Recapitulation (12 page)

Back in the dim aisles they huddled and commiserated, reflected in triple mirrors, images of outgrown images, and outside the window of the Cat’s Meow Mason stood wanting to laugh and found that he couldn’t, quite. He found Bailey unpleasant and troubling, actively hateful, as if time had earned him no perspective at all. Personal grievance? Injured vanity? Or was he troubled by Bailey because, hateful as he once was, he demonstrated the attractiveness of amorality and self-indulgence and irresponsibility? Id. Principle of Evil. Lord of the flies. Why should Bruce Mason have caught, like another childhood disease, the sexual morality that was properly Bailey’s inheritance, not his?

In the window he watched a gray-haired man, his seersucker jacket hung over his shoulder on a bent forefinger, frown and turn away.

He walked on up the street, but at Second South, thinking ahead to the next block, he felt the old pool hall coming, and that could have been as troubling as Bailey. Swerving with the green light, he recrossed Main and went up the other side, past where the Paramount Theater used to be. In its glass cage Olive Bramwell used to sit dispensing tickets, smiles, and in slack periods, chatter. A nice girl, a really nice girl, never Bruce Mason’s steady but a girl he genuinely liked. She warmed his memory by appearing in it.

He and Olive understood some of the same things, without ever discussing them. He had, even then, the feeling that she kept her counsel as he kept his, and that she lived her life in compartments as he did: home, school, work, dates. Picking her up at her apartment (a girl could not conceal her home the way Bruce did) he had seen how shabby a place her family lived in, how proud they were of her, a college girl, how respectful of him, a college man. Her father was a fireman. Once or twice he had got Bruce and his friends the use of the firemen’s and policemen’s gym to practice basketball in. Or was it the police chief who had done that for them—the police chief who was a friend of Bruce’s father’s?

Like Bruce, Olive worked her way through school, first at the ticket window, later at the organ, which she learned to play in order to upgrade her job. Though she was pretty enough to turn heads, hers was screwed on right. A gay and game companion,
she knew what she liked to do, what she wouldn’t do, how far she would go, what she
had
to do. Neither a gold digger nor a fast one nor a teaser nor a dull and timorous dame, just a good-looking girl who had looked over her inheritance and her necessities and gone to work.

Once, walking down this same block with her after a movie, Bruce had looked at her animated face and her good figure in the pony coat she had just bought herself, and had said impulsively, “Olive, you know something? You’re O.K. You make me feel good. I like just walking down the street with you.”

In the middle of the sidewalk she had stopped, staring. Bruce was not one from whom girls expected compliments. Some of the bluster of his runt years clung to him. He affected the humor of belittlement and insult, he specialized in the outrageous. Hello, Double-Ugly. Hey, Repulsive, give us a kiss.

Dumbfounded in the stream of the after-movie crowd, she had stared at him with her mouth open. “Is this you?”

It embarrassed him to see that he had touched her. She had her own defenses, which he respected, and which were more breachable by stealth than by assault. He was afraid she might do something as awkwardly unprotected as he had just done—get tears in her eyes, or peck him with a kiss right there in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Don’t tempt fate,” he told her. “In a softheaded moment I said you’re O.K. Give me any of your lip and I’ll revert to type.”

He swept an arm around her, felt her first resist and then give, and there they went varsity-dragging down the pavement while he leered lustfully into her face. Laughing, she broke free. People around them were laughing, too. That kind of attention-getting Bruce Mason never evaded. Whatever the occasion, he could be counted on to end up showing off.

Nevertheless, a moment that it pleased him to remember. Mark that page in the album.

The Paramount seemed to have been cut in half and renamed the Utah 3. Olive was not in the cage. A girl with buck teeth gave him an indifferent glance as he went by. Some other business, he didn’t even notice what, had replaced the Keeley’s Ice Cream parlor next door. In its windows he saw the gray-haired man with his jacket over his shoulder change direction to avoid
running into one of the paragranite fountains. Saved from collision with the intractable present, he renewed his inspection of his own unsmiling reflection until it hit the window edge and vanished.

Now he was at First South, where coming down he had not so much as turned his head, preoccupying himself with thoughts of streetcars and old-fashioned electric signs like someone who stared intently into a store window to avoid greeting an acquaintance passing behind him. Not through fear. All that was years and years ago, it had been worn smooth by time, and covered over with later deposits like a geological nonconformity. More than that, he had had it in his mind that it was one of the things he would revisit and confront, if only to test what time had done to his response. But there was a reluctance in him, related to his procrastination about calling Joe Mulder. An influential part of his consciousness would have been perfectly content to leave that whole horizon buried.

The
WALK
sign was on, and he almost obeyed it. But he didn’t. He stopped at the curb and looked left across Main Street and down to the second building from the corner.

Gone. No sign in the shape of a pool table outlined in lights, no steps leading down below the street level. A new tall building had replaced the old four-story stone front; the patterned sidewalks of downtown rehabilitation had paved over that lowest point in his life, the place where he had last seen his father alive, and where he had cut every tie that bound him to his origins.

Now he turned and looked east up First South, searching for the shabby front, the dim apologetic sign, of the fleabag hotel where he had killed himself. It, too, was gone. All the buildings on the block must have been razed. Slick high rises confronted one another across their decorator sidewalks. It was as different from the old street as the man standing on the corner was different from the tense student who decades ago, summoned from his law school graduation in Minneapolis, entered the now vanished door and saw the washed area on the grimy wainscot, the tack-holed floor of the corridor from which the carpet had been removed, the door at the end with the hole at breast level through which had gone the first bullet, the one that killed the woman.

It was there as detailed and uncompromising as a photograph: you could have put a magnifying glass to it and read the flyspecks, the numbers and names scrawled on the wall beside the telephone. And then an overlay slid across it and he was seeing another bullet hole, perhaps prophetic: the one in the colored glass beside the front door of the first house they had lived in in this town, the hole against which, at thirteen, he used to put his experimenting tongue to feel the thin stream of icy outside air. That air blew at him out of the past right now. His teeth ached clear to the jawbone, and he was filled with a weary sense of predestination, helplessness, the inevitability of things.

In just a few months, he said to somebody, some
ficelle
or confidante, I buried my brother, my mother, my young love, and my innocence. In a few months more I buried my father and my youth. Put that way, it sounded like a bleat, a plea for pity to match some burning and unassuaged self-pity, and he despised himself for the way it had phrased itself in his head. Yet he was offended to see the pool hall obliterated, and his father with it. He wished his father could have been perpetuated through the places he had frequented. He wished change could have happened without wiping him out—that he could still exist on First South and Main as he existed in the memory, in the neurones which, alone among all the cells of the body, are never renewed. Mason wanted him preserved, he began to realize, so that he could return to him and settle something.

And if with him, then with others, too. With Bailey, if he was alive. With Joe, whom he had cut off with the others though from Joe he had never known anything but kindness. With Nola, of whom he had asked more than she could give. With all of them, dead or alive, he had binding treaties to make. With his mother, no. She was the one person whose memory he didn’t need to placate, whose forgiveness he had without asking. For all his thoughtlessness and egotism, he had loved her with a whole heart, and she had known it. She lay quiet; they understood one another. The others were more demanding.

But he was not even yet ready for them. As after a long plane journey, he had some sort of historical jet lag to get over. His clock needed resetting. And also, he told himself, he must not, must never, exaggerate the pain and anger of his youth, because
however he may have felt at the time, his youth was something that he now looked back on with fascination, disbelief, and a wincing sort of pleasure.

As a matter of fact, for five or six years this city had been so rich and full for him that every morning trembled with possibility like a wall on which sun and wind throw the flicker of leaf shadows. The days and nights could not contain him. He walked his routes to the university, or rode the streetcars to his job in Sugar House, or drove out on a date, or sat up late over books and went to bed with his brain exploding like an ammunition dump, or put his name on the sign-up sheets of tennis tournaments or his lips on the warm lips of girls, with the feeling that any hour could bring him some unimaginable, gorgeous fulfillment. He had no ambition, he did not plan toward any future, he felt no high resolves, he comprehended no goals. He simply lived the full present, and every morning opened his eyes on a new installment of it, and he trusted the new installments never to fail.

The light changed. He left the corner where the associations were all dark and heavy, and walked the obstacle course among urns and fountains back to the hotel, and straight past it to the garage entrance. Within five minutes he was driving up South Temple. In another three or four he was coasting along Tenth East, where the trees overhung so leafily that they obscured the arc light at mid-block, and his eyes were searching the dark east side of the street for the entrance to the old tennis club.

It was not there. A broad low building occupied the space where it had once been. The parking area was gone, superseded by a slope of lawn, in the middle of which was a sign. Looking through and beyond those structures of the present, he saw those of the past, the place where he had gone through a metamorphosis so complete that it had felt (and felt now) like a reincarnation. He could see the old entry, the high fence solid with Virginia creeper, and beyond that the five clay courts belted with their nets, the bungalow-like clubhouse to the left of the gate, the spectator area reaching from the clubhouse to number 5 court, shaded all the way by the grape arbor from which, in late summer, fat clusters of Concords hung down. The courts blazed in the brillance of summers gone but never lost. Under the arbor,
in the weathered, creaky, unraveling wicker chairs, sprawled the figures in white flannels and ducks who were first his idols and then his friends.

If we were cloned, Mason was thinking, if we were cloned instead of being reared by amateur parents, would we still have the illusion that our personal experiences are unique? Who could say? In any case, his separate individualized remembering was an indulgence that he insisted on just now. All right, he said to the disapproving elder in his head,
je plains le temps de ma jeunesse.

But his memory was a sloppy housekeeper, and had trouble concentrating on one thing at a time. It seemed that he was not only sitting in his dark car under the dark trees of Tenth East Street in Salt Lake City, looking across at the summers from 1925 to 1930, but he was also sitting over a drink at a glass-topped table on the terrace of the St. Georges Hotel in Beirut, a place that had since been so shot up by civil war that it didn’t exist except in heads like his that had known it before. Motorboats towing water skiers were cutting circles around the bay. Every now and then one swooped like a swallow through the sea cave in Pigeon Rock. The sound was abruptly cut off, the air was hollow with its absence, the boat and its spidery tow were swallowed up. Then the bow bolted into the open, the sound blared out, the skier swerved in a wide arc toward the beach and away again, the wake spread and chattered against shore and terrace. In the soft November Mediterranean sun he was talking to someone, someone female and sympathetic, who pursed the mouth that he might later kiss, and half dropped the lids that he might later kiss shut, and said with pity and disbelief, “But you had to
hitchhike
out of your childhood! You could so easily have been lost.”

“Yes,” he said, “if I hadn’t been lucky.”

“Lucky you had a father like that? Lucky to be sickly and small and an outsider? You couldn’t have been more out of it if you’d been black.”

“Oh yes I could have.”

“But anyway you surmounted it. You made that scared inward little boy into something. You outgrew him.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“You had to make your own chances.”

“Oh no. They were given to me.”

“Who ever gave you any chances?”

“My mother. Friends. Professors. Even my father.”

“You said your parents never even finished grade school. How would they know what a bright boy needed?”

“I wasn’t thinking of the bright boy. If he’s really bright, he’ll find out what he needs. I was thinking of the runt. I was thinking about confidence. I was thinking about plain physical competence. That meant more to me than being bright. Anything Bruce Mason ever did he owes to the Salt Lake Tennis Club. Shall I tell you about the summer of 1925?”

She is one of those imaginary women so generous and supportive that she calms the winds. She slows the pulse rate like transcendental meditation. “Please do,” she says.