The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page B

pair of stiff-legged dogs. Fortunately I played it light, for the fact was that I really hadn’t intended to hurt her feelings. So I shrugged. “Maybe so.”
    She had no reason to go on, but as the injured party she had to have the last word. “I wish I understood you. You drive me wild, you really do. For a change we’re doing something together, sort of reliving something, something as sad as it could possibly be, and important to us both, and you brought it all back so clearly, and I was interested, and touched, and then you have to start mugging and hoofing, and spoil it.”
    The telephone rang, and since Ruth was encumbered with the cat, I reached across to the bed table and answered it.
    â€œHello, Joe?”
    Ben Alexander. On the telephone his voice is even wheezier, breezier, and louder than it is face to face.
    â€œPresent.” “Been thinking. Why wait for lunch? I want to have Tom and Edith up to dinner Friday. Can you and Ruth come?”
    â€œWhy, I guess so. Let me speak to the foreman.” I put my hand over the mouthpiece and said to Ruth, “Ben wants us for dinner with the Pattersons Friday. Can we go?”
    She checked the calendar and found nothing but a hair appointment “Do you want to?”
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œSure, I guess so. Why not? But you’ve been so funny lately about going out.”
    â€œI’m always ready for Ben’s house, especially as long as he makes that Cabernet.”
    â€œThat’s probably it,” she said, practically with a sniff. “All right, tell him yes.”
    I told him yes.
    â€œSwell,” he said. “Friday at seven.”
    Bang in my ear, as if he had tossed the instrument into its cradle from six feet away.
    â€œThat old rip,” I said. “He’s got more left at nearly eighty than most of us had at eighteen. Running around in his convertible. Why hasn’t he got sore joints? Why doesn’t he ever get tired?”
    â€œWhat makes you think he doesn’t?” Ruth said. “He’s got that metal hip joint, he walks with a cane, his heart runs by electronics, he’s alone, and probably lonely. Why do you think he’s any luckier than you?”
    â€œI didn’t say he was luckier. I said he had more left than anybody his age should have. Sons of missionaries must learn early to get around God.”
    â€œCome on,” she said, and let her hands fall and her shoulders droop as if in defeat. “Come on, read some more before we get into a real fight.”
    â€œYou don’t want to hear any more.”
    â€œOf course I want to hear more!”
    â€œThe perils of the deep are nearly over,” I said. “From here on it’s less profound but with more local color.”
    Â 
    April 3:
    Cøteborg, two days late. In three hours ashore I discover that the solid ground of Sweden is as unstable as the North Atlantic. Doped with more than a week of Dramamine, I stand looking at statues and town halls and into store windows, and as I look they start to lean and roll. Which is maybe the way things look to Mrs. Bertelson, too. She is met by a couple of relatives and a representative of the Swedish-American Line and driven off the dock in a car. The Swedish-American Line man has to interpret—Mrs. B’s in-laws have no English, and she can’t understand their Swedish. Just before she got in the car she threw a desperate look back up at the ship and saw us at the rail. We waved. Her face worked. A word formed on her lips. Good-by, she said, probably not to us. Probably to Omaha, where the house and the grocery store were gone and couldn’t be returned to, and to Minnesota, where her roots were cut, and to the only one who could have dealt with her problems for her, who had gone off that deck feet first, sewn into a sack, thirty-six hours before. Good-by. And vanished into a confusion hardly less than what he had gone