"I went to a public high school," said Mayn.
"Well, this was Quaker," said Gordon, "and I went there up through eighth grade, although they had a high school too. My father went to a public high school but he did six hours of homework a night."
"I was lucky if I did six a week," said Mayn.
"I worked about a sixteen-hour-a-week night shift," said Gordon.
"In the days of Caesar Augustus," said Mayn.
"In the days of Caesar Augustus."
"Well, you had to keep some time to yourself. You were having those dreams."
"It was a lulu," said Gordon. "I don’t know if it was the next night after Metz was supposed to speak to the sixth grade. Sometime in there."
Mayn put his drink down on the floor, sat back and looked very straight at Gordon.
"I keep feeling I’ve missed something," said Gordon, and then had to laugh and shake his head.
"I can’t think what it would be," said Mayn.
If Gordon could finish this dream he could get out of here; the emptiness of Mayn’s living room had begun to weigh on him. When he’d had the dream didn’t matter.
It had a lot to do with newsprint. Mayn raised his dark eyebrows. Gordon was coming out of the Courthouse and being chased by a familiar janitor in galoshes yelling to him that he could not use the courthouse ground-floor corridor as a shortcut from Court to Livingston; the familiar face was pressing him at the same time that the galoshes should have held this person back, and in the dream Gordon emerged into Livingston Street with the old brick of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute up to his right and Boerum Place crossing Livingston down to his left—
"I don’t know this geography," said Mayn, "but I got chased by a patrol car in high school without a license and drove across a wood bridge and it fell to pieces behind me—"
—but it was dark, the streetlamps were still bright, and Gordon had gotten up much too early.
At the school gate there was Metz waiting. At the last second Metz stepped inside ahead of Gordon and leapt up the steps into a glare coming off the glass doors; it was the sun, and the time was the normal time. In no time, Gordon reached his classroom and Metz had already begun addressing the class in German, harsh and speechifying, and two girls were giggling like children. Gordon was at the bulletin board untacking clippings as they were needed to illustrate Metz’s talk and the board flashed. But in the dream Metz didn’t know that with each new piece of newsprint untacked the accompanying explosion on the bulletin board was in the Pacific Ocean, not western Europe.
He was telling his daily life that he’d had in Alsace; they used wooden plates there—
"Was that what he actually did talk about?" Mayn asked.
"Yes," said Gordon, but in the dream his French and German were so easy to understand (like a story you don’t listen to the actual words of) that Gordon recognized his own mother’s slick-haired Italian cobbler in his basement shop on the south side of Montague Street and red decorated Flexible Flyers almost out of control on the ice and snow racing down the harbor end of Montague Street that led to Furman Street and the docks, down Montague’s cobblestone hill covered and quieted with the wintry white gravity of the air itself—or elsewhere, a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta accompanied by an alternately loud and nearly inaudible piano coming out of a brick house on Garden Place with a brass knocker helping the piano keep time to "What a very very nice young man"—
"Dreams," said Mayn.
—and red clay tennis courts at Henry Street between Remsen and Jor-alemon and Gordon’s dad out of breath going for a drop shot and Gordon’s parents standing elbow to elbow sharing a hymnal by the light of Presbyterian stained glass while for some reason the shallow, carved-wood offering plate was reaching into their pew to get their attention, and Metz’s French and German were so easy to understand and Metz told how many planes while Gordon was trying to tell them none of this was true.
"All I want to know," said Mayn, "is who took your place as the fifth-grade angel?"
Gordon had been only one of the fifth-grade angels. It was lost in history. But the kid who had been Joseph and got sick, got well and came back and ended up an angel, whether substituting or not Gordon didn’t recall.
"You’ve taken a leave of absence," said Mayn, "you said you were unemployed?"
"I thought I was not living as I ought to," said Gordon.
"Oh is that all," said Mayn.
Gordon hadn’t said leave of absence. So how did Mayn know? "What have I missed?" Gordon said, standing up and looking around the room, looking for mementoes of Mayn’s adventures. "It’s a rambling memory."
"The Metzes didn’t get out of Europe till ‘44?" asked Mayn.
Gordon actually didn’t know. Perhaps if the Metzes had made a dramatic escape the kids at school would have heard the story.
"Had they been in hiding?"
Gordon didn’t know. He and Metz were friends for a few months. The Metzes moved to Manhattan the next year, he thought. Yes, Metz took violin lessons in Greenwich Village, someone had said.
Gordon said he had to go. "One other thing," he said. "The Christmas pageant, right?"
"Right," said Mayn, "but did Metz take lessons when you knew him?"
"Not in Greenwich Village. That was after he moved away. He visited school the next year and stood in the corridor, he had his violin case with him. He was quite a tough fellow."
"But the pageant," said Mayn.
"Metz’s parents came. So did my mother. She knew Mrs. Metz from Civitas it comes back to me—a women’s club that had speakers. It was Metz’s father who created the scene."
"What happened?" said Mayn.
Gordon and Mayn both laughed. "Maurice hadn’t told his parents he was playing Joseph. His father was offended. I’m sure they weren’t especially observant Jews; maybe that was the reason. Anyway, carrying a candle was one thing; playing Joseph was something else. Miss Gore kept saying, ‘He was really very good,’ meaning how Maurice had looked in the tableau. I remember him after the pageant standing there with everybody and his father talking to him and then to the principal who was a tall, handsome man with a black mustache. Maurice was standing there at attention. His father was upset. Mrs. Hollander was there, too, and I remember she and my mother talked like friends, like two women; and when Mrs. Hollander came up, taking it all in, I remember my mother turned away from the Metzes and the principal and Miss Gore to pay her respects to Mrs. Hollander; and Mrs. Hollander had a smile on her round face with all the rouge; she had a sense of humor, you know; she was little; and instead of answering what I imagine my mother must have said, Mrs. Hollander said into the group, ‘I think you’re expecting quite a lot of your son.’ And something in how she said it shut Mr. Metz up and next thing the principal was introducing Mrs. Hollander to Mr. and Mrs. Metz, and my mother and I were so conscious of what had happened to Mrs. Hollander ..."
Gordon had finished. He had been standing, addressing Mayn who looked up at him from the couch but now swung his head around to look toward the front hall where the tentative sound of a key in a lock could be heard.
The door creaked, and Gordon heard the voice of his own wife Norma say, "Oh you’re home."
"So is someone else," said Mayn, hauling himself up, as Norma in the hall was heard to say, "Oh?"
"I got home earlier than I expected," said Mayn. Gordon wondered if Norma was to have been a welcoming committee.
She was in the doorway now, looking at Gordon, and she was wearing a pale brown cashmere sweater with a monogram, and she had that plain-boned prettiness and that strength of demeanor that Gordon knew he took for granted, and she was hanging on to the red rubber bulb of the plant sprayer.
Gordon remembered the trailing ivy-like plant he’d noticed. "Got yourself a job?" he said.
"What are you doing here?" said Norma, taking a few steps into the room and stopping.
"We’ve been talking," said Mayn.
"What about?" said Norma.
&n
bsp; "Oh, what’s become of us," said Mayn.
"I’ll bet," said Norma, but with an irony of relief risen in her voice, yet Gordon still did not look from her to Mayn.
"Yeah, just reminiscing," said Mayn. "It’s that time of day . . ."
"—when," Gordon added, "the Chacma baboons of southern Rhodesia get melancholy supposedly."
‘They have each other," said Norma.
Mayn said, "He was going to tell me about the day they exploded the cloud cover that makes Venus into a greenhouse."
"Extemporaneously," said Gordon, sitting down again, and understanding now what Mayn had said to the new doorman, the remark that had mas temprano in it—he’d said he had come home a day early. "No," Gordon said, "I don’t think I can manage any more history right now."
"I’ve been watering Jim’s plants while he’s away," said Norma.
Gordon wanted to make a bad joke, but couldn’t think of one.
She went out of the room. Gordon heard water running. Mayn did not say, "Hey wait a minute, didn’t you know?"
"So that was the year I skipped a grade," said Gordon.
"That year you skipped was pretty packed," said Mayn kindly.
"That was only three months of it," said Gordon.
The water stopped. For a few moments there wasn’t a sound from the kitchen.
"Thanks for the drink," said Gordon.
BETWEEN HISTORIES: BREATHERS THICK AND FAST
Who was it heard her words? They come down to us to lodge in many small-scale filaments and are heard in turn from such fars and forgots, easts and wests, as are not yet vacant enough for the absent mind. So that the many have got too serious for the interrogator and he is going to press (el) button releasing his ‘lectrically- (from concentrate) squeezed juice and give a body a hit of it in self-defense. (Our body, his self.)
Her words slant down to us along an angle of the desert twilight from her century which soon could turn a century ago. Owl Woman’s words we mean come down to us we already remember from our friend the multiple child who is getting along and was in the next room doing homework when last we looked or better still research—
I am going far to see the land,
I am running far to see the land,
While back in my house the songs are intermingling.
Songs sung who by? the correspondent Lincoln, sage in saffron, asks (as we hear the research child call, Not your friend; your daughter/son he-or-she).
Sung who by? Oh, by grownups—or similar folk left behind to act in place of grownups—who heard the prevailing easterlies and told their kids, "Hear the song in the wind." Grownups to hear themselves sing the praises of these songs of the wind so the children, who heard within the music honest noise, while hearing also the real song between the volts of their resident adults’ deafened lipservice to those songs (if you call that music real noise), privately willed that whereas grownups were to be heard, they might be not seen. Which lipservice, like global debt, turns ever toward big-talk/small-talk, that stuff of history, which got our parents through the long nighty-night of marriage ever after, like the weather that that talk precipitates and reports and clouds with light.
Where? When? (Who? What?)—and why did you say things more than once? asked the high-school journalism teacher (No: why did anyone?) she long borne in the future memory of the boy and man Jim Mayn, him whom in 1976-7 our saffron-(dis)robed gal correspondent Lincoln (cross-legged in Grace Kimball’s Body-Self Workshop) daydreams out of thin air though she hasn’t met Jim—daydreams on her back burner while breathing-in an evening of women histories, one by one going round the joyful, awful circle healed with humor of tears of women on Grace’s carpet all bare and unedited: except for the foreign entrant, Clara, Chilean but with quick English accent, less naked than the others, it is her secret along her fine, tender arms and not quite flat stomach, and softly changing breasts, higher, lower, as if sometimes having just breathed along with her and sometimes not, and that like a motion of sway hint inclination faintly outward, flowers of one being—who has such a fund of international lore, and such contained eyes, such remote ordeals in her centered awareness—well, in her manners—that when she tells about life it enriches you in all its variety as the next-to-last word in narrative small talk that describes her life, even relations with husband (Men ought always use condoms, always, she says she sometimes thinks) so you think you know more of her than you know about anyone else on Grace’s carpet, but then you don’t: and yet you haven’t been tricked; for Clara—subtly husbanded, faintly shadowed Clara—makes you feel (Shit, said Grace at least more than once, nobody can make you feel unless you want to) that she’s here in Grace’s Body-Self Workshop not only for some other reason but, possibly to her surprise, the right ones too. Yet maybe the doubt is due to our gal Lincoln’s bein’ in love with a man she imagines she’s never seen except in a letter he wrote her young acquaintance slender, intense daughter Flick, where his "When’s the funding for your Washington job run out?" and "Where’s your brother Andrew spending the summer because he don’t never write his dad" decay quickly into the landscape water table of the continental Southwest as if it, and not the person himself, were the issue—not what cut to the quick his high-school journalism teacher thirty years ago.
Statuesque Miss Myles—Pearl W. Myles—was angry at his absence, and, though strong, she saw unfriendly hierarchy out-towering her and mysterious upheaval threatening underfoot; and she imagined three camps of students, those who were with her all the way in her historic fight to set up a school newspaper independent of the principal, a columnar young figure named Thompson Fulkerand; those who hardly cared; and those who in the great race took the baton from their parents if it was not the other way around and felt there’s neither a need for such a news organ on administratively so small a scale nor much of an excuse for making so much noise, and said so again and again of the woman who herself preached, "Why did you say things more than once? No: why did anyone?"
But if Miss Myles grant he had had a tragedy—Jim—she noticed he had expressed enthusiastic interest in the atom bomb, unique explosives leading up to V-J Day, and seemed unaffected by his mother’s mysterious drowning (read one-way swim, one fellow student called it); more interest in the Indian Ira Lee’s practically white sister (as Miss Myles had gathered from her prospective news editor of the putative school paper), who came around when Ira with the utmost slowness genuflecting, rising, gardened for Jim’s grandmother, than Jim showed in the midst of the rotten, blankly bright, future-catapulting thing his mother had done to as if not even really herself (and yet—and yet) and to him and little Brad his brother and to that poor man his father whose acquaintance Pearl had somehow not made and who could be seen walking home late at night, yet did she not detect —for she was Jim’s teacher, who encouraged what she termed "debate and discussion" but did not appreciate differences if they were petty as when she informed the class that you never underlined for emphasis except when in quoting a source to catch a voice emphasis, whereupon Jim put up his horny young hand to report that his great-grandfather—whom he did not need to identify for Miss Myles as once upon a time editor of the family paper—had issued instructions to his staff of three never under any circumstances to emphasize by underlining— so that Miss Myles sensed in Jim a truculence, maybe just sad tension, and in Jimmy’s unusual cool brown eyes a space falling—falling forward, she felt, but not halfway to meet her his teacher, damn it, and so, on the aforementioned unfateful day when the assigned imaginary news story came due and the tall stone of an unprecedentedly young principal had undercut her again, Miss Myles took it that Jim Mayn was bending his power as fifteen-or-going-on-fifteen-year young scion of the once only newspaper in town for a hundred years (narrow-column weekly) until another had commenced printing at the outset of FDR’s third ("There is no indispensable man") term to undercut her—her, Pearl W. Myles—when in reality Jim’s been glad to hear the answer to those ancient lead questions of the journalist’s son
g Where and When: but on one of those days, however beautiful and still more beautiful a woman of thirty she was, he had been detained (as we later learned to say at the prompting of our multiple state) by the Indian halfback Ira Lee, who was telling some of the guys about this map that was like the back of some strange thing under glass, this green relief of South America donated to the high school for future study immemorial, a reptile map crawling under one’s eyes as under glass, museum glass. But ignorant of this, she guessed when she stood up and felt across her broad brow and along the backs of her untired thighs that on a day when an imaginary news story following her models was due and that six-foot-six-inch principal Fulkerand, at twenty-nine the youngest male ever to have an eye in the back of his head and hold such a post in New Jersey who happened by a miracle to be exactly half bald from mid-head forward to the brink and down his high if narrow brow, had announced semi-privately that Miss Myles’s initiative was more nourishing than its fulfillment—on this sensitive day of all days, Jim Mayn had chosen to miss class.
Where? when? who? Turn it one iota, that small talk of passing amity or enmity that Jim’s future colleague-friend said history turned on—turn it one iota, said Ted, hunched at the bar centered above where his drink had been last week before he temporarily gave it up, and you’re looking head-on over someone’s shoulder at some further sight. The grandmother Margaret with her narrow, strong, squared shoulders, tartly directed her fifteen-year-old Jimmy to get out of his True Comics and stir his stumps and wash the mixing bowl (the pale-brown mixing bowl), and while you’re at it the pan and the lunch plates, and anything else he might find in the deep white sink. Small talk less narrative than her stories secretly meant years before to make up for his mother’s not telling him any and even not being there in spirit— when now she is evidently gone for good (read suicide; read, if you can find any, poetry, as Margaret told Jim his mother read as a girl—it’s better than reading nothing, we already remember hoping and half recall books that showed us something we’d been unconscious of); and Margaret’s tales could make him feel that while she might have foreknown mystery afflictions of her daughter, Jim’s mom, who definitely never had had the big hole in her head (like the Navajo Prince’s mother) but had been married as distantly as that demon-infected matron of Margaret’s stories and who Jim realized years later he’d felt must have married his father for some pretty good reason even if not out of deep wish or realistic considerations but—but if, later, other matter in his grandma’s stories seemed fact, some parallels with his own mother might make the Navajo Prince’s mother worth reflecting on—yet the tales existed in this kitchen in New Jersey. Into which now came grandfather Alexander —"Not going to rain after all"—bald as a tall old Danish farmer in a Life magazine, and ever arriving from a distance always, such as the next room, which came a little with him no matter how near he approached (that is, the doughnuts—and crullers in this instance—and his wife), and friendly upon the new soles and heels of his cordovans reflecting fine messages of dust, of history itself precipitated between himself and his shop downtown of shelves and tables (that seldom caught anyone in the act of purchase, yet was a business, year upon year), shoes buffed every day, polished every week, nicked and scraped and rained on, so as then to be rubbed to the patina repeated through these periods of time as the single kiss he now gave Margaret was then given on the far cheek she with brief absent-mindedness turned to him. So that—as Alexander added, "We might get an earthquake instead" (a joke, it seemed)—Margaret turned her gray-blue eyes on Jim while hearing his less-loved, though little, brother Brad call from the front porch and shove open the front door that stuck in the upper corner, for she wondered (though wouldn’t say so to Jim, though did before her death, in a letter) if he guessed Brad’s half-brotherhood as little as Brad did, the love-child of Jim’s mother Sarah and sort of fatally the wall-eyed electrician Bob Yard, who had two good cars but went around in a rusted-out pickup truck with one claw missing on the tailgate, who for once in his rampant, epically give-and-take, and childless married life, wept before Margaret’s very eyes, tears all down his five-hour stubble, and told her that just between the two of them he could after all believe in Sarah’s drowning, but God was this because he had loved her too much to run off with her? (through wind and rain, ‘cross land and sea)— poppycock, said Margaret, a word Jim used years later once so his children laughed and laughed. Poppycock, though, in Margaret’s mind, that her own retiring, original daughter Sarah could ever have run away with Bob, who loved his wife over a much longer haul; but then less nice than poppycock that Bob stood there and told Margaret like a gentleman friend that her eyes got bluer, did she know that?
Women and Men Page 84
