Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online

inclination to go into the parlor, but he said to himself that he wished the damned company would quit wearing out his record. He started for the kitchen, spraddling because of the books in his pants, and his father said after him, “For God’s sake, have you messed your pants, too?”
    That really made him bawl. He started yelling, “No! My books slipped down, and I couldn’t …” But his father cut him offwith one furious motion of his hand. The kitchen door opened and his mother, with an instant cry, stooped to help him. He had finally made it home. Behind him, as the parlor door opened and closed, he heard his father saying something humorous to the company.
    “Great day!” his mother said. “You’ve got yourself tied hand and foot. What on earth!”
    She wiped his nose. She pried the pail out of his frozen fingers. She slid his belt buckle open and reached down and got the books. Then she stood him at the sink and ran warm water on his hands until they stung and tingled and grew clean and red, while he snarled and complained. Last she rubbed lotion into the bleeding cracks in his knuckles and put him at the kitchen table and made him a cup of cocoa.
    All he would tell her when she asked what he had been doing and why his lunch pail was full of mud was that his Latin teacher wanted him to make a
castra.
What was a
castra?
she wanted to know, and he flew out at her bitterly. It was a thing for school, a thing the legions built, what did she suppose? Finally she found out that it was something he was going to build with clay on some sort of board base, and gave him an old breadboard to build it on. Before supper he spent an intent hour, sitting stocking-footed soaking up the warmth pouring from the kitchen register, drawing a
castra
to scale on the clean bleached wood.
    Life in that house was full of tensions. For one thing, they were afraid of the law, and were constantly poised to move, though a move meant losing customers who might never find them again. For another, Bruce’s mother was the wrong woman to be the wife of a man who ran a speakeasy. She had been brought up in a stiff Lutheran family, and without being at all religious, she had a yearning belief in honesty, law, fairness, respectability, and the need for self-respect. When Bruce looked around him and envied the home life of students he vaguely knew, he was envious mainly for himself, but also in part for his mother. She would have loved being part of some friendly town or neighborhood, she would have been immensely thankful to have friends. When company came, she stayed in the kitchen. If the party in the parlor got loud, she sat wincing as if she had cramps, and threw looks at Bruce, with grimaces and jerkymovements of her shoulders. She was a humble, decent woman married to a boomer. All it ever took to remind Bruce of how abused he was, was to catch sight of her face when she didn’t know anyone was looking.
    His father was a perfectionist, he had standards, he aspired to run a classy and genteel joint. Even in the old tin-wainscoted, Congoleum-floored houses they rented, he went around with a towel on his arm, always flicking and dusting, cranking the Victrola, making conversation, setting up a free one for good spenders. When, as sometimes happened, he needed help, he expected his wife and son to hop.
    Bruce escaped him all day at school. His brother Chet escaped completely, for as a halfback on the high school football team he was living at the team’s training camp on the coach’s farm in Murray. Lacking so thorough an escape, Bruce relied on homework. He saw to it that he had loads of it. At home he was not a volunteer, and his mother abetted him, for though they never spoke openly about it, they were in mutinous league against their life.
    That night new customers came in after six. His father took a plate into the dining room, which could be shut off by sliding doors from the parlor but from which he could hear the customers if they