Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"What news?" said Mayn.

That Mrs. Hollander wouldn’t be in school that day because her daughter had been killed.

"What was her name?" Mayn asked abruptly.

"Helena."

"Did Metz come in and give his talk?" Mayn asked.

No, and no one at Dickie’s house complained that Gordon at the crack of dawn had scissored out of Dickie’s parents’ morning paper a Jap-prison-camp-atrocity story.

"Was Maurice Metz Jewish?" asked Mayn.

"Oh sure," said Gordon; "but. ." none of that got talked about; was it even in the newspapers? It wasn’t the type of thing that went up on the bulletin board; and when Metz in January did get to give his talk to the sixth grade, there was probably nothing about Jews.

"We didn’t see how it could have happened, the Hollander kid falling over like that like there was nothing holding her on that roof. I mean, you might get hit by a car. ."; and Gordon’s father when the subway train came in always looked behind him and stepped back; and you might drown, as Gordon’s grandmother nearly did of indigestion when she was swimming in the middle of a Cape Cod pond at eighty; or be in an air crash or be burned to a cinder in your sleep or breathe escaping gas in your sleep ("escaping," as they automatically always said, but it was going into you); or come down with spinal meningitis and die over the weekend. But tumbling over the barrier-wall of an apartment-house roof?

"Awful," said Mayn. "Almost embarrassing."

"Well I was embarrassed in my dreams," said Gordon.

The end of Mayn’s leather valise was visible through the doorway to his foyer.

"You remember a dream from 1944?" said Mayn.

Gordon guessed it was 1944. Remember? Why, by having it many times.

Mayn said he was as bad about dreams as he was about jokes.

A newspaperman?

‘Fraid so.

Newspapermen had endless stories, Gordon said.

Oh all right he had a million, Mayn said, but it was a nine-to-five job.

Gordon said Mayn was kidding him — newsmen were like private eyes.

Yeah, and like sailors, right?

Gordon had had about Mayn a "good feeling" — Gordon heard Norma say she had a "good feeling" about herself, or about Clara the wife of the Chilean economist who took books to inmates in a New York State prison, or Lucille — she picked it up from her group. But also Gordon had to get out of here. Away from Mayn’s waiting, his patient humor.

"But my brother was the one who dreamed," said Mayn, for a moment talking; "walked in his sleep. Came wandering into my room in the middle of the night just before I almost ran away from home."

"This is. .?" asked Gordon.

"— Jersey," said Mayn, "Monmouth County? and soon’s I went to bed, well there he was in my room. What — ten, eleven. He’s telling me this stuff and I thought he was awake standing there sound asleep. I thought he was cracking up. But you know, he was asleep; said he had this feeling I was going away."

"Your brother still visits you in his sleep?"

"I’m not home then," said Mayn.

"O.K., who else visits you?" said Gordon, laughing, but he had pulled himself forward to the edge of his armchair.

Mayn was looking at Gordon with sharp puzzlement, and Gordon through his own impatient uncertainty heard Mayn saying that that was spoken like a lawyer.

Unemployed lawyer, Gordon thought, and thought he hadn’t mentioned what he was, had he?

Mayn said that while he still felt he didn’t have regular dreams sleeping at night, that sort of thing, he was starting to think somewhere in his head he did have a recurrent think-dream if you want to call it that — full of surplus equipment (can you beat that?), but he traded in some of the details for others, he said; it was anybody’s guess what it all meant, but one thing he knew, the memory that kept showing now and then if you could catch it, split-screen, obscure movie tricks, was paying a visit to one’s one-time torturer: there was your title for this dream, a daydream, O.K.? and Mayn had it sometimes, he was pretty certain he didn’t dr^m-dream but he had those waking daydreams. It ought to be about vengeance, right? and he knew this during the dream; but he didn’t avenge himself on the torturer: either his tongue had been removed during that previous bout of torture so he couldn’t speak, or his arms were nowhere to be found having also disappeared during torture, which meant he fitted cleanly into the doorway of the now-unemployed torturer’s furnished room. The fellow lay on a cot smoking his last cigarette, and Mayn knew, armless, that the torturer, or former torturer, would try to bum one when this cigarette was finished, for Mayn was about to be shot out of a surplus cannon to where he would be different.

"There’s the circus," said Gordon.

"That’s Barnum and Bailey in New York City," said Mayn, "the space man in the white aviator’s helmet. I got taken to see it; but our own local circus had the one tent set up on ten acres that the town electrician rented to the town on special occasions down behind the water tower between the Catholic cemetery and an applejack distillery; my grandmother took me there to see an Indian bareback rider."

"But have you ever been tortured?" asked Gordon.

Mayn seemed to look off into some corner of the large, sparsely furnished room. "No," he said. "Of course not."

"But you’ve known those who have been?"

"I knew a man who did it for a living."

"Went through it, or administered it?"

"I’ve known both," said Mayn humorously.

"Where?" said Gordon.

"What about the sixth-grade bulletin board?" said Mayn.

"The bulletin board?" asked Gordon.

"You had turned away from the European theater," said Mayn, "and were concentrating on the Pacific, am I right?"

Indeed.

And at that time — in the days of Caesar Augustus, Gordon wanted to say — for he heard that name uttered again and again in memory by a fifth grader with a watery cold, whose face was secretly lighted by the lectern, for the boy whoever he was was reading his allotment of the Bible story that narrated the Christmas pageant the morning of the last school day before vacation. The whole school was present, parents in the back benches and side benches of the old meeting house — Quaker meeting house, pews really, and aisles dark with small electric candles moving beneath faces — lines from one of the Gospels—"There went out a decree," that was it, "from Caesar Augustus."

"I went to a public high school," said Mayn.

"Well, this was Quaker," said Gordon, "and I went there up through eighth grade, although they had a high school too. My father went to a public high school but he did six hours of homework a night."

"I was lucky if I did six a week," said Mayn.

"I worked about a sixteen-hour-a-week night shift," said Gordon.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus," said Mayn.

"In the days of Caesar Augustus."

"Well, you had to keep some time to yourself. You were having those dreams."

"It was a lulu," said Gordon. "I don’t know if it was the next night after Metz was supposed to speak to the sixth grade. Sometime in there."

Mayn put his drink down on the floor, sat back and looked very straight at Gordon.

"I keep feeling I’ve missed something," said Gordon, and then had to laugh and shake his head.

"I can’t think what it would be," said Mayn.

If Gordon could finish this dream he could get out of here; the emptiness of Mayn’s living room had begun to weigh on him. When he’d had the dream didn’t matter.

It had a lot to do with newsprint. Mayn raised his dark eyebrows. Gordon was coming out of the Courthouse and being chased by a familiar janitor in galoshes yelling to him that he could not use the courthouse ground-floor corridor as a shortcut from Court to Livingston; the familiar face was pressing him at the same time that the galoshes should have held this person back, and in the dream Gordon emerged into Livingston Street with the old brick of Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute up to his right and Boerum Place crossing Livingston down to his left—