Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

No, they didn’t believe in reincarnation, neither Navajo nor grandson and grandmother. Those fellows running the unemployed march in 1894 believed in reincarnation, but Margaret preferred the Great Unknown. . big handsome gent who proposed military-style farms for the unemployed and who kept his identity secret until one day he seemed to turn into another person just by being identified at last as, not after all Captain Livingstone of the British Army encountered by a traveling man in a hotel during the Chicago Fair, nor one of Uncle Sam’s shrewdest Secret Service men, but as A. P. B. Bozarro (or Pizarro), a manufacturer of blood medicine at South Peoria.

No doubt there occurred isolated cases of reincarnation, Margaret observed, staring so deeply into Jim’s eyes he thought it wasn’t all funny. Special reincarnation? he said. She sighed. Why did people want to complicate things by coming back twenty years later for a second or third chance? Oh, he disagreed there, he thought people deserved a second chance. Oh, they deserve it all right, his grandmother murmured, and seemed to laugh quietly but for some reason he hadn’t been sure she was laughing. He thought she said, It’s still in me. But his uncertainty now in 1977 slung him along a curve of silly will back to the last century, thence forward to this moment in 1950, for he hadn’t been sure if he had heard her, and it made him the same person as now in ‘77, same immortally dumb body shouldering his attachment to her so it made him dizzy or lumpy of mind, pulled him out of shape, doubtless more formed by her than by his regular uptown-downtown father or the gap of his mother, so he had to get away, out of the room, downstairs; but she was drowsy anyhow, the frown deepening as her eyelids got heavy, and he saw the thing that had been in the corner of his eye as he got up to go peel potatoes. It was a medium-size gray envelope with a stamp on it and Jeanette Many’s name and address, and under it another envelope with only the place visible, which was a town in Pennsylvania, with trees the shape of girls if he had had night dreams, the town he had come from that very day, and he wondered if it was a check, he hadn’t been sending his laundry home lately in the big cardboard suitcase Margaret had given him, a check and the laundry no connection none whatever, but personal mail is personal mail, and who else did she know in that town, certainly not his girlfriend except by reputation, intuition, generalization, and old wit.

His grandfather when they curled the potato skins carefully away from the cool, pear-like moistness of the white did not speak of Margaret: he asked what Jim was going to do; Jim said, Maybe law; definitely not business, maybe a field geologist for an oil company, maybe professional sports management — he didn’t remember what he said except his grandfather was irked, and Jim thought, Touchy, probably having to nurse Margaret.

Jim said, Maybe marry money and live abroad for a while, some similar gag he didn’t much recall later but then was answered by what he did recall, in so many words: "Society’s immoral and immortal," said his grandfather; "it can do anything it wants, any crazy thing, but you can’t kill it." And something also about fragments that survive, laughing at you after you’re gone — that sort of thing.

She was asleep at suppertime, woke up like a drugged child, drank half a glass of sherry, swallowed just one bite of "shark" (the ham steak Alexander had broiled with numerous bendings over to look into the oven), and half a banana, and dozed in her chair. Upstairs again in her bedroom she came very much awake, frowning. He asked who she had written to. People she owed, she said. He could hear her voice in her letters. In 1977 he thought how close his mother’s death had been to both of them then in 1950. (A Russian Five-Year Plan!) And on the wings of such trivia as Spence, who seemed, on the morning after Amy left her apartment and apparently did not return, part and parcel, pocket and contents, of a life lived between old questions unasked or boring to ask, and a mass of fact unneeded, Mayn phoned his neighbor Norma to tell her of the difference Margaret had made between him and his little brother Brad. But first thing in the morning Norma and the two girls and Gordon (who answered) were all maneuvering around the apartment, which was slightly smaller than Mayn’s, breakfasting, playing the radio, dressing, doubtless undressing and dressing again, someone asking what it was like out, everything up to the higher levels of spirit where he could smell each toasting particle of toast, honey gasketing the thread of the jar — and Mayn flashed on Norma trudging humorously into the lobby after a hard day, her legs, her charity — and after insisting on speaking to her over Gordon’s faint anger, he could then only ask if she knew if the woman Clara had been in touch with Grace Kimball and if Norma knew whether Clara and her husband were in town, he needed to know — but Norma, who said, No, she didn’t know, asked, Are you all right? What is it? So he remembered being married and an old raincoat of his that didn’t repel the rain but he went on wearing it, and, saying goodbye to the dear woman, who said, You and Kimball ought to meet, he felt a concrete thing in the corner of his sleepless eye like something that should be moving but wasn’t, or wasn’t there but had been: he could only tell himself how he had accepted his grandmother’s words that evening — he was probably thinking of his girl angry or his father wanting to see him, though to talk about what? — yet Jim had brought his mother up: Do you think about her, Gramma? Oh yes. It wasn’t really us she was leaving. No, but there’s no way of knowing, without asking her. It brought Brad and my father together. Well, they were alike. That’s true. You took it well, Jim, you let it rest. I don’t know, Gramma. No, you knew a lot in your heart, so did your girlfriend — what’s happened to Anne-Marie? — but your little brother was another story.

Was she that bad off, Gramma?

Sarah? Well, we were all raised to get married and stay married, and she was ill with anemia though maybe that didn’t count, maybe it was that trip to France to the conservatory when she was only a girl.

But you went exploring when you were nineteen.

I almost went too far.

You spent three nights in jail for that woman who axed the painting.

Not when I was nineteen.

What was its name?

The Rokeby Venus, in London. There were demonstrations here.

Braddie accepted it, he knew she wasn’t coming back, he knew she was dead!

But he was so little, Jimmy, and so close to her; I told him all I could, he kept asking and I told him I held myself responsible for being too strict when she was in her teens and even afterward and she went abroad all right to study music but we didn’t let her stay a whole year — we kept an eye on girls in those days.

Did Brad want to know a whole lot?

Oh we got quite close the last year or so.

And you told him a lot?

Oh it’s all things you figured out for yourself, and, gracious, Brad’s just a little bit too nice, sensitive and all, but we don’t laugh much; we had serious talks about how people got to be very unhappy in their home life, and he sent me the most funereal flowers in the hospital.

He kissed her goodnight, he heard Alexander in the next room, he saw that Margaret did not expect him to stay or necessarily to pay her a visit the following morning, which was Friday, he never felt he had to explain himself with her, but wasn’t there then in ‘50 and now in ‘77 this gap a part of you was always passing through? Memory kept things from being over.

Go away and come back light-months later and you’re the same person, pulse back to normal, etcetera; nothing’s happened, where’ve you been? Alive there, alive here. But if dead here, get out fast. But he had been mad at her for talking about his mother in that way to Brad. All times were equal and the spaces between if you wanted.