Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

So what?

"You liked the idea of me," he said, "you know you did."

He’d never talked like that before.

"You don’t have to be away so much," she said.

"I didn’t use to have these chances. I take them when they come."

"You could be a bureau chief."

"In another city maybe, but not now. We’re so much better off."

"Well, I like New York," she said.

"But you don’t want to stay in the city," he said suddenly. "You want the country."

"But I don’t do anything about it," she said.

"Don’t you!"

A frozen lake and green sunny trees were right behind him, behind his back, even though he was in a New York living room, and she looked right through him and took him along with her into summer-thick weeds under a window that were really the endless crop of furry green mint.

Well he wasn’t proud of his job and he wasn’t at all ashamed. He had gone to work first for a wire service — and left. But later, before leaving again (in a way), he had come back for a time to work, but came from Texas to New York, where he’d hardly known he wanted to be — though everyone else wanted it. Lateral transfer from, say, Dallas to Oklahoma City, was not the policy, or not for promising young newsmen. At least at AP.

One of the great cooperative news services, if the void may say a few words.

He had gone to work for the Associated Press in the early fifties when the new TeleTypeSetting circuits had come in.

TTS. It hardly affected him. More news faster. The operation worked, and so did he. It was the inevitable future.

What would he think of this first job of his? First, that this was not exactly — that he was not — or not yet — exactly his hero Ernie Pyle reporting impressions of drought in the Dakotas or lepers in Hawaii. A man named Boyce developed a national column, but the AP didn’t specialize in bylines.

Ernie Pyle had walked through the London blitz.

"You’ll live," said Mayn’s father in New Jersey, though the son hadn’t complained.

TTS meant that now a story had to go off in just one take. So it might have to be held until the last minute, no sneak previews. You couldn’t send pieces of it as you had them and then follow with last-minute inserts or new leads. More likely wait, then have to rush. Then what? Then where were you? Maybe go home, if you could.

A fairly clear filter comes down in front of you soon enough and it’s a clandestine screen and you see through its history, a blank of words not soon enough if ever said between two married people, some desire for power over the other that betrays itself only as the desire for no-power, also a blank between what goes on outside this home and inside. He didn’t like history in high school, or thought he didn’t — dates were made to look like causes of effects — and he made his grandmother laugh with his made-up stuff about how General Jackson had a stomach ache and had a man shot whose family’s history and that of New Jersey and its view of Indians were thereby altered. Mayn did not like history, didn’t understand it any more than the fourth dimension. Well, all he meant was he didn’t know history.

Well, Ernie Pyle now. He was remembered. His stuff became books, which sold back home. From Africa to Sicily — the engineers’ campaign, making bridges and mine-sweeping miles of beach so the guys could take a swim — in the war that you just missed. Still, if you can’t remember, you also can’t forget "the flies and dirty feet and the constant roar of engines and the perpetual moving." And the Ernie Pyle to be remembered was also the Indiana farmer’s son getting out an undergrad daily that subscribed to AP; Ernie Pyle a college editor in Indiana, received Kirke Simpson’s dispatches on the Unknown Soldier being buried in Arlington. Ernie Pyle was moved by these stories and ran them in the pages of The Student. In 1923 he was a headline writer for the Washington Daily News. Later the real Ernie Pyle rubs alcohol on his hands because he’s told to, though the friendly lepers at Kalaupapa would never shake hands.

His words impress themselves through the white space where there isn’t any type, and in this way they pass warmly through stuttered quanta of perforations on the TeleTypeSetting tape that holds your dispatch and operates the TTS linecaster over distances hard to grasp: "the perpetual moving" — words known by heart—"the never sitting down." Sicily more than a word afloat jaggedly off the Italian toe—"go, go, go, night and day, and on through the night again." You press beyond the Iroquois forests your grandmother (as if she were the smooth storyteller) read to you that also never leave you, you press on through the bare Sicilian landscape, you die and you keep moving (oh, you like the "you" in all its callused corn), you burn and shiver with malaria, you die and are wounded, have a drink, see action, occupy an empty village; you press ahead and your hand expecting anything pushes against a heavy door and there’s nothing on the other side except bad weather and Italian prisoners, a lack of resistance hard to account for unless underneath the landscape filling up with Italian civilians were to be found buried a hundred thousand army uniforms doffed at the flick of the Black Hand’s underground finger, a grand shrug of the Sicilian surface, a nod from the Mafia don answering favor with favor in response to a coded word now untraceable (they said) to the source, namely a secret creditor behind the bleakest, most northern walls in the New York State prison system, and flown (say) by navy fighter, passed (say) mouth to mouth, eye to eye, and heart to heart so that the American fighting man with Lucky Luciano behind him doing fifty-five years in Dan-nemora prison, while here and now he’s led by the Black Hand, advanced to take positions that were often not held at all. So what about it, Ernie, did Luciano help engineer the Allied success? Did the Mafia cool it for the Yanks? Ernie Pyle’s life was there in lives of other men so that his understanding of them takes the place of their future that is not at all there, while the closer they get to the front the less they know what’s going on — they’d know if they were back in New York. All they know is tomatoes hanging in the fields, plasma hanging from Sicilian trees. The front; the popping and deep chug of explosion. "Without water you’re sunk," Ernie wrote. (Mayn’s father in New Jersey liked that one!) And sooner or later "it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull dead pattern — yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo" — Troina, where American blood mixed more with German than with the mysteriously absent Italian — with the sun you imagine coming up out of Etna which is as if islanded upon the sea, but no, Etna’s nothing to write home about, no dragon, the Italian doughboy from Boston, from New York writes home about the future, Ernie Pyle knew them, he saw the engineers lay down beach roadbeds of chicken wire and burlap, he got sick, a kid called him "Pop" because he was "gray-headed," and when soon enough he died on the other side of the world in ‘45—same year as Jim Mayn’s mother — he was famous.

But today the perforations on the TTS tape (that came in in the fifties, the void repeats) are also holes bearing dispatches unmemorable as the tiny waste circles of newsprint punched out with a loose-leaf punch onto a library table by a drifter of a journalism student whose family, whose father ("You’ll live"), ran a weekly in New Jersey that folded (joke!) at the end of the War not because it didn’t rent an AP line but because it didn’t go out and get the county advertising. The journalism student is punching holes out of clippings so he can ring them into the binder of an assignment notebook, getting them all together. And this prepares one for a job; yes, this — while his father (prematurely retired) divides himself between other people’s newspapers, the porch, eventually TV, and always the trotters (whose red earth in great deep chunks is like a friend’s red earth on the Colt’s Neck Road where the horse corn grows so thick and green the earth disappears up into it) — all is preparation for a job. Though not the only preparation for a job. Any more than the marriage union is a preparation for divorce, separation, dissolution, or vice versa, though no preparation is needed for the hammerlock a boy gets on a newly returned father or at the same moment the weight of a girl sitting on the father’s legs.