Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

your pen seemed for a moment to run dry just as I was forgetting your retort and as your tale here in one long square corner of your living room was rushing into it a host of facts like me , innocently standing by on its banks hoping none will ask me what’s my line—

child, sheepshead, hand, sisters, hardware, church, crêche: you required all your old craft to defend yourself without (a) attacking the giant sisters, or (b) understandably bolting. How well I myself know that riddle, the contour determinable yet in the mind of its exact describer open. Just how many equidistances locate my only parabola not even I the parabolist know. Your back against the fence, you retorted to the Duono sisters but to the knapsack girls too and with troubled pompous eyes to the crowd: “Look, you can’t insure yourself against life, you can’t insure yourself against interference, not even against being a hero.”

High above the Pacific you might have cited San Gennaro for toughness, but these students wouldn’t have understood. Or you might have described the toughness needed at the end of the Santa Barbara Anti-Abstraction March the year before. Granted entry at last to the sunny Think-Tank, you changed your mind and left the initial mission interrupted and spoke to all and sundry dispersed and gathered there outside the cloister. (Your ink runs fast, and I am nothing and the only way you can understand these sentences maybe is if I read them aloud to you but there isn’t time and you’re not here yet.) A prime speech indeed, it led to your risky trick, a gappy calculus to test young auditors by tossing them a dear dogma to gnaw. Darla, the others, even (if he was there) the blurting thirsty chub, could not have seen through that one either, though maybe they thought it more nearly relevant than the ( sic ) threadbare conservatism of your Hester Street climax—“the wonderful world of war” you were disquoted underground the next week in Manhattan Hash .

What you did say about true toughness there above the blue Pacific before what the papers called your “surprise defenestration” was as easy to foresee as, now in retrospect, your exit from Chicago that noon. I hear our west elevator again moaning near, perhaps bringing force, cop or super or curious, incurious or furious tenant, or a field of smells, Dom. The ideas in your response to the occupation crew high above the Pacific in rising dusk seem not now vivid, but wrong too in their too prompt association with your (come now, surprise? ) de-fe-nes — I confess I confess (yes suddenly we’ve gotten somewhere tonight) that in the virtually narrative length of that ancient word that means “throwing out of a window”— defenestration —and, more, in the clear slots between its Roman units, I see not your (for me) abstracted and fraternal point but in spite of myself and in no clear order Bob’s white-knuckled fist, Al’s drenched sneaker, and my venerable but still efficient junior Corona stolen from our downstairs doorway in Brooklyn Heights in April of 1946.

It was never clear to me how he saw my relation to him at puzzle-time Fridays. I refer to Al’s father. Leaning over him as he held his yellow stub above his twice-folded Heatsburg Hour I believed he might be including me by waiting for me to say what the next line should be or just to think it out silently before he drew it in. I usually knew the next line, and every particle of my being focused so on what absolutely must come next that, as I now know, my mouth would open. Once, I couldn’t keep quiet, for I had a hunch Al’s father was going to connect the wrong two points, there was a melony air of cut grass coming straight up from his hand to the roots of my tongue, I was going to speak when ye gods at my lower lip an unusually welling mass of spit had moved. Impelled, I got out most of the word “No” but could tear free of it barely enough to drag in my lower lip and with it luckily my dripping drool just before it reached a length of no reclaim from which it would have fallen finally to Al’s father’s smudged, brown forearm. “Got a cold?” he murmured, and made the wrong line. But I’ve gone too fast, even for an ideal audience like you.

Some pages back if you’d been here you’d have said, “Hey wait, why did you have to keep Al and Bob from meeting? That’s pretty fussy stuff.”

Was I afraid they’d become friends or tell each other things innocent until joined? Your questions almost equal Ev’s “Why write to somebody dead?” I solved parabolas for my father quite a while before I saw for myself what a parabola is, which made it a whole new solid puzzle disturbing as it hadn’t been before. And this was probably two years before the parabola came up at Poly in Mr. Cohn’s brisk, afternoon class that made me forget the dreadful challenge and pointlessness of ten o’clock chem.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand replying to the brown arm that no I didn’t have a cold. Al’s voice came very close to the house, beside a window in the west wall of their living room a dozen feet from his regular exit window on the south side; and intensely and low he said to his small dog Archy, “Jesus Christ, Arch, I told you don’t dig there, Jesus peezus.” His mother’s flowers.

As he then raised that rather husky voice and complainingly called me to come out and give him a hand, and from the kitchen his sandy-haired sister Gail said, “Oh he’d rather do puzzles,” Al’s mother’s steps crossed the kitchen floor with an emergency firmness, and the kitchen door slammed: “All right, Brother, you’re gettin’ it now! I don’t know where you hear that language and I don’t care.”

Pork loin hissed as the oven came open with a snap of the catch and a crank of the hinge, and staring at Al’s father’s mistake so close to the completion of the puzzle, I could imagine off there in the kitchen my secret Gail holding her head to one side lifting the pan onto the stove top and turning back to the table to finish mashing, they didn’t have a potato ricer. I called her Gail but Al and his father in their own different tones called her by her real name that she disliked. She was one big year older than me then, when I was nine or ten. Al didn’t run away from his mother, he took what she thought he had coming.

But when I was twelve, the year Gail had on me was different — both more and less to both of us than before. She was a natural swimmer and Al wasn’t, though he pulled strong and deep with his wide, growing shoulders, and when he remembered to kick, you could hear it for a quarter of a mile on a still day. Gail didn’t swim fast but she breathed without much roll and she had that strange skim of the instinctive swimmer who seems not held in the normal way by the water’s friction. Up in the hills south of the Heatsburg road and below a small mountain, was a granite quarry long abandoned. The corner of it that had been filled by converging springs was said by Al’s father to be too deep to measure. My parents took Al with us on a picnic there one Saturday when a business friend and his wife and my uncle Coolidge were visiting us. It was the summer my grandmother died and it was the summer I got my typewriter.

No one ever again found it convenient to take us to the quarry, and Al and I were forbidden by my parents and his mother to go up there alone. So for four summers we went secretly, and until the end of the third not even Gail knew.

Al and I biked up the unpaved mountain road, coasted off into a gorge, then went higher and around, and eventually wheeled our way along a needly, root-ridged path dark and full of the thick, mild growth of pine sap that made me want to lay out a poncho roll for the night.

One spring evening the year I was thirteen my parents argued about going someplace else that summer, trying the ocean where the Pounds went and Bob’s parents. And as I listened in my city room confused by a tone I’d never heard, the extreme essence of all those inland summers was for an unsharable moment the quarry far away. Oh to be sure back in the village was the Old Blacksmith Shop, where they sold old stuff that my parents’ friends up for a weekend would look at for it seemed hours after a long lunch at the tavern — ancient farm tools, wooden spoons, blue goblets with tiny bubbles blown right into the glass, hymnals, a churn you wanted to grab hold of and work, and scented soaps I figured must be practically the oldest of all. And oh yes, behind the Blue Grille of the Major Talcott Tavern there was the pleasant swimming hole you had to have a member’s ticket for with sandy beach and mucky bottom. And there was an inn my father said had been a station on the stagecoach route and was restored; and in its low-beamed lobby they had a typed menu on an easel. And the rest, the road past the goldenrod, the gas smell from our laboring refrigerator, the flat lake as you went toward the town of Heatsburg, our village barber-postmaster who made twenty-six flavors of ice cream, a roster of possibility for me even though, through my six-hundred-odd cones there, there were twenty-five flavors I never tried. The goblets, the swimming hole with its diving board by the rocks and cat-tails and the swinging rope down at the dam end, the goldenrod, the stagecoach route, the lake, the ginger (the baked apple, lemon-peel crunch, or peanut brittle) ice cream, oh yes. But losing all this by going to the ocean for the summer instead, meant the quarry that Al and I had taken secret possession of, though I told Al I was sure Gail had found out. And losing it would have meant losing one afternoon the August I was twelve and it meant a wind that passed through the quarry over our deep corner of it.