Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Having said the syllables — Simultaneous Reincarnation — Mayn found them generally applicable like a lot of fairly equal units in an articulate structure and — on his way to dinner with his old friend Ted who, full circle, though not looking well, was with AP again though glad not to be packing one of their computerettes to file his stories into, whence at twelve hundred words a minute one of the new high-speeds prints "out" far and wide your likely less than twelve hundred words, hence less than minute waltz — Mayn had no one but his same old self (if entertained) to tell that at the thought plus the thought that Larry’s Modulus was maybe bigger than the both of them and getting Jim now if not to the Century, where Ted kept his dues up because he admired the famed Drew (but-twice-perhaps-a-year-encountered) Middleton even beyond his gifts as a raconteur — getting Jim at least from this alarming Simultaneous Reincarnation with Grace to those more innocent heartfelt ancient times with Mayga barside, when Brad became Jim’s brother by losing half his brotherhood to a scandalous secret, and the wind his poor mother carved, damn her, damn damn damn her, curved by whim of some swerved splinter in the groove of her unwed brain, took him no less straight away from home as she had either ordered or predicted — a home so real it got nicknamed secretly by Jim and his grandmother — yes, and Margaret at that moving moment of Brad’s Day became, if temporarily, only his grandmother by losing her credibility as a historian "reporting in" with odds and ends coming terribly maybe true within the old tales, for what about that Navajo Prince’s mother coming out of death to life when the son left her? — and had he ever returned home? (for we did not absolutely leave him camped by a river ‘neath the threatening protection of that unprecedented cloud), the stories didn’t get finished by Margaret (Jimmy, if not Margaret, cut them off in ‘45), nor by him, Mayn, in later days with his drab and other modern amendments such as trying to figure what the "plant growth" was that Margaret once said Marcus Jones thought he had to use (we mean, botanical process) to explain the development of (pistol-related) Mena’s unprecedented moon-white mouth — but losing something of her credibility at the cemetery and on the porch, for she’d said, "My heart" — my heart —when she would never speak of her daughter like that, would she? — she wasn’t tender with her, though with Jim’s aunt in Boston she wasn’t either, yet was she tender with Alexander? — for she had him, and she had, to confess the truth, Jim (did Indians really say "How"?) — but the porch, the porch, a muddled not quite nice riddle came across those kid stories for a time, for what was Margaret crying about on the porch that night? — ’cause she didn’t ever cry, and hadn’t there often been "a mumbling of the eyes" (as Mena that other night on the desert floor with Marcus translated a fugitive insight of Sequoya’s), a looking unclearly each at each between Jim’s grandmother Margaret and her daughter Sarah? but you might have thought that that night when Jim secretly observed Margaret and Alexander on the back porch Sarah was still dying, strangling in waters so deep and cold they preserved you (also you, from ever putting her out of mind, though by the direct route from Windrow or the circuitous, no doubt, inertially sideways-slipping flight route round the world that you must have pretty well taken a few times on business you never stood again on that beach, that sand, from where those older green deeps of water were harder to believe in than a black, icy plummet from the brink of a mountain quarry in the Berkshires) — and not only the night porch but the cemetery: what had that meant? He had sometimes made conversation with his father whom he had to admit he felt sheltered by, and while We many of us seldom in later years felt moved to visit Mel, once when with the children Flick and Andrew Jim let his father take them down to the shore while he Jim looked up his Indian classmate backfield rival Ira Lee, who no doubt like other Indians worked at the Fire Department; and once upon a time asked the author of that obituary so brief it flirted with the unspeakable, all that amazing grief was Brad’s own, so Jim could better fall forward into the obstacle of all space round Windrow leaving that full-blood behind him in that house mingling with time while Jim the other brother who’d been told to go away where he belonged presently did so — well, that is, upon graduation and after helping his half-brother carpenter a high-school Shakespeare set of different levels and a couple of trapdoors, and other formalities such as announcing he would stay clear of the newspaper racket (Wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole? added Alexander and wondered where the expression had come from) — as far as — as far as— oh think of something — as far as your old Navajo Prince from (he joked). . but didn’t finish, for his grandmother didn’t appreciate his distaste for what had been a family concern even though her daughter, Jim’s mother, Sarah, would never have scribbled for the paper had Heifetz played in Windrow or Einstein at the ‘39-’40 World’s Fair or had she had a mother who in 1920 would have let her go gallivanting off—

— yet because in later years he would rather report business, industry, new Coast Guard meteorology functions, the specifics of a Sprint missile’s hard core even if, like an Edsel car, such facts shortly "obsolesced," or such human data as how an apartment house set up its own energy mill on its city roof, nuts and bolts reality, no more, he was peculiarly angry at the Spences of his business surviving on exorbitant "tips," inflated little payments for putting one source in connection with another source in the covert interest of gaining information that was to be sure news for coverage but for money-like leverage, too; but he was above starting something with Spence when Spence with stubble like sooty earth on his cheek, and chin like sand, chimed in with a question from bar’s end sparked by information he surely had never heard firsthand here, and one year or the next was heard to say, "You mean you had a cemetery with a race track on one side and a golf links on the other?" (Chuckling derision it was not, but allusive, invasive, pervasively collusive, so Thassright, Spence, thassright, thass what I said. Or, Spence was heard to say, "You mean your grandmother was honest-to-God pursued by that Indian eastward? How far, then? how far?" (Doubt it, Spence, doubt it.) Or, "You mean your mother left a note only for the owner of the boat? — and she said she was sorry this was all a terrible accident, that his boat was there and he was away?" (Forget it, Spence, you didn’t hear a thing; forget it.)

And so when he saw this very Spence — as trashy after fifteen years of off and on being within Mayn’s sights, as sleazily unaltered as some crum who was probably loved by someone, but who? a love child! there, that was it! a love child, as Margaret had once called Mayn’s counter-brother (half-) Brad — Spence in close convjersation at the Press Site we hardly remember with the South American gentleman Mayn was interested in, so he felt his very body inclining to blot Spence from that night view of the white poised vehicle NASA’s vertically movable bridge three Florida miles off, but it came to him, the subject having been fatally on his mind (and he checked it out with his colleague Ted), that Spence was Lincoln reincarnate doing all the damned things that Lincoln could not let himself try doing, until Mayn laughed and asked what had ever happened to the President-elect’s dog, left with a neighbor in Springfield to be walked in the invigorating February chill, smelling near and far— Why that’s who Lincoln became, said Ted.