Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

He kept seeing his father’s mouth open and shut, open as if itself thinking it might be possible to form the word Yes and, upon doubting this possibility, closing it but closing it upon genuine words that were not necessarily No. Mayn looked at the bottles populating the narrow closet. "You sure look in the pink, Jim," he heard dimly from above.

He turned his father’s queries about the future of geothermal and about Jim’s collateral journalistic future in regard to that subject toward the ancient joke relating speech to hot air, but his father persisted; and when they arrived again at Mayn’s interests in weather and missile development which had taken him to four arms-control conferences in a dozen years (and what was the weather on Venus, sort of an outer-space Houston in July? midsummer St. Louee?) Jim told his father he remembered him singing Rodgers and Hammerstein in the bathroom. Offkey, his father added — and Jim couldn’t believe they were having quite this conversation, this mere recollection where details were not in question but the spirit had so changed that his mother wasn’t sleepwalking in Jim’s dreams but just coming slowly up to bed and asking him why he was awake, for he was standing at the head of the stairs. I liked that singing, Jim said quietly. So did I, said his father.

His father asked if Flick was really going to start calling herself Sarah. Seemed so last week, Jim said.

"Why did you name her Sarah?" Mel asked.

"Why did you call my mother ‘Sorry,’ sometimes?" asked the son.

"She was sorry she’d married me — or married at all, maybe. And I was sometimes sorry — not to have more to say to her."

"But it was her name, not yours."

"I felt very bound up with her, we lived in this house in our own separate ways."

"I’m beginning to miss her," said Jim.

His father’s eyes brightened as if he would laugh. "So am I," he said. "Thirty-two years, I mean start missing her again, because I really did miss her at first, though I thought I was relieved."

"I’ve seen that beach at Mantoloking and that boat she supposedly took, a thousand times, and it always slips into my mind out of nowhere, you know like a subway car into a station and suddenly you got this unit in front of you, this package, and then when you look close, you’re back where you were, thinking about a Medeco lock, or this new program contemplated for mapping lightning from above, to check the pattern against storm severity."

"Did Pearl Myles ever get in touch with you?" his father asked. "Do you remember Pearl Myles? She asked for your address."

He could feel the encroachment. He asked his father who the bookseller was who had inspected the cellar shelves. Name was Saint-Smythe, his father thought. Did he leave a card? No card. Carry a bag? Big leather shoulder bag, crazy-looking fellow indeterminate age, hair light or graying (couldn’t tell) and caught up in a rubber band at the back if you can believe that, wearing a fringe jacket; a fringe case but courteous. Came back upstairs with the Jack London Alcoholic Memoirs inscribed to your grandmother just before he went to Vera Cruz with the Marines, you know. He corresponded with Margaret briefly over Wilson’s policy, she loved Woodrow Wilson but disliked the intervention in Mexico and there was our socialist Jack London saying blood would tell and Mexico must be saved from mestizos, but despite their disagreement, he sent Margaret a copy of that Barleycorn confession of his. I told the man he couldn’t have it.

Mayn turned away from his father, who asked if he had ever visited the geothermal installation in northern California (wasn’t it?) called The Geysers. Oh sure: twice. Greeley, Garibaldi, didn’t they go for steam? Jim didn’t know, but did know and conveyed to his father that William Bell Elliott who discovered the area thought he had found the gates of hell. Steam coming out of a canyon for a quarter of a mile. Teddy Roosevelt was interested in steam, said his father.

How was Brother Brad?

All right now, but they took a trip, went to New Hampshire and walked up a mountain and now they’re O.K. Dunno, they’ll never learn to yell at each other. So many don’t, including yours truly. But they sure can take a trip.

"I think I know the guy who came here for those diaries," said Jim.

"Well, then you can find out whether he walked off with them," said his father, who had paused at the dining-room table to open a magazine for a glance. "Did you ever run into that man again who burned down his own house and heard voices?"

"At a ballgame in Detroit, that’s right."

"A Yankee game," Mel said, "and you got into a shoving match as I recall, and made friends afterward."

"You remember that," said the son, who had never wanted to hug his father and didn’t now. "We wound up on an island in Lake Superior out near the old copper mines, the guy was some Norwegian and we stopped to talk with a friend of his at the Ojibway fire tower who was high on foxes: half-cat, half-dog, little bastards know what they’re doing."

"You never mentioned that," said Mel.

The son would like to tell the father he too had failed to live in marriage to another person; but what if that peculiar marriage of his father’s had been not so bad, and why speak for his father? A crowd of unknown voices were sounding off as if they belonged to him, he to them, and why did that Grace Kimball get under his skin when he had never met her?

Mayn asked his father if he had ever looked at the diaries in question.

Never.

"Isn’t it amazing that some people who weren’t at all involved might think Sarah didn’t commit suicide?"

"You mean Pearl Myles," his father said.

"Looking for damn knows what in life."

"Well, how old would she be now?" said his father, and they faced each other.

He pulled away from his father’s house in Windrow, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father might be friends; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch out of the kitchen with the big wooden table where his father and the half-brother Brad had discovered wonderful love that transcended blood by using blood, and step by step through the parlor-dining room where Trenton and New York papers and old copies of Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report were arranged here and there like placemats in addition to the two that were permanently set and a pamphlet entitled Personal Memoirs of James Shields; and step by step (Mel now talking steadily) through the now unhistoric precincts of the sofas and fine ladderback straight chairs and the Windsor chair his grandfather Alexander had sat in uncomfortably when he came that had now a shiny white cushion advertising the race track, and step by step past three drop-leaf tables made by early nineteenth-century ancestors, not to mention the nondescript leather chair that needed to be resprung there in the corner with a lamp beside it and a gray metal magazine rack; step by step to the front hall with the music-room door closed and the mahogany table and the giant paperweight with newsprint embedded in glass myopically reflecting the mirror above it. Then, the door and the porch, where his father in black cardigan sweater from the days of the newspaper stood with a hand on a white porch post and waved and waved again to his son, who started the car and waved back, but then his father held up his hand and came down the porch steps and to the curb and Jim reached to roll down the passenger-side window and his father said, "Let me know if the weather on Venus is changing," and Jim replied, "Do you think I’m interested in that fellow’s wife?" and his father, surprised, replied, "Not really." Jim had turned off the ignition and Mel heard the phone far away in the house—"I’ll never make it" — and waved as he straightened up, so Jim saw only the hand at the window, and started the car as his father made tracks back to the porch — must be seventy-three, seventy-four? And Jim made a U-turn and headed out of town toward the clover-leaf, passing the blue New York car parked, now facing the opposite direction from him, halfway up the block near his grandparents’, a car that with some provincial lack of concern he had thought might be following him. And at the next corner he found a tall man with a medium-size red backpack hanging from his hand hitching, and a fur tail hanging out of the pack. And he stopped to pick the man up — he knew he was going to New York — and in the rear-view mirror, so he didn’t have to turn around, he saw the blue car behind him complete its U-turn and slow down, waiting.