Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

A slick accumulates in a flat swirl of purple green, I’m holding a pint of Budweiser for him as Bob snaps the outboard again and then it turns over and he chokes it, it is to be replaced in 1960 by a rebuilt job with automatic starter. Now Dom, not all of this fits: I mean Al knows about machines too, although (credit card in hand) he hardly seems to. And Al has a brunette beauty too, though her interests, unlike those of Bob’s angel, are almost wholly indoor. And, with seconds of sun splitting up out of racing bay spume into my eyes, it is also true — though I don’t belie my irrevocable knowledge that Al and Bob shouldn’t have met (if at last they have) — true, yes, that Gail’s mother visited her that year on Memorial Day (her thirtieth birthday) the same May day Bob’s wife was visited by her “Pappy.”

Robby and John B. are fighting over the blue Maxwell House bailer. I’m trying to forget priorities and let my face drink the spray. I haven’t been alone with Bob’s wife this trip since at the little airport she shook my hand and kissed me. “That letter…” I said, and then I saw Bob’s gold spectacles through a swinging door, and he pushed through, springy in tattered tennis sneakers and khaki shirt and shorts—“Oh Christ,” she said to me as if changing her mind, “give me a break.” But I think — but here’s Bob — Hi: Hi — I think I’d meant not exactly in that letter her tantalizing clauses flirting with the past here and there like a hand on my cheek; no, I think I’d meant her veering recollection of what I once years ago told her.

If (as I believe) you’re like me, Dom — as like me as Al and Bob are unlike each other — some personal letters make you indelible promises; your son Richard’s weren’t the only ones that threatened your sensitive career.

Bob, with his hand on the outboard’s rubber-handled tiller, probably doesn’t know she wrote me, and so thinks my letter was just my regular wish to see them and their house and their island. Well, the island’s only about one tenth theirs, but turning in out of the bay’s main mass with now the full Atlantic astern and Bob still at full-out, the sight ahead — widening as the approach pass narrows — makes the place seem all theirs. (For some financial, some prudential reason this land isn’t in Bob’s name.) Its titular owner beside her older child on the thwart forward of me, turns halfway round and smiles with the wind. In her letter she said she’d had a dream about her “first husband; first was what the dream said, but who on earth was he?”

Their crescent of beach gets bigger and we pass between white lobster buoys twenty-five yards apart, then rocks even closer, the left flat shelves now barely under high water. Bob’s cove opens, substantial. The left pincer curves landward rising to black boulders, then to a higher nubble of ground strewn with cinder blocks. Bob throttles down. The beach drops to the water, and you know that if I chose I could catch its candid surface as well in my words as you those unidentified loci Americani in the tall thin book of photographs you published December of ’63, more than four years after this scene. The long beams lying near the upper grass that runs around from the nubble to the ledges on our right where Bob’s phenomenal camp stands, were not washed up; he acquired them by night, passing under moonlit clouds to a silent pair of isles where the government once did some kind of training and storage.

Bob wants these beams for floor joists in the next extension. John B. ignores his mother’s cry and jumps off the bow before the motor cuts. On his feet shoulder-deep, he strokes himself ashore, and as we crunch sand and gravel he’s scrambling to lay hold of the old whaleboat’s bow and beach her himself.

The two boys and their mother will take the boat back to the mainland after supper. Bob and I will stay the night and work tomorrow first thing.

Unloading the cement, the beer, moving three of the four beams up to the extension, hacking down lawn grass with a dull sickle — in this scene Bob’s priorities aren’t mine, and then beyond even mine for a dissolute moment like a vision which you Dom were soon to expound for the modern unready world and for certain few graduates of only-childhood, all the afternoon’s points, objects, and deeds spread to a coördinate equality. But putting Bob and the fourth beam off for a minute I follow his wife and the boys into his two impressive improvisations somehow timbered together to the varying ledge angles.

She is changing in one room, I in the other. I’d like to get rid of the boys so I can find out how much she told Bob. What she recollected in her letter if it got to Al could only undo the truth. I hear rustling on the other side, scuffing on the sandy floor, springs as someone (probably she) sits down. “Hey cut it out!” cries Robby, and John B. with his suit in one hand steps naked into the low doorway to see me. I hear springs next door, John B. had been giggling but now keeps looking at my nakedness quite soberly. His mother says, as he turns back into the other room, “Pick up your underpants.” Robby’s dark head pokes round the doorpost smiling silly and interested. And I try to find in his brown eyes what they saw in the other room. “Why don’t you put on your bathing suit?” he says, and I obey at a distance of many years: no, Dom, no neat ushering from present to past, it’s all equal.

Wait , I said to her in her father’s library in Brooklyn Heights hearing my father in the dining room happily agreeing to attend a court tennis match and displaying quite a considerable knowledge of that absurd game, Wait don’t go so fast, turning back to the Monsanto ad she turned her head to look at me, and I slapped one on her with such a rush she had to help us into a warmly leaning balance: “You didn’t really want to look at those Negroes picking cotton,” she said six months later sitting outside the bathhouses at the beach club the summer I was thirteen. My father loved swimming in salt water, especially when there was no surf. No (I told her), it was spontaneous. (She and I heard Bob singing “God Bless America” while he changed from tennis.) I’m not always spontaneous (I said); listen (I said to Petty) one summer at Heatsburg where we used to go and my mother says we’ll go again, I used my friend’s sister to blackmail him into going up to a quarry because I liked her, but he’ll never know.

But I wasn’t afraid Petty might spill this. No, that wasn’t why I hadn’t taken Al along to the Welcome Home party which the honored guests Bob and Petty skipped in ’53. Yes oh of course it’s Petty , Dom. If you were here in this room of yours you’d no doubt have asked more about the dark-braided bride, the familiar voice, the strong angel — Pert, Pet, Petty: Perpetua, Petua — ye gods let it be one of my substantive liberties with you, Dom, that I did not initially condition this maritime precinct of my past with her name. The Examiner identified your former girlfriend Kit Carbon as the “well-known black archaeologist” and Darla Fasinelli in her column in Manhattan Hash condemned the adjective’s bias.

Petty’s wiping a vast black stove Bob found somewhere and cemented here to a mountainous ledge. She flicks her eyes at my bathing suit and murmurs, “K.P.” She’s putting magazines on a cable spool table in the north extension where I changed; under the plastic-paned window an Army blanket covers a cotful of pillows, another cot meets it at right angles along the adjacent wall; she’s asking if my mother ever bought the place near Bob’s parents, and if she still plays the violin and piano; Petty hopes Robby is musical; she hesitates to ask me about my work, then says she was trying just the other night to describe to Leo’s wife Irish what it is I do and that Bob interrupted saying you could call it social anthropology — but she didn’t think that described it exactly. I’m about to ask her if she ever told Bob what I said to her about Gail and Al in ’43, but Bob stops hammering and yells to get the hell out here, and John B. comes in to get the yellow plastic bucket to facilitate construction of the pale city he and Robby are molding. He steps sideways down the rocks and leaps onto the sand.