Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  There were other ghosts back in the night-lighted aisles of vanished Mullett Kelley’s. His later dudism would not be tentative, uninstructed, and solitary, as was that first attempt, but social and imitative. He would dress the way his friends dressed. He could see them in there, crowding toward the windows in Oxford bags with twenty-two-inch cuffs, in Cantbustem white corduroys and crew-necked sweaters, in ROTC breeches and prospector’s boots, in pegged whipcord and British leather, in straw skimmers with rainbow bands, in narrow-brimmed hats of rabbit-fur felt dyed red or green or orange—a brief fad borrowed from some movie, perhaps Brown of Harvard. And in white flannels and white buck shoes, in golf knickers and Argyle socks, in three-buttoned, short-lapelled suits made by Hickey Freeman or Hart, Schaffner and Marx out of (apparently) grain sacks. What one wore, all wore. Witness those Navy-surplus ducks he had seen disappearing down Main Street before dinner.

  He stood and stared in past the little scene of the window display to where Bruce Mason at eighteen or nineteen, the Bruce Mason of the Holly phase or just before, surveyed himself in triple mirrors, a creation almost too perfect for profane eyes: white linen plus sixes, black stockings, black-and-white shoes, black sleeveless cable-knit sweater, black knit tie, white shirt with long arty “studio” collar points. The grasshopper at summer’s end. Medium-big man about campus, editor and tennis player, poeticule, fop.

  With a refocusing of his eyes he made it a year or two earlier, say spring of his sophomore year in college. He was seventeen. Joe Mulder was with him, a couple of years older and cubits bigger. They had peeled off their red athletic sweaters with the white U’s on them and were being shown the new line of suits by Jack Bailey, just returned in disgrace from his aborted mission to Tongatabu.

  Bailey had always been a scandal. In high school he spent his time playing football and tennis and his nights in what he and his peers called cunt-hunting. Their reports on how the hunting had gone drew crowds in corridors and locker rooms. Twice he had wrecked his father’s car, the second time killing the girl who was joyriding with him. In his one year at the university he had raised so much hell that his father had conspired with the bishop of their ward to get him called on a mission.

  Tonga was not a good choice. Bailey was not exactly repentant about getting recalled. He admitted that he had been teaching the girls on the beach at Nukualofa more than the story of the Golden Plates, and that they had taught him more than the ukulele. With small encouragement he would detail what he had taught and what he had learned.

  It was Bailey’s theory that women like it. He believed that there was not a woman alive he couldn’t do it to, given time and circumstances. That was very interesting to virgins like Bruce Mason and Joe Mulder. Having experimented with how far a nice girl would let you go, they demanded to know how Bailey would go about persuading a girl who was saving it. He replied that he would ding their clitoris. Ding their clitoris and they fell like ducks in a shooting gallery. Oh, sure, they said, hooting. How you going to ding their clitoris? Just go ahead and ding, is that what they’re going to tell you? You have my permission?

  Who said anything about permission? said honest Jack Bailey.

  As a haberdasher’s clerk he was a natural. He would appraise your leg and tell you whether you should wear plus fours or plus sixes. He would instruct you in the right style of Arrow collar to wear with your tux. He would show you how to keep your shirt from ballooning out over your belt by attaching a rubber band between a lower shirt button and the top button of your pants. He bought his clothes at a discount and looked snappy in them. He wore his belt buckle snuggled against the point of his left hip. He was a husky, curly-headed, laughing satyr with a good tenor voice, an encyclopedic knowledge of clothes, cars, female anatomy, and the postures of fornication, and no interest in anything else. Joe, with his large tolerance, found him enormously amusing. Bruce found him fascinating because of the possibilities he suggested.

  Bailey had the supreme confidence that he could talk his way out of anything. He liked to tell of the night he was parked with a girl out by the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon, and had to leak so bad he was dying of it. So he got out, saying he’d better take a look at the right rear tire, it had been feeling soft, and while he looked he took out old Elmer and let fly, and while letting fly he talked a blue streak to his girl in the front seat, ten feet away, so that she wouldn’t hear the waterfall against the wheel.

  Chortling, he raised his eyes and sang:

  Just a piss in the park,

  ’Twas to her just a lark,

  But to me ’twas relief supreme …

  The story he was telling now topped them all. Probably he was right, probably he could talk his way out of anything.

  “We’re on her porch,” he was saying. “I’ve been working her over and she’s hot as a firecracker. But there’s no porch swing or anything, so I’ve got her backed up against the wall beside the door. You ever try it standing up? With a tall enough woman it’s O.K. Not like a wheelbarrow—oh, mama!—but O.K. So we’re giving it to each other good. Every time I sock Elmer to her he lifts her off her feet. Every time she comes down she buckles my knees. Sometimes I don’t get in but three or four pumps before I come, but last night I got in ten or fifteen. And then just when I’m coming, and it’s all pinwheels and skyrockets, her old lady opens the door.”

  Cries of disbelief. Laughter. “Bailey, you liar, you could sell that to the Mulder Nursery for ten dollars a ton.”

  “Swear to God,” Bailey said, with his hand raised.

  “So what did you do, you bullshitter?”

  “What could I do? Jesus, I’m in her, I’m going off like Big Bertha. And there’s her old lady three feet away with her nose against the screen door. I couldn’t even quiver. If she turns on the light I’m gone. There we’d have been, stuck together like a couple dogs. So all I can do is hold old Agnes up on my pecker, and brace my hands against the wall like I’m penning her in, trying to kiss her or something, and I say to her old lady, ‘Mrs. Larson, I’ve been trying to get a good-night kiss from your daughter and she won’t give me one. Have you got any influence with her?’ ”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I sure as hell did. ‘I know I’m keeping her up late,’ I says, ‘but she’s been holding us up here for fifteen minutes.’ ”

  Bailey rolled his eyes toward heaven; his cocky, square-jawed face wore a look like prayer. “Jesus, it was me holding her up, and Elmer was losing his holt. There’s no way I can turn away, or get her skirts down, or button up, or anything. I just have to lean there against her and spill this line to her old lady about what a stingy daughter she has, won’t even give a guy a good-night kiss. ‘Maybe if you told her to,’ I says, ‘she’d give me one little smack and I could go home and we could all go to bed.’ All the time old Agnes is fainting down the wall, and I’m scared shitless her old lady will turn on the light, or come clear out.”

  “Penis erectus non compos mentis,” said Joe, who had a lawyer brother.

  “And then what happened?” said Bruce Mason, snake-charmed by this tale.

  “So I lean on old Agnes and I sing a little song in her ear,” Bailey said. “ ‘How about a little kiss, Cecilia? A little kiss you’ll never miss, Cecilia?’ Just like Whispering Smith.”

  “Bailey, you’re the goddamnedest …”

  “If my boyish charm don’t work, I’m ruined,” Bailey said. “I’m still into Agnes about a foot.…”

  “Ah, ah,” Joe said. “Vanity, vanity.”

  “And then her old lady says, ‘I don’t find any of this very funny, Mister Bailey. Agnes, I want you in here in two minutes, you hear?’ And shuts the door. Oo woo. Oh boy.”

  “So then you screwed her again, I suppose.”

  “No,” Bailey said. “As soon as she shut the door, I discreetly withdrew.”

  They shouted with laughter, and Bailey, with one eye on the office door in the back where the boss might be listening, began straightening up a rack of ties
. (Laughter, Mason thought, staring through the window at that embryo of himself inside. Could there have been a time when he thought Bailey funny? And answered himself: yes.)

  But Bailey’s grin faded, he twitched his little mustache and knocked irritably, twice, on the counter. “Shit, though. I went away from there still wearing the condom, and when I got home I threw it in the can and flushed it down and went to bed. But it didn’t go down, and this morning my old lady goes into the bathroom and sees this evidence floating there, and there’s hell to pay. I don’t know if I dare go home. If she tells my old man, I won’t.”

  Back in the dim aisles they huddled and commiserated, reflected in triple mirrors, images of outgrown images, and outside the window of the Cat’s Meow Mason stood wanting to laugh and found that he couldn’t, quite. He found Bailey unpleasant and troubling, actively hateful, as if time had earned him no perspective at all. Personal grievance? Injured vanity? Or was he troubled by Bailey because, hateful as he once was, he demonstrated the attractiveness of amorality and self-indulgence and irresponsibility? Id. Principle of Evil. Lord of the flies. Why should Bruce Mason have caught, like another childhood disease, the sexual morality that was properly Bailey’s inheritance, not his?

  In the window he watched a gray-haired man, his seersucker jacket hung over his shoulder on a bent forefinger, frown and turn away.

  He walked on up the street, but at Second South, thinking ahead to the next block, he felt the old pool hall coming, and that could have been as troubling as Bailey. Swerving with the green light, he recrossed Main and went up the other side, past where the Paramount Theater used to be. In its glass cage Olive Bramwell used to sit dispensing tickets, smiles, and in slack periods, chatter. A nice girl, a really nice girl, never Bruce Mason’s steady but a girl he genuinely liked. She warmed his memory by appearing in it.

  He and Olive understood some of the same things, without ever discussing them. He had, even then, the feeling that she kept her counsel as he kept his, and that she lived her life in compartments as he did: home, school, work, dates. Picking her up at her apartment (a girl could not conceal her home the way Bruce did) he had seen how shabby a place her family lived in, how proud they were of her, a college girl, how respectful of him, a college man. Her father was a fireman. Once or twice he had got Bruce and his friends the use of the firemen’s and policemen’s gym to practice basketball in. Or was it the police chief who had done that for them—the police chief who was a friend of Bruce’s father’s?

  Like Bruce, Olive worked her way through school, first at the ticket window, later at the organ, which she learned to play in order to upgrade her job. Though she was pretty enough to turn heads, hers was screwed on right. A gay and game companion, she knew what she liked to do, what she wouldn’t do, how far she would go, what she had to do. Neither a gold digger nor a fast one nor a teaser nor a dull and timorous dame, just a good-looking girl who had looked over her inheritance and her necessities and gone to work.

  Once, walking down this same block with her after a movie, Bruce had looked at her animated face and her good figure in the pony coat she had just bought herself, and had said impulsively, “Olive, you know something? You’re O.K. You make me feel good. I like just walking down the street with you.”

  In the middle of the sidewalk she had stopped, staring. Bruce was not one from whom girls expected compliments. Some of the bluster of his runt years clung to him. He affected the humor of belittlement and insult, he specialized in the outrageous. Hello, Double-Ugly. Hey, Repulsive, give us a kiss.

  Dumbfounded in the stream of the after-movie crowd, she had stared at him with her mouth open. “Is this you?”

  It embarrassed him to see that he had touched her. She had her own defenses, which he respected, and which were more breachable by stealth than by assault. He was afraid she might do something as awkwardly unprotected as he had just done—get tears in her eyes, or peck him with a kiss right there in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Don’t tempt fate,” he told her. “In a softheaded moment I said you’re O.K. Give me any of your lip and I’ll revert to type.”

  He swept an arm around her, felt her first resist and then give, and there they went varsity-dragging down the pavement while he leered lustfully into her face. Laughing, she broke free. People around them were laughing, too. That kind of attention-getting Bruce Mason never evaded. Whatever the occasion, he could be counted on to end up showing off.

  Nevertheless, a moment that it pleased him to remember. Mark that page in the album.

  The Paramount seemed to have been cut in half and renamed the Utah 3. Olive was not in the cage. A girl with buck teeth gave him an indifferent glance as he went by. Some other business, he didn’t even notice what, had replaced the Keeley’s Ice Cream parlor next door. In its windows he saw the gray-haired man with his jacket over his shoulder change direction to avoid running into one of the paragranite fountains. Saved from collision with the intractable present, he renewed his inspection of his own unsmiling reflection until it hit the window edge and vanished.

  Now he was at First South, where coming down he had not so much as turned his head, preoccupying himself with thoughts of streetcars and old-fashioned electric signs like someone who stared intently into a store window to avoid greeting an acquaintance passing behind him. Not through fear. All that was years and years ago, it had been worn smooth by time, and covered over with later deposits like a geological nonconformity. More than that, he had had it in his mind that it was one of the things he would revisit and confront, if only to test what time had done to his response. But there was a reluctance in him, related to his procrastination about calling Joe Mulder. An influential part of his consciousness would have been perfectly content to leave that whole horizon buried.

  The WALK sign was on, and he almost obeyed it. But he didn’t. He stopped at the curb and looked left across Main Street and down to the second building from the corner.

  Gone. No sign in the shape of a pool table outlined in lights, no steps leading down below the street level. A new tall building had replaced the old four-story stone front; the patterned sidewalks of downtown rehabilitation had paved over that lowest point in his life, the place where he had last seen his father alive, and where he had cut every tie that bound him to his origins.

  Now he turned and looked east up First South, searching for the shabby front, the dim apologetic sign, of the fleabag hotel where he had killed himself. It, too, was gone. All the buildings on the block must have been razed. Slick high rises confronted one another across their decorator sidewalks. It was as different from the old street as the man standing on the corner was different from the tense student who decades ago, summoned from his law school graduation in Minneapolis, entered the now vanished door and saw the washed area on the grimy wainscot, the tack-holed floor of the corridor from which the carpet had been removed, the door at the end with the hole at breast level through which had gone the first bullet, the one that killed the woman.

  It was there as detailed and uncompromising as a photograph: you could have put a magnifying glass to it and read the flyspecks, the numbers and names scrawled on the wall beside the telephone. And then an overlay slid across it and he was seeing another bullet hole, perhaps prophetic: the one in the colored glass beside the front door of the first house they had lived in in this town, the hole against which, at thirteen, he used to put his experimenting tongue to feel the thin stream of icy outside air. That air blew at him out of the past right now. His teeth ached clear to the jawbone, and he was filled with a weary sense of predestination, helplessness, the inevitability of things.

  In just a few months, he said to somebody, some ficelle or confidante, I buried my brother, my mother, my young love, and my innocence. In a few months more I buried my father and my youth. Put that way, it sounded like a bleat, a plea for pity to match some burning and unassuaged self-pity, and he despised himself for the way it had phrased itself in his head. Yet he was offended
to see the pool hall obliterated, and his father with it. He wished his father could have been perpetuated through the places he had frequented. He wished change could have happened without wiping him out—that he could still exist on First South and Main as he existed in the memory, in the neurones which, alone among all the cells of the body, are never renewed. Mason wanted him preserved, he began to realize, so that he could return to him and settle something.

  And if with him, then with others, too. With Bailey, if he was alive. With Joe, whom he had cut off with the others though from Joe he had never known anything but kindness. With Nola, of whom he had asked more than she could give. With all of them, dead or alive, he had binding treaties to make. With his mother, no. She was the one person whose memory he didn’t need to placate, whose forgiveness he had without asking. For all his thoughtlessness and egotism, he had loved her with a whole heart, and she had known it. She lay quiet; they understood one another. The others were more demanding.

  But he was not even yet ready for them. As after a long plane journey, he had some sort of historical jet lag to get over. His clock needed resetting. And also, he told himself, he must not, must never, exaggerate the pain and anger of his youth, because however he may have felt at the time, his youth was something that he now looked back on with fascination, disbelief, and a wincing sort of pleasure.

  As a matter of fact, for five or six years this city had been so rich and full for him that every morning trembled with possibility like a wall on which sun and wind throw the flicker of leaf shadows. The days and nights could not contain him. He walked his routes to the university, or rode the streetcars to his job in Sugar House, or drove out on a date, or sat up late over books and went to bed with his brain exploding like an ammunition dump, or put his name on the sign-up sheets of tennis tournaments or his lips on the warm lips of girls, with the feeling that any hour could bring him some unimaginable, gorgeous fulfillment. He had no ambition, he did not plan toward any future, he felt no high resolves, he comprehended no goals. He simply lived the full present, and every morning opened his eyes on a new installment of it, and he trusted the new installments never to fail.