Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

In the silence that followed this sound, Brad turned over and sat up and stared at Bob, who was his father but didn’t act it and the boy didn’t know. "You know what she said to me?" said Bob, with that brief power of news from beyond the grave: "She said the wind would just go straight ahead, straight out in a line, except the world is always turning, that’s what she said to me, and that’s why," said Bob—

— but Jim as suddenly (hearing Mel ask "Where’d she ever say a thing like that?") left the room and shut the door hearing Bob’s reaction to him and knowing that his own face was full and he wanted to stand alone in the hall, though Pearl W. Myles, with unimaginable presumption, at once followed him into the front hall and, in what order he didn’t know, put her hand on his arm or spoke or picked up the huge paperweight of heavy glass with newsprint embedded in it that wasn’t ever doing anything on the mahogany hall table with the mirror above it which she looked in because Jim caught her eyes widening at herself, then him — and at once he told her he didn’t know what she’s doing here and he went back in the music room in time to hear Bob say to Mel, Margaret, Brad, and posterity: "But I said to her ‘What a lot of stuff— they ain’t curved.’ "

And ever afterward Jim recalled, like the recovery of the Navajo matron with the demon-hole in her head, the blank breathless look of hate in Brad’s eyes that could not quite turn away, that is from the man he didn’t know was his father. And worth remembering, because Margaret left as suddenly as Jim had, and the front door blew closed behind her so one expected to hear her black shoes pounding the lawn, the walk, and a while later when Mel Mayn who seemed to care for Brad was sitting alone with him at the kitchen table having a drink, having let the paper take care of itself all day— most of the day — jim rode his bicycle up into West Main Street past the tall brown Presbyterian Church and out to the intersection with the highway leading in one direction to the shore and in the other past the race track to the gray capital city of Trenton and when he had continued pedaling freely south a mile, he turned in on the gravel of the cemetery where it was a challenge to ride and he would not cross the grass. And it wasn’t long before he saw his grandmother, as if the sound of his balloon tires on the loose stones had found her out, but if she looked sad, here in the place where she had put in place almost with her own hands a granite marker for the lost body of her strange daughter, she was engaged in such conversation with Eukie Yard, who had inherited the caretaker’s position from his cousin all too long ago, that Jim pretended to ignore them and passed among the neighborhoods of this place to the Mayn plot and his mother’s stone whose gray brightness said she was not quite there and whose newness needed the weather to fade it back into the realness of the other stones.

He was not sure what he smelled. It wasn’t cooking but it seemed like some simple food. He did not know what kept him from behaving like Brad. He could not believe what his mother had done. And also she had left her violin. Not to mention (he smiled to himself, literally smiled out loud) the kid insect all wiry and like a pampered kid when he never had been, lying on his stomach today with the violin on the rug beyond his head. God! There wasn’t any good reason Jim could see for her to have done this silent thing.

The marker showed she was either forty or thirty-nine; he was giving her for her birthday a necklace made of pale blue beads and little hollow silver bells, that Ira Lee’s large-eyed, tall, round-shouldered, lip-licking, single-minded, and unconsciously beautiful sister had made, because she had a book that showed different crafts and she was Indian and had visited a reservation in New York, and one in Pennsylvania where Margaret was interested in the women; Jim hadn’t paid for the necklace but he was going to get it anyhow. The breeze had blown away the rain which was on his wet knees, because he was kneeling with nothing to say.

He knew his mother shouldn’t have done what she did, but he couldn’t do any more than put his head on the wet grass and have nothing to say— not even Shit. It was hers, not his, the deed. He was going to miss varsity practice; he was J.V. age but heavy enough and he had run right through Feingold the senior guard whose father was a lawyer who commuted to Newark and who was (that is the son) supposed to make All-State this year if he kept his grades up. Feingold had a flat, splayed nose, not a Jewish nose (according to George the old man soda jerk), and liked bad weather; he really dug in and Jim had almost without thinking what he was doing run right through Feingold yesterday and a moment afterward didn’t know what he had been doing, except going for some point beyond the opposing backfield; and he was missing scrimmage today, wet helmets and somebody’s elbow numbing your lip — but thinking, always thinking; blowing on his fingers before a play to let Feingold think this was a surprise pass when Ira Lee was the regular passer.

Jim didn’t know how sick his mother’d been, and he knew other husbands and wives like the Bob Yards who yelled at each other. She had written a poem to President Truman about the atomic bombs but she showed it to Alexander who gave it to Mel without telling Sarah, and Mel was going to run it in the paper, print it as a surprise. But Brad told Sarah and she went downtown. Jim heard she ran all the way — and took it off Mrs. Many’s desk and left without a word to Mel who was at the far end of the shop keeping calm beside a press probably, and maybe nothing was said about it.

"Would you like a cup of—" tea, you’d think it was, but he had a blank, and in the blank rose and spread a substance beyond words— "and some cinnamon toast?" she asked him one afternoon when he had come into the shady house, heard nothing, and passed to the kitchen, sat down at the kitchen table. He heard his mother moving slowly like an old person or a naturally quiet person, woman maybe, slightly methodical, knowing though that Jim was where he was: and when she stood there in the kitchen doorway, selfish but not bad; dark, her eyebrows beautiful, soft warm curves — and sharp about the mouth as if she was keeping words inside, he realized that those words she did say weren’t words she got much chance to because he was out on his bike or at his grandmother’s. — "Eating grass or washing your face?" Margaret’s voice came out of the sky practically and he didn’t care if he was getting his khakis damp and rubbing his nose in the cemetery sod, he wasn’t crying (she knew that) and he wasn’t carrying on like his Brad today, and his grandmother, who had evidently finished her animated, probably administrative, conversation with the little fat man with the crew cut, Eukie Yard the caretaker, wasn’t talking to Jim like Mel did to Brad: and Jim stood up with rain from the grass on his face knowing she had been crude and sadly harsh, and he said: "I keep thinking maybe she’s here, but she’s not."

"You can be sure of that."

He wanted to say something awful, like "If they find her, this is where they’ll put her," or dumb, like "Least there’s a stone waiting for her." He said. "But it’s like there’s somebody here. You know?"

She seemed to. She knew he wasn’t one of the Sunday types.

Who could tell what he was feeling — that is, how far — which is — O.K. (he thought, and knew she thought) — just what’s the matter with all this pedestrian provincial background. But, observes the interrogator, who cares to guess at feelings? they are like dreams of surplus equipment. No, we answer, they’re thoughts that pretend to be stronger than the words we try them in.