Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  There was a little kid named Arthur who had sat behind Gordon in fifth grade always doing something on his desk, scratching, tapping, and, when Gordon put up his hand, Arthur would start humming some song, and Gordon wanted to just shut him up. It was that sometimes he got terrifically mad at the red-headed kid Arthur—or at Dickie—but then in a moment he wouldn’t be mad. And in between nothing happened, but nothing.

  Well, he had an answer to Dickie the first day in sixth grade when they’d walked home but it had gone right out of his head and they’d gone on home and Gordon had gotten busy on his new homework. That night at dinner the answer had come back to him when his father had said, "So you’re a sixth grader."

  Gordon could only say, "Well ..." and smirk.

  At dinner a week later, his father said, "How’s sixth grade, pal? Shaking down O.K.?"

  Like the maiden cruise of a naval ship, Mayn said (of "shaking down").

  Gordon was simultaneously on the bridge of a brand-new heavy cruiser model he had just finished painting, and in the wardroom where the officers took their meals, and he could not decide if he had a dress hat on or a khaki battle cap, an overseas cap he thought it was called—and back into his head came the words that had come to him powerfully to say to Dickie the first day as they passed the paper store, but now to his father he really said them: "I’m the same person." They didn’t feel like his own words but they were words that had come to him all right. His father frowned and grinned at the same time.

  "Just got to work harder," his father said. His father always took off his suit jacket for dinner unless there were guests. "That’s right," said Gordon’s mother to Gordon the way she would tell him he was tired.

  As for the Christmas pageant, he forgot the matter. Or enough to be uninterested by the time the fifth-grade Joseph got sick and was replaced. The boy, Howard McClone—

  Mayn laughed and Gordon insisted that that was the boy’s name.

  —Howard McClone who was not a particular friend of Gordon’s had been sent home for two weeks having been exposed to measles at school and mumps and chicken pox at Sunday school; Dickie informed Gordon, complaining that he himself hadn’t been quarantined. On the fourteenth day McClone came down with such a case of measles the doctor said it was all three diseases. Gordon’s mother remembered diphtheria. McClone’s triple-header was like a record. McClone was confined to a darkened room. The new guy who had been given the part of Joseph did not especially attract Gordon’s attention. He had arrived right after Gordon had left fifth grade.

  Gordon had mastered fractions; they were like writing his name in all different handwritings, like the daydreaming labyrinths he drew layer by layer outward, which seemed to make themselves up until the paper was filled and he swapped with Patti Oxford who could draw horses or Patti Galdston, who always needed a Band-Aid for a sore thumb. Gordon was made happy by anything printed on the page of a book; it was new, it was clear and opening up, it was problems you could begin fresh in order to get to the next assignment.

  Mrs. Hollander came to school early and Gordon saw her water all those plants.

  Gordon looked at James Mayn. "Do you ever go blank?"

  "Story of my life," said Mayn. "Now, when did Mrs. Hollander’s daughter get killed?"

  "Maurice Metz," said Gordon abruptly. "Maurice Metz."

  "Maurice Metz," said Mayn.

  When Gordon and his fellow sixth graders would pass the fifth-grade room, Gordon saw the new boy sitting up straight staring toward the front of the classroom as if, somewhere out of sight, Miss Gore was calling on him.

  His name was Maurice Metz. He had arrived from Europe soon after Gordon had been skipped, and he was the most imposing of fifth graders with thick eyebrows and a long, narrow head. His pants were too short; he wore high shoes; his pants were of a dark, flecked cloth that looked part of a grownup suit, though not like the smooth, dark cloth that Gordon’s father had his suits made of, one or two every year probably quite cheaply at a tailor’s in the Wall Street area. Someone must have wondered how Metz got to be Joseph, but he was tall and was being made to feel at home, and even if he’d had to speak lines, which he did not have to, his foreign accent sounded strangely good. Joseph was foreign too, though you’d never know from how Gordon’s father’s cousin Rose who worked at the National City Bank talked about not the holy family really but Jesus, who was always "Him," as if everybody knew who she was talking about, which they did.

  Metz was a grind, and when they all filed into assembly twice a week to the grand and final-sounding music Gordon didn’t know then was "Pomp and Circumstance," Maurice Metz would march. He didn’t so much lift his knees as lean into the cadence and shorten his step. But the thing about Metz was that he could really speak German and French, and at recess he would swear in German.

  Gordon’s first report card in sixth grade said Gordon had a good accent in French. His father got him to say a few words at the dinner table and criticized Gordon’s r—he didn’t swallow it quite enough—and, inevitably, his u. His mother said he was only in sixth grade after all; Gordon knew what his father was about to say—"It doesn’t make any difference" (which was somehow right, Gordon thought)—but then his father didn’t say it after all and had a little discussion with Gordon’s mother as to whether he should have a cup of coffee, and it stuck in Gordon’s memory later that evening when his mother joined his father in their bedroom and shut the door and Gordon heard the sound of their talking. His father was a good father and had taken him to a Brooklyn Dodger baseball game in September when Gordon got home from camp.

  "I lived fifty miles away, and I never saw a real Major League game in New York until I was probably twenty," said Mayn.

  Gordon heard himself describing Ebbets Field and the folk on the apartment rooftops beyond the right-centerfield wall, his mother knitting half of one sleeve of a dark red sleeveless sweater for him during a Ladies Day game when her ticket was half-price and the visitors couldn’t touch the soft floaters of Freddie Fitzsimmons who was so round and plump-looking, fat in fact, that Gordon couldn’t see how he could be such a good pitcher and argued it with his mother, who seldom looked down at her knitting and thought Fitzsimmons was good the way some fat people swim well—she was a beautiful swimmer—and anyway it was his arm that counted—but he did not speak to Mayn of how he had felt funny, or was it helpless, that night when his parents’ door opened and shut—my father was a good talker, said Gordon, a good father, he added, and he felt his eyes water and wondered if Mayn noticed; and in the morning, dawdling at the window staring at the harbor, hearing his mother call to him, Gordon went on daydreaming and distinctly remembered thinking (he went on as if it was hard to explain) that he would always remember this moment staring through the window at a tugboat ploughing out of the East River around the Battery—maybe a liner was going out that morning—and he had remembered that moment of daydreaming—funny thing to remember.

  "Well, that was the year you skipped," said Mayn. "So you went to college a year early," said Mayn, "or did you mess up somewhere along the line?" Talk slid apart from thought.

  Gordon had been so busy. And the newspaper became important to him. The Herald Tribune with its easier print, bigger type, on weekdays; the Times and Trib on Sundays. He brought a sheaf of war clippings to school and he and Mrs. Hollander picked from them. Bill Bussing visited the bulletin board as soon as the latest clippings were up.

  Bill never left his house except to go to school, but in his room at the top of his parents’ house he didn’t seem peculiar, he pursued his interests seemingly without interference. He gave things to Gordon, a World War One biplane just like one that Gordon and Chick had seen in a newsreel steeply circling the sky. Bill displayed a plane-spotter chart and an abbreviated version on a handy card above his workbench with silhouettes of bombers and fighters, British, German, and now American, and he knew what engines they had and the range of the bombers. Bill drank chocolate milk by the quart; out came the can of Hershey
’s or the jar of Bosco and a bottle of milk, two Seven Dwarfs glasses, and then back to Bill’s room, and Gordon never saw Bill’s mother or father or a maid or anyone else. Bill would let himself and Gordon in the basement door that had the grating and climb to the top of the house.

  The roof? Mayn murmured.

  You can’t safely go out on the roof of most brownstones like the Bussings’—maybe they used it to sunbathe, who knows?, no the top floor was mainly Bill’s room, with all his equipment, like a photo and chemistry lab and a workshop and the bed was a Murphy bed, it closed up into the wall so Bill had more space to walk, he did a lot of walking.

  Inside, said Mayn. That’s right, Gordon said.

  When Gordon would leave he would let himself out the first-floor not the basement door, and went down the steps of the high stoop; and one day when Bill had given him an old scout knife, Gordon stopped at the paper store and bought a copy of the Daily Mirror for the war pictures. His father saw the paper spread out on the piano and called it a scandal sheet. Gordon’s mother laughed, she said Gordon didn’t care a rap about scandal—

  You remember that? said Mayn.

  —and his father said Look at all Gordon had cut out of the paper, there was nothing left of the sports section even. Gordon’s mother said as she was wont, How good can a good boy be?

  Gordon kept the sports statistics in his school loose-leaf notebook with the big light-blue cloth-covered binder. The current-events clippings he covered Mrs. Hollander’s bulletin board with until she said he should pick only the most interesting pictures and reports as if he were the editor of a newspaper and wanted to catch people’s attention. Then Gordon began to clip headlines, scissoring them slowly and keeping them flat in his notebook till he got to school and tacked them up above pictures and maps (white land, black sea), so whether his classmates read the articles or the maps or looked at an Associated Press photo, they couldn’t miss the headlines.

  His mother, who had lots of plants like Mrs. Hollander, bought him a printing press with rubber letters of dark pink, and he and Chick did EXTRAS with headlines of the football games they played on their street and the roller-skate hockey they all ruined themselves playing over on Grace Court, which was a dead-end street overlooking the harbor. Straussie lived there and further up the block so did Bussing. Gordon rang Bussing’s bell, and suddenly wondered why he was doing it but when Bussing leaned out the top-floor window and Gordon clambered up out of the areaway and rolled off the curb into the street and turned around, he thought what the hell he might as well ask, and asked Bill if he wanted to play. But Bill was busy. He was leaning way out of his top-floor window and Gordon pushed down on his stick and slowly rolled backward. (As if you were in a boat, Mayn said. Exactly, said Gordon.) Bussing tossed something out the window which shook out into a parachute drifting in the direction that Gordon had started to roll. But Gordon had stopped and the chute went over his head past him. And the weight when it hit the street was a small red-and-silver horseshoe magnet and the material of the chute no ordinary handkerchief but a silky sail with eyeholes studded around the rim for the shrouds—a nice piece of work.

  It looked real and Gordon bent way over and picked it up, and bunching it, caught Bussing’s eye and drew his arm back to throw it.

  "Keep it," said Bill and withdrew his head and closed the window.

  At the dinner table that night he shifted the magnet, which was uncomfortable, and his father, who was telling about a man in the office who was going to resign because he’d gotten into officers’ training school after all, asked Gordon what he was doing and Gordon pulled the whole parachute out of his pocket and held it up by the center and laid it beside his butter plate.

  The magnet hit the shiny wood of the dinner table, and Gordon’s mother snapped her fingers and said, "Off the table"—why did Gordon remember that?—and in the same breath she looked at Gordon’s father and said, "But ..." and in her pause, Gordon’s father said, "You mean they wouldn’t take me."

  His mother said she hadn’t meant that; Gordon’s father said "on the contrary" he thought she had. There was a moment of silence. Gordon told his parents about the new boy who could speak German and French—Maurice Metz.

  "Sixth grade?" Gordon’s father said.

  He raised his eyebrows when Gordon said, "Fifth."

  "They’re from Europe," said Gordon’s mother. "They’re refugees."

  Gordon’s father said it was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, and Gordon now recalled that his father told a story of the former college classmate known as Baron who in the late 1920s on his first and distinctly shady flight in South America—had a pilot’s license at twenty-one—nephew of a big shot in Anaconda Copper—had to make an emergency landing. It was right about the time the Guggenheims sold Anaconda, that mine of theirs, so they could increase their investment in nitrates. It was an emergency landing because Baron’s companion on the flight, a former Minister of the Interior in the country they were over, had gone into convulsions. And the former minister had been acting as radioman, and this young American adventurer, Gordon’s father’s classmate Baron who had been quite a good friend at college, thought he didn’t know a word of Spanish. Until he realized he was getting some of what was coming over the radio, getting most of it— which was that.—beginning with, repeatedly, the name—at first notably the middle name Marmaduke—the former Minister of the Interior who had opposed a graduated income tax and inaugurated a new sewer system and made many enemies and was wanted, was thought to be in Baron’s plane. Gordon’s father pointed out that if, as Baron must have recalled, he had not been exposed to the Spanish lessons his aunt and uncle always had at mealtime the preceding summer when Baron was living with them for three weeks while combining pleasure with his dubious labors as a trainee with Anaconda, he would not have understood that he and the former Minister of the Interior who had once been next in line for the presidency were in danger—so he was in the plane, said Mayn—nor understood as well where the transmissions were originating from. As a result, Baron changed course at just the right moment to spot an upland meadow like a small, green cove—or, said Gordon now to Mayn, like one of those small countries with no coastline. The plane landed there and the former minister recovered himself though not his speech under the curious eye of an Indian sheepherder.

  Mayn said he thought he had known how to drive a car—actually, a pick-up truck—without having ever learned.

  Gordon waited a moment.

  It was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, said Gordon’s father. Gordon’s father’s sister was a WAAC attached to the Eighth Air Force in England and she had picked up the language in no time (Gordon’s father’s joke) and would probably never have wanted to come home.

  "Your father wasn’t in the War, then?" said Mayn.

  "He had angina, he developed it in his thirties; he survived the War, but not by much," said Gordon.

  "Some things take a while," said Mayn, mystifyingly.

  Gordon said he hadn’t meant to go on like this.

  Mayn laughed and thrust his open hand outward to raise his cuff and glanced at his wrist watch; Gordon laughed and added that there was a message to himself here someplace.

  If they could get to the end, said Mayn; and by the way, the Crash in ‘29 and what happened afterward hit Chilean copper very hard—was it Chile the Baron had been aiming for?

  Gordon said he supposed it must have been, and, he said, this is what you do if you give up your job; you go and talk to strangers.

  Well, the need to change your life gets you through many a routine day, said Mayn.

  Gordon said that his wife had a new job and she’d already changed. Actually her old volunteer job, but they were now paying her a salary. Amazing, eh?

  It does seem to reverse the usual process, said Mayn as if he said it as an afterthought after paying such close attention to so much of what Gordon said, that Gordon felt Mayn wasn’t entire
ly there. But this was more of Gordon’s unemployed nonsense, probably. Newspaper people remembered everything and nothing. Everyone was eerie in Gordon’s present state of leisure, or about to ask him some question.

  Mrs. Hollander and her daughter? said Mayn, rising with his glass. Such tremendous things happen when you’re a kid, and later on there they are, along with skipping a grade, said Gordon.

  Well, you remember them, said Mayn.

  Of his undeclared race with Maurice Metz there had been nothing to tell—not to his parents at the dinner table, and not to anyone else, probably. But there was. So was this why he remembered not telling? And it was funny, and he’d never told it even to Norma, his own wife.

  Gordon crossed Livingston Street in mid-block by Brooklyn Polytechnic and crossed at an angle so that when he noticed the tall guy Metz with his lunch box and his briefcase with the strap around it, over on the side that Gordon was crossing to, he experienced a sensation of convergence, as he put it now, that was pleasing. He’d spoken to Metz at recess; Metz lived in a house several blocks from the river, on Clinton Street, which crossed one end of Livingston and where traffic from Atlantic Avenue made it next to impossible to play in the street, and Gordon’s mother had told his father that the Metzes were refugees. Metz played soccer at recess, and you could only get the ball away from him if you shoved him, and even then the ball would stick magnetized to his foot. Metz was smart and had shown how the German soldiers goose-stepped and had told how an entire division wrenched their necks when they turned their heads toward Hitler’s reviewing stand in a parade and for a month had to advance sideways in order to see what lay in front of them, and Gordon had said he was going to be a pilot and fly into Africa.