Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

— coincidence, said his father—

— and Norma’s husband, who wasn’t a friend but he liked him and he bent Jim’s ear one night (so bright he’s scary) talking about changing the weather on Venus and economizing on illness by getting three diseases all at once so you got three immunities for the price of one and came in to have a drink one time and told Mayn all about how he skipped fifth grade but he worked into the story a whole year’s worth of Brooklyn Heights where he was brought up, and the Jews and the Nazis, and the daughter of one of his teachers who was playing on a roof and fell off and was killed, but what Mayn got out of it he wasn’t sure except that this Gordon had taken a voluntary leave of absence from his law firm, wanted to be unemployed for a while, think things through, told me I better get a Medeco lock installed, and I had a feeling through this lengthy story of his life that he kept wanting me as a newspaperman to be full of inside dope, but—

— usually, said his father, it was the other way around, the newspaper people stayed two jumps ahead in conversation.

. . and a college kid named Larry lived in the building, too, and he came in and talked Mayn’s ear off and Mayn took him to a basketball game and once drove up to Connecticut for the jai-alai matches and Larry won fifty dollars. So it was like a new apartment building in some respects. Private life, you know.

His father nodded. Mayn asked if he was still considering the retirement place near Wilmington. His father said it was quite a wait, and he didn’t like the lump-sum entrance payment. But to the best of his knowledge, it was well run.

The Quakers ran it, didn’t they?

Mel nodded.

Perhaps he pulled away from why he was visiting his father; if so, his father seemed to encourage this. You don’t have to have a reason if you have this need. Getting back to New York from Washington, rent a car, stop in New Jersey and see Mel, who was generous enough to call it good sense to fit the one trip into the other. What happened to those windmills in Wyoming? he went out a couple of times, didn’t he? (Mayn discovered his father was proud of him.) Well, if a quarter million people can plug their toasters into a giant windmill — how do those contraptions work? — the horizon will be full of rotors and blades; remember the Hitchcock movie where you were inside one of those old Dutch drainage mills and you would feel you were about to get mangled by all those creaking cogs of the wooden gear-train. (Was it a drainage mill, Dad?) (They turned to each other in blank amusement.)

His father had never heard of the cooperative wind conversion system on a Lower East Side apartment-house roof because his son had never told him, or Mel had never asked. Like a toy airplane on a steel-strut stand thirty-odd feet high, took twenty people four days to raise it — couldn’t afford a helicopter. So the utility-company lines get a cut of the surplus household electricity the people’s windmill generates? Synchronous inverter (looks like and is a solid-state box) turns d.c. from the wind generator into standard-line a.c. voltages. Never thought how a windmill worked but you’re right we don’t have to think. We don’t want to know. Unreportable information? his father asked, and was treated, as they moved from the dining room into the kitchen to an account of how the air crossing the curved upper blade of a windmill has to go farther and faster than the air hitting the flat lower blade, and the higher velocity on the upper blade creates "lift," and this turns the blades about the generator shaft — nothing to it — though the Wyoming operation. . that’s something else.

His father gathered he had seen Flick in Washington, was mildly surprised that she was in New York, and struck by the "irony" that she’d phoned her father at his hotel in Washington the night before; Mel wanted to know what was so interesting about a women’s bank, and speaking of interstate how could Jim’s Argentine boss legally own a string of papers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and so on? even Mel remembered the scandalous rumors of that tycoon’s tycoon-brother’s apparently faked plane crash, and Jim said, Private life. His father said nothing about Flick maybe wanting to be called by her given name.

He didn’t pull away from his father’s hand on the bare skin of his hand asking him to unscrew the kitchen globe and screw in a new light bulb. His father except when he was at work, which was after all much of the time in the old days, had spent years with his hands clenched behind his back or, when he was seated (for after all he was not handcuffed), clenched in front of him. His father below him looking upward as Jim unscrewed the globe, inquired what the prevailing winds in New York City were, and Jim in a low, preoccupied voice as he loosened the holding screws just enough to release the globe, which was a regular fly-trap, thought that the summer winds came mostly from the southwest, the winter definitely northwest, but the arrangement of winds through the city had got so weird because of building configurations that it would take someone who knew relativity to figure out where they went and how fast, and even in a relatively simple operation like that Lower East Side apartment house you need a pointed tower because the surface area at the top — Mel handed a sixty-watt bulb up and his son handed the ceiling globe down — can actually back up winds that are approaching so they don’t get right to the blades but are held up — winds in a holding pattern, chomping at the bit! His father thought there were probably some southeast winds around New York as well, and Jim said he really didn’t know — like a good Buddhist, he really didn’t know. Getting religion in middle age? said his father.

His father wanted to know if he still played water polo at the Athletic Club and was told, in somewhat indirect answer, that his son’s trick knee was acting up under stress and he had limped across against a red light the other day, throwing himself on the mercy of a truck driver who, granted, did not have much in the way of pickup acceleration but was so high-slung you almost thought it would drive over you if steered safely without touching you the way a couple of kids he had seen in a market area of lower Manhattan would not go around an unloading trailer van stuck way out into the street but walk under it. This fellow Gordon had been a City kid, you know. They didn’t ride bikes so much, but of course that was thirty years and more ago, and the bicycle had now become a middle-class adult inner-city vehicle.

Mayn’s father (who notably had not yet expressed the hope that Jim would spend the night, for maybe the old man didn’t especially want him to — you had to allow for that chance) asked if he was going out to the cemetery while he was here — and Jim said actually he had already been — he had in fact come into Throckmorton Street and on the spur of the moment instead of stopping at his father’s house (though, as he did not tell his father, there was that car that started up and moved out as soon as he passed) he decided he would take a look at his grandparents first before calling on Mel.

He told his father the kitchen ceiling fixture might need rewiring and asked if his father had circuit breakers now. His father said he would get a licensed electrician in; and there was a moment of silence for Bob Yard, who had wired his last house or almost, for he had had a stroke and fallen from a ladder and in death had displayed a wonderful dark grin as if… as if.. and Jim said really he could do it for Mel, the hourly rates were a total rip-off.

His father asked again how he had traveled on this quick trip and it was too bad Flick was in New York. Mayn said he couldn’t keep up with her, she was becoming an authority on pollution without actually residing in New York and had written something that was supposed to be in the mail to him but he hadn’t gotten it but hoped it would be waiting for him tonight.