Recapitulation (20 page)

The retort jumps to Bruce’s tongue: Why weren’t
you
here looking after her? But he keeps it in; he falls back on the watchful, obscurely sullen silence that has been his response for years. He thinks his father hears it, unsaid as it is.

His father’s eyes travel down Bruce’s black-and-white length. He is the kind of person for whom a tuxedo is automatically sissy or comic. Outlaw or not, within the limits of his experience and comprehension he is incredibly conservative. He accepts only what he knows. When he sees Bruce duded up in riding breeches and English boots he can’t keep from chirping with his lips and slapping his leg and saying, “Giddap,” laughing and looking for corroboration at whoever else is there. Now he just looks.

“Your girl’s in there, you say?”

“Yes.”

He works his cheeks as if they were cold. Briefly he leans to bare his teeth at himself in the mirror beside the kitchen door. He examines his greasy hands, and for a moment Bruce hopes he is going to go and wash, so that he and Nola can get away before he comes out of the bathroom. Instead, his father shrugs and pushes out into the dining room. Bruce comes along behind, apprehensive and ready to be ashamed.

His father’s entrance is disconcertingly like Bruce’s own of a few minutes before. He stands hidden outside the door, and intones, sepulchral and singsong,

On the last words, wearing a rubber-lipped grin, he sticks his head around the jamb.

He has not yet made any sign that he knows Nola is there. Bruce watches him go in and bend over and kiss the woman in the bed—and that is surely showing off, that most certainly reflects his awareness of an audience. Except when he is showing off or clowning, he makes no such standard gestures of affection.

Bruce’s mother’s voice, fluty and high, is as false as his kiss. “I didn’t expect you so soon. How was the trip?” Then, before he can answer, “This is Nola Gordon, Bo. These nice children left their dance to come out and see me.”

Now finally he turns toward Nola. Bruce can’t see her, but he can see the jolt she gives him. He has probably visualized Bruce’s date as some flat-chested flapper with her hemline above her knees and her waistline around her hip bones, her hair cut like a boy’s, her jaws going on a wad of gum—the whole John Held picture. He has not expected someone like this.

At once something humorous and alert comes into his dark face, his lips remain quirked into a half smile after he has said hello. Nola’s low voice murmurs something. Bruce knows exactly how she is looking at his father, her eyes curious and interested, seeming to waver but actually steady, only the light in them changing. He can’t stay out of it. He pushes in, crowding the little room with one person too many.

At once he feels compared and judged. Beside his father’s size and weight and shirt-sleeve dishevelment he feels like the overdressed figure on a wedding cake. Though he is as tall as his father, he weighs fifty pounds less. He is not bearded, dirty, heavy-shouldered, smelling of physical exertion. The old helpless feeling of inferiority oppresses him. He is angry that he has brought Nola here and tried to mix the unmixable oil and water of his life.

In his mother’s watching eyes there is an expression he cannot read. Understanding? Sympathy? Pity? Warning? In a too casual voice she says, “You’re all greasy. Did you have a flat tire or something?”

It is a cue his father has been waiting for. A short laugh erupts from his throat, he spreads his hands and looks at them, he regards Nola with an indescribable waiting slyness in his face.
Bruce reads him—oh, he reads him! He has a tale to unfold. He is going to shine.

“Nothing so serious as a flat tire,” he says. “I tipped over.”

Bruce’s mother sits straight up. “Tipped
over!
”

“Ass over teacup,” he says cheerfully—and is there a deliberateness in the profanity, a calculated nudge? Bruce wishes Nola had kept her coolie coat on. Her shoulders are too naked for this room and this company. His father rolls his hands as if winding yarn. “Down the bank, clear over, and up on her wheels in the ditch.”

“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.

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 letters 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.