Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "We"? we ask.

  Who cares, the interrogator unquestioningly goes on, when we have proof of certain facts: "certain" not in the dubious American sense of an unspecified "some" but in the sense of particular certainties (he flicks his whole head toward the next room, but not as if there’s only one, and when we look back he looks like he would like to pick that nose of his but that’s our prejudice against political terrorism and its quiet linguistic routines)—facts (he goes on) such as that the Indian mother came back to life after her son the Navajo Prince departed armed for self-defense and magic but to give away when the time came with the very gun that the late Anasazi medicine man came into possession of through a spy who the night before the key battle of Chapultepec had won it by dubious play in a game of chance off a young Englishman who thereby regained his speech that had been lost when he had been questioned shortly before about an elusive German traveler’s map or abstract by Marion Hugo Mayne whose western diaries years later came into a distant nephew Alexander’s careful hands; not to mention, continues the interrogator exactly half obsessed by a new role he’s had thrust upon him (yet from him as certain as a shadow), a second fact that this Alexander is the still extant though now for many years widower grandfather of a man who, if it is the same James Mayn, on a bright day near the harbor when he lunched (where he often lunched) with two red-bearded, hungry, and distinguished economists, introduced a friend he happened to meet, a Wall Street oil analyst, to another accidentally encountered friend, a physician who was "in town" to discuss his accidentally deceased wife’s affairs with their lawyer, an intro which led like a suddenly slowed or detoured ray of light to a therapeutic contract between the oil analyst and the Westchester medicine man, who one day told a tale, guilty in its brevity, of a gambler who wagered in her absence his widowed, red-haired sister-in-law as if she were his wife and not his brother’s, and in the event won a powerboat in that card game which he then unloaded in a hurry in order to give up the tables and marry the lady; not to mention, continues the interrogator (being very slightly charming pacing simultaneously this and the next room which has ne’er been done before—with the rolling gait of a sailor), fact number three: it was only after her father had departed the Four Corners area that his daughter Flick entered it to extend her energy inquiries beyond that perfect Asia poison (Vietnam-related) dioxin in Michigan on a river that connects with Minnesota’s Mille Lacs where at an elevation of i ,249 feet above sea level another New York doctor’s Ojibway guide practices his tradition of apprehending tapeworms in order to fly them in the bodies of walleyed pike to opera singers who desire a dramatic weight loss, to the New Mexico power plant and Navajo Mine (so-called) featuring low-sulfur coal stripped from the nonetheless now not appreciably paler landscape to be turned into natural gas; and it was only after he had visited that Four Corners region—complete with as-yet-unexplained rendezvous with two very-differ-ent-as-to-sex-and-color /n-staters—that the correspondent-woman Lincoln grew interested in Mayn, and only after she grew interested in him that she joined an energy workshop also called Body-Self where by chance or design she encountered in the nude a woman who flatly asserted all men should always wear condoms yet herself gave only the illusion of being open with the other women about her husband—a husband whose sanctuarial foundation is set up to fund future finds in geothermal research, weather control without prejudice as to purpose, and many other areas such as Navajo and other Indian water-and territory-conservation legal strategy that doesn’t exclude inter-American (read even Castroist) advisory assistance.

  How far need we bother going? asks the interrogator (meaning not "I" but "we," yet not only because he speaks in a higher voice having been replaced by his relief)—how far with feelings such as the boy’s or the grandmother’s or the bibulous grave tender Eukie Yard’s, when we have these other assembled facts already.

  But Jim didn’t accept—i.e., live with—his mother’s suicide, while knowing that, on his knees or on his feet looking past Margaret at the glint of Eukie’s pint of applejack, he didn’t think her absenting herself right or wrong. She’d been sick with something, infections and fatigue, and she had never much talked to his father. Which Jim had sort of always accepted.

  "I think there’s something here, you know," he said to his grandmother, resisting tears primed not by rain on his face from the grass but by traces of panic and relief in him that responded to the ground. And resisted "ending it all" by hugging her: her brown silk blouse, the black skirt, the medium-low-heeled black shoes (he can specify years later through memory that did not need to function then)—

  —hugging her shoes, murmurs the interrogator in a now deeper voice whose sotto murmur is as from some partitioned distance which, by the ancient and modern modulus for translating terms of one problem into terms of another, accidentally rediscovered by Larry Shearson in (from his view) his hotel-like apartment house, sounds pretty intense because you don’t ask even the wonderful Amy to walk all over you (assumin’ she’ll even come near) nor even if you’re biking among a flood of pedestri- (read pederastri-, no paparasby-) terian traders horse-sucking you bike ‘n all like your own built-in vacuum, that feels (but only feels) irresistible, like the Mayn-to-Lar’-over-’n-out-por-trayed moonless Lake Rompanemus at night, off a familiar, rough-planked dock your feet alone see, or the next room’s door that wasn’t suppose to be open tonight)—

  "There is something here," she said, her feet then so truly on the ground that Jim knew she didn’t go in for God while to be sure singling gods out of her memories and humor but never the whole ballgame as if youse gon’ make one sense of it all including—

  —Let us say, adds our soft-soprano- (no, sobrani-) voiced interrogator, that a mother drowning herself on a windy day because she lacks the socialized sinew to remain useful to those who need her, who commits self-destruction through over-emphasis on happiness or sexual frustration or guilt, through a willingness to entertain rather than encounter the void of human—

  "What do you mean, Gramma?" demanded Jim, "spooks?"—just as we, we, slow on the intake, say the same to the interrogator minus "spooks" and plus "Cuba infiltrating certain American Indian reservations through Anglo sympathizers intellectually bent upon not just understanding the Indian but keeping their culture pure (pronounced in the endemic Spanish, pooro), for do not Castroist advisers in desert powerboats have to be preceded by advance persons who are at least native American and know the "terrain"?

  He looked at her across the specific blank, wet grass where his mother’s small ledge of headstone was. Margaret’s eyes grayer and grayer, and the light behind her like the sound of the announcer bringing the trotters up to the starting mark took her away from him but he couldn’t follow, and, to boot, she turned to look somewhere as if she heard the approach of what would finish here and everywhere a privacy she and he had always had. Though this was nonsense, for they could always laugh—for years afterward they could laugh—the Prince and Princess junk was behind ‘em; or they could laugh for a few years anyhow. And she said, Funny how Brad and your father accept it.

  And then, so Jim dented the earth with the side of his hand, the sides of his hammer fists, he didn’t know what to call out or how; he hammered on the Earth hammering himself or someone else who might as well have been inside him back in or into shape and never said a word, while stupidly feeling that some drumming came up out of the earth at his summons and traced its smoke through him, employing him, ignoring him, maybe proving through this material experiment to have been so insubstantial that there’s nothing holding his mind back, falling forward then over the grave only to find that like a sprinter or a lineman he was leaning too far forward but the ball wasn’t snapped, the gun didn’t go off—but he didn’t fall forward except in mind.

  "Yes there’s something here," said Margaret in that intelligent mellow voice after a moment; "it’s not your mother—"

  "—/ know," said Jim rather quickly without feeling.

  "—and it’s
real, my dear, it’s real—"

  "Yeah, yeah—" tired after Brad’s Day.

  "My heart lies buried there," he thought she said, and it was hard to credit, so he did—tired after Brad’s Day—which in some bumping or winding in his ears he knew wasn’t yet over, like the spaces of silent, silent fact between him and what his mother had wryly specified, which he knew then and later he would have gone on to anyway "Go away where you belong" —yet instead of just doing it, departing Windrow like others leaving home and state, he’d been told to and by a mother who had then given him and his halfway brother the impression that she was the one who’d—and for that moment as his (yes!) apologetic (!) grandma spoke again, Jim the slicing halfback who had run through muscle-bound (actually nice-guy) Feingold like mere matter was in his mother’s shoes, no, well, his mother’s body or her soul at any rate, and he would just believe that she had done this even if he did not accept her—her death (because if he had, he would have felt her last breath clouding his way with or without words which were too easy to say and write down, which was what he wished to say to Miss Myles, fine wide mouth and geometric tits, for he would stick to facts, not make up news). And he got up off his knees and didn’t know what came out of his mouth until there it was: "Gramma, I’m glad Braddie cried and all. He had to. I didn’t feel like the door was closed on that room. He was a kid, I mean any kid; you know what I mean, Gramma? And I thought, he’s my brother and I don’t have to be crazy about him, he’s Brad."

  And then, ‘75 he my brother, Gramma?" and Jim grinned at what had come out because of some story-like relief that got onto her whole face.

  "Brad?" she said. "Brad is your half-brother. You guessed it, I’m sure. But your mother never actually told me till that day at the beach—the morning after that day. You probably didn’t need as much as Brad did, you know." Her face got the way it had been before, so what she’d said seemed to leave her with something else or the same old thing, though the fact itself of this blockbuster that had just come out (coupled with Jim not asking, Who was the father?) was easy to take; it was just there—surprising, ^surprising (y’know).

  Said she was her own mother. Funny thing ever after for better, for worse, for still better: Jim hit Feingold too hard next day but did not pass through him, the attitude was wrong. He didn’t ask his grandmother (who had said, "Look who’s here"—though they were only approaching this part of the cemetery in their vehicles), Was Sarah then her own mother? His mom would laugh at that but you often didn’t know why, and in the cemetery with the rinsed grass all around and by the same token stuck to his hands so he would rub it together in his palms, he missed his mother, he loved her, she was off by herself but he was the one who didn’t go hunt her up—well, he did sometimes, but anyway, she was there and he came and went and knew her humor ‘thout paying much attention to it (life go on quat slowly—he had treated his grandparents’ house like home at eight, ten, twelve . . . Why? Oh, because it took you back to your childhood, was his mother’s joke, it reminded you of your little aproned mother hanging up underwear in the backyard breeze. At eight, to be reminded of your childhood?). She joked as no one else.

  He certainly had been a kid—had played, disappeared all day; ran away once overnight ‘n applied for a job in Englishtown at a dairy; and his grandma wasn’t exactly a little aproned person. His mother, though, was not quite so tall, which was surprising because of Alexander too, and she was a little fuller, squarer, though not strong-feeling, that is, to look at, and, if you could catch her, see her, she conveyed this in the curve of her slow sweep through the rooms of the house, where, like Margaret, to do a day’s work in two days she paid the shiny-black little indestructible girl from "collard-ville" literally on the far side of the Jersey Central tracks whose name was also Margaret; but Sarah never worked along with her and never checked up on her, though Margaret did—and in Sarah’s house. Why I thought you’d gone home, Margaret, said Sarah, which made little Margaret laugh and laugh, sucking without many teeth on a cherry pit from the backyard.

  Leona Stormer who had married an older man who had made her pregnant, a doctor who had known how to—and she’d gone away to Illinois where he practiced—came back and Sarah came face to face with her after years and years, in the cool-tile-floored drugstore on a day as hot as uptown downtown. Sarah had burst into tears, Leona had smiled. Just then Jim appeared, whom Leona had never set eyes on even when he was a baby. Sarah started laughing and crying. Jim found two things out. One was that his mother as he’d suspected really did say odd things: she said to Leona, It isn’t that I feel much for you, you take me back that’s all you do but— Thanks! said Leona, pretending to be a bit irritated, which she was— But, said Sarah, that’s a lot to make me do. Thanks, said Leona, and didn’t cry, though Jim’s impression was that she wouldn’t have, or as he thought back on it years later. But the other thing Jim found—was it accident that he had run into his mother downtown? and he imagined that at eleven or twelve he had been married and working to support his family and had happened to run into his mother (Oh hi, Mom, how are you doing?)—but yes, the other thing Jim found was that he wasn’t embarrassed by her, by what she said to Leona that time in the drugstore. He had observed this woman Sarah who happened to be his mother, a surprising woman, interesting, warm to the touch and would even hug him though he never saw her really touch his father, or was it the other way around?

  But Jim and Sarah left each other kind of alone, that is in the good sense, but then the day came and he thought of all the times he had missed, that is, you know, the chances: to do what, to ask her things, like Dick, who used to ask his father, Why get married? or, Did fish suffer? and whose father died in the middle of the night when Dick was out camping with the Boy Scouts (smoking his first cigarette). But not to just ask her things—no, to be in the same understanding room together.

  (What crap!) And what was he doing there that day in the drugstore when she ran into her old school acquaintance Leona? Well, while we’re all here, might’s well ask what was he doing under the porch that other day? "What doing, Jim?" tiny tot Brad would ask arriving softly in Jim’s room and Jim didn’t speak to him but didn’t tell him to go away: oilin’ my mitt; readin’ a comic; seein’ which cards I’m gonna swap (baseball cards—the stars in the flesh, square-jawed, at ease). Oh, said tiny tot Brad clearly, softly.

  He would be allowed to stay if he didn’t mess around with the cards. Jim gave him one to look at, a duplicate, and Brad put it down on the floor carefully, but he watched Jim instead. Well, don’t look at me, Jim didn’t say.

  Till one day, Brad’s Day, Jim looked at Brad, and looked and looked at him on the floor in his short pants, his legs lengthening, till he’s glad not to look any more; where do you go from there? your bike, your bike with balloon tires mashing the gravel so Margaret across the cemetery saw him before he saw her and Eukie looking (Jim had been told) like Winston Churchill. And where’d you go from your grandma’s fact called forth by your crazy question Is he my brother, Gramma?

  "Well, look who’s here," she said matter-of-factly.

  The vehicles parted wildly as they entered the gravel patterns of the cemetery drives. The Mayn Pontiac contained Mel, who embraced the wheel, his head close to the windshield as if to see better, and Brad, who sat back with his tough insect’s elbow out the open passenger window. The noisy-bodied Ford pickup truck had followed until they all got past the stone posts of the gateway, then it veered along another gravel way so Jim, who was at once on the move himself across the grass, could just about hear Bob Yard talking and Pearl Myles laughing and exclaiming, but the two vehicles got to the golf course side of the cemetery almost simultaneously, and Jim, who was walking away toward the caretaker, Eukie Yard, and later remembered a dog barking out on the road, heard Miss Myles, on removing herself from Bob’s truck, tell Mel she was shocked to hear (which Jim knew meant the projected termination of the newspaper but he didn’t hear the end of her suddenly respectful sentence). Eu
kie stood off against the lintel post of the Vandevere mausoleum wearing one of his—maybe his only—large and voluminous garment like what Churchill always wore. Jim went over there and right up to Eukie with his dirty old crew cut, red cheeks, gray chin, and asked quiet like if Eukie would give him a slug of that applejack (CT never had ‘ny apple, is it strong?").

  Eukie bobbed his bald, crusty head in assent or turning his eyes somehow down into the places of his great olive-green garment and the bottle was in Jim’s hand before Jim could ask what Margaret and Eukie had been in conversation about. He could just punch Bob Yard for upsetting Brad, back home, but why did he think this?—for Bob hadn’t upset Brad. In a moment Jim was both more with his "host" and way beyond him, the effect of the fluid was a burn at first, then a worm coiling gently over his bodily structure outlining his skull-mask which there in the cemetery he saw he had looked forward to.

  "We’ll piddle along with the job printing, but we’ll get a good price for the Democrat," he heard his father saying far away. So the paper was being sold to someone, Jim thought idly; yet it was not going to come out every week any more. "Your wife," a respectful voice was heard muffled by the length of the day, by the grass, by the cushioned distance of this stinking pleasant place, where an impromptu thing was going on, secret each from each of the persons there "your wife was sick ..."

  No connection: it’s been in the works for a year and more; her death had nothing to do . . .

  "Damn," said Bob Yard; "damn it to hell." But Bob himself, he had been affected by Jim’s mother’s death. You might not know it, because he just went on with business, and him and his wife went to the Harness for dinner out on the Matawan road twice a week and drank a snootful and laughed all through the movies, no matter what, or went to sleep in the back row. Margaret didn’t move, as if she’s waiting for a word to set her going, or a funeral that might come from the four persons clustered near the headstone. Jim, off by the Vandevere mausoleum, took another drink. Eukie breathing heavily said nothing, while Brad, whose Day it had turned out to be, stood at the undug grave and his mother’s stone. He said, "What do you mean ‘Damn’?," and Bob, who was not nice but was good company, said threateningly, "Listen, Brad—" who retorted, "Well, my mother was probably right for all you’d know. I bet the wind does curve—"