—but years later Marie when he phoned her ("up") in California told him Margaret had seemed polite and alone, saying they had "picked a good night" and when she got out at her house (and granddad standing silhouetted at the window, the light haloing his bald head) telling Jim the weather was a perfectly good subject for friendship and in any case to discuss even if you were with people you cared about:
: but when Jim’s daughter had asked if "it was in the atmosphere or in people" and elicited from Jim "Holy hell what there is in people!"—his own lost words on an afternoon when falling within a large tree Marie’s brother had only bruised his lower back (where skin would never after grow) but not fractured a bone—restored for what it was worth to him now at his advanced age the Anasazi’s prophecy (readforecast!) that a young person would someday find ("found") a new reincarnation, and with it restored not only his addiction to fact but the fact of this curious sequence detached within that time when the War was ending as if there could never be another one, we would be too busy, and the boys, Jim, Sam, others, were realizing they were but two years away from landing craft and Basic Training sergeants’ yells and the grand threat of all that enormity of specifics and its promise to remove this town for a time from their lives, and maybe months from getting into maybe the Marines (Boot Camp) who grabbed up, well, sixteen-year-olds if you kept it quiet and looked hairy and tough, and Sam et al. told and retold the story of the fourteen-year-old Eskimo who (against the anger of his people whose economy needed the exact amount of hunting he could provide) went and volunteered, got sent to the Pacific Theater, and won a citation and then a name that got him sent home too young to fight anymore which was a unique retirement and wound up hustling older men in San Francisco’s famed Bay Area, until Sam’s fat elder brother who could punch you so it went inside the bone said to shut up because that was a sad story . . .
When Jim Mayn in the sixties, who knew himself pretty well (knew but wouldn’t risk his well-after-all-dubious luck by saying out loud) and had learned somewhere at the start that when he needed to know things in his memory they would probably be there so don’t sweat it anymore’n you sweat intellect and being Walter Lippmann and history meanwhile even if history provokes us to recall in order to disguise its own possible if perhaps only future non-existence, told his children and his colleague Ted or the colleague-woman Mayga anything at all, he felt that he was remembering what he needed, so long as no one zeroed in and like the scamp Spence, point-blanked their way into ancient conversation demanding—imagine demanding!—to know which day it was that Granddad Alexander and he discussed Margaret’s hermit while they hardly noticed Amyabel Larsen with the large but delicate and slightly moving breasts and Leonardo Hugo the oculist with a hundred neckties go opposite ways at the start of the porch conversation and, with rain threatening in Alexander’s pore roots later, return together (hey!) for the first time as if two directions had been added together to make one new whatsis—dream, maybe, to judge from the immobile pose of trance each seemed obviously to hang their clothes on out there on the sidewalk—only then to continue as a couple and not into Amyabel’s but into Leonardo’s almost identical house (where maybe his mother had died that very afternoon, sounded the joke or joker somewhere well above the ground Jim knew his grandparents’ porch was built on).
But what was the importance of this Hermit-Inventor? asks an interrogating voice that once might have been Jim’s own if he had not refrained from those blunt inquiries close to home that are the mark of the family historian or the truth-chewer who has either lived through and just to the edge of the pain or is crazy amidst it and shouts to those who are supposed to know more than he or she, whereas Jim declined to go crazy and instead got on with a life, left Windrow, assembled facts every day, was unaware till i960 that near War’s end American bomber squadrons nosing into Jap air space were meeting (and irritably meeting if there be such a thing as technological irritation) "jet stream" headwinds often equal to the planes’ maxi-speeds—but he did not leave the messages he carried with him which he imagined he was happy with as is—and was collected really as he had always pretty well seemed even to his wife and to new friends slightly more than old friends so that, more plural than, say, one single account of what had transpired, these statements or messages stood as snapshots of the past into the (thank God) grownup present: for example, "My mother in ‘45 absented herself from my life by rowing into the Jersey sea without a permanent boat"; "Holy hell what there is in people"; "We’re ordinary people"; "Was who pregnant where when and by whooom when they made their egg-zit?"; "You don’t talk long hours for thirty years even just about the weather without having some friendship or other"; or "All of the above."
What was the importance of the Hermit-Inventor? Was it that his friend Margaret, Jim’s mother’s mother-to-be, had failed to persuade a heavy-drinking but collateral and intelligent promoter who’d once studied wind with the one and only Eiffel, to feature at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 a balloon ascent seeking to demonstrate high-speed westerlies at high altitudes hinted by a track of recent cirrus clouds insanely swift?
No, his importance was elsewhere among the timeless isobars of his increasing labyrinth of coasts within coasts within coasts of constant pressure which because they tell us pressure tell us where air will move, thus discovering to us the vertical distribution of air—
No—the Hermit-Inventor got you out of there.
The horse helped.
The Mexican blue mare. No, that’s the Prince’s. Do the Navajos have princes?
It was a horse as far as Zuni, to the south; and then I got a stage, and then I got a horse (that’s what one of those kids yelled at us the other night at the intersection when they nearly hit us: "get a horse").
I didn’t feel I was in their car with them at all.
Why would you, Jimmy?
That was the day grandson and grandmother had things out, almost. Not why was she in the cemetery at that hour when she had just gotten home from New York: but
Why, why had he spoken to her as he did the day Marie’s brother got stuck in the tree?
Stuck! (sticking up for his generation, even though he didn’t like his girl’s brother, against the older generation even its most beloved representative)
—and Sammy came to get him (she went on), and he really was most rude to her (she insisted).
"Well what did I say—cripes sake."
"You know what you said," retorted Margaret, "and in front of Sam."
"What was it?" (though he more or less knew).
" ‘What a great friendship!’ you said" (oh, she was emphasizing that remark), "as if those two surprising men didn’t care about each other."
"But you were the one—you said the Anasazi put up with a hundred years of talk about the weather from that zany Hermit (when the Anasazi was more the hermit) to humor him, that’s what you said" (knowing, as he spoke, that she had in her mind harder blows or queries that had glanced hither and yon).
"Not one hundred, for heaven sake" (she started to—oh God, she’s crying).
"Well, thirty, then!" (knowing that other words of his he didn’t care to recall were in their heads blocking and breathing). "I mean, you don’t have to talk to me about the weather, Gramma—"
"Oh" (she laughed and cried, like laughing tears but instead musical as a feeling may be word-free) "oh you’re the Hermit and I’m the Anasazi six hundred years old!"
"No," he said, thoughtfully, though to himself granting her truth, "you re my mother"—which threw them both down into silence.
"She is neither here nor there," Margaret stupidly quipped, and the boy-man drifted off toward the future where he’d been told he belonged.
"She wasn’t in the cemetery last time I looked," he always remembered saying, badly, while some opposite barred him, with its words, from taking the following step.
"Why would you look?" asked Margaret as clearly as if she forgot his words about his mother from the other day still de
layed; he answered himself, not his grandmother: "How could Sarah do a thing like that?" he said his mother’s name.
"We don’t know," said Margaret.
"Holy hell," said the boy-man quietly quoting his father.
"It was in her to do."
"Holy hell what there is in people."
"We’re ordinary people," said his grandmother.
"Well, it isn’t in her now," said Jim and remembered at once, as if the thing he said covered so much it might cover it up if taken seriously.
It was all held somewhere, a load of what we’re capable of, some plural "we we we we" voicing now and then its slide into action. He couldn’t believe this vague thought but it was in him, the sense that somewhere he was in it, a dump, a general dump of what you’re all capable of, a messy cemetery messy because most of the folk weren’t always dead—oh shit.
"You thought I said some terrible thing, didn’t you?" he persisted, and in later years knew only that she had gently backed off.
"She had such life in her but she couldn’t give it up much," said Margaret. "Sometimes I thought it was my doing, but how could it be?"
"What did she say? I can’t remember."
"She said Chopin was great but as for Schumann, his inspiration seems to come between two sobs. I remember her saying that, because I laughed and she said it sounded better in the French where she’d read it."
He didn’t understand couldn’t give it up much and so couldn’t get it out of his head. One thing: he would get away and hear more than these few special emptinesses. His grandmother put her hand on his shoulder. Two facts: his grandmother had a husband; and she had lost a daughter. (If you ever had a person to lose.)
"Your mother had wonderfully bad manners when she chose."
He wanted to say, Stop.
"The day she met your father at his friend’s wedding she told him he came from one of the dull branches of the family remote enough, though, so that she could marry him without producing Mongols, and she told him, ‘If only you could keep up that dashing appearance you had on the running board leaving the church to come to the reception!’ I was standing at the punch table when she said it and he dropped his hat onto the floor, I don’t recall what it was doing in the room."
Wait a sec, there was a connection—
A connection?
—between spiral winds and present and absent weathers.
Oh!—some strained surprise between grandmotherly wonder, laughter, irritation. "Between" what and what? his father Mel in the newspaper office said to someone, anyone, himself, an orderly thinker who was fond (if "fond" could ever state the difficulty with which he paced himself through life) of saying, to someone who had spoken confusingly or with just too many words, "Say that again."
O.K. he answered her: one morning he had come out of the now motherless house and stopped at the end of the walk and found the wind, which he liked, pressing him but on the right side of his back, not his left, aiming right into the wing of his right shoulder yet practically non-existent on his left side; and he turned with the wind, not toward downtown and school beyond downtown, but turned leftward (in the direction of the intersection at the other end of town where the highway ran one way toward Trenton alongside the race track and the other way toward the shore), only suddenly to see Margaret up the street more vivid than distance should have allowed, on her porch just waving to him: the wind had turned him but it wasn’t spiral, you know—it was only strong and a bit curved, the way winds of the Earth will be, but he felt a bit spun, and he believed in mere coincidence so he didn’t think the wind came from his grandmother (anyway it was sort of blowing toward her, "leading" like a forward pass)—but the thing was, you could think what you wanted, and Braddie was known to get so angry when the winter wind was ramming him that he had a fit almost and once went back inside the house and was late for school, instead of running quick downtown like the three hundred jackrabbits Margaret saw all together several jumps ahead of a Kansas dust storm, but the thing was you could think it was hands on your back pushing you, or one hand there and the other not there or not much there— present, absent—but, true or not, you could learn from nature, and so you had to let it do what it did—
(Oh my yes, his grandmother murmured; life is right.)
—and the hands, right hand pushing, left hand not pushing, or for somebody in another town maybe the other way around, could be just your mistake, your imagination, some other hands of yours inside you pushing out: not that you had to believe that, but if you get turned by the wind and the wind doesn’t have real hands so the hands are inside you or something, you can keep on turning ‘cause you’re started and the wind you sort of give in to is inside you maybe as a spiral—even if, outside, it isn’t—
Oh he wanted to have it both ways! his grandmother laughed.
And probably when winds meet, they not only join each other and flow together, but they might spin each other or they might—
"Why, this is our Anasazi medicine man talking all over again, Jim, don’t you remember?"
"But, Gramma, it was the Hermit who talked about the frontier where the breath of the reptile met the breath of the food needles the cactus was tossing out."
"But the inside wind being part of the outside wind, twining spiral and all that, if you recall, that’s our old Anasazi, who by the way had one big lung instead of our two; an earlier lung."
"But he said the spirals got set off in the four corners or something inside us, the four corners facing outward from one another."
"Well, maybe you’ve started a new weather on your own."
But Jim didn’t know.
She said, "Not upcoming or downgoing, but ongoing."
He shrugged slightly and thought of getting away, remembering guiltily how he had needed her. O.K. Gramma, O.K. maybe I’m the Anasazi. He beat reincarnation, and I don’t believe in reincarnation.
Exactly my sentiments.
Right after his mother’s suicide he had to hate his grandmother. How else could he have worked toward this spring victory? He was sort of riding out of town swung toward the future as his mother had once quirkily decreed for him. He would rather be the Anasazi, he told his own daughter years of bedtimes later—because the Anasazi managed for himself a post-mortem cruise in the form of a cloud in order to check if there were foam volcanoes in the eastern states. (And Jim was able some nights to tell his beloved daughter after his equally beloved son had risen above them by formula to the ceiling of the room in sleep, things he knew there was no danger of her believing, and in any case she was more interested in the pistol, what happened to the pistol the Navajo Prince had on him when he pursued the Princess (than in how it had come into the Anasazi’s hands), and interested in what ground-up horse bones etcetera were used for internally—the father didn’t tell her.)
"You can be both Anasazi and Hermit," Margaret told him; for he had gotten up and was going, and all that had been said, like some power that would be there if it were not here, had left unsaid what had upset Margaret to call him rude, rude!, as if to have the power you had to take it from somebody else the way the mestizo spy who had wanted to unload the (later) Mayn family pistol nonetheless used it as a mid-journey deterrent somewhere in the Sonora desert between the Mexican War and the Gold Rush when an unknown but someday-to-be-legendary Alsatian mathematician threatened to withhold specie from his pocket together with a large folded sheet of foolscap evidently valuable, upon which when the mestizo took it from the footsore foreigner he found a numbered design with curved lines radiating outward of varying length dotted or broken, yet with identical maths and figures that all came down one way or another to the number 5—11.125 (she recalled) minus either 3.125 and 3 (successively) or 6.125 equaling, along all these lines of varying length, the number 5 she thought—but here in early 1946, Take the power, Jim, from who? But he knew, he knew—he did, he did—a clamor dividing in him and dividing (when some song his Gramma sang said, "I have nothing to divide"); and he d
elegated the knowledge, just as he kept a new irritating presence to himself in politely asking, "Did that really happen, with the mountain lion becoming a wolf and the great bird flying away?"
"I had left by then," said Margaret, her hands in her lap.
"Had the Princess?"
"I can’t quite tell," his grandmother said and laughed with a slight wit of unease—she was witty, snooty, democratic; tall, loving, crazy punster, very smart; self-depreciating re: her family having settled the town even before Washington hospitalized his wounded in a church out by the railroad tracks, and she also until after she got sick "went" to the bathroom with magical speed, he could never see how she could do it that fast, so the water was flushing almost as the door was being locked. "Yes," said Margaret; "she, too."
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