Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Mayn asked for enlightenment here and there, and Gordon saw the tolerant man Norma had seen, and this came into Gordon’s thoughts together with a magnetism that seized him as if all this stuff twenty-five years ago and more were easier and flowed better than the untenable future which was now. But he didn’t stop; he remembered that Mayn had covered arms-control talks and had a father in New Jersey and had recently returned, Norma said, from the Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and knew someone who’d been on the cover of a magazine—all this from Norma, who always remembered.

  Not that Gordon didn’t; but here he had found himself unexpectedly in sixth grade and with a stranger. Gordon later didn’t know if he really had had in him at the time this suspicion that the event of his skipping a grade would be covered over and infiltrated by the years on either side of it and it would practically get skipped itself.

  But an event when it happened: everything got drawn to it, and bounced back off it.

  Understood later.

  Mayn said he knew what Gordon meant. This seemed kind, for Gordon had been unclear.

  As much too late as it was too late to know if the sixth-grade teacher with the rouge on her cheeks, and the quick movements, and the small, round face and dark eyes, Mrs. Hollander, had a view of life. Or what view may come and grow out of a time of horror into life again. The woman herself when she once or twice spoke of it, could speak of it so succinctly, though slowly, that her gathering distance from it could have been from the beginning a measure of time besides that first blindingly increasing space. It became overwhelmingly simple, a cause of understanding.

  The roof of her apartment house had a comparatively low barrier-wall around it and one day her child, her little girl, not so little—which was why it happened—had tumbled over this barrier-wall where she was playing ball, and fallen six floors to the street where some boys were playing, and had been killed, though not instantly. And Mrs. Hollander was there on the roof and had called to the child to stop.

  She said her child had been old enough to know better, and what she could not get over was that her girl’s last reaction to life had been—she didn’t know—"terror," she said, as if for a moment she were not the mother.

  Gordon had known almost as soon as it happened. But some ten years later, after he had moved to another school, a boy’s school, and graduated and gone to college, this woman Mrs. Hollander said the very thing about death and terror to him that she had said to his parents, who had liked her for her strictness and humor and an awful bravery that was maybe a secret comprehension and control of what had happened to her in this incident of her nine-year-old daughter who could run so fast. Maybe the kid’s reaction feeling herself go over would have been simple shock. But Gordon wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Hollander.

  Gordon sometimes said too much. Mrs. Hollander had told him so. She’d known how to. She’d been good to him and he’d been a favorite of hers.

  Mrs. Hollander was the sixth-grade teacher when Gordon skipped into sixth. He had lost a friend or two at the moment when she entered his life— or thought he had lost a friend or two. And somewhere in there he had almost learned to keep quiet.

  Because at this time in his life some things unsaid hurt. But hadn’t hurt less when they got said.

  One thing especially. Which Gordon had only thought he minded.

  Thought? asked Mayn so quietly it might have been thought.

  Well, he thought he minded, but later decided he didn’t.

  Minded what? said Mayn.

  It came out; it had to. You don’t say that kind of thing yourself. Which was why when Dickie said it as they bounced a ball between them walking down Montague Street, with the harbor in view out ahead of them, the thing Dickie said made Gordon feel like shrugging and saying, "I’ll see ya," and turning in at the paper store to see if a new Submariner comic was in—the sleek hero with the slanted eyes and the long, adept face.

  He’d heard the words all day, that first day he’d skipped. Heard them in the boys’ washroom, in the playground where he was kidded about skipping and had good comebacks out in the open air. Heard them almost in the insect scratching of steel nibs and in the pauses when they were being dipped in the blue-stained volcanoes on each desk, and now and then a unanimous pause came as if the amplified insects had taken off.

  "You thought that then?" Mayn said.

  "I think it now," said Gordon. He’d heard the words also when he and his new sixth-grade classmates some of whom he’d already known had passed down the hall to the stairs and the floor below for Art at one-fifteen, passed the fifth-grade doorway and a couple of kids who were his classmates the day before looked up from their desks at this activity in the hall and saw him, they must have, and the change had been like nothing except in the greasy wood smell of the old, dark floors and the corn soup coming up sweet and humid from the cafeteria in the basement of the school, a decision had passed without his taking it—either sixth grade or fifth grade; not both.

  But the actual words in the air hadn’t been said until Dickie said them coming home.

  Dickie said, "So you must be smarter than me."

  A heavy conclusion they had put together through shared thought.

  Well, Dickie was a wise guy. What did you answer to a thing like that?

  Gordon was a quieter wise guy. The right answer passed into his head, but he said, "There’s lots of ways of being dumb."

  Yes, the right answer had passed into Gordon’s head and out.

  Dickie swore at Gordon for the "dumb" remark, yet was kind of serious. "So you must be smarter than me."

  Gordon said to Dickie, "Come on, that’s not what it means. I happen to read a lot—"

  "—a lot of comics," said Dickie.

  "—and I always was a good speller, and I work hard. And I read a lot," said Gordon.

  Dickie said—and they laughed at this—"I mean, you must be smarter than I thought you were."

  Mayn laughed. Gordon liked getting a laugh.

  Gordon’s parents, really his father, had put the decision to Gordon the night before—definitely a Wednesday—and so what the hell, it was a decision already made. Yet then taken, he felt, by him behind his own back. His father said the teacher Miss Gore thought fifth grade wasn’t enough of a challenge for him (or was she fed up with his whispering?) and his father agreed, and sixth grade would not be too much for Gordon even with the year already begun; and skipping a grade, he’d be that much ahead.

  They were into November already. His father pointed this out. Gordon had been thinking about the fifth-grade Christmas pageant. It had been cast and he had ended up an angel and not Joseph. It was by secret vote of the class but also by choice of the teacher. Parts had been announced by Miss Gore, and two girls had looked at each other and one girl who got what she wanted had put her hands over her face, and Gordon had thought Goddamn it he’d wanted to be Joseph and should have been, he was taller than all but one of the boys in the fifth grade, and he had wanted to be Joseph but was going to be an angel in the pageant instead. Or this was what he was still angry about when his father told him he was going to be skipped into sixth grade starting the next morning if it was O.K. with him. At the Christmas pageant the sixth grade would carry electric candles like the rest of the Lower School except for the fifth grade, who always played the parts and took turns reading out the Bible story at a lectern with one small shaded lamp up at the front of the auditorium, and those who had parts wore costumes and stood in a tableau of the stable and the manger, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men, angels and two little kids from kindergarten to complete the picture. Gordon was out of it now. He didn’t mention this to his father and didn’t mention it to his mother.

  So the next day happened, and so did the days after it. He was in sixth grade. Everything else was the same. Sixth grade was like new clothes, a new book. But seemed the same. It was like a privilege. One he deserved but now didn’t need to earn. Though he had to make up fifth-grade work he
would now miss.

  Mrs. Hollander helped him. He felt like her favorite for a while. His father corrected his answers and, checking Gordon’s scratch paper, showed him a trick for finding the larger denominator necessary for adding and subtracting fractions. It was pretty easy. His father said Gordon was careless, Gordon felt it was hard to argue that one, and yet it wasn’t fair, and there was one time when his father would not say what was wrong but sent him back to his room to figure it out. His father had stayed home in bed for a week in October and read the newspaper and said that we’d missed our chance with Willkie in ‘40, and Dewey was the next President, and when he got sick again in November he took to his bed again (and Gordon’s mother would talk for a long time on the phone to a friend of hers), and at school Mrs. Hollander thumb-tacked news clippings to the sixth-grade bulletin board every morning with pictures of Spitfires taking off against German fighter planes with crosses on them, and barrage balloons over England and maps of Europe, and on Monday she put up the Sunday Times "News of the Week" current-events quiz that Gordon’s father usually got twenty out of twenty on.

  "Can I cut a picture out of the paper to put on the bulletin board at school?"

  His father was in bed and said Gordon could wait till he was finished with the paper. Which meant the clipping would be a day late. But then his father asked what it was about and when he told his father it was current events and it was a picture of a tank and a map of Europe, his father said, Very well, if he cut it out neatly—and asked if they were studying regular history in the sixth grade.

  No, Gordon said, social studies.

  His father said Gordon’s school had always had a good reputation.

  Gordon didn’t tell his father sixth grade was pretty much the same only more interesting.

  Yet the girls, who were nice to him, were not the same. He liked them more. More than Sue in fifth grade, who smelled of banana one day and orange another; more than Margie, with little pigtails, who giggled a lot, giggled up and down the scale every time no matter what.

  The sixth-grade girls giggled too. But had more to giggle about, he thought. He looked at them across the room when they went to get help. They helped him catch up on fractions, which were magical, and decimals, which seemed ominous and larger. The girls and he still compared handwriting scripts and when he read a story in class about a plane that crashed and the pilot walked through the steaming jungle for days and met up with a tribe that rode on crocodiles and ate flying fish that flew from vine to vine and had a medicine man that predicted the future when the jungle would be cleared for an airfield, the girls said it was the best anyone had written in the class, the natives would travel around the world to America, China, or Paris, and as for the pilots who flew into the new airfield, before landing they would have to learn the laws of the natives, especially if, as a new friend Bill Bussing pointed out, they were faking their own death to disappear and then collect the insurance.

  Gordon’s father said it was good, and asked if he’d written his book report on Kipling’s Kim. The answer was Yes, and Gordon said Kim wasn’t interesting. Gordon really liked Penrod and Penrod and Sam, they were easy to get into, you wanted the book not to end. Gordon said he wouldn’t have minded living in a small town like Penrod’s.

  Gordon remembered his drink. Mayn lighted a cigarette, inhaled, and said that he had grown up in a town in New Jersey and couldn’t wait to get out.

  Gordon said one spring he and his mother and father went to a hotel in the country for a week where they had horses and a pool table, and Gordon who was always a ravenous eater hadn’t eaten for five days, more or less, while they were there and recalled no more about it except the place was nice and he couldn’t eat when he got to the table and the night they got home to Brooklyn his mother bought him a Virginia-ham-on-rye sandwich at the delicatessen the minute they got home to the city and he ate it as if he hadn’t tasted food in a week.

  What was going on? Mayn wanted to know, but Gordon said he didn’t know—maybe something with his parents.

  Penrod’s small town was a lot of fun, Gordon was saying, but the school Penrod went to wasn’t a good one, which reminded Gordon that his parents had proposed to him once that he go to boarding school. At boarding school you could smoke, but Gordon could smoke in Dickie’s backyard in Brooklyn Heights behind two old abandoned doors that leaned against two oil drums. Gordon went to Friends School. Mayn had known an ambulance man who was a Quaker, and his own father was thinking of buying into a very ritzy retirement home—actually he’d been retired for twenty-five years, in Mayn’s opinion—run by the Quakers near Wilmington. Gordon said that his school had had a Quaker meeting sometimes on one of the assembly days. A girl in seventh grade got up and recited a poem about humans that turned into deer and Miss Gore surprised Gordon and Dickie by standing up in the side aisle and, with a lot of emphasis, reciting a poem by Walt Whitman, who had used to live right there in Brooklyn Heights as Gordon’s father said when Gordon told him. And in between were the silences when you looked into space and tried not to catch the wrong eye and were supposed to be sitting silently and thinking. You were on your own, but that wasn’t what it felt like. Gordon learned years later that Quaker meeting was non-hierarchical—no leader.

  All in all, the girls were different in sixth grade. Sixth grade was more interesting. He asked Mayn what he was doing telling him all this, and Mayn in a friendly way didn’t know. One day when he went home with the sixth-grade brain, Bill Bussing, who had the Erector Set that came with the motor, Gordon realized that Dickie hadn’t been in the downstairs hall when school let out because much later when he came down his street Dickie was playing football with the other guys including Chick. Chick went to public school and was Gordon’s best friend. Chick organized things but never said much. He was tall and rough but a peacemaker, and when they stopped for a car to come by, Chick nodded to the driver. The public school in the Heights was P.S. 8 and it was a joke in those days.

  Gordon got onto Chick’s side; Straussie, who was small but murder on defense, went home; the game went from manhole to manhole, and once Dickie slammed Gordon like a hammer in the ribs when it was two-hand touch supposedly, and, a moment later, Gordon threw a bullet right at Dickie, who shied, and the football bounced off Dickie’s back and somebody else grabbed it and Chick, who was tall for his age, called for it before Dickie could do anything. A play or two later Dickie said he had to go, he was going to get killed when he got home.

  When it was dark and Dickie had gone in and so had Jim and Chick’s sister Jennifer and Frankie, who could walk on his hands on the sidewalk, and two more cars had parked along this old street of brownstones where houses on one side backed onto the harbor, Gordon threw a pass too high that grazed the globe of the streetlamp—they were lower in those days—but Chick, who was gangly but could stop and go the other way in a second, managed to hold up and catch the ball, sensing where the parked car was.

  Chick asked if Gordon would be home after school the next day and Gordon said yes, knowing if he wanted to he could stop over at Bill Bussing’s to look at two model planes that were suspended from the ceiling and actually were no longer of interest to Bill.

  Chick started to pass and stopped. ‘‘Dickie said you skipped a grade."

  Mayn said, "You mean you hadn’t told him?"

  Chick never asked about Gordon’s school.

  "Yeah. I’m in sixth now."

  Chick aimed his left shoulder toward Gordon and threw a low bullet which Gordon caught at his knees, a perfect spiral.

  "Is it hard?"

  "Medium."

  "Oh yeah?"

  "I got to catch up on fractions."

  "We’re starting on fractions."

  Chick was adopted, and his father, who made a lot of money at the Squibb Company plant right down the hill next to the Brooklyn Bridge, believed in public schools.

  "I think it’s just more of the same old stuff," Gordon told Chick.

  Chick never had
as much homework as Gordon. They did not discuss school. Chick got strapped by his mother once in a while and his mother gave him orange juice for supper instead of milk. (The Squibb Company made tooth powder, said Mayn. That’s right, said Gordon.) Chick was faster and stronger, but Gordon liked to think he could catch a fly ball better and pass a football more accurately, neither of which might be true he also realized. They hung around Chick’s basement, where there was a basketball basket just under the low ceiling. Chick was nice to his sister Jennifer and the three of them often went to the movies on Saturday at the St. George Playhouse on Pineapple Street where the matron in a white, nurse-like uniform didn’t give them any trouble if they sneaked into the center section and didn’t sit in the children’s section on the right. (Ah yes, said Mayn.) Chick and his sister were allowed to go on Sunday.

  Gordon’s mother took him to buy a new pair of corduroy trousers because she said he needed them but really, Gordon thought, because he’d just gone into sixth grade. The Fox movie theater beyond their Heights neighborhood up near the Manhattan Bridge was around the corner from the department store, so they went to the movies and when they got home Gordon’s father who was sick wasn’t home in bed. But he could not have gone to the office because it was Saturday. When he did come home, it was just as the cream of spinach soup his mother made was beginning to smell sweet. His father had been to see Judge Hume, who was also sick, and he arrived home saying with a smile and a pat on the shoulder that they had decided that Gordon ought to study law. Gordon had never seen his father like this, alone and in a sport jacket, a gray-and-blue-checked soft cashmere he had bought when he and Gordon’s mother were in Bermuda.

  Ah yes, said Mayn quietly, remembering something—or nothing.

  Gordon’s father had had enough of lying in bed and he was going to church tomorrow and the office on Monday which was only one stop on the subway under the river and he had so much to catch up on he couldn’t waste time waiting to feel better. Gordon’s mother didn’t approve. His father kissed her. He asked Gordon how it was going. Gordon had a map to make for Monday. Sixth grade was O.K., he said.