Recapitulation

by Wallace Stegner

  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 The parking area was gone, superseded by a slope of lawn, in the middle of which was a sign.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.

  8

  Unlikely as it seemed, they were a close family. The internal strains that tore them apart also forced them together. Because they lived outside law and community, they had no one but themselves to share themselves with. They belonged to no neighborhood, church, profession, occupation, or club. In Saskatchewan they had been part of a small town that they knew and were known in. Here, what happened outside their family did not touch them, and what happened inside it had to be contained there. Secrecy and caution affected even their name. At home his father was Harry Mason, but in Los Angeles, to which he now made frequent trips by car, he was Harry Barnes. The neighbors, such of them as they let themselves become acquainted with, were given vaguely to understand that Harry Mason was in mining. That would explain his frequent absences and his obvious lack of a steady job.

  Sometimes Bruce wondered, long after they were dead and he had left Salt Lake behind, if the unhappiness that he and his mother felt had worked both ways, if his father was as little contented with them as they were with him. Even in illicit enterprises there would probably be professional pride and parental vanity. A pickpocket might be pleased if his children, in their play, paid him the compliment of imitation. Even Harry Mason, proud of his ability to make long drives, stay awake thirty-six hours at a stretch, keep out of trouble, smell danger in advance and avoid it, might have been glad of company on his trips if either his wife or his sons had ever indicated a desire to go with him. Perhaps he resented their resentment of him. Perhaps he thought of himself as a good provider inadequately appreciated.

  Perhaps. Bruce never knew exactly how Chet or his mother felt, because the circumstances of their life suppressed communication. But he supposed the old man might have been a good deal happier with an easygoing, uninhibited, morally slovenly wife, and sons who got in fist fights and saw the world not as a club they wanted to join but as an enemy camp suitable for raiding. On the other hand, maybe not. In his way, Harry Mason was as conventional as they were. He simply didn’t see himself as they saw him.

  They were no longer a speakeasy. Now his father made those forced trips to Los Angeles, and between trips delivered heavy suitcases to certain habitual houses, pool halls, shine parlors, and hotels. The family knew of but did not know the customers. They no longer came to the house, so that they lost even that connection with the city they lived in. Sometimes Bruce felt that his mother would almost have welcomed a return to the time when the parlor had been full, even though the people in it were people she deplored and avoided.

  As a family, they shared nothing with anybody in Salt Lake except its streets and streetcars, its hot thunder-broken summers, its smoky winters, sometimes its movie houses, sometimes its ball park. On Sundays, instead of visiting anyone or having friends in, they often took a drive, all by themselves, up a canyon or out to Holladay, ending up with a quart of solitary ice cream.

  Outside the house, each of them except Bruce’s mother had another life—he and Chet at school, his father downtown in those places where men of dubious occupation gathered to conduct businesses that operated without a business address. They were bootleggers, pimps, leasers of illegal slot machines, merchants of curios and pornographic postcards, promoters of doodlebugs guaranteed to locate gold and silver underground. Now and then his wife could make friends with the woman next door, if Harry Mason thought her safe, and if she had no children to be around the house and see too much. But her acquaintances were few and soon lost, with a move. Much of the time she was alone.

  For a long time she had been sleeping and eating badly. In June, right after Chet and Bruce graduated together from high school, she broke down; and Bruce’s father, with an understanding that surprised him, sent her up to Brighton, in the mountains, for a rest. Bruce camped down on Big Cottonwood Creek and came up every day to take her for walks—up to a lake called Solitude, over the divide to Alta, up around the slope of Moun
t Majestic, along the old tramway that led to Park City, or simply along the dirt roads through the firs and aspen.

  That idyll lasted less than ten days, and ended when federal prohibition agents raided the house in town, where Chet and Harry Mason were batching, and hauled them both off to jail.

  Harry Mason fixed it. He was usually able to fix things, for a lot of people liked him, including the chief of police and several deputy sheriffs, none of whom had any particular affection for federal prohis. Some of those doors to which he carried suitcases after dark were perhaps the doors of judges, district attorneys, people who could quietly squelch a prosecution. The grand jury was supposed to be preparing an indictment. It never did.

  But if Harry Mason could patch things up with the law, he wasn’t able to, this time, with Chet. Chet had been pitching in the semipro Copper League. He was scheduled (Harry Mason’s doing) for a late, informal tryout with the Salt Lake Bees of the Pacific Coast League. With luck, which he never had, he could have ended up pitching in the big leagues, as his principal rival in high school did.

  But the prohis had hauled him off to jail. Even though he had been booked as Chester Barnes, and immediately released, his address had been in the paper, recognizable to those who most mattered to him. He was humiliated before his friends and his girl. Before forty-eight hours were up he had lied about his age, which was only seventeen, married his girl Laura, and left town, headed anywhere outward. In a week he was brought back, doubly and triply humiliated, and his marriage annulled. Within another week he was gone again, it could almost be said for good.

  He was the real casualty of that summer. And yet it seemed to his survivor and brother, brooding backward to those times, that he was never so helplessly a member of that little clenched family as when he left it in anger and pride.

  Instant adulthood. He probably felt it was forced on him. Bruce did, too. In the last year he had suddenly begun to grow, and he came into the summer six feet tall and weighing about a hundred and twenty-five pounds—a greyhound, a willow switch. He wouldn’t be sixteen until December. So what did he do? He, too, lied about his age, saying he was eighteen, which must have been a pretty transparent lie, and before the end of June was in a Citizens’ Military Training Camp at Fort Douglas, on the bench above town. It was the only way he could think of to get away from the house. And he had recently had a taste of military glory, marching down Main Street in the Memorial Day parade in his leather puttees and his Sam Browne belt.

  No Sam Browne belts in camp. He was a buck private in the Signal Corps. If he had deliberately tried to keep himself in the role of runt and weakling he could not have found a better way.

  He was all sapwood, without strength, and years younger than anyone else in that citizen army. The first day on the pistol range, he found that he simply couldn’t lift the boxes of ammunition that the others picked up and staggered off with. Couldn’t budge them, they might as well have been bolted to the ground. Then at the weekly parade and inspection he got dizzy in the heat and threw up, splashing those next to him in line. The sergeant took one disgusted look and told him to fall out and go somewhere and stay the hell out of the way. He spent the rest of the morning under a tree at the edge of the parade ground watching his fellows sweat out there in their woolen uniforms. He knew exactly what they thought of him, and he agreed.

  The whole miserable camp went that way. In the second week they had a sham battle. He was stringing field telephone lines, and he got fouled up and didn’t get them to the command post in time, so that the apricot orchard held by the Blues was overrun and captured. Everybody knew who was responsible. And a while after that, on the pistol range again, Bruce had just reloaded and was standing at raise pistol after shooting 68 out of a possible 70 at twenty-five yards, and the colonel was standing by him giving him his astonished commendation, when Bruce’s index finger, which should have been up along the barrel of the .45 automatic, accidentally wandered inside the trigger guard. The gun went off right beside his ear and almost in the colonel’s face. When Bruce could see again, and the colonel had recovered from his leap backward, Bruce saw that he had shot a scallop out of the brim of the colonel’s campaign hat. The colonel gave him such a scared, furious bawling out—exactly like Bruce’s father, he sounded—that Bruce lay awake most of the night trying to choose between desertion and suicide.

  All he got out of camp was some sharpshooter medals, rifle and pistol. But he couldn’t believe that those were any sign he was growing up. Saskatchewan and his father had given him those, not the citizens’ army. He had been a good shot by the time he was ten.

  Camp didn’t even get him entirely away from home, for the National Guard officers and mess sergeants and cooks had no intention of getting stuck on that baking shelf on weekends. The men had passes forced on them, and there was no place to go except home.

  The very sight of Bruce’s beanpole figure in its badly fitting khaki wool made his father tighten his lips and breathe hard through his nose. And when one Saturday he suggested that they all go to the ball game, and told Bruce to change into some civilized clothes, and Bruce told him that they were under orders to wear the uniform even on pass, he clutched his head in both hands. Who the hell was going to know whether a fifteen-year-old snotnose wore his silly monkey suit or not? Bruce replied that though his father might shoot him he could not make him disobey orders. His father asked whose orders counted around here, the stupid army’s or his. Bruce fell mulishly silent. His father said passionately that by God he was not going to be a laughingstock, sitting in the grandstand next to any comic-opera soldier, and he took Bruce’s mother off to the game.

  She didn’t try to smooth it over. She knew Bruce would rather stay home and read than go to the ball game with his father anyway. Laughingstock! said Bruce darkly to himself, prowling around the house. Who’d be a laughingstock sitting next to who? Finally he sat down in the cool dusky parlor and read about the discovery of New South Wales in Captain James Cook’s Account of a Voyage Round the World in 1769–1771.

  It wasn’t the likeliest book to find in a rented house. Probably it had been brought back by a Mormon missionary—all the world travelers in Salt Lake City were missionaries—who had had his horizons enlarged by carrying the church’s message into the islands of the sea. Somebody more broadly educable than Jack Bailey. It fascinated Bruce because it spoke of escape, adventure, far places, the unknown, the search for Terra Australis. Its most prosaic lines reverberated with possibility: In the afternoon we came upon the dung of an animal which fed upon grass.…

  By the time camp was over, Bruce was out of the Signal Corps and carrying the front end of the bass drum in the band. Then he was released into the hot, endless, companionless vacuum of summer. He could find no jobs except the occasional mowing of a lawn. He knew no one in their neighborhood, and there was no one in any other neighborhood that he felt close enough to to look up.

  The days were glaring hot, the house cool under big old trees. He lived in books and in his mind, which was numbed by the consciousness-changing drugs of adolescent physiology. He was so stunned with hormones that he hardly answered to his name. He read the days through, in all positions: sitting, lying, on his back, on his belly, upside down, hanging over the arm of the couch with his book on the floor, lying on his back with his feet on the sofa and the book held up in the air. Every sort of book passed through his hands without affecting his trance. In a sort of catalepsy he read through their unknown landlord’s glass-fronted library—Conrad, James Branch Cabell, Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, Shaw, Knut Hamsun, Aldous Huxley. He turned hundreds of pages in the Harvard Classics with no more comprehension than if he had been sniffing glue.

  To the remarks, questions, and orders that disturbed the air around him he responded, if at all, with murmurs that would postpone or evade action, until after three or four such inattentive non-responses his father would fly off the handle and drive him out of his trance and force him, confused and sullen, to do what
he had been asked.

  Sometimes he spent an hour at a time simply sitting, lost in some daydream, and now and then when he came out of it he had the unpleasant shock of finding his father watching him. His face at such times was judging and exasperated and full of scorn. But Bruce couldn’t have changed his behavior if he had wanted to. He simply took to avoiding his father whenever he could.

  Then one afternoon deep in endless summer, he stood up from the chair where he had been flopped, glassy-eyed and lost to everything, and announced aloud some indecision arrived at a thousand light-years away. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, and went out into the kitchen to get a glass of milk from the icebox.

  With the glass in his hand he started for the back yard, but when he felt the glare and heat of the afternoon come inward at him, he let the screen door bang shut without going through it. As he sat down at the kitchen table he heard his father’s angry, intense voice. “… crazy! Out of his head!”

  “He’s at an awful hard age,” his mother said. “He’s beginning to grow up.”

  “Then why doesn’t he grow up? Why does he sit by the hour with a stupid look on his face? Tell him something, he doesn’t hear you. Tell him three times, he still doesn’t hear you. Tell him at the top of your voice, he still doesn’t hear you. You have to pull the chair out from under him before he notices. Stands up talking to himself. ‘Well, I don’t know.’ What was that about?”