The vision breaks and tears, dissolving. Below him the trees rattle and are still. Mason feels around in his mind like a blind man reassuring himself about the objects in a familiar room. The web of associations, the dense entangled feelings, are still, after an absence of two thirds of a lifetime, as intensely there as a rattlesnake under a bush. Not the girl herself; she is no more to him than a rueful shrug. But the associations, the sights and sounds and smells that accompanied her, the vivid sensuousness of that time of his life, the romantic readiness, the emotions as responsive as wind chimes—those he does miss.
Listen to those cottonwoods talking, he says to the two he left behind on the dark lawn. Doesn’t that sound tell you, as much as any single signal in your life, who you are? Doesn’t it smell of sage and rabbit brush and shad scale? Doesn’t it have the feel of wet red ditch-bank sand in it, and the stir of a thunderstorm coming up over one of the little Mormon towns down in the plateaus? Just now, for a half second, it drowned me in associations and sensations. It brought back whole two people I used to love. When cottonwoods have been rattling at you all through your childhood, they mean home. I could have spent fifty years listening to the shamal thresh the palms in the date gardens of Hofuf, and never felt anything but out of place. But one puff of wind through those trees in the gully is enough to tell me, not that I have come home, but that I never left.
Having let it surge through his head like the wind through the branches, he takes it back. He could never say any such thing to Joe, much less to Joe’s unknown listening wife. And yet there is something he wants to say. He tries again.
“Do you know how privileged you are?” he asks them. “Are you properly grateful to be living in Paradise?”
They protest, naturally. It is their belief that his life has been filled with exotic adventures and that theirs is restricted and provincial. That is one of the reasons he is only imagining himself in that back yard, and is not there in person: he hates the thought of being treated, by Joe, as The Ambassador, a visiting Distinction. That would only exaggerate the changes and the differences and the losses of forty-five years.
But Paradise. Their incredulity makes him insist. He feels that quiet back lawn as a green sanctuary full of a remote peace. “Paradise is an Arab idea,” he says. “Semitic, anyway. It’s a garden, always a garden. They put a wall around it because that’s how their minds work, they’re inward-turning, not outward-turning. Paradise is safe, not exciting. Like this. Change the mocking-birds in that gully into bulbul birds, and put up a wall, and you’d have it: water, greenness, coolness, peace, and all around you the desert. The Mormons are all mixed up about heaven, their right hand doesn’t know what their left is doing. The Book of Mormon makes heaven into a sort of New Jerusalem, with gold-paved streets and windows of opal and ruby. But the real Mormon heaven was made by hand, and it’s this, it’s an oasis in the desert.”
He cannot tell whether they accept what he says or whether they are only being polite to the ex-ambassador, an old friend. The scene fades, frays, is lost. A car coming along Thirteenth East exposes him where he stands looking down into the moving tops of the gully trees. His shadow rotates, floats outward, stretches, dissolves. For a second or two the car occupies all the silence, the whole inside of his head. Then its noise dwindles and the night and his head are whole again.
He turns back. Most of the houses along the street are dark. It must be eleven or after. A vague frustration grows in him—at the hour, at the fact that the two back there on the lawn cannot understand what he is trying to tell them, at the impossibility of going back there in person at all. How will he get all the questions asked? How will they bridge forty-five years? Can he say to Joe, outright, What did happen? Did Bailey and Nola stay together? When I was here for my father’s funeral you said their singing act had broken up, and you thought they had, too. But if she didn’t marry Bailey, whom did she marry? Where’s she living? What happened to her?
He would not admit that much interest in her, either to Joe or to himself. But he admits curiosity. That intense obsessed involvement, and then absence, silence. She managed to remain mysterious; he would like to know about her, but he can’t imagine asking. Neither can he imagine trying to explain to Joe why in forty-five years he never wrote a single letter. He was the one with the unstable address; he should have given Joe a chance to keep in touch. Later, much later, he might have read about Mason in the newspapers or got him with his breakfast orange juice on the “Today” show, he might know exactly how time has dealt with Bruce Mason, what he looks like, how he has spent his life. But by the time that information might have been available, it would have been far too late for Joe to write. Pride would have intervened. I’ll write the bugger when he writes me.
So now if Mason goes up on that porch and rings the doorbell and startles them out of their bedtime preparations—her hair in curlers, Joe’s teeth in a glass—in what role does he appear? Is he the Diplomat or is he the bootlegger’s boy?
It is impossible, not because he fears Joe but because he fears time, change, himself. After so long a silence, his slightest word, the answer to the simplest question, may strike Joe as being the word of a man who went away and forgot all his old friends and now comes back dropping names, parading himself rich and famous, as it may seem to them, around his home town.
Tomorrow it may be easier. Tonight he is too tired, he is not yet used to the strangeness of the once-familiar. After the funeral tomorrow he will call them, take them to lunch, spend the afternoon reaching back to what, however it may seem from his actions, means the most to him in this place.
He cuts across the parking strip to his car, and in the empty street, a street that stares like an Utrillo, makes a U turn and starts back toward the hotel.
2
The canyon breeze had died, the trees were still, the street lay out before him, not simply empty, but blurred and ambiguous, a double exposure, and he felt bewildered, in the strict sense, half lost in a half-remembered wilderness, beguiled by familiar-seeming landmarks as he had been when a boy prowling the willow bottoms of the Whitemud, following the destinationless and overgrown paths that cattle had pushed through the brush. He clenched his eyes shut and opened them again to clear his vision, and the street came single again. But it was the street of the past, not that of the present.
It had the familiarity of hallucination. Its trees overhung it with their known, late-at-night stillness, the arc lights blurred in the leaves and cast puddles of inert dusty light on sidewalks and parking strips and the angles of curbs. He had just dropped Joe off after a date, and was turning home. The tiredness of a long day and night had softened his bones. He yawned a jaw-cracking yawn: he had not slept since 1931. Slouched in the seat, scratchy-eyed, doped with drowsiness, he let the car find its own way like an old buggy horse.
Not surprisingly, it took him home, and by ways as familiar as the faces of the dreamed-of dead, past East High School’s gray barracks, site of all his subsequent flight-pursuit, corridor- and stairway, forgotten-examination nightmares; past the lunch shack, plastered with Camel and Coca-Cola signs, where they used to lunch on hot dogs and root beer, and where older boys, Chet among them, bought forbidden cigarettes and stood on the firing line just off the school grounds and smoked them with the intention of being observed.
Below the lawn, spread along the fossil beach terrace of the lake that thousands of years ago filled the valley, was a long hanging darkness, the playing field where in paleozoic gym-class softball games he had patrolled an invariable, contemptuous right field and batted ninth. Below that, the slope fell away to the crisscrossed lighted streets of the city, the bright bands of State Street and Redwood Road, the curving line of a new freeway, and far out, the darkness of the salt flats and the lake and the desert that reached to California. Up to the right, at the head of Main Street, the floodlighted Capitol stared whitely. Below it was the bloom of the business district with the spiky floodlighted temple at its upper edge.
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 professo
r 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.
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