Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  “Look at them,” Holly had said to him once as they sat in the tower bay looking down at the after-dinner golfers moving under the floodlights. “Toujours gai, my God! Someday I’m going to build a miniature golf course with fairways six inches wide and rough six inches deep. I’ll fill the water holes with crocodiles and sow the sand traps with sidewinders. How would it be to hide a black widow spider in every hole, so that picking up your ball would earn you some excitement? What if you sawed the supports of all the little bridges nearly in two?”

  Live it dangerously. It was strange to recall how essential that had once seemed. Go boom, take chances. He ran his hand along the sill, thinking that this was the pose, sitting right here and looking out, that Holly had assumed when Tom Stead painted her in her gold velvet gown.

  Probably that portrait wasn’t anything special. It couldn’t have been. The chances were that Tom Stead was painting signs somewhere now, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death. But then, in this room, in the presence of its subject whose life overflowed upon them all, that slim golden shape with the velvet highlights was Lilith, Helen, Guinevere, das Ewig-Weibliche. And it was hardly a day before other girls, less fortunately endowed or graced, began dropping comments on how warm that Holly-Stead romance was getting, and hinting that there was tucked away somewhere, in the best Goya fashion, a companion portrait, a nude.

  Well, well, what a bunch of bohemian puritans. Mason did not believe in any nude, or in its importance if there was one, though at the time the possibility had bothered him, and he had been malely offended, surprised that she would lower herself.

  What he had meant was that his vanity was hurt if Holly accorded Stead any privileges she did not accord to him. And he didn’t really believe that she accorded any to Stead. What truly shone out of that golden portrait, as out of Holly herself, was not glamour but innocence. Under the sheath she was positively virginal, a girl from Parowan who had made the big step to city excitements but remained a girl from Parowan. If you cracked the enamel of her sophistication you found a delighted little girl playing Life.

  Once more he felt on his lips the touch of that soft, childlike kiss by the piano on a Christmas morning, and stood up so abruptly that he startled himself with the sight of the dead woman, whom he had forgotten. It was innocence. Holly could put away the predatory paws of college boys, twist laughing from the casual kiss, pass among the hot young Freudians as untouched as a nun, shed like water the propositions that came at her seven to the week. There she sat in her gold gown by her window opening on the foam: a maiden in a tower.

  Like someone tapping at a door, wanting to interrupt a private conversation, Nola was there in his head asking to be asked in. He found it curious that he didn’t want to ask her in, not just now, though she was surely a more significant part of this lost place and past time than Holly. It was Holly he wanted to talk to just now; she seemed fresher with possibilities, not so tainted with old sullen emotions. The two had briefly shared these rooms, but it was Holly whom the rooms remembered.

  He crossed to the door of what had once been her bedroom, wanting to look in on her intimately. In this room, now completely bare, aseptically painted, he had sat many times when she was ill or when on Sunday mornings she made it a charming point of her sophistication to entertain in bed. While she lay propped with pillows he had read to her, talked to her, kissed her, had his hands fended away. The empty space was still charged with the vividness she had given to everything. There was one night very late, two or three o’clock, when he had sat on one side of the bed and a mournful and lovesick jazz trumpeter had sat on the other, neither of them willing to leave the other alone there, and all that night he had read aloud into the smell of sandalwood the life story of a mad woman from Butte, Montana. I, Mary MacLean, that one was called.

  What an occasion she had made of it, laid up with a cold, hemmed in by rival young men, covered to the chin in an absurd, high-necked, old-fashioned nightgown, taking aspirins with sips of ginger beer, laughing at them alternately or together with that face as vivid on the pillow as a flower laid against the linen. It was innocence. In that crackpot bohemian pre-Crash wonderful time, it was innocence.

  How he and the trumpeter had broken their deadlock, what had ever happened to the Tom Stead flurry, what became of Holly’s string of other admirers—all gone. She sent them away, or they quarreled at her over their bruised egos, or they became upset at finding her always in a crowd. Plenty of self-appointed hummingbird catchers, but no captures.

  And yet, maybe.

  Summer and winter, day and night, were telescoped in his memory. How old would he have been? Nineteen? Something like that. He was still in college, and even though he had stayed out most of one year to work, he had still graduated when he was twenty. And twenty, for him at least, had been very different from nineteen. Say it was 1929. Say he was nineteen, Holly two or three years older. There was neither beginning nor ending nor definite location in time to what he vividly remembered. What they had been doing, whether they had been out to some university dance or to some nightclub, hardly any details came back. But they were alone in a way they seldom had been.

  They must have been talking, something must have led up to it. It could have been during the time of gossip about Stead, for Holly was upset. It could have been only some occasion when she found her job as secretary of the American Mining Congress, or the attentions of her boss, or simply being absolutely independent and self-supporting, more of a strain than usual. But there she was, floodlighted in his mind, pressing against him with her face against his chest, clinging and crying, saying, “Bruce, get me out of this! I can’t take any more of it. This is all no good, it leads nowhere, it’s grubby and I hate it. I’ve got to get away, Bruce. Please!”

  Both the tears and the way she clung excited him. But the game had been played through all their acquaintance under different rules. And if she was an innocent, what was he? He went on in the old way, alarmed but still kidding, burlesquing gestures of consolation, patting the crow-wing hair, saying, “Well now, hey, don’t let it get you down. Brucie fix it, whatever it is.” Inanities, idiocies. She wore an evening dress cut very low in the back, and he played his fingers up and down her spine. He slid his hand in against her skin, slid it further, expecting the competent twist and shrug and fending, and the laugh that would mean the emotional fit was over. But his hand went on around, clear around, and with a shock like an internal explosion he found it cupping the frantic softness of her breast.

  Even remembering, all his sensations were shocking to him. He remembered how smoothly the curve of her side swelled upward, how astonishingly consecutive her body was. Also, and almost with revulsion, how rigid and demanding the nipple of her breast. Innocence—he had never touched a girl there, bare—never imagined, or imagined wrong. Stupefied by the sudden admission to her flesh, made uneasy by the way she crowded and clung, a scared schoolboy where she needed a man, he stood wrapping her awkwardly with his hand paralyzed against her discovered body, and kissed her and tasted her tears, and thought with alarm and conviction of Stead and the rumored nude, and was anguished with eagerness to escape.

  He remembered not a scrap, not a detail, of how he got away. She offered herself, and that was all. The peewee golfer putting his little white ball up the little green alley of his youth came suddenly on the sidewinder in the sand trap, the crocodile in the artificial lake.

  He closed the door on the memory. It had begun to occur to him that he was an extraordinary young man, and not everything that was extraordinary about himself pleased him. Innocence? Maybe, though there were more contemptuous names for it. Amusing certainly. If he were not caught in this queer emotional net he would have to laugh. You simply couldn’t tell a story like that without drawing smiles. But he was not telling a story. He was standing in Holly’s denuded bedroom trying to understand his emotions of nearly fifty years earlier. No matter what he had pretended, at that age he was hungrier for security than for taking c
hances. A fraud, he would gargle the whiskey he would obediently not drink. A great yapper with the crowd, he would tear up the turf coming to a stop when the cat quit running, he would break his neck not to catch what he was after.

  He told himself that he had been a very young nineteen. He told himself that the bohemian excitement boiling around Holly was an absurd and perhaps touching and certainly temporary phase of growing up. He told himself that he had not been ready.

  Like a bubble of gas escaping from something submerged and decaying in deep water, there rose to the surface of his mind one of Blake’s proverbs of hell that he and Holly had admired together that long-gone Christmas morning. It burst, and it said, “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.”

  The last time Mason had seen Holly, she was boarding a train for Seattle, on her way to Shanghai and a job they all publicly envied and would probably not have risked themselves. Whatever happened to her, her life could not have been dull. She had probably spent it flying around the world like a piece of space hardware. As Mason himself had done, however inadvertently. Holly had burst out of Salt Lake’s provincial security by choice. He had been thrown out like a bum through swinging doors. The result might have been the same, but the motivation was not; and remembering the night when she stopped playing make-believe and presented him with an option that would have totally changed his life, he half regretted his youthful unreadiness as if it had been a flaw of character and nerve. He disliked that cautious image of himself.

  His watch told him it was nearly five. Starting for the door, he passed the dead woman’s table and looked again into her waxen, dead-white face. The skin was delicately wrinkled like the skin of a winter-kept apple, but soft-looking, as if it would be not unpleasant to touch. The barbaric silver necklace somehow defined her. What it said about frivolity, girlishness, love of ornament and life, made him like her. But it lay very soberly on the black crêpe breast.

  He thought how she had been tampered with by McBride, and how further touches of disguise would redden cheeks and lips and complete her transformation from something real and terrible and dead to something that could be relinquished and forgotten. He turned away, frowning with a regret that was almost personal, a kind of rueful sorrow. He did not want her to have died.

  As he reached the door he threw an apologetic look back at the room as quiet and empty as a chapel, and at the corpse that lay so quietly at its center. There was a dread in the room that he would not stay for. He meant to tiptoe out, but he heard almost with panic the four quick raps his heels made on the bare floor before they found the consoling softness of the stairs.

  2

  Smiling, with a manila envelope and a slip of paper in his hand, McBride intercepted him at the bottom. “Find anything you recognize?”

  “Too much. Even the body.”

  McBride’s eyebrows flew up. “What? Really? You mean …?”

  “No, no. Figuratively. Ghosts.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, of course, I suppose it would be rather disturbing, wouldn’t it? I’m sorry if I …” He handed Mason the manila envelope. “These are some things Mr. Philips brought down from the Home. Your aunt’s watch, wedding ring, and so on. And there’s this box. I don’t know if you’ll want to take it now, or get it later.” He stooped inside the office door and brought out a cardboard box tied with cord.

  “Box?” Mason said. “What’s in it, do you know?”

  “No. It’s marked with your name, so Mr. Philips didn’t feel he should dispose of it with her other things.”

  Mason hefted the box. It was not very heavy. “That’s strange she’d package up something for me. Her mind’s been gone for years.”

  “It was something she was keeping for you, I think. I gather it’s been in her room there a long time. I can keep it here if you’d rather take it tomorrow.”

  “No, I can take it along now. It’s only two or three blocks.”

  “All right. And there’s this,” McBride said, and handed Mason a slip of paper. “Someone telephoned, wants you to call her.”

  At first Mason would not accept the piece of paper. He had the unpleasant sense that he had been shadowed, his disguise penetrated, his cover cracked. “Telephoned me? Nobody knows I’m here. Unless my secretary. Was it from California?”

  “No, local. She’d read in the paper about Mrs. Webb’s death, and guessed you might be coming. She called the Home first, and they directed her here.”

  Mason let his fingers close on the paper. There was nothing on it but a number. “She didn’t leave her name?”

  “No. If you want to use the telephone, there’s one right in here.”

  Briefly Mason considered and rejected the fantasy that by some incredible coincidence the call might have been from Holly—that he had wandered down this rabbit hole into the past and that now anything was possible, even likely. Absurd, of course. He said, “Was there an obituary notice that named me as a survivor?”

  “I don’t know,” McBride said. “Probably. It would be a natural thing, considering who you are. Go ahead and call, if you’d like.”

  But Mason stuck the paper into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Thanks, I’ll call from the hotel. Will you do me a favor?”

  “Of course.”

  “If anyone else calls for me, or this woman calls again, you don’t know where I’m staying. Take their numbers, and their names, too, if you can.”

  “I understand.”

  “What time should I be here tomorrow?”

  “There’s only the graveside service. No reason to come until we’re about ready to start for the cemetery. Say eleven-thirty?”

  “Good. I’ll try to have some flowers sent up.”

  “That will be nice.” McBride bent his head sideward in deferential agreement, like a Goan houseboy, and Mason picked up the box by the cord and went out into the unabated heat.

  The afternoon sun glared in his eyes. The sun glancing off the pavement lifted into the air a dark, wet-looking mirage. Cars going townward into the rising heat waves began to blur, grew as tall and square and black as the old Dodges of his youth, stretched and lifted off the street darker and higher until, tall as towers, they merged with the buildings downtown.

  All his impressions suffered from distortion and ambiguity. Looking at buildings, he couldn’t say whether he remembered them or whether his memory was filling the street with things it wanted familiar. Though he had been vaguely prepared for changes, he had not foreseen how strangeness and familiarity might fuse. He knew the street but was made uneasy by it. Was that because the person who saw and the person who remembered were not the same, though they used the same eyes?

  He knew this Bruce Mason who walked down South Temple Street carrying a cardboard box of his aunt’s unwanted leavings. He had lived with him a long time, knew what he could do and how he would respond to different situations. But Bruce Mason walked double. Inside him, moving with the same muscles and feeling with the same nerves and sweating through the same pores, went a thin brown youth, volatile, impulsive, never at rest, not so much a person as a possibility, or a bundle of possibilities: subject to enthusiasm and elation and exuberance and occasional great black moods, stubborn, capable of scheming but often astonished by consequences, a boy vulnerable to wonder, awe, worship, devotion, hatred, guilt, vanity, shame, ambition, dreams, treachery; a boy avid for acceptance and distinction, secretive and a blabbermouth, life-crazy and hence girl-crazy, a show-off who could be withered by a contemptuous word or look, a creature overflowing with brash self-confidence one minute and oppressed by its own worthlessness the next; a vessel of primary sensations undiluted by experience, wisdom, or fatigue.

  Put aside, postponed, schooled, overtaken by events, he was never defined, much less fulfilled—hardly even remembered until Mason came around Black Rock that afternoon and saw the old lake bottom littered with the stumps of the pilings on which the Saltair Pavilion used to ride above waist-deep water, and turned eastward to see the mir
age city rising against its mountains, and heard the ghostly unmufflered roar of Jack Bailey’s bug.

  When he took off his jacket, and a drift of air bushed his sweating forearms with a chill like liquid nitrogen, it was the boy’s skin that cringed with remembrance of what evaporation can do in super-dry air. And when he looked at the people he met, half expecting to encounter someone in whose altered features he could decipher a face once known, it was the boy on whom he relied for recognition. He himself would not know an old acquaintance, no old acquaintance would know him. Actually, he would not have liked meeting anyone the boy might know. He didn’t want either the boy or himself to be recognized. He wanted them to see without being seen, as if they looked through one-way glass.

  They met only strangers. In the hot street the sound of tires was sticky. The sidewalk was hot through his soles. Inhabited by his Doppelgänger, exhilarated by the sense of being invisible, he passed the old Church offices with their flower beds, and the garage ramp that had usurped the space of the old gym, and was sucked through a whirl of reflections into the Utah Hotel’s cool lobby.

  For the last block he and the boy had been marching to the beat of a scrap of poetry, a little 4/4 tune risen from the same cistern that had produced Blake’s proverb of hell:

  You need not be a chamber to be haunted.

  You need not be a house.

  In his room, where a chilly wind blew out of the air conditioner, he threw box and jacket on the bed and called Room Service for ice and tonic water. They came promptly—this had always been a first-class hotel, quintessentially Mormon both in its friendly efficiency and in the air of moneyed confidence it wore. More and more pleased to be here, he got the bottle of gin from his bag—before leaving he had remembered that Utah sold no liquor by the drink—and made himself a gin and tonic.