Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Was it her ghost? He got quite sure of it. But there was no proving it so he put it behind him.

Did he see ghosts where others dreamed? And had history repeated itself downstairs, or what?

He had little to go on, putting his mother together out of his later life. Until one day he regretted not asking people who had known her about her. Why hadn’t he? Because he thought it was up to her?

He went for the definite. Yet he did once see her later on. She was resting on her oars for a long time. He was playing squash in his freshman year at college in a cold court defending the center with hip and elbow and killing perhaps his partner’s very mind targeting the angles to make him dart forward or long-alleying a wall-hugger so the black ball found a home in a dead rear corner, yet always as if his variant wrist knew the future independent of its lord — and this was when he once saw his mother resting on her oars for a long time before some change that came would end this rocking pause.

He "decided" — how? — that she had felt herself not fit for relations with people, all these relations — was that it?

He had seen her row once, and off the beach at Mantoloking, which was crazy and fairly dangerous, and he, a child, had felt it. Though she had gone with a grinning lifeguard, who had shoved the boat, a white and high-bowed small boat across the barriers of magnet-strong low breakers to dig further into the swell. And they both got up onto the gunwales facing each other and grinning out there in the immediate distance of the boy’s watch kept for her, and then they both clambered down and she insisted on rowing. Why did Jim think "insisted"? A secret of the line between where he was and where she was, and the line between them was a foreign shore, and he knew he heard her speaking inside him or maybe him inside her — yet not then, but much later, after she was gone, he recalled this inside business and knew it had been felt by him then. He caught a follow-through of his partner’s racket on his right knee and was never the same again, though was playing two months later and played even better the following year though moving sideways was a bit risky. Out-thinking his "partner" was all it was, and yet he was there doubled in a future of the next second before it had come, it was waiting for him awful as a lost traveler’s inertia, you wouldn’t tell this about yourself even to the multitudes of eyes watching you from the totally imaginary Ship Rock of the northwest New Mexico desert — this future he couldn’t do more than joke about — with his daughter, that is — though once with the South American lady who had wandered thoughtfully into the bar of the hotel the night before or after the first U-2 announcement: and he and Ted were talking (hell) history, light history (Clear, two-plus-two causes; or Just Plain Accident; or the secret rooting capabilities of New Jersey beach sand and mid-1940s bare feet; or history’s trick of happening elsewhere if you paid close attention: well then, didn’t Buddha say speak only of what you know) and Ted had known an ancient relative of Greeley’s, like an old, comparatively valuable pistol, a tea-totaler incidentally whose great-great uncle had lived for a week at the semi-utopiate community in Greeley, Colorado, that Meeker and Greeley founded, and the ancient relative in question when living remembered sloops racing each other out the East River and to the other end of the harbor to the Narrows to meet an incoming ship and whip back to Manhattan to peddle the hot foreign news in the newssheets they had in those days before the great man had founded his Tribune partly to purge journalism of such obnoxious attractions as medical advertising of that day—

And Mayn — and Ted too — and maybe partly in the presence of "their" despised end-of-the-bar auditor Spence with the cruddy sideburns both bushy and patchy and the hide jacket frontier-fringed — showed off to the newcomer, the lady perhaps six or seven years Jim’s elder, a round-faced beauty with an exacting kindness waiting in the eyes, and independent; and she did put three fingers to her lips listening to Jim pass from the wind of sailpower running the news business all the way back to the 1680s when the law said no one might ferry across from Manhattan to Brooklyn when the sails of all the windmills were rolled up or in a rowboat ferry at least, which led to the friend of Ted’s who had grown up in Brooklyn Heights with a view from Grace Court of the ferry lights moving away from the Battery in the early evening and wanted never to look at that vast harbor again and had moved as far inland and slightly southwest as you could get without coming out the other side, and while one thing led to another, the foremost thing was that after the official NASA statement the next day that nobody believed, they had all foregathered (as Jim’s father would say) — pasf-gathered was more like it — here before Ted had gone off to dinner with an economist from Puerto Rico, and Spence, when Mayn had looked away for a moment from his exquisitely trustworthy interlocutress to whom he hadn’t mentioned he was married but wanted to because he was going to be friends with her, had seemed to appear — and for a horning-in moment inquired so incredibly what was the bean with the limitless oil that Mayn had recently been heard speaking of that’s like sperm oil and the planty bush survives up to two hundred years (which Mayn didn’t recall saying because he didn’t actually know how long and now said so, somewhat angrily, to this sidling character who shied away doubtless into his hole as Mayn turned back to the South American lady hearing Spence say, c" d you think I dreamed that?") — so incredibly, yes, that the woman said, Who is he? as if she’d detected Mayn holding out on her:

— that is, he told his daughter Flick years later (when she could be told things to was it before or after college?) the barest facts of what he had told the South American lady in i960 but did not think Flick would believe him and anyway cared much more for her than for conveying what became so hard to credit that it was a shadow whose very source had been cast with it — all this both a species of but distant possibility maybe of madness, and a vulgar violation of his most ordinary self.

This, Flick might have partly picked up, for she said to him (admittedly the evening he came to Washington to be met by her, and not in his gift to her the old white Cadillac she had that very weekend sold as a collectible), Well you aren’t exactly ordinary, Daddy, the places you’ve been, but this business of our living in the future, well, I’ve never seen that transparent bubble and the plate that people stand two by two on to get transferred into space.

She worried her feeling; she said she didn’t want to talk about the therapist she had been seeing for three months in Boston because it set up a triangle though she knew he wasn’t like that — just paid the bills, right? — but she was trying to hold on to some feelings she tended to discount, it was easy for her to let them get away: one was that she herself had been a reason he and Joy (she named her mother) had stuck it out as long as they had — she and Andrew, of course; and this made her more sad, or she tried to think but it was really more mad since she was thinking it had been her business when it had been theirs.

But it was her life, and he was relieved to feel equality between the mad-sad point and how in late ‘76-early ‘77 she went on about not the maniacal aliveness of dioxin tinting pale cells palely and promising like a habit only the future chance to look back (dioxin in the food chain thus not the point but held to through her pedagogic rhythm which was her own well-known stubbornness now made into policy). But this label of "ordinary" her father gave himself. "Ordinary"?