Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  So that for us, collecting in and around such organism, what young Jim was in fact put through, that summer night of interrupted wartime sleep, can converge upon Mayn’s naming by an exile-economist’s mujer, yielding blindly a new brief obstacle to the three who heard the name, the lithe man who had gently uncradled the bedroom phone, and the two women who felt the intervention in their very hearts and therewith said, not in the Gluten Nacht or Buonappe-notte tongues of gran’opera but in good, honest Anglo, "Goodnight," yet not by a long shot American "G’night," or, literally—with the additives restored—"Have a nice day, tonight."

  So that while Mayn in ‘63 or ‘64 (no problem) insisted that Roy Sievers had batted in 114 runs for the Washington Senators in 1957 (well before Washington was, lock, stock, and barrel, moved to Minn.—which means, observes the dictatorial interrogator with an accent of the sea shadowily awash in his syntax, that Sievers subsequently did not equal that personal best because with Washington in Minnesota he was himself to his own distraction permanently within shooting distance of the famed antler’d pike-whale of Lake Superior which our own nationals matriculating in the aeronautical program near that thousandfold lac, have been warned of by an Indian with a squint valuable enough to be worth preserving who exchanges such warnings for such information as our nationals have to offer, such as relocation techniques or disappearing acts used for certain anti-Castro Cubans now variously resident in our blessed coastal economy, its sovereignty cast like a shadow by the overlapping sea, a subject Mayn had to be interested in until the involvement of another whom he could not respect returned him to those routines by which he had made his living. He preferred to judge as waste-coincidence the convergence of his own route and that of an exiled Allende economist house-ticketed to an opera one of whose principals had a long-term relation with a simple, cuff-trousered Park Avenue G.P. who had fished with a Lake Superior Ojibway Indian with the same given name Santee as a diamond-squinting aeronautical trainee who relayed information about Cubans being relocated in Chile via an underground North American route more direct than if they’d traveled overland or underground from Cuba right to Chile. If not purely coincidental, at least impurely: which however hastily inhumed in lurid likelihood Mayn would leave to others to bring to light which when it came wriggling forth might have an ageless Spence coiling and coiling around it as if it were money in the pocket more than history on the make with or without that moral "eye" or epicenter Mayn quietly eschewed to own was his.

  Leave to others? Like one misled.

  By what? By what had stopped his mother singing? A ringing that surrounded her voice? But then him—well—her son with the reddish hair that in one month, like overnight, a year and more later began to go very dark like dye or through that gravity between colors that bled the red away.

  But misled more by words of his mother Sarah, that threatened to forget themselves but he didn’t let them as he took himself and his in-spite-of-what-that-strange-woman-said not very foxy thick shock of exploding strong-springing hair that she told him had been having a dream so he ought to go away, she said, and find out if he was fox or bear, well he hated that kind of talk, he wondered if when his father gave her a little kiss on the cheek he kissed the mole near her jaw, all Jim wanted was a bit of information because that would have been just unintense and friendly, but little Brad whom she talked music to and had a tenderness toward (out of all proportion to that little begatten nothing’s deserving) she didn’t have a respect for (that Jim did get but didn’t know what to do with) so he took it out of the music room, her strange respect, at past one in the morning and left, ten stairs at a time, to leave her where she was downstairs—that woman, his mother—and he dived into his T-shirt and kicked into his chinos with a few stiff paint stains of glossy gray porch paint on them, he touched them, and he bent to finger his moccasins back onto his bare heels, and went into the frame of his window unhooking the lower end of the screen to bank it out just far enough so it didn’t come off at the top when he slid out onto that side of the sloping shingle roof and was on the ground smelling the leaves of summer and fresh-turned earth of a flower bed that had a smothering dampness of rock about it and a sweetness of hands, of hide, of the milk of humus; and he could recall being on the roof and being on the ground, but nothing in between, except the words of his unsatisfactory mother that tried to forget themselves, like forgetting her, their utterer.

  So that he was out of the house and on Throckmorton Street’s broad sidewalk of great natural slabs of slate washed and rubbed free of the blood they had attracted in falls and minor kid fights. And he ran fast through the quiet night, joying in the extent of his speed, the length of his bounding stride.

  So that he was at his grandmother Margaret’s house too fast ever to have seen what he later found had seen him—his father coming home under the maples and elms and serried streetlamps of that moonless night of Throckmorton Street past the steep little cement ramps leading up to each house’s gravel or blacktop driveway, that is, had seen him come loping round the side of the house and out across the grass as if toward a football field’s sideline which is the sidewalk in tonight’s fresh opportunity to forget our life if we will because you want to run and like crazy sometimes.

  And he is on his grandmother’s porch near the swing couch and the white-painted woven-wood chairs remembering that his granddad Alexander’s snore could be heard only at a distance of twenty-five or so miles because he was still at Mantoloking, he hadn’t come home with them that afternoon. Jim felt the wooden pillars supporting the porch roof luminously personal with the streetlight beyond, and his right hand was on the ornate front doorknob before he thought to raise his left to the doorbell for he didn’t call on Margaret at this hour, when he heard an angry—wasn’t it angry?—surge of words garbled from inside the house like the only sound within half a mile and he didn’t ring. He took two soft steps to the broad window where the dim light came from the little sitting room beyond the front parlor with all the furniture and the mantelpiece with Alexander’s cigars and two long bookshelves and wonderful long tubular sort of velvet cushions in the corners of the couch, he could smell it all through the window but what was going on was beyond this in the little sitting room, through the door of which Jim saw his grandmother and the wiry, shaky old man from New York who’d come to see her at Mantoloking beach that afternoon, and they were not at each other’s throats but holding each other at arm’s length laughing like before or after hugging as Jim had seen her do with her husband.

  And Jim had a good look at his grandmother’s face changing, and then she seemed to turn her back to him, it was to the window. She wore a light-colored summer dress, there were beads across the back of her neck—which was the way Jim remembered.

  Her legs were pale as he had never before seen them, and she seemed dimly to have said, "... may need you . . . time comes"—or words to that effect, whatever it was—words with a murmured vagueness at this distance and the window between, that betokened great clarity at close range, that is for the Hermit-Inventor of New York to whom she spoke and who didn’t have his dark glasses on now but the old man’s eyes or one of them, the one that was visible, seemed to be looking at Jim and her at the same time so he felt something not terrible about what parents don’t feel they have to tell children.

  So that Jim left the porch, stepped down the steps one by one, went down the walk, and heard his mother’s words and then his own eardrums pounding his brain. And turned away down the sidewalk but stopped to look back at his grandmother and grandfather’s house and a figure standing now in that window Jim had been snooping through. And the figure, just some townbody like anyone known, or on the other hand the Hermit-Inventor of New York whom Jim had always heard of but never before seen except now when (if it was one and the same and it possibly wasn’t) he was very sick but had a nephew, he’d been heard to say at the beach (though Margaret had said precious little about the funny old guy in his khakis and his sneakers with a concave c
hest and long white eyebrows). He was the Hermit-Inventor of New York, and after Jim with irritation stood his ground and stared back without real connection at the face he couldn’t see, he broke into a run back toward his own house but slowed up when two late cars passed slowly like Sunday up the wide street in the direction of, perhaps, the race track or beyond it Lake Rompanemus in the woods where the "piners" lived in poverty. He stopped and found himself walking as if nothing had happened, and the cars passed, and he heard his mother’s words again and looked back at Margaret’s house and then the other way at his own, which he could just make out the lights of. And he looked at one and the other, back and forth. Until he heard a slight ringing in his ears like when he drop-kicked a field goal, smelled horse manure on the cool fall air, heard pounding feet not blocked out by Ira, the Indian halfback from the other, not the race-track, end of town—and got hit in the head as if he were ball and runner by the little enemy guard who moved like crazy, the one weapon the visiting Toms River team had, but the ball was on its way, a tremendous drop-kick field goal which actually Windrow didn’t need in order to win—a day when Jim’s father stood on the sidelines and never made any response when Jim looked at him in those days before protective face masks, but when he came to, he found his father above him with the same look on his face. And so, wandering between the two houses of light in the quiet street, he got around his mother’s awful words to what it was that had first woken him. It had been the phone and he knew his mother was saying, downstairs, what he had heard her many times say but couldn’t remember what, except that it meant that his father was just leaving the newspaper and was walking home and would be home presently though some part of his home he would never reach.

  And hearing his grandmother Margaret call his name down the street, for he was almost home now, he kept walking and didn’t turn back toward her and the Hermit-Inventor of New York, never guessing then that his father had phoned Margaret but assuming rather that the Hermit-Inventor had seen him at the window and Margaret had come out on the porch.

  So that, understanding what had first woken him up, Jim said out loud the words that were trying to forget their utterer: his mother had said, and said to him who was the son she could depend on to look out for himself she said and whom she loved, and loved maybe more but not the way she loved Brad, her only other child: "I have to get out of all this. I just want to die sometimes. I could just disappear into the sea. You look at me as if you could kill me. Don’t worry. It’s not your fault; it’s not your responsibility; it’s not your life."

  "What do you mean?" the boy asked. "Oh your grandmother said she had to talk to me tomorrow," said Sarah. "So what?" replied Jim. "You’re right," said his mother.

  But the dashing, languid interrogator lest those words of a generation ago forget themselves if not their utterer asks, What wasn’t his "responsibility"?—to kill her or to keep her alive?—the words let’s make no bones about it cut two ways if we should wish to implement them, the interrogator adds with the century’s signal neutrality at his fingernails knowing that the torture he can give for fucking around in the words that we use to answer him gon’ hurt us more than him.

  So that, on an evening with two young people still young enough to be "his own," Mayn spots at a resounding city intersection a foreign face that tells him what it could never guess it bore; for, a generation ago, on that night so many months before Jim’s mother did disappear into the future of the sea, the father who phoned Jim’s grandma Margaret downstreet to check that the boy racing whitely across the lawn and down West Throckmorton Street like some thief (but which one?) was headed her venerable way, had been in his slow-moving, only apparently hard-working (right?) march toward the void (not like me or any of my family, was Sarah’s line) so unlike his son Jim in Jim’s sharp eyes that Jim imagined some alter paternity; but then the returning walker saw his father watching from the porch and understood that his father had come home, as usual late, and was no doubt taking a pleasant breather thinking about things, maybe concisely separate news of other people’s lives, before penetrating the awful suspension of his own house—a reliable person, "kind of like a brother to me," Jim’s mother said; and Jim felt (though it then got thrown away—a shadow—into the future of a New York intersection and beyond) that if between two dimly lighted silent porch fronts he himself had no alternative parentage, he must have something in common with that impassive father.

  Alias Missing Conversation

  On this noisy night corner of New York he would say her name out loud almost, but to whom? Did not Chekhov the doctor say a He and She is what you need? How well he knew love’s labor.

  Clara, the mind calls, so clear it’s felt inside the mouth. Clara. Without his wife, he grows specific here on this giant night corner of New York in a fashion that could put her in still more danger were she here. The equal, his Clara, of some Shakespeare lady stronger than all the others if the mysterious stagehand had lived to write her down out of the light in his eye. Clara, he hears Shakespeare call, as if to offer them help here in New York City, or (chuck the husband) help only the brave dame. He had seen it all by the time he passed fifty, fifty-one, more scenes than one might slake a shtick at: yet if he could steep the globe of his teapot to dimaxial Carib tempests, why not a pastoral history of some Chilean kingdom by the sea? Used Verona, Venice, Vienna—a very used Vien indeed (and wasn’t there a Polack in there somewhere?)—so why not The Damsel of New Netherland, why not Fluellen of New Yorkl The great stagehand, spurred by a moment’s clairvoyance or by his own warlike name, Shakespeare, replies that, Ay, he has visited New York some time after Hotspur’s rejuvenation and while composing simultaneously those "Co-supremes" the Phoenix and Turtle-dove and a major work Gertrude s Revenge and in fact had named that small island village of Canarsie Indians New Ork (a few short years later mispronounced by Hal Hudson as New York but in any case ignored by his Dutch employers just as the Florentine John Verrazano’s "New Vera" had been ignored by his French employers) but anyhoo has visited New York but does not know it well, his time was limited and he desired to visit the Painted Desert, the Mesas, and those terrible Mines that when you’re not looking move their mountains from place to place not with kettledrum or bray of traffic but by rumor and dangerous richness of vein, and on returning a few short weeks later to that strangely crenellated East Coast had had to get back to London for rehearsals, though America was a great place to visit . . .

  Clara: he wants her here with him on this street corner across from Penn Station. So he could nod west toward the glimmer-glass colony escalator’d like some insect civilization and cylindering in light the sports-arena complex: and say to Clara who holds his whole history in her heart collapsing or extending time at will, "Scale model" ... or "Do insects play?" So she, a citizen of his exile very watchful lately, answers whatever will bring what he drily sees more to life.

  But she should not be here. Not tonight. Not right here, where it is unclear. Unclear if something superfluous or terribly risky wants something of him—help, even. He would like to speak to someone and fears the dizziness as if it comes to lone tourists endlessly self-conscious in foreign parts. Silence is the real crime against humanity. "Here the Earth still shakes from the old battle—" oh, that Russian lady Akhmatova and her friends they really had it bad, dizzy inside the stomach of the monster capable of accommodating even them, or dizzy just from hunger. Phone Clara to tell her that. But no; make not a phone call.

  He takes up position alone out among the night lights of New York City, never in all his visits only a tourist; and now a resident for—four years, is it?, years measurable even as minerals are measured whose sale might (as the Americans say) "fund" the noble Doctor Allende’s posthumous terrorism or so thinks its putative recipient Pinochet whose name Clara plays on, on and on, her only tedious habit.

  Now tonight a tourist again, when anyone you run into tonight might be a visiting limb of your lamented nation’s intelligence that’s changing its nam
e—going through Changes, as they say here in New York—so even the Chilean navy is getting into the act tracking down the doctor’s son Pascal.

  He takes up position to receive a letter from a man in a New York State prison: Foley, who always has a thing or two to say but this time is passing it through a private mail service.

  Not the one he has conceived that would compete favorably with the U.S. Mail. But one that’s operating now just for privacy, or so this privileged (foreign) correspondent here on the outside figures, standing steady 20/20 but, on this huge avenue corner, always looking out for a dizziness inside himself he would rather leave in the doctor’s office diagnosed by its French name, a distinguished dizziness if the doctor’s right.

  Standing like a domestic tourist from Akron or Tulsa, or a scholar from San Antonio surveying river cities of the world, now on a Sunday night in the nation of New York having taken up position where agreed, he commands Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street. This is it. He wishes he were in Boston, in Cambridge, for a moment in a Chilean friend’s house discussing skiing. Why did he permit this mail drop to be private to the point of clandestine? It might tell the wrong people if they are watching that he communicates secretly with a prison where in turn there is someone they are interested in, though not this merely "interesting" Foley.