Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Miss Myles said, "You’re convinced—?" and there was an authority in the in that rose and fell in half an instant that sounded like she wasn’t thinking about wind any more.

The hand dropped off? inquires the Interrogator with a humor of new pride in his sense of the idiom of our history.

Jim called to Bob Yard, who hulked with subtly gentle animus with his hands in his overalls, that he should leave his brother Brad alone — what was everybody on a day like today doing getting mad over nothing?

Brad said (the little shit), "What day?"

Henceforth, though never again observed, "Brad’s Day" was what Jim plainly meant. Bob asked who needed a lift, Jim turned from the beseeching eyes of his grandmother who was for once in their lives at a loss; and Jim saw what he had declined to ask Margaret: who was the father of Brad? And like a visit to the future he saw that the feeling the drink gave him was just sustaining in order later (when it wore off) to enable him to belie the feeling that had moved him to ask Eukie for a drink, yet now turn to him and ask, "What was my grandmother out here for? what was she telling you here all alone?" Only to hear Eukie, whom he couldn’t hit any more ‘n he could slam — though, mind you, not scared to slam — Bob’s face, say, "You got something on her?"

Facts come in their time, reminds the interrogator in a minor mood; if not now, then in time to come (he smiles at his English and as if caused by this lieutenant smile a shriek appears in the next room, of discovery or of pain yet maybe out of both sides of the mouth), and most curiously facts are the future of their absence where that precise absence is in questions here and now. You hear that call—

— read shriek, we urge, not call, as if he were not one of us, this Interrogator—

— O.K., shriek, he concedes — but there was and will be again a sage in southeast Asia, in the southwest of the United Conditions of America (or States, literally) or among the current urban Boston Unitarians, who say (a la Tao), "E’en though one’s held as a slave, one need not let the external imprisonment bond the free mind within; O.K.? Therefore, feign insanity— but hold to one’s true sentiments."

The shriek came again, like fact. The shriek was not a person. It was in lieu of a person, in lieu of a silence faultily designed to extend the putative person’s inability to answer the question put to her, if it is a she, by the interrogation process: Did songs by her carry coded advice to kill their recipients upon receipt? did the code tell which Cuban refugees were to be contacted as having been in fact sent by Fidel, the Cuban king? The singer-composer, having answered with silence, has next tried to sing her answer, which is her own song but out comes that horrendous shriek (more to come). But that was a woman, what do you expect? they are more strong than men, hence make mas noise (read news) like Jews disagreeing yet we have in support of the regime agreeable Jews too, whole families we are glad to report.

Whereas to answer Eukie’s question, we had a boy, fifteen years old about, and strong-legged if a manly young drunk thickened by the real turf of his home cemetery; and we already remember that where do you go when hit by death? a hard act to follow, where do you go from that fact, if it is a fact? and where do ye go from the fact thrust like a bodily part to play, to wit the fact that Brad is your half-brother, which isn’t so bad, not so bad at all, because it isn’t as if you were adopted, which Dick discovered on the day of his father’s funeral from one of his fellow scouts (who had come to the church in step as a unit, as the patrol they in fact were) and a moment later in a stupor of what felt like embarrassment asked a fellow scout what he thought it felt like to be just ash though still living—

— No; Brad’s half-brotherhood, I could handle that, the newsman was heard to say — and I guess Brad didn’t completely fall apart that day, it was an amazing piece of behavior, that’s all, and then it was over. .

Funny, said senior journalist-colleague Ted in the sixth decade of the century in question, a blockbuster like that, it’s almost easier to handle than. .

— than what? asked the Chilean woman Mayga, stepping down from her stool and putting a hand on her red pocketbook, and smiling at Jim and Ted with such affection and neutrality Jim wanted to give her a present as if that would complete the event, like the last fact.

— than being told by your grandmother, said Jim (feeling some palpable unlosable sleaze spread slowly in their direction down the long bar from that character Spence who was listening as openly as he was not looking), that you didn’t need the kind of attention that your brother did—

— or a fight that you’re not sure you want, said Ted, who knew Jim but had never heard the future that Jim had confided to Mayga who in turn had told Ted, but hadn’t told, or had chance to tell, Jim, her special friend (though they met in all only half a dozen times in ‘62-’63), that she had a sinking sense returning home to help her husband as if giving up her job here in Washington were the start of some long fall.

And Jim wasn’t sure what he wanted, with applejack of which he suspected there was yet another pint in Eukie’s voluminous suit heating Jim’s thighs and chest and wildly thickening the hair in his eyebrows, and a wish to get clear of that place and even, for the moment, of his grandmother’s look that went through him to be met behind by Eukie’s words which were an inflated shadow of what world there was.

"So what if I have?" said Jim, not knowing what he meant except if he "had" something on Margaret it was the age and experience he had reached that could turn away from her stories and still want to know what she was doing with them beyond for years holding the attention of her favored grandson whose mother apparently didn’t tell stories. But Eukie’s question — well, it sort of smelled: because you don’t have something on your grandmother; you don’t. And he didn’t say, My mother’s another story — for Eukie wasn’t entitled to hear that from Jim, ‘cause who the hell’s Eukie? as Jim walked slowly toward the group composed of his father, who had his hands in his old seersucker trouser pockets and stared at the plot of grass as undisturbed as his wife’s permanent absence, and of his brother Brad, who said to Bob Yard he was sorry, it was just that (and Bob raised a hand gently and smugly and said, Sure), and Pearl Myles, who took a tiny pad from her pocketbook and made a note, bent slightly from her statuesque height — Jim, as he moved, not knowing what he’d do but standing toward the dumb future as he walked, until he reached Margaret; and to her he said, "You said there’s something here. I believe you, but it’s not my mother and it isn’t any spook." He wished he could turn some answers into questions — answers off there in what the cosms of the hanging sun did to the Princess, but he settled for Bob Yard having a crappy attitude, and he went to Bob then, his father Mel shaking his large, square head again and again the way one might cry, but Jim couldn’t walk through his mother’s — for Jim just knew —one-time secret amour (as which this after all not unduly hairy or unwarrantably swarthy person was, horribly incredibly but had they kissed?). So afterward Jim thought he had gone around him. But no; Bob had given way. Jim had told him, "You don’t insult my family." Bob had stepped back (he didn’t do that ever) — and to the side; and, dividing the unknown with young Jim, Bob grinned and then cut off the grin, though not because he knew what Jim was about to do. Which surprised everyone and with, for Jim, a surprise within the surprise which covered the larger asininity of what he did.