—oh please don’t, said Mel—without enough clothes, y’know—but after Dad Mel said she was in heaven, big brother Jim said, touching his half-brother’s shoulder (though Mel could touch Brad, too), No, Braddie, she’s O.K.
—no need for her to go on floating downward in your ill head, she had the water to float on, in, under, within, through, out through, so long as you got the basic info into your who where when lead—
—What? asks a now-long-unheard-from voice, a childlike interrogator who have overheard stuff not comprehensible or not especially desired— "What?" asks a kid watching TV—multiple kid dune homework with the sound off for a new wrinkle—
—No, she’s O.K., Braddie, she’s O.K.
Well’s far’s I’m concerned, said Dr. Herman, when Jim told him of Mel’s asseveration that most Armenians were Catholics, all Cartiolics are Armenians—have you ever had a real drink, Jimmy? and he bent to deftly lift from back of some other bottles ein quart applejack before Jim could start to describe Brad’s Day finishing off at the cemetery with a couple of snorts from Eukie’s small but somewhat inexhaustible bottle emerging from his voluminous coverall—"sirensuit" as it was called by Margaret (a great Chur-chillian sometimes though then she would see he was only history) and when Jim asked why "siren," Alexander said Churchill attracted all the ladies with that suit and looked like a baby in point of fact, and Margaret said Nonsense, the fact was that the siren was the air-raid warning and Churchill was always out among the people at those times and always wore that one-piece semi-military-fatigue coverall outfit—and Jim said, "Thanks, Gramma," and she said, "You’re welcome," he still visualized the Prince leaving in quest of the Princess, and the giant bird still adrift in that formidable western sky that at some margin, or set, of the light, became East, and the curious recovery of the Navajo Queen—curiouser and curiouser if you thought about it but he could stop thinking and he did stop asking:
And seldom asking his father, Mel, who didn’t relinquish the weekly newspaper for quite a time, questions he really wanted answers to and often thinking up questions about Windrow goings-on that Mel would have incorporated succinctly into the Democrat: a piner woman and her infant were found dead at the edge of the swamp west of Lake Rompanemus: in fact, the woman’s foot was in the water. Back in the woods the apparently sleeping body of a piner man, in fact dead, was found braced in the limbs of a tree near a burned cabin. (His clothes, Mel observed upon being asked by Jim what about him, were still damp, but there was no sign of foul play or water in the lung though no autopsies were held on three unknown piners.) Jim asked Sam, who for some reason had not told Jim that Sam’s uncle at the firehouse had heard about it at the Elks’ from Dr. Herman, who had been called by the police and had taken Cornelia with him and Cornelia who was in Miss Myles’s journalism class had turned in the brief article to Mel at the Democrat, which became briefer in the Democrat, though Miss Myles, who got this information out of Jim, could never persuade Cornelia to expand it into a feature piece. Jim saw waterflies playing on the murk near the dead woman and child, saw one waterfly carry some sultry irritation to the baby so it revived and opened its mouth but was capable only of silence. (The woman had shown signs of malnutrition and her hair was bedraggled. There were no plans to drag the swamp.) When confronted with such interesting news items strangely brief, Jim tended not to ask his father. If he got into talk with him it was maybe to tell him things like what would happen if the Earth slowed down rotating and stopped rotating when inertial momentum had been enough reduced so no one had been hurled off Earth’s surface—’cepting that this event occurred in a dream (though a daydream) Jim had which therefore he would never have told Mel and possibly would not have broached to his mother were she there still, or were she to appear on the roof in the middle of the night or in his framed picture of Sequoya, brave Cherokee linguist, gift from Alexander like the picture next to it of Andrew Jackson in a black coat looking pretty mad—the pictures done in the same year of 1821, according to Alexander; or Jim would tell his father there was "some crap" showing through the ceiling, a discoloration on the slanting, low, roof-squeezed ceiling above Brad’s bed—some rotten shingles out on the roof at that point and it would get worse—and Mel asked Jim (a rare asking, a rarely personal species of asking though father and son and densely aware, more than that, of each other) if Jim recalled how upset Sarah’d been when they came home from her group’s chamber recital at the Presbyterian church and the snow firm underfoot and the winter stars out and even with his tone deafness he’d told Sarah it was one of the memorable evenings of his life and she said Byron Kennett’s mother had come up after the quintet and told Sarah Sarah was making By fall in love with her, did Sarah know that? and she could see it in his eyes during the Mozart, she could see it in his eyes, and all Sarah could say was wasn’t Betty glad Byron was falling in love with someone safe— with a laugh!—but Betty got mad and said some fairly surprisingly final words and went away, and though Sarah, though bitchy, was enough in the right all right, she couldn’t get over it and got cold late in the evening and her fingers got blue, did Jimmy remember? not really except Mel had wanted to call the doctor—"my musical anemia," Sarah said, "my incurable blues" and she looked so young then, said Mel, like a little girl, younger than when I first knew her, but deathly pale though we knew what a toughie she was, climbing out on the roof to look at the shingles one spring and when Mel, whose slippers were always dark red leather, the best, and made of leather only (not the carpet-material-type slippers Alexander wore out onto the porch to go half-sideways like a sea captain or a sailor down the steps to retrieve the newspaper in the morning with the dew still icing the front lawn the deepest damp green), said if they didn’t reroof the house he’d have to waterproof his slippers, Sarah picked it up as lightly as one of her letters downtown to her father came up off the floor into his hand, and when Dr. Range in his yellow slicker came by when Brad had influenza and they were all there, Sarah said (and Mel said that’s the second time you got that wrong) that they were probably a leak-proof and dry house but Mel was the only man she could imagine waterproofing his carpet slippers, which got a laugh but not from Mel, who essentially clapped his hands and offered a sherry to the doctor who said he would love to but it was against his religion this early in the day whereupon Mel plucked the doctor’s yellow oil-slicker rainhat from the hall table where it hatched a massive paperweight with newsprint from the first, heavily Jacksonian issue of the Democrat sunk into it, and handed the slicker hat deftly to Dr. Range, whose services were not for very much longer sought by the Mayn family though Margaret and Alexander Mayne (with the e) went on with him nominally their physician for years, though Margaret, who was congenitally well and believed that there’s an awful lot of things in this world that’s your business and nobody else’s, couldn’t stand doctors doctoring—much less hospitals mined with bedpans, buzzing with thermometers that got shoved hither and yon, granted, by nurses that for all their hellish officiousness knew more than the doctors up to but not including slicing you open, which Margaret would never permit done on her, though she had had Sarah’s and Sarah’s sister’s tonsils out (well how many actual tonsils does that make?)—and it comes to us as if it were moving outward to our fingertips or had been on the tip of the tongue, a notorious nearness better located at the susceptibility threshold of the tastebuds—when ‘twas through Jim unbeknownst to him that we relations extracted clean clear and isolate Sarah’s "Well done," when Mel hadn’t flown the hat to Dr. Range’s head or done anything special, only wished it a bit fast perhaps from the mahogany table to the doctor’s living fingers, which is no sin.
No sin for Range to say Sarah might get out among people more than she did, for if anemia was anemia, blues didn’t help anemia, and though no longer called in after Sarah’s death, Range did offer to grandfather Alexander the morning after charges had not been preferred against Jim, against Bob, or against Anne-Marie Vandevere (the remarkably impassive one of the lot) the
confidential opinion that Jim would land on his feet, the doctor had liked him ever since Jim had in his opinion quite possibly saved the young German girl who had been out of sight down in the meadow between the cemetery and the race track when she had been struck in the temple by the good doctor’s unseen golf ball that had sliced and sailed—took off and seemed to travel further than would a good shot, although there’s an illusion—through trees and into downhill sky, and all Jim saw was one girl in one meadow fall, drop, drop sideways, almost as if cleverly pouncing on something unknown there in the grasses: Jim had run to her, found her gagging, sensed her whole struggle, gone into her mouth with his fingers; had gotten her tongue forward, had started raising her hips, pressed some life into her (she seemed in a concussive shock) so that when the doctor, in search of his ball, came in view looking down to the right of the golf course and beyond this far end of the cemetery, the intent motion of the boy straddling the girl and the swift, sturdy approach through the field of that Ira Lee, the Indian kid (part-Indian? full-blooded halfbreed!) lacked any visible response from the girl lying in the field who was then, as if in death, the cause of Ira striking Jim across the side of the head for Jim went on trying, that is to revive the girl, and in fact never stopped although the doctor’s shout and Ira’s second thought saved Jim from a second blow; but judging from the examination at the hospital, she could have been in trouble if not found soon—she was a refugee, but not a German Jew—and Ira’s presence there never got explained any more than Jim’s, who came out the rescuer, but he never said how he came there, a fairly boring place to be, and this was long before his mother died—all in all, an impressive performance, the doctor emphasized to Alexander; that boy’s all right—
—an isolated incident of irresponsibility giving Anne-Marie the key to Bob’s pickup so she could get inside and wait, where presently Italo-American emotion found Dutch-settler property enclosed beautifully in the cab but not locked in, which inevitably if not fatally caused that scene to beget and to overflow into and to slide sideways curving into (out of nowhere) a next:
while Jim, from obstacle through obstacle rushing through his high school building at twin speeds too fast, too slow outward, unsure what’s wayside and what’s way, how much to love his mother gone, how deeply to give his father thought, how much weight the motion he had experienced above the smudged Windrow, New Jersey, lens guarding the earth-colored corrugations of a continent of South America donated by—he forgot—how much to blame his grandmother Margaret for being the East Far Eastern Princess who in her turn couldn’t tell him quite where she was Margaret or how she was her own mother or what was so and what wasn’t and so he had thought, hell, he didn’t want any more of that story stuff, he’d close that out and about time: and there in one place was coach telling him to get off the glass, then finding stuff coming out of his mouth about it being Jim’s girl (but only the one he knew about) that he hadn’t first thought about, re: Jim; and there in another was an absolutely pooped Mr. Quirk (Jim’s summer employer’s brother) who had only three in his Solid class and had been ordered to remove the otherwise much-laughed-at sign over his door "let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"; and there in another place whizzing by was the tall young legislative principal Thompson Fulkerand, columnar, firm as stone, exactly half-bald, and the equally tall, majestically material Pearl W. Myles, and they ain’t talking about the weather but it’s bad whatever it is, there’s the eye in the back of Fulkerand’s head for half an instant jolting Jim as he bounds by so fast only the word "criminal" in no doubt "Well I’m not a criminal, Miss Myles" or "It’s criminal what’s done to gain favor with the student body" gets into the strong, fast, angry boy’s head; there’s the occasional, laughable seventh sense in Jim that at least for the time being he, or the world-altering episode he’s in, is insane; there’s Mel’s all-too-brief obit for his wife, black-edged oblong on the second page a stone’s throw from the masthead, that Jim was not asked about but, after the fact, when asked by Alexander (in Mel’s presence, for Alexander did that) if Mel’s piece seemed O.K. with him, Jim called it "short and sweet" and never spoke of it again—locked it in; and there’s the order in which people came to Brad’s Day: there’s Alexander, his shined shoe-toes sticking out while he peruses a book about Indian music and smells very faintly of peanut butter he keeps in his shop; there’s Brad, so set apart by his own hand, his own act, of legs, neck, head, stomach, voice, playing hookey some might say; elsewhere, though same room, there’s Mel reporting a chance today of a hurricane originating astoundingly along the mid-Atlantic coast, and Margaret, shocked she said at Mel, then ovaling her mouth, though she didn’t ring true, while that weather reporter’s hand made a rare trip to the small of Brad’s or anyone’s back; and then, blink, there’s the sound heard at a distance but not a close-up, an illustration of which Pearl Myles from on gentle high asked for as part of her tall kindness to Jim and the family; and always there, central and invisible, is Brad sometimes swimming, the way any swimmer will use the floor for training and support, though not much on breathing, though ‘twas heavy:
For as we breathe, so shall we move, but upon moving, we go on of force breathing—
—on the move? the interrogator tries out idiomatically echoing in warped unison Mel’s "on the move?" at the bedroom doorway and Jim had abruptly quarter-turned to catch his father in the corner of his eye, then continued laying out every bit of his clothing on the bed beside a suitcase and a largest-size old khaki scout knapsack, he had three pairs of narrow khakis, he had five white T-shirts, he had four pairs of colored boxer shorts and two white jockey, he had three pairs of washed denim jeans, one of them Army-Navy store bell-bottoms, he had a maroon V-neck sweater raveled at one wrist, a yellow cashmere sweater (you said sweater) his aunt sent him from Boston that he never wore, and a tight-fitting scratchy, very warm blue-black turtleneck Navy sweater that Margaret had just last week brought him from the City; he had a washable seersucker jacket that he could wear certain evenings this coming summer if he had to, and for shirts he had a fine-red-white-and-blue-checked button-down, a blue Oxford button-down, a white tab-collar shirt with a light-brown stripe, and a regular white button-down; he looked at the closet and around at his open bureau drawers and answered his father: "Yeah, seeing what I got." His father had had a (his "warm weather") haircut, which enlarged his square head and broad-chinned face. Behind Mel, or around him, the sound of frying was audible, for Brad was a capable cook and, flicking the pan butter with a (with "his") spatula up over the yolk and unsettled white, would fry himself an egg in the afternoon and sandwich it between two slices of Tip Top bread, the egg of which Jim now smelt, and saying Brad made him hungry and was there any peanut butter left which he knew there was, he stepped around his father who sort of got out of the doorway. In the morning there’s Brad looking at Jim when Jim comes in for a fast glass of milk, Brad slowly chewing a mouthful of cereal in the quiet of the sunny kitchen so sounds like Braddie’s got nuts in his cereal or bones—whole animals, for God’s sake—while looking, looking, looking, munch, munch at his big brother (How ya doin’, Brad, you glutton!) and less fugitive and meaningless and exactly not to be turned away from, the dark red wool skirt (her mom did weaving as a hobby) of Anne-Marie Vandevere sitting on his right in the pickup truck (how did he drive it so many times right in town?), the cloth tight across her thighs and knees and lap you could tap like a drum but there must be a tunnel underneath right up because of the cloth not hanging down the way it sometimes did, he’s not sure how much he’s going to get this afternoon? why no practice that afternoon?—either it’s very late or it’s Sunday—and he’s eating an apple or something sweeter, he can’t quite recall, not what Anne-Marie thought or said about his mother’s drowning though he didn’t go out with her till just after, and not worth recalling, obstacle upon obstacle, but it’s his life, he feels years later, and there it was in all its minor trivia as vivid as fact in suspension ("Suspense," said Ted, "but did Anne-Marie eve
r say anything?"—and both men, aware of the Chilean journalista between them who smiled at her drink, knew the difference between saying that about an adult and, here, of Anne-Marie—"Oh she often spoke, and she’d have thought it out and she’d begin by saying, ‘You know . . .’ and you listened.").
It was later like he’d turned to these facts, all scattered and all the more exact and kind of meaningless, yet horrendous, funny—he’d imagine the entire life of the Stormer woman (going far away from her home and feeling occasionally guilty, and bearing a child and then another child conceived in marriage while perhaps her doctor-husband watched, watched her being a good doctor’s wife or falling out of love with him without knowing if it was him as a man or as a medicine man), the woman who married the hairy, intensely hard-working doctor ("workaholic" we always say now in the mid-eighth decade of a century that threatens to see life itself as a drug), in Chicago they lived, and Leona who on a visit to Windrow parents ran into Sarah and seemed not to be insulted by her one day in the old, still drugstore that was also a soda fountain and afterward Jim asked his mom if he could have a Clark bar and she paid for it with the tears in her eyes and then needed a bite of it, raising her lipsticked lip a shade above the upper teeth looking along her nose at it. Jim aimed the balled wrapper at the trash can and it missed and landed on the white tiles that weren’t as much like bathroom tiles as was the facing in the barbershop from linoleum floor up to the counter.
Yet Flick Mayn, the daughter of Jim, once wrote for herself to give to her dad ridding she hoped some need from not just her system, why was it insulting to say to Leona Stormer, "It isn’t that I feel much for you; you take me back, that’s all you do—" but it’s honest—and your mother cried—
Women and Men Page 100
