No, they didn’t believe in reincarnation, neither Navajo nor grandson and grandmother. Those fellows running the unemployed march in 1894 believed in reincarnation, but Margaret preferred the Great Unknown . . . big handsome gent who proposed military-style farms for the unemployed and who kept his identity secret until one day he seemed to turn into another person just by being identified at last as, not after all Captain Livingstone of the British Army encountered by a traveling man in a hotel during the Chicago Fair, nor one of Uncle Sam’s shrewdest Secret Service men, but as A. P. B. Bozarro (or Pizarro), a manufacturer of blood medicine at South Peoria.
No doubt there occurred isolated cases of reincarnation, Margaret observed, staring so deeply into Jim’s eyes he thought it wasn’t all funny. Special reincarnation? he said. She sighed. Why did people want to complicate things by coming back twenty years later for a second or third chance? Oh, he disagreed there, he thought people deserved a second chance. Oh, they deserve it all right, his grandmother murmured, and seemed to laugh quietly but for some reason he hadn’t been sure she was laughing. He thought she said, It’s still in me. But his uncertainty now in 1977 slung him along a curve of silly will back to the last century, thence forward to this moment in 1950, for he hadn’t been sure if he had heard her, and it made him the same person as now in ‘77, same immortally dumb body shouldering his attachment to her so it made him dizzy or lumpy of mind, pulled him out of shape, doubtless more formed by her than by his regular uptown-downtown father or the gap of his mother, so he had to get away, out of the room, downstairs; but she was drowsy anyhow, the frown deepening as her eyelids got heavy, and he saw the thing that had been in the corner of his eye as he got up to go peel potatoes. It was a medium-size gray envelope with a stamp on it and Jeanette Many’s name and address, and under it another envelope with only the place visible, which was a town in Pennsylvania, with trees the shape of girls if he had had night dreams, the town he had come from that very day, and he wondered if it was a check, he hadn’t been sending his laundry home lately in the big cardboard suitcase Margaret had given him, a check and the laundry no connection none whatever, but personal mail is personal mail, and who else did she know in that town, certainly not his girlfriend except by reputation, intuition, generalization, and old wit.
His grandfather when they curled the potato skins carefully away from the cool, pear-like moistness of the white did not speak of Margaret: he asked what Jim was going to do; Jim said, Maybe law; definitely not business, maybe a field geologist for an oil company, maybe professional sports management —he didn’t remember what he said except his grandfather was irked, and Jim thought, Touchy, probably having to nurse Margaret.
Jim said, Maybe marry money and live abroad for a while, some similar gag he didn’t much recall later but then was answered by what he did recall, in so many words: "Society’s immoral and immortal," said his grandfather; "it can do anything it wants, any crazy thing, but you can’t kill it." And something also about fragments that survive, laughing at you after you’re gone—that sort of thing.
She was asleep at suppertime, woke up like a drugged child, drank half a glass of sherry, swallowed just one bite of "shark" (the ham steak Alexander had broiled with numerous bendings over to look into the oven), and half a banana, and dozed in her chair. Upstairs again in her bedroom she came very much awake, frowning. He asked who she had written to. People she owed, she said. He could hear her voice in her letters. In 1977 he thought how close his mother’s death had been to both of them then in 1950. (A Russian Five-Year Plan!) And on the wings of such trivia as Spence, who seemed, on the morning after Amy left her apartment and apparently did not return, part and parcel, pocket and contents, of a life lived between old questions unasked or boring to ask, and a mass of fact unneeded, Mayn phoned his neighbor Norma to tell her of the difference Margaret had made between him and his little brother Brad. But first thing in the morning Norma and the two girls and Gordon (who answered) were all maneuvering around the apartment, which was slightly smaller than Mayn’s, breakfasting, playing the radio, dressing, doubtless undressing and dressing again, someone asking what it was like out, everything up to the higher levels of spirit where he could smell each toasting particle of toast, honey gasketing the thread of the jar—and Mayn flashed on Norma trudging humorously into the lobby after a hard day, her legs, her charity—and after insisting on speaking to her over Gordon’s faint anger, he could then only ask if she knew if the woman Clara had been in touch with Grace Kimball and if Norma knew whether Clara and her husband were in town, he needed to know—but Norma, who said, No, she didn’t know, asked, Are you all right? What is it? So he remembered being married and an old raincoat of his that didn’t repel the rain but he went on wearing it, and, saying goodbye to the dear woman, who said, You and Kimball ought to meet, he felt a concrete thing in the corner of his sleepless eye like something that should be moving but wasn’t, or wasn’t there but had been: he could only tell himself how he had accepted his grandmother’s words that evening—he was probably thinking of his girl angry or his father wanting to see him, though to talk about what?—yet Jim had brought his mother up: Do you think about her, Gramma? Oh yes. It wasn’t really us she was leaving. No, but there’s no way of knowing, without asking her. It brought Brad and my father together. Well, they were alike. That’s true. You took it well, Jim, you let it rest. I don’t know, Gramma. No, you knew a lot in your heart, so did your girlfriend—what’s happened to Anne-Marie?—but your little brother was another story.
Was she that bad off, Gramma?
Sarah? Well, we were all raised to get married and stay married, and she was ill with anemia though maybe that didn’t count, maybe it was that trip to France to the conservatory when she was only a girl.
But you went exploring when you were nineteen.
I almost went too far.
You spent three nights in jail for that woman who axed the painting.
Not when I was nineteen.
What was its name?
The Rokeby Venus, in London. There were demonstrations here.
Braddie accepted it, he knew she wasn’t coming back, he knew she was dead!
But he was so little, Jimmy, and so close to her; I told him all I could, he kept asking and I told him I held myself responsible for being too strict when she was in her teens and even afterward and she went abroad all right to study music but we didn’t let her stay a whole year—we kept an eye on girls in those days.
Did Brad want to know a whole lot?
Oh we got quite close the last year or so.
And you told him a lot?
Oh it’s all things you figured out for yourself, and, gracious, Brad’s just a little bit too nice, sensitive and all, but we don’t laugh much; we had serious talks about how people got to be very unhappy in their home life, and he sent me the most funereal flowers in the hospital.
He kissed her goodnight, he heard Alexander in the next room, he saw that Margaret did not expect him to stay or necessarily to pay her a visit the following morning, which was Friday, he never felt he had to explain himself with her, but wasn’t there then in ‘50 and now in ‘77 this gap a part of you was always passing through? Memory kept things from being over.
Go away and come back light-months later and you’re the same person, pulse back to normal, etcetera; nothing’s happened, where’ve you been? Alive there, alive here. But if dead here, get out fast. But he had been mad at her for talking about his mother in that way to Brad. All times were equal and the spaces between if you wanted.
He phoned Washington, early as it was, and realized he was thinking of poor old reliable business-as-usual Ted in a far-off time zone of California, but Flick wasn’t home. A friend had phoned a few days ago to say his wife and son—for he was legally separated—had had their apartment broken into and the super was threatened with a knife, and the thieves, like bad movers, had cracked a mirror; the man’s son had called his dad collect, secretly—the man was ups
et and Mayn had been too busy to talk and hadn’t called back but would. A film maker had phoned to ask him to play mixed doubles and to inquire how far they were into the lightning-mapping project and were they going to use U-25? Mayn had business in Connecticut and he had been up all night. Amy was not home or at her foundation where Mayn and Larry had talked to the watchman; and the Chilean economist didn’t answer his home phone at two A.M. And Mayn needed reading glasses, his eyes were tired, and the thing persistently existing in the corner of his eye would turn into Spence if he didn’t get some sleep but he didn’t have time, or into a mountain of mind-bending mineral slag Dina West had evoked with the merest of references: and all Mayn could think was that death leads us to reincarnation, and he had a glass of orange juice to prove his reality, and whereas normally he would have to have someone to talk to to think old things over, it was the reverse now, with Norma anyway, and he heard himself saying in answer to Ted’s "You’re pretty hard on that little so-and-so," "Yeah, we all have a little Spence in us" for Ted to carry on, in Mayn’s affectionate imagination, "Spence has more than most."
Where did he come from? Mayn didn’t even know. But maybe he would have to see. The phone rang and he reached it before the second ring to hear his daughter’s low-pitched, expectant voice identifying him.
"Just the person I wanted to talk to."
"Well, this guy Spence phoned me—"
"Long distance?"
"Here in New York. Who’s he with?"
"Himself, Flick. Stay clear."
1 ‘Well, I didn’t think it was a Senate subcommittee but I think he bothered you once or twice before."
"How come he knew where to phone you in New York? That’s more than I know."
Flick gave her father a number and said it was her friend Lincoln’s, the woman who had called him after being called by the obnoxious Spence. "But he must be on to something, Daddy."
The corner of his eye was full again. He saw the wastebasket by the desk before he’d half turned to find it empty. The hand-written pages of his letter to his daughter weren’t there. They’d disappeared during the night. He had been out for three or four hours.
"I wrote you last night, m’dear."
"O.K., that’s a good coincidence, but ... Daddy—you know everything—when your grandmother committed suicide—"
"What!"
"—you told me you were away camping with your girlfriend and having a fight the whole weekend and you didn’t hear until late Sunday night—"
"What has this to do with Spence?" Mayn intoned, but didn’t want to hear.
"Did an old teacher of yours come all the way from Minneapolis and show up at the cemetery and upset Alexander?" Mayn saw the children playing in the backyard in Windrow, their great-grandfather in a broad-brimmed straw hat about to let go of his lemonade glass when the girl with long, light-brown hair races over, giggling at her brother, and takes the glass as it slips from the fingers, which wakes the old man up, who insists on taking the glass from Flick. "Did she come all the way from Minnesota?"
It was drizzling and his bus didn’t get in till after the burial, and his grandfather was uncommunicative and Jim felt horrible at getting to the house when a crowd of people were eating deviled eggs and slicing turkey and a big glazed ham and he felt he still wasn’t there yet. He told his daughter this, and her voice coming back sounded flat, like after he had left his family and would phone Joy and the children and only Flick would talk to him but with a special unwillingness in representing the other two: "And did she meet someone in the group at the cemetery whose uncle had adored your grandmother and said he would have been proud of her decision?" His grandfather took him aside and told Jim that that woman Myles had been "bothering us" again, and Alexander had finally asked her very quietly did she want him to tell her what the gas smelled like and show her the identical messages all over the living room and the back porch saying DON’T LIGHT MATCHES? And Jim had been aware of listening indelibly to what was being said but in order to get it so firm that he could consign it right away from him, but it did not all get consigned, because he remembered, but did not tell his daughter, "This time ..." (said Miss Myles)—"What?" his grandfather said—"there’s no doubt . . ."—"About what?" said Alexander—"About why" was what Pearl Myles had said. The voices in the living room and dining room were not hushed and they drove Jim out onto the porch as if they were a clamor sifting him, dividing and dividing him.
"Spence might get himself buried," said the father calmly.
"And Daddy, I couldn’t decide if he was crazy or not, I mean maybe he’s dangerous but he’s sort of up front, obnoxious but I mean why didn’t he ask you about that printer Morgan who was mixed up with a relative of ours? I mean, what do I care about all those people, but there seemed to be Chilean fathers mixed up with Masonic lodges past and present and two daughters we’re supposed to be involved with, but I don’t believe it, any more than I believe that a German submarine had anything to do with me that surfaced one late afternoon off the Jersey shore and helped a person escape to South America who had a banned opera in her head and was either daughter or great-niece to a strong woman who nonetheless found time to listen to mountains think or knew some people who had—does that mean anything to you?"
"I don’t know a thing about Chilean opera, but I remember the story about the sub. There was a waterspout out there the same day."
"Chilean?"
His daughter had not said escape to Chile; if she knew this much she would have picked up Chile, but only if she had cared to. The follower makes up the followee, who reciprocates: but these cannot be Mayn’s thoughts: he does not know what they mean, he knows the poignant politeness of an unknown economist at Cape Kennedy in December of ‘72, his ex tempore remarks re: astronauts and their overnight bags disappearing into space for a break from domestic responsibilities, wives, secretaries, kids, even the bachelor geologist who, however, was not the one who did a brief dance-like hop before stepping up into the white van with the rusty tailpipe; a Chilean economist who spoke of a prisoner inventing a chemistry of thought or communal-think in the void of a prison Mayn found for himself.
"Spence has to be stopped."
"From what, Daddy?"
Only Norma had a key to "the wastebasket," and she would never have taken the letter. He heard questions answering his knowledge that what he had in his power he would use. But interrogations directed not just to him. Though passing through his head, signatures of lightning that when he heard of he thought they had been in his imagination already. So he didn’t figure where they were coming from.
"He listened to Ted and me talk years ago and then he started turning up in my life. He’s not even a journalist but he’s everything that stinks in this racket." But who was Mayn talking about? He felt his daughter angry, saw her lips puff, her eyes narrow and seem to go vague.
"I mean I don’t care about some old relation of yours or your grandparents’ who described a pistol in a two-volume diary so I couldn’t care less where the diary is hiding. But now the mountain: there’s something in the mountain, Daddy. It sounds—"
"I told you about that diary in the letter I wrote you last night."
"—but that mountain sounds like pure insanity but, like, when the fantasy gets really pure, that’s danger; that’s critical mass."
He was tired of big talk, but smiled at her "critical mass" and turned away.
"Don’t turn away, Daddy."
"I’ve told you about mountains that think—Mountain Capability—don’t you remember? I don’t remember where it came from, I can’t imagine Margaret referring to ‘Aimed Being’ as a form of thought, but I’m listening to you talk about critical mass as if you had any idea what it is. (Not that I do.)"
"Well, I don’t remember your telling me about mountains except Ship Rock in a letter but it’s not a mountain, but some of Spence’s information sounds right."
He had a heavy day and he told his daughter maybe he was the "reason" to Spence
’s "rhyme" and asked her to come up to Connecticut with him, but she wouldn’t. She said, "I asked him where he was coming from connecting my family to some people named Morgan who used to carry diagrams across deserts that might be about sunspots and harvests or about pistols or railroad routes but were Masonic messages between the hemispheres and he said you were an old friend of his and he was worried about you."
Mayn saw a hand get hold of the four or five handwritten pages in last night’s wastebasket and pull them out carefully but he had never seen Spence’s hands.
"He’s no friend of mine."
"He said a dangerous character had phoned him in the middle of the night asking him about some of this information but he himself had known only what he had heard."
Mayn wanted his daughter to go up to Connecticut with him, the very first women’s interstate Bank; get her away from this.
She said, Business, Daddy? in that ironic way, and said she had something to show him that she had been writing, and he said, Can’t wait, and she said, It’s in the mail, What’s wrong with business? and they were drifting into an old fight in which he might say technology wasn’t demonic, not evil in itself, the machines were to serve us, the real risk was—but though she didn’t want to hear she asked, then, if he’d gone into this because of the family paper and he distinctly felt her mind reach to hang up her receiver, and he said No, and wished she could see how much he loved her but she sounded tired, the "tired" that would last only on the phone. She said, "He asked what I knew about the death of Mayga—he just threw her name at me like we were all friends. Why did it feel like extortion?"
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