Recapitulation Page 6

  Panic began to rise in him, for here in the kitchen he could not pretend that the cabbage was anything but ridiculous, a contribution to the household that would have made his father snort in incredulous contempt. Moreover, and this was worse, it had been stolen. His mother knew at once that it was a theft he brought home. He remembered her angry whisper coming with the rush of warm air through the register: “I wonder how we’ll feel if he turns out bad. What if we make him into a thief, or worse?”

  “Ma …” he said.

  It was more than he could do to support her still look. Still clutching the cabbage root, he let his eyes slide away until they settled on the castra. There lay reassurance. The daubed wall was tight and neat, the tents stood in mathematically precise rows. Like a dog on a track his mind ducked after his eyes, and he found himself repeating other words like castra that had a different meaning in singular and plural: words like gratia-gratiae, and auxilium-auxilia, and impedimentum-impedimenta, and copia-copiae; and even going over some of the words that customarily took in with the accusative: names of towns, small islands, domus, rus. Such words, though really exceptions, were supported by all the precision and dependability of law.

  Out of the register came the squawk of the needle being taken carelessly off the record, a big burst of laughter, a woman’s squeal, shouts whose words he refused to hear, and then the music again, good old “Nobody Lied,” his own contribution to the parlor fun.

  He brought his eyes unwillingly back to his mother, opening his mouth to say, “I …”

  She was looking at him with odd intentness. Her hands hung awkwardly before her as if she had forgotten them there. Her mouth twitched—smile, or grimace such as she made when the parlor grew rowdy?

  Perhaps the true climax of that rueful day, perhaps the culmination of that depressed period of their life as a family, was that tableau in which Bruce after a fashion presented and his mother in some sort accepted the grotesque vegetable he had stolen to compensate her for the uncertainties and deprivations of her life. He brought her this gift, this proof of his love and loyalty, and they stared at each other with emotions mixed and uneasy. What should they have said there in that kitchen? What another family might greet with great belly laughs they could not handle so easily. They had no margin for laughter.

  The slap-tongue sax was pounding through the pipes. He wanted to say to her, “I’m awful, I have filthy thoughts, I steal, I cheat on merit badges sometimes, I’d even cheat in school if I couldn’t get on the dean’s list any other way. I’m a crybaby and people laugh at me and I’m sorry, I …”

  He said none of it. She said, with her eyes glittering full, “Ah, poor Bruce!”

  She put out her arms and he dropped the cabbage and crept into them. Hugging each other in the sanctuary kitchen, they were both about half comforted.

  5

  Mason came up from a long way down to find that his assiduous waitress was standing by his table, a healthy-looking blonde girl who smiled so brilliantly that he felt like shading his eyes. “Anything else? Dessert? Coffee?”

  “Just coffee, please. And the check, if you will.”

  She went away. Opposite his window the golden angel tiptoed his floodlighted spire. In the pale sky beyond, the colors of sunset were almost gone. Venus hung over the bony silhouette of Antelope Island.

  An hour ago he had wondered why coming back here revived only the trivial and sentimental. Now he sat like someone whose car had just crashed, and who was not quite sure he could climb out. That night in November 1922, recovered from and forgotten, needed only to be remembered and it was as virulent as it had ever been. His childhood had been a disease that had produced no antibodies. Forget for a minute to be humorous or ironic about it, and it could flare up like a chronic sinus.

  Which was unjust—his father was not always like that. It was just as possible to remember times when he had filled his son with admiration and pride. Was he an incurable grudge-holder? Was he going to pursue the poor devil with his hatred as if he had never survived adolescence? Was he never going to be reconciled to his mother’s unhappy submissive life? If he had known that this would be the net result of his returning, he would not have returned.

  Since 1922 he had been packed and stored with later experiences, emotions, acquaintances, affections, languages, bodies of learning, cautions and wisdoms. He was thirty years older than his mother had been on that evening of the castra and the cabbage. Yet that single miserable evening, with its hatred of him, its loyalty to her, and its self-pity for himself all intact, hung in his head as unalterable as a room that disappears when a switch is touched, and appears again the moment the switch is turned back on. He hadn’t turned on the light in that room for years, but there it still was, implacable.

  The waitress brought the coffee and poured it from its metal pot with gestures that were graceful and self-conscious. Mason picked up the check from its tray, added a twenty per cent tip, signed it, and turned it over again. At once respectful and pert, the girl stood there. “Enjoy your dinner?”

  “Very much.”

  “I saw you looking at our sunset.”

  Did she think she ought to trade some cheery chat for the good tip? Had she been trained to give diners the friendly-Mormon-girl treatment? Did she think maybe he might turn out to be Stanley Kubrick?

  “Spectacular,” he said.

  “Salt Lake’s supposed to have the best sunsets in the world.”

  The old local brag. “I know,” he said. “I used to live here.”

  The girl made a comic face. “Nice try, Alice,” she said. “When?”

  “When?”

  “When did you live here?”

  “I left in 1932.”

  “Oh, wow. I bet it’s changed.”

  “Some ways. Not the sunsets.”

  He watched her through the steam of the raised coffee cup, thinking that some things changed hardly at all. This was a type he had known by the dozen, just such a girl as he might have met at the kitchen entrance after her evening’s work, and taken out to the Green Dragon or the Old Mill to dance till the band folded. Just the sort of peppy date who would have necked happily in the car, parked in front of her house, and on the porch before going in, but would have briskly made him keep his hands to himself. Just the sort of date from whose enthusiastic but restricted kisses he had so often gone home (would anyone now believe it?) satisfied and pleased with himself.

  “But you weren’t born in Salt Lake,” he suggested.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Evidence.”

  This was her kind of game. With her hip against the table edge she shot a look in search of the hostess, did not see her, cocked her eyebrows, and smiled down on Mason her brilliant smile. “Where does the evidence say I’m from?”

  “Somewhere north. Malad? Brigham City? Cache Valley?”

  Comic dismay, real puzzlement. “What are you, a medium or something? How’d you know?”

  “From the way you say “ ‘carn bread.’ ”

  Now an uncertain glance through her lashes. “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you like being from—where is it? Cache Valley?”

  “I’m sarry if I talk like a hick.”

  “Oh now, come on,” Mason said, contrite. “Who said you talk like a hick? You talk like somebody from up around the Idaho border. You made me feel I’d come home.”

  “Yes,” the girl said, rather sullenly, he thought. She was still smiling, but the smile had flattened against her marvelous gleamy toothpaste-ad teeth. As if indifferently, she looked across the Sky Room’s wavering candles. “Jist give me a year,” she said. “If I could git out of here and down to the Coast I’d sure wear the Cache Valley out of me. You wouldn’t know then where I’m from.”

  “Maybe you’re better off here,” Mason said. “Don’t knock Cache Valley, or Salt Lake either. You might not like California half as well.”

  “Mmm.”

  “California food do
esn’t taste the way this dinner did. They do something to it. It isn’t served as pleasantly. The sunsets are watery.”

  She blinked and smiled and found something to deal with somewhere else in her section. How standard, touching, in the end uninteresting. Dissatisfied provincials, exportable dreams, upward-and-outward mobility. Mason knew all about it.

  Venus, in the few minutes his eye had been off it, had slid down behind Antelope Island. He drained his coffee cup, ready to leave. From the second table down, against the windows, a party of four came past, holding him for a minute in his chair. Their table stood disheveled under its soiled dishes and crumpled napkins. A busboy, his face fiery with acne, wheeled up a cart and began to clear away.

  Click. Involuntary narrowing of the eyes.

  He moves dazed through magic. If you should draw him, you would have to put x’s where his eyes should be, like a funny-paper character who has been hit on the head. He is fourteen, and enchanted. His motions are somnambulistic and his mind numb, but his senses are wide open. The breeze that sweeps through the wall-less pavilion brings in midway sounds: nasal chanting of barkers, thunder of the roller coaster with its obbligato of squeals, shuffling of many feet, cries and mutterings, the rumble and twitter of voices. And midway odors: taffy, pop-corn, cotton candy, rancid grease from hot-dog and hamburger stands, the encompassing smell of the salt flats. The shore breeze blows them into the pavilion and through the tables and across the dance floor and through the unused tables on the other side, picking up in passing all the dining-room odors of roast beef, barbecue sauce, spare ribs, coffee, vinegar, floor wax, a sudden sourceless onion smell of female perspiration, an equally sudden and sourceless whiff of perfume. Tangled and braided, smells and sounds blow through the room and through Bruce and are swept out over the lake.

  The lake side, where he is standing, is dark and quiet. Only a mangy velvet rope holds the tables in; beyond are timbers and the sense of water. When the music stops, he can hear the slosh of brine against the pilings down under, and from far off, as if they came floating on the water, the clear voices of bathers over on the north side, where Chet works. The darkness isolates and protects him. From here in the shadow, when there are no tables to be cleared, he can look and listen.

  His eyes are dazzled by the tent of hazy luminance through which he sees. The revived saxophones sob through his soul. The people at the tables are more dressed up and romantic than ordinary people. Some are eating, some have already begun to dance. He watches a pair of girls go by, dancing with one another for lack of male partners. Does one of them look at him with an interest not quite covered by her gum-chewing indifference? He wishes he had a white coat that fitted him. The one he has to wear has sleeves six inches too long, so that he has to turn back the cuffs, and the shoulders are broad enough for someone twice his size.

  The members of the band on their platform all wear ice-cream pants and blue jackets and straw skimmers. They are playing “Ain’t We Got Fun,” and the people at the tables begin to join in, singing and clapping like people at a picnic.

  There’s nothing surer,

  The rich get rich and the poor get poorer (laid off, children),

  In the meantime

  In between times

  Ain’t we got fun.

  Near Bruce a boy and girl are doing the Charleston. He is a slicker in a four-button pinch-waisted suit with bell-bottomed pants. The girl’s red dress is so short that he can see her stockings rolled below the knee. Her mouth is red and laughing, her shingled head is like a boy’s. Her feet move in swift twisting motions, following the twistings of her partner’s bell bottoms. They hang on to each other’s arms and put their noses together, watching their feet and laughing.

  Bruce can do the Charleston. A high school acquaintance whose mother is a dance instructor taught him one afternoon at Warm Springs. But he is not sure he would do it here. Whole dance halls have been shaken down when a lot of people start doing it. It works like an earthquake. It gets everything going to a rhythm, and pretty soon the hall vibrates apart. He watches these two, and is both envious and contemptuous of the bell bottoms and the sideburns, and thinks with disapproval that the girl shouldn’t show her knees in public this way, and wonders what it would be like to put his arm around her red silk waist, and with his face only inches from her laughing face, Charleston her around the floor.

  He moves to ease the swelling in his pants. What’s the lightest thing in the world, Mr. Gallagher? Your pud, Mr. Sheen, it rises with thought. All by himself, he snickers.

  Then he spots a family—father, mother, somewhat fat daughter—leaving a table. With one hand in his pocket, hiding his condition behind the cart, he starts toward them. Ed Mueller, the manager, is watching him, he sees, and he hurries, wanting to impress. Almost at once he feels it is safe to take his hand out of his pocket and be businesslike with both hands on the cart handle. In his mind, as he starts stacking the dishes, is a tableau in which Mueller, at payoff time, publicly praises him. Watch this Mason kid. He may be little but by God he’s on the job. He could teach all of you something.

  His glance brushes the glance of the fattish girl. She turns away so indifferently that he knows she is only lighting a Murad. Back of that nonchalance there is a gleam of curiosity, interest, invitation.

  In the grease on one of the plates he finds a nickel embedded, and hastily digs it out and darts after the departing family. “Mister? Sir? You left this.”

  Young Lincoln, he waits for their praise. He hopes Mueller is still watching. But the man toward whom he holds the nickel does not accept it. His face is full of heavy astonishment. The fat girl is staring, the mother smooths her dress over her high corseted rump. Slowly comprehension dawns. Bruce’s face grows slowly hot. “Oh,” he says vaguely, and turns away, too confused for thanks or anything else. Three tables away, Ed Mueller, who has been watching, is breaking up in laughter.

  Sullenly Bruce finishes loading the cart and starts off toward the kitchen around the dark edge of the dance floor. He has an impulse to throw the nickel as far as he can throw it out into the water, but instead he wipes it off on a napkin and pushes it down into his watch pocket, where his ten-dollar paycheck from the news company where he works during the week is folded tightly around the silver dollar his mother makes him carry in case he should run into what he scornfully calls a Dire Emergency.

  His mother doesn’t like his working here. She says it is too much for a boy of fourteen, and not strong at that, to work ten hours a day, six days a week, at the news company, and then ride out fifteen miles on the train and work all Saturday and Sunday night. By the time he gets back to town and catches the Owl streetcar home it is way past midnight. It isn’t like Chet, who sleeps at Saltair, under the Pavilion. And Chet is older. Bruce will ruin his health. He will stunt his growth, which, though she refrains from saying so, seems to be stunted already.

  He did not win her over by argument. He simply threw such a tantrum, followed by sulking, that she gave in. This is his second weekend. Though he has been working since eight this morning, and has had for supper only the extra sandwich his mother put in his lunch sack, he is not tired. He is only furious with that stupid man and that fat girl and that Ed Mueller with his horse laugh.

  He will show Ed Mueller. Suppose the pavilion caught fire, and while everyone else ran around in panic, trampling each other, suppose here came the one they call Shrimp (unknown to them, he is an Eagle Scout), burrowing along the floor where the air is better, dragging people to safety, grabbing confused Ed Mueller and getting him out, plunging back in after others. He comes upon a body with the flames all but swallowing it, and as the fire sweeps up and away and the smoke clears for a moment he recognizes the flapper in the red dress and the shingle bob. Her slicker escort has run like a coward, leaving her to her fate. Fallen, she is wonderfully helpless; her white legs are exposed above the knees. He takes up her soft body (who would have thought he was so strong?) and carries her to safety. Under cover
of the smoke he cops a feel.

  At the swinging doors to the kitchen he backs around, pulls the cart through, and unloads it onto the table behind which four pearl divers in their undershirts, their tattoos shining with sweat, stand armpit-deep in greasy suds. They are not men to be fooled with—impatient, savage, dangerous. Though the most dangerous of all, according to Chet, are fry cooks. Fry cooks will take after you with a cleaver if you so much as look at them cross-eyed.

  Keeping his eyes open and his mouth shut, he finishes unloading and backs out through the swinging doors. The music comes loud in his face. His sullenness is already forgotten. Out past dancers and diners, above the bright midway, the scrolls and scrawls of the roller coaster lift out of the light into obscurity. A red car is crawling up the first long pitch. He hears the screams and then the thunder as it tips and falls.

  What a keen place! As the moon moves through the sky he moves through that dreamland. As swimmers float unsinkable on the brine of Great Salt Lake he floats on blended saxophones. The girl in red and her slicker friend are up again, still doing the Charleston. From time to time one of the band members stands up and sings through a megaphone.

  He assures: “It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more.” He exhorts: “Horsie, keep your tail up, keep the sun out of my eyes.” He warns: “You got to see your mama every night or you won’t see your mama at all.”

  Eventually it is eleven, the last table has been cleared, they hang around the kitchen waiting to be paid. When Mueller comes in, finally, Bruce accepts his dollar and a half and his train ticket back to town. The long day has come down on him like an avalanche of feathers. Rubber-legged, blind with yawning, he gropes out of the kitchen and staggers across the midway toward the gates beyond which the train waits on the causeway. Behind him the band is playing “Moonlight and Roses,” and the dance floor lights go dim. The nearly empty midway stares, too brightly lighted. Its concessions are closed, all except the check stand, where the attendant is killing time by throwing an ice pick underhanded at the wall.