Recapitulation (2 page)

Back in the hall again, he stood looking up at the spiral stairs, apparently as unsupported as the Beanstalk, and remembered a time when Holly and two roommates—not Nola, she came later and was here only a few weeks—came down the shabby old steps arguing about the proportions of the perfect female figure, and he met them on the second landing and like a chorus line they raised their skirts and thrust out their right legs before him, demanding to know which was the most shapely. An undergraduate Paris and three demanding goddesses. He had picked Holly. Why not? Though if Nola had been there then, it might have been another story. That would have been obsession, not judgment.

“We’ve just redone the whole place,” McBride said. “It was the home of a Park City silver king originally, but it was all run down.”

Mason continued to look up the stairs. McBride’s information was no more important than the decorative changes, but up there was something that
was
important, or used to be. It pulled at him like an upward draft.

“I used to know this house years ago,” he said. “Some people I knew had an apartment on the third floor.”

“Oh? Front or back?”

“Front. The one with the round tower window.”

“Oh yes. We haven’t done much to that yet—just painted it.”

“I wonder,” Mason said, and made a little deprecatory gesture and felt irritably ashamed, like a middle-aged man recalling last night’s party, and his own unseemly capers and his pawing of the host’s wife. It was fatuous to want to go up there, but he did.

“Go on up if you like,” McBride said. “The only thing, there’s a woman laid out in that room.”

“Well, then …”

“It doesn’t matter, if you don’t mind. She’s presentable.”

For a moment Mason hung on the word. McBride’s professional vanity was one of the odder kinds. And he was annoyed that a corpse should intrude upon a sentimental but perfectly legitimate impulse. Then he put his hand on the mahogany rail.

“Maybe I will.”

The second-floor hall, at whose doors he had knocked and entered, was as much changed as the ground floor, but up the second flight of stairs he mounted into a growing familiarity. And he climbed against the pressure of a crowd of ghosts. The carpet ended at the stairhead. He put his feet down softly and held his breath with the wild notion that he heard voices from the door of Holly’s old apartment. Up these stairs, a hundred, two hundred times—through how long? a year?—he had come with books or bottles or manuscripts in his hands and (it seemed to him now) an incomparable capacity for enthusiasm in his heart. From the high burlap-hung window of the apartment they had let their liquid ridicule fall on the streets of the bourgeois city. He half expected, as he moved into the doorway, to see their faces look up inquiringly from chair and couch and floor.

But in the room there was only the dead woman, and she was not looking at him.

She lay on a wheeled table, with beside her one stiff chair and a taboret bearing a bowl of withered lilacs, all of it arranged as if for a macabre still life. Looking toward the window across the woman’s body, he saw how the light of afternoon blurred in her carefully waved hair.

For a few seconds he simply stood in the doorway, stopped partly by the body and partly by the sensation of obscure threat: he was walking in a strange neighborhood and needed his own gang around him.

In Holly’s time the tower bay had held an old upright piano, its backside exposed to the room like the hanging seat of a child’s sleepers. Afternoons, evenings, Sunday and holiday mornings, the place had sounded to “Twelfth Street Rag,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Mood Indigo.” On at least one Christmas morning they had sung carols around the piano, syncopating them wickedly. That was the morning when he had brought Holly the facsimile copy of
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
, a mutinous book full of mottoes for their personalities and their times.

But what he remembered now, hanging in the doorway, was how in some lull in the bedlam that always went on there they had found themselves smiling foolishly at one another by the piano, and she had put up her hands to his face and kissed him sweet and soft, a kiss like a happy child’s.

He felt the stairs in his legs, the years in his mind, as he went in softly past the woman who lay so quietly on her back, and when he had almost passed her he turned and searched her face, as if he might surprise in it some expression meaningful to this wry and confusing return.

She was a plain woman, perhaps fifty. McBride had not yet made her look nice. She wore a simple black dress, but she had a Navajo squash-blossom necklace around her throat. It struck Mason as a remarkable piece of realism—perhaps something she had especially liked and had stubbornly gone on wearing past the age when costume jewelry became her. It gave her a touching, naïvely rakish air.

Yet she shed a chill around her, and her silence spread to fill the room. Hardly a sound came through the stone walls. In the old days there had always been the piano banging, the phonograph going, two or six or sixteen voices making cosmic conversation. And he could not remember ever seeing the apartment in daylight. The windows were always shrouded in their artificially frayed burlap, and the light was from lamps, most of them low on the floor and some of them at least with red bulbs in them. And always the smell of sandalwood.

Like a Chinese whorehouse. Pitying and entranced, he sat down on the window seat overlooking the reach of South Temple. Directly across was a Five Minute Car Wash with a big apron of concrete and a spic dazzle of white paint and red tiles. In the times he remembered, that lot had held a peewee golf course where men in shirt sleeves, women in summer dresses, young couples loud with laughter, had putted little white balls along precise green alleys of artificial grass and over gentle predictable bridges and causeways into numbered holes.

“Look at them,” Holly had said to him once as they sat in the tower bay looking down at the after-dinner golfers moving under the floodlights. “
Toujours gai
, my God! Someday I’m going to build a miniature golf course with fairways six inches wide and rough six inches deep. I’ll fill the water holes with crocodiles and sow the sand traps with sidewinders. How would it be to hide a black widow spider in every hole, so that picking up your ball would earn you some excitement? What if you sawed the supports of all the little bridges nearly in two?”

Live it dangerously. It was strange to recall how essential that had once seemed. Go boom, take chances. He ran his hand along the sill, thinking that this was the pose, sitting right here and looking out, that Holly had assumed when Tom Stead painted her in her gold velvet gown.

Probably that portrait wasn’t anything special. It couldn’t have been. The chances were that Tom Stead was painting signs somewhere now, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death. But then, in this room, in the presence of its subject whose life overflowed upon them all, that slim golden shape with the velvet highlights was Lilith, Helen, Guinevere,
das Ewig-Weibliche.
And it was hardly a day before other girls, less fortunately endowed or graced, began dropping comments on how
warm
that Holly-Stead romance was getting, and hinting that there was tucked away somewhere, in the best Goya fashion, a companion portrait, a nude.

Well, well, what a bunch of bohemian puritans. Mason did not believe in any nude, or in its importance if there was one, though at the time the possibility had bothered him, and he had been malely offended, surprised that she would
lower
herself.

What he had meant was that his vanity was hurt if Holly accorded Stead any privileges she did not accord to him. And he didn’t really believe that she accorded any to Stead. What truly shone out of that golden portrait, as out of Holly herself, was not glamour but innocence. Under the sheath she was positively virginal, a girl from Parowan who had made the big step to city excitements but remained a girl from Parowan. If you cracked the enamel of her sophistication you found a delighted little girl playing Life.

Once more he felt on his lips the touch of that soft, childlike kiss by the piano on a Christmas morning, and stood up so abruptly that he startled himself with the sight of the dead woman, whom he had forgotten. It
was
innocence. Holly could put away the predatory paws of college boys, twist laughing from the casual kiss, pass among the hot young Freudians as untouched as a nun, shed like water the propositions that came at her seven to the week. There she sat in her gold gown by her window opening on the foam: a maiden in a tower.

Like someone tapping at a door, wanting to interrupt a private
conversation, Nola was there in his head asking to be asked in. He found it curious that he didn’t want to ask her in, not just now, though she was surely a more significant part of this lost place and past time than Holly. It was Holly he wanted to talk to just now; she seemed fresher with possibilities, not so tainted with old sullen emotions. The two had briefly shared these rooms, but it was Holly whom the rooms remembered.

He crossed to the door of what had once been her bedroom, wanting to look in on her intimately. In this room, now completely bare, aseptically painted, he had sat many times when she was ill or when on Sunday mornings she made it a charming point of her sophistication to entertain in bed. While she lay propped with pillows he had read to her, talked to her, kissed her, had his hands fended away. The empty space was still charged with the vividness she had given to everything. There was one night very late, two or three o’clock, when he had sat on one side of the bed and a mournful and lovesick jazz trumpeter had sat on the other, neither of them willing to leave the other alone there, and all that night he had read aloud into the smell of sandalwood the life story of a mad woman from Butte, Montana.
I, Mary MacLean
, that one was called.

What an occasion she had made of it, laid up with a cold, hemmed in by rival young men, covered to the chin in an absurd, high-necked, old-fashioned nightgown, taking aspirins with sips of ginger beer, laughing at them alternately or together with that face as vivid on the pillow as a flower laid against the linen. It was innocence. In that crackpot bohemian pre-Crash wonderful time, it was innocence.

How he and the trumpeter had broken their deadlock, what had ever happened to the Tom Stead flurry, what became of Holly’s string of other admirers—all gone. She sent them away, or they quarreled at her over their bruised egos, or they became upset at finding her always in a crowd. Plenty of self-appointed hummingbird catchers, but no captures.

And yet, maybe.

Summer and winter, day and night, were telescoped in his memory. How old would he have been? Nineteen? Something like that. He was still in college, and even though he had stayed out most of one year to work, he had still graduated when he
was twenty. And twenty, for him at least, had been very different from nineteen. Say it was 1929. Say he was nineteen, Holly two or three years older. There was neither beginning nor ending nor definite location in time to what he vividly remembered. What they had been doing, whether they had been out to some university dance or to some nightclub, hardly any details came back. But they were alone in a way they seldom had been.

They must have been talking, something must have led up to it. It could have been during the time of gossip about Stead, for Holly was upset. It could have been only some occasion when she found her job as secretary of the American Mining Congress, or the attentions of her boss, or simply being absolutely independent and self-supporting, more of a strain than usual. But there she was, floodlighted in his mind, pressing against him with her face against his chest, clinging and crying, saying, “Bruce, get me out of this! I can’t take any more of it. This is all no good, it leads nowhere, it’s grubby and I hate it. I’ve got to get away, Bruce. Please!”

Both the tears and the way she clung excited him. But the game had been played through all their acquaintance under different rules. And if she was an innocent, what was he? He went on in the old way, alarmed but still kidding, burlesquing gestures of consolation, patting the crow-wing hair, saying, “Well now, hey, don’t let it get you down. Brucie fix it, whatever it is.” Inanities, idiocies. She wore an evening dress cut very low in the back, and he played his fingers up and down her spine. He slid his hand in against her skin, slid it further, expecting the competent twist and shrug and fending, and the laugh that would mean the emotional fit was over. But his hand went on around, clear around, and with a shock like an internal explosion he found it cupping the frantic softness of her breast.

Even remembering, all his sensations were shocking to him. He remembered how smoothly the curve of her side swelled upward, how astonishingly consecutive her body was. Also, and almost with revulsion, how rigid and demanding the nipple of her breast. Innocence—he had never touched a girl there, bare—never imagined, or imagined wrong. Stupefied by the sudden admission to her flesh, made uneasy by the way she crowded and clung, a scared schoolboy where she needed a man, he stood
wrapping her awkwardly with his hand paralyzed against her discovered body, and kissed her and tasted her tears, and thought with alarm and conviction of Stead and the rumored nude, and was anguished with eagerness to escape.

He remembered not a scrap, not a detail, of how he got away. She offered herself, and that was all. The peewee golfer putting his little white ball up the little green alley of his youth came suddenly on the sidewinder in the sand trap, the crocodile in the artificial lake.

He closed the door on the memory. It had begun to occur to him that he was an extraordinary young man, and not everything that was extraordinary about himself pleased him. Innocence? Maybe, though there were more contemptuous names for it. Amusing certainly. If he were not caught in this queer emotional net he would have to laugh. You simply couldn’t tell a story like that without drawing smiles. But he was not telling a story. He was standing in Holly’s denuded bedroom trying to understand his emotions of nearly fifty years earlier. No matter what he had pretended, at that age he was hungrier for security than for taking chances. A fraud, he would gargle the whiskey he would obediently not drink. A great yapper with the crowd, he would tear up the turf coming to a stop when the cat quit running, he would break his neck not to catch what he was after.