Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Well, that was the year you skipped," said Mayn. "So you went to college a year early," said Mayn, "or did you mess up somewhere along the line?" Talk slid apart from thought.

Gordon had been so busy. And the newspaper became important to him. The Herald Tribune with its easier print, bigger type, on weekdays; the Times and Trib on Sundays. He brought a sheaf of war clippings to school and he and Mrs. Hollander picked from them. Bill Bussing visited the bulletin board as soon as the latest clippings were up.

Bill never left his house except to go to school, but in his room at the top of his parents’ house he didn’t seem peculiar, he pursued his interests seemingly without interference. He gave things to Gordon, a World War One biplane just like one that Gordon and Chick had seen in a newsreel steeply circling the sky. Bill displayed a plane-spotter chart and an abbreviated version on a handy card above his workbench with silhouettes of bombers and fighters, British, German, and now American, and he knew what engines they had and the range of the bombers. Bill drank chocolate milk by the quart; out came the can of Hershey’s or the jar of Bosco and a bottle of milk, two Seven Dwarfs glasses, and then back to Bill’s room, and Gordon never saw Bill’s mother or father or a maid or anyone else. Bill would let himself and Gordon in the basement door that had the grating and climb to the top of the house.

The roof? Mayn murmured.

You can’t safely go out on the roof of most brownstones like the Bussings’—maybe they used it to sunbathe, who knows? no the top floor was mainly Bill’s room, with all his equipment, like a photo and chemistry lab and a workshop and the bed was a Murphy bed, it closed up into the wall so Bill had more space to walk, he did a lot of walking.

Inside, said Mayn. That’s right, Gordon said.

When Gordon would leave he would let himself out the first-floor not the basement door, and went down the steps of the high stoop; and one day when Bill had given him an old scout knife, Gordon stopped at the paper store and bought a copy of the Daily Mirror for the war pictures. His father saw the paper spread out on the piano and called it a scandal sheet. Gordon’s mother laughed, she said Gordon didn’t care a rap about scandal—

You remember that? said Mayn.

— and his father said Look at all Gordon had cut out of the paper, there was nothing left of the sports section even. Gordon’s mother said as she was wont, How good can a good boy be?

Gordon kept the sports statistics in his school loose-leaf notebook with the big light-blue cloth-covered binder. The current-events clippings he covered Mrs. Hollander’s bulletin board with until she said he should pick only the most interesting pictures and reports as if he were the editor of a newspaper and wanted to catch people’s attention. Then Gordon began to clip headlines, scissoring them slowly and keeping them flat in his notebook till he got to school and tacked them up above pictures and maps (white land, black sea), so whether his classmates read the articles or the maps or looked at an Associated Press photo, they couldn’t miss the headlines.

His mother, who had lots of plants like Mrs. Hollander, bought him a printing press with rubber letters of dark pink, and he and Chick did extras with headlines of the football games they played on their street and the roller-skate hockey they all ruined themselves playing over on Grace Court, which was a dead-end street overlooking the harbor. Straussie lived there and further up the block so did Bussing. Gordon rang Bussing’s bell, and suddenly wondered why he was doing it but when Bussing leaned out the top-floor window and Gordon clambered up out of the areaway and rolled off the curb into the street and turned around, he thought what the hell he might as well ask, and asked Bill if he wanted to play. But Bill was busy. He was leaning way out of his top-floor window and Gordon pushed down on his stick and slowly rolled backward. (As if you were in a boat, Mayn said. Exactly, said Gordon.) Bussing tossed something out the window which shook out into a parachute drifting in the direction that Gordon had started to roll. But Gordon had stopped and the chute went over his head past him. And the weight when it hit the street was a small red-and-silver horseshoe magnet and the material of the chute no ordinary handkerchief but a silky sail with eyeholes studded around the rim for the shrouds — a nice piece of work.

It looked real and Gordon bent way over and picked it up, and bunching it, caught Bussing’s eye and drew his arm back to throw it.

"Keep it," said Bill and withdrew his head and closed the window.

At the dinner table that night he shifted the magnet, which was uncomfortable, and his father, who was telling about a man in the office who was going to resign because he’d gotten into officers’ training school after all, asked Gordon what he was doing and Gordon pulled the whole parachute out of his pocket and held it up by the center and laid it beside his butter plate.

The magnet hit the shiny wood of the dinner table, and Gordon’s mother snapped her fingers and said, "Off the table" — why did Gordon remember that? — and in the same breath she looked at Gordon’s father and said, "But…" and in her pause, Gordon’s father said, "You mean they wouldn’t take me."

His mother said she hadn’t meant that; Gordon’s father said "on the contrary" he thought she had. There was a moment of silence. Gordon told his parents about the new boy who could speak German and French — Maurice Metz.

"Sixth grade?" Gordon’s father said.

He raised his eyebrows when Gordon said, "Fifth."

"They’re from Europe," said Gordon’s mother. "They’re refugees."

Gordon’s father said it was a distinct advantage being able to speak more than one language, and Gordon now recalled that his father told a story of the former college classmate known as Baron who in the late 1920s on his first and distinctly shady flight in South America — had a pilot’s license at twenty-one — nephew of a big shot in Anaconda Copper — had to make an emergency landing. It was right about the time the Guggenheims sold Anaconda, that mine of theirs, so they could increase their investment in nitrates. It was an emergency landing because Baron’s companion on the flight, a former Minister of the Interior in the country they were over, had gone into convulsions. And the former minister had been acting as radioman, and this young American adventurer, Gordon’s father’s classmate Baron who had been quite a good friend at college, thought he didn’t know a word of Spanish. Until he realized he was getting some of what was coming over the radio, getting most of it— which was that. — beginning with, repeatedly, the name — at first notably the middle name Marmaduke — the former Minister of the Interior who had opposed a graduated income tax and inaugurated a new sewer system and made many enemies and was wanted, was thought to be in Baron’s plane. Gordon’s father pointed out that if, as Baron must have recalled, he had not been exposed to the Spanish lessons his aunt and uncle always had at mealtime the preceding summer when Baron was living with them for three weeks while combining pleasure with his dubious labors as a trainee with Anaconda, he would not have understood that he and the former Minister of the Interior who had once been next in line for the presidency were in danger — so he was in the plane, said Mayn — nor understood as well where the transmissions were originating from. As a result, Baron changed course at just the right moment to spot an upland meadow like a small, green cove — or, said Gordon now to Mayn, like one of those small countries with no coastline. The plane landed there and the former minister recovered himself though not his speech under the curious eye of an Indian sheepherder.