Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Likewise, Jones’s learned whereabouts could be established in 1896 when Alexander Mayne attended the presidential convention with his young wife Margaret who at twenty-two going on twenty-three shared with Bryan only his liking for Charles Dickens and his more public sympathy for farmers, and who had had a soothing, in fact down-right medicinal cup of tea with Jacob Coxey in ‘94 a short time before he led his march of the unemployed on Washington, D.C., and in her fine, though paternally edited piece for the Democrat had something to say about the silver-lined inflation whose formulae Bryan ignored in favor of the truism that a dollar "approaches honesty as its purchasing power approaches stability": this was as "far from the authentic Jacksonian support for the forgotten working man everywhere" (never an appeal, as Nicholas Biddle fumed, to mobs like those martialed to anarchy by Marat or Robespierre in the Faubourg St. Antoine) as were the locofoco "workies" striking the new friction matches of the 1830s to footlight with candles the "platform" of their protest against financial privilege and solidarity with such maverick journeymen as John Windt and George Evans and the Hudson (N. Y.) cordwainers plus the renegade printer William Morgan of upper New York State and Philadelphia, "more unlike the western interests of that day which were as indifferent to anti-bankism as a well-to-do Mexican lady fandangoing all night in Santa Fe was to the low class of a barefoot peon partner showing his smalls." Alexander had his doubts: Jackson was very middle-class and would never have gone along with striking ironmolders sixty years later reciting, "The robes ye weave, another wears."

Why anything might turn into anything or itself, war into weather into war and back again in i960, given the right imagination, the right overflight, the right reception of light, the rightly modulated night, the right day for a nothing of a brother to play hookey and turn into a noise of grief, then into a half-brother as separate from the real Mayn son as Brad was for Jim and real enough to help Jim go away— not from a snake’s nest of garden hv whence Brad promised pork chops for dinner, but from acting for Jim in a way better not worked out, given that "I don’t want them to find her" really meant, "I don’t want her to come back." For any words might turn into the right gap of passion in which to model some genius of Sarah the way Mel did for years, or, more exactly, into the Alexandrian mellowing of Margaret as a giver not a taker (who took the West for herself but monitored Sarah’s minute sojourn in France years later).

Jim never let himself quite know this in the atmosphere at Windrow, which bent his efforts elsewhere until years later he felt himself filtered as through Windrow itself one late morning near Fontainebleau within striking distance of Paris, in the information that with his rambling left hand Thomas Jefferson wrote the meteorologist Le Roy regarding Le Roy’s reports on how dew point varies with wind direction, the northwest mistrao and the northeast grec being not so dry as the north wind (nor, of course, said Mayn, so sane as the north wind, at least if we are talking about your mistrao and similar winds)—

ah, his journalist companion for his part added, of ill repute —

of ill ions, went briefly on Jim Mayn, such positively charged particles as put people into a funk in Egypt when the south wind comes in off the desert, the khamsin wind "of fifty days" or the German Fohn whose relation to the history of the thirties and the forties could never excuse the Third Reich: so that (continued his French companion), as Le Roy had provoked Jefferson to ponder, dry and moist are relative in air, so dry summer air at the seaside or not may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But Mayn could not tell his correspondent confrere what a filter of Windrow and its everlasting though twenty-odd-miles-distant shore these quite charmed informations veered through, no more than that on the road to Fontainebleau he was listening for transitions to submarines, which presumably were much on the Gallic newshawk’s specialist mind; but when Jim said he thought for a second that he had seen the Eiffel Tower in the distance, the man laughed and said even if it was possible at fifty kilometers, Jim was looking the wrong way (Easier that way, rechuckled the American pragmatist) — and when the man very thoughtfully expounded the stress moments in Eiffel’s adaptation from his bridges to this tower, Jim thought they were getting into U-boat waters at last, pressure, distribution, range, cost-benefit breakdowns, formulae rendering congruent a stable peace and an authoritative news supplement if not scoop (in French, un scoop) that happened actually to be beyond Mayn’s knowledge: but it all came then to the delightful and hardly alarming "when and how" fact that behind the Tour Eiffel in principle of wind-bracing practice stood an earlier work of Eiffel’s—

— the moving hospital-submarine!

No, the moving hospital, not to be confused with the Wide Load which at times gets as big as (not just) home or house but apartment house capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units and only thus an articulated structure — the moving hospital was a spin-off of the Civil War as the moving missile emplacement was a spin-off of the Cold like breathtakingly advanced weather observation—

— which was a spin-off of the balloon-observation surveillances that were a spin-off of the Civil War, like concentrated food—

— but no, we do not think so—

— because the balloon observation was of military movements but not of the inertial wind — and other systems to which it was subject, mais no, the earlier work of Eiffel’s was the internal steel frame of the Statue of Liberty, Bartholdi’s visible outer sculpture like permanent news — solid and fundamental as lives of unknown people Mayn sometimes briefly knew — or saw, without knowing, and was seen as by a larger knowledge he joined and sensed his power in, until one day he heard a story of a detective whose client knew more about him than he of the client, a story also of love and freedom told by a fellow elevator passenger so briefly from the floor where he got on to the ground floor, where he and she and her friend, the two leaving Grace Kimball’s workshop, vanished that he knew that very story, had lived it, even if only in advance like sentiments of reincarnality—

— which proved nothing except that Sarah, whose mother told a story of a Princess spirited or sublimated we now say in the guise of a mist into the Statue to foil an Indian transcontinental^ pursuing her, must doubtless that day at Mantoloking within the visible woman sitting like a statue on a black towel or lying down have been secretly standing within that seated or prone person, before, during, and after the moments when Jim saw her looking out to sea and when Jim found himself founded like a gnomon sundial in the sand above his vulnerably irritating brother; for was she not in fact watching for a German submarine to break the horizon and bear her off to South America or, failing that, Manhattan!

: a possibility we, of their relations, would not rule out, since, as the angry savant had it, "some souls one will never discover, unless one invents them first":

: which takes character beyond courage to be sure, though Mayn would leave the formulae and what power went with them to someone else (for he was only taking up a sort of residency in a New York apartment where he had once lived happily and not happily but also happily (lived and not lived) with his wife and children who had moved on: