her eyes rested on me. She said nothing, but her mouth twitched, the sort of twitch that is extracted by a stomach cramp.

“So they lived happily-unhappily ever after,” I said. “Year after irrelevant year, half a century almost, through one world war and through the Jazz Age and through the Depression and the New Deal and all that; through Prohibition and Women’s Rights, through the automobile and radio and television and into the second world war. Through all those changes, and not a change in them.”

“That’s what you told your secretary, What’s-her-name, you weren’t interested in.”

“Exactly. It’s all over in 1890.”

“When they broke up.”

“Exactly.”

For a while she was silent, sliding her silken big toe down the crack between two planks, taking a step to follow it, sliding it again. Her head came up, the whites of her eyes flashed at me. “What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?”

“I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.”

“What?”

“Horizontal. Permanently.”

“Ah!” She moved her shoulders, half turned, looked at me and away. Talking to Grandmother’s portrait she said, “Death? Living death? Fifty years of it? No rest till they lay down? There must be something . . . short of that. She couldn’t have been doing penance for fifty years.”

I shrugged.

Skating in her stockings, the nylon faintly hissing on the floor, she carried her drink over near the desk, where she stood a while inspecting the piles of letter folders, the books, the tape recorder, the manila envelope of Xeroxed news stories from Boise. I was afraid she might open that and read, but instead she opened a folder of letters. With her mouth ruefully pursed, she read a while, folded the folder shut. Then she lifted her chin and looked closely at the spurs, the bowie, and the revolver hanging in their broad leather on the wall.

“What’s this? Local color?”

I thought her manner veiled and unconvincing; it seemed to me that since my outburst I was in charge, not she; she had lost the initiative.

“Grandmother had them hanging there when I was a boy,” I said. “I found them and put them back.”

“I didn’t know she was the cowgirl type.”

Too flippant; patter words. I nailed her down.

“They were to remind her of whom she was married to.”

Her back was toward me, the shoulderblades showing through the thin green cotton. She did not turn even part way, but spoke to the wall. “You make it sound like such punishment. Didn’t they get along at all?”

“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 digitalis.”

“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 corner 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.