Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Well, if so, then in her mind; for not in his.

Perfectly understandable, then, that hearing Ted with his firm view of history as commerce cloaked in the small talk of sporting drama and moral health and divided mostly between the Ordinary, who gave the power, and the Worst, who took the power by being also dumb but so colossally so that their complements and client audience the Ordinary just watched them bestride the Earth like statuary bridges of fine, fixed networks of public utility when actually such busy, blood-like action coursed through these structures that the Earth risked explosion and worse still leakages that would permanently stain — oh hearing Ted go on about the Third World wishing we’d sprinkle more bauxite on our breakfast in the morning ‘stead of home-spawned plastic snowies, and more natural zinc, wood, and diamonds in our brain resectioning ‘stead of the new orluminums and solid-state love-informations, Jim was put in mind albeit contemplatively of that isolated incident "Spence" looking for and finding somewheres to happen, since it had been right here (not only in the Easter conference in question but) in this hotel bar snickering like a breath of impedance at the tribute to Mayga as Woman President of Chile, and then with an impudence so incredible Mayn could just about disbelieve its content, "She said you left your notebook out on purpose" — when it was such a distance from the warmth between Jim and Mayga one day he told her about Brad’s Day and environs down to the end of the bar that he never thought Spence was listening.

Today, this very late afternoon, perhaps in honor of the dead lady Mayga, they were in many places in that conversation and Jim Mayn said it was a mistake to go to people for what they couldn’t possibly provide, produce, or give you. Ted’s father, for example, had an excellent sense of humor but little kindness in him. Jim’s had little humor, from what one could divine after upwards of a hundred years, though how many Mels there were was no doubt someone’s guess — probably one Mel. Right you are, responded Ted, right you are; except any person has one thing to give and you’ve been given it if you don’t know it.

It was time to call a halt to these festivities, such as they were, and Jim observed that the one thing Ted came up with agayn and agayn was interesting news items re: Third World.

And who was it who in some isolated incident had told Jim to read Adams, Henry Adams? The rear of his brain just above and independent from the balance part has a sluice let into it out of which and in pour and are dumped things (definitely things) and maybe nothing is lost, as Alexander used to think with a book in his hand, oft recalling some fact from Margaret’s own early "travails" — so that she, rehashing that old time, would sweep it away with her hand and an exhaling, whispering sound of dismissal — who cares now? — about a homeless quite presentable Mohave woman who with her Ojibway "wife" (that’s right) had almost got them both killed by the Utes they stopped briefly with and had wound up among these Navajo, and this Mohave woman wore men’s pants and wasn’t allowed to sing ceremonials but had amazing veterinary skills with sore horses and anemic sheep and understood the wild pigs, she said, and was accepted as "the husband" though not permitted to do what hunting that community of Navajo went in for though did spend time among the men yet never, as in another Indian people, discussed her "wife" intimately with the men. (The weaving, said Margaret, was extremely well done, tight and flat, though for my money the Navajo patterns weren’t a patch on the drawings, horse and haunted landscape drawings, done by a part-Sioux part-Cheyenne holy fellow with these pale gray eyes almost white eyes over and over from one single sight seen in a dream when he was twelve, pretty sad chap in the early nineties of course.) (But, said Alexander, the weaving and the pictures were two quite different products — yet for Jim’s grandfather history was not only a catalogue but, maybe somewhere in his snoring sleep just before he woke up hearing Jimmy being taught by his grandmother off in her room in her bed to whistle or in relations never to be flushed from their coils and crannies coins and flex of feeling, a romance, and Alexander had in the winter of ‘93-’94 met at a campfire by a Pennsylvania river a band of itinerant unemployed who told him of Coxey’s Army of the poor that would set out on Easter Day to march on Washington though Alexander was back home by then — where was the romance?)

Jim thought you never knew how much got left out of Mel his father’s obituary for Sarah and how much in the very niggardly nucleus of that black-framed box on page 2 actually crept in. Like time of death, when no one after all could tell: so "knowledge" in the absence of evidence, what was that? You never knew what Jim himself felt because he told Anne-Marie he wasn’t all there when he had the copy of the New York Times in his hands, for three lines of information appeared there, three mornings after — after what? the drowning? — and he wasn’t all there when, the next afternoon, without touching it he leaned on his grandparents’ dining-room table, one hand on either side of the weekly issue Margaret had folded to page 2—("Well I could have told you that," said Anne-Marie, with married humor while stirring chocolate into two tall, cold glasses of milk)—

Jim told Marie that his mother had no middle name. Marie said that girls didn’t. Jim said without thinking that his mother hadn’t been exactly a girl. Anne-Marie did have a middle name but she said she didn’t want it, it was "Maureen" — from a famous sharp-tongued horticulturist great-aunt on her mother’s side — her father liked "Marie Maureen." Jim had a middle name which was Charles, but boys always did.

But his mother didn’t. She had been strolling past the monumental brown-stone Presbyterian church one afternoon, one of the few times Jim recalled taking a walk with her. (One of the few? said "Marie" (he tried out the name), Well, maybe one of the two or three, said Jim.) In fact, he had only happened to meet her and he was on his bike, so he swooped up a little steep driveway ramp, cut along the sidewalk, and slowed down to "a walk" beside her where she was whistling softly some music. She looked at him in a darkly friendly way without saying anything and asked him if he liked his middle name Charles (which she said as if he might have forgotten it) and before he could answer she said that his father’s middle name was Honesty (which the way she said it he almost believed) and she told him she had been scheduled, before birth, to have a middle name but "your grandmother" dropped it, and she had tried using it as her given name the spring and early summer she was studying in France and in French it sounded really like her— Marthe, Marthe, Marthe. But she ran into a violin student from the Middle West whom she really liked in the middle of the night in the pitch dark in this dormitory she lived in outside of Paris and when she heard his voice asking who it was (and she knew this was Robaire, Robaire, Robaire) she said her real name, "Sarah," without thinking. And she particularly recalled this because he had been at a recital of Saint-Saens and had met an American violinist named Spalding who was going to be famous, and when "Robaire" had said to him that he himself thought you made your own luck, Mr. Spalding had said to look him up in New York, though he wouldn’t be there for a few months.

Where did you and your mother go? asked Anne-Marie (Maureen).

Jim and his mother had gone on a little further, and she had asked how fast he could ride back to the church and return to where she was, but when he raced back to the church he got yelled at by three of the guys who were walking along the sidewalk with their baseball mitts, and he stopped for what he later thought was only a moment but when he recollected his projected round-trip and wheeled away back up Winderhoff Avenue seeing only — he didn’t know what, porches, tree trunks, a man far up the street fixing a flat — he pedaled on and on but no mother. He had lost track of time.