Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  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.

  She sees that he has seen. Embarrassed, she pulls her robe around her and lies back. Grimacing, she says, “Don’t let it get too serious, too soon. You’ve got too much ahead of you. You don’t want to tie yourself down like Chet.”

  Or like me, she might have said. When she was Bruce’s age, twenty, she had been married for two years.

  “No danger,” he says lightly.

  They are both self-conscious and pretending not to be. “Try to get home early,” she says. “You never allow yourself enough sleep.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “I’d sleep if I could, believe me. Anyway, I’m not young any more, I don’t need as much sleep as you do.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll promise to sleep as many hours tonight as you do.”

  They laugh, but he is vaguely uneasy, for he has felt, like the draft from a door standing open somewhere else in the house, how the stillness and darkness of empty rooms will close around her as soon as he leaves. The people next door—Marcotte, that’s the name—are away visiting their daughter. No one will drop by, no one will telephone. It will be a long, ticking time till ten, and then till eleven, and then till midnight, and then till whatever hour, one or two or three, when his headlights will sweep across the ceiling as he turns in. Shifting blame that he ought to accept himself, he says, “I should think Pa could have waited till you were well before he made his trip.”

  “Ach,” she says. “Anybody dragging around the house makes him jumpy. He’s better off having something to do.”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re better off.”

  “I’m just fine.”

  “Don’t get out of that bed. Tomorrow I’m staying home all day and cleaning the place up and cooking you little custards and stuff.”

  “All right. You can baby me tomorrow.”

  “How do you feel? Can I get you anything before I go?”

  “No, no. You run along and give your Nola a thrill.”

  “I hate to go off and leave you alone.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m fine.”

  “I’ll try to get in early, but I may have some committee business afterwards.”

  This is a lie as ridiculous as hers about feeling fine. She knows it, and is indulgent. He knows it, and is not pleased with himself. The only committee meeting he is likely to attend will be a committee of two in a dark parked car.

  Her eyes, bright as blue turquoise, go narrow with the crinkling of her smile. She makes a show of snuggling her back comfortably into the pillows, and opens her magazine. He leans and kisses her cheekbone. “Good night. I’ll leave the light on in the living room.”

  “No need to waste electricity.”

  But he leaves it on anyway. It makes him feel better about leaving. Then he opens the door and emerges into the spring dusk. The air smells of mown lawns. His dancing pumps are as light as gloves. He jumps the six steps, his feet touch grass twice, he is in the car. By the time he has turned the corner he has forgotten her, he is looking ahead, not back.

  Mason’s foot eases up on the brake and the car begins to roll. The route is precisely the one he would have taken that night in 1930—down to Tenth East, right on Tenth East to South Temple, down South Temple to the tower house and the hotel. When he passes E Street on the right, he looks for the old Brigham Street Pharmacy, once hangout and landmark, universally known among the young as the BSP. It has become a shabby branch bank.

  A block further down, he involuntarily slows as he approaches the house with the tower, as if he were indeed going to stop there, leap up lawn steps and porch steps and interior stairs as impetuously as he just now leaped from his porch, and arrive panting at the door where Nola in a party dress of green taffeta, her hair piled rich and dark on her head, his orchid pinned to her waist, will open. She has a figure more womanly than Holly’s, not so pencil-thin, deeper-bosomed. Her shoulders, rising bare out of the stiff green silk, are smooth and golden. She is as full of promise as the spring night outside. He has never seen her dressed up like this. She takes his breath.

  “Oh, hey, beautiful!”

  “You like it?” She touches the orchid at her waist. “I never had an orchid. I had to try to live up to it.”

  “You make it look like some daisy out of
a vacant lot.”

  He slides inside and reaches for her, but she shrinks away, laughing. “You’ll smear my war paint.” Relenting, she leans forward. He leans to meet her, and she gives him a soft, fluttering, puckered kiss as if she were kissing him through a hole in a curtain. Only their lips touch. He tastes raspberry lipstick, and when she goes into her bedroom to get her wrap he takes out his handkerchief and wipes a faint red stain from his mouth. The sight of it on the clean folded cloth excites him. He sits down at the piano and bumps out a mechanical bass to “Twelfth Street Rag,” his total accomplishment on the piano besides “Chopsticks.” In the middle of it, the other bedroom door opens and Holly comes out, dressed for a date.

  “Well, hi.”

  “Hi, Holly.”

  “You’ve got a new talent.”

  True. Nola has taught him those chords so that they can play something four hands.

  “No limit to my gifts,” he says. She makes him nervous. It has been two weeks since he asked her for a date. After that little outburst of hers, he just dwindled away, without quarrel or explanation. He doesn’t know how nonchalant or casual to be.

  Something about Holly’s upper lip makes her look as if she might lisp, though she doesn’t. She moves around setting little things to rights, squats briefly to turn on the red lamp on the floor. Its light glows on the ceiling as if from a manhole down into a volcano. She lights a cigarette, and he smells menthol. Kools. “You’re going to the spring formal, I hear.”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  Her amused glance takes him in from his satin-bow pumps to his wing collar.

  “I’m going to a party at the country club with my boss.”

  “Aha!”

  “Yes,” she says. “Aha!”

  Nola comes out with a brocade coolie coat over her shoulders, its arms hanging loose, and a gold evening bag in her hand. Even in high heels she manages to move like a barefoot woman. He sees Holly’s eyes stop on her for just a moment, a look as measuring as if she were about to sit down and draw her. Then she widens her look to include Bruce and makes a little wave with slim fingers. “Well, have fun, kids. Freut euch des Lebens.”

  That is a motto he and she once adopted for themselves, when they were reading William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives. Freut euch des Lebens. Live it up.

  “She doesn’t like me going out with you,” Nola says on the stairs.

  Bruce has had the same impression. Though it bothers him a little, nothing could inflate his self-esteem more.

  The chivalric code as it has leaked down to him and his crowd from Emily Post and other authorities is explicit about the opening of car doors, the help one should offer a lady in such matters as sitting down, the obligation of the escort to walk on the gutter side of the sidewalk, presumably to shield the lady from the splashing of possible mud and slush. There is no mud or slush this mild night, but he opens doors, holds elbows, makes sure all feet and skirts are inside before shutting. He is scrupulously on the gutter side from parking place to hotel entrance. He holds the revolving door while Nola, lifting her whispering skirts, slides in. Emerging behind her into the lobby, he sees that some student couples are already there, watched with interest by hotel guests sunk in lobby chairs and sofas. Who are all the beautiful young people?

  He is whacked hard between the shoulder blades, and here is Jack Bailey, rank as a barrel in which Bourbon has been aged. His arm is hooked into the elbow of a swamp angel, a Moulin Rouge character so obvious in her inclinations and compliances that she might as well wear a satin band over her shoulder like an Atlantic City beauty contestant, saying Miss Willing. Jack introduces her: Muriel Something. He says to Nola with his burbling leer—he is the only person Bruce knows for whom words like “burble” and “leer” are unavoidable—“Been out on Redwood Road lately?”

  She only looks at him. So does Muriel. Coldly.

  “Stay away from there with this guy,” Jack says. He raises his finger like a preacher, and intones, “He knows no such word as no!” Then, a magician patter-chorusing while he folds his handkerchief, he says, “They’re changing the name of Redwood Road, did you hear?”

  “They are?” Bruce says. “Why? What to,”

  “Taylor Walk.” Jack raises his eyes up along his upward-pointing finger and wahoos into the coffered ceiling of the Utah Hotel lobby. His girl snickers, gently chewing gum. Already drunk, Jack says, “Listen. Intermission. Room 244. Eh?”

  They leave him. They choose to walk up the broad steps to the mezzanine.

  He keeps falling out of his time machine. Instead of ushering a gorgeous girl in by the front entrance, he drives up to the side. The attendant comes out of his glass office and Mason turns the car over to him. The lobby, instead of boys in dinner jackets and girls in party gowns, shows only bellhops and two belated couples who have been doing whatever it is one does now in the evening in Salt Lake, and who are waiting in their denim leisure suits and Hamro slacks for the elevator. Instead of joining them, Mason, too, walks up the stairs to the mezzanine.

  Now it returns, now he is back there, for off to the right of the stairhead are the doors to the ballroom, where the orchestra will be arranging their chairs and wetting their reeds, and where other members of the committee will be talking to the assistant manager about dinner details or lighting, or making last-minute adjustments of the decorations (red roses on white trellises, like a garden scene from a high school play).

  He goes to the doors and looks in. The past is not there, the present slaps him in the face. The big gaunt room is lighted only by orangey wall-bracket lamps whose bulbs are twisted to resemble candle flames. Folding chairs with mimeographed sheets scattered on or under them stand in broken rows where their occupants pushed them when they rose from whatever librarians’ or petroleum geologists’ or woolgrowers’ meeting last went on here. The podium wears three water glasses, a pitcher, and a wilted microphone. The room is stagnant with dead speeches, rules of order, motions and seconds and amendments, treasurers’ reports. He doesn’t suppose it has been used for a dinner dance in years. Dinner dances went out with the Model A.

  Yet if he narrows his eyes he can make it swirl with colored motion, a Calder mobile. His senses venture out toward the throb of dance music, he sniffs girls as fragrant as tuberoses, the whiskey breath of a grinning undergraduate spinning his girl close reeks in his face.

  If Bruce Mason were with another girl, that breath might be his: he would have felt obligated to gargle. If the girl in his arms were another, say Olive Bramwell, he, too, might be charging around the ballroom like Crazy Horse surrounding Custer. But Nola has a calm that discourages boisterousness. Her dark piled hair among the shingle bobs and fresh marcels makes her seem more womanly than any girl in the room. She is not made for acrobatics or showing off; she is made for waltzes, slow fox-trots, circlings in uncrowded corners, long looks, murmured talk, serious questions, sober moments, upward smiles, communion. Her voice is husky, her laugh so warm and low that it makes the laughter of other girls sound like the cackling of hens.

  Already it seems to be intermission. The musicians are setting aside their instruments, the crowd is pressing toward the doors and the punch bowls on the mezzanine. Waiters have appeared with tables that they set up around the periphery of the floor. They whip white cloths over them, lay them with silver and glasses. But these two stand talking, unwilling to break.

  On the merest glance, he is younger than she—younger in years, younger in manner and self-command. He is blond where she is dark, his eyes are blue where hers are brown, he is thin and hyperactive by contrast with her composure, darkly tanned where she is golden. She makes a center, he orbits it. She smiles, he laughs. He talks with his mouth, eyes, hands, body; she listens. He whips around her as if she were egg and he spermatozoon. Utter opposites, they make a one: Yin and Yang. Their force field deflects intrusions. From the first note of the band until now, they have avoided trading a single dance.

  It is the first time they have go
ne out together to anything but a movie. They have still many things to discover about one another—where they come from, what they like, how they feel, what they hope to do. In six dances he has painted six self-portraits, summarized his twenty years, told about his friends and his job, carefully avoided saying anything about his family, invited her corroboration of his opinions of professors and courses, discovered that in the autumn quarter, before he knew her, he graded her papers in a Victorian poets class and gave her a C plus, determined to his brief disappointment that she has no interest in Hemingway, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, or tennis. He has learned that her mother is dead and that she was brought up by her father and several aunts on a ranch in Emery County. There at the ranch in Castle Valley, on the edge of the San Rafael Swell, she has a horse named Baldy, whom she pronounces Bally. Her eyes are full of light as she tells him about all-day rides into the Swell or up onto Ferron Mountain. She adores her brother, a rodeo rider, who once competed in bull riding and saddle bronc with boils on his behind.

  In return for this information he confides, since it is something she obviously respects, that he, too, is a sort of cowboy, having grown up in Saskatchewan and Montana.

  He sees that the crowd has left them, that they are standing alone, and says, “There’s booze up in 244. You want to go up?”

  “Will it be a lot of noisy drunks?”

  “Probably.”

  “Jack Bailey and those.”

  “I don’t know who all. Jack for sure.”

  She scowls. To his fascinated eyes she has the most expressive face he has ever looked at. In an instant, Helen becomes Medea. “Jack Bailey thinks he’s smart.”

  “Why? What’s he done?”

  “Nothing. But he sure tries.”

  He is bothered. The thought of Bailey after her in a car, really putting it to her, tail or walk, and meaning it, turns him cold. He can hardly bear not to know, though he dares not ask. She gives him a smoky glance out of the corners of her eyes and looks away, toward the doors, nursing some irritable recollection. He feels inept and junior. He wants to retrieve the moment and get the scowl off her face.