Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  Her eyes come up a moment and are hidden against his chest again. He sees the part in her hair. Even in his heated state, as with Forsberg a few minutes earlier, he notes how false real emotion can make us appear. She looks coy and false.

  “You, too,” he tells her. “You love me. You want to. Don’t you?”

  She says into his shirt, “Would I be acting like this if I didn’t? Damn you, you … You know what I was thinking when I told Eddie you were driving me down home? I was hoping you would. I kept thinking of being alone with you. I kept wanting to show you off to Buck and my father and sister and everybody. My father’s always after me to marry some nice boy and settle down and quit living in apartments. He thinks it’s dangerous, or immoral, or something. And I was thinking, if we did go, there might be some place … I know I couldn’t say no to you, and I didn’t know how you felt about—marriage, and everything. If I didn’t say no, and then you didn’t want to marry me, where would I be? You wouldn’t respect me. You’d lose interest.”

  What he hears is unreal, like the murmured talk of a talking picture heard without seeing the picture. Laocoön in the toils of his serpent had no more pressure on his chest or thunder in his ears. He tips her chin up and stares into her eyes, to see if they are saying what her mouth is saying. But she will not look directly at him. He encloses her in a shivering, exultant hug.

  “When is this wedding?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Can you postpone starting your job? Say you’re not quite through school?”

  “I think so.”

  “I’ll get tomorrow and the next day off. How far is it down there?”

  “A hundred and seventy-five miles.”

  “My car’ll be fixed by tonight. We can leave early tomorrow and camp out somewhere and come in just before the wedding, as if we’d driven straight down.”

  She studies him with her lower lip bitten thoughtfully under her even teeth. “I … can’t leave early tomorrow.”

  “Why not?”

  Her eyes hunt in his like someone hunting for a lost earring in the grass. “I have to see somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “Why are you so inquisitive! The doctor, if you have to know.”

  “About what? What’s wrong?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  Her eyes still hunting in his, her lips bending into a smile, she shakes her head. “No.”

  Heated conjectures have started up in him. He is almost totally ignorant, and timid to boot, and afraid to think what his mind suggests to him. Yet the suggestion is unavoidable. Something female. Something in preparation for their trip? He knows the limerick about the girl from St. Paul who went to the birth-control ball, and about her pessaries and other accessories, but he has only a dim idea what the accessories might be, or how they work. In the world of Jack Bailey it is the gentleman who provides protection. Is she really, as coolly as this, contemplating getting herself something, knowing she intends to go all the way? The thought instantly quells desire. Then he realizes that she has no such thing in mind. She could not even conceive of taking love so coolly. She is only telling him that she has something wrong, some variety of the female troubles that the Lydia Pinkham ads speak of but nice girls do not.

  “When do we go, then? Day after?”

  “Can you arrange it?”

  “I sure as hell will. And the day after, too, so we can stop somewhere on the way back.” The further this conversation goes, the more unbelievable it is. He looks into the bottomless brown pool of her eyes, and what he sees there lifts him eight inches off the floor. “Do you know somewhere?”

  “I was thinking. Have you ever been in Fruita?”

  “In the Capitol Reef?”

  “Yes. It’s just a pocket in the cliffs, on the Dirty Devil. An uncle of mine has a peach orchard there. We’ve camped in it sometimes. There’s a grove of cottonwoods, and a ditch that comes right out of the river, and an old log house that he stores hay in. Nobody lives within two or three miles. Anyway, they’ll all be staying on at home after the wedding.”

  “Perfect!” He puts his lips to the fragrant part in her hair and whispers against her skull. “And you will. Tell me you will.”

  “You’ll think I’m fast.”

  “I think you’re wonderful. Gorgeous! Incredible! Beyond compare! Say you will.”

  “Oh, do I have to tell you?” She lays her forehead against his chest and immediately pulls it back. “Bruce?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want you to think …”

  “I don’t think anything except that you love me.”

  “No, there’s something.… Why I have to go to the doctor. I’ve got … You know, something’s a little wrong. To fix it they might have to … I might not be technically a virgin.”

  Full of magnanimity, he forgives her. “Who cares?”

  “I don’t want you to think anything.”

  “You’re a darling.”

  She takes his wandering hands and holds them. “You!” she says. “You’re exactly what my father is afraid I’ll get mixed up with!”

  “Are you afraid?”

  Her eyes swim and change, they have suction in them, they pull him down. She is smiling. With her eyes wide open she kisses him.

  Eventually, somehow, he breaks away, still leaning to kiss her one more time through the door as it closes. He is shaky, his face is stiff. What he feels as he leaps down the sidewalk is not love, not desire, not anything that simple. It is nothing that needs further gratification. It is already gratified. It is wonder.

  The sun is intense and dizzying, straight overhead. The shade where Joe sits seems like darkness. When he levitates into the seat, Joe rouses himself.

  “You already? You haven’t been gone more than two hours. If you’d only stayed a while, Welby’d have had it all bagged.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Pree-cisely,” Joe says. Pulling away from the curb and setting a course toward Sugar House, he looks at Bruce curiously out of the corners of his eyes, but he asks no questions.

  As for Bruce, he seethes behind his pretense of everyday-ness. His mind is full of reruns of the scene he has just left. He is formulating the lies he will have to tell J. J. Mulder in asking for two days off. And one other thing, one unworthy thought: If a girl were getting ready to go to bed with a fellow, and wasn’t sure how experienced or inexperienced he was, but was afraid he might know she was not a virgin, she might, if she were scheming but not too clever, tell such a story as Nola had just told him.

  An expert in untruths, he feels the unlikelihood of her being deflowered, at just this moment, by a doctor. It is too pat. It anticipates potential questions. And there is Eddie Forsberg, high school sweetheart, who had some reason to think she might marry him and go off with him to the Philippines. He must have had reason. But he can’t pursue her down to the ranch because her father or brother might shoot him.

  He dismisses these sneaky thoughts. He believes her because he wants to believe her, because he can’t equate such a lie with the look in her eyes and the passion with which she kisses him. He shoves the treacherous little notion back and away, he smothers it in anticipations, he obscures it with fantasies of pure young love in a paradise oasis among the red cliffs.

  4

  Except for the wrinkles in it, the sweater might have been brand-new. He held it up and looked for holes, sniffed the wool for the smells of preservation: neither moths nor mothballs had been there. The thing might have come straight from its original Utah Woolen Mills box. Mason couldn’t remember whether or not he had ever seen Nola wear it. At least she hadn’t given it to Bailey.

  Laying it aside, he picked up the two bundles of letters, one tied with string, one with a piece of brown velvet ribbon that he seemed to remember around Nola’s hair, times when she let it down and bound it behind her head. When she sat at the piano it hung down her back in a thick, dark-chestnut sheaf like a
horse’s tail, clear to the bench.

  As between those tied with string and those tied with ribbon, he chose those tied with ribbon. They were not, he saw, chronologically arranged, only bundled together. Put in order and read consecutively, they might make a sort of sickly Sturm und Drang novel, a decaffeinated Sorrows of Young Werther or Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. He was certainly not going to read them through. He might look at the top one.

  It was postmarked March 4, 1931. That would have been only a little while after he got back to Minneapolis from Chet’s funeral. At Christmas he hadn’t been able to go home because the banks had all failed, and the savings of more than four years at the Mulder Nursery had gone in one blow, crossed out. Lesson number one in the curriculum of growing up. The holidays he had hoped to spend with Nola in Salt Lake he spent in Minneapolis in the company of other threadbare students, eating crackers and cottage cheese, and milk kept cold on the window ledge, and reading, reading, reading, boning up in hornbooks, reviewing torts and contracts and crimes in preparation for February’s exams, and putting in a systematic three hours a day on general books calculated to improve his mind. Aristotle just then, as he recalled: Poetics, Ethics, and Politics, one after the other—books he had managed never to hear of during his undergraduate years, and as unrelated to his immediate life as the Harvard Classics philosophers he had read when he was fifteen.

  Then, at the end of January, on the eve of examinations, came the telegram announcing the last of Chet’s misfortunes and mistakes. Lesson number two followed so fast upon number one that he hardly had time to set his feet. Like his catch-up reading, his instruction in real life had much ground to cover in only a little time.

  If Chet had not been generous and good-natured, he would not have worked up a sweat on a cold and windy day, helping dig somebody’s car out of the snow at the Ecker ski-jumping hill outside of Park City. If he had been born luckier, he would have waited to catch pneumonia until after antibiotics had tamed it. Being generous, unlucky, and ill-timed, he dug and pushed, he got overheated, he fell sick, and he died within six days. “I’m leaving you the dirty work, Ma,” he told his mother a few hours before he drowned in his own secretions. Then he escaped from his future, which was drab, and his marriage, which was in trouble, and abandoned to the responsibility of others the daughter he had conceived before he was legally a man.

  Bruce came home to a week of clenched misery. Chet’s wife had gone to pieces, his father ate his own vitals in guilt and self-blame, his mother tried to hold them both up, Bruce tried to support her. It was his father who took that death hardest. He had always liked Chet better than Bruce. Chet was an extension of himself, wholly masculine, big-chested, unbookish, an athlete. Even after the runaway marriage and the subsidence into odd jobs and semipro baseball, the dream of the big chance, big leagues, big success, had never quite died for either of them.

  It was like the game of swatting the baby with a pillow: the old man never realized it wasn’t going well until it had gone all to pieces. He never knew how he felt about Chet until Chet was dead. Every night Bruce heard him moaning in nightmares, and his mother’s voice as she tried to wake him to a reality as bad as his dreams.

  Death closed their closed family in upon itself more than ever; they were as impervious as a spore. There was no room for Nola among them. Bruce had to find time for her separately, which was not easy. She was tied down by classes and practice teaching. He saw her only in the evening, late, when her own work was done and when his parents had gone to bed so that he could borrow the car. Their hours together were somber. Though she was sympathetic, and cried for his trouble, it was the renewed separation that she feared. She couldn’t make anything out of their brief bleak reunion for thinking how soon it would end.

  He could give her only scraps of himself. His mind was always back at the house where his mother would be lying sleepless, waiting for the next installment of his father’s nightmare and hoping for the sound of Bruce’s key in the door. Through the months in Minneapolis, Nola had been an anguish in his blood, he had been swollen with visions; but while he was at home they never even tried to make love. There was no place, and anyway Chet would have lain like an accusation between them. All they did was sit in the cold car and torment one another with abortive touching, and kisses that had in them something like a groan.

  On the last night he picked her up after dinner and they sat up on Wasatch Boulevard in the white cold, under the cold mountains, huddling and kissing and promising. He talked about the next summer and all they would do, but in the middle of his Pollyanna spiel she put her hands to his face, cupping it and staring into his eyes, and cried in her husky voice, “Oh, do you have to go back there? I can’t stand it if you go away again!”

  And here, something odd. He had been utterly miserable in Minneapolis. With no gift for the law’s precisions, and undereducated to begin with, he had compensated by a monomaniac diligence. He went nowhere except to classes and the library, he took no exercise, he ate in twenty minutes in order to get back to the books. In spite of the monotonous bland things he ate, his ulcer was a constant reminder under his wishbone. He was away from everything that had once given him a delusive confidence, his heart was wrenched with more love than it could hold, he was blackly lonesome. And yet when she begged him not to go back, he had not a moment’s hesitation. Of course he was going back. He would stick it out, and she should, too, and eventually they would get their postponed reward. Four more months, and then all summer together. Another nine months, and together for good. He would find a place in some local law firm, or hang out his own shingle.

  Mason could hardly believe his own naïveté What had he thought he was going to do? Arrange little divorces? Settle little real estate squabbles? Draft little wills? Litigate little disputes about water rights, or breaches of contract or promise? That last was probably it. Breach of promise was very big about that time. Many a female heart, inspired by Peaches Browning, was exposing its injuries to sympathetic juries.

  It was fantastic that he should ever have thought his future might lie in the practice of law. That was only the direction in which he had been pushed by people eager to do him a favor. He had no more initiative in his career than water has on a slope. Nevertheless, once started, he would have felt it immoral—unthinkable—to stop before the end. He would get his degree and come back. They would be married and build a house, or maybe only a basement at first, in the Salt Lake Depression style—a roofed-over foundation in which they would live until they could afford to build the first floor. Just Molly and me and baby makes three.

  Question: Why that mule headed inertia? Answer: In the first place, he was mule-headed. He hated to back up, start over, change direction. To this day he drove that way, gerade aus like a German, despising the people who dart from lane to lane. Moreover, he was used to delayed rewards. He knew something about having to work for what he wanted, and even more about frustrations and disappointments. He was a digger, but there was a fatalist in him, too. He mistrusted the rewards that he would break his neck to win. He half expected to fail even though experience should have taught him that most of the time he did not. In his bones he knew that the world owed him nothing. Some part of him was always preconditioned to lose. And though he felt himself superior to his background, and capable of some vague unspecified distinction, he knew himself unworthy. He was a sticker because it was easier to dig in and be overrun than to attack and be repulsed.

  To Nola he had said nothing about any of that. He didn’t know himself that well. Also, he had hope. When you live by daily postponements, you had better have hope.

  It didn’t help that on that last night he felt he had to take her home at ten so as to spend the last hour or so with his parents. The next morning, when he kissed her goodbye at the Union Pacific station, her lips were cold from the wind, and her eyes were bottomless. Sad? Resentful? He couldn’t tell. He never could read her eyes.

  Now here was this letter written from Mi
nneapolis a few weeks after he left her for the second time. He wished Aunt Margaret had managed to preserve something else, his letters to his mother or Joe, a diary, old papers, photographs, anything. To reconstruct that time from these letters alone was like trying to make a composite drawing of a suspect from the evidence of a single witness.

  He is still running books past his eyes, a random sampling of the wildest variety: Longinus’ On the Sublime, Heroes and Hero Worship, The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle, Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Andreyev’s The Seven That Were Hanged. These are his after-study-hours reading. He confides that before turning off his light about two every morning, he gives himself a German lesson, reading a page, with the help of a dictionary, from Also Sprach Zarathustra, Tieck’s essays on Shakespeare, or Giovanni Papini’s Gog.

  Strange, strange, and far off. Even the handwriting strikes him as strange. Most people’s handwriting, he believes, grows more angular and irregular as they age, like the shapes of old pine trees. His, on the contrary, has grown more precise. It is demoralizing to see this impetuous scrawl and know it for his own. It is even more demoralizing to read what this boy sees fit to say to his girl, frantically signaling from his isolation to his desire.

  He is excruciating. His letter is a desperate patter chorus of puns, doggerel, snatches of languages he does not know. Embarrassed to speak seriously of what he respects and covets, he describes professors as vacuum cleaners full of air, dust, and dead flies. Poverty, exile, and the death of a brother have taught him nothing. He sounds seventeen, not twenty-one. And if Mason were the girl this boy is writing to, he would notice one thing: though he is bitter against his exile and passionate for its end, the bulk of the letter, like that score card of books he has read in the past week, is about what his exile is teaching him. He speaks less of his losses than of his gains.

  Dull fare for an unintellectual girl left behind in Salt Lake City, as dull as Yeats on fairies or Schopenhauer on suffering. Would she have felt that this compulsive self-improvement of Bruce Mason’s, which she cannot know is half-baked and only semi-directed, threatens what she wants and what he says he wants? Would she feel the torque of foreign books, foreign ideas, working on his provincial innocence?