Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  For the interrogator like the diva’s officer betrays that special personal neatness of the police, and can seem our personal interrogator with the seared earphones bearing terrible frequencies in honor equally of lie or true. Still, like a breathless stammerer, he asks where we were coming from and what our thrust was when we reported that the diva whose tapeworm once just about obscured her its host is acquainted in all those opera cities with so many exiles better than herself. And we, who have sometime felt the burden of the interrogator’s thrust have gone out of our way to save Mayn when it was he who casually told Lar’ that this Hermit (in his 1893 manifestation) from the City of the East was remarkable single or plural.

  Only listen to what comes out of you. Because Waste Can Be Recycled, this truth has made it onto afternoon TV even when no one is in the room to watch, although why can’t Mayn see how what he is takes him right off a bar napkin, that is right off the diagram he draws on it of wind-force in terms of length:

  Which can’t express that one wind if it tried except by some second diagram (or sometime four-color map) of all the words that ever used to substitute in that family for feelings that were its history: where a mother unhappy but mysterious about it left, but had already left before she left.

  Larry had pointed out that the Hermit-Inventor had, O.K., taken his five to six months’ vacation from New York but not necessarily from himself. But if you listen to what comes out of you—as if you knew much real history— you risk hearing not just breath, which is also spring air dividing around the man Jim’s father, the young man, dressed up (cutaway and mustache) for someone else’s vintage wedding and (on the running board of a vintage roadster coasting like a figure skater)—but you risk as well hearing your own voice which can contain incarnate that once-young best man five minutes before meeting and being introduced into the future of a young woman who was ever after thought to have wed him because of her family newspaper the Windrow Democrat (exactly nine months to the day before Jim, the first of that mother’s two sons, came two weeks early to light—but doesn’t that mean a whirlwind romance, or something?)

  But your voice can contain also conglomerates of seemingly grandfather-generated facts: such as that William Heighton, editor of the Mechanics Free Press in the late 1820s and the founder of the Philadelphia Working Men’s Movement in Jackson’s time, had been a cordwainer, and, regardless of that, that cordovan itself (from that Spanish city of leather, Cordoba) was either goatskin or split horsehide and, unlike morocco, holds its natural grain (when tanned and dressed) and regardless of this, continued Mayn’s grandfather Alexander

  (who went out in vain to wait for Margaret or seek her where she did not expect it when she returned in early 1894 from the West stopping, stooping, finding in Ohio and Pennsylvania detours from the myth of her journey near its end as if, fearing (which she really did not) her father’s reaction to her being months late coming home, she flew in on a wind only to target some penultimate capillaries by which, having blown in at last to the great City of the East, she took her strange time winding down to Windrow fifty miles away)

  Hakluyt in his Voyages refers to that costly Spanish leather Cordoweyn cargoed with "figs, raisins, honey, dates, and salt"—

  —and for a moment we who have stood back in invisible company with the interrogator and his ready whip must add through the thinking fingers of an unseen-composer-furniture-mover-part-time-boyfriend to the basso rotondo adding them in an aria central to the climax of his original soon-to-be-privately-showcased comic opera of Hamlet (with music so strangely derivative it might be from an undiscovered score of the Otello-Falstqff’master) nine rhymes, one for each year of wear that according to the gravedigger the unusually waterproof body of a tanner will last (like Shakespeare’s problem child through upwards of a score of different tragic operas) after and beyond burial but this time with one mystery-guest star-singer whom he (tough little unknown Roslein) has leaned on and maybe another star who would be the curious diva—

  : an illustrious craft, cordwainery, added Jim Mayn’s grandfather, who knew good shoe leather and who kept a curiously successful Odds and Ends & Second-Hand (mainly American war) Books shop diagonally across (the Jersey Central tracks) from the firehouse—and we hear, he said, in England of the cordwainers’ craft guild in the City of Exeter suing for favor to the Lord Mayor—

  "... who was sometimes a Yard," said Margaret—"Bob Yard’s father’s family, very important in Exeter before they came here, even if Bob’s more like a Spanish pirate with those wall eyes."

  Which was neither here nor there, said Jim’s grandfather, who spoke facts like a tongue and as if he fancied them plucked free of causality’s warp or cured of any fleeting convergence with others.

  Yet this was just his habit. For, by contrast, witness the Mayne family pistol, i.e., what Grandfather Alexander did with it by way of tracing it but never in Jim’s memory holding it along two alternative dumb courses: the ‘‘mantelpiece," he neatly called it before Jim knew "piece" was a word for a hand firearm—where it rested above the parlor hearth pointing at a couple of finger-like cigar containers that were monster fingers of course. The serial number on the left side of the cylinder supposedly dated its manufacture well prior to the 1847 run of one thousand Colts rushed down to Mexico for the Battle of Chapultepec, an order that had revived if not rejuvenated Samuel Colt’s business at its new factory in Hartford after it had failed in Paterson a few years previous.

  Now, in 1894 the Navajo Prince told a blonde woman by a Pennsylvania river bank at dawn that he had found the pistol some two years ago in a cliff by the light of the double Moon upon that retired medicine man the last of the Anasazi people. He was so old he was likely beyond death or mere life and in weight as light as, according to Grandfather Alexander’s own estimate, those six-hundred-year-old Texans breathing the purest air there was, in the time when the guerrilla Charlie Quantrill with the lynx eyes preyed on Kansas abolitionists, killed twenty-eight (he said) of his brother’s murderers, and vanished into East Texas to be afterward the brains behind Jesse James whose appropriation of federal funds was to have enabled the redleg-Abolitionist-hating Quantrill to reopen the Civil War which would have been another effect of the Texas "pure" that kept some Lone Star elders alive six hundred years until they dried up and were wafted away eastward where they might have mingled, leaf-crumble-like, with the crude oil and snakeroot used as a last and Indian resort after emetics, cathartics, "cupping," and opium to bring round old General Harrison whose Inaugural Address of March 1841 though edited, expurgated, and violently abridged by Daniel Webster still ran too long (at one hour and forty minutes) for the brand-new President to survive without an overcoat or survive as a historical power (for unlike the body of the immortal Tecumseh the body of General Harrison was not at once secreted mysteriously away so that having never been seen to leave, it might be expected to return). A woman naturalist in the Southwest who was thought mad not because she, a Chilean far from home, claimed a blood bond with the Anasazi medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince had taken the pistol but because she had developed white lips exactly like those of the fierce javelina (or peccary), the only wild pig native to the Americas whose habits and in particular curious scent glands situated in the rump she had been studying on foot all the way north from some teeming point of the Chile-Argentine border, reported that the late medicine man had been given the pistol in question by a many-fingered mestizo spy who had coveted it but upon acquiring it had been uneasy with it precisely because he had been told he mustn’t "unload" it on (or divest himself of it to) anyone except a dark healer at least a century old. Or so he had been assured by the young Englishman with white or blond hair who had let himself be hoodwinked in a game of chance the night before the Battle of Chapultepec in September 1847 in return for recovering his speech which he had lost when questioned some days before about a German visitor (perhaps a spy) who had left with him a map-like, abstract-chart-like thing executed on a square of paper a
nd had then disappeared on a road north toward Guanajuato’s silver-veined hills—questioned the young English person had been by one Marion Hugo Mayne with an e usually, whose western diaries had come into his distant relative Alexander’s hands years ago (read years later) from a friend of Margaret’s, and, bound with them, an account in brown ink in a different hand but with a curiously similar manner and vocabulary, of President Jackson’s use of a safe widower Martin Van Buren in gaining some measure of social acceptance for Peggy O’Neill Eaton, a tavernkeeper’s daughter whose second husband, Jackson’s Secretary of War, she had had relations with prior, though, to marrying him, all of which irked Old Hickory up to and beyond his angry reaction to Henry Clay’s attack on his bank policy, which in turn pushed the President to shift large deposits from the Bank of the United States to "pet" banks just when these claims must be paid out in gold for western lands so that the banks were, so to speak, financially embarrassed when then forced to meet the sudden demands of English banks for repayment of short-term loans. And so it went, as Alexander’s grandson Jim Mayn more than once told a late-evening colleague in a bar of some American city—and Van Buren got stuck with the Panic of 1837.

  But the year before the depressed winter of ‘37~’38 when Greeley wrote of "filth, squalor . . . want, and misery" in New York’s Sixth Ward, who but the cordwainers led the way toward federation of local craft unions convening leatherworkers from all over including Philadelphia whence notably the aforementioned editor Heighton, not to mention the Mayn family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat, a Mason who had been pressuring President Jackson to explain his interest in a village attorney’s daughter from upstate New York who had pursued her lover William Morgan all the way to New York and Philadelphia after he had been in a way expelled from that upstate village by being thrown into its local jail for promising to reveal Masonic secrets and had been then sprung secretly one morning by a supposed friend who had disappeared after having allegedly tried and failed to shoot Morgan on the road.

  "Cleopatra’s Nose," Mayn’s grandfather would muse—the fine trivia that workaday Mayn and his "ilk" dumbly overlooked—but his grandfather had once mentioned it when Jim had asked about the wanderings of a pistol and there was a gun-control law somewhere in the speculations of his granddad’s memory, for Jim had never known him to hunt or target-shoot, or to touch that pistol on the mantel, and one day Jim might get back to figuring it out because who else was likely to trace the firearms of that earlier family history—unless it was one of his brother Brad’s kids back home in Windrow a million miles from those ancient rainfall fluctuations that may have converged upon the Anasazi cliff dwellers parallel with (and independent of) the Apaches climbing their lethal ladders (as the East Far Eastern Princess compassionately learned) up into those sun-annealed apartment-house honeycombs with not just rabid blood in their hearts but with undreamt knowledge of a magic oil that the Navajo Prince’s irritable though ventriloquially musical mother (for whom the ceremonial sing was in progress the night he arrived with his newfound Manchoor Anglo girl) would apply to restore if not her temper (good or bad!) but the hair to that part of her head where the appropriate people were chanting the Night Way to heal her head-hole in and out of which cream-colored demon-types moved and from moment to moment settled or not. That is, apply—apply, we said—an oil from a bean from a plant that survives only in the driest earth: water is sealed into its leaves by a film of wax, and its taproot goes down thirty feet—a waxy oil the Indians used as a coffee substitute before they knew coffee; as a wax for women’s eyelashes; and to bring on labor contractions plus halt skin cancer in its tracks.

  "You mean," said a late-night colleague—"there was an Indian in your grandmother’s life?"

  but Mayn himself, recalling his grandfather at least on this score less than what that gentle, well-shod browser actually said, had figured that in the larger sense—

  "What sense?" came a neutral warrant of a voice (Spence’s) from the end of the bar like your own unnecessarily self-critical afterthought.

  History (which also might turn fundamentally upon whether, at any crux in question, small talk had been possible) was accident pretty much—a bunch of haphazard collisions, and if you’ve got fortuitous stuff like that and little more than fortuitous, how can history be worthwhile?

  "—Wait a minute?" came the same voice of a man Mayn didn’t like, who then and later, with his thin, curly sideburns, figured in the current ongoing (though questionable) century—"What’s this oil you’re talking about?"

  "What’s it to you—a bean, a seed—going to be good for lubricating high-temperature high-speed machinery, anti-viral penicillin stabilizer, shampoo, sun screens, face oils, you name it, solvents for producing polyethylene—"

  But not unhappy exactly in the multiracial structure is the very Ojibway, diamond-squinter, whose grandmother stored oil in a sturgeon bladder—but not the oil in question—nor is necessarily one all-purpose angel-unit asking, But whafs this seed?—a peek of a voice at the tip end of the bar (read time’s tilt) which Mayn seemed to ignore. As did his late-night old-friend journalist colleague Ted, who smoked unheard-of cigarettes and lived in a five-room half-furnished Washington apartment when he was not less solitary traveling; who did not tell stories, and who now said, "Cleopatra’s Nose."

  "Which Cleopatra?" chimed in the itinerant photo-journalist Spence, hopeful of company.

  Mayn did not acknowledge this leather-fringed man Spence, reared doubtless hydroponically or unconsciously out of the oil he was inquiring about like a scavenger, a Spence at the end of the bar and not even pleasantly unlikable. Mayn answered Spence that the bean had been named in the Lower California desert a century and a half ago by a naturalist named Link after a colleague botanist who had died eighteen years before—"but the breakthrough came in 1933 in Arizona."

  "Which Cleopatra?" said Ted. "The one whose nose would have changed history if it had been a hair longer but wasn’t—anyone called Cleo in your family, Mayn?—that’s what your granddad must have meant!"

  —while along a bond of humor joining the two colleagues in the same bar in Washington in the early seventies flashed a vacation-beach insight of green-water stripe made by sandbar so the surrounding sea mo’ blue thereby, which equals sad but we can’t tell why, we find only a collection of sunny bodies on a beach and add on two more bodies that are non-present but implicit—one the best man of (then, in 1944 or -5) thirteen or fourteen years ago (Jim’s father, Mel) who is at work back in town at the family newspaper which is soon to pass into history, for he doesn’t like the beach; the other, the grandfather Alexander, who is back across the road beyond the beachfront row of cottages and on the bay side peering (if he’s not snoozing) down into the water off the dock for crabs, for the slow, rich, helpless softies you eat it all.

  What had been happening? For what did happen when she got sick later made him wonder what had been happening but all he could come up with was her and his father—people, what he felt they were like—but not events that proved so. Nor had this event that was scattered across the sand at still-unsullied Mantoloking on the Jersey shore maybe a forty-minute drive from Windrow shown itself so he could follow its start to its finish, which was elsewhere; and he hadn’t felt even it until long after: so that he couldn’t be sure, and so he felt dumb, and then, in this order, he thought maybe there’s nothing to understand; or if there is, it’ll come to him as time goes by, the way grandfather Alexander slowly travels the five-minute walk from the beach to the bayside cottage thinking for a time alone about a very fresh chowder for supper with unavoidably a couple three guests thrown in, the Bob Yards, and this old, coughing, until today unbelievable and basically non-existent sonofagun-figure of Margaret’s past weirdly materialized from New York— it’s ‘44 or ‘45—so ancient history has been only fifty miles away all these years.

  and one of these, Bob’s wife, is suddenly in the bayside cottage with Alexander saying hello with quickness, familiarity, a
nd anger not directed toward him but doubtless toward the beach, so that he turns his shoulder in order not to deflect it because he knows Bob Yard’s wife well, and their childless marriage filled by their good talk. And feels more than he can put intuition to, and thinks there is something going on on the beach and is told by Bob’s wife it is the old acquaintance of Margaret from the western days who has arrived in the Yards’ car, but Alexander has his chowder to consider, the boys will eat two bowls, Sarah none.

  But the double Moon? What meant the double Moon upon the old medicine man from whom the Navajo Prince got his pistol? comes a voice or a unison of voices from the next room as a divider partition explodes lightly in the laughter unseen onlookers give either the reappearance of half a couch moving back into its apartment or Larry reflecting after a long, deflected bike ride.