Recapitulation Read Online Free PDF

window table were the geometric paths of the temple grounds and the brown turtleback of the Tabernacle, and right opposite him, pasted against the clouded west, was the temple itself, spiny as a horned toad. Though he found that he couldn’t admire it architecturally, it struck him as comforting and safe—he felt protective about it. It was one of the shapes of permanence he remembered.
    The place was crowded with early diners, and the service, though assiduous, was slow. Mason did not mind. He ate his salad and looked out of the window while the sky began its phases from gray to red, red to purple, purple to saffron. At a certain moment floodlights sprang to life at the bases of the temple’s clustered spires and improved them, deepening the round windows and brightening the Angel Moroni on his steeple point. The light was gentle outside, even gentler inside, accentuated by a blade of candle flame on each table.
    Then he noticed that the flames had begun, all together, towaver, and about the same moment he felt the faint touch on his face and hands. The windows along the east and south had been opened, and were catching the canyon breeze flowing down from the mountains to fill in under the air still rising from the warm lake.
    One touch, and his skin remembered. Magic. He sat drenched in another of those showers of sensation that had been passing over him ever since he arrived.
    He was on the lawn behind Joe Mulder’s house, flat on his back, arms wide in cool grass, his eyes full of stars. If he rolled his head to the right he saw the dark crowns of trees rising out of the gully. If he rolled it to the left he saw, over the roof of the bungalow, the rim of the Wasatch smoking with imminent moonrise. Others were sprawled around him. Who? Joe, for sure; probably Jack Bailey; probably Welby Kreps. The Phi Delt quartet. They had probably been practicing for the Spring Sing, gathered in Joe’s back yard harmonizing Tin Pan Alley moon songs: “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain,” “Moonlight and Roses,” and the one Bailey called the sheepherder’s song, “The Same Old Moon, the Same Old June, But Not the Same Old Ewe.”
    The smells were of mown grass and damp earth and the rich rotting of compost over the gully’s edge. The mood was idle, easy, contented, open to every sort of nocturnal yearning. Their recent harmonies hung in the air that moved cool and secret down the gully and spread along the grass, but no one suggested another song or another run through an old one. They were quiet, flopped loosely, waiting for nothing in particular. His ear, close to the ground, heard dim stirrings as if night crawlers were oozing out of their holes—as if, with a flashlight, you could startle their reddish gleam among the grass blades.
    The edge of the moon dazzled over the rim. Someone sat up, a silhouette edged in silver. The leaves of the maple between house and garage glinted silver and dark, moving as if the light beyond were forcing them aside. In the gully, hidden among the stir of cottonwood leaves, a mockingbird awoke and sang.
    Incredulously Mason backed away from that vision. What a Rube Goldberg wiring job a man was! How enduring were the circuits stamped into a boy when he was dizzy with hormonesand as vulnerable to experience as dry blotting paper to water! Push the right button and you floodlighted him like the temple. Push another and you got a whole
son et lumière.
    And what programmed the memory for such instant recall was not necessarily profound or even important. He supposed people were often programmed by important things; he had been himself—teachers, great books, painful deaths, family conflicts, the midnight miseries that had marked even such a deceptively safe adolescence as his own. But what sprang out of revisited Salt Lake City to confound him with forgotten emotions seemed to be mostly trivia, the sort of thing to which he had paid no attention at the time and had never recalled