Collected Stories by Wallace Stegner

Author:Wallace Stegner [Stegner, Wallace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Classics
ISBN: 9780718197490
Google: lf5m605P8csC
Amazon: 0143039792
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2013-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Impasse

By the time they dropped down off the heights, the reluctant sun, which had hung interminably on the Col de Vence and forced Louis to doge and shield his eyes as he cramped the Citroën around the curves, had finally been dragged below the rim, and the glare of the day was taken off them. Along the grateful gray edge of evening they bounced through the streets of Nice and on to the highway returning back up the coast.

Out on the water it was still full afternoon. Sails passed like gulls; close in, the bay was creased with the water-bug tracks of paddle boats. But where they drove, the day had quieted, and in the confined car the bickering seemed to have quieted, too. Straightening out with the traffic toward Monte Carlo, a drink, dinner, Louis appraised the lengthening silence and grew halfway hopeful.

But he said nothing; the quiet was too pleasant. Only in the sloping windshield he saw the reflection of his wife’s face, the mouth drawn down ruefully, and he dropped his hand from the wheel to cover hers. That got him a wan, surprised smile.

Pretending to stretch, he focused his daughter’s face in the rearview mirror. No smile there, wan or otherwise. Margaret sat like a captive barbarian queen. Her hair stood up from her forehead in an abrupt black mane. Her eyebrows were heavy, level, finely outlined. Photographs always showed her handsomer than she was, perhaps because photographs, like his shadowed view of her in the mirror, obscured the coarse and roughened skin. But no photograph ever hid what he could not miss now—the arrogant curl of her mouth, the way her eyes looked flatly out in insolence and challenge.

Not a pretty girl. That, of course, was a good part of the trouble. In the windshield he surprised on his own face the rueful, puzzled expression he had seen on his wife’s. He heard their friends saying, “How I envy you your three months in France. And how nice you could arrange to take Margaret. How wonderful for all of you, especially for her.”

The mildness of evening drifted down off the hills, the first faint, perfumed stirring of the land breeze. Through trees and across gray headlands he saw villas clinging like balconies on the mountain, and turning to see what view they would have, he found Cap Ferrat flood-lighted, sharp and cleanly colored, its white villas and red roofs, gray shore and blue encircling sea drenched in light. It seemed to have emerged that minute from the water, wet and fresh. Stuck behind the stinking exhaust of a bus, he watched the promontory, and forgetting that they were silent and at odds, he said, “Somerset Maugham has a villa out there somewhere.”

Jean looked, interested. She had read everything Somerset Maugham ever wrote. But from the back seat, Louis heard what he knew he should have anticipated—the contemptuous noise and the voice. “What are we supposed to do about that? Make a pilgrimage?”

Patience, he told himself. Aloud he said lightly, “Nothing as strenuous as that, I guess.

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