Recapitulation (4 page)

Je suis une chose qui dure.
So said Henri Bergson, whom he
had probably not thought of since reading him as background for a college paper on Proust half a century ago.
Je suis une chose qui dure.
I am a thing that lasts.

But not, it was clear, unchanged. New shapes took over from old ones. Memory had to be—didn’t it?—a series of overlays. I remember, therefore I was. I was, therefore I am. I both contain and commemorate myself. I am both grave and gravestone.

Mason had left Salt Lake sick with hatred of Jack Bailey. But grievance and injured vanity did heal, and other recollections seemed to have lasted almost as well as the grudge. He wouldn’t mind seeing Bailey again, if only out of curiosity. And if Bailey, then certainly others, the ones who once made his world for him, Joe Mulder especially, who all but created Bruce Mason.

Would he call Joe? Of course, why not? Though if he was still alive, as he might not be, their meeting could be an awkward effort by two strangers to reconstruct one another from memory. He had a vision of himself ringing a doorbell and being confronted by some old baldhead or some grandma with a hearing aid. “Remember me? I’m Bruce Mason, we used to know each other back in the nineteenth century.”

The prospect both daunted and intrigued him. He had often enough imagined coming back and restoring all the relationships, filling himself in on all that had happened in his absence. But now that he was here, it did not seem an easy thing to do. He made himself another drink before he checked the telephone book.

Then he had it open, his finger went down the M’s, and suddenly there it was, the name, even the same address, Joe’s parents’ house, which for two or three years had been more home to him than his own. Delighted, he hunted for a pad on which to write down the number, found none, and ended by fishing out of his jacket pocket the slip that McBride had handed him. He scribbled the number on the back of it, shut the telephone book, told himself that he might as well make this other call, too, whoever it was. Then he turned the slip over, looked, turned it back. The number was the same on both sides.

Adrenalin went through him. He made a short, incredulous sound of laughter. Right in the same house, as if waiting! While
the absentee tried to make up his mind whether to restore old friendship, the stay-at-home acted as if it had never been broken. But it was a woman who called. His wife, presumably. It struck Mason as not completely protocol that the instant, infallible restoration of contact should not have come in Joe’s own voice.

Just the same, nothing in a long time had given him this much pleasure. It made him, in fact, slightly giddy. He took a little impulsive walk across the room. The stiffness of the long drive lurked in his muscles. His skin had glazed over in the air-conditioned chill. As he sat down on the bed he had an unsteady moment, a darkening of the sight. Then it cleared. But it had lasted long enough to check his dialing finger. Wait, wait. A gap that wide couldn’t be closed in a minute. There would be plenty of time after dinner. Call him then.

In the old days the Roof Garden had been open, with awnings and pots and planters and the smell of freshly watered flowers. Now it was the Sky Room, enclosed for elegant dining. The sun had found clouds to hide in, and the windows were unveiled. Below his window table were the geometric paths of the temple grounds and the brown turtleback of the Tabernacle, and right opposite him, pasted against the clouded west, was the temple itself, spiny as a horned toad. Though he found that he couldn’t admire it architecturally, it struck him as comforting and safe—he felt protective about it. It was one of the shapes of permanence he remembered.

The place was crowded with early diners, and the service, though assiduous, was slow. Mason did not mind. He ate his salad and looked out of the window while the sky began its phases from gray to red, red to purple, purple to saffron. At a certain moment floodlights sprang to life at the bases of the temple’s clustered spires and improved them, deepening the round windows and brightening the Angel Moroni on his steeple point. The light was gentle outside, even gentler inside, accentuated by a blade of candle flame on each table.

Then he noticed that the flames had begun, all together, to
waver, and about the same moment he felt the faint touch on his face and hands. The windows along the east and south had been opened, and were catching the canyon breeze flowing down from the mountains to fill in under the air still rising from the warm lake.

One touch, and his skin remembered. Magic. He sat drenched in another of those showers of sensation that had been passing over him ever since he arrived.

He was on the lawn behind Joe Mulder’s house, flat on his back, arms wide in cool grass, his eyes full of stars. If he rolled his head to the right he saw the dark crowns of trees rising out of the gully. If he rolled it to the left he saw, over the roof of the bungalow, the rim of the Wasatch smoking with imminent moonrise. Others were sprawled around him. Who? Joe, for sure; probably Jack Bailey; probably Welby Kreps. The Phi Delt quartet. They had probably been practicing for the Spring Sing, gathered in Joe’s back yard harmonizing Tin Pan Alley moon songs: “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain,” “Moonlight and Roses,” and the one Bailey called the sheepherder’s song, “The Same Old Moon, the Same Old June, But Not the Same Old Ewe.”

The smells were of mown grass and damp earth and the rich rotting of compost over the gully’s edge. The mood was idle, easy, contented, open to every sort of nocturnal yearning. Their recent harmonies hung in the air that moved cool and secret down the gully and spread along the grass, but no one suggested another song or another run through an old one. They were quiet, flopped loosely, waiting for nothing in particular. His ear, close to the ground, heard dim stirrings as if night crawlers were oozing out of their holes—as if, with a flashlight, you could startle their reddish gleam among the grass blades.

The edge of the moon dazzled over the rim. Someone sat up, a silhouette edged in silver. The leaves of the maple between house and garage glinted silver and dark, moving as if the light beyond were forcing them aside. In the gully, hidden among the stir of cottonwood leaves, a mockingbird awoke and sang.

Incredulously Mason backed away from that vision. What a Rube Goldberg wiring job a man was! How enduring were the circuits stamped into a boy when he was dizzy with hormones
and as vulnerable to experience as dry blotting paper to water! Push the right button and you floodlighted him like the temple. Push another and you got a whole
son et lumière.

And what programmed the memory for such instant recall was not necessarily profound or even important. He supposed people were often programmed by important things; he had been himself—teachers, great books, painful deaths, family conflicts, the midnight miseries that had marked even such a deceptively safe adolescence as his own. But what sprang out of revisited Salt Lake City to confound him with forgotten emotions seemed to be mostly trivia, the sort of thing to which he had paid no attention at the time and had never recalled since.

What is an event? What constitutes an experience? Are we what we do, or do we do what we are? The circumstances that had poisoned Mason’s boyhood, the events that in a malign conjunction had gathered to drive him from this town, seemed to have lasted less well than a kiss behind the piano on a Christmas morning, or the feeling of fellowship, almost beatitude, that came from the shadowy presence of friends not even firmly identified on a dark lawn, where the air breathed romantic yearning and trembled with the sound of cottonwood leaves, and had only just ceased vibrating with June-moon harmonies rehearsed for a forgotten Spring Sing.

Dangerous to squeeze the tube of nostalgia. Never get the toothpaste back in. He could end up embarrassing himself. Because the fact was, the darker things he had to remember about this town were at least as numerous as the sentimental and satisfying things, and merely by remarking that he didn’t seem to remember them, he brought them back. If he would let them, they could swarm at his mind like autumn flies at an attic window.

His dinner came, with profuse apologies from the young waitress, and he took his hands off the table to let her fuss at setting him up nicely. He ate with his eyes turned out the window and his mind turned backward.

All his earliest years in Salt Lake had been an effort, much of the time as unconscious as growth itself and yet always there as if willed, to outgrow what he was and become what he was not. A stray, he yearned to belong. An outsider and an isolate, he
aspired to friends and family and the community solidarity he saw all around him in that Mormon city. A runt, he dreamed of athletic triumphs. Insignificant, he coveted the kind of notice he saw given to football heroes, sheiks, slickers, and campus politicians with glib tongues—all of whom, he felt in his heart, which was arrogant even when most envious, were inferior to him in brains and potential.

Convinced that everything private to him and his family was the reverse of respectable, he agonized considerably about goodness and guilt and God. Once he found a place in the Boy Scouts he went up through the ranks like a rocket from Tenderfoot to Eagle, cheating a couple of times to get merit badges he wasn’t qualified for, and suffering bleak contritions when he thought over his sins in bed. All sorts of sins, comic now but not then. He was the original of the kid who slept with boxing gloves on.

Most means of gaining attention were unavailable to him, but none was beneath him; and though all through high school he had no real friend, he did not go unnoticed. At thirteen, when he started the tenth grade, he was barely five feet tall and weighed barely ninety pounds. But he learned very soon to speak in the voice of Polyphemus or the Bull of Bashan. Kidded or persecuted by bigger boys, he offered to tear them to bits and scatter their bloody parts for the sea gulls. Very early he understood the exact shade of hyperbole that would startle but could not be taken seriously. Beneath notice, he compelled it.

Because he was too small to take the required ROTC—the only kid in school not in uniform—he became a violent anti-militarist, full of contempt for the regimentation, the itchy woolen breeches, the rolled puttees, and the choking blouses of the chickenshit soldiers. Then in his senior year, when he suddenly started growing, he took up the military life so enthusiastically that at the year-end parade and inspection he was leading a platoon, wearing a Sam Browne belt, shoulder pips, leather puttees, and a sword. He even spent part of the following summer at a Citizens’ Military Training Camp, of which the less said, the better.

In gym classes he was a joke, added to teams as an afterthought or a handicap. Embedded in the sedimentary strata of
his mature descendant were cherty nodules of humiliation, as when a hulk of a retarded athlete surveyed him with astonishment in the shower one day, remarking, “My God, shrimp, you haven’t got knockers big enough to knock up a chicken!”

Bushwah, you big dumb ape. Come fooling around and I’ll show you how to knock. I’ll knock your teeth so far back you’ll grin out the back of your neck. I’ll kick you so hard you can carry your ass in a knapsack.

He pushed his comic ferocity ahead of him like a shield behind which siege forces advance toward a defended wall. Born mascot, midget, he muscled secret bricks. He ran around the block a lot, mostly at night when he wouldn’t be seen. He dreamed. The dreams were not remarkable, and they neither stopped nor changed after he started to grow, but continued on, even into college. Athletic prowess, casual heroisms, and the adoration of perfumed women comprehended them all. He got his clues from movies and popular songs. For a good while he was in love with the great pansy eyes of Corinne Griffith, and in his fantasies he closely resembled Wallace Reid.

The mere recollection of the shrimp he once was made Mason shake his head incredulously. He saw the waitress start from her place, apparently thinking he had found something inedible among his dinner, and he had to smile and nod her back with intimations of pleasurable surfeit. Looking back out into the fading sky, he thought with some exasperation that the twenties have been badly misrepresented by moviemakers and social historians too young to know what they are talking about, and badly misunderstood by contemporary kids who have roared more by the age of thirteen than the slickers and flappers of the Roaring Twenties roared in their whole mythical lifetime. The twenties as Mason remembered them were the age of innocence.

Or was it that, famished for acceptance, he himself had rebelled backward, away from his father’s lawlessness? He didn’t think so. Everyone he had grown up with had been pretty mild. Holly, the most sophisticated creature he had ever seen, was, as he had decided this afternoon, a small-town innocent creating in stodgy Salt Lake a pale lavender version of Greenwich Village.

Good Mormon girls would not only not take a drink, they might refuse to go out with someone who smoked: they didn’t
dare come home with the smell of cigarettes in their clothes. The line between nice girl and chippie was as firmly drawn as a national boundary, and if challenged, would have been defended by all the red-blooded youths who spent much of their time and treasure trying to lure nice girls across the border. What they were all headed for, perhaps after a brief fling by the males, was “My Blue Heaven,” sung in a male alto by Gene Austin. A smiling face, a fireplace, a cozy room, a little nest that’s nestled where the roses bloom. Just Molly and me, and baby makes three. Much more sweet than hot. Mason remembered billboards (put up by whom?) with pictures of chubby infants and the caption “Utah’s Best Crop.”

For better or worse, the place he derived from. Precisely what made him smile fascinated him. He seemed to have passed through some barrier into an earlier and simpler time, and at the same time to have exposed himself to feelings that he had thought completely outgrown. Was this a worse place to grow up in than some more worldly city? Didn’t Salt Lake, once, save him, or let him save himself? Would delight have been any more delightful, or friendship any warmer, or young love any more delirious, or unhappiness any bleaker, or the terror and awe of adolescence any more potent, in another town and another society?