Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  His father wanted to know if he still played water polo at the Athletic Club and was told, in somewhat indirect answer, that his son’s trick knee was acting up under stress and he had limped across against a red light the other day, throwing himself on the mercy of a truck driver who, granted, did not have much in the way of pickup acceleration but was so high-slung you almost thought it would drive over you if steered safely without touching you the way a couple of kids he had seen in a market area of lower Manhattan would not go around an unloading trailer van stuck way out into the street but walk under it. This fellow Gordon had been a City kid, you know. They didn’t ride bikes so much, but of course that was thirty years and more ago, and the bicycle had now become a middle-class adult inner-city vehicle.

  Mayn’s father (who notably had not yet expressed the hope that Jim would spend the night, for maybe the old man didn’t especially want him to—you had to allow for that chance) asked if he was going out to the cemetery while he was here—and Jim said actually he had already been—he had in fact come into Throckmorton Street and on the spur of the moment instead of stopping at his father’s house (though, as he did not tell his father, there was that car that started up and moved out as soon as he passed) he decided he would take a look at his grandparents first before calling on Mel.

  He told his father the kitchen ceiling fixture might need rewiring and asked if his father had circuit breakers now. His father said he would get a licensed electrician in; and there was a moment of silence for Bob Yard, who had wired his last house or almost, for he had had a stroke and fallen from a ladder and in death had displayed a wonderful dark grin as if ... as if .. . and Jim said really he could do it for Mel, the hourly rates were a total rip-off.

  His father asked again how he had traveled on this quick trip and it was too bad Flick was in New York. Mayn said he couldn’t keep up with her, she was becoming an authority on pollution without actually residing in New York and had written something that was supposed to be in the mail to him but he hadn’t gotten it but hoped it would be waiting for him tonight.

  His father wanted to know what it was.

  Well, she says it’s like fiction. Probably selling herself short. I guess it’s environmentalist.

  He felt he and his father were pulling away from each other, and when he had tightened the three screws around the globe’s circumference, he came down off the stepladder in one stretching step.

  No, he had flown from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, hopped to Washington and had rented car on spur of moment thinking to make stop in Philly to make purely speculative inquiry, but drove straight here; car’s not his, could have taken the Metroliner (not here direct, of course), but he’d felt like a car. "You don’t look like a car," his father said, and he could hear twenty-five years ago his father singing when he was a bit nervous or unhappy, though the off-key melody made him always sound like he cared about everyone in the house, which curiously Jim Mayn had never thought before.

  He turned to his father as his father turned away and sat down with a grunt. Nowadays, his father observed, a small-town paper gets all the news it can handle from your electronic terminals. That was true, said his son, they carried the machines around in suitcases like astronauts; he wanted to get into something else but it was his trade. Andrew’s college expenses were about it, now.

  His father asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He said, Nothing to talk about—well, Andrew didn’t keep in touch; didn’t feel like it—and some curious stuff going on right now but mostly it’s a guy getting into my hair for some reason, probably my fault, involving people I know; turn away from it, it doesn’t exist, almost. His father said he knew, and Mayn told his father he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t being pulled into some hard-to-explain activities involving a cluster of other people’s supposings that became something maybe threatening even to a man with as slow a fuse and as low adrenalin as he; but that wasn’t why he had stopped on the way back.

  Mel said, "Funny but your life tells you every few years or so—"

  "—I don’t believe my life tells me anything."

  His father said O.K., O.K., turn it around and put it your way, but—

  He asked his father who this bookseller was and his father said to wait a minute—"stock taking was all I meant, I mean your marriage didn’t—I don’t know what went wrong but I didn’t have to ask you about it, you’re a good man and you felt that on balance you had to shift gears—"

  The son laughed and ran water in the sink experimentally and then yanked open the icebox door and found a beer.

  "—and now a few years later you’re taking stock of how you’re doing: I tried to do that when your mother died, and I didn’t get anyplace except Brad and I got closer, and I started eating better, in fact I developed quite an appetite, and I recognized I liked this town—what was it you and your grandmother named it?"

  Mayn said he had left for Hartford and points south the morning they reported the prison escape and hadn’t looked at a New York paper since.

  "Well, Adlai Stevenson said, Stick to your profession, whatever else you do."

  Maybe that hadn’t been too clear to him, the son observed, and sat down in the other kitchen chair, beginning to sense why he had come to see his father.

  "I had a strong feeling in my heart about you that you would survive and you were always there even if you didn’t get in touch, and had wound up by some circuitous route several rungs up but in the family job, and I held myself responsible for your mother, no one else."

  This was a longer set of words than the economical obituary he had set up in type for Sarah as if it had never been written by a living soul, and his son told him so.

  Mel laughed: was Flick serious about returning to her given name; and what was she doing in New York? Jim said that she was serious about everything; however, the difference between toxic pollution and her boyfriend was that her boyfriend made her laugh. Mel listened deeply, and asked if she was enjoying the old white Cadillac Jim had bought for her.

  If you pulled away the parts of Mel that were above his forehead and below the bone of his chin, you would have remaining a man of indeterminate age, eyes you might never have looked at closely to understand that they wanted help in engaging yours—forget their color which was mostly brown with some pale brown threads of orbit targeting a place potentially of pain-free interest far beyond you or behind them.

  Mayn kept saying things that weren’t why he had come, yet often these were answers to his father’s genuine questions, which in turn did seem to be why the visitor had come.

  Slow going into a tourist’s brief "Story of Geothermal," through some question whether the St. Louis World’s Fair (really just "Fair") was 1903 or 1904 because if ‘04 then Italy could have advertised there its small, virgin dynamo driven by the first steam well. This was at Larderello near where third-century Rome exploited that mysterious steam field: yet had not your Sky lab astronauts—?

  —that was Skylab 3, replied the aging son.

  Hadn’t he attended the last Moon launch? his father asked.

  Yes indeed, and Skylab a few months later.

  He hadn’t spoken about Skylab, said his father.

  Skylab 3’s same Skylab different crew.

  Yes, his father knew that.

  They photographed some hot spots in Central America.

  Heat-sensing cameras, his father believed (who for the years when Jim would make duty visits with the wife and children would ask Jim’s children before they would go over to their great-grandfather’s to play in the backyard if they could eat two hamburgers apiece and Flick would always say Yes— but had never to Jim’s ear asked Jim like now with an urgency which after all was only a warmth of being curious yet flowed jointly this private afternoon from Jim’s need: which was quietly, inarticulately, to go inside some imaginary polis complete with kitchen and cellar housed amid a warped map of demands waiting far and near, connected by others even if he had declined to do so, and now nearer
than New York, for he saw the blue car pass once and imagined correctly that it would be parked by a high, grassy curb down near his grandparents’ house or back near the Baptist Church whose horrendous purple stained-glass window against white Victorian-shingled gingerbread seemed to glow outward at you with some light of determination from inside)— It was the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, he said, whether that’s 1803 or 1804, because I’ve run on the track at the university there that they built for the Games, I think, because it’s three laps to the mile— Well, the Purchase was ‘03, said his father, who knew a lot about the Civil War. Well, grinned the son, his memory jogged, the Fair was ‘04 because a man Margaret met on her way East hoped to organize a balloon experiment there, or maybe it was the St. Louis Fair itself he hoped to organize. Your grandmother got a lot of mileage out of that trip West, said his father.

  His father persisted: where were the main hot spots? . . . any chance for New Jersey to—?

  Well, the New Zealand area was a regular thermal wonderland, we overtook them in ‘72 and Italy the next year for number one.

  What about the Russians?

  Well, they’ve got a small unit in Kamchatka.

  His father wanted to know how it worked, and he told him, adding how nuclear explosives in the "ploughshare" method could fracture rock, admitting us to the heat that from piped-in water will make steam to be piped out while trapping the radioactivity down around the hot rock level, if you want to believe that.

  He and his father rose from the kitchen table and Jim went downcellar looking for the M. H. Mayne diaries he did not find, turning from time to time to address his invisible father who was standing almost directly over him in the kitchen above. ‘To the best of my knowledge," he heard him say for the millionth time.

  He kept seeing his father’s mouth open and shut, open as if itself thinking it might be possible to form the word Yes and, upon doubting this possibility, closing it but closing it upon genuine words that were not necessarily No. Mayn looked at the bottles populating the narrow closet. "You sure look in the pink, Jim," he heard dimly from above.

  He turned his father’s queries about the future of geothermal and about Jim’s collateral journalistic future in regard to that subject toward the ancient joke relating speech to hot air, but his father persisted; and when they arrived again at Mayn’s interests in weather and missile development which had taken him to four arms-control conferences in a dozen years (and what was the weather on Venus, sort of an outer-space Houston in July? midsummer St. Louee?) Jim told his father he remembered him singing Rodgers and Hammerstein in the bathroom. Offkey, his father added—and Jim couldn’t believe they were having quite this conversation, this mere recollection where details were not in question but the spirit had so changed that his mother wasn’t sleepwalking in Jim’s dreams but just coming slowly up to bed and asking him why he was awake, for he was standing at the head of the stairs. I liked that singing, Jim said quietly. So did I, said his father.

  His father asked if Flick was really going to start calling herself Sarah. Seemed so last week, Jim said.

  "Why did you name her Sarah?" Mel asked.

  "Why did you call my mother ‘Sorry,’ sometimes?" asked the son.

  "She was sorry she’d married me—or married at all, maybe. And I was sometimes sorry—not to have more to say to her."

  "But it was her name, not yours."

  "I felt very bound up with her, we lived in this house in our own separate ways."

  "I’m beginning to miss her," said Jim.

  His father’s eyes brightened as if he would laugh. "So am I," he said. "Thirty-two years, I mean start missing her again, because I really did miss her at first, though I thought I was relieved."

  "I’ve seen that beach at Mantoloking and that boat she supposedly took, a thousand times, and it always slips into my mind out of nowhere, you know like a subway car into a station and suddenly you got this unit in front of you, this package, and then when you look close, you’re back where you were, thinking about a Medeco lock, or this new program contemplated for mapping lightning from above, to check the pattern against storm severity."

  "Did Pearl Myles ever get in touch with you?" his father asked. "Do you remember Pearl Myles? She asked for your address."

  He could feel the encroachment. He asked his father who the bookseller was who had inspected the cellar shelves. Name was Saint-Smythe, his father thought. Did he leave a card? No card. Carry a bag? Big leather shoulder bag, crazy-looking fellow indeterminate age, hair light or graying (couldn’t tell) and caught up in a rubber band at the back if you can believe that, wearing a fringe jacket; a fringe case but courteous. Came back upstairs with the Jack London Alcoholic Memoirs inscribed to your grandmother just before he went to Vera Cruz with the Marines, you know. He corresponded with Margaret briefly over Wilson’s policy, she loved Woodrow Wilson but disliked the intervention in Mexico and there was our socialist Jack London saying blood would tell and Mexico must be saved from mestizos, but despite their disagreement, he sent Margaret a copy of that Barleycorn confession of his. I told the man he couldn’t have it.

  Mayn turned away from his father, who asked if he had ever visited the geothermal installation in northern California (wasn’t it?) called The Geysers. Oh sure: twice. Greeley, Garibaldi, didn’t they go for steam? Jim didn’t know, but did know and conveyed to his father that William Bell Elliott who discovered the area thought he had found the gates of hell. Steam coming out of a canyon for a quarter of a mile. Teddy Roosevelt was interested in steam, said his father.

  How was Brother Brad?

  All right now, but they took a trip, went to New Hampshire and walked up a mountain and now they’re O.K. Dunno, they’ll never learn to yell at each other. So many don’t, including yours truly. But they sure can take a trip.

  "I think I know the guy who came here for those diaries," said Jim.

  "Well, then you can find out whether he walked off with them," said his father, who had paused at the dining-room table to open a magazine for a glance. "Did you ever run into that man again who burned down his own house and heard voices?"

  "At a ballgame in Detroit, that’s right."

  "A Yankee game," Mel said, "and you got into a shoving match as I recall, and made friends afterward."

  "You remember that," said the son, who had never wanted to hug his father and didn’t now. "We wound up on an island in Lake Superior out near the old copper mines, the guy was some Norwegian and we stopped to talk with a friend of his at the Ojibway fire tower who was high on foxes: half-cat, half-dog, little bastards know what they’re doing."

  "You never mentioned that," said Mel.

  The son would like to tell the father he too had failed to live in marriage to another person; but what if that peculiar marriage of his father’s had been not so bad, and why speak for his father? A crowd of unknown voices were sounding off as if they belonged to him, he to them, and why did that Grace Kimball get under his skin when he had never met her?

  Mayn asked his father if he had ever looked at the diaries in question.

  Never.

  "Isn’t it amazing that some people who weren’t at all involved might think Sarah didn’t commit suicide?"

  "You mean Pearl Myles," his father said.

  "Looking for damn knows what in life."

  "Well, how old would she be now?" said his father, and they faced each other.

  He pulled away from his father’s house in Windrow, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father might be friends; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch out of the kitchen with the big wooden table where his father and the half-brother Brad had discovered wonderful love that transcended blood by using blood, and step by step through the parlor-dining room where Trenton and New York papers and old copies of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were arranged here and there like placemats in addition to the two that were permanently set a
nd a pamphlet entitled Personal Memoirs of James Shields; and step by step (Mel now talking steadily) through the now unhistoric precincts of the sofas and fine ladderback straight chairs and the Windsor chair his grandfather Alexander had sat in uncomfortably when he came that had now a shiny white cushion advertising the race track, and step by step past three drop-leaf tables made by early nineteenth-century ancestors, not to mention the nondescript leather chair that needed to be resprung there in the corner with a lamp beside it and a gray metal magazine rack; step by step to the front hall with the music-room door closed and the mahogany table and the giant paperweight with newsprint embedded in glass myopically reflecting the mirror above it. Then, the door and the porch, where his father in black cardigan sweater from the days of the newspaper stood with a hand on a white porch post and waved and waved again to his son, who started the car and waved back, but then his father held up his hand and came down the porch steps and to the curb and Jim reached to roll down the passenger-side window and his father said, "Let me know if the weather on Venus is changing," and Jim replied, "Do you think I’m interested in that fellow’s wife?" and his father, surprised, replied, "Not really." Jim had turned off the ignition and Mel heard the phone far away in the house—"I’ll never make it"—and waved as he straightened up, so Jim saw only the hand at the window, and started the car as his father made tracks back to the porch—must be seventy-three, seventy-four? And Jim made a U-turn and headed out of town toward the clover-leaf, passing the blue New York car parked, now facing the opposite direction from him, halfway up the block near his grandparents’, a car that with some provincial lack of concern he had thought might be following him. And at the next corner he found a tall man with a medium-size red backpack hanging from his hand hitching, and a fur tail hanging out of the pack. And he stopped to pick the man up—he knew he was going to New York—and in the rear-view mirror, so he didn’t have to turn around, he saw the blue car behind him complete its U-turn and slow down, waiting.