Recapitulation (17 page)

Abruptly the capitol winked out. Its afterimage pulsed, a blue hole in the darkness, and before it had faded, the temple, too, went dark, cued to the same late clock. Something invisible but palpable, some recognition or reassurance, arced from the dark desert across the city and joined the dark loom of the Wasatch. In one enfolding instant, desert and mountains wrapped closer around the valley and around him their protective isolation.

Seen and unseen, lighted and dark, it was all effortlessly present. Here was a living space once accepted and used, relied on without uncertainty or even awareness, security frozen like the expression on a face at the moment of a snapshot. This territory contained and limited a history, personal and social, in which he had once made himself at home. This was his place—first his problem, then his oyster, and now the museum or diorama where early versions of him were preserved.

He felt its relationship to himself so strongly that he became defensive and resistant. It couldn’t be that he actually yearned backward to the limited life he had known in this place. For more than forty years he had lived where the world was most dangerous, at the uneasy edges where nations slid down or were
heaved up like the earth’s plates in collision. He had had to devote himself to cultures and languages not his own, and to problems the very reverse of personal. He had given his life, or most of it, to social and political Medicare, he had attended a thousand meetings with his attaché case full of Band-Aids. He had been not a person but a representative, interchangeable with other representatives, trained and disciplined toward imperturbability even while being spat at for his color or for the flag on his fender, even while being driven through streets vicious with sniper fire. Yet here he had spent the whole afternoon and evening walking around the edges of this preserve of the memory, fascinated by images out of his immaturity and by the fragrance of lost possibility.

He drew down his mouth, and like some Scott Fitzgerald answering the charge of writing about frivolous things, muttered the only excuse that came to him. Maybe it’s my subject matter. Maybe it’s what I really know.

Remembered habit created remembered reality. His needle ran in a groove. At Seventh South he turned left down the hill, and in a few seconds was rolling slowly, almost stopped, opposite the last house where they had lived in Salt Lake City, the house of his postponed senior year in college, the duplex that was home when Nola was his girl, the happiest house, for a while, that the Masons ever had.

The roofs of other houses jutted up along the side street where there had been empty lots before, but otherwise he saw no change. The cinder-brick duplex was still jacked up above the corner by a flight of cement steps. The basement garage still opened on the side street, an excellent arrangement for a man who had cars to unload and suitcases to deliver. A man with such a garage need not fear nosy neighbors.

Unless memory was mistaken, during the year-plus-a-summer that they had lived here, his father had all but forgotten to be afraid of the law. He had made himself a place, he filled a need. Among the neighbors he passed for a traveling man. His trips were as routine as if he were making calls on hardware dealers or bookstores. His private arrangements were so neatly concealed in the basement behind a false wall of cupboards that Bruce had fixed up a basement apartment within fifteen feet of
the cache, and sometimes had friends in, without causing any anxiety. Caution had haunted all their other houses like the smell of drains. Here they breathed freely.

They were like any other middle-class family. The 1929 crash happened while they lived here, and they never even noticed it. They had money in the bank and a Cadillac in the garage—one of those early models whose gas-tank pressure you had to pump up before you could start, the kind that for years afterward you saw around, indestructible, converted into hearses.

In the vacant lot out behind, his father had made a vegetable garden, and could often be seen working along his rows of lettuce, beans, and corn, sweating contentedly and kidding the passersby who kidded him about working too hard. The people in the other half of the duplex—what name? Albert Something, some French name—were quickly tested and found safe. Bruce’s mother had a friend, his father had a companion with whom to share a bottle of home brew on a hot afternoon, or a gin fizz on a late Sunday morning. They experimented together with kits for making wine out of black mission figs. They went deer hunting together in the Uintas.

Contentment, of a kind, and for Bruce, too. This street where he paused, craning to look, was filled with memories of an easy belonging—smell of cured October leaves, sight and feel of frozen ruts, sting of cold clean air when he shoveled off sidewalks and driveway after a snow, smells of growth in the spring, brightness of forsythia against the dark cinder brick of the house. He traced the flight of a spiraling football as he or someone else threw a long pass diagonally from sidewalk to sidewalk, testing his arm.

The sound of his idling engine was the idling of LeGrande Benson’s new Studebaker, and they were sitting in it on a bright winter morning, the exhaust steaming into zero cold, the windows fogged, the breath of the heater puffing against their shins, the radio going softly, while LeGrande told him about his rookie season with the Chicago Bears. Bruce was full of respectful, amused astonishment that at two hundred and twenty pounds LeGrande had been found too light to play tackle, and had been converted into an end. He valued the reminiscences about Bronco Nagurski and Ernie Nevers; up to that time, he had
known no one so familiar with greatness. Neither had he ever seen, until then, a car with a heater or one with a radio.

This Benson, a pretty good friend of his who lived up the street, and with whom he had played club basketball, had made the giant stride out of their provincial rut. In a way that must have been deeply satisfying to him, Bruce provided the hometown audience he required for the reciting of his adventures. But he did more for Bruce than Bruce did for him. Without envy, for it had not occurred to him that he, too, might someday take such a step, Bruce listened attentively, proud to know Benson, prouder to be known.

Felicity. Life without strain. And it was more than being accepted on the block and living without fear. Something in their family relationships had eased, too. Chet had lived down the anger and disappointment he had both caused and felt. Now at twenty-two a married man of five years’ standing, trapped, his hopes put away or scaled down, he was living in Park City and playing baseball in summer, basketball in winter, for the Silver King mine. Now and then he brought Laura and their infant daughter down and gave Bruce’s mother the joy of being Grandma.

Nor was Harry Mason immune. Bruce remembered him propping the baby on the sofa and pushing a cushion into her face, knocking her backward when she struggled to sit up. “Toughening her up,” he called it. He had played the same game with his own children. As with them, he never knew enough to quit when she was red and gurgling with laughter. He nearly always went on until he made her cry, when in baffled irritation he would hand her to her grandmother. At such moments, Bruce felt that he half understood him. He did not mean harm. He simply tested by teasing what was in a sense his, what he perhaps loved and felt responsibility for. The tests were such limited tests as he could conceive. They all failed to pass. In the end, so did he.

Almost as much as Chet, Bruce had grown past his father’s obligation to make a man of him. They hardly saw one another for days at a time, for Bruce was at school or work all day and out more than half the nights. If his father grumbled about his tomcatting around, he could challenge him, asking wherein he was failing. He was attending college, which nobody else in the family
had ever come close to doing. He was making nearly straight A’s—and if he felt that he didn’t deserve his grades, considering the amount of studying he did, he carefully kept that opinion to himself. He worked a forty-hour week while going to school and a sixty-hour week during vacations. He bought his own clothes, and had bought his own car. He had a bank account that approached a thousand dollars. In that last year of school, he was editing the literary magazine and reading papers for Bill Bennion and another professor friend—how, and during what free time, only God knew. Thanks to J. J. Mulder’s indulgence, he could arrange his work hours so as to play on the tennis team in the spring, and in tournaments during the summer. Though he did not point out this detail, either, his name was in the sports pages oftener than Chet’s.

He said, and believed, that the more he asked himself to do, the more he could do. His mother, who never got over thinking of him as sickly and frail, protested that he would ruin his health, and when he discovered that he had an ulcer, she thought she had made her point. But he told her what he had been told: that ulcers were a young man’s disease, and would pass, and anyway were no hindrance to anything but his eating habits. His drinking habits he did not mention, and his smoking habits he did not change.

Yet in a way she was right. Mason could not remember just when the ulcer had appeared. Perhaps he had had it for months before he finally took his dull bellyache to the doctor. But during the year or so of his greatest felicity and confidence, there it was, his personal bosom serpent. He supposed that retrospect should make more of it than he had made at the time.

But then, at the end of the twenties, exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem smug. It would be falsifying memory to pretend that he was anything but arrogant and a prig. Except for the notes from underground that his ulcer sent him, he was brashly confident. He thought good times were forever. He assumed that his happiness was the product of his own excellence. His father used to eye him askance when he sounded off. “You know me, Al,” he would say.

Perhaps he shared some of his wife’s pride in their younger son, though he would have had no way of showing it, and
though Bruce (Mason admitted) would probably have become totally insufferable if he had thought he had his father’s approval. And once the old man met Nola, Bruce heard no more about late hours. She broke him down like a dandelion stem. It was a queer, disquieting experience to watch the father whom he had feared, hated, and despaired of pleasing, show off before a girl—
Bruce’s
girl—like a sixteen-year-old.

He had rolled almost past, and was already craning backward to see the corner and the dark house. But now he stepped down hard on the brake, for he didn’t want to outrun what leaped into his mind, vivid and intact, cunningly lighted. He was improving on it, expanding it, preparing exposition and climax and denouement, even as it materialized. In the moment when it returned to him, he was already beginning to transform it from tableau to story.

The year is 1930, the season is spring, probably May. The time is evening, around eight-thirty. Though it is still light outside, it is beginning to be dusky in the house. In his dinner jacket, his breastplate of gleaming white, his smoky-pearl studs and cuff links, his Bond or Dart collar as prescribed by Jack Bailey, his hand-tied black butterfly bow, he comes into the bedroom where she lies reading. She lowers her magazine to take him in. Two weeks ago she had her left breast and all the lymph glands on that side removed, a radical mastectomy, and she is pale and thin. Her freckles show coppery across the bridge of her nose, her heavy sorrel hair is in a braid. Her eyes are always startling him—the brightest, clearest blue he ever saw in a human head. Her smile breaks out in pure pleasure.

“Oh, you look nice!”

“That’s what they all say.”

“I’ll bet they probably do, at that. Except for your homely face, you’ve got to be quite a handsome boy.”

“Sez you.”

“Sez me.”

Sometimes, in spite of what he knows about her life and the things she has had to put up with, and despite the stoic look that lurks in her face whether she is sick or well, he feels her spirit as gay and playful as a girl’s. She brushes away her troubles, she
makes scornful fun of illness and pain, she is resolutely cheerful even in the face of this operation, which scared Bruce’s father helpless, sickened Bruce, and must surely have frightened her. Right now, though she looks white and tired, a sassy sparkle lights up her eyes. He has an intimation of how game and pretty she must have been as a girl, and he knows that he is the one who brings this out in her. He is the apple of her eye. Across the footboard and the rumpled bedclothes they smile at one another as if they had a big joke in common.

“O.K.,” he says, accepting reality. “Who flutters pulses is me.”

She reaches her left arm, stiff from the operation, the armpit tight with half-healed scars and adhesions, and turns the face of the Big Ben that ticks on her bed table.

“Are you going with Joe?”

“No, he couldn’t get a date.”

“You’re starting early, for you.”

“I’m on the committee. I ought to get down a little ahead of time to make sure everything’s O.K. By the time I pick up Nola and get to the hotel it’ll be nearly nine.”

“Nola, Is she a new one?”

“Nola Gordon. No, not new—well, pretty new. I’ve taken her out a couple times. She’s living with Holly.”

“Is she pretty? Do you like her?”

He rolls his eyes toward the ceiling and licks his slavering lips.

“Does she like you?”

“Adores me. She’s putty in my hands.”

An amused snort bursts out of her. “It sounds to me as if it was the other way around.” Looking him over with the little smile crinkling the corners of her eyes, she says, “Come here, let me fix your tie.”

She sits up, and he bends over her. Because of her stiff arm, she can’t quite reach, and he kneels on one knee so that she can tug the bow straight. Her face is within inches of his, intent on what she is doing. As she works, her robe falls open, and down the opening, in the V of her nightgown, he catches a glimpse of the flat, mutilated left side of her breast—a skin flap drawn across bare ribs and held by red scars like claw marks.