Recapitulation (25 page)

On the last night he picked her up after dinner and they sat up on Wasatch Boulevard in the white cold, under the cold mountains, huddling and kissing and promising. He talked about the next summer and all they would do, but in the middle of his Pollyanna spiel she put her hands to his face, cupping it and staring into his eyes, and cried in her husky voice, “Oh, do you
have
to go back there? I can’t stand it if you go away again!”

And here, something odd. He had been utterly miserable in Minneapolis. With no gift for the law’s precisions, and undereducated
to begin with, he had compensated by a monomaniac diligence. He went nowhere except to classes and the library, he took no exercise, he ate in twenty minutes in order to get back to the books. In spite of the monotonous bland things he ate, his ulcer was a constant reminder under his wishbone. He was away from everything that had once given him a delusive confidence, his heart was wrenched with more love than it could hold, he was blackly lonesome. And yet when she begged him not to go back, he had not a moment’s hesitation. Of course he was going back. He would stick it out, and she should, too, and eventually they would get their postponed reward. Four more months, and then all summer together. Another nine months, and together for good. He would find a place in some local law firm, or hang out his own shingle.

Mason could hardly believe his own naïveté What had he thought he was going to do? Arrange little divorces? Settle little real estate squabbles? Draft little wills? Litigate little disputes about water rights, or breaches of contract or promise? That last was probably it. Breach of promise was very big about that time. Many a female heart, inspired by Peaches Browning, was exposing its injuries to sympathetic juries.

It was fantastic that he should ever have thought his future might lie in the practice of law. That was only the direction in which he had been pushed by people eager to do him a favor. He had no more initiative in his career than water has on a slope. Nevertheless, once started, he would have felt it immoral—unthinkable—to stop before the end. He would get his degree and come back. They would be married and build a house, or maybe only a basement at first, in the Salt Lake Depression style—a roofed-over foundation in which they would live until they could afford to build the first floor. Just Molly and me and baby makes three.

Question: Why that mule headed inertia? Answer: In the first place, he
was
mule-headed. He hated to back up, start over, change direction. To this day he drove that way,
gerade aus
like a German, despising the people who dart from lane to lane. Moreover, he was used to delayed rewards. He knew something about having to work for what he wanted, and even more about frustrations and disappointments. He was a digger, but there
was a fatalist in him, too. He mistrusted the rewards that he would break his neck to win. He half expected to fail even though experience should have taught him that most of the time he did not. In his bones he knew that the world owed him nothing. Some part of him was always preconditioned to lose. And though he felt himself superior to his background, and capable of some vague unspecified distinction, he knew himself unworthy. He was a sticker because it was easier to dig in and be overrun than to attack and be repulsed.

To Nola he had said nothing about any of that. He didn’t know himself that well. Also, he had hope. When you live by daily postponements, you had better have hope.

It didn’t help that on that last night he felt he had to take her home at ten so as to spend the last hour or so with his parents. The next morning, when he kissed her goodbye at the Union Pacific station, her lips were cold from the wind, and her eyes were bottomless. Sad? Resentful? He couldn’t tell. He never could read her eyes.

Now here was this letter written from Minneapolis a few weeks after he left her for the second time. He wished Aunt Margaret had managed to preserve something else, his letters to his mother or Joe, a diary, old papers, photographs, anything. To reconstruct that time from these letters alone was like trying to make a composite drawing of a suspect from the evidence of a single witness.

He is still running books past his eyes, a random sampling of the wildest variety: Longinus’
On the Sublime
,
Heroes and Hero Worship
,
The Origin of Species
and
The Voyage of the Beagle
, Freud’s
Totem and Taboo
, Andreyev’s
The Seven That Were Hanged.
These are his after-study-hours reading. He confides that before turning off his light about two every morning, he gives himself a German lesson, reading a page, with the help of a dictionary, from
Also Sprach Zarathustra
, Tieck’s essays on Shakespeare, or Giovanni Papini’s
Gog.

Strange, strange, and far off. Even the handwriting strikes him as strange. Most people’s handwriting, he believes, grows more angular and irregular as they age, like the shapes of old pine trees. His, on the contrary, has grown more precise. It is demoralizing to see this impetuous scrawl and know it for his
own. It is even more demoralizing to read what this boy sees fit to say to his girl, frantically signaling from his isolation to his desire.

He is excruciating. His letter is a desperate patter chorus of puns, doggerel, snatches of languages he does not know. Embarrassed to speak seriously of what he respects and covets, he describes professors as vacuum cleaners full of air, dust, and dead flies. Poverty, exile, and the death of a brother have taught him nothing. He sounds seventeen, not twenty-one. And if Mason were the girl this boy is writing to, he would notice one thing: though he is bitter against his exile and passionate for its end, the bulk of the letter, like that score card of books he has read in the past week, is about what his exile is teaching him. He speaks less of his losses than of his gains.

Dull fare for an unintellectual girl left behind in Salt Lake City, as dull as Yeats on fairies or Schopenhauer on suffering. Would she have felt that this compulsive self-improvement of Bruce Mason’s, which she cannot know is half-baked and only semi-directed, threatens what she wants and what he says
he
wants? Would she feel the torque of foreign books, foreign ideas, working on his provincial innocence?

He reminds Mason of one of those little toy apes made of cloth and fur, with painted grins and rubber-band insides. Twist the rubber bands tight and set this anthropoid on a table and he will begin to writhe and contort himself toward uprightness. A hand or foot will catch and brace, the body will lift, the head will come up. Then something will slip and down he will go again, flat on his low brow. But he does not stay there. The body goes on writhing, begins to come up, struggles to stand, is almost standing. Then flop, he is flat again, but his fixed indomitable grin is already stirring with mindless persistence upward, a paradigm of evolution.

The quintessentially deculturated American, born artless and without history into a world of opportunity, Bruce Mason must acquire in a single lifetime the intellectual sophistication and the cultural confidence that luckier ones absorb through their pores from earliest childhood, and unluckier ones never even miss. He is a high jumper asked to jump from below ground level and without a run, and because he is innocent and has the temperament of an achiever he will half kill himself trying.

And Nola Gordon is what? She has no real interest in high jumping. She likes to sit and let the sun shine on her, and sing.

What could she have made of his idiotic way of signing off? Where his feeling might be laid miserably bare, he has to ham it up. “Nola, mein Schatz, Ich liebe Dich. In fact I might say, without fear of successful contradiction, je t’aime. Or even
.” How preposterous. Irritated, Mason denies his acquaintance. Whatever happened to him, he deserved it.

Then he turns the last sheet over, and there is a postscript.

One letter is enough to depress him. It brings back that whole frantic, lonely, expanding winter, those ulcer-diet meals of cottage cheese and milk and mashed potatoes and bread and ice cream, those late half hours of communion each night before he
climbed into bed with Nietzsche or Tieck, those bleak visits to the post office when the box showed nothing—he wrote her daily, she did well to manage two letters a week. He ties up the bundles and tips the box to put them back in.

There remains the manila envelope. When he undoes its metal clasp, snapshots slide onto the spread.

His first impulse was not to look at them. There were advantages to being orphaned away from the past. Evidence might be hard on the self-protective memory. Just now, in a single letter, Bruce Mason had so embarrassed his mature descendant that the descendant shrank from the relationship. He felt a derisive unwillingness that verged on distaste, like a Victorian cleric trying to reconcile himself to descent from an ape.

What if Nola Gordon, too, should turn out to have been an absurd adolescent, callow, provincial, not beautiful, not mysterious, not in any way worth the disturbance she caused? The memory, Mason had discovered, is deceptive and self-serving, and could blur faces as it could blur other things. What if he turned these snapshots over and found that Nola was not the dark mysterious desirable girl he thought he remembered? What if he had invented her? What if the fashions of the early Depression years turned her into a frump?

But he was engaged in laying ghosts, not only the ghosts of his luckless parents and the ghosts of old girl friends, but the ghosts of old innocence, inexperience, possibility. His innocence had always been flawed by self-doubt, and only those years of delusive security, when he had been sixteen-going-on-twenty-one, had lured him into the open. When the boot came down, he had crawled back under his rock dragging his squashed guts.

Not that he needed healing, or ever had. He took the blows that fell on his family and himself because he expected them. The world owed none of them anything, and no few years of relative grace had convinced him otherwise. He had read Epictetus; he was a Stoic by destiny and choice. And he was not, afterward, driven to wipe all that out of his mind. It was only the girl he wiped out, and her he systematically forgot not so much because love or grievance gnawed at him as because he was ashamed to have been a fool, and by no means a guiltless one.

Now he flinched away from looking at these photographs and refreshing the face of his temptation. He was reconciled to having been a fool, but at least he wanted the temptation to have been irresistible.

The photographs lay face down. He turned over the top one and there she was, smiling from the doorway of a little log cabin. She wore riding breeches and boots, a white shirt open at the throat, a black Stetson pushed back on her head. Beside her, a wagon wheel leaned against the log wall; above her head, a nail wore a bouquet of binder twine. The interior of the cabin shadowed backward in dim crisscrosses of hay. The face looking at him was heavier and more Indian-looking than he remembered it, but he could see why it used to interrupt the beating of his heart. The eyes were candid under severe dark brows. The mouth was curved in a Gioconda smile.

Quickly he shuffled through the others. Only eight—one roll from his old bellows Kodak. One print was so over-exposed that all detail was washed out. Two were of a crowd—the wedding crowd—spread across the grass under the cottonwoods, self-conscious countrified strangers not even forgotten because never known, but once studied gingerly as potential relatives by marriage. When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.

Here are the bride and groom, she in a best dress, her hair direct from the beauty parlor, he wearing a Tom Mix shirt and a dazed smile. Flanking them, the bride’s daughter, father, and brother Buck. Buck’s hard face is a younger version of his father’s, curly dark hair an earlier stage of curly gray. Both have the beaks of hawks and eyes that bore into the camera like the eyes of zealot grandfathers in old tintypes.