Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Leave to others? Like one misled.

By what? By what had stopped his mother singing? A ringing that surrounded her voice? But then him —well — her son with the reddish hair that in one month, like overnight, a year and more later began to go very dark like dye or through that gravity between colors that bled the red away.

But misled more by words of his mother Sarah, that threatened to forget themselves but he didn’t let them as he took himself and his in-spite-of-what-that-strange-woman-said not very foxy thick shock of exploding strong-springing hair that she told him had been having a dream so he ought to go away, she said, and find out if he was fox or bear, well he hated that kind of talk, he wondered if when his father gave her a little kiss on the cheek he kissed the mole near her jaw, all Jim wanted was a bit of information because that would have been just unintense and friendly, but little Brad whom she talked music to and had a tenderness toward (out of all proportion to that little begatten nothing’s deserving) she didn’t have a respect for (that Jim did get but didn’t know what to do with) so he took it out of the music room, her strange respect, at past one in the morning and left, ten stairs at a time, to leave her where she was downstairs — that woman, his mother — and he dived into his T-shirt and kicked into his chinos with a few stiff paint stains of glossy gray porch paint on them, he touched them, and he bent to finger his moccasins back onto his bare heels, and went into the frame of his window unhooking the lower end of the screen to bank it out just far enough so it didn’t come off at the top when he slid out onto that side of the sloping shingle roof and was on the ground smelling the leaves of summer and fresh-turned earth of a flower bed that had a smothering dampness of rock about it and a sweetness of hands, of hide, of the milk of humus; and he could recall being on the roof and being on the ground, but nothing in between, except the words of his unsatisfactory mother that tried to forget themselves, like forgetting her, their utterer.

So that he was out of the house and on Throckmorton Street’s broad sidewalk of great natural slabs of slate washed and rubbed free of the blood they had attracted in falls and minor kid fights. And he ran fast through the quiet night, joying in the extent of his speed, the length of his bounding stride.

So that he was at his grandmother Margaret’s house too fast ever to have seen what he later found had seen him — his father coming home under the maples and elms and serried streetlamps of that moonless night of Throckmorton Street past the steep little cement ramps leading up to each house’s gravel or blacktop driveway, that is, had seen him come loping round the side of the house and out across the grass as if toward a football field’s sideline which is the sidewalk in tonight’s fresh opportunity to forget our life if we will because you want to run and like crazy sometimes.

And he is on his grandmother’s porch near the swing couch and the white-painted woven-wood chairs remembering that his granddad Alexander’s snore could be heard only at a distance of twenty-five or so miles because he was still at Mantoloking, he hadn’t come home with them that afternoon. Jim felt the wooden pillars supporting the porch roof luminously personal with the streetlight beyond, and his right hand was on the ornate front doorknob before he thought to raise his left to the doorbell for he didn’t call on Margaret at this hour, when he heard an angry — wasn’t it angry? — surge of words garbled from inside the house like the only sound within half a mile and he didn’t ring. He took two soft steps to the broad window where the dim light came from the little sitting room beyond the front parlor with all the furniture and the mantelpiece with Alexander’s cigars and two long bookshelves and wonderful long tubular sort of velvet cushions in the corners of the couch, he could smell it all through the window but what was going on was beyond this in the little sitting room, through the door of which Jim saw his grandmother and the wiry, shaky old man from New York who’d come to see her at Mantoloking beach that afternoon, and they were not at each other’s throats but holding each other at arm’s length laughing like before or after hugging as Jim had seen her do with her husband.

And Jim had a good look at his grandmother’s face changing, and then she seemed to turn her back to him, it was to the window. She wore a light-colored summer dress, there were beads across the back of her neck — which was the way Jim remembered.

Her legs were pale as he had never before seen them, and she seemed dimly to have said, "… may need you. . time comes" — or words to that effect, whatever it was — words with a murmured vagueness at this distance and the window between, that betokened great clarity at close range, that is for the Hermit-Inventor of New York to whom she spoke and who didn’t have his dark glasses on now but the old man’s eyes or one of them, the one that was visible, seemed to be looking at Jim and her at the same time so he felt something not terrible about what parents don’t feel they have to tell children.

So that Jim left the porch, stepped down the steps one by one, went down the walk, and heard his mother’s words and then his own eardrums pounding his brain. And turned away down the sidewalk but stopped to look back at his grandmother and grandfather’s house and a figure standing now in that window Jim had been snooping through. And the figure, just some townbody like anyone known, or on the other hand the Hermit-Inventor of New York whom Jim had always heard of but never before seen except now when (if it was one and the same and it possibly wasn’t) he was very sick but had a nephew, he’d been heard to say at the beach (though Margaret had said precious little about the funny old guy in his khakis and his sneakers with a concave chest and long white eyebrows). He was the Hermit-Inventor of New York, and after Jim with irritation stood his ground and stared back without real connection at the face he couldn’t see, he broke into a run back toward his own house but slowed up when two late cars passed slowly like Sunday up the wide street in the direction of, perhaps, the race track or beyond it Lake Rompanemus in the woods where the "piners" lived in poverty. He stopped and found himself walking as if nothing had happened, and the cars passed, and he heard his mother’s words again and looked back at Margaret’s house and then the other way at his own, which he could just make out the lights of. And he looked at one and the other, back and forth. Until he heard a slight ringing in his ears like when he drop-kicked a field goal, smelled horse manure on the cool fall air, heard pounding feet not blocked out by Ira, the Indian halfback from the other, not the race-track, end of town — and got hit in the head as if he were ball and runner by the little enemy guard who moved like crazy, the one weapon the visiting Toms River team had, but the ball was on its way, a tremendous drop-kick field goal which actually Windrow didn’t need in order to win — a day when Jim’s father stood on the sidelines and never made any response when Jim looked at him in those days before protective face masks, but when he came to, he found his father above him with the same look on his face. And so, wandering between the two houses of light in the quiet street, he got around his mother’s awful words to what it was that had first woken him. It had been the phone and he knew his mother was saying, downstairs, what he had heard her many times say but couldn’t remember what, except that it meant that his father was just leaving the newspaper and was walking home and would be home presently though some part of his home he would never reach.