Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

"Yes there’s something here," said Margaret in that intelligent mellow voice after a moment; "it’s not your mother—"

"—/ know," said Jim rather quickly without feeling.

"— and it’s real, my dear, it’s real—"

"Yeah, yeah—" tired after Brad’s Day.

"My heart lies buried there," he thought she said, and it was hard to credit, so he did — tired after Brad’s Day — which in some bumping or winding in his ears he knew wasn’t yet over, like the spaces of silent, silent fact between him and what his mother had wryly specified, which he knew then and later he would have gone on to anyway "Go away where you belong" — yet instead of just doing it, departing Windrow like others leaving home and state, he’d been told to and by a mother who had then given him and his halfway brother the impression that she was the one who’d — and for that moment as his (yes!) apologetic (!) grandma spoke again, Jim the slicing halfback who had run through muscle-bound (actually nice-guy) Feingold like mere matter was in his mother’s shoes, no, well, his mother’s body or her soul at any rate, and he would just believe that she had done this even if he did not accept her — her death (because if he had, he would have felt her last breath clouding his way with or without words which were too easy to say and write down, which was what he wished to say to Miss Myles, fine wide mouth and geometric tits, for he would stick to facts, not make up news). And he got up off his knees and didn’t know what came out of his mouth until there it was: "Gramma, I’m glad Braddie cried and all. He had to. I didn’t feel like the door was closed on that room. He was a kid, I mean any kid; you know what I mean, Gramma? And I thought, he’s my brother and I don’t have to be crazy about him, he’s Brad."

And then, ‘75 he my brother, Gramma?" and Jim grinned at what had come out because of some story-like relief that got onto her whole face.

"Brad?" she said. "Brad is your half -brother. You guessed it, I’m sure. But your mother never actually told me till that day at the beach — the morning after that day. You probably didn’t need as much as Brad did, you know." Her face got the way it had been before, so what she’d said seemed to leave her with something else or the same old thing, though the fact itself of this blockbuster that had just come out (coupled with Jim not asking, Who was the father?) was easy to take; it was just there — surprising, ^surprising (y’know).

Said she was her own mother. Funny thing ever after for better, for worse, for still better: Jim hit Feingold too hard next day but did not pass through him, the attitude was wrong. He didn’t ask his grandmother (who had said, "Look who’s here" — though they were only approaching this part of the cemetery in their vehicles), Was Sarah then her own mother? His mom would laugh at that but you often didn’t know why, and in the cemetery with the rinsed grass all around and by the same token stuck to his hands so he would rub it together in his palms, he missed his mother, he loved her, she was off by herself but he was the one who didn’t go hunt her up — well, he did sometimes, but anyway, she was there and he came and went and knew her humor ‘thout paying much attention to it (life go on quat slowly — he had treated his grandparents’ house like home at eight, ten, twelve. . Why? Oh, because it took you back to your childhood, was his mother’s joke, it reminded you of your little aproned mother hanging up underwear in the backyard breeze. At eight, to be reminded of your childhood?). She joked as no one else.

He certainly had been a kid — had played, disappeared all day; ran away once overnight ‘n applied for a job in Englishtown at a dairy; and his grandma wasn’t exactly a little aproned person. His mother, though, was not quite so tall, which was surprising because of Alexander too, and she was a little fuller, squarer, though not strong-feeling, that is, to look at, and, if you could catch her, see her, she conveyed this in the curve of her slow sweep through the rooms of the house, where, like Margaret, to do a day’s work in two days she paid the shiny-black little indestructible girl from "collard-ville" literally on the far side of the Jersey Central tracks whose name was also Margaret; but Sarah never worked along with her and never checked up on her, though Margaret did — and in Sarah’s house. Why I thought you’d gone home, Margaret, said Sarah, which made little Margaret laugh and laugh, sucking without many teeth on a cherry pit from the backyard.

Leona Stormer who had married an older man who had made her pregnant, a doctor who had known how to — and she’d gone away to Illinois where he practiced — came back and Sarah came face to face with her after years and years, in the cool-tile-floored drugstore on a day as hot as uptown downtown. Sarah had burst into tears, Leona had smiled. Just then Jim appeared, whom Leona had never set eyes on even when he was a baby. Sarah started laughing and crying. Jim found two things out. One was that his mother as he’d suspected really did say odd things: she said to Leona, It isn’t that I feel much for you, you take me back that’s all you do but— Thanks! said Leona, pretending to be a bit irritated, which she was— But, said Sarah, that’s a lot to make me do. Thanks, said Leona, and didn’t cry, though Jim’s impression was that she wouldn’t have, or as he thought back on it years later. But the other thing Jim found — was it accident that he had run into his mother downtown? and he imagined that at eleven or twelve he had been married and working to support his family and had happened to run into his mother (Oh hi, Mom, how are you doing?) — but yes, the other thing Jim found was that he wasn’t embarrassed by her, by what she said to Leona that time in the drugstore. He had observed this woman Sarah who happened to be his mother, a surprising woman, interesting, warm to the touch and would even hug him though he never saw her really touch his father, or was it the other way around?

But Jim and Sarah left each other kind of alone, that is in the good sense, but then the day came and he thought of all the times he had missed, that is, you know, the chances: to do what, to ask her things, like Dick, who used to ask his father, Why get married? or, Did fish suffer? and whose father died in the middle of the night when Dick was out camping with the Boy Scouts (smoking his first cigarette). But not to just ask her things — no, to be in the same understanding room together.

(What crap!) And what was he doing there that day in the drugstore when she ran into her old school acquaintance Leona? Well, while we’re all here, might’s well ask what was he doing under the porch that other day? "What doing, Jim?" tiny tot Brad would ask arriving softly in Jim’s room and Jim didn’t speak to him but didn’t tell him to go away: oilin’ my mitt; readin’ a comic; seein’ which cards I’m gonna swap (baseball cards — the stars in the flesh, square-jawed, at ease). Oh, said tiny tot Brad clearly, softly.

He would be allowed to stay if he didn’t mess around with the cards. Jim gave him one to look at, a duplicate, and Brad put it down on the floor carefully, but he watched Jim instead. Well, don’t look at me, Jim didn’t say.

Till one day, Brad’s Day, Jim looked at Brad, and looked and looked at him on the floor in his short pants, his legs lengthening, till he’s glad not to look any more; where do you go from there? your bike, your bike with balloon tires mashing the gravel so Margaret across the cemetery saw him before he saw her and Eukie looking (Jim had been told) like Winston Churchill. And where’d you go from your grandma’s fact called forth by your crazy question Is he my brother, Gramma?