Recapitulation by Wallace Stegner Read Free Book Online Page B

erected his defenses and mounted guard.
    “It’s beginning to look real good,” his mother said after five minutes of clock-ticking, stove-ticking, tap-dripping silence. “You do a nice neat job of things.”
    Praise made him businesslike. “I wish I had a little eagle.”
    “A what?”
    “An eagle. Legion standards had eagles on them. In camp they planted the standard in front of the commander’s tent.”
    “I guess … I don’t quite know what a standard is,” she said.
    He didn’t bother to answer.
    For a while she read a magazine at the other table. Bruce had not heard any noise, either from his father or from the company in the parlor, for some time. The radiator puffed its warm breath against his legs, the dust puppies fluttered in its grill, the tin pipes sighed and popped.
    “I’ve got a pin shaped like a bird,” his mother said. “Would that help you? Maybe you could fasten it onto this—standard—some way.”
    She bothered him, trying to horn in on this thing she didn’t even understand. On the other hand, maybe he
could
use the pin. He leaned back. “Let’s see it.”
    “We’ll have to wait till they go, in there. It’s in my sewing basket.”
    “I think they’re gone.”
    “I haven’t heard the door.”
    “They’re gone. I’d hear them through the register.”
    He was already up, skating on stocking feet across the slick linoleum. “Well, I’ll have to find it for you,” she said. “You’d never know where.”
    Down the darkish hall, lighted only by a high dim bulb that brought a shine out of the newel post and tangled in the shadows of the coatrack, he stroked with skating strides, made a detour to pass his hand across the cold stream of air at the bullet hole, and slid up to the half-open parlor door.
    He was there just a split second before the tap of his mother’s heels startled them. Lew McReady was bent far over his girl on the sofa, whispering in her ear or kissing her, Bruce couldn’t see which. But he could see, in the spread of light that the table lamp shed, the white satin of the lady friend’s blouse, and Lew McReady’s fingers working like a cat’s claws in it.
    Then they heard. McReady snapped around and spread his arm in a big elaborate gesture along the sofa back, and yawned as if he had just been aroused from a nap. The girl made a sound like a laugh. Behind Bruce his mother said in a tight voice (had she seen?), “I’m sorry, Bruce needs something for a thing he’s making at school. Excuse me … just a second … he’s making something …”
    McReady crossed his legs and made a sour mouth. Bruce knew his son at high school, one of the big stupid ones, a football player who was supposed to star if he ever got eligible. But he couldn’t keep looking at McReady. He had to look at the nurse, who smiled at him. She seemed extraordinarily pretty. He couldn’t understand how she could be so pretty and let old McReady paw her. She had a laughing sort of face, and she was lost and damned.
    She said, “What is it you’re making?”
    “A
castra
—a Roman camp.”
    “For Latin?”
    “Yes.”
    His mother was rummaging in the sewing basket. He wished she would bring the whole basket so that they could get out of there, and yet he was glad for every extra second she took. McReady, still spread-eagled elegantly over the couch, lighted a cigarette. He had a red face with large pores, and the hair on top of his head was thin, about twelve hairs carefully spread to cover as much skull as possible. When he took the cigarette from his lips and looked at the tip and saw the pink of lipstick there, he put the back of his hand to his mouth and looked across it andsaw Bruce watching him. So he separated himself from the others and interested himself in a long wheezing coughing spell. His eyes glared out of his purpling face with a kind of dull patience, waiting for things to die down. The nurse smiled at Bruce, and loathing her he smiled back. She said, “I