Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  Uncertainly she looks up. “Didn’t it go?”

  Voices assure her that it didn’t. She winds the film. The boy stares aggrievedly into his tray of flash powder. “Try it again.”

  Fixed smiles. Prunes. Click. Again no flash. “Why, what’s the matter with the blame thing?” the camerawoman says.

  Buck disconnects the flash boy, to the boy’s disgust. “Try it over in the sun, where you don’t need that contraption. Come on, Aud, get that lucerne-wrangler over here.”

  Bruce follows along, opening his camera. At the grove’s edge the bride, with restrained violence, wipes her daughter’s nose and hisses at her to stop her bawling. The three freeze again, then unfreeze while Buck waves his father into the picture.

  “Where’s Junior?” somebody asks.

  “Hell,” Buck says, “you won’t get him in this.” He looks down into the finder. “Hey, Aud, can’t you laugh?”

  “I’m smiling,” Audrey says grimly.

  Bruce, after a couple of frugal snapshots, saving his film for better things, comes up behind Nola and stabs her between the shoulder blades with his finger. She turns with a smile which his instinct tells him is too open. Those old women don’t miss a thing. Yet he couldn’t be happier. It thrills him to have her turn to him that way.

  “I’ve got to go help with the food,” she says a little breathlessly. “Save us places. Right at the end of the second table, there, by the ice-cream freezers.”

  “O.K. When do we start back?”

  “They’d think it was funny if we didn’t stay a while. They’ll cut the cake right after we eat. Then I thought you and Buck and I might take a ride.”

  “All right. But don’t forget we’ve both got to be back so we can get to work in the morning. Your aunties wouldn’t want you driving late, without a chaperone.”

  They have drawn back against a tree, out of the crowd. Her eyes as she studies him are full of light, and promises, and secret understandings. “You devil. You’ve been down with Buck, sneaking drinks behind the stable. He came up smelling like a saloon.”

  “Not me. I copped a smoke, is all. I observe the Word of Wisdom.”

  “Yes, just the way the rest of them do.” As if the answers to important questions were written on him, she studies him. “How’s it going? I saw you talking to Dad.”

  “We had a good talk about alfalfa and peaches and whiteface cattle and I told him about my childhood in Saskatchewan. He thinks I’m a reformed cowboy.”

  “Reformed! How do you think the wedding went?”

  “Fine. It got a little juicy there for a minute.”

  “Poor Audrey. She’s scared.”

  “Scared why?”

  “She was really in love with Elmo. She’ll never get over him. But she needs somebody to help bring up the kids. It was no good when she was working in Price. That’s a tough town.”

  “Darrell looks O.K.”

  “O.K. Not very exciting.” Like a child with a secret she smiles at him. “Not like what I’ve got.”

  “You know something?”

  “What?”

  “You’re a darling.”

  “Just you keep thinking so. Do you know something?”

  “Probably.”

  “They like you. Buck thinks you’re O.K. And Dad was leery about what I’d bring down, but he told me you’re a very pleasant young fella.”

  “Isn’t that kind of minimal? Didn’t he find me exciting?”

  They commune privately under their tree while the crowd mills and jabbers. Seriously she says, “How does it seem down here to you? Do you like it?”

  “Like it? Sure, it’s great.”

  “It’s better than great. Would you like it if we could run the ranch sometime?”

  “A reformed cowboy like me? Sure. Is there a chance?”

  “I think Dad’s about given up on Buck.”

  “What’s the matter with Audrey and Darrell?”

  “They’ve got all they can handle over on the Minnie Maud.”

  “I’m a heathen. Wouldn’t that bother them?”

  “Not for long. Anybody that’s good enough for me is good enough for them.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Am I good enough for you?”

  Her light frown warns him: somebody heading their way. He looks, and it is one of the men who helped kill Buck’s bottle. His Levi’s have been shrunk to his skinny legs. He has ten inches of wrong-side lighter cloth turned up for a cuff around his boots.

  “Well,” Bruce says, “we’ll have to see about that on the way back.”

  Her hand squeezes his arm, she turns and leaves him, moving with her incomparably physical, barefoot-woman’s walk. The lean man arrives and props himself against the tree and breathes upon Bruce his most un-Mormon breath. His eye is on Darrell, growing more uninhibited now that the formalities are over and his coat and tie off. Audrey stands at his elbow, hooked to him like a gate to its post.

  The lean man shakes his head. “Another good man gone wrong.”

  The camera wanders off among the million leaves of the grove, with only glitters of sun coming through them. Eventually it comes to rest on a length of railroad rail that hangs on a wire by the kitchen door. A hand bearing a tire iron comes into the picture and beats with vigor on the rail. Men stand up with alacrity, the old women rise from their swing, children come pouring from all directions. Bruce Mason reaches the end of the second table just in time to save the end place, and then the one to the right of it, from a twelve-year-old boy who, twice balked but hardly noticing what has balked him, promptly dives under the cloth and comes up on the other side next to the bride’s daughter and two of her girl friends.

  Women, Nola among them, make a procession from house to tables, bearing platters of fried chicken and corned elk, washbasins of potato salad, dishpans of hot biscuits, bowls of watermelon pickle, chokecherry jelly, pickled peaches and apricots. One stands by a milk can of lemonade, filling pitchers with a dipper. Close behind Bruce four ice-cream freezers, though covered with a yellow horse blanket, radiate cold.

  Plates and platters go down the table, are emptied, are retrieved and carried back to the house for refilling. Eventually the procession slows. A woman sits down to eat, then another, only two or three anxious aunties standing ready for whatever need arises. Nola comes hurriedly to her seat, and Bruce stands up to tug her chair into place on the uneven ground. The bride’s daughter watches, fascinated, this demonstration of big-city politesse.

  On both sides of her, her girl friends are gnawing drumsticks and talking through them. One place down, the twelve-year-old is gobbling as if this might be his last chance for a square meal until the Fourth of July. For a minute the bride’s daughter watches her friends with distaste and him with loathing. Unable to bear more, she leans around the girl next to her and says to him, “Eat with your fork!” Her eyes, seeking corroboration and approval, come around to Nola, who smiles, and Bruce, who winks. Conspiracy of good manners.

  Now the feast is finished, the littered tables are abandoned. The freezers once filled with homemade peach ice-cream stand tilted and empty in their melting salt water, drawing flies. The drying shepherd pup is seeking out morsels under the tables. Audrey, with Darrell’s hand guiding hers, has cut the cake, and girls have carefully wrapped their pieces with the intention of taking them home and sleeping on them.

  There has been a lot of competitive pie-sampling: Elverna’s apple, LaVon’s peach, Aunt Vilate Chesnutt’s coconut cream. Before the men and boys have quite finished with that, Audrey in a crowd of women and girls has thrown the bridal bouquet. But she has not given everybody a fair chance. She has grooved it like a three-and-nothing fast ball into Nola’s hands.

  Tearfully now she makes her way around family and friends, her bony face blurred with crying, and kisses each in turn, some several times, crying, “Oh, God love you, God love you!” She stands for a moment before Bruce, leans and kisses him quickly, says to him tensely, “I think it’s great! You be good to
her!” and goes on by. The crowd lines up before the rarely used front door, making an aisle from it to the sandstone fence, on the other side of which waits Darrell’s pickup, the honeymoon vehicle. Buck, as best man, was supposed to guard it from pranksters, but instead has helped hang it with banners saying “Just married,” and through the holes in its perforated solid-rubber rear tires he has helped string tin cans on baling wire. With his own hands he has tied a chunk of Limburger, imported from Salt Lake for the occasion and kept carefully hidden in the springhouse, to the exhaust manifold.

  Now the run through showers of rice, the yelled good wishes, the pandemonium as the pickup jerks away with its wheels trailing tin cans. Men whoop, women scream, dogs bark, dust rises in clouds. Safely down past the stable, Darrell hops out and yanks the wires loose from the wheels and hops in again. Audrey is wadding the “Just married” banners in her hands. They start up, a wadded banner flies out, Darrell raises his clenched fist and pokes it at the sky. Their dust goes down the valley road toward some destination which Darrell has been too cagey to reveal even to his treacherous best man.

  Dissolve. A moment of quiet. The dust settles.

  It is not the newlyweds who drive down the valley and whose dust drifts southward across the reef. It is not early afternoon, but later, five or six o’clock. The light is growing flatter, the shadows are beginning to reach out from buttes and promontories. It is not a black pickup that the camera follows, but a gray Model A coupe with fender wells and a rear-bumper trunk, quite a snappy little heap. The two who ride in it, sitting close together in spite of the heat, are not sheepish or tearful, but young and glorified. The girl holds a bridal bouquet in her lap.

  The dreaming eye follows their dust down to a junction, turns right with them up a long hill, passes the summit and swoops with them down the switchbacks on the other side. When the driver has to double-clutch and shift down on a steep turn, taking them smoothly around without so much as a minimum skid in the gravel, the girl hugging his arm hugs it tighter. “Good skinner,” she says.

  The camera loses them in a canyon and picks them up again as they top out at a great distance, buzzing along an elevated sagebrush plain above which rise the rounded shoulders of a higher plateau. Aspens are just leafing out on the high slopes, and in all the north-facing hollows there is snow. They drag their balloon of dust through little towns–Fremont, Loa, Bicknell–which seem to be inhabited exclusively by children on horseback who want to race. They round a corner under the colored cliffs of Thousand Lake Mountain, they pass through Torrey, they bore like a corkscrew into the rock along the Dirty Devil. On their left, the Capitol Reef rises. Its lower cliff is already in the shadow of the western wall; its domed white rim is still in light so brilliant that the eye squints against it.

  The canyon widens and flattens. They are in a pocket of green among red cliffs. A dusty track turns off left. “Here,” the girl says, and the driver swings the wheel. They bump down the ruts toward a grove of trees and stop against a ditch.

  The leaves hang heavy, individual, heart-shaped, dark green, utterly still. The ditch runs clear knee-deep water. Across it, filling the bottomland to the foot of the cliff, are spaced peach trees, braced and propped against the weight of ripening fruit. Just between cottonwoods and orchard is an old house of squared logs, doorless, its inside crammed with hay, a broken wagonwheel leaning against the jamb, a clutch of binder twine on a nail above the wheel. There is a dense, unnamed familiarity: we have known this place before.

  Into the stillness that sifts down on them like feathers, a canyon wren drops its notes, musical as water. The ditch chuckles and guggles to itself under its banks. Down the canyon from the high plateaus, feeling its way toward the desert, comes the first stir of evening breeze.

  The dreamer yearns and strains against an overwhelming sensibility. He is as susceptible as poor homely Audrey. He leans to kiss the girl beside him, but there is an encumbrance, and looking down, he sees with a shock that he is holding something alive and crippled, a big fierce scared bird that struggles against his hold and pecks his hands. In the enclosed car he can’t let it go, and yet it struggles so powerfully that he has great trouble hanging on to it. Indecision rises toward panic. What will he do with the thing? Open the window and throw it out? Wring its neck? Cram it down between brake and gearshift and put his foot on it?

  The girl’s eyes are on him, full of growing aversion, and he is ashamed.

  His shame awakens him, but he resists being awakened. With his knees under his chin he burrows back and down, wanting to pick up the dream where it was broken, deal with this buzzard or whatever it is, take that look off Nola’s face and get on with the consummation he knows is coming.

  But though his half-conscious mind can remember it, his unconscious refuses to dream it. Some censor forbids this movie. Dream and girl repudiate him, or he them. He finds that he can’t evoke her face, much less her body, shivering and damp and goose-pimpled from their dip in the ditch, crowding against him, growing warmer, stopping her shivering, on the bedroll under the broken shadow of the cottonwoods. She blurs and evades him until in the end he lies quiet and lets her go.

  The room hangs in its small-hours stillness above the stillness of the street. He feels bleak and old, done with, excluded and a failure, and is angry with himself for feeling so. For the dream, now that he has come fully awake, he neither wants nor believes. It lies to him about himself and it lies about the episode it pretends to recall. Some inferiority or self-doubt has been warping the facts in order to prove something. There was no repudiation then, and no failure. However fumbling and green he was, he was not unsuccessful, nor was Nola unwilling. The end of that initiation was not disappointment but a great grateful tenderness. Still the censor bans the rerun.

  The trouble with the censor is that it knows too much. It has another, and much longer, and presumably far more important life to remember and keep under control. It is wary about accepting the illusion of wholeheartedness that would have to accompany this uncensored dream. It knows that the girl and first love are both victims, and so is the boy who took them joyriding. They cluster at the edge of consciousness like crosses erected by the roadside at the place of a fatal accident.

  6

  “So what are you saying?” asked some interlocutor in some anteroom of sleep. “That it wasn’t just a Dear John situation? That you got really hurt?”

  “No,” Mason said. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “She left a mark on you.”

  “A heart with an arrow through it.”

  “If she didn’t mean anything, why couldn’t you finish that dream?”

  “Embarrassment. I’m too old to be having erotic dreams. And of course she did mean something. She meant a great deal, then.”

  “You keep saying you’re a thing that lasts. You know what the Red Queen said to Alice.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’ ”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  It must mean something, or he would not have worked it into this conversation. But he couldn’t make sense of it, and let it go. Finally his interlocutor—he perceived that it was both Holly and the woman of the St. Georges terrace, and that she was smiling at him with a certain fondness and with an air of sympathetic and ironic knowledge—said, “You’re like a nailhead that’s been painted over. You think you’re all covered up, but I can still see you under there. She was the biggest thing in your life, and she threw you down.”

  “And I recovered. I’d have recovered faster if she hadn’t chosen to unload me just when my family was being wiped out, too.”

  “But you worshiped her, didn’t you? When she let you go to bed with her it was like a religious experience.”

  “Yes. All right. But let’s not talk about a bloody nose as if it were a broken head. She wounded me where I was most vulnerable, in my vanity and my self-confidence. She preferred another lover. She wa
s a grown woman with a body and I was a boy with brains. The body always says hurry, the brains may say wait. When I went away she found out that she hated being on the shelf like a purchase with a deposit on it. She had desires that wouldn’t let her wait. I could have waited indefinitely, no matter what I said or thought.”

  “Could you? You just admitted she was like a religious experience. You think sex is holy, don’t you?”

  “Not the way I see it in the movies and in the lives of my junior colleagues.”

  “Ought to be holy, then.”

  “Sure, it ought to be. I’m that old-fashioned. Mystery, the profoundest agitation and self-sacrifice. Nothing to be cheapened or played with. Not just a jazzy incident on the pleasure circuit. Not the great god Orgasm.”

  “That’s what you didn’t like about Jack Bailey.”

  “Didn’t like but couldn’t help being fascinated by.”

  “Why didn’t you ever marry?”

  “Mainly because as soon as I got out of law school I took a job off in a country where the native women went veiled and stayed behind walls, and where there weren’t any others. Even if I had been anywhere where I might have met a woman I wanted to marry, Saudi Arabia was no place to take a wife. By the time it all opened up after the war, I was petrified in my bachelor habits. Get it out of your head that Nola spoiled me for all future women. We had a brief affair.”

  “Was it so brief? All summer. You went to that wedding at the beginning of June and you didn’t go away to school until September.”

  “But it was 1930,” he reminded her or himself. “In Salt Lake City. You girls had this thing called a reputation to be careful of. Nola’s apartment was always full of roommates and their dates. In those days there weren’t any motels. In a hotel, in a town the size of Salt Lake, you were bound to run into someone you knew. You didn’t take her home, the way they seem to now, and expect your parents to bring the two of you breakfast in bed. That left the automobile. You remember how it was.”

  “I wasn’t prying after details. I only said it mattered to you.”