Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— close down some of these systems, a voice says firmly at a semicircular meeting of Grace Kimball’s workshop, close ‘em down, don’t go back for more, ol’ Freud’ll have you sniffing around day and night till you got a snootful and it’s like booze, one snootful paralyzes you as good as another, close down some of those systems, you’ve seen ‘em, they work, he do act like that some of the time? you know it’s most of the time, which might as well be all the time, so don’t go back for more — so that we might have substituted the verbal sound "voice" for "workshop" and dispatched to the heart of what’s just been said—

— hear those voices with their boots on comin’ down through the woodwork and you’re under the porch but outside if you want to be — and the memory is worth not maintaining major space for, so store it dehydrated it’ll keep next to Brad’s brief vision he recalled and recalled and recalled of Sarah with skin peeled raw when the draped black towel came off which meant the waters tore her clothing, she left no garment in the boat, and she had gone away on her trip—

— oh please don’t, said Mel — without enough clothes, y’know — but after Dad Mel said she was in heaven, big brother Jim said, touching his half-brother’s shoulder (though Mel could touch Brad, too), No, Braddie, she’s O.K.

— no need for her to go on floating downward in your ill head, she had the water to float on, in, under, within, through, out through, so long as you got the basic info into your who where when lead—

— What? asks a now-long-unheard-from voice, a childlike interrogator who have overheard stuff not comprehensible or not especially desired— "What?" asks a kid watching TV — multiple kid dune homework with the sound off for a new wrinkle—

— No, she’s O.K., Braddie, she’s O.K.

Well’s far’s I’m concerned, said Dr. Herman, when Jim told him of Mel’s asseveration that most Armenians were Catholics, all Cartiolics are Armenians —have you ever had a real drink, Jimmy? and he bent to deftly lift from back of some other bottles ein quart applejack before Jim could start to describe Brad’s Day finishing off at the cemetery with a couple of snorts from Eukie’s small but somewhat inexhaustible bottle emerging from his voluminous coverall—"sirensuit" as it was called by Margaret (a great Chur-chillian sometimes though then she would see he was only history) and when Jim asked why "siren," Alexander said Churchill attracted all the ladies with that suit and looked like a baby in point of fact, and Margaret said Nonsense, the fact was that the siren was the air-raid warning and Churchill was always out among the people at those times and always wore that one-piece semi-military-fatigue coverall outfit — and Jim said, "Thanks, Gramma," and she said, "You’re welcome," he still visualized the Prince leaving in quest of the Princess, and the giant bird still adrift in that formidable western sky that at some margin, or set, of the light, became East, and the curious recovery of the Navajo Queen — curiouser and curiouser if you thought about it but he could stop thinking and he did stop asking:

And seldom asking his father, Mel, who didn’t relinquish the weekly newspaper for quite a time, questions he really wanted answers to and often thinking up questions about Windrow goings-on that Mel would have incorporated succinctly into the Democrat: a piner woman and her infant were found dead at the edge of the swamp west of Lake Rompanemus: in fact, the woman’s foot was in the water. Back in the woods the apparently sleeping body of a piner man, in fact dead, was found braced in the limbs of a tree near a burned cabin. (His clothes, Mel observed upon being asked by Jim what about him, were still damp, but there was no sign of foul play or water in the lung though no autopsies were held on three unknown piners.) Jim asked Sam, who for some reason had not told Jim that Sam’s uncle at the firehouse had heard about it at the Elks’ from Dr. Herman, who had been called by the police and had taken Cornelia with him and Cornelia who was in Miss Myles’s journalism class had turned in the brief article to Mel at the Democrat, which became briefer in the Democrat, though Miss Myles, who got this information out of Jim, could never persuade Cornelia to expand it into a feature piece. Jim saw waterflies playing on the murk near the dead woman and child, saw one waterfly carry some sultry irritation to the baby so it revived and opened its mouth but was capable only of silence. (The woman had shown signs of malnutrition and her hair was bedraggled. There were no plans to drag the swamp.) When confronted with such interesting news items strangely brief, Jim tended not to ask his father. If he got into talk with him it was maybe to tell him things like what would happen if the Earth slowed down rotating and stopped rotating when inertial momentum had been enough reduced so no one had been hurled off Earth’s surface—’cepting that this event occurred in a dream (though a daydream) Jim had which therefore he would never have told Mel and possibly would not have broached to his mother were she there still, or were she to appear on the roof in the middle of the night or in his framed picture of Sequoya, brave Cherokee linguist, gift from Alexander like the picture next to it of Andrew Jackson in a black coat looking pretty mad — the pictures done in the same year of 1821, according to Alexander; or Jim would tell his father there was "some crap" showing through the ceiling, a discoloration on the slanting, low, roof-squeezed ceiling above Brad’s bed — some rotten shingles out on the roof at that point and it would get worse — and Mel asked Jim (a rare asking, a rarely personal species of asking though father and son and densely aware, more than that, of each other) if Jim recalled how upset Sarah’d been when they came home from her group’s chamber recital at the Presbyterian church and the snow firm underfoot and the winter stars out and even with his tone deafness he’d told Sarah it was one of the memorable evenings of his life and she said Byron Kennett’s mother had come up after the quintet and told Sarah Sarah was making By fall in love with her, did Sarah know that? and she could see it in his eyes during the Mozart, she could see it in his eyes, and all Sarah could say was wasn’t Betty glad Byron was falling in love with someone safe — with a laugh! — but Betty got mad and said some fairly surprisingly final words and went away, and though Sarah, though bitchy, was enough in the right all right, she couldn’t get over it and got cold late in the evening and her fingers got blue, did Jimmy remember? not really except Mel had wanted to call the doctor—"my musical anemia," Sarah said, "my incurable blues" and she looked so young then, said Mel, like a little girl, younger than when I first knew her, but deathly pale though we knew what a toughie she was, climbing out on the roof to look at the shingles one spring and when Mel, whose slippers were always dark red leather, the best, and made of leather only (not the carpet-material-type slippers Alexander wore out onto the porch to go half-sideways like a sea captain or a sailor down the steps to retrieve the newspaper in the morning with the dew still icing the front lawn the deepest damp green), said if they didn’t reroof the house he’d have to waterproof his slippers, Sarah picked it up as lightly as one of her letters downtown to her father came up off the floor into his hand, and when Dr. Range in his yellow slicker came by when Brad had influenza and they were all there, Sarah said (and Mel said that’s the second time you got that wrong) that they were probably a leak-proof and dry house but Mel was the only man she could imagine waterproofing his carpet slippers, which got a laugh but not from Mel, who essentially clapped his hands and offered a sherry to the doctor who said he would love to but it was against his religion this early in the day whereupon Mel plucked the doctor’s yellow oil-slicker rainhat from the hall table where it hatched a massive paperweight with newsprint from the first, heavily Jacksonian issue of the Democrat sunk into it, and handed the slicker hat deftly to Dr. Range, whose services were not for very much longer sought by the Mayn family though Margaret and Alexander Mayne (with the e) went on with him nominally their physician for years, though Margaret, who was congenitally well and believed that there’s an awful lot of things in this world that’s your business and nobody else’s, couldn’t stand doctors doctoring — much less hospitals mined with bedpans, buzzing with thermometers that got shoved hither and yon, granted, by nurses that for all their hellish officiousness knew more than the doctors up to but not including slicing you open, which Margaret would never permit done on her, though she had had Sarah’s and Sarah’s sister’s tonsils out (well how many actual tonsils does that make?) — and it comes to us as if it were moving outward to our fingertips or had been on the tip of the tongue, a notorious nearness better located at the susceptibility threshold of the tastebuds — when ‘twas through Jim unbeknownst to him that we relations extracted clean clear and isolate Sarah’s "Well done," when Mel hadn’t flown the hat to Dr. Range’s head or done anything special, only wished it a bit fast perhaps from the mahogany table to the doctor’s living fingers, which is no sin.