Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

One hairy wrist didn’t want its cruller and gave it to the hairy wrist that had led the silent prayer. I wonder, Dom, if you recall the last thing you said, and with a poignant lameness looking down at your untouched coffee some of whose good Chicago cream I saw a short time later had surfaced in a cool arabesque: “We owe it to our children to make mistakes with them; but let our mistakes be pivotal, let them be exciting.” You seemed set to go on, but then after a moment looked up surprised, as if imprinting — and too late — a delayed exclamation point.

During Question Time you attacked Religious Leaders. The attack exploded westward toward the setting sun and its afternoon papers, and you (you devil) managed to catch the setting sun that day by accidentally eluding me and not attending the night congress of the I.R. Annual Get Together where, in my laminated dinner jacket, I sat in vain till past-President Dickens whispered to incoming President Deirdre Reardon, Nun-at-Large for some regional religion, who then announced that “prior commitments on the west coast” had forced you to cancel. And I was off (as quick as thought) across a toe or two along my aisle, then to hotel, cab rank, O’Hare, and via neutral skies to the brink of the Pacific.

But I foresaw. For I had seen. Your morning performance in the Inner Group did not amaze me, for the simple reason that almost two years before as the denizen from Scituate or did he say North Scituate and I noted the advance of the four clerks that afternoon of your self-styled failure before the black and white leaders of Old Settlement, you teamed gratuitously with the premature witch. On the corner was the red fire alarm box she was accustomed to go around three or four times and this afternoon of your bloodied nose on the wry platform and the prematurely applauding audience and, left on the bar inside, your tie and billfold, you caught the premature witch as she reached her ritual alarm box preparatory to crossing the street, and you said something I infer must have been “Let’s go halves.” Whereupon you each did semi-circles about the box, meeting first on the curb side then on the inboard side once and twice — but the magic didn’t work — till like a virtually sane person she stopped you and said, “Friday I go round here just three times before I cross the street; can’t get to the deli too soon; you got better things to do.” You said, “No better things, no worse— many things.” Your prior mutterings about “medicine” demonstrated plainly what your trouble was: you were failing to keep a clear passage at least between if not equinear a couple of your ideas, Field-state and Commitment. You were becoming uninsulatable.

By the time I got to the coast you’d been there since three p.m. If to plot your truth I do not need exactly time here tonight in your late apartment, so I did not that Tuesday night of Sister Deirdre’s Rotary Congress when though tardy catching up with you on the coast I naturally foresaw what had happened, I mean your telegraphed challenges to students, to faculty, to one or two sheriffs, to the governor, though nothing for the college administration. You were photographed in The Examiner with your mouth tortuously open as in one of your accents, Irish, Italian, southern.

Wednesday in a squared spiral you climbed the flights of tiled stair-halls in that official edifice the occupation of whose top few floors students had signaled weeks before by accidentally jamming both elevators. You lost interest and paused at the sixth floor for a sight of the twilit sea and a slight press conference. Yes , you said, your blast in Chicago yesterday had been intended; and yes, Religious Leaders for once had better be poured all on the same griddle if only to see if their differences disappeared. But feeling the pull from above you were off up the stairs again, summiting at last among an occupation squad who had read some of your books, knew your later positions on the Mickey Mouse watch, followed your campaigns for archery, undersea farming, marriage, trains, highway de-organization, and the House of Representatives, rocked onto your one musical composition “The Song of Kuwait” which had unexpectedly taken off and not as satire but as a reversible area of open yearn — and having had a suppertime wrap-up on their synchronized transistors they at once asked what might come of your Chicago blast. Answer? If my step-son Ted had watched me, Dom, the way I observed you, he’d have been just as able to foresee that I’d be awake at that dawn hour when he was looking out our kitchen window, as I to foresee your response to those student demonstrators nine or ten levels above the Pacific coast.

You were baring your teeth to speak, when a harmless fub-lubber blurted out a mere matter of fact: “You, you — led-a-march-on-Santa-Barbara.” He might as well have said you’d been divorced or had a daughter Lila and a son Richard who didn’t like his sister’s husband or in New York you’d kept a trampoline on your upstairs neighbor’s penthouse terrace. The fub, who twice told newsmen it was tough making a revolution, making a revolution made a man thirsty — admired that 1966 cause of yours.

On what ensued student testimony seems consistent if not wholly factual. You said (winded from your climb), “You kids think you’re tough. Where I come from there’s tough guys and tough guys.” You told them when you went to Harvard the last thing you’d have thought worth your sweat was administrative reform. You told them if they had to use a logical counter like “relevant” better be clear what wasn’t relevant to what, and — look, one term of the relation was themselves and the other term was (you name it) a book assigned or a policy promulgated or what one of their own number right here in the clerical wreckage of this room high above the Pacific had just last week cryptically designated “ancient atmospheres.” Yeah, where are you Darla Fasinelli? ah that’s you, sweetiepants, nicer than the U.P. shot, yeah well then let’s say ancient atmospheres are not relevant to you heads, but how many atmospheres? and just which ones? you can’t cry “irrelevant” if you don’t know both terms of the relation. But (as, Dom, you briskly unsealed one of their dark jugs of Paisano) tough? Why who up there knew about tough? , and how come no niggers? and what’s your paramillinery yearning power?

Dom, you might at this point high above the campus and its Pacific cliff have brought up the street fight in New York, Christmas of ’67. You’d been on a platform a few stones’ throw south of San Gennaro — Hester it was. You held a succulent sheep’s head half out of its brown paper bag and beside you was a starched ribboned child whose papa pushed her up the steps to you while you were praising your friends the Iacco boys home from Air Cavalry duty, the younger missing a hand. You were trying to end your celebration speech and get a drink, and at last suddenly said that the talk against the war made us forget that in any war men could be brave as well as weak, and had true chances to be tested unlike almost any other chances in a man’s life. I trailed your group north, and so did that last remark, and so did two giant sisters who own Empire Hardware off Canal: three girls with knapsacks stopped chanting “Hardware No! Software Sí!” to accuse you of glorifying the war, and you grinned and called back to them, “It’s a stupid pointless war, that’s my position” whereupon the giant Duono sisters caught you with your back to the church fence and shouted, “I got a brother over there!” and thrust at you cute metal flags prettily painted fifty stars and all — and with your back to the wire-mesh and through it behind you the lifesize Christmas crêche, you—