Recapitulation (21 page)

He opened the Yeats.

Nothing there for a Jack Mormon girl from Emery County. What could he have been thinking of? He laid Yeats down and picked up Schopenhauer.

Nothing there, either. What could she have felt when, out of his arrogant inexperience, out of his sheer undergraduate enthusiasm for hard doctrine, or the self-pity that had made him believe he was suffering’s biographer, he plucked things like this from the great grab bag of Western culture and demanded that she read and ponder them? He might as well have suggested that she learn Turkish. Her mind operated on a direct hookup with the senses, not by abstract ideas; and to suffering, any kind of suffering, she had a cat-like aversion.

He put down the Schopenhauer and picked up Wilde, skimmed over a few pages of overheated dialogue, and stopped near the end, detained in spite of himself by the voice of Salome.

“Look at the moon!” Holly once read to him from that same play. “
Regardez la lune!
How strange the moon seems. She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.”

Their limited and provincial city had never given them the opportunity to hear Strauss’s opera, but even if it had, they would have heard Herod’s daughter in their own way. Though it would have delighted them, probably, to see a raging soprano stagger and crawl around the stage, smeared with blood, clutching the bloody head of her obsession by its bloody hair, she would have delighted them primarily because she was a vessel of jeweled language. In their literary way, they responded to words as incantation.

They would have been charmed, titillated by the sound. But Nola, though she couldn’t read, could have played it.

Across Mason’s mind, floating in the empty room like the moon rising from a tomb, appeared the body of the dead woman he had seen that afternoon, and he felt like a ghoul or a necrophile, infatuated with corpses.

Alack. Nearly fifty years agone.

He dropped the three books over the edge of the bed and picked up the sweater, a white cardigan with a red U above the pocket and four red stripes around the upper left sleeve. The last letter he earned, part of the paraphernalia of innocent self-advertisement then universal among athletes on a campus. Mason had the impression that the letter-sweater thing was no longer fashionable, and would embarrass a contemporary jock. Then, it had been as natural as wearing shoes. The sweater was a sort of escutcheon. You could tell by the kind—cardigan, pullover—what sport was involved.

Seniors, he remembered, had had a choice between the usual red with white letter and stripes, and the dressier white with red. He had chosen white for that last one because Nola did not wear red, and this one was for her. He didn’t suppose he had even tried it on. Forty-five years ago just about now, only a few weeks after the prom from which he had just returned, he had picked it up at the coach’s office and carried it straight to her—his signature, label, mark of ownership; his substitute for a West Point class ring, juvenile forerunner of presidential citations and ribbons of the
Légion d’honneur:
decorations will be worn. Would you like to wear my sharpshooter’s medals? Here, let me offer you my Purple Heart.

We’re like sun myths, he said to the listening presence of Joe Mulder, who had come quietly into his head and stood there attending like someone watching the evening’s television news. We’re like sun myths in the late afternoon of a cloudy day, looking
back at the morning, when we were ascendant, when our strength waxed instead of waning. Being in love with that girl was only part of it, for me. Just picking up this sweater puts me back to that time when everything was cresting.

It wasn’t a time of choices, though it might seem so. The sun leaned on us, and warmed us on that side. We turned toward what shone on us, and if we leaned too far, we toppled, and toppling, toppled others. Call it the domino theory.

He is walking along Thirteenth East Street on an absolutely perfect morning, a creation morning. Perhaps there was a shower during the night, but it feels as if prehistoric Lake Bonneville has risen silently in the dark, overflowing its old beach terraces one by one, flooding the Stansbury, then the Provo, on which this street is laid, then finally the Bonneville; filling the valley to overflowing, stretching a hundred miles westward into the desert, lapping against the Wasatch, pushing long fjords into the canyons, washing away all the winter smoke, softening the alluvial gravels, rinsing and freshening every leaf of every shrub and tree, greening every blade of grass; and then before daylight has withdrawn again into its salty remnant, leaving behind this universal sparkle and brightness.

It is such a morning as all the old remember and only the young belong in. School is over, college is done with, summer and life are ready to begin. He drags the dewy coolness to the bottom of his lungs. His feet are light on the sidewalk, lighter yet on the parking-strip grass where he prefers to walk. In his left hand is an old canvas equipment bag, in his right a tennis racket, imperceptibly cracked in the throat from his bad habit of hitting his overhead with a lot of spin, like a second service. With this
cracked but otherwise very satisfactory racket, which he hopes to sell that morning to Marv Eldridge, who is just taking up tennis and is not discerning, he takes the heads off dandelions, forehand and backhand. His footwork is nimble, his backswing fluent, his eye is on the ball, he follows through with a snap. He wears clean white cords, white buck shoes, and his letter sweater with three stripes, and every detail of himself gratifies him. He admires the springy condition of his legs and the strength of his right forearm, considerably bigger than the left. The characteristic tennis player’s callus on the inside of his right thumb is like a badge.

The east side where he walks is shaded by tall houses, but between them and at intersections the sun slants through and stretches across the street to lean on eastward-facing porches where bottles of milk and rolled
Tribunes
wait to be retrieved. The cones of pink blossom on the horse chestnut trees light up like candles when the sun strikes them. The leaves around them are heavy and rich and dark.

At the drugstore on the Second South corner he turns right, up the slope toward where the Park Building’s white marble front overlooks the Circle and the tree-dotted lawn. This is a different sort of morning from the hundreds when he has walked up this gentle hill toward an early class. Everything is over except Commencement, which, scornful of ceremonies, he will evade. Nothing remains but last errands. He sees only a few straggling students. The scene has been clarified and hardened into finality like a negative in the fixing bath, yet it is morning, with morning’s excitement in it, and he walks toward unlimited possibility. Ahead, the sun dazzles over the roof of the Park Building and overexposes his sight. The mountains beyond are backlighted and featureless.

Now at the edge of the Circle, Maurice comes wobbling and scurrying across the grass, waving his arms, uncoordinated and ablaze with greeting. His hair is wild, the words he speaks are chewed and unintelligible. He wears his brown leather jacket and basketball shoes, and he obviously wants something. It takes Bruce half a minute to comprehend: Maurice wants to carry his racket. Given it, he is transformed. He handles it with both hands like a battle-ax, making fierce faces and sweeping the air.

Old Maurice, the campus moron, enthusiastic leader of cheers at football games, self-appointed master of ceremonies at pep rallies, front prancer in snake dances after high school basketball games, adorer of all athletes. Everybody knows Maurice, everybody laughs and groans when he goes scrambling and falling in a frenzy of school spirit out of the stands and onto the cinder track. Some people, especially girls of the snottier kind, find him disturbing and think he should be kept at home, but that would be the worst sort of unkindness. Distorted image of Bruce’s own innocence, Maurice touches and amuses him. He feels protective, and kids him along. Who could resist his adoration? He reveres this hero in his letter sweater with three stripes, he is ennobled to be seen with him. Out of the corners of his odd little mismatched eyes he invites the attention of a couple of gardeners returfing a worn patch of lawn, and when they look up grinning he decapitates them with two swings in the air.

At the steps of the L Building, Bruce offers to take the racket back, but Maurice doesn’t want to give it up. He will look after it. He understands its preciousness, he will take the greatest care of it. So Bruce leaves him sitting on the sandstone steps, cradling the racket in his lap and shielding it from a student who passes too close.

Bill Bennion’s office, always a mess, is on this morning a total mess. The desk overflows with bluebooks and themes, the chairs are piled with books recently returned by undergraduate borrowers and not yet restored to the shelves, which anyway are too jammed with other books, cardboard boxes of notes, stacked mgazines, and wadded lunch bags smelling of banana skins to hold them. The wastebasket has overflowed onto the floor. On the window ledges and on the tops of the radiators the dust is thick over piles of mimeographed sheets that have been there in that condition ever since Bruce first came into this office as a sophomore.

He has been in it many times since that first one. A lot of literary bull sessions have gone on here. He has been introduced to a lot of books here, and has carried them out and brought them back and been profanely quizzed about them. Across these piles of themes and across the littered desk he has broadcast his share of barbaric yawp, and been set straight without impatience by
the smiling man who sits across there with the morning sun pouring in on him from behind, turning his bald skull into a fuzzy golden dandelion-head and sending shafts and whorls through the smoke of his pipe.

From the equipment bag he takes Carl Van Vechten’s
The Tattooed Countess
and Eliot’s
For Lancelot Andrews
, and pushes clear a corner of the desk and lays them on it.

“Well,” says his professor and friend Bill Bennion, watching him benignantly through his smoke. “The end of something.”

“The very end.”

“Now what?”

“Now what?”

“What are you going to do with yourself?”

“Oh, what a dusty answer gets the soul,” Bruce says, “when hot for certainties in this our life!”

“You horse’s ass,” Bennion says, and takes his pipe out of his mouth to laugh. When he laughs, the slight cast in one eye is accentuated and his benignant expression is touched with completely friendly scorn. In the equipment bag Bruce finds some pages of an old theme, crumples them into a ball, looks for a place to put them, feints left, feints right, and scores with a spectacular hook shot into one tight corner of the wastebasket.

“Hey, look.” He blows his whistle and holds up two fingers.

“Don’t evade the issue, you cretin,” Bennion says. “What
are
you doing to do?”

“What is there to do? Birth, copulation, death. Choice is an illusion.”

“The hell it is. If you turn out to be a gardener, after all the effort I’ve put in on you, I’ll staple you to a stump by the balls. Have you decided? Or haven’t you put your so-called mind to it at all?”

With his hands behind his head, his arms fuzzy with pale hair all the way around, even on the inside, even on the biceps, he scowls through the smile that never leaves his face—
can’t
leave his face, that’s the way his face is. He has no other expression except that benevolent, interested, slightly strabismic, pleasantly scornful smile.

“God, I don’t know,” Bruce says. “I suppose maybe I ought to take the fellowship and get an M.A.”

“In English?”

“Isn’t that what you offered me one in? You didn’t think I should take the one Parker offered me in philosophy.”

“That’s right, you shouldn’t. You’ve got better things to do with your life than losing yourself in a subject nobody believes exists. What’ll you do with an M.A. if you get it?”

Bruce shrugs, without an idea, and if the truth were told, untroubled.

“Teach?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Are you prepared to go on for a Ph.D.? If you’re going to teach in any place worth teaching in, you’ll have to have it.”

“Utah doesn’t give Ph.D.s.”

“I know that, for God’s sake. You’d have to go away somewhere.”