Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

But the year before the depressed winter of ‘37~’38 when Greeley wrote of "filth, squalor. . want, and misery" in New York’s Sixth Ward, who but the cordwainers led the way toward federation of local craft unions convening leatherworkers from all over including Philadelphia whence notably the aforementioned editor Heighton, not to mention the Mayn family founding editor of the Windrow Democrat, a Mason who had been pressuring President Jackson to explain his interest in a village attorney’s daughter from upstate New York who had pursued her lover William Morgan all the way to New York and Philadelphia after he had been in a way expelled from that upstate village by being thrown into its local jail for promising to reveal Masonic secrets and had been then sprung secretly one morning by a supposed friend who had disappeared after having allegedly tried and failed to shoot Morgan on the road.

"Cleopatra’s Nose," Mayn’s grandfather would muse — the fine trivia that workaday Mayn and his "ilk" dumbly overlooked — but his grandfather had once mentioned it when Jim had asked about the wanderings of a pistol and there was a gun-control law somewhere in the speculations of his granddad’s memory, for Jim had never known him to hunt or target-shoot, or to touch that pistol on the mantel, and one day Jim might get back to figuring it out because who else was likely to trace the firearms of that earlier family history — unless it was one of his brother Brad’s kids back home in Windrow a million miles from those ancient rainfall fluctuations that may have converged upon the Anasazi cliff dwellers parallel with (and independent of) the Apaches climbing their lethal ladders (as the East Far Eastern Princess compassionately learned) up into those sun-annealed apartment-house honeycombs with not just rabid blood in their hearts but with undreamt knowledge of a magic oil that the Navajo Prince’s irritable though ventriloquially musical mother (for whom the ceremonial sing was in progress the night he arrived with his newfound Manchoor Anglo girl) would apply to restore if not her temper (good or bad!) but the hair to that part of her head where the appropriate people were chanting the Night Way to heal her head-hole in and out of which cream-colored demon-types moved and from moment to moment settled or not. That is, apply — apply, we said — an oil from a bean from a plant that survives only in the driest earth: water is sealed into its leaves by a film of wax, and its taproot goes down thirty feet — a waxy oil the Indians used as a coffee substitute before they knew coffee; as a wax for women’s eyelashes; and to bring on labor contractions plus halt skin cancer in its tracks.

"You mean," said a late-night colleague—"there was an Indian in your grandmother’s life?"

but Mayn himself, recalling his grandfather at least on this score less than what that gentle, well-shod browser actually said, had figured that in the larger sense—

"What sense?" came a neutral warrant of a voice (Spence’s) from the end of the bar like your own unnecessarily self-critical afterthought.

History (which also might turn fundamentally upon whether, at any crux in question, small talk had been possible) was accident pretty much — a bunch of haphazard collisions, and if you’ve got fortuitous stuff like that and little more than fortuitous, how can history be worthwhile?

"— Wait a minute?" came the same voice of a man Mayn didn’t like, who then and later, with his thin, curly sideburns, figured in the current ongoing (though questionable) century—"What’s this oil you’re talking about?"

"What’s it to you — a bean, a seed — going to be good for lubricating high-temperature high-speed machinery, anti-viral penicillin stabilizer, shampoo, sun screens, face oils, you name it, solvents for producing polyethylene—"

But not unhappy exactly in the multiracial structure is the very Ojibway, diamond-squinter, whose grandmother stored oil in a sturgeon bladder — but not the oil in question — nor is necessarily one all-purpose angel-unit asking, But whafs this seed? — a peek of a voice at the tip end of the bar (read time’s tilt) which Mayn seemed to ignore. As did his late-night old-friend journalist colleague Ted, who smoked unheard-of cigarettes and lived in a five-room half-furnished Washington apartment when he was not less solitary traveling; who did not tell stories, and who now said, "Cleopatra’s Nose."

"Which Cleopatra?" chimed in the itinerant photo-journalist Spence, hopeful of company.

Mayn did not acknowledge this leather-fringed man Spence, reared doubtless hydroponically or unconsciously out of the oil he was inquiring about like a scavenger, a Spence at the end of the bar and not even pleasantly unlikable. Mayn answered Spence that the bean had been named in the Lower California desert a century and a half ago by a naturalist named Link after a colleague botanist who had died eighteen years before—"but the breakthrough came in 1933 in Arizona."

"Which Cleopatra?" said Ted. "The one whose nose would have changed history if it had been a hair longer but wasn’t — anyone called Cleo in your family, Mayn? — that’s what your granddad must have meant!"

— while along a bond of humor joining the two colleagues in the same bar in Washington in the early seventies flashed a vacation-beach insight of green-water stripe made by sandbar so the surrounding sea mo’ blue thereby, which equals sad but we can’t tell why, we find only a collection of sunny bodies on a beach and add on two more bodies that are non-present but implicit — one the best man of (then, in 1944 or -5) thirteen or fourteen years ago (Jim’s father, Mel) who is at work back in town at the family newspaper which is soon to pass into history, for he doesn’t like the beach; the other, the grandfather Alexander, who is back across the road beyond the beachfront row of cottages and on the bay side peering (if he’s not snoozing) down into the water off the dock for crabs, for the slow, rich, helpless softies you eat it all.

What had been happening? For what did happen when she got sick later made him wonder what had been happening but all he could come up with was her and his father —people, what he felt they were like — but not events that proved so. Nor had this event that was scattered across the sand at still-unsullied Mantoloking on the Jersey shore maybe a forty-minute drive from Windrow shown itself so he could follow its start to its finish, which was elsewhere; and he hadn’t felt even it until long after: so that he couldn’t be sure, and so he felt dumb, and then, in this order, he thought maybe there’s nothing to understand; or if there is, it’ll come to him as time goes by, the way grandfather Alexander slowly travels the five-minute walk from the beach to the bayside cottage thinking for a time alone about a very fresh chowder for supper with unavoidably a couple three guests thrown in, the Bob Yards, and this old, coughing, until today unbelievable and basically non-existent sonofagun-figure of Margaret’s past weirdly materialized from New York— it’s ‘44 or ‘45—so ancient history has been only fifty miles away all these years.

and one of these, Bob’s wife, is suddenly in the bayside cottage with Alexander saying hello with quickness, familiarity, and anger not directed toward him but doubtless toward the beach, so that he turns his shoulder in order not to deflect it because he knows Bob Yard’s wife well, and their childless marriage filled by their good talk. And feels more than he can put intuition to, and thinks there is something going on on the beach and is told by Bob’s wife it is the old acquaintance of Margaret from the western days who has arrived in the Yards’ car, but Alexander has his chowder to consider, the boys will eat two bowls, Sarah none.