Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  —so at least he asked someone something during those days, and took that Windrow Democrat obituary standing up, that weather-report brevity edited into being by fifteen or so years of wedlock: so that if Jim (whom his grandmother called on her last day "good people"—"you’re good people, Jim") had ever been a scientist instead of a journeyman, he might have found a formula for that extremity of briefness that so much reduces it releases its very soul which had become already the void about it; and so for years, whatever Brad felt after scissoring out the black frame and the words of the kind man who had been and was becoming his father, and whatever Brad felt a month later after reading in his brother’s scrupulous quotation from the brother-in-law man "Aren’t you the Mayn boy?" adjacent to the words "How did he know me? I didn’t ask," Jim had to ask himself how much of that obit so easily memorable it wouldn’t stop repeating in his head was ignorance, and how much as unspeakable as the solitude on a breezy September beach when, having run one fisherman into the ground, he no more knew that the other was watching him than knew what he meant in his terrible words spoken against the wind but never ever written down for a brother-half-brother to spy among all those horizons of a lined notebook page, "I don’t want them to find her."

  Margaret had let herself be appointed, because of her Democratic party connections, to the state prison commission during the War and had revived her New Deal interest in unemployment, what it costs to make jobs in peacetime or not to. But, though she set foot in church only on special occasions, whichever the church need be, she said the Devil found work for idle minds. She meant Mel, when he got rid of the paper at last; and she did not mean he played the market (with some success) and the local harness races (with some happiness and just barely in the black), though she regarded the first as living vicariously through numbers, not real making of usable products: what she did mean was that Mel suffered even more over Sarah’s "tragedy" because he stopped working and had less to do; and into one gap came another, if that is possible, and we, who are relations meteorolong, whorled, human ward, and possible as well as relations that people have actually had, believe it is, and were there, like an equal and opposite reaction, to receive through Mayn’s at the time only incipient voiding-sluice (incidentally creating us at need) his moving picture clandestinely witnessed through glimmering back-porch screens in order to be put soon out of mind, of Margaret turning on the porch light, opening the kitchen door to come out and open the wide old icebox while Alexander came and stood on the kitchen threshold continuing a conversation and asking her now not why she was crying (which she clearly was)—for of course their younger daughter was gone and there were problems of life itself—but, rather, what on earth she meant that Mel was dying vicariously (Alexander really didn’t understand that)—was it that we didn’t know exactly where Sarah "was"? But Alexander, who was subtler than anyone else told him, got out of the way when Margaret went back into the kitchen and the sticky yellow door slammed and the back-porch light went out upon the odd sobbing noises of the loved voice and upon the possibly inaudible stress in the devoted husband’s words didn’t and Sarah (as if, well, he and Margie did know the final whereabouts of someone else), and upon the curious boy who sometimes roamed the early evening and mastered into middle life a healthy shrug because he knew how to shut the door too.

  So what if the double Moon expected as its due two explanations if not more?—ranging those twi-set nights those twi-set times between the story of the day and the story of the night to the shadow Marcus Jones the man-botanist cast on the woman-zoologue Mena as he got off his bike in that narrowing desert, for Mena claimed that before Marcus went away that night he had cast upon her the double shadow "hers to convey" until she met her next human—

  —the ancient Anasazi?

  —right you are, who because of her appearance at the top of the last ladder upward to his cell had caused that lifted pistol in his feather-light hand to throw two shadows according to the precise Mena, which was the only way he had seen the double Moon.

  But so what, so what, shrugs the humor of the boy-man with such casual cogence his very shrug grows him up a year, two years, five years, who could now have spoken a bit of Spanish with Mena had she existed still, six years, seven, eight ("You will go away where you belong, my darling"—but we did not pick up "my darling," with all our audio resources did we?—sho did!—did not—)

  Until the "so what" ‘s subtly prevail, even when to a child and, in fact, the children of Joy Mayn and Jim Mayn are voiced the weathers which the Hermit-Inventor of New York divided with his mortal colleague the Anasazi medicine man, the weather of presence and the weather of absence, which do not quite parallel the division between the weather from earth and the weather from beyond, the weather from the body, the weather from almost nowhere, weather of going and weather of arriving, and so on perhaps into a future where Mayn found himself returned to the city and to an apartment he had inhabited with a family, and the family had been his own, and the family had rented the apartment at that particular time, and now, taking possession of the apartment with misgivings not because he now owned it, but because of love he found he really had given, and naturally the love he had not given, he compiled for professional use a history of rent control and related matters in the city of New York which struck him as the classification of the constituents of a chaos, or so it was suggested to him in similar or congruent words by a new acquaintance, a fellow tenant of the building where, within the inertial system he partly tried to take a view of, he did much of the compiling, oft interrupted by "so what?" from voices known and unknown, sometimes his own, breathing in and out such weather as was ludicrously true and profanely painful, recalling the "so what?" shrugged silently from the boy’s own early telex looking on at a grandparental scene complete with lights on and lights out. Meanwhile—

  It could be established exactly where the intent botanist and geo(il)logical bicyclist Marcus Jones was employed when one morning in 1892, a year before Margaret entered that world, Marcus listened with curiosity to a young visitor from the South tell of having seen in company with Navajo friends along the dusty bank of a "wash" near Ship Rock, New Mexico, the brightest and tallest showy loco imaginable in height twelve to sixteen inches with up to fifteen whorls along each main stalk all tufted with nearly luminous white hairs among the spikes of deep pink and live lavender so well known among the Oxytropis. Marcus could hear the locoweed report with one ear, while with the other pick up an unabashed chat between two silver-mine operators who were contemplating backing Bryan over in Nebraska for reelection to Congress this time from the boondocks.

  Likewise, Jones’s learned whereabouts could be established in 1896 when Alexander Mayne attended the presidential convention with his young wife Margaret who at twenty-two going on twenty-three shared with Bryan only his liking for Charles Dickens and his more public sympathy for farmers, and who had had a soothing, in fact down-right medicinal cup of tea with Jacob Coxey in ‘94 a short time before he led his march of the unemployed on Washington, D.C., and in her fine, though paternally edited piece for the Democrat had something to say about the silver-lined inflation whose formulae Bryan ignored in favor of the truism that a dollar "approaches honesty as its purchasing power approaches stability": this was as "far from the authentic Jacksonian support for the forgotten working man everywhere" (never an appeal, as Nicholas Biddle fumed, to mobs like those martialed to anarchy by Marat or Robespierre in the Faubourg St. Antoine) as were the locofoco "workies" striking the new friction matches of the 1830s to footlight with candles the "platform" of their protest against financial privilege and solidarity with such maverick journeymen as John Windt and George Evans and the Hudson (N. Y.) cordwainers plus the renegade printer William Morgan of upper New York State and Philadelphia, "more unlike the western interests of that day which were as indifferent to anti-bankism as a well-to-do Mexican lady fandangoing all night in Santa Fe was to the low class of a barefoot peon partner showing his smalls." Alexande
r had his doubts: Jackson was very middle-class and would never have gone along with striking ironmolders sixty years later reciting, "The robes ye weave, another wears."

  Why anything might turn into anything or itself, war into weather into war and back again in i960, given the right imagination, the right overflight, the right reception of light, the rightly modulated night, the right day for a nothing of a brother to play hookey and turn into a noise of grief, then into a half-brother as separate from the real Mayn son as Brad was for Jim and real enough to help Jim go away—not from a snake’s nest of garden hv whence Brad promised pork chops for dinner, but from acting for Jim in a way better not worked out, given that "I don’t want them to find her" really meant, "I don’t want her to come back." For any words might turn into the right gap of passion in which to model some genius of Sarah the way Mel did for years, or, more exactly, into the Alexandrian mellowing of Margaret as a giver not a taker (who took the West for herself but monitored Sarah’s minute sojourn in France years later).

  Jim never let himself quite know this in the atmosphere at Windrow, which bent his efforts elsewhere until years later he felt himself filtered as through Windrow itself one late morning near Fontainebleau within striking distance of Paris, in the information that with his rambling left hand Thomas Jefferson wrote the meteorologist Le Roy regarding Le Roy’s reports on how dew point varies with wind direction, the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec being not so dry as the north wind (nor, of course, said Mayn, so sane as the north wind, at least if we are talking about your mistrao and similar winds)—

  ah, his journalist companion for his part added, of ill repute—

  of ill ions, went briefly on Jim Mayn, such positively charged particles as put people into a funk in Egypt when the south wind comes in off the desert, the khamsin wind "of fifty days" or the German Fohn whose relation to the history of the thirties and the forties could never excuse the Third Reich: so that (continued his French companion), as Le Roy had provoked Jefferson to ponder, dry and moist are relative in air, so dry summer air at the seaside or not may contain more water than moist air in winter.

  But Mayn could not tell his correspondent confrere what a filter of Windrow and its everlasting though twenty-odd-miles-distant shore these quite charmed informations veered through, no more than that on the road to Fontainebleau he was listening for transitions to submarines, which presumably were much on the Gallic newshawk’s specialist mind; but when Jim said he thought for a second that he had seen the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the man laughed and said even if it was possible at fifty kilometers, Jim was looking the wrong way (Easier that way, rechuckled the American pragmatist)—and when the man very thoughtfully expounded the stress moments in Eiffel’s adaptation from his bridges to this tower, Jim thought they were getting into U-boat waters at last, pressure, distribution, range, cost-benefit breakdowns, formulae rendering congruent a stable peace and an authoritative news supplement if not scoop (in French, un scoop) that happened actually to be beyond Mayn’s knowledge: but it all came then to the delightful and hardly alarming "when and how" fact that behind the Tour Eiffel in principle of wind-bracing practice stood an earlier work of Eiffel’s—

  —the moving hospital-submarine!

  No, the moving hospital, not to be confused with the Wide Load which at times gets as big as (not just) home or house but apartment house capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and only thus an articulated structure—the moving hospital was a spin-off of the Civil War as the moving missile emplacement was a spin-off of the Cold like breathtakingly advanced weather observation—

  —which was a spin-off of the balloon-observation surveillances that were a spin-off of the Civil War, like concentrated food—

  —but no, we do not think so—

  —because the balloon observation was of military movements but not of the inertial wind—and other systems to which it was subject, mais no, the earlier work of Eiffel’s was the internal steel frame of the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi’s visible outer sculpture like permanent news—solid and fundamental as lives of unknown people Mayn sometimes briefly knew—or saw, without knowing, and was seen as by a larger knowledge he joined and sensed his power in, until one day he heard a story of a detective whose client knew more about him than he of the client, a story also of love and freedom told by a fellow elevator passenger so briefly from the floor where he got on to the ground floor, where he and she and her friend, the two leaving Grace Kimball’s workshop, vanished that he knew that very story, had lived it, even if only in advance like sentiments of reincarnality—

  —which proved nothing except that Sarah, whose mother told a story of a Princess spirited or sublimated we now say in the guise of a mist into the Statue to foil an Indian transcontinental^ pursuing her, must doubtless that day at Mantoloking within the visible woman sitting like a statue on a black towel or lying down have been secretly standing within that seated or prone person, before, during, and after the moments when Jim saw her looking out to sea and when Jim found himself founded like a gnomon sundial in the sand above his vulnerably irritating brother; for was she not in fact watching for a German submarine to break the horizon and bear her off to South America or, failing that, Manhattan!

  : a possibility we, of their relations, would not rule out, since, as the angry savant had it, "some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first":

  : which takes character beyond courage to be sure, though Mayn would leave the formulae and what power went with them to someone else (for he was only taking up a sort of residency in a New York apartment where he had once lived happily and not happily but also happily (lived and not lived) with his wife and children who had moved on:

  which Mayn too did, in circles no doubt, until a day came, or he to it waiting, soon after the aforementioned renewed trial residency, when a nice, sometimes worried woman in the apartment house in question, whom he let befriend him without insisting on her husband materializing, told him of a person named Grace Kimball he thought he’d heard of, who said she had withdrawn from this world only to return with new powers, her own, her own extraordinary powers nonetheless very simple, you know, Mayn smiled sharply like a laugh.

  Norma added that the withdrawal at least of Grace had been in marriage (in marriage, said Mayn, checking) (yes: in) while the powers found partly in stories told in Norma’s group of women seemed real—the people, the women and men that had become "family" to nonetheless send on their way at some point—forget the night gapped like Pentothal with all the interchangeable braceros translated into and out of the planetary labor force wide-loaded in convoys of super-semis cross-continent: two women technologists sit sipping mixed fresh-crushed juice, getting acquainted, that kind of thing, discussing they imagine two men when, by some small-world economy scrambling whatever used to be the matter, it’s in fact one guy they’re talking ‘bout for the longest time, the unknown medium through which they get acquainted: not to mention (for to Norma Mayn didn’t) the couple in Phalanx, New Jersey, a marriage that did and still may play (with revised dialogue) who ritually hitch him up like old Dobbin complete with the old vegetable man’s fedora with earholes (that is, for the horse) to a real imported rickshaw (brought it back themselves never thinking what they would do with it, just part of tax-write-off basic research) so he can pull her down the garden path with the blue ribbon on it and we’ll hitch old, yes, Dobbin to the shay: not to mention, but he does, to Norma and then independently to Norma’s husband, a couple of heavy-handed economists Gordon proves also to know even better, one from Metz in Alsace-Lorraine which is in France at the moment, the other an Irishman from Los Angeles, "old L.A. people," one (actually employed) cousin marched with Coxey’s Army of unemployed protesters in ‘94—well, took the train as far as Chicago, then walked to Washington—and both economists have red hair and beard (if you looked back and forth they could do with only one set of looks), and once when Mayn and they had a lunch that was a b
it awkward at first, then too full of talk, Mayn had said he had thought of getting to know some more economics as a substitute for economists but economics seemed too hard (which made the red-haired economists laugh and say in unison, You and Max Planck), then later when the waiter got into an argument over the arithmetic of the tab with a man about Mayn’s build whom he’d been introduced to at the bar because the man, who was missing one little finger (though Mayn didn’t recall feeling it) and wore a well-cut blue pinstripe and a red pointed handkerchief and a dark-blue, tiny-red-emblemed club tie, was lunching with a doctor-friend of Mayn’s whose boat he’d been on, now just sold to the Xerox people in Stamford, Mayn had said to his tablemates that on the other hand economics was really too easy, which made the russet ecologues blush in concert and in concert choke on final swallows of their first Manhattans and say in hilarious unison, You and Bertrand Russell!, upon which Mayn, who had the impression that he mumbled a lot but realized that this was internal and that his speech was normal, caused further hilarity by adding that he would stick to what he could see, like whether people listened when we talked, and seemed to say only what they knew, and whether they used their hands and what they looked like (—Their hands? the economists asked, but this time kept the joke private, as if it would be one too many):

  they were way ahead of him, he told them, like Rogers and Rockefeller when they bought Anaconda Copper with a rubber check they covered by loan collateraled with fresh-printed stock in a non-company that existed to buy Anaconda, leaving them with, after they sold the fresh stock, a real copper company and thirty-six million dollars profit: the economists were eating their lunch through this transaction, they did not know those facts—maybe they weren’t the facts, said Mayn—seemed impossible, yet so easy; and, as usual, a bunch of people got stung—the economists nodded with mouths too full for what formulae formed higher in each head—the argument nearby with the waiter was over—and the man in the blue pinstripe was grinning at what the elder gent the doctor had said, who was (Mayn knew) "drinking a little" since his wife’s death but who was an easy chap, Mayn had played squash with him a few years back, a man who didn’t believe in making difficulties for himself, so that while, true, he had become a shrink, which is, hour after hour (facts supplanting facts), dealing with folk who make difficulties for themselves, and are made by them—and mostly, though you had matriculated and paid your dues, done training, etcetera, you might just tell them, Take some time for yourself, you know (—A breather?—) That’s the ticket; and for him himself it was after thirty years of medicine and in order to retire into (at his wife’s suggestion) seraZ-retirement: