Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  "Listen, kiddo—"

  "Bob" said the unknown foster father.

  "Listen, little Brad, you’ve been the center of attention," said Bob, "but you ain’t the only one."

  "Bob, you simmer down, the boy’s got a point—"

  "How’s it sitting?" came the murmur in Jim’s ear as if nobody was next to him where he stood at a distance from the cluster by his mother’s memorial. "You better step in ‘n defend your dad." It was, of course, Eukie the caretaker speaking, but he didn’t ask for his pint back, and Jim just knew there was another in that giant suit.

  "Of course the wind curves," said Pearl Myles like a speech or song, and if the latter then ‘twas no bird ever seen in that landscaped acreage; "you’re all of you right: the wind bends round the curve of the Earth, the Earth’s gravity draws the wind—isn’t that it?"

  But who is remembering all this? stabs the interrogator, himself again; or, better said, what use are the family facts to the abiding subject of the grown journalist James Mayn’s activities? both in the seventies and in relation to folk drawn into the interior or the meaningful margins of Grace Kimball’s workshop carried on naked, with visual aids, "glass, rubber, plastic" (a modern variant of an old game played with hands), and in a living unit rented as residential within the articulate structure we have gradually seen built up by partial pictures, accommodating (on faith, perhaps) a multiplicity of small-scale units, when in reality Kimball takes money from her workshoppers and is even now planning not only Eros, a nationwide system of women’s health "houses" which will serve fresh foods subject to selective boycott and which will aim at further rearranging man and woman in terms of checks and balances by supposedly establishing healthier and more permanent separation between the sexes, but Kimball is also contemplating workshops for men—which will require a compulsory minimum nudity about the genitals hopefully spreading to other areas of the body including the feet, which contain wonderful tangled and stalled powers, and the teeth, the cleansing of which she proposes to instruct by means of an imported servo-oscillator, if the assembled members will ever stop betraying themselves with talk called input taped raw into Kimball’s abundance bank where it is always retrievable though you might have to skim off the crust to get to the cream which in turn includes the lengthy conviction lubricated by repetition as by any good commercial shortening (yet far far from her home, her adolescence, some solace she is coming from that no one will find in her famous fuck-your-audience auditorium a purgatory to tell how she saw through guilt, manipulation, universal addiction) that the asshole, sensitive zone that it is, should be upgraded as not only the easy out that it has traditionally been but as a joyful entry as well, which can be neat to a degree that the person is a really neat person without respect to age or shape or size or color (of genitals, that is, at this early stage when they are all that are exposed of the person who is brave enough to commit himself to the achievement of "personoia").

  "That wasn’t it," said Jim’s newly discovered half-brother Brad to Miss Myles, whose handsome scale fitted that of the stonework in the Windrow cemetery, though it might have been lost on Brad, who pondered the mere stone marking his mother’s undug grave; "she said—"

  "—well I was the one that heard it," said Bob, staring across the gravestones and spruce bushes at Cousin Eukie and at Jim, who could seemingly hear what he could see an actual face and mouth say, no matter how far, maybe, except when a vehicle came along the highway which was about a football field away from where he stood.

  "But you didn’t believe her," said little Brad, "and even if I hear what she said from you, I believe her, and—" he raised his finger profoundly and shook it at Pearl Myles, who taught high school—"Mom meant—I know what she meant—the Earth turns and it pulls the wind sideways."

  "Well, I don’t see it," said Margaret; "the wind winds up at a different latitude because the Earth turned while the wind was moving; I heard of a person who could actually see latitudes but couldn’t quite see the wind. What happened to Alexander? Did he go back downtown?" (Not that the gathering here was a regular month-and-a-day observance, it had just happened; and she turned to see Jim take some steps toward them. A hand touched him and dropped off; he was drunk.)

  Miss Myles said, "You’re convinced—?" and there was an authority in the in that rose and fell in half an instant that sounded like she wasn’t thinking about wind any more.

  The hand dropped off? inquires the Interrogator with a humor of new pride in his sense of the idiom of our history.

  Jim called to Bob Yard, who hulked with subtly gentle animus with his hands in his overalls, that he should leave his brother Brad alone—what was everybody on a day like today doing getting mad over nothing?

  Brad said (the little shit), "What day?"

  Henceforth, though never again observed, "Brad’s Day" was what Jim plainly meant. Bob asked who needed a lift, Jim turned from the beseeching eyes of his grandmother who was for once in their lives at a loss; and Jim saw what he had declined to ask Margaret: who was the father of Brad? And like a visit to the future he saw that the feeling the drink gave him was just sustaining in order later (when it wore off) to enable him to belie the feeling that had moved him to ask Eukie for a drink, yet now turn to him and ask, "What was my grandmother out here for? what was she telling you here all alone?" Only to hear Eukie, whom he couldn’t hit any more ‘n he could slam—though, mind you, not scared to slam—Bob’s face, say, "You got something on her?"

  Facts come in their time, reminds the interrogator in a minor mood; if not now, then in time to come (he smiles at his English and as if caused by this lieutenant smile a shriek appears in the next room, of discovery or of pain yet maybe out of both sides of the mouth), and most curiously facts are the future of their absence where that precise absence is in questions here and now. You hear that call—

  —read shriek, we urge, not call, as if he were not one of us, this Interrogator—

  —O.K., shriek, he concedes—but there was and will be again a sage in southeast Asia, in the southwest of the United Conditions of America (or States, literally) or among the current urban Boston Unitarians, who say (a la Tao), "E’en though one’s held as a slave, one need not let the external imprisonment bond the free mind within; O.K.? Therefore, feign insanity— but hold to one’s true sentiments."

  The shriek came again, like fact. The shriek was not a person. It was in lieu of a person, in lieu of a silence faultily designed to extend the putative person’s inability to answer the question put to her, if it is a she, by the interrogation process: Did songs by her carry coded advice to kill their recipients upon receipt? did the code tell which Cuban refugees were to be contacted as having been in fact sent by Fidel, the Cuban king? The singer-composer, having answered with silence, has next tried to sing her answer, which is her own song but out comes that horrendous shriek (more to come). But that was a woman, what do you expect?, they are more strong than men, hence make mas noise (read news) like Jews disagreeing yet we have in support of the regime agreeable Jews too, whole families we are glad to report.

  Whereas to answer Eukie’s question, we had a boy, fifteen years old about, and strong-legged if a manly young drunk thickened by the real turf of his home cemetery; and we already remember that where do you go when hit by death? a hard act to follow, where do you go from that fact, if it is a fact? and where do ye go from the fact thrust like a bodily part to play, to wit the fact that Brad is your half-brother, which isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, because it isn’t as if you were adopted, which Dick discovered on the day of his father’s funeral from one of his fellow scouts (who had come to the church in step as a unit, as the patrol they in fact were) and a moment later in a stupor of what felt like embarrassment asked a fellow scout what he thought it felt like to be just ash though still living—

  —No; Brad’s half-brotherhood, I could handle that, the newsman was heard to say—and I guess Brad didn’t completely fall apart that day, it was an amazing piece
of behavior, that’s all, and then it was over . . .

  Funny, said senior journalist-colleague Ted in the sixth decade of the century in question, a blockbuster like that, it’s almost easier to handle than . . .

  —than what? asked the Chilean woman Mayga, stepping down from her stool and putting a hand on her red pocketbook, and smiling at Jim and Ted with such affection and neutrality Jim wanted to give her a present as if that would complete the event, like the last fact.

  —than being told by your grandmother, said Jim (feeling some palpable unlosable sleaze spread slowly in their direction down the long bar from that character Spence who was listening as openly as he was not looking), that you didn’t need the kind of attention that your brother did—

  —or a fight that you’re not sure you want, said Ted, who knew Jim but had never heard the future that Jim had confided to Mayga who in turn had told Ted, but hadn’t told, or had chance to tell, Jim, her special friend (though they met in all only half a dozen times in ‘62-’63), that she had a sinking sense returning home to help her husband as if giving up her job here in Washington were the start of some long fall.

  And Jim wasn’t sure what he wanted, with applejack of which he suspected there was yet another pint in Eukie’s voluminous suit heating Jim’s thighs and chest and wildly thickening the hair in his eyebrows, and a wish to get clear of that place and even, for the moment, of his grandmother’s look that went through him to be met behind by Eukie’s words which were an inflated shadow of what world there was.

  "So what if I have?" said Jim, not knowing what he meant except if he "had" something on Margaret it was the age and experience he had reached that could turn away from her stories and still want to know what she was doing with them beyond for years holding the attention of her favored grandson whose mother apparently didn’t tell stories. But Eukie’s question—well, it sort of smelled: because you don’t have something on your grandmother; you don’t. And he didn’t say, My mother’s another story—for Eukie wasn’t entitled to hear that from Jim, ‘cause who the hell’s Eukie?, as Jim walked slowly toward the group composed of his father, who had his hands in his old seersucker trouser pockets and stared at the plot of grass as undisturbed as his wife’s permanent absence, and of his brother Brad, who said to Bob Yard he was sorry, it was just that (and Bob raised a hand gently and smugly and said, Sure), and Pearl Myles, who took a tiny pad from her pocketbook and made a note, bent slightly from her statuesque height—Jim, as he moved, not knowing what he’d do but standing toward the dumb future as he walked, until he reached Margaret; and to her he said, "You said there’s something here. I believe you, but it’s not my mother and it isn’t any spook." He wished he could turn some answers into questions—answers off there in what the cosms of the hanging sun did to the Princess, but he settled for Bob Yard having a crappy attitude, and he went to Bob then, his father Mel shaking his large, square head again and again the way one might cry, but Jim couldn’t walk through his mother’s—for Jim just knew—one-time secret amour (as which this after all not unduly hairy or unwarrantably swarthy person was, horribly incredibly but had they kissed?). So afterward Jim thought he had gone around him. But no; Bob had given way. Jim had told him, "You don’t insult my family." Bob had stepped back (he didn’t do that ever)—and to the side; and, dividing the unknown with young Jim, Bob grinned and then cut off the grin, though not because he knew what Jim was about to do. Which surprised everyone and with, for Jim, a surprise within the surprise which covered the larger asininity of what he did.

  Which still was fact, and people saw it happen, saw him seated "running" away when he had not known how to drive, he had only seen others do it.

  He loved his grandmother more than his mother. But no he didn’t. And shit, if it was true in these stories that delayed and delayed, that the fingertips of the East Far Eastern Princess when they were met almost exactly by those of her beloved, inquiring Navajo Prince printed a sound so beautiful to her she had to show it to him but it spun slicingly upon the membranes of his sick mother’s mind so she yelled and hurt so badly the elders declared the music of the original source of the painfully uncomfortable hole in her head was a punishment for wandering into the mountain when she was with child —why then Jim would one day find out for a fact that the Princess, whose father, like an early gubernor of New Neitherland personally known to an earlier manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York, claimed that his people had taken scalps (because smaller and easier to handle than skulls) for ages before the Indians got the idea: which they must have borrowed, shall we say, from Choor—the Princess, to continue, had whorls on her fingertips while the Prince had a high percentage of arches which when joined to hers created cascades of sweetest friction—so the breathing Hermit-Inventor would have written down the tones had he not been most agreeably disputing with the fast-fading old Anasazi healer the relation of breath to wind and flesh to cloud, taken so much further on his own by the otherwise skeptical newsman James Mayn, who could not trust but could not abandon Margaret’s "histories," that once upon a time reporting these histories in a future world which encompassed his own timely children, boy and girl, at one warp and, at another, a libration-point space town free of weather and conveniently reached from Earth by Matter-Frequency Modulus doubling up two persons into one, Mayn could not tell if the tribal medical society specializing in removing bullets were Zuni, in the Zuni region where the Princess, with the Prince pursuing her, passed to the south soon after they left the Navajo outcrops and dry sheep grasses and bands of horses. Later the pursuit placed its hopes in some known river such as the Susquehanna or Juniata, above which (unprecedentedly low in the sky) one night early in 1894 the Navajo Prince, the Colt revolver he would give away when the time came loaded but no protection against his having lost again the trail of the woman he followed and whose dreams he had shared up to but not including her last three before leaving the site of the Long Afternoon, saw, smelt, and even, like his brother’s grandson Michael whom he never knew who in 1943 carried coded on his person in the words of his own curiously exact Navajo tongue an American radio message which saved a thousand lives, heard the sough and song and veritable humor of a low night-cloud the Prince identified at once as having been the Anasazi medicine man or a goodly part of him, knowing then, too, if only for a riddling instant, that, whether he was a giver or taker, if he did not turn and pass back across the land to his own people he would be childless like a woman.

  But it was Brad who proved childless, though only in the Interrogator’s genetic sense, for Brad and his wife his high school beloved who was possessed of the faintest dark down in a curve of the small of her back, adopted three children before they were through, and were at once adopted by them. Brad, who on the day he was revealed to Jim as only his half-brother and grieved from nine in the morning to nearly three that afternoon for the mother whose death he accepted, jumped through this strangely overdone act of grief in Jim’s mind from subhuman occupant of same-home space to full-brothered divider of such commemorative labor between the two as had never been spelled out and never was again, except in James’s very life.

  As not even he much knew except in flashes of past connection meaningless as that between the Navajo Prince’s sudden departure and his mother’s miraculously coming back to life, unless it was the young Princess’s clandestine prior flight that did the trick.

  Did Jim grudge his newfound brother Brad nothing after that? He would surprisingly pitch in unasked and help Brad build a backdrop for a school Shakespeare play when Brad fell behind and his friends Bernard and Mark forgot and didn’t show up; Jim—while Brad frowned like a bloodhound puppy—would help him with math before Brad had a chance to speak to 4 ‘their father," who was going to invest sixty-some thousand dollars in General Electric after the sale of the paper whenever that came true, and lived, indeed day to day, to see value enhanced; and Jim, transcending fact, would tell Brad how on Brad’s Day he had taught himself almost without th
inking to drive along the weedy shoulder of the blacktop playing it by ear and only once funnybone-jamming the indestructible transmission of Bob Yard’s surprised pickup truck which felt like a very wide bed behind you as you swung and rambled rattling down the road that passed the garden of the dead where he sometimes imagined his mother’s ashes, in lieu of her moldering body—ashes in a cylinder he had heard, and in his daydream inserted at night so the grass sod hardly blinked—till one day he saw the standard container, and it was a regular oblong box not any golf-hole-type cylinder or whatever the time capsule was that they buried at the World’s Fair with a picture or was it a lock of hair of Ann Sheridan, the Oomph Girl with a beautiful smile and a fast answer.

  It was a fact that, the year after Mayn’s friend Mayga, back home in Chile, lost her life (whether or not taken by one of her two male companions along a cliff path above Valparaiso harbor, but almost certainly not given by Mayga), a minor State Department functionary named Karl wore an automatic pistol under his jacket during the emergency "Hot Line" discussions in Geneva; and a fact that an annex to the agreement called for two duplex circuits, one a tele-wire telegraph, the other a radio telegraph, plus two terminal points with telegraph teleprinter—though Mayn’s daughter Flick who heard about Karl many times but never met him doubted that he would have gotten into that room in Geneva armed.