The Big Rock Candy Mountain (77 page)

He had picked the highest room he could find, because he hated the flat country. The sky came down too close all around, like a smothering tent, and an eye that wanted to look out was constantly interrupted by buildings, trees, the swell of low hills. Even outside the city, where he had gone hopefully on walks, he had found no place high enough to give him a view, no place flat enough to let him see more than a quarter of a mile. The upper-floor room helped some. It gave him a chance at night to pretend that the lights he looked down on were much farther away than they really were, and to cultivate his nostalgia for the high benches around Salt Lake with the forty-mile valley wide open below him, the state road a string of distended yellow lights on down toward the Jordan narrows, the slag dumps at Magna and West Jordan belching gobbets of fire on the black slope of the Oquirrhs.

He was homesick and almost terrifyingly alone. He ought to go out to a movie, or get busy on torts. There were plenty of things to do if he could bring his mind to them, but instead he went and sat on the window sill, opened the sash to let in a blast of cold January air, and sat looking out.

Bruce Mason, he said. Bruce Mason, first year law. There was something almost cosmically ironical about his choice of profession. He remembered what Bill Levine, a friend of his father‘s, had said when he heard it. That big gross animal with the shrunken legs, sitting in his wheel chair all day with a sanctimonious look on his face, a look that said, “See, I'm a cripple, I have to sell taffy and nuts on the street for a living. A nickel for a bag of nuts will help keep life in a body that the world has miserably misused!” And under cover of the taffy and nuts he would arrange you a woman, sell you a stolen car, get you a bottle or a case, give you a card to the hop joints in Plum Alley, play procurer and pimp with his patient, resigned smile that covered a lewdness as deep and stinking as the pit.

“There's nothing like a lawyer in the family,” he had said. “Eh Harry?”

Bruce shut the window and stood up. And what, he said, would you do if you became a public prosecutor and found yourself prosecuting your old man? Would you send him to McNeil Island for, two years for conspiracy to evade the prohibition law? That would make a nice little problem in family loyalty and public duty. Would you sprinkle dust on Polynices' head, or leave him for the wolves?

If I only understood better, he said. If I really knew what I think, what I am, what he is and mother is and Chet is, how everything got off on the wrong foot. If I knew how and why mother has stood it for over twenty-five years, I might know something.

He got out his mother's last letter, delivered that morning, written three days before. It was a good letter, but it told him nothing of what he wanted to know. Everything that was tangled or thwarted or broken in the family relationships was carefully held back.

If a man could understand himself and his own family, Bruce thought, he'd have a good start toward understanding everything he'd ever need to know. He laid his mother's letter down and sprawled his legs under the desk. The book on torts was at his elbow. He tossed it over on the cot and reached for a notebook.

“This is not a journal,” he wrote. “It is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand.”

Understand what? he said. Where do I begin? With myself, my father, his father, his grandfather? When did the germ enter? Where did the evil come in?

“I suppose,” he wrote, “that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. He runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?

“What is my father? What is my mother? What is my brother? What am I? Those sound like fatuous questions, but they occupy our whole lives. Suppose I said my father is a bootlegger who lives in Salt Lake City, is easily irritated, has occasional spells of intense good spirits? Suppose I said he wears a diamond like a walnut in his tie and another as big as a pickled onion on his finger, that he pays a hundred dollars apiece for his suits. Those are observable characteristics. Or suppose I said that all his life he has been haunted by the dream of quick wealth and isn't quite unscrupulous enough to make his dream come true, that he is a gambler who isn't quite gambler enough, who has a streak of penuriousness in him, a kind of dull Dutch caution, so that he gambles with one hand and holds back a stake with the other. He might have made a mint playing the market before the crash; instead he bought gilt-edged stocks outright and made less. Suppose I labelled him: a self-centered and dominating egotist who insists on submission from his family and yet at the same time is completely dependent on his wife, who is in all the enduring ways stronger than he is. Suppose I listed his talents: a violent stubbornness that butts through things and often overcomes them, immense energy (generally in the wrong causes), a native tendency to be generous that is always being overcome by his developing greediness and his parsimonious penny-pinching. Add a vein of something like poetic talent, a feeling for poetry of a certain sort, as witness his incredible performance last summer of quoting, after a lapse of almost thirty years, pages and pages of Burns that he had learned in the Wisconsin woods.

“When I have put that down, I have perhaps sketched a character, I have done the sort of thing a novelist probably does before writing his book. But I have not even scratched the surface of Harry Mason. Everything I have listed is subject to contradiction by other characteristics, open to qualification in degree and kind; everything has a history that goes back and back toward a vanishing point. His history is important. It is important to know that he ran away from home at fourteen, and why; that he worked in the woods and on the railroad; that he was disappointed in his ambition to be a big league ball player. It is valuable to remember that all his ancestors as far back as I know anything about them were pioneers, and that he was born when almost all the opportunities for pioneering were gone. It is necessary to look at his father, about whom I know nothing except that the Andersonville prison spoiled his disposition. Probably it didn't spoil his disposition at all, but only let out something that was already there. It would be as accurate to say that the strain of living outside the law has soured my father's temper. Actually he has always had it. It's like the tar in tar paper. When it's new and fresh the tar is distributed, the paper holds it. Under conditions of sun or rain or exposure the tar begins to lump or ooze out. The process of growing older is perhaps a simple process of breaking down cell walls, releasing things that have for a while been bound up in the firmness of young muscle.

“And how far back beyond one ought to go, and how infinitely much one could fill in to the bare outline of two generations! I can‘t, obviously, make even a beginning. What bred that evil temper and that egotism and that physical energy and that fine set of senses and that manual dexterity and that devotion to pipedreams into Harry Mason, into his violent old father, into the generations hidden down below the eroded surface of the present?

“To know what Harry Mason is, as of January, 1931, I should have to know every thought, accident, rebuff, humiliation, triumph, emotion, that ever happened to him and all his ancestors, and beyond that I should have to weigh him against a set of standards to which I was willing to subscribe. That would be understanding, but that kind of understanding can only happen instantaneously in the mind of God.”

 

So where do I start? he said. He had been writing furiously for three quarters of an hour, but he hadn't even come to a starting point. Nothing in the whole texture of his life or his family's life was arbitrary, yet he could approach it only by being arbitrary. There were too many things he couldn't know.

All right, he said, I'll start with the things I do know.

 

“I suppose I have always hated him, probably not always with justice. Most children whose fathers are not completely housebroken must have that same hatred in greater or less degree. Yet if a father is housebroken he is less than God, and open to contempt. It must be a hard thing to be a father. To get away with it, a man should have both strength and patience, and patience my father never had. I know that I hold things against him that were my fault, times when I whined or disobeyed or didn't listen, but still, to have one's nose rubbed in one's own excrement, or have his collarbone broken by his father's knocking him end over end across the woodbox, are humiliations that a child cannot easily forget or forgive. It helps not at all to know that your father is often sorry and ashamed after a blow-up.

“When the child is a cry-baby, as I was, the situation gets worse, because the cry-baby runs to his mother and there arises a combination of mother and child against father. (I wonder what crybabyishness in a child becomes as the child matures? What is the connection between uncontrolled bawling in a child and uncontrolled rage in a man? It is curious to think that maybe my father as a child was a cry-baby.)

“My hatred of him seems to arise from two things: his violence to me, and his inability or unwillingness to see that he was misusing my mother. It is possible that she has never thought herself misused, though I know she has always hated the liquor business, and has thought that Chet with another kind of start would have done better.

“Add to those reasons my own adolescent snobbishness. I was ashamed of the old man all the time I was in college. I was envious of boys whose fathers were respectable, companionable, understanding, everything that mine was not. I hated the flashiness he put on in his clothes, I hated what I saw as boorishness in his manners. I don't believe we've had a friendly and open conversation since I was twelve, and I know he hasn't kissed me since at least that long ago. I think he has been afraid to.

“It used to drive me crazy, wondering why mother stayed with him. I have asked her a dozen times why she didn't leave him. I'd get a job and support her. She always said that I didn't understand. Understand what? There's only one thing she could have meant, that she loved him. That, and her belief that loyalty to your own actions is the highest virtue, are the only reasons she would have stayed. She made her bed, and she'll lie in it till she dies in it. That kind of loyalty, without love, would be stupider than I think any action of mother's could be, but even without love, it is more admirable than anything the old man can show. I don't think he has ever faced the consequences of an act; he shuts his eyes and gets mad.

“Chet's the same way, only he never did have a bad temper. It was only when the old man pushed him around that he got hard and mulish. Somehow the tar missed him; and though it seems a mad thing to say, I think he is weaker for not having it. When things go wrong for him he broods. He was that way at Christmas, having trouble with Laura, thinking about how he had to come crawling back last year and ask charity from the family. It's a pity that he couldn't have stayed with baseball, but once he got his back up he wouldn't admit his mistake about Laura. If he had, he wouldn't be out of work now, and he wouldn't have had to take that blow in his pride. I could have cried, almost, at Christmas, the way he's got so gentle with me. He used to be always horsing around and sparring at me and kidding me. Now he's Big Brother, obviously proud of me, taking me on as an equal and in some ways, painfully, as a superior. And there was that graduation present he bought me just after he'd come back, when he didn't have a dime and was still looking for work and was still raw from having to ask the old man to help him out. I know he stole the money for that cigarette lighter from the baby's bank, and that Laura found him out and they had a fight.

“That was a nasty time for him, and I don't imagine it's much better now, driving a taxi. I remember how he was when he came back, after the mine closed down and he lost his job. All day he'd sit in the front room learning to play a Hawaiian guitar, twanging away on ‘The Rosary,' a sick tune if there ever was one, sit. ting there all alone, wrapped in some kind of personal isolation, while the baby cried and Laura scolded and mother tried to keep things smooth ... There's a defeat in that picture that I hate, because Chet is a good fellow. He'd give you his shirt in zero weather. I guess he missed the old man's selfishness, too—and in a way that too weakens him. I hate to see him whipped before he's twenty-four, hopelessly practising a home course in taxidermy, and fooling with that damned guitar.

“And the dreams, the hopelessly rosy dreams. I remember just after I'd gone back for the holidays, when we were taking a shower together and harmonizing in the bathroom. He thought we could work up some songs, go in for a vaudeville act, try to get on the Pantages circuit. He actually had got himself believing it was possible. It isn‘t, even though he can sing. I don't know why it's impossible, but I know it, and I knew it then. It all belongs with the taxidermy and the dead magpies in the basement and the glue and paper and feathers, and the interminable damned- guitar twanging ‘The Rosary.'

“That's a defeat that the old man is at least partly responsible for. Mother's is another.

“Yet it's important to remember that he isn't a monster, as I used to think he was. He doesn't tramp on people out of meanness. They get in his road, that's all, or he's tied to them and drags them along with him. He can even be kind, and I guess that now I think of it I can see why mother loved him once and maybe still does. I saw that when she got sick a year ago.