Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

" I told you about that diary in the letter I wrote you last night."

"— but that mountain sounds like pure insanity but, like, when the fantasy gets really pure, that’s danger; that’s critical mass."

He was tired of big talk, but smiled at her "critical mass" and turned away.

"Don’t turn away, Daddy."

"I’ve told you about mountains that think — Mountain Capability — don’t you remember? I don’t remember where it came from, I can’t imagine Margaret referring to ‘Aimed Being’ as a form of thought, but I’m listening to you talk about critical mass as if you had any idea what it is. (Not that I do.)"

"Well, I don’t remember your telling me about mountains except Ship Rock in a letter but it’s not a mountain, but some of Spence’s information sounds right."

He had a heavy day and he told his daughter maybe he was the "reason" to Spence’s "rhyme" and asked her to come up to Connecticut with him, but she wouldn’t. She said, "I asked him where he was coming from connecting my family to some people named Morgan who used to carry diagrams across deserts that might be about sunspots and harvests or about pistols or railroad routes but were Masonic messages between the hemispheres and he said you were an old friend of his and he was worried about you."

Mayn saw a hand get hold of the four or five handwritten pages in last night’s wastebasket and pull them out carefully but he had never seen Spence’s hands.

"He’s no friend of mine."

"He said a dangerous character had phoned him in the middle of the night asking him about some of this information but he himself had known only what he had heard."

Mayn wanted his daughter to go up to Connecticut with him, the very first women’s interstate Bank; get her away from this.

She said, Business, Daddy? in that ironic way, and said she had something to show him that she had been writing, and he said, Can’t wait, and she said, It’s in the mail, What’s wrong with business? and they were drifting into an old fight in which he might say technology wasn’t demonic, not evil in itself, the machines were to serve us, the real risk was — but though she didn’t want to hear she asked, then, if he’d gone into this because of the family paper and he distinctly felt her mind reach to hang up her receiver, and he said No, and wished she could see how much he loved her but she sounded tired, the "tired" that would last only on the phone. She said, "He asked what I knew about the death of Mayga — he just threw her name at me like we were all friends. Why did it feel like extortion?"

"She was a Chilean journalist Ted and I knew. She did a kind of respectable P.R. more than steady reporting. Mixed up in liberal politics, working for the election of Frei, opposed to foreign involvement in copper. Interesting person. And there’s more to it than that."

"I know who she is, Daddy."

"Spence doesn’t keep information in his head long, it comes in and goes out the same day."

"Mom told me about her."

"Well, I’ve got to go to Connecticut and I think if you don’t come with me you should go back to Washington. What did you come up here for?" He could brain Spence.

"I think it was a mountain I didn’t know about till I got here."

"What on earth did your mother know about Mayga?"

"I don’t want to go into it, Daddy."

His grandfather’s words exactly: when Jim asked what Pearl Myles, who’d come and gone, had meant about there being no doubt this time.

Then Anne-Marie whom he hadn’t seen since a year Christmas phoned the house from upstate New York from college because her parents had told her about Margaret, and she loved Jim; she knew how to say such things and she found some ease or rest in him or put it there, though she used more words to speak now than in high school, so for a second the funeral lunch felt like a surprise party. And Sammy was there because he hadn’t gone to college but was learning the construction business. And Mayn, with his daughter’s words or some accelerating leverage in the phone line’s magnetic current, could not tell if, in 1950 he had a gap he saw back into that was his own ongoing mystery or stupidity, a congruence that memory teased you with, and that was also an absence of his grandmother, her strong shoulders, her eyes as largely observant as his wife’s, buried nearby, yet also a big nothing of his mother, who wasn’t buried nearby. Lunchtime voices rose in his grandmother’s home, and he felt himself swell or deform in one direction or another for the voices pulled him and rose like a classroom of voices when the teacher goes out of the room for five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes. And feeling inside out in the least dramatic of apartments in New York in 1977 where the elevator stopping and moving on sounded like the power supply accumulating, resting, practicing its power, circuit-breaking off into cerebral lesion as if the group house let a universe dissolve its walls and repointed bricks, Mayn didn’t have words to think the wordless panic bordering on absolute inertial not-caring with which (read congruently; read responsible for two suicides; read We) he had to know and absolutely had to know what his mother who had conveniently preceded both of them would feel about this rational death of his grandmother, her mother, who had had enough of "stretching" with or without anesthesia and wrote her letters and then her last multiple identical notes of concern for all who should enter the household before her death was known but especially her husband, who had cigars on the mantelpiece, Jim saw them, three lonely Dutch Masters, and would never light a match for any other reason except, on special occasions, red candlesticks in the andiron-heavy brass holders on the mantel in the living room or on the dining-room table — and howling to know, he thought that his difficult, remote mother, who would talk so directly to you sometimes when she felt like it that you thought you were remembering her words already, would have wept at her mother’s practical act and have admired the woman, and he could have given his mother his love at a time of shock and sadness for her, she would have been polite to all the people who came, and there were people in the house Jim had never seen before, and in his own apartment a century later he’s standing in all the angles of the house turned inside out and looking outward dazed into his usual ease and fair good humor but not alone — what did that mean? — but ready for anything, which was like being ready for nothing, afraid of people coming to him to say they’re sorry but seeing that they had come to his grandfather, the bereaved beloved, who materialized at the mantelpiece thirty feet away from where Jim was standing near the phone, and was actually smiling and nodding with Jim’s mother’s sporty friend whose speaking voice flowed over from his singing voice, and Alexander paused in his gentle amusement to light a cigar so there were only two cigars left there with the pewter ashtray and a small, pale-green Oriental bowl of flowers Jim knew had come from the cemetery. Then he saw Brad, whom no doubt he had been seeing, his half-brother who hated the devious, lunatic winds of January mornings, and he’s taller in a three-button gray flannel suit and more upright, with his girlfriend who’s touching him shoulder to shoulder until Brad greeting his half-brother raised his hand in the sleeve of his suit jacket, French cuffs and all: so that a quarter of the same century later hearing steps near his apartment door, and finding good old tears standing out in his eyes, he saw his half-brother come toward him so that he knew Brad was here in Windrow and he, Jim, was not, but wasn’t aware of the tears that had passed out of his eyes clearing them, until Brad shook his hand and did not know if that was why Brad had come over to him leaving his girlfriend talking to a tall, skinny man in khaki pants and a corduroy jacket and no tie, and to the Indian Ira Lee, who was working at the firehouse: "She wrote me such a tremendous letter, I got it this morning; I’ll show it to you."