Free Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner Page B

looking back more than sixty years, I am looking back more than a century, but I think I hear the same tone, or tones, that she did: the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four.
    The parlors that New Year’s Evening were filled with a large company of persons moving about and changing places, and but few were in the room by the window. Dark had fallen outside. I was sitting close to the great pane and I saw in it, as in a mirror, all the persons assembled within the rooms; we were there reflected on that background of night starred with specks and clusters of lights, but these did not obtrude. Our images were softened and mysteriously beautified—it was charming. One face in the foreground showed distinct on the darkness of the world outside. I had my drawing pad with me and I made an attempt to draw it—it was the face in line with my view—and, as it happened, it was the only one of all those mirrored in the window that has stayed with me in my own life. All the others are gone out of it years ago; most of them are out of the world.
    Whose face? Oliver Ward’s naturally, my grandfather’s. She made him look rather like a Crusader—all he needs is a helmet, and a gorget of chain mail. His face is young, strong, resolute in profile: which is probably the way she saw it.
    And why was he sitting so that his face was in line with her view? Because he was already more than half in love with Susan Burling, and after returning her sketch pad to her he had neither the social ease to make further excuses for talking to one so popular, nor the courage to tear himself away. So he sat at a little distance as if in deep thought about his coming adventure in the West, and hardened his jaw at difficulties and dangers, and hoped that he looked quietly heroic.
    And why did she draw his face? Not simply because it was there, I think. He had at the least made her notice him.
    On that minimum contact they came together; it is as if you should bond two whole houses together with one dab of glue. Within a week he had left for California, and for nearly five years they did not see each other again. Clearly he went with the notion of “proving himself”—that was Grandfather’s character—and stayed on a long time because he had as yet no proofs. Clearly, though, he wrote to her, and she replied, for the reminiscences speak of the “understanding” that gradually established itself between them.
    But not entirely of her volition, perhaps not even with her full consent. I find it interesting that in the more than one hundred surviving letters that Susan wrote Augusta Drake during those five years, there is no mention of the name or existence of Oliver Ward until more than a week after his return.

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 corner 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 modern inability to do anything right. All the time I was trying