Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Margaret hastened to inform her father, whose anxiety conveyed itself to her not only by telegraph but in the caress of her own quill’s brown-welling point across the watermark-graced page ruled only by her oblong green and ink-stained blotter lowered line by line faster and faster down until we lost track and must remember what we didn’t know we knew — never suspecting that, as an English financier and furniture maker whose house up in Brigham Street had a sublime view down upon the city and steeply up behind along the slope of the mountains told Margaret, a man here has found in the desert through an Indian woman named Manuel — who shampoos with it regularly and with it fixed a sore of his that’s virtually inside his body — an oil, or wax, contained by the pods of a hardy bush, such that said oil if one could grow sufficient of said plant will light a lamp as brightly as any whale, while what has happened to th’ willing though transplanted whales is unknown. Yet no man here, where clarity belies distance in the mountains of the land and hence anon on water too, has seen leviathan blow, who may by now be all fish if not thoroughly salted (if not to taste, to travel well — a trip more total not to say saltier than any old ocean can imagine rivers to bleed our rocks salt-free): so, as we already remember, those whales, those rather tragic power-pusses, took a wrong turn and got totaled, if one still says that of whales at this late date.

And so you see, Margaret said, on her way further west, I am very much alive — which was what in the dark of early June half a century later Jim’s grandma called to his granddad, who had called into the night yard through the bedroom screen he’d installed the afternoon before, "Margie?" (as if it might be only her voice) "… you all right?" — not, "Margaret, who’s out there?" when a pickup truck its trademark audible in a tailgate’s loose hinge passed, headed downtown.

But very much alive was what the Navajo Prince’s mother had become, and Jim felt this more curiously and sadly on Brad’s Day (which came more than a year after the June night-yard pyjama-bottom scene, for school had started anew by the time of Brad’s Day and the atomic bombs had got themselves dropped, no connection) — Brad lay on the floor of the music room learning to sink or swim.

"Very much alive" (Margaret called back at the distant second-floor bedroom screen behind which was her concerned husband Alexander, who now began to lightly sneeze as if it were animal dawn, and the boy in pyjama botts and his grandmother with her hair way down le back of her nightgown snickered out there in the night yard; snickered at the sound, until she like a girl took his hand (but he gently escaped) and told him, "Come on," then stopped short and Jim could swear he heard Alexander’s bedsprings depressed — and she informed him that, having perhaps come to life because the two young lovers had flown (first one, then the other), the Navajo Prince’s mother said she heard the bird as the thick cloth of Darkness itself, and knew the foreign princess was not aboard the bird on its way back to the national mountains of Choor. And it was not known there except to the Anasazi healer and two or three others that somehow the lady now alive but with her demons back used the song-like voice of Owl Woman, "In the great night my heart will go out, / Toward me the darkness comes rattling…"

But on Brad’s Day, with Alexander reading out of a book and bending to pat poor Brad on his heaving shoulder blade, but now seating himself at the piano and playing lightly and sketchily "Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet"! when the boys had never seen him even try to play a piano or any other instrument so that Brad rolled onto his side and stared at Alexander’s back with wretched face — Jim tasted that damned egg essence! And he would have sprung upon his shitty little bastard of a brother who was taking up everybody’s time, for crying out loud, except Jim knew that in the dark yard a year and a month and more ago he had slipped his hand out of his grandmother’s as they both heard one more screened sneeze — a last little irritation — Jim had been moved — and went toward the palely glimmering white trim of the back porch quicker than Margaret who suddenly lagged, elderly or measuredly female; and Jim was moved to feel a big something so he nearly ran down the street to his own house — father, brother Brad, mother: moved by the Navajo lady coming back to life alone with her buzzing bonnetful of shifting demons and others.

So that on Brad’s Day while the grandfather played well enough for Brad to tell him to please not touch that piano — then Brad went back face down on the floor sobbing but not moving — Jim would have asked his grandfather if all that Navajo story-stuff predicted the future: for they were now without the mother Sarah, who had told Jim to go away and not be afraid: which was not a fact like what Alexander Big-Shoe Granddad asked Brad, for he got along with little Brad, What was Dizzy Dean’s middle name? and a few years later, What was the name of Bernhardt’s dog? when Brad was in high school.

Jim was no walking encyclopedia but he could ask his grandfather what was Harry Truman’s middle name and have his elder wait for a whole minute with his lips drawn back above his teeth before giving up. Only, a moment later, to ask what general (clue: he’s Mexican) had part of his body buried with full military honors while he was still alive and kicking?

They now heard Margaret taking off her brown raincoat in the hall— brown? intones the interrogator (but in the interest of further information suspends punishment) — America may be second to none in acoustics and/or sound, but what is the sound of brown?

— taking her time before they saw her at the threshold of the music loom surveying her husband become musician (who had introduced Jim once to the words "She’s always been a giver, not a taker"). Alexander turned round toward her on the piano stool as if he had been practicing; and Brad was on the floor snuffling and groaning, making noise in his sleep almost(!) or might have been about to receive a kick from Jimmy. Who was ready to kick him when he was down where he belonged, wriggling and heaving there on the shallow lake of his mother’s music-room floor, shades of a Sarasate tune they used in the movies to make you pity a sad scene (though no one can make you feel anything, it’s what you want to feel. .). "The sun’s getting ready to come out," she said; "how’re you feeling?" she asked Alexander and she knelt beside Brad who did not stop sobbing or moaning. She laid her hand on his moving shoulder blade. She listened not for his pulse but, Jim was clear, for what she herself thought.

"Water’s still warm over t’ Lake Rompanemus," said Alexander.

"Welcome to it," said Margaret; "the wind is not warm."

Brad was set apart; he had done it himself, it didn’t matter why, and he maybe didn’t know; and Jim wanted no more to do with his grandmother’s histories because they now made him question what had become of his mother.

(This had gone far enough, asserts the interrogator, we know next to nothing of the suicide’s intentions: we suspect she was about to be found out as having yielded birth some years before to a natural child, but we know that she was not for long if ever moved by the father of Brad Mayn and we detected in her a purpose at the beach looking out past Jim so that he could not look both at her and at what attracted her attention if anything, that is, beyond the perhaps lonely horizon, a purpose that turned in her some calculated aim beyond death, no more a rendezvous with a Jersey Coast blower whale than with an enemy sub canvassing postwar coves from America to America, Liberty Island to Penguin Paradise — and at that very seaside point we have thrust upon our attention the fact that that current manifestation of the Hermit-Inventor of New York appears with Bob Yard and walks down the beach and back with his old friend Margaret who in the person of a Princess once found sanctuary through him upon wending her way back to the East: yet you betrayed the fact that to give her in the form of the Princess sanctuary he turned her (you can’t turn anybody without their consent) into a thing (You said it, chimes a voice with a bare body in the Body-Self Workshop circle, a thing), but wait, says the smiling interrogator (who discovers he too can have charm), a "thing" (says he) accessible only to meteorologists: from which she could be returned to her original form only by the same knowledge, and come to think of it we have on our staff government meteorologists who — but no, forget I said that — and our interrogator seems some piece of us, or his relations, albeit tortured in the next room in order to be not all wrong any more than he has been all bad, a’torturing though he sometime be.)