Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  Unexpectedly given three free hours in any other city, he would have visited a museum or toured the monuments. Here the museums contained mainly pioneer relics, and he knew the monuments. Without much wanting to, he found himself driving around town in that state of mixed recognition and bewilderment that had possessed him in every unoccupied moment since he arrived.

  The city was bigger than he liked, and its expanding edges were indifferent to his insistent recollection. The university had grown so much that the old Circle, once the heart of the place, looked lost and apologetic, a survival. His impulse to go in and see if Bill Bennion’s office was still there withered. His suggestion to himself, that he find a telephone book and see if he could locate Bill himself, lasted only as long as it took him to recollect that if Bill were alive he would be past eighty, perhaps senile, surely forgetful, with no such memories as Mason had of the times when Bill had taken a can opener to his mind and let in the air of books and ideas. Many bright students had gone through Bennion’s life, each occupying three or four years. He could hear Bill’s ironic voice: “Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth? I do not call him to mind.”

  He drove on up toward the mountains and found that much of old Fort Douglas had become a golf course. The apricot orchard through which he had unreeled his tardy telephone wire was a fairway bordered by bungalows. The firing range where he had shot the nick out of Colonel Waterman’s hat had vanished under lawn and sand traps. And up on Wasatch Boulevard where he and Nola had used to park, he got totally lost, and was swept into a freeway that took him clear to the mouth of Parley’s Canyon before he could turn off.

  Making his way back through Sugar House, he drove past the J. J. Mulder Nursery and found that someone (Joe?) had face-lifted its sagging vine-covered front and transformed it into a glass-and-redwood palace call the Tree Farm. Was this the place to try to renew contact with Joe? He hesitated, almost turned in, turned back out again. There would be all the interruptions of customers and phone calls. Joe might not even be there, might have retired. And anyway, Mason wanted to see no Tree Farm; he wanted to keep the Mulder Nursery as he remembered it.

  Coming in on Seventh South along Liberty Park, he drove slowly, looking for the first house they had lived in in Salt Lake, the one with the bullet hole beside the door. He recognized nothing.

  Down Ninth South to State. Now Automobile Row. Once he had haunted the State Street corner of the old ball park, waiting to chase down one of the balls that got hit over the fence in batting practice. Turned in at the wicket in the left-field wall, such a ball got you a free bleacher seat. Long gone—gone, he realized, well before he had left Salt Lake. Gone, too, naturally, the Night Owl, where at one or two of a Sunday morning after a date he and Joe used to stop for a pork tenderloin and a milk shake.

  But when he turned up West Temple he could tell from the feel of his insides that this was where he had been headed all along. After two blocks he slowed to a crawl. Mid-block, on the west side, there should be a brick apartment house. There on the southeast corner, ground floor, after two months of hard trying, his mother had died in October 1931.

  It wasn’t there. What was there was a two-story, balconied motel, a square U with its opening to the street, cars angled in against the walks, its office showing a lighted neon sign: VACANCY.

  Like his father’s fleabag hotel, the place of her dying had been swept away and replaced, and in the process her very existence had been made dubious and unverifiable. Nothing here confirmed what he had carefully inked out but not forgotten.

  Vanished or not, this was what he had been inexorably returning to—this misery, this wreck of everything. He had lost his brother, his savings, his safe place in the world, his girl. He had never had a father. He was losing his mother day by day as the codeine and then the morphine dehumanized her. Happiness, confidence, security, hope, were delusions. Pain was real, and shame was real. He withdrew into endurance, he avoided old friends, even Joe. He embraced dull sorrow.

  Now none of that existed. In their Chamber of Commerce zeal for progress they had modernized him out of his profoundest life.

  “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life,” Schopenhauer had once tried to teach him, “our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” Did he believe that? He didn’t know. Or rather, he did know, of course he knew. He didn’t believe it for a moment. Nevertheless, he resented being cheated out of what he had finally made his way back to.

  His father could not bear to go on living in the apartment where she died. Neither could he bear the doldrums and bad times that the Depression by then had brought on. An entrepreneurial frenzy moved him, he was uptown all day working on schemes. Within a couple of weeks of his wife’s death, he and Schmeckebier had leased the old pool hall and were working all hours cleaning it up and painting. Expenditures brought on economies, and soon they had given up the apartment and moved into that cheap hotel uptown, sharing a single room. The fall tipped toward winter, the smoky blanket thickened over the city. Bruce walked around in a spiritual coma, unconscious.

  Behind him a car blasted its angry horn. He took his foot off the brake and turned in against the curb. Turning, he looked into a face contorted with improbable fury. An arm in a loud sport shirt was shaken at him, a voice yelled something: thellryuhdoin! The car peeled past, roaring.

  Salaam. Peace. The face, the disproportionate fury, might have been his father’s.

  Why hadn’t he left at once? The Mulders would have taken him in. J.J. might even have found work for him, Depression or no Depression. Or he could have found pickup work at the university, reading for Bill Bennion or others. Or he might have gone back to Minneapolis and starved it out there until the new term opened.

  But he stayed, sleeping in that shabby room where the other bed groaned with his father’s cigar-soaked dreaming weight, and by day hanging around the pool hall.

  The sun was like a burning glass on his arm, lying along the car door. The pavement writhed with heat waves, and his mind with ambiguous recollections. He tried to remember how he had finally broken away, and could not be sure. Did he make a brutal scene? Did he throw up to the old man, before they parted, everything he had ever held against him? Did he say, You made her live half her life without friends, and never even realized, because she was loyal and wouldn’t tell you, what you did to her. Me, too, you shamed me in front of my friends so that I can’t face them, and can’t live in this town. Chet, too, if you’d been any kind of father he wouldn’t have got that start he could never recover from. Did he say any of that? And did he go on and say, Yes, and when she was dying, did you try to help her and make it easier? Or did you groan around about expenses till she felt she couldn’t afford to be sick? You know what you did. You stayed away all day, day after day, hanging around the New Grand Hotel trying to make a quick buck and investing in gold mines that eventually broke you. And two days before she died you all of a sudden had to go to Los Angeles for a load of whiskey—nothing could wait. What you were doing was running out. You were leaving her to die alone, or with only me. And you already had that henna-haired floosie. Mother told me. She said she could smell her. Hard times! While your wife died by inches, with only me to help, you were already being consoled by that …

  Had he said any of those harsh things, or only rehearsed them sullenly, wanting to say them? He had an image of his father’s face convulsed with rage like that driver who had just peeled by, furious at six seconds’ delay. But there was another image, too, the hard face crumpling, going to pieces. Which was more intolerable?

  The feelings of that miserable time came out of the gray past and overwhelmed him.

  2

  Still in waders, with the string of ducks across his shoulder, he stood hesitating on the sidewalk in the cold November wind. His knees were stiff from being cramped up all day in the blind, and his feet were cold. Today, all day, he had been alive; now he was back ready to be dead again.

  Lights were on up and down the street, a
nd there was a rush of traffic and a hurrying of people past and around him, yet the town was not his town any more, the people passing were strangers, the sounds of evening carried no warmth or familiarity. He admitted acquaintance with none of it. He had shut himself off.

  Then what was he doing here, in front of this pool hall, loaded down with nine dead ducks? What had possessed him in the first place to borrow gun and waders from his father, and go hunting? If he had wanted to breathe freely for a change, why hadn’t he kept right on going? What was there here to draw him back? A hunter had to have a lodge to bring his meat to and people who would be glad of his skill. He had this pool hall and his father, Harry Mason, Prop.

  He stepped out of a woman’s path and leaned against the door. Downstairs, in addition to his father, he would find old Max Schmeckebier, who ran a cheap blackjack game in the room under the sidewalk. He would find Giuseppe Sciutti, the Sicilian barber, closing his shop or tidying the rack of Artists and Models and The Nudist with which he lured trade. He would probably find Billy Hammond, the night clerk from the Windsor Hotel, having his sandwich and beer and pie, or moving alone around a pool table, abstractedly whistling, practicing shots. If the afternoon blackjack game had broken up, there would be Navy Edwards, dealer and bouncer for Schmeckebier. At this time of evening there would be a few counter customers and a cop collecting his tribute of a beer and the other tribute that Schmeckebier paid to keep the cardroom open.

  And he would find, sour contrast with the bright sky and the wind of the tule marshes, the cavelike room with its back corners in darkness, would smell that smell compounded of steam heat and cue-chalk dust, of sodden butts in cuspidors, of coffee and meat and beer from the counter, of cigarette smoke so unaired that it darkened the walls. From anywhere back of the middle tables there would be the pervasive reek of toilet disinfectant. Behind the counter his father would be presiding, throwing the pool-hall light switch to save a few cents when the place was empty, flipping it on to give an air of brilliant and successful use when feet came down the stairs past Sciutti’s shop.

  The hunter moved his shoulder under the weight of the ducks, his mind full for the moment with the image of his father’s face, darkly pale, fallen in on its bones, and the pouched, restless, suspicious eyes that seemed always looking for someone. Over that image came the face of his mother, dead and six weeks buried.

  His teeth clicked together. In anger he turned, but the thought of going to the hotel room curdled as it was forming. And he had to eat. Broke as he was, a student kept from his studies, he had no choice but to eat on the old man. Besides, there were the ducks. He felt somehow that the hunt would have been incomplete unless he brought his game back for his father to see.

  His knees unwilling in the stiff waders, he went down the steps, descending into the light shining through Joe Sciutti’s door, and into the momentary layer of clean bay-rum smell, talcum smell, hair tonic smell, that rose past the still-revolving barber pole in the angle of the stairs.

  Joe Sciutti was sweeping wads of hair from his tiled floor, and hunched over the counter beyond, their backs to the door, were Schmeckebier, Navy Edwards, Billy Hammond, and an unknown customer. His father was behind the counter, mopping alertly with a rag. The poolroom lights were up bright, but when he saw who was coming he flipped the switch and dropped the big room back into dusk.

  As the hunter came to the end of the counter their heads turned. “Well I’m a son of a bee,” Navy Edwards said, and scrambled off his stool. Next to him Billy Hammond half stood up, so that his pale yellow hair took a halo from the backbar lights. “Say!” Max Schmeckebier said. “Say, dot’s goot, dot’s pooty goot, Bwuce!”

  But Bruce was watching his father so intently that he hardly heard them. He slid the string of ducks off his shoulder and swung them up onto the wide walnut bar. They landed solidly—offering or tribute or ransom or whatever they were. For a moment it was as if this little act were private between the two of them. He felt queerly moved, his stomach tightened in suspense or triumph. Then the old man’s pouchy eyes slipped from his and the old man came quickly forward along the counter and laid hands on the ducks.

  He handled them as if he were petting kittens, his big white hands stringing the heads one by one from the wire. “Two spoonbill,” he said, more to himself than to the others crowding around. “Shovelducks. Don’t seem to see many of those any more. And two, no three, hen mallards and one drake. Those make good eating.”

  Schmeckebier jutted his enormous lower lip. Knowing him for a stingy, crooked, suspicious little man, Bruce almost laughed at the air he could put on, the air of a man of probity about to make an honest judgment in a dispute between neighbors. “I take a budderball,” he said thickly. “A liddle budderball, dot is vot eats goot.”

  An arm fell across Bruce’s shoulders, and he turned his head to see the hand with red hairs rising from its pores, the wristband of a gray silk shirt with four pearl buttons. Navy Edwards’ red face was close to his. “Come clean, now,” Navy said. “You shot ’em all sittin’, didn’t you?”

  “I just waited till they stuck their heads out of their holes and let them have it,” Bruce said.

  Navy walloped him on the back and convulsed himself laughing. Then his face grew serious and he bore down on Bruce’s shoulder. “By God, you could’ve fooled me. If I’d been makin’ book on what you’d bring in I’d’ve lost my shirt.”

  “Such a pretty shirt, too,” Billy Hammond said.

  Across the counter Harry Mason cradled a little drab duck in his hand. Its neck, stretched from the carrier, hung far down, but its body was neat and plump and its feet were waxy. Watching the sallow face of his father, Bruce thought it looked oddly soft.

  “Ain’t that a beauty, though?” the old man said. “There ain’t a prettier duck made than a blue-wing teal. You can have all your wood ducks and redheads, all the flashy ones.” He spread a wing until the hidden band of bright blue showed. “Pretty?” he said, and shook his head and laughed suddenly as if he had not expected to. When he laid the duck with the others his eyes were bright with sentimental moisture.

  So now, Bruce thought, you’re right in your element. You always did want to be back with the boys in the poolroom, pouring out to see the elk on somebody’s running board, or leaning on the bar with a schooner of beer talking baseball or announcing the weight of the big German brown somebody brought in in a cake of ice. We haven’t any elk or German browns right now, but we’ve got some nice ducks, a fine display along five feet of counter. And who brought them in? The student, the alien son. It must gravel you.

  He drew himself a near beer. Several other men had come in and he saw three more stooping to look in the door beyond Sciutti’s. Two tables had started up; his father was hustling, filling orders. After a few minutes Schmeckebier and Navy went into the cardroom with three men. The poolroom lights were up bright, there was an ivory click of balls, a rumble of talk. The smoke-filled air was full of movement.

  Still more people arrived, kids in high school athletic sweaters and bums from the fringes of skid road. They all stopped to look at the ducks, and Bruce saw glances at his waders, heard questions and answers. Harry’s boy. Some men spoke to him, deriving importance from the contact. A fellowship was promoted by the ducks strung out along the counter. Bruce felt it himself. He was so mellowed by the way they spoke to him that when the players at the first table thumped with their cues, he got off his stool to rack them up and collect their nickels. It occurred to him that he ought to go to the room and get into a bath, but he didn’t want to leave yet. Instead he came back to the counter and slid the nickels toward his father and drew himself another near beer.

  “Pretty good night tonight,” he said. The old man nodded and slapped his rag on the counter, his eyes already past Bruce and fixed on two youths coming in.

  Billy Hammond wandered by and stopped by Bruce for a moment. “Well, time for my nightly wrestle with temptation.”

  “I was just going t
o challenge you to a game of call shot.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Billy said, and let himself carefully out as if afraid a noise might disturb someone—a mild, gentle, golden-haired boy who looked as if he ought to be in some prep school learning to say “sir” to grown-ups instead of clerking in a girlie hotel. He was the only one of the poolroom crowd that Bruce half liked. He thought he understood Billy Hammond, a little.

  He turned back to the counter to hear his father saying to Schmeckebier, “I don’t see how we could, on this rig. That’s the hell of it, we need a regular oven.”

  “In my room in back,” Schmeckebier said. “Dot old electric range.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Sure. Vy not. I t’ink so.”

  “By God,” Harry Mason said. “Nine ducks, that ought to give us a real old-fashioned feed.” He mopped the counter, refilled a coffee cup, came back to the end and pinched the breast of a duck, pulled out a wing and looked at the band of blue hidden among the drab feathers. “Just like old times, for a change,” he said, and his eyes touched Bruce’s in a look that might be anything from a challenge to an apology.

  Bruce had no inclination to ease the strain between them. He did not forgive his father the cowardly flight to Los Angeles only hours before his mother died. He did not discount the possibility that his father’s profession might have had the effect of making Nola reconsider whom she wanted to marry. He neither forgot nor forgave the henna-haired woman who several times had come to the pool hall late at night and waited on a bar stool while the old man closed up. Yet when his father remarked that the ducks ought to be drawn and plucked, he got to his feet.