Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Ah yes, said Mayn quietly, remembering something — or nothing.

Gordon’s father had had enough of lying in bed and he was going to church tomorrow and the office on Monday which was only one stop on the subway under the river and he had so much to catch up on he couldn’t waste time waiting to feel better. Gordon’s mother didn’t approve. His father kissed her. He asked Gordon how it was going. Gordon had a map to make for Monday. Sixth grade was O.K., he said.

There was a little kid named Arthur who had sat behind Gordon in fifth grade always doing something on his desk, scratching, tapping, and, when Gordon put up his hand, Arthur would start humming some song, and Gordon wanted to just shut him up. It was that sometimes he got terrifically mad at the red-headed kid Arthur — or at Dickie — but then in a moment he wouldn’t be mad. And in between nothing happened, but nothing.

Well, he had an answer to Dickie the first day in sixth grade when they’d walked home but it had gone right out of his head and they’d gone on home and Gordon had gotten busy on his new homework. That night at dinner the answer had come back to him when his father had said, "So you’re a sixth grader."

Gordon could only say, "Well…" and smirk.

At dinner a week later, his father said, "How’s sixth grade, pal? Shaking down O.K.?"

Like the maiden cruise of a naval ship, Mayn said (of "shaking down").

Gordon was simultaneously on the bridge of a brand-new heavy cruiser model he had just finished painting, and in the wardroom where the officers took their meals, and he could not decide if he had a dress hat on or a khaki battle cap, an overseas cap he thought it was called — and back into his head came the words that had come to him powerfully to say to Dickie the first day as they passed the paper store, but now to his father he really said them: "I’m the same person." They didn’t feel like his own words but they were words that had come to him all right. His father frowned and grinned at the same time.

"Just got to work harder," his father said. His father always took off his suit jacket for dinner unless there were guests. "That’s right," said Gordon’s mother to Gordon the way she would tell him he was tired.

As for the Christmas pageant, he forgot the matter. Or enough to be uninterested by the time the fifth-grade Joseph got sick and was replaced. The boy, Howard McClone—

Mayn laughed and Gordon insisted that that was the boy’s name.

— Howard McClone who was not a particular friend of Gordon’s had been sent home for two weeks having been exposed to measles at school and mumps and chicken pox at Sunday school; Dickie informed Gordon, complaining that he himself hadn’t been quarantined. On the fourteenth day McClone came down with such a case of measles the doctor said it was all three diseases. Gordon’s mother remembered diphtheria. McClone’s triple-header was like a record. McClone was confined to a darkened room. The new guy who had been given the part of Joseph did not especially attract Gordon’s attention. He had arrived right after Gordon had left fifth grade.

Gordon had mastered fractions; they were like writing his name in all different handwritings, like the daydreaming labyrinths he drew layer by layer outward, which seemed to make themselves up until the paper was filled and he swapped with Patti Oxford who could draw horses or Patti Galdston, who always needed a Band-Aid for a sore thumb. Gordon was made happy by anything printed on the page of a book; it was new, it was clear and opening up, it was problems you could begin fresh in order to get to the next assignment.

Mrs. Hollander came to school early and Gordon saw her water all those plants.

Gordon looked at James Mayn. "Do you ever go blank?"

"Story of my life," said Mayn. "Now, when did Mrs. Hollander’s daughter get killed?"

"Maurice Metz," said Gordon abruptly. "Maurice Metz."

"Maurice Metz," said Mayn.

When Gordon and his fellow sixth graders would pass the fifth-grade room, Gordon saw the new boy sitting up straight staring toward the front of the classroom as if, somewhere out of sight, Miss Gore was calling on him.

His name was Maurice Metz. He had arrived from Europe soon after Gordon had been skipped, and he was the most imposing of fifth graders with thick eyebrows and a long, narrow head. His pants were too short; he wore high shoes; his pants were of a dark, flecked cloth that looked part of a grownup suit, though not like the smooth, dark cloth that Gordon’s father had his suits made of, one or two every year probably quite cheaply at a tailor’s in the Wall Street area. Someone must have wondered how Metz got to be Joseph, but he was tall and was being made to feel at home, and even if he’d had to speak lines, which he did not have to, his foreign accent sounded strangely good. Joseph was foreign too, though you’d never know from how Gordon’s father’s cousin Rose who worked at the National City Bank talked about not the holy family really but Jesus, who was always "Him," as if everybody knew who she was talking about, which they did.

Metz was a grind, and when they all filed into assembly twice a week to the grand and final-sounding music Gordon didn’t know then was "Pomp and Circumstance," Maurice Metz would march. He didn’t so much lift his knees as lean into the cadence and shorten his step. But the thing about Metz was that he could really speak German and French, and at recess he would swear in German.

Gordon’s first report card in sixth grade said Gordon had a good accent in French. His father got him to say a few words at the dinner table and criticized Gordon’s r —he didn’t swallow it quite enough — and, inevitably, his u. His mother said he was only in sixth grade after all; Gordon knew what his father was about to say—"It doesn’t make any difference" (which was somehow right, Gordon thought) — but then his father didn’t say it after all and had a little discussion with Gordon’s mother as to whether he should have a cup of coffee, and it stuck in Gordon’s memory later that evening when his mother joined his father in their bedroom and shut the door and Gordon heard the sound of their talking. His father was a good father and had taken him to a Brooklyn Dodger baseball game in September when Gordon got home from camp.

"I lived fifty miles away, and I never saw a real Major League game in New York until I was probably twenty," said Mayn.

Gordon heard himself describing Ebbets Field and the folk on the apartment rooftops beyond the right-centerfield wall, his mother knitting half of one sleeve of a dark red sleeveless sweater for him during a Ladies Day game when her ticket was half-price and the visitors couldn’t touch the soft floaters of Freddie Fitzsimmons who was so round and plump-looking, fat in fact, that Gordon couldn’t see how he could be such a good pitcher and argued it with his mother, who seldom looked down at her knitting and thought Fitzsimmons was good the way some fat people swim well — she was a beautiful swimmer — and anyway it was his arm that counted — but he did not speak to Mayn of how he had felt funny, or was it helpless, that night when his parents’ door opened and shut — my father was a good talker, said Gordon, a good father, he added, and he felt his eyes water and wondered if Mayn noticed; and in the morning, dawdling at the window staring at the harbor, hearing his mother call to him, Gordon went on daydreaming and distinctly remembered thinking (he went on as if it was hard to explain) that he would always remember this moment staring through the window at a tugboat ploughing out of the East River around the Battery — maybe a liner was going out that morning — and he had remembered that moment of daydreaming — funny thing to remember.