Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  A crowd has gathered at the gates. They are tired, yawning, subdued. Somebody grumbles that if they’d jist open the gates a man could at least go out to the train and lay down. There is a slow, ponderous leaning as people stack up behind. Everybody is pressed close together, closer to the gates. Packed bodies hold Bruce up on every side. He is down below, and can see little—could see little even if his eyes were not so heavy. They drag shut against all his efforts to hold them open. Asleep on his feet, embedded in the crowd, he drifts.

  A shift, a stagger, somebody steps on his foot, he feels himself losing his balance, and comes awake to find that he has grabbed hold of a girl’s arm. As if his own fantasies were writing the script, it is the girl in red. Muttering an apology, he lets go and straightens himself. She gives him only a glance, yawns loudly, laughs, raises her hands to take hold of her boy friend’s shoulders, and twists him around facing away from her so that she can lay her cheek against his back, pretending to sleep.

  Bruce’s fingers tingle with the memory of her skin. Sunk down below everyone, he can’t see out, but he can see, close to him, the girl’s red dress and bare raised arms. Lifted that way, they pull her breast up and out so that it juts alive and bold against the red silk. In Bruce Mason the lightest thing in the world stirs and lifts. No longer sleepy, he folds his arms—it is dusky, he is jammed among people, there is no need of getting a camouflaging hand into his pocket even if there were room to do it. He is as aware of the bulge of her breast as if it were a sparking live wire. With his arms folded, and if he lifts his hands a little high, the fingers of his left hand are within inches of that softness. He is thinking that if the crowd should shift again as it did a minute ago, and if he were again bumped off balance, his fingertips might just brush against her as if by accident.

  It does not take long. The crowd does shift. It leans. Instead of bracing against it, he lets it move him. His fingers touch her.

  Snap! Her arm clamps down on his hand, pinning it to her side. Her furious face is a foot from his, she has pointed teeth, she is shouting. But he is deaf, his mind has gone white with terror. Frantically he yanks, but she has him. Then she reaches for him with her other hand, and he breaks loose. The boy friend is struggling to turn and get at him. He dives low and burrows, lunging ahead. Hands grab at him, voices rise, but he twists, breaks away, gets beyond the surge of the turmoil he has created. He feels with his body that the gates have just been opened, and he shoves between a man and woman, sees an opening, hits it, and is through onto the causeway and up onto the steps of the open excursion car. Through the car, off the other side, up along the train in near darkness, he outdistances everyone, slides into the end seat of the front car, facing backward and watching the train fill up.

  Every glimpse of red stops his heart. He is prepared to jump off on either side if he sees them. He will jump into the lake, swim under the causeway and hide among the pilings, drown there in the dark if he must, but he will not be taken. His heart pounds so hard it hurts him, he has trouble getting his breath. He is frantic with the fear that they will somehow get close before he sees them, and will pop up on both sides of the car, trapping him. He will be collared and dragged off, a cringing, babbling, weeping, skin-and-bones crybaby with guilt and depravity written all over him.

  He cannot see them anywhere. People are boarding his car, but none of them pays any attention to him. But in his sliding back and forth across the seat with his neck craning like a baby bird’s in a nest, he attracts attention, and then he freezes, sitting with his breath still as short as if he were being strangled, and his guts full of fear.

  But the train jerks and starts, and nobody has come. They leave the causeway and gather speed, rocketing across the flats toward the far glow of the city. The tainted wind tears at him; he gulps his lungs full of it. Gradually his heart quiets and the constriction of his throat eases. Driven to know where they are, and whether they are still hunting him, he starts cautiously back along the steps, hanging to the poles that support the roof. But the steps are preempted by necking couples who do not enjoy being disturbed, and it is hard to see by the one dim light at each end. What if they are lying in wait for him? If they should jump up suddenly in front of him, what will he do? Jump off the train? The flats rush by below him, the pole he clings to throbs with speed. Intensely aware of the ground rushing past, he visualizes and pities his own death.

  It is too dangerous. He retreats to his front seat, where at least he should be safe until they reach the city. His mind, running ahead, tells him that from here he can beat anyone off and through the station. But streetcars are brightly lighted. What if he should board one and they should get on behind him? He doesn’t want to see that girl ever again. The memory of her furious face and pointed teeth, the way her arm snapped down and trapped him against her side, will do him for a long time. How could she have known that his fingers were not an accident? Where did a girl like that get so strong?

  He will have to walk home, twelve long Salt Lake blocks, nearly two miles.

  The car is dusky, and people are quiet, but he does not dare let his eyes close. When they slow for the station, he is off like a slingshot rock. For the first two blocks he runs, tired as he is. Then he plods.

  The streets, growing brighter as he approaches Main, are almost deserted. Occasionally a car goes by, and now here comes the first streetcar from the station, brightly lighted, nearly full. He stands behind a tree while it passes.

  At West Temple, rather than go into the brightness of Main Street, he turns south, but at Third South he must turn again across the bottom of the business district, across Main and then State. At each of those intersections he waits until there is nothing in sight for a block each way, and then forces his dead legs into a trot. Beyond State Street it grows darker, shabby houses replace business buildings, there is a nighttime odor of damp lawns and poplar trees. Between the widely spaced arc lights the trees hang heavy and dark. The sidewalks are humped and uneven. His eyes burning with rage and humiliation, he plods one interminable block after another, stumbling and cursing and pitying himself. His head is often turned back over his shoulder, for he is as afraid of the dark as he has previously been afraid of the light. How could such a contemptible thing as he defend itself against thieves and murderers? His body will be found with its throat cut, thrown under some hedge.

  Starting at every rustle of a disturbed bird, his heart stopping and then starting again with great bounds, his eyes bulging from his head, he finally takes to the middle of the street, away from the fearful dark along the sidewalk.

  As he enters his own block, the clock in the City and County Building tower booms out one heavy stroke. His feet have hardly touched the porch steps before his mother is at the door in her bathrobe. She takes him by the arm; she says in a voice unusually angry for her, “Bruce, this is just too much! You’ll kill yourself! I’m not going to let you work out there any more. You’ve got to promise me!”

  He mumbles something about missing the Owl. He lets her lead him into the kitchen, he accepts a glass of milk and a cookie, he staggers off to his room with her arm around his shoulders, he submits when she drags off his clothes. In his underwear, he falls into the bed like something falling from a roof.

  He has made her no promise. But he understands that he won’t go back the next night, nor the next weekend, nor ever again. He will get his mother to telephone that he is sick. When she has turned off the light and gone softly away, he lies grinding his teeth, his eyes squeezed shut on angry tears. Already his arms, legs, shoulders, head, his very hair, are falling away, disappearing, weightless in sleep.

  6

  Once again Mason came up from a long way down. He watched the acned boy clear the table and wheel away. He shook his head with a wincing kind of sympathy. Pretty unlikely material. But who could say? Some survived. Half apologetically, he tried to catch his waitress’s eye as he went out, but she was busy with other things.

  His watch said eight-forty. H
e should now go and call Joe Mulder and reestablish contact with his amputated youth. But the initiative in that particular reunion had so far been with the youth, not with him. It kept blurting into his awareness: unschooled yokel, country cousin, full of itself. He was not prepared to shut it up and take over. Procrastination, as he freely admitted, kept him from the telephone, led him out through the lobby into the street, and seduced him across Main Street and under the wall of the temple block until he stood opposite the Temple Square Hotel.

  It was smaller than he remembered it, but it still looked as if it were used by good Mormons coming into town for Spring and Fall Conference. That was the clientele the church had built it for. When it was brand-new, Nola Gordon had lived there for one week. Bruce Mason had been perhaps an indirect cause of her moving in. He was certainly the cause of her moving out.

  They were already what his mother called “in deep.” Nola was wearing his fraternity pin. He was wearing the West Point class ring that had been given her by a previous steady, a fellow from her home town. There might have been an omen in that ring, if Bruce had been in a mood to read it.

  That was the year after he stayed out of school to work full time so that Joe’s father could take the family to Europe. What year? 1929? 1930? He was beginning to discover that the memory had no calendar. Inside there, all was simultaneous. A sense of time had to be forcibly imposed on it.

  But it was still in charge of him, random and disjointed though its reminders were. It simply outboxed him, it danced around and hit him at will. Time’s patsy, he came straight from being peppered by a lot of adolescent humiliations and found himself facing this hotel whose only association was Nola. What had made him walk this block and stop here? A need for some sort of reassurance? It was an interesting notion. Until this moment he had managed pretty effectively to exclude her from his rerun of old pictures. He had hardly said her name in his mind.

  Unappeased grievance, or habit? For a long time he had worked hard to dis-create her. He had willed her never to have existed. So now, without conscious intention, he walked straight to where he could be reminded of no one else. So far as he could remember, he had never been in the Temple Square Hotel in his life except during the week she lived there.

  Holly had scared him off because she took the offensive. She grabbed. He was too young and green, his bones hadn’t hardened. By the time he had come to Nola, only weeks later, he was farther along. And Nola was a different girl, altogether other.

  Books and ideas put her to sleep, art bored her. Only music meant anything, and in that, by a freak of nature, she had a real gift, which, by the accidents of her nurture, remained undeveloped. How did a girl from a cow town on the edge of the slick rock country, a girl with obvious Indian blood in her from some time when a polygamous grandfather, on the advice of the priesthood and with the aim of getting glory in heaven, help around the house, and pleasure in bed, took a Ute wife—how did such a girl from a starving and primitive little town get born with perfect pitch and the ability to play almost any instrument, after a try or two, by ear? Where did she learn so well to sing parts in her husky contralto? Was is the compulsion of a gift that drove her to sing, or Mormon tradition and habit, the practice of a pentecostal hymn-singing frontier reinforced by choiring Welsh converts? Merely youth? Did all the young sing? Were they all like Dryden’s countryman who whistled as he walked, for lack of thought? Whatever it was, everybody Bruce Mason loved in his home town sang, and so did he, and so, more than anyone, did Nola.

  Singing, she was a warm and happy energy. Joy came out of her mouth. Knowing nothing about music, knowing only ballads and popular songs, she loved the congruency of long sonorous chords. “You’re so true!” she cried to Bruce the first time they found themselves singing in a crowd. He hoped she meant the remark more than musically. But it was in singing that they first came close. They entangled themselves in songs, they converted emotion into harmony. Whenever they were together they hummed like prairie telegraph wires, and their repertory covered every sentimental occasion but specialized in the ecstasies of new love. Right now, without trying, he heard the song they used to sing most significantly, leaning their heads together, closely harmonizing, baritone and dark warm alto. Their song.

  It made Mason feel like a sentimentally scored movie. If he were telling this to anyone, he would have to laugh to keep from looking foolish. But he was not telling it to anyone, and he didn’t much care, at the moment, if he looked foolish to himself. He often had. What fascinated him was that that moonstruck boy and he were the same person. What a thing a human life was!

  Where Holly was all vivacity, Nola was all repose. There was a deep quiet about her, the air of complete self-containment that Mason had often noted in animals, seldom in humans. She did not chatter—it struck him now that she had told him remarkably little about herself, her family, her background, her growing up. When things bored her, she curled up and slept. Her hair was dark, heavy, and unbobbed: luscious hair, Holly said enviously. Very early in their acquaintance—and the acquaintance of a boy and girl that age, in those times, was as alert and responsive as boxing or table tennis—she took it down and proved to him that she could sit on it.

  Her eyes were as dark as her hair and voice. They were less speaking eyes than Holly’s, they did not flash or sparkle, but an unquenchable life glowed in them, deep down or behind, looking out from a center that was untroubled and untroublable, serene, acceptant, complacent, maybe even devouring. Mason never saw them bleached out, streaked, or tired. Her face was Indian-looking, a little heavy in the bones; olive-skinned, expressionless in repose, dark-browed, with a small triangular scar above the right eye that managed to be an accent, not a blemish. She had a magnificent scowl, and she walked with a straight back and neck like a barefoot woman carrying a head burden, the proudest, most unselfconsciously female walk he ever saw. On a horse she was marvelous: she had grown up on a ranch, and her brother was a rodeo rider. For all her quietness, her soft-voiced withdrawal, the placidity of her dark eyes, she compelled notice—his notice, at least. Simply by being there as if waiting, she took his attention away from brittle, witty, febrile Holly. She smoldered without apparently being aware that she was afire.

  In psychology classes they used to argue, with all the exhilaration of emancipated thinkers, that mind is only the high integration of the physical, and that unless the spirit can be proved to have its location in some organ, it has to be a fiction. Nevertheless, the head, Mason was thinking now, the head, which probably developed as the seat of the first sense organ, feelers or eyes or whatever, and went on developing from there, is a very different part of the physical apparatus from the body. The body eats, evacuates, winces, and reproduces. The head senses, comprehends, responds, and plans. That was not quite the way St. Paul put it, but never mind. There were head people and body people. Holly, for all her calculated glamour, lived above the neck. Nola, with no intentional glamour at all, lived below it.

  Holly understood that, and understood where Mason himself belonged. One spring night, a while after they had their queer, unresolved parting, they were sitting together on the porch swing while Nola was up in the tower changing her clothes. Bruce thought, in a dim way, that he owed Holly some sort of explanation, if only an after-the-fact explanation that was essentially a lie. So he told her what was by then becoming a fact, that he was in love with Nola.

  It was dark. He could barely see her at the other end of the swing, but he felt her turn toward him. “You’re joking,” she said in her light, high voice. A vanilla voice; Nola’s was caramel, or chocolate.

  “No. I am.”

  “In the good old-fashioned way?”

  “In the good old-fashioned way.”

  “Meaning you’re going to marry her?”

  She jolted him. She often jolted him, being two or three years older, and used to thinking not in collegiate terms but in the terms of real life. Marriage had never entered Bruce’s head. He was afloat, or adrift, on t
he present like a fly on meringue. But having said what he had said, he had no alternative but to go on. “Sometime,” he said. “Not right this week.”

  He heard her long earrings jingle as she shook her head. It seemed to him that by contrast with Nola’s unadorned femaleness, Holly was false and empty, just as her light voice was made for jokes and quips and society verse where Nola’s husky whisper had a thrill in it like the rattle of a snake.

  “But eventually,” Holly said. “And get buried in Salt Lake.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Necessarily,” she said. “Oh, Bruce, she doesn’t have a brain!”

  “She’s got anything I want or need,” he said. They didn’t say much more. He was angry. So, he supposed, was she. Very shortly after that, Nola moved out of the tower. It was just too awkward.

  She didn’t come to the Temple Square because it was a church hotel. Her family were as much cowboy as churchgoer, and she herself was no more religious than a lizard on a rock. She had a summer job in a downtown department store. The hotel was new, clean, and convenient. Perhaps there was also at work in her a residual country girl timidity. In the city she had lived in her sorority house or with roommates, never alone. Living alone would be pleasanter for her and Bruce, but she may also have felt it more dangerous. This was Utah, 1929 or 1930. Perhaps she picked the church’s hotel to ensure the supervision she had just discarded.

  Mason had no more idea now than he had then why she had chosen as she did when their growing involvement led them away from the awkwardness of being around Holly. Looking across at the bright entrance behind which a precise memory lay waiting to be examined, he first examined himself to see if there was any mold of old emotion on any of this, and decided that there was not. It was as clean as a bleached bone, without power to do more than make him smile.