Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

“—not often,” she says, and I forget what I asked here, I’m in the doorway looking left at the bay and the cove and, thirty-odd feet from here where the new extension is being floored, at Bob’s calf, yellowed athletic sock, and high army shoe, and now the second shoe slides into view; some eastern scent sticks in Petty’s hair, in the doorway her right breast is firmly against my left tricep, but this isn’t why I forgot my late question (“Do Bob’s parents come up?”).

When he came back to New York after almost finishing his M.A. in philosophy, it was only to leave again. He followed the east coast way up beyond the summer place his father was getting ready sto retire to. Missed it completely.

He will indeed continue his own camp at minimal cost and build Leo one on the nubble.

Hindsight eases out of Bob’s life seeming interruption, to make a life as seamless as the unspeakable.

John B. is off in the grass peeing, now grabs a huge rotten plank and tries to haul it down to the sand.

“That man’s there again,” Perpetua says looking up from her knee that’s stabilizing the end of one joist Bob’s hammering. “Comes and sits in his Land Rover above the next beach at our line and looks. No he’s over our line.”

“Maybe I can use him,” murmurs Bob.

I’ve hauled up a fourth, fifth, and sixth beam; the seventh lies across the eighth, which leans on an overturned driftwood stump.

I’ve been in the water and I’m having a beer, I don’t know what time it is.

You can see Bob’s two lobster pots out there past the pincers. But he likes to raid a summer neighbor’s illegal pot within this cove, Bob knows exactly where to put down his boathook for its submerged line, Brandeis professor of economic geography who thinks he’s quite a salt according to Bob. Bob knows he wouldn’t do a thing if he caught us, it’s funny to Bob like sex.

The question isn’t what but who Bob takes seriously, or maybe no one or everyone. In the vaunted order of his life maybe everyone.

Robby to Bob: “That man’s going on our nubble.” The man’s contour against the deepening southeast sky is still.

Bob hammers again, then gets up out of his framework of joists and looks away toward the man. What Bob will do is completely open suddenly.

Al wouldn’t witness Bob’s life without recalling his own father’s incredulity when Al brought home a twenty-two dollar encyclopedia one day in ’45. Al couldn’t witness Bob talking Karl Barth tomorrow night with the Harvard vicar of their local church any more than he could Bob and Petty and the vicar crossing themselves after grace in front of a glistening tower of Liebfraumilch and a blue, willow-pattern platter of hot dogs and the Sunday-night earthenware pot of sweet yellow eyebeans. Imagine Al when the Indian pudding comes, and the jolly buoyant collaboring of the credo’s carnis resurrectionis and that reverent sense of the true business of Monday and Tuesday, parish debts or the bracing distinction between gambling and a hard-nosed faithful participation in the American body economic, yes it’s these mysterious companies that Leo loves to know, the knowing, yes yes and growth prospect the concrete ground toward yes a transcendental Awareness of the Impossible that nevertheless really happened in this synoptic country Ben (while the young vicar nods with palsied speed nay joy); Bob laughs with gay incredulity: the Profit Motive and the Resurrection (and the vicar interrupts: Of course , Bob, but by Jiminy our generation’s heard enough about the so-called Christian ethic , which gets nobody anywhere theologically)—“Kierkegaard,” says Bob, squeezing the brown bottle upside down over Ben Sedgwick’s glass.

Were Al present he would flex his right bicep in anxious scorn, and his game shoulder would jab him.

Yet when I look from Petty to her vulnerable Robby to the man on the nubble a hundred and fifty yards off now staring apparently at its effective owner Bob, to John B. to my own bare foot, my arc between Bob and Al seems to have been crossing a field of force as indescribable, Dom, my normal way as Bob’s harmonies are merely warm.

The finished city lies between Robby and John B. They make no move to wreck it. Bob’s been staring at the man; now he contemplates his dark-bunned bride of six years close by, who knows Bob is looking, so doesn’t break her gaze at the man on the nubble.

Bob’s low laugh is way off in another mood. “Why you just go ahead and be Lady Pound but you and I know.” The laugh rises and John B. looks around for a second. Bob would not touch her now. Petty is still looking at the intruder but is surrounded by Bob. He says to me, but not so Petty can’t hear, “Oh you hang around her you know you been somewhere, and you won’t find it in National Geographic.” It’s a big joke, but again also under the aspect of mystery.

“Please stop it,” Petty says without shifting her gaze from the man on the nubble, but her primness is flickeringly tickled and she tries to keep back all she thinks she shows. The unknown man on the nubble seems to give her something to protect her against the exciting doubts that Bob’s presence assaults her with.

He turns away and looks at what he’s been doing. He says, “I’ll never get to the bottom of you , woman, not in a hundred Maine winters, by Je sus,” and the low laughter is again under the aspect of mystery.

As he jumps on down to the sand to get the last two joists, Petty calls, “You can get the lobsters any time,” and preoccupied he doesn’t answer. She follows down and heads for the water.

Robby says to Bob as Bob goes to take up the two beams, “Daddy, look at our castle,” and Bob turns and squats to look at the low but monumental oblongs, their walls here and there in the Egyptian style steeply “battered” like the great outer barrier. John B. has his hand on the Number 7 joist: “It’s nawt a castle; it’s a city.”

“Whatever it is,” says Bob, “it’s beautiful.” He means it and his sincerity embraces both boys, they come together in the sound of their father’s word.

“Whatever it is,” says Robby, “it’s a castle.”

Still squatting in the space between the sand construction and the beams, Bob looks up again at the man on the nubble. “It’s a city too.”

“I said it’s a castle,” says Robby. And then as John B. says, “It’s a city,” in four stamps Robby levels the buildings, kicking down the outer wall for good measure.

“Gawd damn you!” shouts John B.’s high voice and with his palm he claps the end of the Number 7 beam, which pivots on the flat slant of Number 8 so the other end turns smartly into Bob’s temple and he tips right over onto the wreckage of the city-castle. His hand doesn’t move to his head, he doesn’t move.

Robby is lifting Bob’s head and John B. is running in a sort of sideways dance away from his father and nearer Petty, who, up to her hips, turns and rushes powerfully out of the water and runs to Bob.

The man is leaving the nubble for his Land Rover, and as the radial line between us because of his motion sweeps across the family scene at the edge of the tough beachgrass, I am able to move swiftly. Bob is out cold.

When Hugh Blood and Bob got into an argument between stickball innings, I stepped between them and shoved Hugh. It was over an issue of fact which, despite what our English book at Poly said, is always more gripping than a matter of opinion because you know the true truth is there waiting. Hugh said his argument was with Bob not me, but we all knew he’d never try anything with Bob and I just stood facing him. It was the year before we graduated, so it must have been Saturday or Sunday — probably Sunday because we’d have been at Poly for practice almost any other afternoon. It was either DiMaggio’s record streak or the walls of Babylon, games or miles, I forget. And after Hugh did not shove back, Bob said let’s let Joey settle it. So Bohack Joey must have been there, so it couldn’t have been Sunday, and as I shall explain later it must have been before May. And it must have been DiMaggio not Babylon. And for a moment, here moving surely to Bob’s unconscious side lying on the ruins of Robby’s castle, I have moved all too swiftly to his white-knuckled fist which ultimately Joey Neurohr’s mouth and spine sought and found. Today Joey is in a real estate agent’s on Cobble Hill and if we met we wouldn’t dare speak. Joey had the right answer — I wondered how Hugh could even imagine it was fifty- four —and then Bob, as if Joey were about to give the answer he’d already given, said to all of us, “Joey knows.” And Joey knew he’d been rooked again somehow and he sneered a grin and went off on his bike-cart.