Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  He felt for the pistol in his bag and with his other hand he gripped the greasy and dry cut of bison meat and he pulled it from his overall pocket and put it there on the bench. When he got to his feet and straightened his hat, he knew that what was bursting inside him was her heart as well as his, and he knew that she had recognized him as she passed.

  Then he fainted.

  And so your dream decided you about us? we already can foresee Jean continuing—very slightly bothering her mid-forties beloved.

  I would be a fairly old father but a humorous one.

  And you already have children, though where this son of yours fits in I "haven’t the slightest," as my mother used to say. I think you’re a romantic about marriage but who would ever guess it?

  Ted said that.

  Ted said how the world would end, I seem to remember.

  Yes, with a digression.

  But what in the dream persuaded you?

  The humor of nothing but life.

  Amy thought the dream was great.

  A female colleague of mine thought we might see a family therapist.

  Suppose we make it up as we go along.

  Far out.

  The Hermit’s second call came as Alexander entered the printing office and Margaret’s lately somewhat shaggy-haired gray-bearded father was at the back with the pressman and Alexander strode to answer.

  What will Flick say?

  She’s Sarah now. I think she is getting into family history, what there is of it. She’s welcome.

  But Spence the other night—he was coming across the cemetery like what he had to ask was . . .

  You’re right; it was scary. I thought he had gone nuts. Which is better than what my opinion of him had been.

  Alexander hung up the phone and asked his future father-in-law if he had seen Margaret and ascertained only that she had discussed her future with her father who had found it, as always, enlightening; her father had hoped she would go on writing for the Democrat when she got settled. They had reviewed several topics and one she had particularly cottoned to was revisiting the Statue of Liberty, having never visited the fully assembled "monster." Alexander observed that of course he and his cousin had paid a visit to the Statue last autumn when Margaret was still in the West. His future father-in-law observed that the spiral stairs had made him dizzy. Going up or coming down? asked the future son-in-law. Both, I think, was the answer. The men chuckled. Alexander said he must find out where Margaret had gone.

  Her father said that it was interesting what she had said about Indian language having a word for water in a pitcher for drinking and a word for water in rivers, harbors, lakes, and so forth, but not a bunch of words to distinguish among those various bodies of water as we do.

  Alexander politely rejoined that he believed the word for "geyser" was the same as the word for "waterfall." He had to go, he said, and bade his future father-in-law goodbye.

  "The Hermit-Inventor—he said that," said Mayn loudly as the first dark figure moved toward him among the gravestones. "If you can describe something, you must take responsibility for it. My grandmother must have told me."

  Jean was calling to him, she was horribly upset—what had he meant by leaving like that after some aria of Gertrude’s?, she kept waiting for him to come back, she thought he was sick, and then the dumb show aborted and before anybody could leave the police came in to ask questions because that Chilean de Talca had disappeared and there was blood and one of his handmade English shoes lying on its side in the theater vestibule if you call that a theater, and it was being said that de Talca had either murdered someone or had been murdered, the flurry had begun about ten minutes or so after the end of the show when no one was sure it had ended, and she had looked outside and couldn’tymd him, and from what Spence had said—she was crying somewhat tensely, not sadly—she had guessed from what that Spence had said that Jim had returned here of all places, she was crying excitedly and he held her so close she grunted into humor and ran her hand over his grass-and-gravestone-clammy back, and he said he had been intensely tired and had lain down and dropped off and had had an incredible dream and he was sorry he had put her through this, and she said As long as he was sorry, while he half-wondered how she had obtained a car to drive the fifty miles.

  But three other figures were making their way across the turf and gravel of Maplewood Cemetery, and it was God knows two in the morning almost.

  We already remember his dream, since, thinking to find being in it, we had encouraged trace matter to beam it up to him where he lay hoping to window what would come, until, like queer turns of coast weather, we found we had been the trace but knew this only after we had passed from it to being its effects so much less bodied we hardly recalled tracehood except the glow so red-orange in the cold, cold ground it might have been a heart.

  He was coming across the Windrow burial ground, he knew he had come as fast as the wind and he had not actually passed all the places between the Statue and here. He could see himself by the misty force of a Moon that was turned mostly to another world and gave this one tonight only its doubts. He kneaded the vermilion clay in his pocket. Her ancestors lay here and he knew the place was by a field on the far side with a short hedge on the field side and two maple trees on either side of the family stone, with small stone markers also here. And so he found the place and smelled the recent turn of earth against iron and found this trace of digging a few feet apart from a stone whose name his fingertips and eyes read to be that of Margaret’s mother who had taken to her early-hastened grave secrets in letters known to have come to her—confiding in her—from a great man in Washington who "lost nothing save honor," Margaret once said, when he sold railroad bonds to friends in Maine, where even now the Anasazi healer might have arrived and found what he had voyaged the continent to see. The pistol was as warm in his other pocket as the lost bison cells had been precious. He wanted to be with the Anasazi seeking those small famed foam volcanoes that form below waterfalls when it has warmed up and then gets cold again, towers like buildings, though two or three feet tall only. The Hermit-Inventor had doubted such existed, but the Prince had wondered if the Anasazi needed to go so far to find them. He heard pressures upon the ground at a distance and knew the dead do not walk and he crouched to the place that had been dug, and his hands felt the shape of his child there in the New Jersey soil. He felt the pistol again and remembered the Anasazi saying he would give it to the right person when the time came if he had patience. The pistol was outside him and he outside it; but long time had entered him, he knew his people were thinking of him as best they could, and he recalled what Margaret had liked best in him, his way of thinking about objects they would contemplate together and after a long time he would say what they made him feel. But there was a thing in him she had said she did not like, and she scarcely told him what it was, it didn’t matter because she loved him, yet it would matter. He saw the figure nearer, and felt the steps in his very fingers, and it was not Margaret coming across the burial ground but a person he knew as well as the thousands-of-years-past people he had seen join into one, descending from the north straits toward better country. But the long time that had entered the Prince was now new, it was not back in time but forward but as if not so far ahead in time from that old Bering Strait crossing that it passed beyond this moment: as if nothing strange should happen to him.

  But Spence, his ringed hands flashing wildly, his voice deeper, his need immense, was telling and asking, and could not say enough except this was not what he was really about; and Mayn, who tolerated him in the damp aura of faint danger here that would pass, recognized that de Talca had been convinced of Mayn’s involvement with Chilean interests from way back though it had been de Talca’s own family that had been responsible for the death of Mayga Rodriguez upon the discovery that her intimate liaison with Mayn around the time the U-2 cover got blown extended to pages of a music score known by certain Masonic elders to have circulated its never-performed opus pl
otting the demise of patriarchy in the haciendas, the business of the mines, the male-decreed alliances of marriage, the public power of the arts, and education in the sciences and techne even to the organization of Chilean shipping and the redesign of the railroad system.

  The other two figures came more slowly, but, but for one, all the speeds equaled out—Jean’s intensely attentive silence and her soft touch upon Mayn’s neck and ear and ribs; Mayn’s strange easing of Spence, calming him, reassuring him; the man and woman hand in hand approaching close enough to be now the diva, her hair not piled high but over her shoulders, and her friend the physician who was talking to her steadily; and always Spence’s final, frantic summaries of what he understood to have been de Talca’s deal through an ultimately warm-hearted and tactically unreliable Chinese woman to get hold of a child and thus lure the Cuban escapee in return for the risky freeing in Santiago of that renowned old logia lauterina liberal the diva’s father at a precise moment when de Talca’s superior had found tampered-with a messenger’s large envelope containing coded music and a fortuneteller’s witness that Mayn and Spence were brothers and in cahoots with the woman Kimball who had arranged a secret retreat to some supposedly spiritual center in Colorado near the national meteorological research center for the Chileans her intimate the wife Clara and Clara’s exile-economist husband who had openly criticized the American government for clandestinely supporting the operation of DINA right in his own adopted backyard of New York—

  all speeds equal to ours so unincorporated if still accommodated to a multiplicity of—but ours until we felt again light that did not have to reach us nor anywhere, light at last at rest, not gong nowhurs no matter how real the people who claimed to brang it to us cheap, split, fused, shredded, exploded like possibilities, imploded like an uncertain East Far Eastern erotic praxis— until, arriving to ask what was happening, what was happening, and full of such should-haves and should-haves as would have driven a less dramatic person into chaos, the distraught woman Luisa was, she said with a smile, now calmed by the anguish of Swiss citizenship, and her doctor, a polite man of perhaps Mayn’s age though less healthy though less used, suddenly said, "I believe my mother knows your aunt ... in Boston?" while his beloved diva looked into all the faces there as if to know them and one day become them, and Spence and Mayn communicated agreeably by Colloidal Unconscious to say they were sure what they would find on this old site if they should pursue it, but—

  what had long belonged to us was the nothing that thus was strange in his heart if he could only leave his child here in the ground with its surely mountainous heart where it would rest its own light even in this New Jersey territory. He rose, wondering if he would return to his people or go elsewhere. He imagined a foam volcano risen as some hollow cylinder when bubbles formed in the unexpectedly overnight thawed water and froth oozed from its holes and froze—or so they had heard from the nine-fingered botanist Marcus, or perhaps from the traveler who had been in Chapultepec and in California and in Utah and northeast among the Iroquois and alone.

  And seeing the figure of his rival Alexander slow his steps, he found the other figure clear across the burial ground, rushing toward them with that girl-mother’s imperious and loving swing of her wonderful hips, her dark hair now loose and thick, a person with the most beautiful large eyes in both worlds put together, eyes in which he would see his own country again when she came nearer, yes she was finished with even the fears that she had seldom admitted to him when they had smelled the ponderosa bark and seen the sunrise out of the mountain and laughed at a big-pawed wild cat halfway down a tree, and he had said, Nothing lasts for too long, and she had said, No . . . no— this brave person who scoffed like him at magic.

  He wanted to throw away the pistol and the man near him was angry and was going to speak to him, and the Navajo Prince took out the pistol to give it away perhaps as a present, but to give it away as the Anasazi had said, which now seemed wrong and unknown but here it was in his hand, loosely, not gripped, and as if the trigger were two thousand miles away, he understood the man before him as if he became him at the same time that he was himself.

  He extended his hand with the pistol, and Margaret called, and he saw into Alexander’s hand and saw that Alexander was going to shoot him.

  The northern sun spread through the overcast, which hung like no noctilucent cloud if such had ever existed at the height at which the young Indian had claimed their reincarnate friend the Anasazi traveled. The Hermit-Inventor had reached a place where indubitably three foam volcanoes rose evanescent out of the ice-bound April stream. But the Anasazi and his cloud were not here, unless precipitated in some happy form here during some recent night. Nor was the young Navajo, who might be anywhere, on his way home, on his way here, or speaking curiously to some resident of the land.

  And then, for seeing was believing, the foam cylinders risen from the stream or descended from these brief waterfalls drew his attention upward to what he had not seen before. A double sun replying to itself through the overcast. An optical illusion. Hard to explain. The Hermit gazed at it until it became the one sun, though it was still clearly two. He heard a motion along the surface of things. He thought he would stand here awhile.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Joseph McElroy was born in 1930. He has received numerous awards for his fiction. He lives in New York City. This is his sixth novel.

  Table of Contents

  the departed tenant