Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— Jim thought you never would know what got left out because I’m not about to ask Dad how responsible he felt, and what he thought about the fact that she left only the note to the boat owner saying she was "kind of sorry." He couldn’t ask Anne-Marie about Mel’s responsibility, and then, a month later when he knew more, he couldn’t ask her or Mel how many people knew about us, that is, the number of boys Mel was in fact the father of; or why Mel never got into a fight with Bob, although the shoes on the porch above Jim’s head (upon his head) got amplified in our view to a threatening weight, and he couldn’t at the long, days-long moment of his mother’s death, if there was one, believe in a time ahead when these things could be talked of apart from the Sunday wonder and stunned fluency of euphemism in a room where the absence of the dead parent gave Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl and the clothes and hands of others the same independent molecular substance as the whole-wheat sandwiches on the silver plates that Mel told Margaret he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but the thing was, as Jim confidentially pointed out to her, his hand on her shoulder, that she had sliced off the crusts which she never did because she used to say, Eat ‘em and they’ll give you gold teeth!—

— so at least he asked someone something during those days, and took that Windrow Democrat obituary standing up, that weather-report brevity edited into being by fifteen or so years of wedlock: so that if Jim (whom his grandmother called on her last day "good people" — "you’re good people, Jim") had ever been a scientist instead of a journeyman, he might have found a formula for that extremity of briefness that so much reduces it releases its very soul which had become already the void about it; and so for years, whatever Brad felt after scissoring out the black frame and the words of the kind man who had been and was becoming his father, and whatever Brad felt a month later after reading in his brother’s scrupulous quotation from the brother-in-law man "Aren’t you the Mayn boy?" adjacent to the words "How did he know me? I didn’t ask," Jim had to ask himself how much of that obit so easily memorable it wouldn’t stop repeating in his head was ignorance, and how much as unspeakable as the solitude on a breezy September beach when, having run one fisherman into the ground, he no more knew that the other was watching him than knew what he meant in his terrible words spoken against the wind but never ever written down for a brother-half-brother to spy among all those horizons of a lined notebook page, "I don’t want them to find her."

Margaret had let herself be appointed, because of her Democratic party connections, to the state prison commission during the War and had revived her New Deal interest in unemployment, what it costs to make jobs in peacetime or not to. But, though she set foot in church only on special occasions, whichever the church need be, she said the Devil found work for idle minds. She meant Mel, when he got rid of the paper at last; and she did not mean he played the market (with some success) and the local harness races (with some happiness and just barely in the black), though she regarded the first as living vicariously through numbers, not real making of usable products: what she did mean was that Mel suffered even more over Sarah’s "tragedy" because he stopped working and had less to do; and into one gap came another, if that is possible, and we, who are relations meteorolong, whorled, human ward, and possible as well as relations that people have actually had, believe it is, and were there, like an equal and opposite reaction, to receive through Mayn’s at the time only incipient voiding-sluice (incidentally creating us at need) his moving picture clandestinely witnessed through glimmering back-porch screens in order to be put soon out of mind, of Margaret turning on the porch light, opening the kitchen door to come out and open the wide old icebox while Alexander came and stood on the kitchen threshold continuing a conversation and asking her now not why she was crying (which she clearly was) — for of course their younger daughter was gone and there were problems of life itself — but, rather, what on earth she meant that Mel was dying vicariously (Alexander really didn’t understand that) — was it that we didn’t know exactly where Sarah "was"? But Alexander, who was subtler than anyone else told him, got out of the way when Margaret went back into the kitchen and the sticky yellow door slammed and the back-porch light went out upon the odd sobbing noises of the loved voice and upon the possibly inaudible stress in the devoted husband’s words didn’t and Sarah (as if, well, he and Margie did know the final whereabouts of someone else), and upon the curious boy who sometimes roamed the early evening and mastered into middle life a healthy shrug because he knew how to shut the door too.

So what if the double Moon expected as its due two explanations if not more? — ranging those twi-set nights those twi-set times between the story of the day and the story of the night to the shadow Marcus Jones the man-botanist cast on the woman-zoologue Mena as he got off his bike in that narrowing desert, for Mena claimed that before Marcus went away that night he had cast upon her the double shadow "hers to convey" until she met her next human—

— the ancient Anasazi?

— right you are, who because of her appearance at the top of the last ladder upward to his cell had caused that lifted pistol in his feather-light hand to throw two shadows according to the precise Mena, which was the only way he had seen the double Moon.

But so what, so what, shrugs the humor of the boy-man with such casual cogence his very shrug grows him up a year, two years, five years, who could now have spoken a bit of Spanish with Mena had she existed still, six years, seven, eight ("You will go away where you belong, my darling" — but we did not pick up "my darling," with all our audio resources did we? — sho did! — did not—)

Until the "so what" ‘s subtly prevail, even when to a child and, in fact, the children of Joy Mayn and Jim Mayn are voiced the weathers which the Hermit-Inventor of New York divided with his mortal colleague the Anasazi medicine man, the weather of presence and the weather of absence, which do not quite parallel the division between the weather from earth and the weather from beyond, the weather from the body, the weather from almost nowhere, weather of going and weather of arriving, and so on perhaps into a future where Mayn found himself returned to the city and to an apartment he had inhabited with a family, and the family had been his own, and the family had rented the apartment at that particular time, and now, taking possession of the apartment with misgivings not because he now owned it, but because of love he found he really had given, and naturally the love he had not given, he compiled for professional use a history of rent control and related matters in the city of New York which struck him as the classification of the constituents of a chaos, or so it was suggested to him in similar or congruent words by a new acquaintance, a fellow tenant of the building where, within the inertial system he partly tried to take a view of, he did much of the compiling, oft interrupted by "so what?" from voices known and unknown, sometimes his own, breathing in and out such weather as was ludicrously true and profanely painful, recalling the "so what?" shrugged silently from the boy’s own early telex looking on at a grandparental scene complete with lights on and lights out. Meanwhile—

It could be established exactly where the intent botanist and geo(il)logical bicyclist Marcus Jones was employed when one morning in 1892, a year before Margaret entered that world, Marcus listened with curiosity to a young visitor from the South tell of having seen in company with Navajo friends along the dusty bank of a "wash" near Ship Rock, New Mexico, the brightest and tallest showy loco imaginable in height twelve to sixteen inches with up to fifteen whorls along each main stalk all tufted with nearly luminous white hairs among the spikes of deep pink and live lavender so well known among the Oxytropis. Marcus could hear the locoweed report with one ear, while with the other pick up an unabashed chat between two silver-mine operators who were contemplating backing Bryan over in Nebraska for reelection to Congress this time from the boondocks.