“You could have been killed!”
“Damn right I could have.”
“Are you all right? You didn’t get hurt at all?”
“Nary a scratch.”
“The car?”
“Few dints and scratches. Never broke a thing.”
She knows and Bruce knows what he means. A broken bottle in a carload of liquor can be disastrous—you daren’t even stop for gas, for fear someone will smell you.
“How?” Bruce’s mother says. “Where?”
He is still speaking to Nola, not to her. “Down by Santaquin. Thunder shower wet the road where they’d been grading, left it slick as soap. I came to this curve in the dark and started to skid and straightened her right out.” His muscled, oily arm shoots out, his hand makes the rolling motion. “She hit something solid and went over. Touched on her side and then on top and then came clean on over. Never even killed the engine. Bumped my head on the roof and that’s all—the wheel held me in. Before I know where I am, there I’m sitting in the ditch with the old car going chug-a-chug-a-chug under me. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t anything wrong—that’s where I got all dirty, checking it out. Finally I just drove down the ditch till I found a place where I could get back on the road, and came on in.”
“Oh, you’re lucky!”
“Skillful,” he says, and winks at Nola, who is watching him with her expectant dark eyes and her slow smile. He sees the plate of cookies and the glasses of milk on the bed table and helps himself. “These for me? Thankee, I think I will.”
“You must be starved,” Bruce’s mother says. “Let me get you something solider than …”
“Stay in bed!” Bruce says harshly. “I’ll get him something, if he wants something.”
Chewing a cookie, his lip stained with a crescent of milk, his father looks at him. Marksman’s eyes, he has, red-streaked and steady. It is as if he were looking down a rifle barrel. A grunt comes out of him. “I can get myself something.”
“We should be getting back, anyway,” Bruce says to Nola. Obediently she picks up her coolie coat from the bed.
His father looks at the Big Ben, which says ten minutes to twelve. “You starting out on your party now?”
“We’ve been at the party. We just came up to see Mom. The party lasts till one. I have to be there to help close it up. I’m on the committee.”
“Well,” says his father with an incredulous laugh. “If you’re on the committee.” To Nola, in that jocular, nudging tone—he reminds Bruce of Jack Bailey—he says, “Are you on the committee, too?”
“Nope. I’m just the committee’s date. I go where it goes.” Obviously she does not feel the bullying pressure that Bruce feels. She is pert, she looks on this as kidding.
Bruce holds the coolie coat for her to slip into it, and as she half turns and raises her arms, he sees his father’s eyes on her smooth shoulders, her shaven armpits. Comprehending and feeling everything, a reservoir of understanding and concern, his mother says from the bed, “Don’t stay out too late, now. I’m sure Nola needs her sleep as much as you do.”
“Sleeping is what I do all day Sunday,” Nola says with a smile.
“Well, it’s not what your committee does,” Bruce’s father says. His eyes meet his son’s, almost as if good-natured. “I’ve got work for you tomorrow, Mr. Chairman, and I don’t want to have to get you up with a stump puller.”
“Don’t worry,” Bruce says, like a sullen, dominated fifteen-year-old. The old man has made his point; he has diminished him.
His mother says, “You need some sleep yourself, Papa. You’ve just driven a thousand miles nonstop, and rolled over in a ditch.”
“I’m setting the alarm for seven.” A brag, Bruce perceives. I, the untiring, the indefatigable. I plow deep while sluggards sleep. He drags Nola from her goodbyes, they get away.
“Your mother’s a darling,” she says as they settle into the Ford.
“Yes.”
“She thinks you’re the cat’s pajamas.”
“Yes, poor deluded thing.” He is still smarting from his father’s infallible gift for making him look small. “At least she’s right about one thing. She thinks you’re gorgeous.”
“Ha!” she says, neither affirming nor denying. After a second, when they have started up the street, she says, “You and your father don’t get along.”
“Was it that obvious?”
“You won’t let him joke you.”
“His jokes aren’t jokes.”
“I thought he was cute,” she says—to provoke him? “So big and sort of tough. I like tough people.”
“Well,” he says, furious, “there’s always somebody willing to kiss the cow.”
“Oh come on! You’re tough yourself. Feel how hard your arm is.”
She snuggles against him, holding his skinny wing. Thank God it is hard, so hard you can barely tell the muscles from the bones they are strung on.
“Every time I spit I split a plank,” he says. “Them I don’t kill I cripple.”
“No, I mean it. You don’t quit. I’d hate to be on the other side from you if you really wanted something.”
Mollified, he lets his feathers be smoothed. “Good. Because you know what I want?”
“Let me guess.”
“Don’t waste time guessing. Do you want to go back to the prom?”
“Do you?”
“No. The other guys can close it up. I want to go up on Wasatch Boulevard and look at the lights and taste your raspberry lipstick.”
“Oh, you do.” But she does not object. He swings up through Federal Heights toward Fort Douglas. As if she understands the sulky thoughts he still has not chased from his head, she leans against him and begins to sing in her husky contralto. In a moment he joins her. The city falls away behind as they climb toward the foot of the mountains. He opens the car window to let the night in.
III
1
Brushing his teeth, he remembered that he had done nothing about flowers for his aunt’s funeral. As was his disciplined habit, he got his notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote himself a reminder for the morning. Then he started to get into bed and found in the middle of it the box that he had carried from the funeral parlor that afternoon.
He had felt no curiosity then, but now as he took the box by its cord and started to set it on the floor, he hesitated, hefting it. What would the poor old thing have put away for him? An afghan, to keep his knees warm? Some crocheted antimacassars? A quilt? It felt a little heavier than any of those things that she would probably have called “keepsakes.” And it touched him, now that he gave his attention to the box, that she would have put away anything at all. Gratitude he had not expected, never having given any affection. Perhaps she had felt it necessary to pass something on, for they were the last two survivors of a tribe, the last orphaned speakers of their family tongue. He had felt that bond himself, even while resenting her as a burden. Better that meager relationship than no relationships at all.
A label had been stuck to the outside of the cardboard. It curled and came off when he touched it. The ink of the writing on it was faded and brown, evidently years old. So this was no late senile whim. She must have boxed it up, whatever it was, years ago. “Property of Mr. Bruce Mason,” she had written on the label.
Sighing, he crawled into bed, hoisted the box onto his stomach, and untied the cord.
Something soft and bulky, wrapped in brown paper, filled most of the box. On top of it, sunk into depressions that had been shaping for many years, were three books, limp-imitation-leather Modern Library, ninety-five cents each, the backbone of any undergraduate library in the twenties.
He stared at them, still uncomprehending. He opened one of the books and saw his own name scrawled slanting up the inside cover. Impatiently he yanked the brown parcel from the box and uncovered a white sweater with four red stripes around one sleeve. He made an astonished sound like laughter, and tipped the box. Out tumbled two bundles of letter
s and a manila envelope. He leaned back against the headboard so abruptly that he banged his head. He said aloud, “Well, I’ll be damned!”
Nola had brought that box to Joe’s house, where Bruce was staying, on the morning of his father’s funeral. This was a year after they had broken up—not the June of their abrupt parting but the next one, the very day when he should have been graduating from law school in Minneapolis. She chose to bring back this symbolic package of repudiation not when his hurt and anger were hot, not when his mind was on her, but when he had got over her, after a fashion, and when he was gritting through the aftermath of his father’s last violence. He was anguished to be done with it all, and gone. He never spoke to her: he saw her coming up the steps and would not go to the door, but let Joe talk to her. And he never looked in the box that Joe brought inside. He scorned to take back anything he had once given her, he wanted to give her no assurance that they were quits. So Joe, after taking him from the funeral hill to the Union Pacific station, must have dropped the box with Aunt Margaret when he delivered her to the Home. She had sat on it for forty-five years like a hen on a china egg.
Tired as he was, he could not resist looking. What, of the things he had given her during the time when she was an altar he laid offerings on, would she have felt she should return to him? It was bizarre that she should have been the one to preserve the only relics of that time of his life. Everything else was gone. If he was a thing that lasted, the only documentation was what his estranged girl packed up to throw back at him. This was the total album and attic where that part of him could be found.
He picked up the little books again. He supposed that he had loaned them to Nola and urged her to read them. Perhaps she had tried to, for she wanted to please him. Now, finally, they returned to him like library books carried away accidentally or on purpose, and discovered years later and mailed anonymously back where they belonged. Salome, by Oscar Wilde; Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, edited by William Butler Yeats; Studies in Pessimism, by Arthur Schopenhauer.
He opened the Yeats.
The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue/sidheog, a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are denee shee/daoine sidhe (fairy people).
Who are they? “Fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost,” say the peasantry.
Nothing there for a Jack Mormon girl from Emery County. What could he have been thinking of? He laid Yeats down and picked up Schopenhauer.
Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance.… I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.… The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.
Nothing there, either. What could she have felt when, out of his arrogant inexperience, out of his sheer undergraduate enthusiasm for hard doctrine, or the self-pity that had made him believe he was suffering’s biographer, he plucked things like this from the great grab bag of Western culture and demanded that she read and ponder them? He might as well have suggested that she learn Turkish. Her mind operated on a direct hookup with the senses, not by abstract ideas; and to suffering, any kind of suffering, she had a cat-like aversion.
He put down the Schopenhauer and picked up Wilde, skimmed over a few pages of overheated dialogue, and stopped near the end, detained in spite of himself by the voice of Salome.
Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood?… Nay, but perchance it was the taste of love. They say that love hath a bitter taste.… But what matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth.
“Look at the moon!” Holly once read to him from that same play. “Regardez la lune! How strange the moon seems. She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.”
Their limited and provincial city had never given them the opportunity to hear Strauss’s opera, but even if it had, they would have heard Herod’s daughter in their own way. Though it would have delighted them, probably, to see a raging soprano stagger and crawl around the stage, smeared with blood, clutching the bloody head of her obsession by its bloody hair, she would have delighted them primarily because she was a vessel of jeweled language. In their literary way, they responded to words as incantation.
Ah, thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well, I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it: did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now.
They would have been charmed, titillated by the sound. But Nola, though she couldn’t read, could have played it.
Across Mason’s mind, floating in the empty room like the moon rising from a tomb, appeared the body of the dead woman he had seen that afternoon, and he felt like a ghoul or a necrophile, infatuated with corpses.
Alack. Nearly fifty years agone.
He dropped the three books over the edge of the bed and picked up the sweater, a white cardigan with a red U above the pocket and four red stripes around the upper left sleeve. The last letter he earned, part of the paraphernalia of innocent self-advertisement then universal among athletes on a campus. Mason had the impression that the letter-sweater thing was no longer fashionable, and would embarrass a contemporary jock. Then, it had been as natural as wearing shoes. The sweater was a sort of escutcheon. You could tell by the kind—cardigan, pullover—what sport was involved.
Seniors, he remembered, had had a choice between the usual red with white letter and stripes, and the dressier white with red. He had chosen white for that last one because Nola did not wear red, and this one was for her. He didn’t suppose he had even tried it on. Forty-five years ago just about now, only a few weeks after the prom from which he had just returned, he had picked it up at the coach’s office and carried it straight to her—his signature, label, mark of ownership; his substitute for a West Point class ring, juvenile forerunner of presidential citations and ribbons of the Légion d’honneur: decorations will be worn. Would you like to wear my sharpshooter’s medals? Here, let me offer you my Purple Heart.
We’re like sun myths, he said to the listening presence of Joe Mulder, who had come quietly into his head and stood there attending like someone watching the evening’s television news. We’re like sun myths in the late afternoon of a cloudy day, looking back at the morning, when we were ascendant, when our strength waxed instead of waning. Being in love with that girl was only part of it, for me. Just picking up this sweater puts me back to that time when everything was cresting.
It wasn’t a time of choices, though it might seem so. The sun leaned on us, and warmed us on that side. We turned toward what shone on us, and if we leaned too far, we toppled, and toppling, toppled others. Call it the domino theory.
2
He is walking along Thirteenth East Street on an absolutely perfect morning, a creation morning. Perhaps there was a shower during the night, but it feels as if prehistoric Lake Bonneville has risen silently in the dark, overflowing its old beach terraces one by one, flooding the Stansbury, then the Provo, on which this street is laid, then finally the Bonneville; filling the valley to overflowing, stretching a hundred miles westward into the desert, lapping against the Wasatch, pushing long fjords into the canyons, washing away all the winter smoke, softening the alluvial gravels, rinsing and freshening every leaf of every shrub and tree, greening every blade of grass; and
then before daylight has withdrawn again into its salty remnant, leaving behind this universal sparkle and brightness.
It is such a morning as all the old remember and only the young belong in. School is over, college is done with, summer and life are ready to begin. He drags the dewy coolness to the bottom of his lungs. His feet are light on the sidewalk, lighter yet on the parking-strip grass where he prefers to walk. In his left hand is an old canvas equipment bag, in his right a tennis racket, imperceptibly cracked in the throat from his bad habit of hitting his overhead with a lot of spin, like a second service. With this cracked but otherwise very satisfactory racket, which he hopes to sell that morning to Marv Eldridge, who is just taking up tennis and is not discerning, he takes the heads off dandelions, forehand and backhand. His footwork is nimble, his backswing fluent, his eye is on the ball, he follows through with a snap. He wears clean white cords, white buck shoes, and his letter sweater with three stripes, and every detail of himself gratifies him. He admires the springy condition of his legs and the strength of his right forearm, considerably bigger than the left. The characteristic tennis player’s callus on the inside of his right thumb is like a badge.
The east side where he walks is shaded by tall houses, but between them and at intersections the sun slants through and stretches across the street to lean on eastward-facing porches where bottles of milk and rolled Tribunes wait to be retrieved. The cones of pink blossom on the horse chestnut trees light up like candles when the sun strikes them. The leaves around them are heavy and rich and dark.
At the drugstore on the Second South corner he turns right, up the slope toward where the Park Building’s white marble front overlooks the Circle and the tree-dotted lawn. This is a different sort of morning from the hundreds when he has walked up this gentle hill toward an early class. Everything is over except Commencement, which, scornful of ceremonies, he will evade. Nothing remains but last errands. He sees only a few straggling students. The scene has been clarified and hardened into finality like a negative in the fixing bath, yet it is morning, with morning’s excitement in it, and he walks toward unlimited possibility. Ahead, the sun dazzles over the roof of the Park Building and overexposes his sight. The mountains beyond are backlighted and featureless.
Recapitulation Page 16
