Recapitulation (7 page)

A noise at the door made him turn. His mother came quietly in. Her face was white and still. She smiled and spoke, and her voice was low and matter-of-fact. “Does it work?”

It took him a moment to understand that she was talking about the pin. “No,” he said then. “It’s too big. It splits the match.” Accusingly he glowered at her where she wavered in the big lens of tears.

“Why, Bruce,” she said. “You’re crying! Oh, poor kid!”

She started for him, but he kicked his feet into his unlaced shoes and stumbled to the outside door. Down the steps he lurched and recovered and ran, and stopped in the shadow where the old pear tree tangled its branches with the overgrown lilac hedge. His mother’s silhouette was in the lighted rectangle of the door. “Bruce?” her high voice said. After that one call she stood still, listening. Then she bent her head and turned back in, and the rectangle of light narrowed and was gone.

Under the pear tree’s darkness it was still and cold. When he went out through the hedge he saw his breath white against the arc light. He stood with his fists clenched and his teeth clenched and his mind clenched against the sobs that rattled and shook him. He could hear the sounds of traffic from Ninth South, but in the park opposite, and up and down the street, there was no sound. It was as if they lived not merely at the edge of the park but outside the boundaries of all human warmth, all love and companionship and neighborliness, all light and noise and activity, all law.

He had never been able to bring a companion home from school with him, or even a neighbor boy casually encountered on the block. Once, when a good-natured older boy rode him home on his handlebars, he gave the boy a wrong address and stood at a strange gate until he went away. The very sight of his house, divided within itself but enclosing its secrets behind thick
hedges, drawn blinds, closed doors, shook him with self-pity. He set off up the sidewalk, which along the Surplus Canal became a dirt path, and as he walked he cursed aloud in the filthiest words he knew.

He cursed his father and Lew McReady and the wicked girl who had started all this; she was as repulsive to him as if he had caught her copulating with animals. He shed tears for his mother and himself, forced to live in a way they hated. After a while, exhausted by tears and cursing, he stood shivering under trees that rattled stiffly in a little night wind, and imagined revenges, triumphs, ways of becoming rich and famous. He magnified himself in years, strength, confidence, and nerve. He whipped his father with his tongue until he cried and begged forgiveness for all his impatience and contempt. There was a brief tableau in which he stood humbly by while Bruce broke all the bottles of homemade Sunnybrook Farm, until the cellar was flooded with whiskey and they stood knee-deep in broken glass.

Stumbling along the path again with his mind full of carnage, he saw Lew McReady in a dozen postures of defeat, collapse, and cowardly apology. He saw the girl, too. She came up to him soft and beguiling, and for a moment his picture of her was totally obscured by the image of his own scornful eyes and contemptuous, repudiating mouth. But within seconds of that magnificent rejection he was thinking how it would be to touch her, and he was beside her in some very private place with a grate fire and soft music when he came to himself and fell to cursing again. Thinking how close he had come to letting her into those dreams of coiling limbs and silky skin, he shook with self-loathing. Passing a tree, he smashed his fist against it and howled with outrage at the pain.

There was a moon like a chip of ice; the air smelled of smoke and frost. He was the loneliest creature alive. With his hands tucked into his armpits, his eyes glaring into the dark, his throat constricted by occasional diminishing sobs, he went on. Now he was at the edge of the big cabbage field he had passed that afternoon. Out of the shadows the heads lifted in even rows, touched by the moon with greenish light.

Reminded of the
castra
with its rows of tents, he yearned for that job he had begun. He wanted to be back above the warm
register, removed, intent, and inviolate. He saw the kitchen as sanctuary: though he had fled from it, he had already had enough of the cold and dark. And anyway, what he had fled from was the parlor. In the kitchen was not only warmth but the true thing that made it sanctuary—his mother, sitting with her magazine, glancing across from her isolation to his, making tentative humble suggestions that might for a few seconds gain her entrance to his world.

Understanding and shame dawned together, coming on like the rheostat-controlled light in a theater. He had had all the contempt he wanted, that day, but now he heaped more on himself. With his chin on a fence post he stared across the glimmering cabbage field and gnawed his chapped knuckles, thinking. There was this one person in the whole world who loved him, only this one he could fully trust. If he thought himself lonely, friendless, and abused, what should he think of her? Ever since they had left Canada she had been without friends, without even acquaintances beyond the company that came to the parlor. He had school, he was almost as used to praise as to contempt. Outside his hateful house he was able to gather approval with both hands, and bring it back to her and have it doubled. Who praised
her?
Who helped
her?
What did
she
have? He remembered the scuttle of coal he had deliberately not roused himself to get for her.

His father said, “If we don’t do this, how do we eat? Did you ever hear of money?”

She said, “It might be better to starve. So help me, sometimes I’d rather.”

Bruce said, “I won’t let us starve. I’ll get a job. I’ll quit school if I have to. We won’t take anything from him. I’ll look after you.”

The roguish one, the ninety-pound volunteer.

In the moonlight the cabbages went row on row like the crosses in the poem. Their ranks swam and melted and reformed greenishly, shadowily, a great store of food left carelessly unharvested, while at his house they ran a speakeasy because it was the only thing his father knew how to do. His mother submitted because she must, or because of Bruce.

In his nostrils, shrunken in the cold, lay the sourish smell of
the field. He dove under the fence and in a moment was wrestling with an enormous cabbage, trying to unscrew its deep root from the ground. Before he defeated it he was crying again with exhaustion and anger, but there it lay at last, a great cold vegetable rose. Stripping off its outer leaves, he rolled it under the fence, crept through after it, gathered it in his arms, and went staggering toward home.

He heard the phonograph the moment he opened the door. His mother was sitting alone in the kitchen. Her life was right where he had left it. As he stuck his head and half his body inside, she stood up. Her eyes went from his face to the front of his sweater, where dirt from the cabbage had rubbed off on him, and from that to where his hand was still out of sight holding the cabbage behind the door.

“Where did you go?” she said. “Are you all right?”

Already his confidence in what he had done was leaking away. The last block of the way home, the cabbage had weighed like solid lead. It seemed to him that all that day he had been carrying weights too heavy for his strength up to that house he hated and took refuge in. Now by its root he dragged the upended cabbage around the door, and watching her face for her response, said, “I brought you something.”

She was standing straight beside her chair. Her head did not move as she glanced at what he offered her; only her eyes flicked down and back up. She said nothing—not “Oh, how nice!” or even “Where did you get it?” Nothing.

Panic began to rise in him, for here in the kitchen he could not pretend that the cabbage was anything but ridiculous, a contribution to the household that would have made his father snort in incredulous contempt. Moreover, and this was worse, it had been stolen. His mother knew at once that it was a theft he brought home. He remembered her angry whisper coming with the rush of warm air through the register: “I wonder how we’ll feel if he turns out bad. What if we make him into a thief, or worse?”

“Ma …” he said.

It was more than he could do to support her still look. Still clutching the cabbage root, he let his eyes slide away until they settled on the
castra.
There lay reassurance. The daubed wall was tight and neat, the tents stood in mathematically precise
rows. Like a dog on a track his mind ducked after his eyes, and he found himself repeating other words like
castra
that had a different meaning in singular and plural: words like
gratia-gratiae
, and
auxilium-auxilia
, and
impedimentum-impedimenta
, and
copia-copiae
; and even going over some of the words that customarily took
in
with the accusative: names of towns, small islands,
domus, rus.
Such words, though really exceptions, were supported by all the precision and dependability of law.

Out of the register came the squawk of the needle being taken carelessly off the record, a big burst of laughter, a woman’s squeal, shouts whose words he refused to hear, and then the music again, good old “Nobody Lied,” his own contribution to the parlor fun.

He brought his eyes unwillingly back to his mother, opening his mouth to say, “I …”

She was looking at him with odd intentness. Her hands hung awkwardly before her as if she had forgotten them there. Her mouth twitched—smile, or grimace such as she made when the parlor grew rowdy?

Perhaps the true climax of that rueful day, perhaps the culmination of that depressed period of their life as a family, was that tableau in which Bruce after a fashion presented and his mother in some sort accepted the grotesque vegetable he had stolen to compensate her for the uncertainties and deprivations of her life. He brought her this gift, this proof of his love and loyalty, and they stared at each other with emotions mixed and uneasy. What should they have said there in that kitchen? What another family might greet with great belly laughs they could not handle so easily. They had no margin for laughter.

The slap-tongue sax was pounding through the pipes. He wanted to say to her, “I’m awful, I have filthy thoughts, I steal, I cheat on merit badges sometimes, I’d even cheat in school if I couldn’t get on the dean’s list any other way. I’m a crybaby and people laugh at me and I’m sorry, I …”

He said none of it. She said, with her eyes glittering full, “Ah, poor Bruce!”

She put out her arms and he dropped the cabbage and crept into them. Hugging each other in the sanctuary kitchen, they were both about half comforted.

Mason came up from a long way down to find that his assiduous waitress was standing by his table, a healthy-looking blonde girl who smiled so brilliantly that he felt like shading his eyes. “Anything else? Dessert? Coffee?”

“Just coffee, please. And the check, if you will.”

She went away. Opposite his window the golden angel tiptoed his floodlighted spire. In the pale sky beyond, the colors of sunset were almost gone. Venus hung over the bony silhouette of Antelope Island.

An hour ago he had wondered why coming back here revived only the trivial and sentimental. Now he sat like someone whose car had just crashed, and who was not quite sure he could climb out. That night in November 1922, recovered from and forgotten, needed only to be remembered and it was as virulent as it had ever been. His childhood had been a disease that had produced no antibodies. Forget for a minute to be humorous or ironic about it, and it could flare up like a chronic sinus.

Which was unjust—his father was not always like that. It was just as possible to remember times when he had filled his son with admiration and pride. Was he an incurable grudge-holder?
Was he going to pursue the poor devil with his hatred as if he had never survived adolescence? Was he never going to be reconciled to his mother’s unhappy submissive life? If he had known that this would be the net result of his returning, he would not have returned.

Since 1922 he had been packed and stored with later experiences, emotions, acquaintances, affections, languages, bodies of learning, cautions and wisdoms. He was thirty years older than his mother had been on that evening of the
castra
and the cabbage. Yet that single miserable evening, with its hatred of him, its loyalty to her, and its self-pity for himself all intact, hung in his head as unalterable as a room that disappears when a switch is touched, and appears again the moment the switch is turned back on. He hadn’t turned on the light in that room for years, but there it still was, implacable.

The waitress brought the coffee and poured it from its metal pot with gestures that were graceful and self-conscious. Mason picked up the check from its tray, added a twenty per cent tip, signed it, and turned it over again. At once respectful and pert, the girl stood there. “Enjoy your dinner?”

“Very much.”

“I saw you looking at our sunset.”

Did she think she ought to trade some cheery chat for the good tip? Had she been trained to give diners the friendly-Mormon-girl treatment? Did she think maybe he might turn out to be Stanley Kubrick?

“Spectacular,” he said.

“Salt Lake’s supposed to have the best sunsets in the world.”

The old local brag. “I know,” he said. “I used to live here.”

The girl made a comic face. “Nice try, Alice,” she said. “When?”

“When?”

“When did you live here?”

“I left in 1932.”

“Oh, wow. I bet it’s changed.”

“Some ways. Not the sunsets.”

He watched her through the steam of the raised coffee cup, thinking that some things changed hardly at all. This was a type
he had known by the dozen, just such a girl as he might have met at the kitchen entrance after her evening’s work, and taken out to the Green Dragon or the Old Mill to dance till the band folded. Just the sort of peppy date who would have necked happily in the car, parked in front of her house, and on the porch before going in, but would have briskly made him keep his hands to himself. Just the sort of date from whose enthusiastic but restricted kisses he had so often gone home (would anyone now believe it?) satisfied and pleased with himself.