Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  As did the Princess in another direction, only to be followed by the Navajo Prince bearing a Colt revolver to protect the beloved who had left him so he forgot how much else she had really left. So that—so that ... the Prince’s mother, until now lifeless for a week and a day yet fresh as a sprig of wild bean, found that new-grown eye in the fountain-top of her head uninjured receiving her same demons in new eye-sized forms of incandescent picture: and she came to life calling out that she had been abandoned by the Princess from the East even more than by her son the Prince, yet was very much alive (three little words Margaret wrote to her anxious editor-familias from the Great Salt Lake in the summer of ‘93, for she knew he was deeply concerned about the failure of the National Cordage Company in May and the most extensive troop movements since the Civil War and the drop in the gold reserves that he professed not to understand except it threatened ‘‘paper" and had come on Shakespeare’s birthday or nearabouts)—

  still very much alive in sun the like of which, dear father, I had never seen—heading south tomorrow while from the mountains twinkling with dog-tooth violets this City seems embowered in shade.—I tell you it is laid out in squares called blocks, forty rods square, the sidewalks sixteen foot wide, the streets lighted by two hundred gas lamps. Industry here includes slat-fences, mattresses, scroll-sawing, turning, type, and bone-ash, not to mention a vinegar works. The glass works employ seventy-five men—make fruit jars, demijohns, vials, soda water and appolinaris bottles—can turn out 550 dozen bottles a day. Of newspapers, we have (I catch myself speaking like a Salt Laker when I will be long gone by the time you receive this) 3 dailies, 2 semi-weeklies, 5 weeklies, 3 semi-monthlies, and 9 monthlies, and if the Territorial Library boasts 4000 volumes, many scientific, you will like to know that the Masonic claims near twice that number. And so you see, dearest father, I am very much alive, unlike the whales a California party planted here in the Great Salt Lake—never suspecting (because Californians prefer quick magic to slow)—

  Margaret hastened to inform her father, whose anxiety conveyed itself to her not only by telegraph but in the caress of her own quill’s brown-welling point across the watermark-graced page ruled only by her oblong green and ink-stained blotter lowered line by line faster and faster down until we lost track and must remember what we didn’t know we knew—never suspecting that, as an English financier and furniture maker whose house up in Brigham Street had a sublime view down upon the city and steeply up behind along the slope of the mountains told Margaret, a man here has found in the desert through an Indian woman named Manuel—who shampoos with it regularly and with it fixed a sore of his that’s virtually inside his body—an oil, or wax, contained by the pods of a hardy bush, such that said oil if one could grow sufficient of said plant will light a lamp as brightly as any whale, while what has happened to th’ willing though transplanted whales is unknown. Yet no man here, where clarity belies distance in the mountains of the land and hence anon on water too, has seen leviathan blow, who may by now be all fish if not thoroughly salted (if not to taste, to travel well—a trip more total not to say saltier than any old ocean can imagine rivers to bleed our rocks salt-free): so, as we already remember, those whales, those rather tragic power-pusses, took a wrong turn and got totaled, if one still says that of whales at this late date.

  And so you see, Margaret said, on her way further west, I am very much alive—which was what in the dark of early June half a century later Jim’s grandma called to his granddad, who had called into the night yard through the bedroom screen he’d installed the afternoon before, "Margie?" (as if it might be only her voice) "... you all right?"—not, "Margaret, who’s out there?" when a pickup truck its trademark audible in a tailgate’s loose hinge passed, headed downtown.

  But very much alive was what the Navajo Prince’s mother had become, and Jim felt this more curiously and sadly on Brad’s Day (which came more than a year after the June night-yard pyjama-bottom scene, for school had started anew by the time of Brad’s Day and the atomic bombs had got themselves dropped, no connection)—Brad lay on the floor of the music room learning to sink or swim.

  "Very much alive" (Margaret called back at the distant second-floor bedroom screen behind which was her concerned husband Alexander, who now began to lightly sneeze as if it were animal dawn, and the boy in pyjama botts and his grandmother with her hair way down le back of her nightgown snickered out there in the night yard; snickered at the sound, until she like a girl took his hand (but he gently escaped) and told him, "Come on," then stopped short and Jim could swear he heard Alexander’s bedsprings depressed—and she informed him that, having perhaps come to life because the two young lovers had flown (first one, then the other), the Navajo Prince’s mother said she heard the bird as the thick cloth of Darkness itself, and knew the foreign princess was not aboard the bird on its way back to the national mountains of Choor. And it was not known there except to the Anasazi healer and two or three others that somehow the lady now alive but with her demons back used the song-like voice of Owl Woman, "In the great night my heart will go out, / Toward me the darkness comes rattling ..."

  But on Brad’s Day, with Alexander reading out of a book and bending to pat poor Brad on his heaving shoulder blade, but now seating himself at the piano and playing lightly and sketchily "Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet"! when the boys had never seen him even try to play a piano or any other instrument so that Brad rolled onto his side and stared at Alexander’s back with wretched face—Jim tasted that damned egg essence! And he would have sprung upon his shitty little bastard of a brother who was taking up everybody’s time, for crying out loud, except Jim knew that in the dark yard a year and a month and more ago he had slipped his hand out of his grandmother’s as they both heard one more screened sneeze—a last little irritation—Jim had been moved—and went toward the palely glimmering white trim of the back porch quicker than Margaret who suddenly lagged, elderly or measuredly female; and Jim was moved to feel a big something so he nearly ran down the street to his own house—father, brother Brad, mother: moved by the Navajo lady coming back to life alone with her buzzing bonnetful of shifting demons and others.

  So that on Brad’s Day while the grandfather played well enough for Brad to tell him to please not touch that piano—then Brad went back face down on the floor sobbing but not moving—Jim would have asked his grandfather if all that Navajo story-stuff predicted the future: for they were now without the mother Sarah, who had told Jim to go away and not be afraid: which was not a fact like what Alexander Big-Shoe Granddad asked Brad, for he got along with little Brad, What was Dizzy Dean’s middle name? and a few years later, What was the name of Bernhardt’s dog? when Brad was in high school.

  Jim was no walking encyclopedia but he could ask his grandfather what was Harry Truman’s middle name and have his elder wait for a whole minute with his lips drawn back above his teeth before giving up. Only, a moment later, to ask what general (clue: he’s Mexican) had part of his body buried with full military honors while he was still alive and kicking?

  They now heard Margaret taking off her brown raincoat in the hall— brown? intones the interrogator (but in the interest of further information suspends punishment)—America may be second to none in acoustics and/or sound, but what is the sound of brown?

  —taking her time before they saw her at the threshold of the music loom surveying her husband become musician (who had introduced Jim once to the words "She’s always been a giver, not a taker"). Alexander turned round toward her on the piano stool as if he had been practicing; and Brad was on the floor snuffling and groaning, making noise in his sleep almost(!) or might have been about to receive a kick from Jimmy. Who was ready to kick him when he was down where he belonged, wriggling and heaving there on the shallow lake of his mother’s music-room floor, shades of a Sarasate tune they used in the movies to make you pity a sad scene (though no one can make you feel anything, it’s what you want to feel . . .). "The sun’s getting ready to come out," she sai
d; "how’re you feeling?" she asked Alexander and she knelt beside Brad who did not stop sobbing or moaning. She laid her hand on his moving shoulder blade. She listened not for his pulse but, Jim was clear, for what she herself thought.

  "Water’s still warm over t’ Lake Rompanemus," said Alexander.

  "Welcome to it," said Margaret; "the wind is not warm."

  Brad was set apart; he had done it himself, it didn’t matter why, and he maybe didn’t know; and Jim wanted no more to do with his grandmother’s histories because they now made him question what had become of his mother.

  (This had gone far enough, asserts the interrogator, we know next to nothing of the suicide’s intentions: we suspect she was about to be found out as having yielded birth some years before to a natural child, but we know that she was not for long if ever moved by the father of Brad Mayn and we detected in her a purpose at the beach looking out past Jim so that he could not look both at her and at what attracted her attention if anything, that is, beyond the perhaps lonely horizon, a purpose that turned in her some calculated aim beyond death, no more a rendezvous with a Jersey Coast blower whale than with an enemy sub canvassing postwar coves from America to America, Liberty Island to Penguin Paradise—and at that very seaside point we have thrust upon our attention the fact that that current manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York appears with Bob Yard and walks down the beach and back with his old friend Margaret who in the person of a Princess once found sanctuary through him upon wending her way back to the East: yet you betrayed the fact that to give her in the form of the Princess sanctuary he turned her (you can’t turn anybody without their consent) into a thing (You said it, chimes a voice with a bare body in the Body-Self Workshop circle, a thing), but wait, says the smiling interrogator (who discovers he too can have charm), a "thing" (says he) accessible only to meteorologists: from which she could be returned to her original form only by the same knowledge, and come to think of it we have on our staff government meteorologists who—but no, forget I said that—and our interrogator seems some piece of us, or his relations, albeit tortured in the next room in order to be not all wrong any more than he has been all bad, a’torturing though he sometime be.)

  Yet had Margaret’s histories (otherwise free of any news of whales, which she admitted she had never read a word about) foretold the future? For wasn’t that what you learned from reading the history books? His own father said so, and when he got time (which he officially never did, because of his editorial devotions to the family that he had married into without his bride having to "change her name"), he read Ulysses S. Grant: on the subject of winners and losers, however firmly the South, like Mexico after Chapultepec, claimed there was other loss in battle besides the battle itself.

  Jim’s father said this to a visitor on the front porch one day, many months before Brad’s Day. Jim lay hidden in the cool earthen space under the porch, latticed by the light that came through the diamond openings of the diagonally cross-hatched lattice slats, himself and the damp-scented cavern. The visitor’s reply stuck for years in Jim’s memory but he did not summon it later, and so perhaps could not, from the shades cast by the light of freedom and loss, while the visitor, whose heavy shoes creaked and tapped their toe tips directly above Jim’s eyes, listened to Jim’s father observe some dull thing about bias and the reading of history and the newspaper business, and replied that his host had always worked hard at toleration: which precipitated a rare guffaw from Jim’s father and thence from the helpless son supine below the battlements a cough really due to the visitor’s convergent (porch-high) fart during his host’s laugh plus the farter’s murmured "Did you hear something?" Which words coincided with Jim’s cough yet accidentally foretold it, though it was less cough than laugh, less laugh than a body’s custody of some surprise held though not quite grasped.

  And before the host could think to answer the guest’s casual suspicion, he was adding what, as he said, the guest knew little if anything about, to illustrate the business carried on between bias and impartiality, for whereas the family paper—the Democrat—had come into being well over a century before to put the county if not New Jersey squarely behind Jackson and against the Central Bank and its sovereign favors to the big guns, to property as Hamilton stitched it into our founding chapters (honorable and succinct as a Swiss ledger) and it multiplied into paper you couldn’t pay my taxes with, we have to give to Lincoln in the early 1840s if not total agreement at least space to duel in his own way with James Shields, the Illinois state auditor, who told the tax collectors to take the notes of the tottering Illinois State Bank at only their real value (you know this story?), which was forty-four cents on the dollar, which Lincoln—

  —dueled in his own way? came the unexpectedly knowing retort—(and the sub-rosal or sub-cathetral auditor stirred upon the dark earth, smelling through porch boards the noble gas against natural law descending from the afore-related wind, as from treated seaweed, or from a fresh, soundless second, only to hear, then:) you sure you didn’t hear something? as if the tapping of the boot tip on the porch above the boy answered the frequency of his own sound yielded by who can tell what motive beyond accident or, to travel on ahead to a Washington bar in ‘62 and a friend Ted, that key to history known as small talk and so small it might be the space past or yet to come of the tapeworm’s expansible tunnel—

  —second wind? says the interrogator turning our trial to his own personal uses—isn’t that what you people call the reserve breath that runners reach only at un certain deeper hollow of fatigue? better be sure it’s not the oxygen-depletion stage of running on fat cells which we know are not the greatest back-up.

  —Lincoln’s own way was to choose cavalry swords against James Shields, went on Jim’s father—who was so nearly right above Jim that pomposity closed in on love that was surprised alone, not grasped—the jumbo size, a plank on edge between, and an eight-foot limit behind for each. For Lincoln had much longer arms than Shields (and, we add, arms which were to be one day the longest arms of any American President in history though not matter of profound wonder to their beleaguered owner).

  —But—and the visitor rose, transferring his weight—but that was a sure thing, Mel; are you sure you got the facts right? I mean I know you always do, but I thought Lincoln was a fearless—

  —That’s why he wanted to avoid the duel though he’d brought it on in

  the first place: he wrote these letters to a paper showing Shields at a fair using

  state paper to pay off the town’s women who came to his window let down

  ‘cause he couldn’t marry them all" "so handsome and so interesting"—

  Shields was Irish and Lincoln wrote the letter as a certain Aunt Rebecca—

  "Well," said the visitor’s creaking porch and shoes, "I’m sure I heard something."

  "Shields you know caught a bullet in the lung in the Mexican War but he lived to be outmaneuvered by Stonewall Jackson fifteen years later in the Shenandoah rain while the bossman General McClellan was building bridges like a politician, soon after Grant beat Johnston at Shiloh—and when the Governor of Pennsylvania said Grant had been drunk and lost thirteen thousand men, Lincoln said, ‘He fights.’ "

  "Once got drunk and mislaid my toolbox," said the other.

  "Lincoln was a fighter if there ever was one. Hardest kind of fighting."

  "He didn’t eat good I seem to recall," said the voice, "but wasn’t he married to an impossible lady?"

  Jim moved his foot and rang a trowel against the upended teeth of a dark rake, whose earthy rust he now knew was what he had been smelling.

  After a second, "I wouldn’t want to say for the record," said his father, and for a moment the men might have looked at each other so that nothing could keep up appearances: but the diversion of the boy’s presence was not the only fact between the two men who were not willing to hate each other, nor (deep down) willing to spend time at the beach with their wives and children though the visitor and his wife�
�loudly difficult to a point of throwing a muffin tin at him fresh full from the oven—had no children for all that went on between them.

  And on Brad’s Day, scarcely a month after a woman whose whereabouts in her New Jersey town had been unknown for several hours was discovered or inferred in certain of her effects (including a large black towel) well above high water at Mantoloking, with incidental vague apologies written to a neighbor, whose gray dory, with those sweeping proud lines that, of all months, in August needed a coat of paint on its bottom, was reported found on a spit in Barnegat Sound with one oar gone and a damply darkened paper bag rolled tight as a toothpaste tube yet with one lengthwise half of a dill pickle inside it wrapped in white store paper not waxed, the discussant men above on that porch were two of the four principal folk to "look in" on young Brad’s bereavement, though at least two others also came during the day.

  Brad turned his head up away from the piano, and, his profile toward where his grandmother Margaret knelt with her hand no longer touching him, he knew his brother Jim was still there. Jim respected the little bastard, who still was telling Jim nothing more than the day at the beach when Jim got suddenly stuck above him in the sand towering murderous but hearkening to the threatening call of their mother from her black towel blinded by the sun. And meanwhile Brad on the floor of the music room wasn’t going to school. It’s embarrassing having your mother kill herself. And no more point in Jim telling him than forcing dry cornflakes scratch by scratch down his throat. Yet Jim didn’t go to school all that day himself. There were other people in this life of theirs who could come to the house. And on this day probably for the first time Jim thought about the look of the house. The dark-brown shingles of the porch roof led you up to the roof angles and facing of the second and third stories. The dormers and the other sections of roof spread in what seemed a lot of directions when you weren’t actually looking at the house. He couldn’t draw, he thought, but he drew the house, doodled its thick white pillars from the low, thigh-high wall that ran around the porch to the porch ceiling, the day after Brad’s Day, when he was sitting in History and couldn’t think, and out it came onto his notebook, but the angles of dark shingled roof section varied less than the mountainous watercourses he found he had with some instinct drawn, but he’d never thought of what the house looked like till Brad’s Day.