Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  “You better have another,” his father said, “You don’t get grub like this every day.”

  “One’s my limit.”

  Mason came back around. For a while they worked on their plates. Back of him Bruce heard the clack of balls hitting, and a moment later the rumble as one rolled down the chute from a pocket. The thin abstracted whistling of Billy Hammond broke off, became words.

  Annie doesn’t live here any more.

  You must be the one she waited for.

  She said I would know you by the blue in your eye …

  “Talk about one being your limit,” his father said. “When we lived in Dakota we used to put on some feeds that were feeds. You remember anything about Dakota at all?”

  “No.”

  He was irritated at being dragged into his father’s reminiscences. He did not want to hear how many ducks the town hog could eat at a sitting.

  “We’d go out, a whole bunch of us,” his father said. “The sloughs and the river were black with ducks in those days. We’d come back with a buggyful, and the women folks’d really put us on a feed. Fifteen, twenty, thirty people. Take a hundred ducks to fill ’em up.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring across the counter, thoughtfully chewing. Bruce noticed that he had tacked two wings of a teal up on the frame of the backbar mirror—small, strong bows with a band of bright blue half hidden in them. The old man’s eyes slanted sideward and caught Bruce looking at the wings.

  “Doesn’t seem as if we’d had a duck feed since we left there,” he said. His forehead wrinkled, he rubbed the back of his neck. Meeting Bruce’s eyes in the backbar mirror, he spoke to the mirror, ignoring the gobbling image of Schmeckebier between his own reflection and Bruce’s.

  “You remember that set of china your mother used to have? The one she painted herself? Just the plain white china with one design on each plate?”

  Bruce sat stiffly, outraged that his mother should even be mentioned in this murky hole—and after last night. Gabble, gabble, gabble, he said to himself. If you can’t think of anything else to gabble about, gabble about her. Drag her through the poolroom, too. Aloud he said, “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “Blue-wing teal,” his father said, and nodded at the wings tacked to the mirror frame. “Just the wings, like that. Awful pretty. She thought a teal was about the prettiest little duck there was.”

  His vaguely rubbing hand came around from the back of his neck and rubbed along the cheek, pulling the slack flesh tight and distorting the mouth. Bruce said nothing, watching the pouched hound eyes in the mirror.

  It was a cold, skin-tightening shock to realize that the hound eyes were cloudy with tears. The rubbing hand went over them, shading them like a hatbrim, but the mouth below remained distorted.

  With a plunging movement his father was off the stool. “Oh, God damn!” he said in a strangling voice, and went past Bruce on hard heavy feet, down the three steps and past Billy Hammond, who neither looked up nor broke his sad thin whistling. Schmeckebier had swung around. “Vot’s duh matter? Now vot’s duh matter?”

  Bruce turned away from him, staring after his father down the dark pool hall. Orderly things were breaking and flying apart in his mind. He had a moment of blind white terror that this whole scene whose reality stared and glittered was no more than a dream, a reflection from some dark mirror. Centered in that mirror was the look his father had thrown at him, or at the glass, just before he ran.

  The hell with you, that look had said. The hell with you, Schmeckebier, and you, my son Bruce. The hell with your ignorance, whether you’re stupid or whether you just don’t know all you think you know. You don’t know enough to kick dirt down a hole. You know nothing at all, you know less than nothing because you know things wrong.

  He heard Billy’s soft whistling, watched him move around his one lighted table—a well-brought-up boy from some suburban town, a polite soft gentle boy lost and wandering among pimps and prostitutes, burying himself for some reason among people who never even touched his surface. Did he shoot pool in his bed at night—or in the morning, whenever he got to bed—tempting sleep? Did his mind run carefully to angles and englishes, making a reflecting surface of them to keep from seeing through them to other things?

  Almost in terror he looked out across the sullen cave, past where the light came down in an intense isolated cone above Billy’s table, and heard the lugubrious whistling that went on without intention of audience, a recurrent and deadening and unconscious sound. He searched the gloom at the back where his father had disappeared, and wondered if in his bed before sleeping the old man worked through a routine of little jobs: cleaning the steam table, ordering twenty pounds of coffee, jacking up the janitor about the mess in the toilet. He wondered if it was possible to wash yourself to sleep with restaurant crockery, work yourself to sleep with little chores, add yourself to sleep with columns of figures, as he knew you could play yourself to sleep with a pool cue and a green table and fifteen colored balls. For a moment, in the sad light, with the wreckage of the duck feast at his elbow, he wondered if there was anything more to his life, or to his father’s life, or to Billy Hammond’s life, or anyone’s life, than playing the careful games that deadened you into sleep.

  Schmeckebier, beside him, was still groping in the fog of his mind for an explanation of what had happened. “Vere’d he go?” he said, and nudged Bruce fiercely. “Vot’s duh matter?”

  Bruce shook him off, still watching Billy Hammond’s oblivious bent head under the light. He heard Schmeckebier’s lip flop, he heard him sucking his teeth.

  “I tell you,” the guttural voice said, “I got somet’ing dot fixes him if he feels bum.”

  He, too, went down the steps past the lighted table and into the gloom at the back. The light went on in his room, and after a minute his voice was shouting, “Harry? Say, come here, uh? Say, Harry.”

  Eventually Harry Mason came out of the toilet and they walked together between the tables. In his fist Schmeckebier was clutching a square bottle. He waved it at Bruce as they passed, but Bruce was watching his father. The old man’s face was crumpled, but rigid in its collapse, like the face of a man in a barely controlled rage. He would not look back at Bruce.

  “Kümmel,” Schmeckebier said. He set four ice-cream dishes on the counter and poured three about a third full of clear liquor. His squinted eyes lifted and peered down toward Billy Hammond. “Let him alone,” Bruce said. “He’s walking in his sleep.”

  So there were only the three of them. They stood together a moment and raised their glasses. “Happy days,” Harry Mason said. They drank.

  Schmeckebier smacked his lips, shook his head in satisfaction, and waddled back toward his room with the bottle. Harry Mason went around the end of the bar and began to draw hot water. With the tap rushing and steaming, he scraped plates into the garbage pail.

  In the quiet which no clatter of crockery or hiss of water or whistling from Billy Hammond could penetrate, Bruce said what he had to say. “I’ll be starting back to Minneapolis this afternoon.”

  But he did not say it in anger, or with the cold command of himself that he had imagined in advance. He said it like a cry, and with the feeling he might have had on letting go the hand of a companion too weak and exhausted to cling any longer to their inadequate shared driftwood in a wide cold sea.

  Was that the way it was? Mason hoped so. It lived so circumstantially in his memory that it seemed plausible. On the other hand, that whole script might be a creation of revisionism and guilt. In view of what happened the following June, he did not want his last words with his father to have been furious or full of recrimination and contempt. His break with Nola Gordon had been that way, and even after he had recovered from her, he had never been able to feel good about the way he had gone out—wronged lover, angered ego, even falser and more histrionic than Eddie Forsberg.

  The duck feast with its troubled and nearly compassionate ending was at least as convincing as its alternatives
, those confrontations and cold accusings, that list of grudges and outrages, that he had run so many times through his sullen projector that he couldn’t tell, finally, whether he remembered them or had invented them. Which parting did he invent? And why, sitting outside the obliterated place of his mother’s death, did he remember or invent a parting from his father, and not the desolate hour when his mother sighed and stopped?

  He thought he knew. He had known all along. She lay quiet, the old man did not. She was loss, he was failure. Whatever he remembered about her was clear and unambiguous. Anything he remembered about his father might be pure fiction.

  Without some external evidence, he had no way of sorting out truth from wishfulness and self-deception and grievance; and of his whole early life, up to the time when he started back eastward, presumably forever, he had now no external evidence except the memorabilia of a love affair that, compared with the death of his mother and his total failure to be reconciled with his father, had come to seem minor, even trivial. He told himself that it is easy enough to recover from a girl, who represents to some extent a choice. It is not so easy to recover from parents, who are fate.

  The door, when he moved his arm, was hot enough to raise blisters. Through the windshield, still dusty from the desert, he looked across the street overexposed in hot light. An undocumented life had its limitations, but also its advantages. He was not bound by verifiable facts. What he liked about the past he could coat with clear plastic, and preserve it from scratching, fading, and dust. What he did not like, he could either black out or revise. Memory, sometimes a preservative, sometimes a censor’s stamp, could also be an art form.

  He seemed to have shut off the engine. Now he started it again and pulled away from the curb. He went up to South Temple and turned right past the temple and the monument, the hotel and the historic Mormon buildings, the slick new ZCMI Center, the funeral parlor where at the moment they were probably readying Aunt Margaret for her last excursion. At O Street he turned left up the hill, and when he reached the edge of the City Cemetery he turned left again until he found the corner and the gate.

  This documentation, at least, would be intact. Graves lasted longer than either buildings or unpleasant memories, and death could not be revised. Up there in the family burial plot, the only piece of ground they had owned since they left Saskatchewan for Great Falls and the whiskey business, the three of them would be waiting for him.

  But he needed directions, after all those years. There was a building inside the entrance, and a yard full of tombstones, and a greenhouse with a manure pile. As he parked and stepped out into the glare he saw that it was just past eleven. In a half hour he was supposed to be at the funeral parlor, lining up in a three-car procession.

  There was no point in driving down there only to drive right back. When he had found the sexton in his office, he borrowed the telephone to call McBride and say he would meet the funeral at the grave. Then the sexton took him to a map on the wall and showed him where the Masons were to be found. He went out and climbed into the oven-like car and drove up steep, curving roads until he found the place.

  3

  Three times before he had stood on that hillside with an open grave before him. This time the scene was tidier than on any of those other occasions. Those who mattered were underground, and their graves were long healed. Except for what lived in his mind, they might have been under the grass forever. The new grave, an afterthought, almost an irrelevancy, was made temporary by its frame and sling, and its raw dirt was covered with a rug of Astroturf.

  Each time the weather was different. His brother had been buried on a bleak, damp day of spitting snow, and clouds that snagged on the bare trees. His mother had been lowered into the mud in a steady rain that streamed off the expensive copper coffin with which his father had tried to buy forgiveness for more things than any coffin, no matter how expensive, would cancel out. The old man himself had gone down on a morning of such transcendent early-June brightness as might have been ordered for the funeral of a hero.

  Aunt Margaret seemed likely to make her exit accompanied by a totally inappropriate thunderstorm. Thunderheads were piling up beyond the Oquirrhs, another quite separate set had gathered along the crest of the Wasatch. Twin Peaks and Olympus had lost their tops, a lurid storm-light lay over the end of the valley at the Jordan Narrows. The sultry morning tasted of brass, the air was stagnant, the sky rumbled. From straight overhead a consuming sun burned down.

  Mason didn’t begrudge his aunt the orchestral accompaniment and the stage lighting, nor did he begrudge her a place in the family burial plot, which would hold six. In her persistent, cracked way she had attached herself to them, for lack of anyone closer. She was welcome to the room she needed. He was not going to use it.

  Nevertheless, he could not look upon her burial as anything more than a continuation of the long obligation her life had been. If there had been any family left besides himself, he would not have thought he owed her anything. If he had not had the impulse to revisit Salt Lake anyway, her death would not have brought him: he would probably have left her to one of those quick-disposal organizations that would collect and cremate and scatter you, all within a few hours and at minimal cost.

  Sitting coatless above the graves, under a box elder tree whose leaves broke and scattered the fierce sun, he brooded about burial customs. The Mormons, who expected to inherit heaven in the flesh, probably felt when they laid the dead away that they should be kept intact, so that they could leap to reassemble themselves when Gabriel, or Moroni, or whoever had the assignment, blew the trumpet. The Parsees who exposed their dead to the buzzards on the towers of silence were harder to understand. How had that appalling custom ever got started? Was it like cauterization, was it to obliterate identity and discourage memory? It didn’t appeal to Mason, for his dead or for himself.

  But neither did the modern way of being parceled out to the organ banks and the transplant operating rooms. Who wanted immortality as spare parts? Who could feel anything but haunted if he met his brother’s eyes in another head, or heard in the pulse of a stranger the heart that had once made rosy the face of a child now lost? The towers of silence were better than that. Scattering was better. The grave, where the dead stayed put, where the living could sit on the ground and say, “I wish, I wish, I wish!” or “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” or “There, I’ve done everything, I’ve observed all the forms, and we’re quits, lie still”—the grave might be best of all. Even if the trumpet never blew, the grave at least granted memory its illusions.

  When he had run from that place on the day of his father’s funeral, wanting never to return, Mason had abandoned his unitary family to the empty universe, and become himself a sort of asteroid, wandering outside all gravitational pulls. Yet he felt those durable identities underground, he was troubled by a sense of continued presence, of immanence and possibility.

  If he turned his head he could see up to Eleventh Avenue and the bare mountain behind it, where new raw houses were being erected on new raw streets for the living of new raw lives. Some grudging graveyard-school poet in him all but said, “Wait. Wait a while.” But he reminded himself that they were as entitled to their innings as he had been, or any of his people here under the grass. It was an amateur, pickup, playground game, and few got many solid hits, but anyone was entitled to his time at bat.

  Down the other way, spreading toward the edges of the great valley, the city simmered in yellow-brown smog. The storm-light at the Narrows had become a heavy smudge. The thunderheads continued to pile up, fronting one another, mountain to mountain. There were flashes in the murk beyond Bingham, and answering flashes above Long Peak. Between the cracks and rumblings of distant thunder he heard the city’s traffic like a big steady engine. The air did not move, but he had the impression that the blue overhead was closing in from the south.

  When he lay back on the grass, the zenith even through the leaves was too bright to look at, and so he rolled over o
nto his stomach and propped himself on his elbows, prone, memory-prone, inhibited like a nickel-cadmium battery by past failure and incomplete use. Below him were the graves.

  The first one said:

  SON

  CHESTER LAWRENCE MASON

  APRIL 19, 1907–JAN. 24, 1931

  The second said:

  MOTHER

  ELSA NORGAARD MASON

  SEPT. 1, 1881–OCT. 24, 1931

  The third said nothing. It was only an area of turf whose outline he would not see at all if its shape were not suggested by the two named graves beside it, and by the small aluminum marker, stained with weather and stamped with a meaningless number (he had looked), where a headstone might be.

  What should that third grave say? HUSBAND? His mother, conventional, forgiving, and loyal, would have put up such a stone over him if he had died before her, but it would have been gross mislabeling. FATHER? Surely piety did not require that concession. If Mason had felt obligated to order a stone for the old man’s grave before he took off into world-space, he would probably have specified a blank slab. He would have treated his father like an entry in his reminder book—drawn a rectangle around his name and blacked it out. Did.

  Yet Harry Mason’s only definition, now, was given him by the relationships he lay beside. Without them he would merge with the universal grass. In his life it was the same. The family that he created and bungled and abused and betrayed was his only accomplishment.

  Was that why Mason had felt he must come back? Him? Did he think he owed his father something? Acknowledgment, was that what had always been missing? Or had the old man marked him so that even forty-five years after his death the son still craved his approval? Was he here to show off the accomplishments of a diligent life, the souvenirs of upward mobility, from sharpshooter’s medals to the rosette of the Legion of Honor, not to the girl on whom he had once heaped these trinkets, not to the friend whose tennis cups and football trophies had stirred him to emulation, but to the father who had been as omnipotent and as full of faults as Jove? Was he in this town, on this hillside, for the same reason that he once took nine dead ducks into a pool hall he despised?