Recapitulation Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    What is an event? What constitutes an experience? Are we what we do, or do we do what we are? The circumstances that had poisoned Mason’s boyhood, the events that in a malign conjunction had gathered to drive him from this town, seemed to have lasted less well than a kiss behind the piano on a Christmas morning, or the feeling of fellowship, almost beatitude, that came from the shadowy presence of friends not even firmly identified on a dark lawn, where the air breathed romantic yearning and trembled with the sound of cottonwood leaves, and had only just ceased vibrating with June-moon harmonies rehearsed for a forgotten Spring Sing.
    Dangerous to squeeze the tube of nostalgia. Never get the toothpaste back in. He could end up embarrassing himself. Because the fact was, the darker things he had to remember about this town were at least as numerous as the sentimental and satisfying things, and merely by remarking that he didn’t seem to remember them, he brought them back. If he would let them, they could swarm at his mind like autumn flies at an attic window.
    His dinner came, with profuse apologies from the young waitress, and he took his hands off the table to let her fuss at setting him up nicely. He ate with his eyes turned out the window and his mind turned backward.
    All his earliest years in Salt Lake had been an effort, much of the time as unconscious as growth itself and yet always there as if willed, to outgrow what he was and become what he was not. A stray, he yearned to belong. An outsider and an isolate, heaspired to friends and family and the community solidarity he saw all around him in that Mormon city. A runt, he dreamed of athletic triumphs. Insignificant, he coveted the kind of notice he saw given to football heroes, sheiks, slickers, and campus politicians with glib tongues—all of whom, he felt in his heart, which was arrogant even when most envious, were inferior to him in brains and potential.
    Convinced that everything private to him and his family was the reverse of respectable, he agonized considerably about goodness and guilt and God. Once he found a place in the Boy Scouts he went up through the ranks like a rocket from Tenderfoot to Eagle, cheating a couple of times to get merit badges he wasn’t qualified for, and suffering bleak contritions when he thought over his sins in bed. All sorts of sins, comic now but not then. He was the original of the kid who slept with boxing gloves on.
    Most means of gaining attention were unavailable to him, but none was beneath him; and though all through high school he had no real friend, he did not go unnoticed. At thirteen, when he started the tenth grade, he was barely five feet tall and weighed barely ninety pounds. But he learned very soon to speak in the voice of Polyphemus or the Bull of Bashan. Kidded or persecuted by bigger boys, he offered to tear them to bits and scatter their bloody parts for the sea gulls. Very early he understood the exact shade of hyperbole that would startle but could not be taken seriously. Beneath notice, he compelled it.
    Because he was too small to take the required ROTC—the only kid in school not in uniform—he became a violent anti-militarist, full of contempt for the regimentation, the itchy woolen breeches, the rolled puttees, and the choking blouses of the chickenshit soldiers. Then in his senior year, when he suddenly started growing, he took up the military life so enthusiastically that at the year-end parade and inspection he was leading a platoon, wearing a Sam Browne belt, shoulder pips, leather puttees, and a sword. He even spent part of the following summer at a Citizens’ Military Training Camp, of which the less said, the better.
    In gym classes he was a joke, added to teams as an afterthought or a handicap. Embedded in the sedimentary strata ofhis mature descendant were cherty nodules of humiliation, as when a hulk of a retarded athlete surveyed him with astonishment in the shower one day,