II
1
Back of the low outline of the house rose the gully trees. Light was shining through the side windows onto the shrubs along the drive. Almost furtively he went up the walk and stopped below the steps that mounted to the familiar door.
Ghosts watched from the shadows—Joe, Joe’s father and mother and big frolicsome sisters and their young-businessman, golf-playing husbands. And the waif named Bruce Mason who seemed to live there. If someone inside should turn on the light, the whole Mulder family would be caught, not, like Jack Bailey, in flagrante delicto, but in their goodness and friendliness and warmth, their St. Bernard size and companionable numbers, their profound unanxious solidarity and confidence. He had the feeling that their footprints must be stamped into the cement floor of the porch like the prints of old-time movie stars in the entrance of Grauman’s Chinese.
Here nothing had changed except himself. In the little light that seeped around the front drapes, it seemed that even the porch furniture duplicated the swing and chairs that they used to loll in on Sunday mornings, drinking grape juice and ginger ale, playing bridge or solo or Mah-Jongg, listening to Johnny Marvin or the Two Black Crows on Joe’s portable Victrola, reading about themselves in the sports pages in the sweet morning shade.
Or attending tolerantly while Joe’s father, with the nose of a ship’s figurehead and the bearing of a Roman senator, lectured them on the need of eating a head of lettuce each day, or the benefits of debating societies in forming the minds of boys their age, or the superiority of good music, Grieg or MacDowell, to the popular songs they wasted their time on. Sometimes he sat down at the piano—the whole family played the piano, often simultaneously—and sang in a resonant bass,
The hours I’ve spent with thee, dear heart,
Are like a string of pearls to me.
I count them over, every one apart,
My rosary, my rosary!
How was it, Mason thought, standing in darkness and making no move toward the steps, that someone so supremely middle-middle, a small businessman whose imagination reached no further than family, community, and Kiwanis, and whose opinions were often as dubious as those of Harry Mason, though invariably opposite—how was it that this decent, limited, rather pompous man should have been a figure of such authority and respect? Even at sixteen Bruce Mason had known more about the seamier possibilities of human nature than J. J. Mulder would ever know, and he had thought he knew more than he did. Yet he listened to Joe’s father with deference, and would no more have ridiculed or mocked or contradicted him than he would have spit on his floor.
“Bruce’s God,” Harry Mason had sneered once when Bruce was quoting J. J. Mulder on some subject or other. It was a revelation. Bruce understood him clear down to the ground. Jealousy. His father had never met J.J., but he felt him as a rival. That was startling, and would take some thinking about. Harry Mason resented the fact that his guarded, laughterless, irritable house should be abandoned in favor of one rotten with respectability.
How could he have expected anything else? His sons were bound to escape him as soon as they could. Chet had gone outward, flying off the edge. Bruce had gone inward, toward the respectable sobriety of the Mulders. Everything they represented—the family, community responsibility, good citizenship, ethics—drew him as milking time draws a barn cat. From the time when Joe first brought him home after a tennis match, all through the years when he worked in J.J.’s nursery as handyman, delivery boy, and salesman, J.J. had to be respected as what Bruce thought a father ought to be, and his home as what a real home was. He suspected that he had given more thanks and outward affection to Joe’s mother than to his own, too. She never had opinions. She was subdued to J.J.’s omniscience, and retained only sympathy and kindness and a determination to fatten up that thin Mason boy Joe was so fond of, and whose own family was somehow no good in ways that she carefully did not inquire about.
Jack Mormons, the Mulders did not tithe or go to meeting, but they kept the strenuous Mormon sense of stewardship. Having talents, one improved them. Having money or position, one tried to use it for the public good. Once Bruce had caught on to those attitudes, he had only one way to go.
Now after long absence he stood before their house reminding himself that they really had treated him as a son, and that he owed them nearly everything—the job that J.J. gave him and innocently exploited him in, the independence the job had promoted, the affection they let him freely share. He supposed he was their faith in self-improvement made manifest, the object of a Mormon proselytizing impulse not lost but only redirected. He corroborated their belief that anyone could take hold of himself and make himself into something better, happier, richer. It was an American, especially a Western, as well as a Mormon notion. Mason had subscribed to it then, and sneakingly still did. But he had given them little in exchange for what they gave him. In respect to his personal and family life, they must have found him as taciturn as a paving block. It was their own openness and generosity they liked him for.
He studied the dim light behind the drapes, either a low-wattage night light or the diluted illumination from some room deeper in the house. For a second or two he thought he heard the murmur of television or radio voices from the back somewhere, then he didn’t. Gone to bed? Not likely.
Everything in his memory rejected the notion of Joe Mulder pottering off to bed at ten-thirty. He remembered too many Sundays when, making the most of their one day off, they had got up before six to go out and play eighteen holes at Forest Dale or Nibley Park, and lunched on a Brigham Street Pharmacy malted milk so thick it had to be eaten with a spoon—tractor oil, SAE 50—and gone on to the tennis club and played five or six sets, singles and doubles, and then separated briefly for dinner and a change of clothes, to meet again and go out on a double date that kept them up till two or three. It offended his image of Joe Mulder to think of him going to bed. That engine.
It dawned on him that he was smelling the dark fume of lilacs. How exactly right! At this house the lilacs would have been continuously in bloom since the day he had first climbed its steps.
Following the fragrance, he stepped around the corner of the porch, and in the light from the side windows he saw the tapered cylinders of blossom lifting from among the crowded green hearts of the leaves. They were almost gone by. The top blossoms were browning, and only the shaded and protected ones were still fragrant. He leaned around and put his nose deep into the leaves and dragged his lungs full of the fragrance that preserved everything he once was.
All at once he was uncomplicatedly eager to see Joe, and impatient at his own evasive delays. But as he turned to start up the steps and put his thumb to the bell button he was stopped by the question of what he would say if the door opened. The patterns of communication between him and Joe would be fossilized. They would have no common language except the jargon of an antique adolescence. He couldn’t imagine how he would greet his oldest friend.
Remember me? Coy.
Joe, you old scissorbill! Embarrassing, grotesque.
Or pull the old trick, crouch down low, turn up the coat collar and the face, become an upward-peering dwarf so that the opener of the door, expecting someone at eye level, would have to jerk his glance downward to the gibbering thing at his feet? Halloweenish, a shame to his gray hairs.
Maybe just silence? Stand there waiting for recognition?
He couldn’t do it. Instead of mounting the steps he swerved off across silent lawn to the sidewalk, and went walking up the street as if he were not a visitor from a strange planet, or an Enoch Arden peeking in the windows of the past, but only a citizen out for a pre-bedtime stroll.
His mind was busy with what might have been going on back at the house if he had had the nerve to push the doorbell. He finessed the greetings and exclamations and handshakes, and because he couldn’t quite visualize how Joe would have aged—his red hair would have gone rusty white, probably, and his Airedale eyebrows would have grown bushier, but those
details didn’t make a picture—he transferred them all out onto the back lawn, where they sat in darkness in the warm wind, perhaps with sweating beer cans in their hands, with their minds turned backward.
“You know, we grew up deprived,” Mason might say. “Prohibition was a terrible thing. We’ve sat out on this lawn a lot of nights, but never with the comfort of a beer. If we wanted a beer we had to go down to Otto’s.”
Joe makes a sound like gagging. “Ether beer!”
“Black home brew with a stick of ether in it, that’s right. It’s a wonder we lived.”
Joe says, rumbling, “Remember the time Bailey drank milk and gasoline because somebody told him it was intoxicating?”
“My goodness,” says the faceless wife from her darkness. “Didn’t it kill him?”
“You couldn’t kill Bailey with a drink. Anyway, I doubt he swallowed any. He was gagging before he got the glass up to his nose.” Casually he adds, “What ever became of Bailey? He still around?”
“He’s around, raising as much hell as ever.”
But that is not what he wants to hear. He backs up; he rephrases the question. This time they do it right.
“Dead,” they say. “Died four or five years ago.”
That’s better. End of story, end of grudge. All that Nature Boy vitality, all that uninhibited machismo, gone quiet. Lounge lizard, wild partier, reckless driver, cunt-hunter, farewell.
“What is it about the Baileys?” he hears himself say. “How do you account for their missionary spirit? Is there joy in hell when some innocent is subverted? Bailey was the worst companion you and I could have found, do you know that, Mulder? Alcohol, cigarettes, women, speeding, drunken driving, the works. He really was a missionary, too. In Tongatabu he just had the wrong gospel forced on him. The church wasn’t his dish. But when it came to leading people into temptation he was a regular Dr. Livingstone. Nothing tickled him more than to baptize somebody.”
In his dark chair Joe Mulder, hardly yet encountered, barely visualized, continues to rumble with laughter. “Remember that radiator cap? Bailey never got over it. You filled him with admiration.”
It stands in his head like a scene from The Rake’s Progress: the three of them in the hot alley parking lot, about to climb into Bailey’s red bug. Bailey stops with one leg up, points, swears. “Some son of a bitch! They look, and his radiator cap is missing. Promptly, unhesitatingly, Bruce Mason, sixteen and in the first flush of being in, skips to a Model T touring car parked in the corner, unscrews its radiator cap, and skips back. From up on the blanket-covered board laid across the gas tank for a seat, Bailey cheers. Then someone says, from the doorway of a store that backs onto the alley, “What the hell goes on?” Angry young man in a rubberized apron, scowling in disbelief out into the glare. Bruce’s perception is instant and crystalline: the young man would be coming out, but there are three of them, and Joe is as big as a house. Support makes him impudent. He says to the young man, “Somebody stole our radiator cap, and I was stealing yours to replace it.” The owner’s eyes bug in outrage, but he stays in the doorway. “Well, put it back, for Christ sake!” “Right you are,” Bruce says, and puts it back. “O.K.?” The young man watches with his head sunk down. Joe climbs into the bug. Bruce goes to its front end, nudges the crank in until it catches, hooks his finger into the choke wire, and leans his shoulder against the radiator’s beehive cells. Bailey retards the spark and pulls the gas lever halfway down. Bruce leans, lifts, jerks. One pull, and she starts. The young man in the doorway looks over his shoulder—someone is calling him from inside. Bruce waves and hops up beside Joe. Reluctantly, looking backward, the young man disappears. In a skip and a jump Bruce is back to his car. With the radiator cap in his hand he meets the bug as it turns for the alley entrance. Bailey slows, Bruce leaps up, they are gone. At the first corner Bailey stops and Bruce jumps out and screws the plug onto the radiator. Bailey pounds the wheel, delighted. “Nerve of a road agent,” he says. “Mason, by God, that beats me!”
“Bailey was catching, like smallpox,” Mason says into the rattle of cottonwood leaves. “I don’t take much pleasure in his memory. One thing I do remember with pleasure, though—the night you crammed him into the garbage can down at the club.”
He hears his own steps in the quiet street, he is aware of the cars that pass, brightening trees and house fronts and throwing his shadow ahead of him down the sidewalk. The canyon breeze flows steadily against him, a strong breeze for all its mildness. It is dry, but fragrant with what it has blown past since emerging from the canyons: soaked lawns, sprinklers forgotten in flower beds and shrubbery, drives and gutters overflowing. Like a salty cracker eaten with ice cream, that dry wind bearing moist odors blends into a contradictory and tantalizing taste, and he is savoring it even while he juggles and arranges that scene years back, on the same sort of summer night as this, but earlier, barely dusk:
They have been playing late, and are just coming out of the heavy Virginia creeper shadows of the club. And here comes Murphy’s half-witted girl across the parking area. She is really helpless. Any male who speaks to her undoes her; she can’t do anything but roll her eyes and moo. Somebody, Murphy or somebody else, has already got her good and pregnant. She must be five or six months along. Almost every night she comes to the club like this, and Murphy, that little five-by-five who is always singing “O Sole Mio” or “Là ci darem’ la mano” as he rolls the courts in the mornings, is given every evening renewed cause to sing. He will be very proud of that bastard when it is born: “That’s-a my baby!”
But now here comes this unwatched imbecile across the parking area, mooning along in no hurry through the dusk, and Bailey suddenly gets the idea that he’d like to take her on. Never had a feeb, he says. And look, she’s already pregnant, no danger or anything. He begins to kid her. It starts as kidding. Then Bruce and Joe find out he means it. He wants them to go back and keep Murphy occupied for ten or fifteen minutes while he takes this poor moron under the hedge.
They laugh and refuse. He insists. They continue to refuse. He gets impatient. They try to drag him away, laughing. He will not budge, getting surly. That is when Joe suddenly folds him up and crams him into the garbage can. He comes out fighting, ready to kill Joe. Joe holds him off with one long arm until the girl gets tired of waiting and moons on into the club to see Murphy.
“Bailey was the kind that should suffer a conversion on his deathbed,” Bruce says to Joe’s shadow on the lawn. “He would have made a proper hero for Graham Greene. You and I are too square to get to heaven, but the Baileys are another matter. Only the real sinners give God any reason to exert Himself. No fun shooting tame hares.”
“Speak for yourself,” Joe says.
He has come to a place where Thirteenth East crosses the gully. The land falls away on the lower side into an unbuilt darkness that rattles with moving cottonwood leaves. Simultaneously aware of where he is, and how familiar it is, and hanging back to continue that imaginary conversation on Joe’s back lawn, he feels how the whole disorderly unchronological past hovers just beyond the curtain of the present, attaching itself to any scent, sound, touch, or random word that will let it get back in. As a stronger gust rattles through the tops of the cottonwoods below him, he stops dead still to listen. Memory is instantly tangible, a thrill of adrenalin in the blood, a prickle of gooseflesh on the arms.
In the moving shade he and his mother wait for his father. (Where? Somewhere in the Sun River valley near Great Falls? Somewhere on the Frenchman or the Milk?) The horses, tied to the wheels, rustle for a last oat in the wagon box. On their backs the sweat marks have dried white under the harness. Dust is white in the cracks of the wagon, on the felloes and spokes of the wheels, in the furrowed bark of the trees. The hubs, where axle grease has been extruded, wear knobs of dust like luxuriant mold. The ground is pancaked with the dung of cattle that have dozed in this shade, and over ground, dust, dung, the litter of fallen twigs, is drifted a snow of cottonwood fluff from burst
seedballs. When a sudden wind swarms through the grove, every leaf of every tree spins and rattles, accentuating the stillness that is not stillness at all, but a medley of dry sounds: crackle of grasshoppers, sawing of crickets, distant mourning of doves, and through it, over it, around it, encompassing it, the tap and clatter of cottonwood leaves. He doesn’t know what he and his mother are doing there, he only knows that they wait, patient or imprisoned or entranced, immobilized in afternoon. When he looks up, the sun glints through at him off the varnished faces of thousands of heart-shaped reflectors, and beyond the dancing leaves the sky is a high pure blue crossed by traveling fair-weather clouds that darken and dissolve
become a velvet night sky with a late moon loose in it. The sound of cottonwoods has never ceased. He is aware that behind him, where their bedroll is laid out, the grove is deep black below and afire with cool shimmering light up where the wind stirs the high leaves. But he is not looking at the grove. He looks the other way, across the irrigation ditch, toward the peach orchard and the cliffs. Light like frost touches the high rim, and breaks up the face of the cliff into highlighted edges and promontories separated by depths of soft matte shadow. It falls in ragged patches between the orchard trees, and glitters and passed and is renewed on the water of the ditch. On the other side, Nola stands up, rising out of the dark pool of her clothes, facing him, dusted and hazed with moonlight, glimmering but plainly seen. The night is soft against his skin, but he is shivering, his jaw locked as if by paralyzing cold. She takes a step and dips a foot in the water. A low laugh wells out of her. “Oh, it’s warm!” her husky voice whispers. “Come on.” His shivering is so violent that at first he cannot move. He hears it communicate itself to the gelatinous air, and shake through the air into the tops of the cottonwoods and vibrate there, the very voice of his awe and worship and desire
Recapitulation Page 12
