Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  A funeral procession, a hearse and three cars, so meager a cortege that it had to be Aunt Margaret’s, turned in at the gate and started the circling climb up the hillside. The headlights were pale and blind in the brightness of sun that still fell on the hill. Mason stood up, tightened his tie, and put on his jacket.

  The southern end of the Oquirrhs was gone, and a wall of black rain was advancing through Murray. The towers of cloud above the Wasatch were miles high, brilliant at the edges, black in the folds. Holladay and East Mill Creek, along the foot of the range, were overrun as Mason watched; the sunlight shrank toward him along the freeway leading to Parley’s Canyon. Then the darkness marching up the valley was split like the House of Usher. The hot fork vibrated yellow on the air and then blue on his inward eye, and he counted: one, two, three, four, five. The five was drowned out in an appalling crash.

  The hearse and limousine pulled up on the drive, followed by two cars. Out of the limousine, hurrying and with his eye on the sky, got McBride, followed by another man. Out of the hearse got the driver and a dark-suited assistant. Out of the two cars crept, stiff and slow, four old ladies, helped by two men, one of whom had to be the Home director, Philips. They clustered on the grass like leaves that the next wind would blow away.

  McBride came half trotting across the lawn. “I hate to put it this way, but if we don’t get through here in about five minutes …”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  “I was thinking of the ladies from the Home.”

  “Quite right. They mustn’t get wet.”

  “I brought umbrellas. But still.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Thank you,” McBride said. “You have every right to expect a simple, dignified service. But we can’t always …”

  Distracted, he smiled at Mason and waved his helpers on, beckoned impatiently at the people from the Home. While the old ladies were assisted tottering to the graveside, the funeral-parlor people opened the back door of the hearse and got Aunt Margaret rolled into the open. They couldn’t have moved with more driven speed if they had been sailors lowering a lifeboat. Across the grave Philips lined up the four ladies, clucking and shifting their uncertain feet. Running, he went to the car and brought back umbrellas, opening them and putting one in the hand of each lady. The ladies, who had probably anticipated the funeral as an outing, eyed Mason with interest and the sky with uneasiness, the coffin with the wincing sympathy of premonition.

  A gust of wind came up the hill and blew the ladies crooked and passed. The air was still again. The blue had all but closed overhead. Out of its edge, apparently aimed like an artillery shell, a lightning bolt jagged down. It struck somewhere east, near Fort Douglas. The funeral-parlor people, McBride included, were struggling to get Aunt Margaret’s coffin straight in the sling. The moment it was steady, and McBride stepped back, two helpers darted to the hearse and came back bearing flowers which they piled on the rug of Astroturf beside the open hole. The man who had ridden in the limousine with McBride, and who it seemed was some sort of house preacher, stepped forward, smiling thinly on the handful of spectators and waiting for the thunder to roll away.

  It was a service almost as lame as Mason remembered his father’s, when a lurid murder-suicide had presented the preacher with an impossible task. This time the preacher offered up a short prayer asking rest for this humble woman who, having long ago lost husband and children, had been blessed with one affectionate and loyal friend, her nephew, Ambassador Bruce Mason, here today. He threw name and nod across the grave at Mason, who stood impassively and despised him for a toady. Through the kindness of that one surviving relative, this poor woman was enabled to live out her life in comfort and security, and to make new friends in a strange city. (Thunder, two claps of it, one on top of the other, and such a rolling barrage that Mason heard nothing else for a full minute. When words were distinguishable again, that meek and humble woman Margaret Webb had borne her infirmities as patiently and as long as God in His infinite mercy required. She had felt her loved ones waiting on the other side, and was going home.

  Mason did not recognize in any of this the stubborn and demanding old woman who had been his aunt, but he acknowledged the convention. De mortuis, and good luck to her. The unfelt and not very appropriate words of the funeral parlor’s all-purpose preacher produced in him a shabby sort of pity, and a wish that he had shown the poor old thing a little more personal attention. At the same time, the preacher’s complimentary allusions to the affectionate nephew (read Visiting Dignitary) annoyed him, and he wanted the charade over.

  The preacher opened his Bible and spread it across his left palm. Mason would have sworn he saw air made visible as a new flurry of wind rushed up the hill and snatched the pages upright and fluttering. The dresses of the old women were plastered against their bones. Philips grabbed his hair and held it on with one hand, standing with his eyes slitted and his lips drawn back from his teeth. While they fought the gust, lightning struck somewhere on the mountainside with a demoralizing crash. They waited till its noise rocketed away and was absorbed into the general rush and grumble of the coming storm. Then the preacher found his place again and began to read, or pretend to read what he knew by heart.

  The 23rd Psalm, predictably. He raised his voice nearly to a shout in order to make himself heard. As he was leading them through the valley of the shadow of death, the clouds overhead rushed together and wiped out the last streak of sun, and darkness poured up the hill, right on cue. The ladies, with little cries, huddled and clung and braced their frailty against the weather. From two of them Philips took the umbrellas, apparently afraid that if he didn’t, the wind would blow ladies and all away. The air was prickly with imminent rain.

  The preacher beat it to the finish line, but barely. His “forever” was hasty, blown away on a gust. It was hardly out of his mouth before Philips and McBride, folding down umbrellas as they went, were herding the ladies toward their cars. Just as frantically, the preacher, the hearse driver, and the black-suited assistant cranked Aunt Margaret into the ground, as if to get her to shelter before the deluge. The moment they had her down, they ran for hearse and limousine.

  Hurried, windblown, still deferential, McBride came back to shake Mason’s hand with his strong birdlike claws. His forehead was wrinkled; he seemed genuinely distressed, and Mason thought in a moment of friendlier feeling, Why, he’s a person. God help us, maybe we all are.

  “I’m so sorry,” McBride was saying. “I so wanted things to go well. But sometimes the weather …”

  “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine. Do we have any more details to settle?”

  “No. I have your check. You have the things Mr. Philips brought down. I hope everything was satisfactory in spite of this storm.”

  “Perfectly,” Mason said. “Many thanks. Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, sir.”

  Sir. He did not feel like “sir.” He felt like the last survivor of a star-crossed family. He felt like the puzzled son of a feckless father—boomer, dreamer, schemer, self-deceiver, bootlegger, eventually murderer and suicide, always burden, always enigma, always the harsh judge who must be appeased. He felt like the last remaining spectator at the last act of a play he had not understood.

  McBride hung a moment as if he wanted to say something more, and then ran. Now came Philips, his charges safely put away in their cars, still holding his hair on with his left hand. “What a shame about the weather! I hoped we would have some time—I expected to see you at the funeral parlor.”

  Attentive, flatly smiling, Mason heard the rebuke: Where were you?

  “The ladies have been anxious to meet you,” Philips said. “Margaret often spoke of her nephew the ambassador. She was very proud of you. Could you perhaps come by this afternoon and have tea with us?”

  “I’m sorry. I have to start back to San Francisco this afternoon.”

  Frowning, wagging his head, Philips acted out his resigned disappointment and the disappointment
of the ladies. A drop of rain splashed the left lens of his glasses.

  “Well, then it’s all finished,” Philips said. “I’m glad to have met you, finally.”

  “Thank you for taking care of her. I’m sure she found a real security with you.”

  “She was one of our family,” Philips said. “We shall miss her.” He looked at the sky and fled.

  Mason ran, too, and made his car with the rain already spattering him, his shoulders and glasses wet, his skull stinging with cold drops. Before he could slam the door, the sky bellowed and opened. Rain burst on the roof and drowned the windshield. There was such a roar that he could not hear the engine when he started it. One look out past the overwhelmed wigwag of the windshield wipers told him that he did not want to drive in that downpour. He shut off the engine again and let the wipers die and sat as immersed as if he were in a bathysphere on a sea bottom. The ruby taillights of the funeral procession winked on in a blurred row, but did not move.

  For a good fifteen minutes everything outside was wiped out in water. The windows steamed up and when he tried to open them the merest crack he was sprayed with fine drops. Water rushed and thundered on the roof, artillery duels went on in the sky. Rubbing the steam from a peek-hole space, he could see nothing but the smeared red of the taillights ahead of him, and the vague swirling rush of gathering water in the road. He felt it push at his wheels as if it were going to sweep him away down the hill. The old ladies marooned in their cars must be in a twittering panic. Poor old Aunt Margaret must be afloat in her flooded grave.

  Eventually the downpour slackened. Opening the window a few inches, he saw the hearse and the three cars still waiting. The drive was a river six inches deep that went around the cars as if they were rocks in a rapid.

  Then smoke puffed from the hearse’s exhaust, and the hearse rolled away cautiously downstream, throwing up rooster tails of water from its rear wheels. The limousine followed. The moving lights went around a rain-swept corner of trees and shrubs and were gone. The cars from the Home sat on. Thunder, still heavy but receding, marched around Ensign Peak and started up toward Ogden. Far down over the Oquirrhs, a gap of blue had opened. The sound of the rain on the roof was less than the sound of the flooded road.

  Five more minutes, and the Home cars started and pulled away, turned around the corner of shrubs and trees, and disappeared. Mason sat on in the diminishing rain, looking out the cautiously half-open window at Aunt Margaret’s flowers beaten down on their bed of Astroturf beside the frame and sling. In a little while, probably, the sexton’s truck would come up the hill and remove the machinery, and a couple of men would shovel the mud into the hole until Aunt Margaret was safe with the others.

  The light was growing overhead, the rain had all but stopped. Blue was reclaiming the sky down the valley. In the wet, polished granite of the headstones above his mother and brother, Mason saw reflected blue, and the limbs of the box elder tree moving as if in water.

  Should he put a headstone over Aunt Margaret? God would not need it to find her, in case He ever wanted to summon her to immortality. And no one was going to come to her grave on Memorial Day and put a little glassful of fresh flowers there. The Genealogical Library of the Mormon Church, busily compiling its lists of everybody who ever lived on earth, even families as migrant and meaningless as Margaret’s, would get her name from the cemetery records or from whoever kept the records of births and deaths. There was no need of a stone.

  Nevertheless, he sat with narrowed eyes and visualized how three identical stones would look there in a row. Let her in, why not? Establish a quasi-eternal territory for the family, give it the appearance of having been united and complete. According to the best traditions of American mobility, and in conformity to his own status as orphan, he himself would end up somewhere else, probably scattered out beyond the Golden Gate somewhere, and no one would have to make these empty decisions about him. He was the last. No one would have to propitiate him, or make a place for him. But Aunt Margaret, who had wanted in, might as well be given what she had wanted.

  The wet granite of the two stones reflected the moving branches, the expanding blue. Beside them, hardly bigger than the tags they had used to wire onto shrubs in gallon cans at the Mulder Nursery, he could see the aluminum disk that marked his father’s two square yards of grass.

  He was conscious of no decision. He simply started the engine, drove down to the building by the gate, found the sexton eating his lunch, and interrupted him long enough to order two headstones identical with the two already set up over the family. He wrote out a check for the sum the sexton added up on his order blank. He wrote out on two 4×6 cards what the stones should say.

  One was to say only Margaret Mason Webb, and her dates, which Mason did not have but which the sexton said he would get from the Home. The other was to say:

  FATHER

  HARRY GEORGE MASON

  MARCH 12, 1870–JUNE 3, 1932

  “Any sentiment?” the sexton said. “ ‘Rest in peace,’ anything like that?”

  “No,” Mason said. “That will say it.”

  “It will take six months or so. The new grave has to settle.”

  “That’s all right. Can you let me know when it’s done?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sexton said. “I can do that, if you want.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Well, thank you very much.”

  “You bet,” the sexton said, and turned back to his lunch.

  Mason had his reminder book out, and was scratching back and forth and up and down over the entry that had read “Funeral: be there 11:30.” When nothing could be read, when it was only a black rectangle, there remained on the page the last thing he had contemplated doing: “Call Joe.”

  “I wonder …”

  “Mmm?”

  “No. Nothing. I can do it from the hotel.”

  He lifted his hand to the chewing sexton, a man with a good appetite and a good conscience, and went out into the washed, dripping glitter of noon. His mind was running ahead as he drove out the gate and down the hill to South Temple. If he had a quick lunch he could be on his way by two, and with any luck, and the hour gained on the time change, he could be in Elko to sleep, and have a relatively easy drive home tomorrow.

  And Joe? What about him? Was he going to call from the hotel? He knew he was not, almost before he asked himself the question. He had known all the time that he would not. However much Joe had meant, however warm and loyal it had been of Joe to try to reach through to him, it wouldn’t do, it would only be a frustration and a disappointment. Whoever had lasted in Bruce Mason, it was not the young man who had once been best friend to Joe Mulder, any more than it was the one who had cracked his heart over Nola Gordon. They would have nothing in common but that adolescence with its games and its love affairs and its sun-myth conviction of power and growth. What they had once shared was indelible as if carved on a headstone, and was not, after so long a gap, to be changed or renewed.

  As he drove down to the hotel and turned his car over to the youth in the glass office, he was busy in his head with one final check-off. Around Bruce Mason as he once was, around the thin brown hyperactive youth who had so long usurped space in his mind and been a pretender to his feelings, he drew a careful rectangle, and all the way up on the elevator to pack his bag he was inking it out.

  WALLACE STEGNER

  Recapitulation

  Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize 1972); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (199
2). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.