Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So Jim Mayn fell ahead, not exactly not thinking of his imaginary news assignment for Pearl W. Myles who had healthy, chesty breasts like those of the great all-style swimmer at the World’s Fair in New York long before synchronized swimming approached Olympic status while at the moment there was no Olympics at all except what his non-combatant editor-father called target practice going on over there. Yet Jim wasn’t really thinking ‘bout the imaginary news assignment either; and he looked at some ripped-out notebook pages that still had sand in one crease, having made a very quiet research trip to where (clue) there were gulls above and sandpipers below — the beach where his mother had left her departing note — and no one but the driver who had picked him up going and returning knew he had gone — much less to investigate — or so he thought, and all he knew when he came home was that he could not resort to this mystery material for Miss Myles’s assignment— because, he then saw, he had gone only to see — and later it came upon him again when he was putting behind him his little brother Brad and Brad’s own inimitable (as it was called) "falling-apart." "It" confined itself seemingly to one day — a long day yet a day of days as they might say who follow us with further measures meant to yield true weight, as in a territory of Indians, a hold of absences, a smile of tarantulas or javelinas, and a smell of troubles, necessary because of interruptions (as on Brad’s Day) which we really need to see as part of the whole parcel rather than breaks between breathing in and breathing out — I mean. . you know?. .

Because there were minutes end to end when Brad who must have been ten did not breathe and in those wartime days, pre-Now, they didn’t tell you to breathe. Except in the form of an iron lung visible to Jim and his friends in Life magazine — and to Gordon and engineering-minded Bill Bussing after school on the top floor where experimental rubbers were tried on if not out — and so the open-ended Windrow, New Jersey, group that came and went in the music room of the Throckmorton Street house might but obscure the scrawny boy’s sobbing, pat him sometimes, bring him a sandwich that seemed to madden him with its alien and scented caring. Brad’s Day began in the morning exactly a month after the tragedy and a week or two — strangely hard for Jim to recall — after Margaret, impatient at the carver’s delay, had imposed a brief stone upon that otherwise untrammeled point of the family burial place, a grave "empty of all but earth," Alexander had suggested for the inscription but Margaret would not have it.

On this morning of Brad’s first and last "statement" of this endless loss and grief, Margaret did not come down the street to make breakfast for the three widowers Mel, Jim, and Brad because she was in that rare condition of being sorry for herself having fought with her husband Alexander about his venturing downtown on a wet day when he had a bad cold, and then the rain had stopped after he left. She had gone out into the field-like wet of the grass of the backyard, staring at her dark flower beds, no doubt thinking about her daughter (hearing the notes of a strong violin chord or a piano run repeated as Sarah when speaking never did, for she always heard what she had just said), should Margaret phone the boy Ira Lee to tell him not to come this afternoon? She was confused, perhaps. Her son-in-law went early to the newspaper office today, and she pictured two bright cartons of cereal left on the kitchen table for the boys, and the milk left out.

Jim wondered if she would come, and felt it was a beginning, if she did not. And then Brad was first heard fisting the piano in the music room. The same clutch of bombed keys again and again until Jim yelled to his brother to shut up and went downstairs to the music-room door, which held just as many memories as the room, hearing then the moment when it was obviously not going to go on — and Jim stopped in mid-air, he felt, as if he were, well not the music, but like it. Jim knew it all so well it was beyond fact, maybe like those dreams he did not have (but his own mother had said he just did not recall), and surely (no, no, not surely) it was like someone else knowing it — the start of Brad’s awful performance — (so, heck, forget it, someone else will remember it), some elder who didn’t have anything better to do; still it stayed with him, and when he was older he told it three, maybe four times, years later in his life: to his wife, who, so uncannily, had never been told the Indian stories and was kept out of (or free of?) the mere tangle of ideas he guessed he had about his mother (tangled by truly not knowing, by not tracking her down living or dead because you didn’t do that, if she wasn’t there)— throw in his father, too; to Mayga and colleague Ted at a Washington bar; yet also at once to his grandmother who was part of Brad’s Day itself, though coming in late.

No easy thing to tell her, as she became a part.

No small thing Brad. Alone in the house, Jim stood above his brother and did not remember the distance from threshold to piano. Brad was nuts, sick or something. Brad’s back was straight with the most arching-in curve as if he’s being good. What’re you doing? he said to Brad. Little Brad was crying, gasping; he shook his head kind of slowly, half-fake, or helpless. Jim looked down into the scalp of the unknown kid, the flecks of live skin in his very short crew cut entirely different from the boy underneath, who was—

— going to pieces, Mayn told his wife one day. .

— who was a brother in Jim’s mind always, but never before what he was now: a relative who would not move from where he was. Braddie farted silently and Jim didn’t breathe, he had gone up to this brother and had nothing much to say and couldn’t name what it was and would just as soon not live through what was going to happen, which threw everything out the window including himself carrying all the traces — a billion, but only traces — of the ancient fate sprawled in the room’s dumb things.

"What the hell, Brad," he said, and reached behind the bony little insect of a kid and shut the cover over the keys in case Brad was thinking about hitting them some more. The brother instead kept on in a language, a language was what it was, and Brad’s ghost-sort-of was crawling through something, without his body much moving. Jim kept saying words. Such as, "Gramma’s probably comin’ over. You got to go to school. She’s going to tell you you got to." Saying over again, like he hadn’t heard himself say.

They both heard someone coming downstairs, but no one was up there. Then they remembered, without either of them needing to say it. The stairs creaked because that’s what they did. And years later Jim found what he wanted to connect the habit to — the movements or motions you felt overall, in an apartment house, that were less from people doing things than from what was left of them after they went out to work or away on business or vacation, although it might be the elevator or the edifice responding to the wake of a truck passing in the street.

Jim knew at this moment with his brother that his brother was doing something with their mother that Jim wasn’t. Jim thinking of a girl. He’d been on his way, but now he had to stay with this person who left him still no place to stand. But it was Jim’s house. But it wasn’t, and hadn’t been for a while, because his grandmother’s place was up the street and his mother had let him come and go, though he didn’t have to. But maybe he did. He wanted to have Brad look him in the face.

Brad stood up from the piano bench and Jim actually touched his shoulder. Brad went to the dark, inlaid drop-leaf table that a great-grandrelative had made and grasped the violin case and slid it into his arms like he was carrying wood. Pretty morbid, Jim told his wife some twenty years later, and she did not agree, but did not look away from him as his brother had done. It wasn’t as if Brad was Sarah’s only son, except Jim knew at this long, long moment that he had been thinking of himself as her only son. Later he figured it was because he felt really like the only grandson, Margaret’s favorite, although Alexander would have politely objected. "Whatcha doin’ with that violin?" Jim said. "That’s Mom’s violin." Brad went down on his knees and put the violin case out in front of him. He lay down with his face on the floor and put his arms up above his head so his hands were touching the violin case and at that instant the case moved, as Jim told his grandmother seriously when she came in and she said, He must have pushed it with his hand. Yet Jim hadn’t had that impression. Had Brad’s hands been on the case? And Jim thought of every talk he had had with his dead mother. His sense that she thought he was "all right" and thriving. Not especially musical, yet enjoyed singing.