Women and Men

by Joseph McElroy

  He had not known that he ever "thought it wasn’t"—and he was grateful to hear—in a way about power. And felt Norma had something more to say.

  What had Mayga had to say at the end (this end)? Something he had felt almost not withheld. Her few notes about the future in a notebook in front of her on the bar. Random material last seen there, always with a surfacing capability, the mortal matter miscellaneous of Jim Mayn’s extended family so near-flung we could take responsibility for Larry and not go far wrong.

  He was about to say to Norma, "You find yourself in other people," but it sounded stupid in advance though he knew Norma would have appreciated it. He said, "I gather my grandmother’s old yarns got into your workshop."

  "I wasn’t there that time," said Norma; "but Grace said Clara, the wife you know of that exiled Chilean economist, came out of herself a little and got pissed off."

  "What about?—the medicine man that dies and becomes a cloud for a time?"

  "You must have been talking to Lincoln. No; calling a Navajo chief’s son a prince and having him follow a white girl like that and lose his pistol."

  "They had quite original weather in those days," said Mayn.

  During these few days of 1977 when all that had been started threatened to slide into action, Mayn did not ask his daughter her reported version of how the Navajo Prince had ended. (And were there princes among the Navajo? He had never been one of your know-it-all newspapermen.) Yet—perhaps because he hadn’t worked out lately on the Nautilus machines sitting back straining into the mirrored distance, strapped in next to a well-known left-fielder who visited the city in the off-season to buy art—Mayn felt in his actual bones a gap between invented events he was familiar with and some sterner presence shadowing him: a gap between on the one hand such acts once issuing from the Statue in the aging harbor as that unconvincing metamorphosis of the Navajo Prince into the easternmost Thunder Dreamer ever seen, though Thunder Dreamer in but one or two respects, at his critical juncture with the Princess’s faithful admirer Harflex, a metamorphosis due to the Prince’s having ingested a collossal dollop of the uniquely low noctilucent cloud somewhere between Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and the Ford (or Fjord) of Choor, and on the other hand, some deflected intelligence that, possibly his own once, became now some sterner presence or surveillance—his daughter, who he had suddenly heard from his son had for all she said about operating by telephone, set out to be a writer; his wife, who he’d heard from Flick was getting married to the New Hampshire gent with the permanent tan; Mayn’s own girlfriend Jean, who (one) overnight switched from science journalism to science itself—nutritional biochemistry and global agriculture, a huge career decision at twenty-nine, that she said (and he couldn’t see it) had come to her four years ago in a motel near Cape Kennedy because of Jim, she laughed that it was while they were lying in bed digesting three dozen local oysters consumed at Captain Billy’s, a preparation for a disappointing press conference and a wonderful walk on the beach where there had been no shells but many stars; and beyond Flick, Joy, and Jean, and underneath every stone, that family less Spence, who, on the night Albuquerque’s Dina West called from a New York hotel, and the Chilean economist’s research aide Amy was absent without keys from her apartment, and Larry who had forgotten to press his button entering the elevator found on emerging at his floor at two in the morning that well-known opera singer famously dressed up like a Mexican and her auburn hair built upwards like a hunk of furniture kissing a tall dark man in a blue pinstripe suit and very expensive real-silver-tooled black western boots, goaded Mayn to get somewhere before Spence did: for Spence all activities so long as the dollar flag was up, or, if the mind is a taxi, down, were as equal as distances our bent head unleashes or compacts squaring change with the obstacles to grasping it: so Mayn, who thought he had never dreamed and had been told by Mayga that if he could only, well, recall his dreams, he would not have to lose any sleep over his life, seemed to find his way from his mother’s indispositions in the forties when she was steadily departing yet never seen to do more than be absent in another form: to Grace Kimball’s 1977 apartment at a time she convened the growing Body-Self: to 1965, when a frail, failing grandfather reported how mad Margie used to get at Jimmy and how they became friends again and Jim was the one who came up with the idea that because of shifting collaborations on, for example, territorial and shared weathers, the Hermit of New York and the six-hundred-year-old retired Anasazi healer might have been one and the same (but no): to 1950, when Margaret could not visit him in Pennsylvania where he was in college because she was sick, she had these lumps in her intestines or something, so he came to see her on an impulse on a weekday, she didn’t look so good, puffy along the cheekbone like his Boston aunt who drank only during the day, and Margaret was also a little weary in the focus of her eyes’ color, but able to love Jim and be irritated by him, both of them arrested and at rest, he, half-proud of stupidly jamming and badly spraining his wrist boxing, needed a day off ("What do you mean you needed a day off, for heaven sake?" his grandmother snorted) and so had cut a class where he’d just gotten a B-plus on the midterm, and angry and anxious at having left without telling his girlfriend, who had quite a temper, to put it mildly, as he told Margaret grimly, and he’d like to throttle her. His grandmother listened to him for a moment, so alone and established in her sunny bedroom that the rest of the house felt entirely contained in Jim’s grandfather, who had gone to the post office and come back and was downstairs somewhere, not here where the sun’s light polished the brass of the walnut highboy, and boughs with secret early buds on them swayed in the wind coasting a roof of dark shingles, and though she said she was tired having written a dozen letters in the last three, four days Margaret did not mention his not having written her a card in the hospital though it was a month ago now, the hated hospital, and she had never been in one as a patient before and felt that the purpose of New York was to go to Schumacher’s to buy material or to Rockefeller Center to sit in the ice-side restaurant and have clam chowder and grilled-cheese sandwiches and a glass of dry sherry, and so Jim had had to find out from his grandfather, whom he didn’t have to ask when Alexander phoned to say he wasn’t going to let Margie travel, that her operation had been exploratory, what they called "stretching," and he was more upset than she that she had to go back and have a second, because she absolutely wouldn’t.

  "If she has a temper, enjoy it now while you can," said Margaret. "Don’t put it off," she said, and then shaking her head went into hoots of laughter like the "Hoo-hoo" with which she and her cousin but never Jim’s mother entered a friendly house without ringing the bell—"No; my gracious, don’t put it off," as if to say, I’m sure you never do—"but it wasn’t just that one class you cut today and don’t you have class Friday?"

  And while they discussed such things that had all been discussed at Christmastime as President Truman, who would never fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes but wasn’t trying to, thank goodness, though Jim’s girl’s father thought Harry couldn’t help being an improvement—and Margaret said she had to like a man who bellyached in public about having to be two people, President and an ordinary human being, man, husband, and father, and she and Jim discussed whether the Washington music critic Hume would need a new nose ‘f he ever met Margaret Truman’s dad, who had promised he would, and whether the war in Korea would be done with by the time Jim graduated because at least we had a man with experience in General MacArthur running things, although his mother had run him, and Margaret questioned the dark glasses, but would Truman actually give MacArthur the atomic bomb to use as he had said he would?—no, he would loan it to him—while Jim’s Poly Sci professor got half the class mad for saying the aim of a political party is to get elected . . .

  Jim’s grandmother was marginally pensive there in the sunny room, a scent of soap, her oval translucent soap, coming from the bathroom; thoughtful, he sensed—though she was so curiously remembered by him in ‘77 that he was startled to see he couldn’t
fully feel any more the time or its span then in 1950 back to his mother’s sudden absence in ‘45, though was able to recall not knowing the terrible wonder that took place the afternoon after he had seen Margaret in ‘50 (while a section of his mind was disloyally stuck back in his college town, gymnasium at the head of the street, movie theater, bookstore, soda fountain, package store)—thoughtful, he could recall her in ‘77 through that sprightly conversation which turned then into what she seemed to be really thinking: anyway he remembered no special sequence—only, at some center of their talk, "Better get it now because you don’t get it after you’re gone": which was, yes, reincarnation, that mortally old friend they joked about that used to come up in the old Indian powwows they had had when they both agreed when you died you died: while when-you-died-you-died didn’t mean that your buried flesh or ashes or even the miles of compact intestines and liver and all the little sacs your personal undertaker (Margaret had a good gruesome side) flushed down the drain didn’t enrich the crops and the seas, too, and the hereditary upgoing and downcoming atmosphere, so what had been an invisible particle of a "you" wound up in the blood of an angry Indian with high blood pressure or in the womb of a terror-stricken adolescent in a suburb of perhaps Rome scared to tell her father or in the tip of an elephant’s tongue (they would laugh, the two of them, even hearing the grandson’s father calling from the porch) or the hind-mounted scent-gland of a nightmare-white-mouthed javelina during threatening weather trying to smell its way home to Mineral del Monte or a Mexico City alley or some impossibly southern pampa it retained only the faith of in its shins and eyelids that in turn reach the garnish of a fat, filmy king’s Egyptian table when the pastrami from New York didn’t fly in on time, but we were not meaning reincarnation by the book, from moral escalation (you white in you next life) or inclination upwards or downwards if there even was a ranking, and witness Owl Woman all in this life abstracting her angelic Body-Self into a hole in a saguaro cactus in time to sing to herself as if from far away and to other auditors from any angle and the illusion of many distances

  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

  which for a second gives pause to the exploiters of saguaro potential interrogating the unthreatenable botanist Marcus Jones preoccupied more with how in desert plants the green stem may take over the job of photosynthesis than with danger to himself, who will regrow a lost finger no more than a crocodile tooth sows the desert with the pitless prune, and all stop to listen to the cactus song, and the tortured but cheerful botanist is sure the plant is bearing animal fruit to yield peace on earth if not carried too far: while Alexander brings three cups of tea he says he steeped too long, three slices of lemon on a silver butter plate, six store-bought lemon-flavored cookies on another plate, and "No pills," observes Margaret ("only make you feel better," retorts the husband): until he leaves the old chums alone so they rejoin some dispersed twists of their old reincarnation agreement which seems to include a quite other agreement not to discuss Sarah: until (. . . something . . .) just before he left her to go (only downstairs, Gramma) to help Alexander peel the potatoes ("But you go downstreet and let your father know you’re alive"—"You mean, let him know I’m here?" for Alexander hadn’t answered the door before and Mel had gone away doubtless thinking his mother-in-law was sleeping), she told Jim her visit among the Indians had been dry and difficult, beautiful but hard-working, white man came by with a beard, and a child whom she sometimes cared for thought it was wool, and on being asked by him who her father was, the child said, "My father is unknown," and the man peeled off a couple of chili peppers for them to eat with bread, and the hot didn’t faze the child while when the man asked Margaret what she thought she was doing there among the Indians and she said, "Just living," the brave young man who was the chief’s son and who was her particular friend but was afraid of lightning and she wasn’t, came up and answered for her and never lost his temper; another time she was alone with the women weaving, and she got up and went wandering and heard singing from a hogan and was invited in, incredibly, and there was corn pollen everywhere and the people sang late and when she asked her gentleman friend’s aunt, Tall Salt, what it meant, Tall Salt didn’t joke with her as usual but said there was "a lot of story" in it she didn’t need to know but someday she would—and then was when Margaret reckoned they expected her to stay; and another time Margaret discovered she was thought to be a healer, they had seen this in her, and she had not known, but when Small Canyon Wind got terribly sick in his eightieth year and legs swole up so his bones got smaller and smaller like to burst, she was told by a voice she didn’t identify (for Navajos don’t go around telling each other what to do) to go to the old man and pray outside his hogan, a white Anglo girl darkly tanned in cotton skirt dyed red, and she went and prayed whatever of the People’s prayers she found she knew. They came to her and closed her eyes, these prayers, and she held out her hands and their trembling got uncontrollable, and she heard a man say, Yes, yes, and she held out her hands further and further, feeling a lightning or very white sun come down out of the heavens as if balancing things out that had been unbalanced, and her hands trembled with some force she then knew had always been there at rest and shown now only in the smallest quantity so she was afraid, and she found she was reaching out to one of the singers standing there outside the sick man’s house and he was being pointed out diagnostically by the hand trembling, and so this man went right inside having been picked by Margaret to sing and he did and the sick old man through faith or luck or magic or caring was genuinely healed that night, which prepared him for death the following week; and Margaret even helped the chief’s son’s mother who at her age still had a fontanel that suppurated like a saint’s wounds or from some possibly external sinister mysterious cause and didn’t heal when oiled with a secret vegetable and "actually bubbled with its own pulse which either drove her mad or was the sign of a distemper she had independently arrived at" (subtle differences quickly stated, for Margaret had a very good brain): and she had reached a "personality" there with those people where she was another person, she couldn’t describe it except as temporary, but got to believing what Tall Salt assured her, that like the lightning above them that she had an understanding with, a sacred life inside her guided her arm when she let it and made it longer at times and moved her arm-hand with a—"well, call it sympathy, Jim, I don’t believe I have it now, though if I did then, let it rest." Did she say that? Her voice came equally from all those distances, 1950, 1965, now from a nearby 1977 apartment Mayn hadn’t set foot in, lighting the way back to her love and personality, and equally back to 1893 and the epic easterly trek of ‘94, and the forties of his mother and his growing up; so that when he had become interested in Ernie Pyle’s war reporting long after the fact, he had run into an Indian bridge builder in Canada who laughed about the Navajo language, its fabled difficulty, and told Mayn what Mayn (quin-repente-quoian) instantly recognized, but from where? from the newspapers during the War (though he didn’t follow the War like Norma’s Gordon) or from a movie? till this night in 1977 he recalled circuitously the day in 1950 and, turned through the corner of his unchanging eye which was doubtless as empty as his repossessed apartment, heard Margaret: "They didn’t make up their minds if they wanted me to really know their language. It’s so hard they used pairs of Navajos as radiomen in the Pacific Theater, because who knows Navajo?"