If this machine is not doing right by you,
would you please let me know.
Is that level of voice all right in the back row?
Good.
This is a kind of experiment because what I'm reading from
is an incomplete manuscript and an untested one.
It started out simply because not
having any book to write I decided I had to write a book.
[LAUGHTER]
And got fooling around with some ideas
and found that I had already started some of them years ago.
And that here is a story called the Maiden In A Tower,
which I thought might be a beginning.
And the moment I saw it as a beginning of something else,
it occurred to me that what it was a continuation or a return
many years later to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
So I changed the name of the published story in this
and remodeled it to suit my own ends.
Since it was mine I could do what I wanted with it.
And it seems to be a kind of return
of the one survivor of the family and the Big Rock Candy
Mountain.
Returning to Salt Lake City, Utah
after an absence of 45 years or so.
This seems to be a novel about time,
and about the changes of time.
And since I already had one story
that I could use for a beginning I cannibalized two others.
And somewhere in this manuscript two more
stories are going to get worked in also
with their names changed from the story of publication.
And I will simply--
because it's hard to excerpt from this thing
and make anything like a single or unified reading
I'm going to simply start at the beginning
and hope that when time runs out we have arrived
at a place where we can stop.
It's easier actually I think for you to start at the beginning.
It's a little more like picking up a book
and reading the first pages.
And you don't, in this case, have to go on with it.
That's one of the nice things about it.
[LAUGHTER]
This begins I think with a couple of epigraphs.
One from Ivan Turgenev.
The truth is like a lizard.
It leaves its tail in your hand and runs away.
It knows that it will shortly grow another one.
And the second from Gertrude Stein.
Think of anything, of Cowboys, of movies, of detective
stories, of anybody who goes anywhere, or stays at home
and is an American, and you will realize that it is something
strictly American to conceive a space that
is filled with moving.
So this is the beginning.
The short story with its names changed.
Originally called Maiden In A Tower.
The highway entering Salt Lake City from the West
curves around the southern end of Great Salt Lake
past Black Rock and the ratty beaches.
Swings North, away from the smoke of the smelter town's,
veers toward the dry lake bed where a long time
ago the domes of the Saltair Pavilion
used to rise like an Arabic exhalation
and straightens out eastward again.
Ahead across the white flats, the city and its mountains
are a mirage or a mural.
Metropolitan towers, then houses and trees
and channeled streets, and then the mountain wall.
Driving into that, smelling the foul, exciting salt flat odor,
I begin to feel like the newsreel diver whom
the reverse projector sucks feet first out of his splash.
Perhaps fatigued from the hard day and a half
across the desert explains both the mirage-like look
of the city, and my own sense that I'm
being run backward toward the beginning of the reel.
Perhaps a subconscious awareness of my errand
has something to do with it.
It is not the first time I returned to Salt Lake
to bury someone, but both of those previous homecomings,
dim and silvery in my memory, almost subliminal,
were from the East, through the mountains.
This route suggests something else.
This is the road out which at 16 or 17
I remember driving much too fast in a stripped-down Ford bugs
with yelling companions in the rumble seat.
We must have driven back, too, but I
remember only the going out.
To see the city head on like this is strange to me.
Past middle age, tired, but alert with the odd notion
that I am returning both through distance and through time,
I passed the airport and the expanding edge
of town industries and the fairgrounds,
and slow for the first streets of the city.
45 years have made differences, but they do not seem critical.
The city has spread a good deal, and I
am surprised after the desert by the green luxuriance
of the trees.
But the streets are still a half mile wide,
and water still runs in at least some of the gutters.
It really is a good town, clean, with a freshness about it
that revives me.
Passing the Brigham Young monument
I nod gravely to the figure with the outstretched hand.
And like a native returning, I turn
at the light in the middle of the block
and pull into the parking garage that has replaced
the old Deseret Gymnasium.
That change shocks me a little.
The old rat trap gym held a lot of the boy I used to be.
The doorman collars my bag.
A youth climbs in to take the car underground.
Still running pleasantly backward into the reel,
I go into the not much changed lobby and register.
And I'm carried up the not much changed elevators
to the kind of room I remember.
Such a room as we used to take when
we held fraternity and class parties in the hotel
back in prohibition times.
During at least one of those years
I was on a diet for ulcers and couldn't drink.
But I used to retire religiously with the boys,
gargle raw Green River Red Eye and spit it out again
in the wash bowl, only for the pleasure of lawbreaking
and of carrying a distinguished breath back
to the ballroom with the girls.
For a second I started thinking, touched by my giddy
and forgotten youth.
Later, fresh from the shower with a towel around me,
I pick up the telephone book and hunt up the Merrill Funeral
Parlor.
But when I have found it I am troubled,
struck by the address.
363 South Temple on the Avenue side,
somewhere around D Street near the cathedral.
I try to visualize that once familiar street,
but it's all gone except for a general picture of tall stone
and brick houses with high porches,
and lawns overtaken by plantain weeds.
One, the one Holly had lived in, had a three-story stone tower.
That tower, with all the Jazz age
bohemians crawling in and out.
Havelock, Ellis, Freud, Mencken, the memoirs of Fanny Hill,
Love's Coming of Age, The Well of Loneliness,
Harry Kemp, Frank Harris.
My Lord, I'm flooded with delighted recollection.
They're all before me.
Reed-necked aesthetes, provincial cognoscenti,
sad, sexy yokels, lovers burning with a hard gem-like flame.
A homosexual or two trying to look
blasted and corroded by secret sin.
Painters of vile green landscapes,
cubist photographers, poets and iconoclasts,
scorners of the bourgeoisie, makers
of cherished prose, dream tellers, correspondence school
psychoanalysts.
They swarmed through Holly's apartment
and eddied around her queenly shape with noises
like breaking china.
I remember her in her gold gown, a Proserpine or a Circe.
For an instant she is slim and tall in my mind,
and I see her laughing in the midst
of the excitement she created.
And how her hair, smooth black, and her eyes, very dark blue,
and how she wears massive gold hoops in her ears.
I write the number down and tuck it
into the pocket of the seersucker jacket laid out
on the bed.
But when I have dressed and gone down
and I'm walking in the blazing heat of South Temple,
past the Church offices, Beehive House, Lion House, the Eagle
Gate, the Elks Club and Alta Club,
the old and new apartment houses.
I begin to look at numbers with a feeling that approaches
suspense, and I search not so much for the Merrill funeral
parlor as for the house with the round stone tower.
Finally, just past the cathedral,
I see it lifting across the roof of a mansion gone to seed.
And in another 30 paces I can see the sign and the new brass
numbers on the riser of the top porch step.
It is the very house.
Quickly I look around for landmarks
to restore and brace my memory.
The street does not seem much changed.
Some of the old maples and hickories I remember are gone.
And the terrace rolls down with an unfamiliar smooth nap
of grass.
The porch no longer carries its sagging swing.
And the porch and steps have been renewed and painted.
The doors as I remember it, with rays
of colored glass in its fan light,
and the doorknob's massive handful is an almost startling
familiarity.
But inside all has changed.
Partitions have been gutted out.
The stairs now mount or levitate a spiral
of white spokes and mahogany rails
from an expansive, plum-colored carpet.
Instead of the cupping old parquetry
my feet find softness, hushness.
The smells are of paint and flowers.
I am eyeing the stair when a young man comes out
of the office on the left and bends his head
a little leftward and says softly and pleasantly, yes sir,
can I help?
I bring myself back to what I have driven 800 miles to do.
I say, "I'm Bruce Mason.
My aunt, Mrs. Webb, died day before yesterday
at the Julia Hicks home.
They telephoned me she would be here."
"We've been expecting you," the young man
says, and puts out his hand.
"My name is McBride."
A brief handshake, a moment when the young man regards me
with his head tilted.
"Did you fly in?"
"Drove."
"All the way from San Francisco?"
"I slept a few hours in Elko."
"It wasn't so bad, then."
"Oh, no, not bad at all."
In my mind is a faint amusement.
This young man might have been left over
from one of Holly's parties.
He looks better equipped to write fragile verses
than to deal with corpses.
"She's in the parlor just back here," he said.
"Would you like to see her?
She looks very nice."
This is, of course, McBride's function.
He's the one who makes them look nice.
"Maybe later," I say.
"I expect there are some details we ought to settle."
"Of course," McBride says.
"If you just step in here we can look at caskets
when we've done the paperwork.
You have a family cemetery plot, I believe?
Should only take a minute for this."
He holds the door wide, standing gracefully
and deferentially at arm's length, and ushers me through.
A very few minutes suffice to settle the details.
We rise, facing each other across the desk coolly
glimmering in the muted North light.
"Now would you like to see her?"
McBride says.
Clearly he takes pride.
He probably stands back, estimating its effects
like a window dresser.
"All right," I say, though it's not
as if I had any tears to shed.
I never saw her but three or four times in my life
when I was just a boy.
And she's been senile for 10 years.
McBride guides me around the unfamiliar stairs
to where the plum carpet flows smoothly into what
was once perhaps a dining room.
She does look nice, very sweet and peaceful.
Which I can't believe she did when she was alive.
I go forward to the table with a basket of house gladioli
at its foot to remind myself that this
is my father's sister, the only relative on that side
that I ever even saw, makes me feel nothing.
It was only a freak that she came to Salt Lake
at all, evidently with hope of attaching herself to my father
and arriving when he was already dead and buried.
So that she became, for lack of anyone else to look
after her, my unwanted obligation.
Though I have taken care of her for half her life,
I can stir up no feeling for her wax figure.
I suppose if I had been attached to her
I might think her peaceful and even touching,
as McBride wants me to.
All I can think is that she looks well embalmed.
But then, she was probably close to mummified when she died.
Old Aunt Margaret, barely known in my childhood,
and in my maturity only an obligation and an expense,
thrusts her sharp nose, sharp cheekbones,
and withered lips up through the rouge and lipstick.
And is, if she is not a total stranger,
only old Aunt Margaret, mercifully dead at 86.
I can't even see in her face any resemblance to my father,
and I feel none of the conventional disgust
with young McBride, who tampers with the dead.
Considering what he had to work with, he's done pretty well.
Back in the hall again I stand looking up
the spiral stairs, apparently as unsupportive as the beanstalk,
and remember a time when Holly and two roommates--
Was Nola one of them?
No, she came later.
--came down the shabby old steps arguing about the proportions
of the perfect female figure.
And I met them on the second landing.
And like a chorus line they raised their skirts
and thrust out their right legs before me,
clamoring to know which was the most shapely.
An undergraduate Paris and three demanding goddesses.
I picked Holly.
Why not?
McBride is in the office door.
"We've just redone the whole place," he says.
"It was the home of a Park City silver king originally,
but it's all rundown."
I continue to look up the stairs.
McBride's information is no more important
than the decorative changes, but upstairs there
is something that is important.
It pulls at me like an upward draft.
"I used to know this house years and years ago," I say.
"Some people I knew had an apartment on the third floor."
"Really?
The front one or the back?"
"Front.
The one with the round tower window."
"Oh, yes," McBride says, "we haven't done much
to that yet, just painted it."
"I wonder," I say.
And make a little deprecatory gesture,
and feel irritably ashamed, like a middle-aged man recalling
last night's party and his own unseemly capers,
and his pawing of the host's wife.
It's fatuous to want to go up there, yet I do.
"Go on up if you'd like," McBride said.
"The only thing, there's a woman laid out there."
"Well, then that wouldn't matter, if you don't mind."
"She's presentable."
For a moment I hang on the word.
McBride's professional vanity is one of the odder kinds.
And I'm annoyed that a corpse should
intrude upon a sentimental but perfectly legitimate impulse.
And I put my hand on the mahogany rail, maybe I will.
The second floor hall at whose doors
I have knocked and entered is as much
changed as the ground floor.
But up the second flight of stairs
I mount into a growing familiarity,
and I climb against the pressure of a crowd of ghosts.
The carpet ends at the stair head.
I put my feet down softly and hold my breath
with a wild notion that I hear voices
from the door of Holly's old apartment.
Up these stairs 100, 200 times, through how long, a year?
I came with books or bottles or manuscripts in my hands,
and it seems to me now, an incomparable capacity
for enthusiasm in my heart.
From the high burlap-hung windows of the apartment
we let our liquid ridicule fall on the streets
of the bourgeois city.
I half expect as I move into the doorway
to see their faces look up enquiringly from chair
and couch and floor.
But in the room there's only the dead woman,
and she's not looking at me.
She lies on a wheeled table, with beside her one stiff chair
and a taboret bearing a bowl of flowers.
All of it arranged as if for a macabre still life.
Looking toward the windows across the woman's body
I see how the light of afternoon blurs
in her carefully waved hair.
For perhaps a minute I simply stand in the doorway,
stopped partly by the body and partly by the sensation
of an obscure threat.
I'm walking in a strange neighborhood,
and I need my own gang around me.
In Holly's time the tower bay held an old upright piano,
its backside exposed to the room like the hanging
seat of a child's sleepers.
Afternoons, evenings, Sundays, and holiday mornings
there were loud four hand renderings of 12th Street Rag
and St. Louis Blues.
On at least one Christmas morning
we sang carols around it, syncopating them wickedly.
That was the morning when I brought Holly
the facsimile copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
a mutinous book full of mottoes for our personalities
and our times.
But what I remember now, hanging in the doorway,
is how in some lull in the bedlam that always went
on there we found ourselves smiling foolishly at each other
by the piano.
And she put up her hands to my face
and kissed me sweet and soft, a kiss like a happy child.
I realize that I remembered that kiss before,
sleeping or waking.
I feel the stairs in my legs, the years in my mind
as I go in softly past the woman who
lies so quietly on her back.
And when I've almost past her I turn and search her face,
as if I might surprise in it some expression
meaningful to this wry and confusing return.
She's a plain woman, perhaps 50.
McBride has not yet made her look
nice with lipstick and rouge.
She wears a simple black dress, but she
has a Navajo squash blossom necklace around her throat.
It strikes me as a remarkable piece of realism.
Perhaps something she especially liked, and stubbornly went
on wearing even past an age when primitive costume jewelry
became her.
It gives her a touching, naively rakish air.
Yet she sheds a chill around her,
and her silence spreads to fill the room.
Hardly a sound comes through the stone walls.
In the old days, there was always the piano banging,
the phonograph going, 2 or 6 or 16 voices
making cosmic conversation.
And I cannot remember ever seeing the apartment
in daylight.
The windows were always shrouded in their artistically frayed
burlap, and the light was from lamps, most of them
low on the floor and some of them, at least,
with red globes in them.
And always the smell of sandalwood,
like a Chinese whorehouse.
Pitying and entranced, I sit down
on the window seat overlooking the reach of South Temple.
Directly across is a Five Minute Car Wash
with a big apron of concrete and a spic dazzle of white paint
and red tiles.
In the times I remember, that lot held a peewee golf course,
where men in shirtsleeves, women in summer dresses,
young couples loud with laughter putted little white balls
along precise, green alleys of artificial grass,
and over gentle and predictable bridges and causeways
into numbered holes.
"Look at them," Holly said to me once as we sat in the tower bay
looking down at the after-dinner golfers moving
under the floodlights.
Toujours gai, my God.
"Someday I'm going to build a miniature golf
course with fairways six inches wide and rough six inches deep.
I'll fill the water holes with full-sized crocodiles
and sow the sand traps with sidewinders.
How would it be to hide a black widow spider in every hole
so that holding out and picking up your ball
would get you some excitement?"
"What if you sawed the supports of all the little bridges
nearly in two?"
Live dangerously.
It's strange to recall how essential that one seemed.
Kaboom, take chances.
I run my hand along the weathered sill
thinking that this was the pose, sitting right here
and looking out, that Holly assumed when Tom Stead painted
her in her gold velvet gown.
Probably that portrait wasn't anything special.
It couldn't have been.
The chances are that Tom Stead is painting signs
somewhere now, if he hasn't drunk himself to death.
But then, in this room, in the presence of its subject
whose life overflowed upon us all,
that slim golden shape with the velvet highlights
was Lilith, Helen, Guinevere, das Ewig-Weibliche.
And it was hardly a day before other girls less fortunately
endowed or graced had begun dropping comments on how warm
that Holly-Stead romance was getting.
And hinting that there was hidden away somewhere
in the best Goya fashion a companion portrait, a nude.
Well, well, what a bunch of bohemian Puritans.
I don't believe in any nude, or in its importance
if there was one.
Though at the time I suppose it bothered me,
and I was merely offended.
Surprised that she would lower herself.
What I meant was that my vanity was
hurt she might have accorded to Stead privileges
she didn't accord to me.
And I didn't even believe she accorded them to him.
What truly shone out of that golden portrait, as out
of Holly herself, was not so much glamour as innocence.
Under the sheath she was positively virginal.
A girl from Parowan who had made the big step to the city
excitements, and was still a girl from Parowan.
If you cracked the enamel of her sophistication,
you found a delighted little girl playing life.
What's more, I feel on my lips the touch
of that soft, childlike kiss by the piano
on a Christmas morning.
And stand up so abruptly that I startle myself
with the sight of the dead woman whom I have forgotten.
It was innocence.
Holly could put away the predatory paws of college boys,
twist laughing from the casual kiss,
pass among the hot young Freudians
as untouched as a nun, shed like water
the propositions that came at her seven to the week.
There she sits in her gold gown by her window opening
on the foam.
A maiden in a tower.
Across the room I try the door to what
was once her bedroom, wanting to look in on her intimately.
In this room, now completely bare, aseptically painted,
I sat many times when she was ill.
Or when on Sunday mornings she made it
a charming point of her sophistication
to entertain in bed.
While she lay propped with pillows I read to her,
talked to her, kissed her, had my hands fended away.
The empty room is still charged with the vividness with which
she invested everything.
There was one night, very late, 2 or 3 o'clock,
when I sat on one side of the bed,
and a mournful and lovesick jazz trumpeter sat on the other.
Neither of us willing to leave the other one alone there.
And all that night I read aloud into the smell
of sandalwood the life story of a crazy woman
from Butte, Montana.
I, Mary MacLane that one was called.
What an occasion she made of it.
Laid up by flu, hemmed in by rival young men,
covered to the chin in an absurd high-necked old fashioned
nightgown, taking aspirins with sips of ginger beer.
Laughing at us, alternately or together,
with that face as vivid on the pillow as a flower
laid against the linen.
It was innocence in that crackpot bohemian
pre-crash wonderful time.
It was innocence.
How the trumpeter and I broke our deadlock, whatever
happened to the Tom Stead flurry,
what became of Holly's string of admirers?
All gone.
She sent them away, or they quarreled at her
over their bruised egos.
But they became upset at finding her always in a crowd.
Plenty of self-appointed hummingbird catchers,
but no captures.
And yet, maybe, summer and winter, day and night,
are telescoped in my memory.
How old would I have been?
19?
Something like that.
I was still in college, and even after staying out
most of one year to work I graduated
when I was not quite 21.
1927 or 1928.
Say I was 19.
Holly two or three years older.
There's neither beginning nor end nor definite location
in time to what I most vividly remember.
What we'd been doing, whether we'd
been out at some university dance, or just out on a date.
Whether she then had roommates.
Yes, she did, of course she did.
Hardly any details come back, though,
but we were alone in a way we seldom were.
We must have been talking.
Something must have led up to it.
For there she is, with the clarity of something
floodlighted in my mind.
Pressing against me and crying with her face against my chest,
clinging and crying and saying, "Bruce, get me out of here.
I want to get out of this.
This is all no good, I've got to get out of it, Bruce, please."
Both the tears and the way she clung excited me,
but the game had been played so long by other rules
that I didn't even ask her what was the matter.
I just went on in the old way, burlesquing gestures
of consolation.
Patting the crowing hair, saying, "There,
there, little girl.
Don't you fret, Brucie fix it, whatever it is."
Inanities, idiocies.
She wore an evening dress cut very low in the back,
and I played my fingers up and down her spine.
I slid my hand in against her skin,
slid it further, expecting the competent twist
and shrug and fending, and the laugh
that would mean the emotional fit was over.
But my hand went on around, clear around,
and with a shock like an internal explosion
I found it cupping the frantic softness of her breast.
Even remembering, all my sensations are shocking to me.
I remember how smoothly the curve of her side
swelled upward, how astonishingly consecutive
her body seemed.
Also, and almost with revulsion, how rigid and demanding
the nipple of her breast.
Innocence, I'd never touched a girl there.
Never imagined, or I'd imagined wrong.
Stupefied by the sudden admission to her flesh.
Made uneasy by the way she crowded and clung.
A scared schoolboy where she needed a man.
I stood wrapping her awkwardly, with my hand
paralyzed against her discovered body,
and kissed her and tasted her tears.
And thought with alarm and conviction
of Tom Stead and the rumored nude,
and was anguished with eagerness to escape.
I remember not a scrap, not a detail of how I got away.
She offers herself passionately in my memory, and that's all.
The peewee golfer putting his little white ball
up the little green alley of his youth
come suddenly on the sidewinder in the sand trap, the crocodile
in the artificial lake.
I closed the door on the memory.
It's begun to occur to me that I was an extraordinary young man,
and not everything of what was extraordinary about me
pleases me.
Innocence?
Maybe, though there are more contemptuous names for it.
Standing in Holly's denuded bedroom
I try to understand myself.
At that stage in my life I was certainly hungrier for security
than for taking chances, no matter what I pretended.
A fraud, a gargler of whiskey I would obediently not
drink, a great yapper with the crowd,
but when the cat stopped running what
a frantic sliding to a stop.
What digging not to catch what I was after.
I tell myself that I was a very young 19.
And that young 19 is likely to back away in consternation
when its bluff is called.
I tell myself that the bohemian excitement boiling around Holly
was an absurd, and perhaps touching, and certainly
unimportant stage of growing up.
The rules change with maturity.
Yet my mother married unhappily 19, and my brother disastrously
at 17.
What does that say of them and of me?
What does it say of caution and of risk, half-heartedness
and whole-heartedness?
And nibbling at the edge of my mind
is the knowledge that by then Nola Gordon
was one of Holly's roommates.
And that in a couple of casual encounters
I had had intimations of an altogether sultrier possibility
than Holly's brittle bohemianism.
The last time I saw Holly, she was boarding
a train for Seattle on her way to Shanghai, and a job we
all publicly envied and would not have risked ourselves.
Not yet, at least.
Whatever happened to her, her life can't have been dull.
She's probably spent it flying around the world
like a piece of space hardware.
In the end, as it happened, I played it Holly's way.
Security, which I was once avid for,
and from which only irresistible temptation could lure me,
eventually disgorged me and sent me
to live my life in the exotic ends of the Earth.
Or so it has seemed to some of my friends.
Right now I would find it hard to say whether I've
been adventurous or have made my moves in search of a wider
safety.
Like a bubble of gas escaping from something submerged
and decaying in deep water that rises
to the surface of my mind, one of Blake's Proverbs of Hell
that Holly and I admired together that long gone
Christmas morning.
It bursts, and it says prudence is a rich, ugly, old maid
courted by incapacity.
Actually, I don't accept Blake's contemptuous romanticism.
From the life of prudence I've got a training in law,
and law is something I respect.
The prudent appraisal of my own gifts
and the possibilities of the Depression years
forced me into the Foreign Service,
where I've served in ways I can't think contemptible.
I've made an adequate salary and been prudent with it.
Lived well and retired secure.
I can regret no specific prudent act.
It's impulse that I've learned to be wary of.
And yet I stand here remembering the night when Holly stopped
playing make believe, and I wonder
if my youthful timidity was symptomatic,
a fatal flaw of character and nerve.
I remind myself that nobody can turn in any direction
without turning away from something.
Wasn't I exercising choice?
I reflected anyone who has watched his father tear himself
apart chasing rainbows and his mother and his brother brought
down by a too great open-heartedness
is likely to grow up cautious.
But the fact is, right now I do not like
that cautious image of myself.
Irritably I look at my watch.
Nearly five.
Starting for the door I pass the dead woman's table
and see her calm, pale face, the skin delicately
wrinkled like the skin of a winter kept apple.
But soft looking, as if it would not be unpleasant to touch.
What was her name?
What did she die of?
What did she look like when she wore expression?
Who loved her?
Who mourned her?
What things in her life did they regret, or had she regretted?
Would they dislike it that a total stranger
had been alone with her, staring into her dead face?
And in that face what is it that the caution of death
encloses and hides?
The barbaric silver necklace seems somehow to define her.
What it says about frivolity, girlishness,
love of ornament and gaiety in life makes me like her.
The way it lies on the black, sober crepe breasts
says, "Too late, too late."
I think how she's been transported and tampered
with by McBride, and how further touches of disguise
will complete her transformation from something
real and terrible to something serene and removed.
Alone with her before she must be taken away,
I feel an actual sadness for the death of this woman I never
knew, and gratitude that I've been permitted to see her.
Gratitude or something like it.
And yet, as I start for the door,
I throw an apologetic glance around the room
as quiet and empty as a chapel.
And at the woman who lies so quietly at its center.
I mean to tiptoe out, but I hear almost with panic
the four quick raps my heels make on the bare floor
before they find the consoling softness of the stairs.
So much for the story.
Having got to that point, I had to tip it
so that it would go somewhere else.
[APPLAUSE]
I'm out of fuel.
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
I want to read you a little more, if I may.
Smiling with a slip of paper in his hand
McBride intercepts me at the bottom.
"Find anything familiar?"
"Too familiar.
A man shouldn't go back to anything
after nearly 50 years."
"Has it been that long?
No, I should think he shouldn't.
Here, I forgot to give you this.
Somebody telephoned, wants you to call her."
I will not accept the paper.
I have the unpleasant sense that I have been shadowed,
my disguise penetrated, my cover cracked.
"Telephoned me?
Nobody knows I'm here, unless my wife--
Was it from California?"
"No, local.
She'd read in the newspaper obituary about Mrs. Webb,
and she guessed you might be coming.
She called the home first, and they directed her here."
Unwillingly I let my fingers close on the slip.
There is nothing to it but a number.
"She didn't leave her name?"
"No.
If you'd like to use the phone there's one in here."
Still uneasy from my upstairs encounter with the past,
I briefly consider, and at once reject,
the thought that by some incredible coincidence
the call might be from Holly.
Ridiculous.
I stick this slip into the breast pocket of my jacket.
"Thanks, I'll call from the hotel.
What time should I be here tomorrow?"
"Since there will only be a graveside service,
there's no reason to come until we're about
ready to leave for the cemetery, say 11:30."
"All right, I'll see you."
McBride bends his head sideward in agreement like a Hindu,
and I go out and down the steps into the unabated heat.
The late afternoon glares in my eyes.
Up the eastbound lanes of South Temple
the rush hour traffic is thick, but the lanes going downtown
are nearly empty.
The sun glancing off the pavement
lifts into the air a dark, wet-looking mirage.
A car passes, moving into the rising heat waves.
Its outline after half a block begins to blur.
It grows as square and tall as one
of the old Dodges of my youth, stretching and lifting
off the street, darker and higher, until tall as a tower
it merges with the buildings downtown.
All my impressions suffer from distortion and ambiguity.
Looking at buildings I can't say whether I remember them
or whether my memory is filling the familiar streets
with things it wants familiar.
I have been prepared for strangeness,
and I've also been hopeful of finding some things unchanged.
But I'm not prepared for the ways in which strangeness
and familiarity fuse.
It's like turning a corner into a new street
and finding it the street I just left.
Like walking into a mirror, and then
looking closer finding that it isn't the same street backwards
at all, but a deceptively altered imitation.
Is that because the person who sees
and the person who remembers are not the same, though they
use the same pair of eyes?
Here goes Bruce Mason, retired diplomat,
with three Middle Eastern and two European posts behind him,
as well as the hard-won Middle Eastern ambassadorship.
Resident now of Menlo Park, California.
Comfortably well off.
Well preserved at 180 pounds, but that's 10 too many.
A solid, settled, judicious man who can accept responsibility,
and knows how to keep his counsel and his cool.
Something of a troubleshooter, something of a scholar.
A treatise on Sharia law, a book on the politics
of Middle Eastern oil, articles in Foreign Affairs
and elsewhere.
A member now of a presidential commission on energy.
In demand as a speaker before service clubs and university
groups.
An associate of the Hoover Library
on War, Revolution, and Peace.
A man who reads not only the things his profession
demands of him, but biography, novels, poetry.
A rather private man.
No back slapper, sometimes moody,
a man not exactly serene but most of the time cheerful,
and on balance, content.
And so composed and unflappable that in the embassy in Amman
they joke that a self-winding watch would go dead
on his wrist.
[LAUGHTER]
So I guess I would be characterized
by those who know me.
So I would characterize myself.
Something as close as possible to the ideal foreign officer.
But here inside this mature diplomat,
an expert on world energy problems,
walking with the same muscles and feeling
with the same nerves and sweating
through the same pores, goes a thin, brown youth.
Volatile, impulsive, never at rest,
not so much a person as a possibility.
Subject to enthusiasm and elation and exuberance
and occasional great black moods.
Stubborn.
Capable of calculation, but often
astonished by consequences.
A boy vulnerable to wonder, awe, worship, devotion, hatred,
guilt, vanity, shame, ambition, dreams, treachery.
A boy hungry for acceptance and distinction.
Secretive and a blabbermouth.
Life crazy and hence girl crazy.
A showoff who can be withered by a contemptuous word or look.
A creature overflowing with brash self-confidence
one minute, and oppressed with its own worthlessness the next.
A vessel of primary sensations undiluted by experience,
caution, or fatigue.
Put aside, postponed, schooled, overtaken by events,
he was never quite defined much less fulfilled.
Hardly even remembered until I came around Black Rock
this afternoon and saw the old lake bottom
littered with the stumps of the pilings on which the Saltair
Pavilion used to ride above waist-deep water.
And turned eastward to see the mirage city rising
against its mountains and heard the ghostly and muffled roar
of Jack Bailey's bug.
Holly knew a version of that unformed Bruce Mason.
Whoever telephoned McBride was trying
to make contact with a version of that same youth.
Now young Bruce Mason, multiple and nascent, gone for decades,
but never quite given up, walks with me into the eye of the sun
and steals my senses.
When I take off my jacket an adrift of air brushes
my sweating forearms with a chill like liquid nitrogen.
It's the boy's skin that cringes with remembrance
of what evaporation can do in super dry air.
And when I look at people I meet, half expecting
to encounter someone in whose altered features
I can decipher a face once known,
it's the boy on whom I rely for recognition.
I myself would not an old acquaintance.
No old acquaintance would know me.
Actually, I fear meeting someone the boy might know,
for I don't want him to be recognized.
I want him to see and know without being seen and known,
like someone behind one-way glass.
We meet only strangers.
In the hot street the sound of tires is sticky.
The sidewalk is hot through my soles.
Inhabited by my doppelganger I pass the old church offices
with their flower beds and the garage ramp
that has usurped the space of the old Deseret Gym.
And with definite relief I am sucked
through a whirl of reflections into the cool hotel lobby.
For the last block we have been marching
to the beat of a scrap of poetry,
risen from the same cistern which yielded
Blake's proverb of hell.
You need not be a chamber to be haunted.
You need not be a house.
In my room where a chilly wind blows out
of the air conditioning unit I call room service
for ice and tonic water.
They come promptly.
This has always been a first class hotel.
Quintessentially Mormon, both in its cheerful efficiency
and the air of moneyed confidence it wears.
I'm glad to be inside it, cool and safe.
Safe.
Have I been feeling threatened?
No, I decide, only a little uneasy.
Not yet acclimated to the clash between what the eye sees
and what the mind remembers.
I get the bottle of gin from my bag,
before leaving I remembered that Utah
sells no liquor by the drink, and made
myself a gin and tonic.
Mine is a corner room the west windows which
look across Main Street toward Temple Square I leave
shrouded, for I can feel how the undiminished heat will burst in
at me if I draw the drapes even inches apart.
But the south windows are shaded by the sun's angle,
and I pull the drapes wide.
Sipping my drink I look down on the intersection
of Main and South Temple, a corner once
as familiar as my own face.
Progress has been at work on it.
Directly across South Temple the old Zion's Bank
has leaped up 26 stories.
On the southwest corner the Deseret News building
has been replaced by a new one.
And something drastic has happened to Main Street.
Its sidewalks have been widened well
out into the former traffic lanes,
perhaps for the purpose of pinching off traffic
and encouraging the pedestrian as in a mall.
But the sidewalks thus expanded have been encumbered
by planters, fountains, flower urns,
and stelae made of a substance that looks like granite
but probably isn't.
The pedestrian now walks an obstacle course
among structures suitable for the Soviet exhibit at a World's
Fair.
God pity the adolescent who in his exuberance
talking to his girl turns around and walks backward.
God pity the woman who window shops as she walks,
ass over teacup into a fountain or a bed of gaillardias.
On the other hand, it does get some flowers and young trees
into the downtown concrete.
It does demonstrate the community pride, half Mormon
and half Chamber of Commerce that
has always made Salt Lake a cleanly and pleasant town.
All right, I decided, what if the imitation granite things
are too heavy and too many?
What if somebody now and then does fall
into the fountains or the flowers?
As far as I can see down Main, about a block and a half,
the wide encumbered sidewalks continue.
Though I lean, I can't quite see to the entrance of the old pool
hall.
Is that smelly cave still There probably not.
It would be incompatible with beautification.
But I feel its possibility down there just out of sight,
and I feel the instant protective caution,
like the caution I would exercise if I were walking
along a road I knew was mine.
I keep to one side, I circle.
From the middle of the intersection
the shadow of Brigham Young's frock coated figure,
standing where the Gentile jingle left him, with his back
to the temple and his hand to the bank,
reaches almost to the bank doors.
A car turning the corner burrows under the shadow like a cat
under a rug.
When it has passed, the outline of Brother Brigham
settles back upon the pavement as intact as a revelation.
Then something strange.
The intersection drifts and becomes a double exposure,
as if a transparent overlay has been slid cross it.
Over the modern corner with a zebra
striped pedestrian crossing and its wide, cluttered sidewalks
hovers the image of an older, simpler meeting of streets.
From my window I see three foreshortened figures
pass below me and turned across South Temple.
The camera cuts to street level and I see them plain.
Three sunburned boys of 16 or 17 or 18.
One of them very tall with red hair, one dark and curly
haired, one thin and blond.
All of them in white shirts whose sleeves are rolled nearly
to the shoulder and in white Navy-surplus bell-bottom
ducks with laces at the back of the waist.
They walk past in a way, slim-hipped identicals,
walking with a spring that could at any moment break into a run,
grinning back over their shoulders at the camera.
Three abreast they pass out of the frame,
out of sight, out of time.
Glimpsed and gone, irrecoverable.
Their presence written on the hot summer air, the period
as irrecoverable as they.
Joe Mulder, Jack Bailey, Bruce Mason, fixed for a few seconds
by a Pathe News cameraman filming a Salt Lake City street
scene in the summer of what, 1925?
1926?
The summer after our freshman year in college.
The days there intact.
We've just come from the tennis club
where Joe Mulder and I have played and won
a doubles match that puts us into the second round
of the state tournament.
From the club we have accompanied Bailey
to the mission home, which he will enter tomorrow
to be briefed for his coming mission to Tonga.
We're now on our way down to Second South to lunch
at the workingman's restaurant called Joe Vincent's.
On my palate, either as anticipation or remembrance,
lingers the flavor of that slab of white bread and slab
of overdone beef smothered in that yellow-brown Formula 57
gravy.
I let the three figures go and sit
brooding with a cold edge of the glass against my upper lip.
Irrecoverable, but realer than anything else in the street.
Much realer than the planters and fountains
of downtown beautification.
I saw them living, solid, Mercurial with expression
but as unchangeable as history.
They are history.
That Pathe newsreel must be preserved somewhere.
I could go to some archive and project it.
Just before the boys appear on camera,
President Calvin Coolidge has been crowned with a war bonnet
by some tame Sioux in the Black Hills.
Just after they pass out of sight, beyond the ZCMI corner,
a forlorn family will start picking
through the wreckage of their home
in a tornado-struck Oklahoma town.
Je suis une chose qui dure.
So said Henri Bergson, whom I've probably not thought
of since reading him as background
for a college paper on Proust away back, nearly half
a century.
Je suis une chose qui dure.
I am a thing that lasts.
But not unaltered, either as subject or as object.
If I have the idea that I could come back after 45 years
and resume conversations in the middle of a sentence,
I'm certainly going to be disappointed.
Being is consciousness and consciousness
retains its identity, which is in good part memory.
But experience doesn't wait while identity defines itself
for eternity.
It enforces on identity an uninterrupted process
of transition.
Perhaps even the memory that records the stages of change
isn't permanent.
Memory has to be, doesn't it, a series of overlays.
The collegiate bohemian of 19 who hung around Holly
and affected Proust and Joyce and Havelock Ellis
was a different creature from the 16-year-old in sailor
pants drunk on achieved companionship
and the exhilaration of having friends.
But one contains the other, as the one who
sits looking out a Utah hotel window contains them both,
and 1,000 more besides.
Of all the identities or partial identities
or tentative identities I have been, I am now for this moment
the unpredicted, evanescent, directorial sum.
I remember, therefore I was.
I was, there I am.
I both contain and commemorate myself,
I am both grave and gravestone.
I left Salt Lake City sick with hatred of Jack Bailey,
but grievance and injured vanity heal.
And other recollections have lasted at least as well
as the grudge.
I would be glad enough to see Bailey again,
if only out of curiosity to know what time has made of him.
And if Bailey, then many others, too.
The ones who made a world for me.
Joe Mulder especially, who all but created Bruce Mason.
And having created him made it possible for him to survive.
Will I call him?
I can't answer myself with certainty.
If Joe is alive, and there's at least a 50% chance
that he isn't, he contains as many versions of young Bruce
Mason as old Bruce Mason contains of young Joe Mulder.
Their meeting will be an effort by two strangers
to reconstruct each other from the album
snapshots of a long time past.
A reunion of two sets of outgrown,
and by now false memories.
And how do I explain to Joe or Joe's survivor
45 years of total silence?
I can't explain them to myself.
I get up and make myself another drink, holding it in my hand
and looking down on the telephone book,
lying where I threw it on the bed earlier this afternoon.
If Joe is alive it'll take only 20 seconds to find out.
Before I can change my mind I've opened the book
and found the Ms.
My finger moves down the column and stops.
There it is, even the same address,
Joe's parents' house, which for two or three years
was more home to me than my own.
Delighted I hunt for something on which
to copy down the number, and finally fish out
of my jacket pocket the slip that McBride gave me.
I scribble the number on it, and then struck by something turn
the slip over.
Joe's number and the one on McBride's side are the same.
Adrenaline goes through me.
It's as if I had taken a whiff of ammonia.
Right in the same house, waiting all these years,
keeping his eye out for the slightest clue of my returning.
Manifestly keeping his eye out, or why would he
have seized on the obituary notice
of Margaret Webb, a woman he probably never heard of?
The notice must have contained me as a named survivor.
But why did a woman call?
Joe's wife?
Probably he has one.
Still, it strikes me as odd that his instant, infallible
restoration of contact should have
come by some other voice than his own.
I take a nervous little journey across the room
and back to the bed table and the telephone.
My skin has glazed over in the air conditioned chill.
The stiffness of the long drive lurks in my muscle.
I have an unsteady moment, a darkening of the sight,
vertigo.
Then it clears and I pick up the telephone.
But at the last moment my finger betrays me,
I swerve aside, I dial the present, not the past.
She answers in the middle of the second ring, "Hello?"
"Hi, Annie."
"Oh, it's you.
I was hoping it was.
How are you, exhausted?
Are you in Salt Lake?"
I love the way her voice warms at the sound of mine.
Intimacy and comfort and certainty
flow toward me over 800 miles of wire.
I sit down on the bed and pull the pillow up
against the headboard and get comfortable.
"Everything's fine, I got in about 3:00.
How's it with you?"
"Fine.
Quiet.
I've already done anything since you left except practice Bach.
Ugh is he hard."
"That's the best thing you ever did, taking up the piano again.
I wish I hadn't let it go so long, it might be easier now."
"How was the drive?"
"Great.
Beautiful across the desert, big brassy sky,
big shaving cream clouds, big gray valleys
slung between the ranges.
I kept being reminded of the Beqaa Valley
up behind Beirut on the way to Damascus."
"I hope you had a vision."
"Not quite, just the usual hallucinations."
"Was it hot?"
"It's hot here.
I didn't notice it on the road with the air conditioning.
You should have come."
"I'm better off practicing Bach.
Anyway, you didn't want me to come."
"What makes you think that?"
"I could tell.
From the minute they called you acted
as if you'd been given a chance to go to the moon
but couldn't tell anybody."
"It's you having hallucinations.
Why should I be excited about having to come back and bury
Aunt Margaret?"
"The funeral is a good excuse."
I thought about that for a few seconds.
"Oh, it is?"
"Yes."
She waits ready to debate me if I choose.
When I don't choose she says, "Anyway, I'm
not good at funerals.
I weep even for people I never knew.
Have you made the arrangements?"
"We'll bury her at noon tomorrow."
"Will there be anyone there but you and the funeral parlor
people?"
"I don't suppose, unless some of the old folks at the home
are up to it."
"I hope they are.
I'm destroyed by funerals where there's only
the one car and the hearse, and three people at the grave.
It just seems so forlorn.
Buy a lot of flowers, send the poor old thing off in style."
"All right, though nobody's going
to notice, she least of all."
"Just the same."
"All right."
We seem to have run down.
The pause lengthens, then she says in a different voice,
"How does it seem to go back?"
"Strange," I say, suddenly eager to talk about it.
"Strangely familiar, familiarly strange.
Lots of deja vu.
"Does it bother you?"
"Bother me?"
"You were so unhappy there."
"Was I?"
I ask, surprised.
"Your father and all that."
"Yeah, I suppose," I say.
"Well, it's a long time ago."