Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  Mayn, standing in the kitchen doorway, said, Where did I hear about . . . Brahmins was it? . . . who look at heaven over their shoulder till they get fixed in that position and on account of their neck being twisted, nothing but liquids can get into their stomach.

  Metz did not look at Gordon crossing the trolley tracks and converging on him, and Gordon reached that far side and turned onto the sidewalk a few steps ahead of Maurice Metz and Gordon heard Metz’s steps and quickened his, only to hear himself in step with Metz, who wore those high shoes. Gordon wanted to stop and say "Hi," but they turned into Boerum Place and speeded up.

  Once inside the school building, they went up the stairs two at a time to the second floor: where they separated, Metz into fifth grade, Gordon into sixth. Gordon liked to be early, and sit in his desk with a library book. Or he would read a Street and Smith sports magazine, and Mrs. Hollander would come in and smile across the room at him and whoever else was early and say good morning quietly as if somebody was asleep.

  And Gordon thought of this when he walked to school, whether he took the Clinton-Livingston route or Montague-Court Street-Livingston or sometimes went through the block-long corridor of the Courthouse to Livingston which felt like a shortcut because of the change to marble floors and revolving doors. As the days went on, he felt Maurice closer. They were out of step. At Schermerhorn they took their separate ways across the intersection, and Gordon had Metz in the corner of his eye when they got into the last half-block on the school side of Schermerhorn. In front of the school’s wrought-iron gateway was a seventh-grade girl named Elizabeth who recited poetry in assembly and had an extraordinarily narrow nose with a beautiful, knife-like keel. "Hi, Maurice," she called, and behind Gordon and Metz came a siege of running, panting steps, and as two little kids in corduroy long trousers sprinted between Gordon and Metz, Gordon heard a voice, Bill Bussing’s, call, "Hey, Gord, wait up," and Metz passed Gordon.

  Bill Bussing was near-sighted. His glasses didn’t fall off when he ran relay races in the playground, but they didn’t fit the ridge of his nose right and in study period he was observed with glee by a few of his fellow sixth graders regularly contorting his face when his glasses slipped. He squinched up his nose, lifting his upper lip, curling out his lower. He would do it twice in succession, jamming his eyebrows high all in one violent motion as if he had a stuffed-up nose, and this unconscious, agony-like habit was quite fascinating for minutes at a stretch, partly because his powers of concentration were so great.

  Gordon’s mother told Gordon he would end up wearing glasses if he read in a bad light. Gordon’s father said that he had developed longer and longer arms to read the Lunch Club menu in his office building and, reaching the limit of his development, he had had to acquire reading glasses or go hungry. Bill Bussing bought a container of chocolate milk in the cafeteria but brought his lunch, which he made himself. The breadless sandwich was what he said he’d invented which was stuck-together layers of liverwurst, salami, and baloney, but he would produce also a breaded pork chop in wax paper with a rubber band around it, a withered slab of fried fish, a typewriter-ribbon container of salted nuts, some stuffed olives, shrimps with toothpicks in them, some slick marinated raw carrot sticks—all of which he ate very fast in order to get out to the playground yard but would always offer to trade. Gordon brought some kind of meat sandwich on Thomas’s protein bread with lettuce and butter on it and a blue Thermos of milk, and his mother gave him money for a bowl of soup, but if it was vegetable, which was salty and peppery but basically tasteless, or if it was not tomato or corn, Gordon spent the money on Hershey bars after school. Bill Bussing always got out to the playground ahead of Gordon.

  Maurice Metz was a different person in the playground. He held court against a brick wall and the little red-headed kid Arthur stood with him as if Dickie and others who engaged Metz in conversation to hear him curse in German and translate it and to consult him on whether for instance Hitler had a tank that could go over water were consulting Arthur as well. Arthur nodded as Metz made his predictions; Hitler, for example, Hitler would invent a new and totally secret weapon. Arthur spoke for Metz when he knew the answer, for instance that Metz’s aunt had committed suicide thinking that the Allied invasion of Europe would fail in the end. But Bill Bussing challenged Metz on this and other matters of fact and even went home with Metz after school.

  So when Metz came into the sixth-grade room one dark November afternoon when Mrs. Hollander seemed to have given her desk lamp and the two ceiling lights a narrower, more glowing brightness, and Gordon had finished his homework and was reading a library book that he must have wanted to finish before the bell rang, he was aware of Metz and looked around at the clock above the blackboard and looked at Bill Bussing, who squinched up his face and was greeted by an outbreak of snickers.

  It came back to Gordon. It was three of them. Dick Phillips, who made incredible maps and had a handshake buzzer attached to his middle finger and hidden in his palm so you got a tickly shock that bored right into your hand. And Phoebe McGinnis, who played the violin, was blonde even to her thick eyelashes and seemed not all there but would kiss and had also given Dickie a bloody nose. And Jim Gurley, who played quarterback on the Lower School football team with a tendency to hog the ball, and lived with his mother who was divorced.

  Gordon stared at Dick Phillips. "He can’t help it if his glasses slip; you shouldn’t laugh at him, you shouldn’t do that, he can’t help it if he does that stuff with his face."

  "What stuff?" Bill Bussing asked.

  "You were laughing yourself," said Dick Phillips.

  "Hell I was," said Gordon, looking away into Bill Bussing’s eyes. But Gordon was already hearing Mrs. Hollander call out that if they had something to say they should tell it to the rest of us—and study hall had fifteen minutes to go, and it could go on longer if "you people" couldn’t tell time—and if we couldn’t tell time maybe some of us shouldn’t be in sixth grade.

  Mayn said, "This is the lady whose daughter ..."

  "Yes," said Gordon; "Mrs. Hollander." Who, hearing Gordon’s last words, said, "Gordon, what did I hear you say?" but so that Gordon knew that he wouldn’t have to repeat it. Furthermore, she was talking to Maurice Metz, who stood at gangly parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, and when she got up he was taller than she; she took Maurice Metz to the bulletin board and together they looked at the clippings tacked there—white land, black sea, cross-hatched no-man’s lands. Metz’s hands were still clasped behind his back. Bussing was still looking at Gordon and now went back to his book but looked up at Gordon once more and did a squinch with nose, mouth, cheeks, and forehead to end all squinches, simultaneously turning the page.

  It’s the war movies I remember, Mayn said.

  Gordon and Metz might speak in the playground, but they did not speak during their tacit race to school in the morning. Some mornings, that is. If Gordon happened to be with Patti Galdston or Dickie, it was no race; same if Gordon and Metz came in sight of each other beyond a point three-quarters of the way down the block of Livingston Street which Gordon entered from the Courthouse he used as a shortcut from Court Street rain or shine.

  And like the rule of walking, they seemed to agree not to communicate, not to acknowledge what was going on. Which made the race more urgent but less official as if, being separate, they could not estimate each other’s position but raced nonetheless, increasing the pace, leaning forward, so Gordon might feel his feet quick and fast as hands, as though his feet were connected to his shoulders.

  "Who won?" asked Mayn, interested.

  Sometimes—well, Gordon and Maurice Metz wouldn’t have a dead heat, so what happened was that at some point in the home stretch one or the other would withdraw. That is, by doing the last thirty yards at a run—say, to greet a friend coming from the other direction. Or being hailed from behind or looking back to see a friend who had not hailed him—once, in Gordon’s case, Dickie; once, Straussie; and so on. But these
endings were still victory or defeat, and there came a day when both boys went right to the gate of the school which was parallel to the sidewalk, and, being on the outer curbside, Gordon had to find an extra couple of steps turning right in order to tie Metz; but knew at that instant that he wanted to hit Metz with a right-arm sweeper, sweep him away with the longest arms ever seen. And, abreast at the gate, the two looked at each other and, once inside the gate and going up the stone steps, Metz said breathlessly to Gordon, "I have played chess with Bussing yesterday. He is pretty good."

  "You remember that?" said Mayn.

  Yes, Gordon thought he did. He’d played chess only a few times with his father, who spotted him a queen, and yet he at once without thinking offered to beat Metz.

  "Spotted you a queen?" said Mayn.

  "I’m afraid so," said Gordon.

  By now it was December. Gordon and Chick still played touch in the street and blew on their fingers when they were going to pass. Gordon spent a lot of time in Chick’s basement practicing passing the basketball behind their backs. Gordon saw Dickie in the cafeteria and said he would meet him after school. It was one of the days they didn’t take the blue-and-gray bus out to the school athletic field in the afternoon. It was a Wednesday. Dickie said he had pageant rehearsal. Gordon forgot after school and gave Patti Galdston the slip and waited for Dickie.

  Then Metz came out with little Margie who was eating something, a juicy pear, some cookies, and was not hunching up her shoulders and giggling; and when Gordon said, "They had pageant practice, didn’t they?" Margie said, "Who said?" and Metz remarked that there was no pageant practice today.

  "All this—" said Gordon—"I want to think that the last event here was my father suddenly, or fairly suddenly, dying, you know?, but that’s not true."

  Maurice Metz had been invited by Mrs. Hollander to visit the sixth grade and give a talk on his home in Alsace-Lorraine. Dickie appeared with Metz one day at Chick’s house when Chick and Gordon were shooting baskets under the low ceiling of the basement playroom. Chick said, Let’s go outside, and Metz, who seemed to have met Chick already though Gordon didn’t ask, and who laughed at his own inability to throw a football without it wobbling all over the place, kicked it halfway down the block where it bounced with a sonorous, metal-bending blat off the top of a parked car. They played soccer in Europe. Metz had to go home to take care of his baby sister. Dickie said Maurice had told Miss Gore he was ready to bow out of the pageant if the first Joseph recovered. Chick and Gordon shot baskets and played Monopoly upstairs on the living-room rug with Chick’s sister until Gordon’s mother called up to say dinner was on the table and where was Gordon?

  Gordon—could he have some more water?—did avoid his friends in order to intersect with Metz en route to school. (Was there any water in there the first time? said Mayn.)

  But Gordon spent the night at Dickie’s and walked to school with Dickie the morning Metz was due to speak to the sixth grade on Europe where he had recently come from with his baby sister and his father who according to Gordon’s mother had been a lawyer and was starting all over, and his mother, who made Metz eat lots of apples and oranges which he put into his lunch box which was the heaviest in school.

  That night Gordon’s mother called home from Manhattan and called Chick’s and reached Gordon at Dickie’s. She and Gordon’s father had been to the doctor and would be having dinner in Manhattan and might be a little late. Gordon said he’d stay overnight at Dickie’s. This was before the wholesale domestic use of sleeping bags, but Gordon distinctly recalled telling his mother before asking Dickie if it was O.K.—having at once decided he would stay —then putting it to Dickie’s mother.

  So Gordon stayed there. So he didn’t hear the news until he got to school the next morning, when he and Dickie parted company in the hall outside the fifth- and sixth-grade rooms.

  "What news?" said Mayn.

  That Mrs. Hollander wouldn’t be in school that day because her daughter had been killed.

  "What was her name?" Mayn asked abruptly.

  "Helena."

  "Did Metz come in and give his talk?" Mayn asked.

  No, and no one at Dickie’s house complained that Gordon at the crack of dawn had scissored out of Dickie’s parents’ morning paper a Jap-prison-camp-atrocity story.

  "Was Maurice Metz Jewish?" asked Mayn.

  "Oh sure," said Gordon; "but . . ." none of that got talked about; was it even in the newspapers? It wasn’t the type of thing that went up on the bulletin board; and when Metz in January did get to give his talk to the sixth grade, there was probably nothing about Jews.

  "We didn’t see how it could have happened, the Hollander kid falling over like that like there was nothing holding her on that roof. I mean, you might get hit by a car . . ."; and Gordon’s father when the subway train came in always looked behind him and stepped back; and you might drown, as Gordon’s grandmother nearly did of indigestion when she was swimming in the middle of a Cape Cod pond at eighty; or be in an air crash or be burned to a cinder in your sleep or breathe escaping gas in your sleep ("escaping," as they automatically always said, but it was going into you); or come down with spinal meningitis and die over the weekend. But tumbling over the barrier-wall of an apartment-house roof?

  "Awful," said Mayn. "Almost embarrassing."

  "Well I was embarrassed in my dreams," said Gordon.

  The end of Mayn’s leather valise was visible through the doorway to his foyer.

  "You remember a dream from 1944?" said Mayn.

  Gordon guessed it was 1944. Remember? Why, by having it many times.

  Mayn said he was as bad about dreams as he was about jokes.

  A newspaperman?

  ‘Fraid so.

  Newspapermen had endless stories, Gordon said.

  Oh all right he had a million, Mayn said, but it was a nine-to-five job.

  Gordon said Mayn was kidding him—newsmen were like private eyes.

  Yeah, and like sailors, right?

  Gordon had had about Mayn a "good feeling"—Gordon heard Norma say she had a "good feeling" about herself, or about Clara the wife of the Chilean economist who took books to inmates in a New York State prison, or Lucille—she picked it up from her group. But also Gordon had to get out of here. Away from Mayn’s waiting, his patient humor.

  "But my brother was the one who dreamed," said Mayn, for a moment talking; "walked in his sleep. Came wandering into my room in the middle of the night just before I almost ran away from home."

  "This is . . . ?" asked Gordon.

  "—Jersey," said Mayn, "Monmouth County? and soon’s I went to bed, well there he was in my room. What—ten, eleven. He’s telling me this stuff and I thought he was awake standing there sound asleep. I thought he was cracking up. But you know, he was asleep; said he had this feeling I was going away."

  "Your brother still visits you in his sleep?"

  "I’m not home then," said Mayn.

  "O.K., who else visits you?" said Gordon, laughing, but he had pulled himself forward to the edge of his armchair.

  Mayn was looking at Gordon with sharp puzzlement, and Gordon through his own impatient uncertainty heard Mayn saying that that was spoken like a lawyer.

  Unemployed lawyer, Gordon thought, and thought he hadn’t mentioned what he was, had he?

  Mayn said that while he still felt he didn’t have regular dreams sleeping at night, that sort of thing, he was starting to think somewhere in his head he did have a recurrent think-dream if you want to call it that—full of surplus equipment (can you beat that?), but he traded in some of the details for others, he said; it was anybody’s guess what it all meant, but one thing he knew, the memory that kept showing now and then if you could catch it, split-screen, obscure movie tricks, was paying a visit to one’s one-time torturer: there was your title for this dream, a daydream, O.K.?, and Mayn had it sometimes, he was pretty certain he didn’t dr^m-dream but he had those waking daydreams. It ought to be about vengeance, right?,
and he knew this during the dream; but he didn’t avenge himself on the torturer: either his tongue had been removed during that previous bout of torture so he couldn’t speak, or his arms were nowhere to be found having also disappeared during torture, which meant he fitted cleanly into the doorway of the now-unemployed torturer’s furnished room. The fellow lay on a cot smoking his last cigarette, and Mayn knew, armless, that the torturer, or former torturer, would try to bum one when this cigarette was finished, for Mayn was about to be shot out of a surplus cannon to where he would be different.

  "There’s the circus," said Gordon.

  "That’s Barnum and Bailey in New York City," said Mayn, "the space man in the white aviator’s helmet. I got taken to see it; but our own local circus had the one tent set up on ten acres that the town electrician rented to the town on special occasions down behind the water tower between the Catholic cemetery and an applejack distillery; my grandmother took me there to see an Indian bareback rider."

  "But have you ever been tortured?" asked Gordon.

  Mayn seemed to look off into some corner of the large, sparsely furnished room. "No," he said. "Of course not."

  "But you’ve known those who have been?"

  "I knew a man who did it for a living."

  "Went through it, or administered it?"

  "I’ve known both," said Mayn humorously.

  "Where?" said Gordon.

  "What about the sixth-grade bulletin board?" said Mayn.

  "The bulletin board?" asked Gordon.

  "You had turned away from the European theater," said Mayn, "and were concentrating on the Pacific, am I right?"

  Indeed.

  And at that time—in the days of Caesar Augustus, Gordon wanted to say—for he heard that name uttered again and again in memory by a fifth grader with a watery cold, whose face was secretly lighted by the lectern, for the boy whoever he was was reading his allotment of the Bible story that narrated the Christmas pageant the morning of the last school day before vacation. The whole school was present, parents in the back benches and side benches of the old meeting house—Quaker meeting house, pews really, and aisles dark with small electric candles moving beneath faces—lines from one of the Gospels—"There went out a decree," that was it, "from Caesar Augustus."