Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

He kissed her on the lips. “Well you know what I mean, Ab.”

Their father’s phlebitis had him in and out of bed, and the leg got so bad he’d been in the hospital but there was nothing to be done for it. Al was out of touch with home; Gail worked in Boston and wasn’t sure if she cared about his not writing home but was sure how she cared about him. He’d been to Boston, but this was her first time here.

“Daddy’s been impossible, and I do know what you mean. Why shouldn’t you enjoy yourself when you’re not putting in five weeks on station. Those other two you share with haven’t got it as good being on the same ship. You got this place all to yourself.”

“The landlady won’t let us have girls up.” Al looked at me and added, “Not with square heels anyhow.”

Gail sat back down. “What about me?”

“I told her my sister was coming this weekend.”

“I can imagine what she thought.” Gail sat very straight on the bed; she was half-turned toward me. She wore a brown tweed suit, her trenchcoat lay over her gray-and-blue plaid suitcase on a chair. She’d done a little too much with her hair.

This is getting out of hand, Dom; to simplify, we’ll leave the plaid case behind.

Well, Crazy Annette was waiting for us in an upstairs Chinese place just a stone’s throw, Al said, from the library. I thought she’d had a few, even allowing for the notorious whimsy that accounted for her uproarious nickname with the Coast Guard. On the other hand, to those boys from Florida and Georgia she wasn’t just another Mainiac, she was oddly, though too oddly, pretty, and she was pretty smart. At seventeen her dark moist eyes seemed to have been enlarged not by Nature but by daydreaming or hypnosis. “She reads Fitzgerald,” Al said the other weekend I’d come up. Her father was a policeman. Gail of course hadn’t met her, and Annette, sitting down opposite Gail, made much of me. When we’d met two months ago we’d expatiated on my astrological sign. Her father subscribed to a six-dollar-a-year horoscope. Now, with a quick little hello to Gail, Annette touching my shoulder and wrist several times gave me a repetitive account of why I was entering a hazardous period. I would not be able to rely on friends — she ticked off my situation, touched my leg with her finger — I’d have to be “circumspect” or I’d lose a position I’d worked hard to reach. Annette was a bit breathless and kept eying Gail and punctuating her nonsense about Leos with little laughs of relief. When the waitress came and was enthusiastically introduced by Al to Gail and me as having gone to Annette’s high school, Al ordered the Number Four Family for us. I didn’t smell alcohol on Annette, but when Al said again that the Number Four was a little bit of everything and this was a good good place and I drily murmured, “This looks like a great place” as I caught the noncommittal eye of a possibly Hawaiian sailor I suspected was a shipmate of Al’s, Annette got the giggles and didn’t stop even when she put her head on my shoulder.

“Why,” said I, “‘a most sweet wench,’ ‘the honey of Hybla’”; in one of my letters a year or two ago I’d told Al we were studying Henry IV . Al smiled at Annette but unconvincingly.

“Where’s Hybla?” asked Gail.

“Who knows?” I said. “Mythical or made up.”

The waitress set down a pink-flowered teapot and Al poured too soon, and the tea was pale and Gail poured the cup back before he could stop her (“No no”). Without looking at me, he said, “It’s in Sicily.”

“Not really,” I said, “not now.x”

Annette said, “I just want to know is it good or bad,” and giggled.

Ignoring her, Al said to me, “‘O thou hast done much harm upon me; before I knew thee, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.’ It’s in Sicily.”

He hadn’t overlooked Annette’s queer spark, and it seemed he hadn’t figured out if he was showing Gail off to Crazy Annette or letting his farflung sister Gail share his seaport life even if the port wasn’t Boston.

Gail was asking Annette if she’d miss Portland next year when she went to the State University in Orono, while I said to Al I ceded to his superior knowledge and stood corrected and he said it was the story of his life but interrupted himself— and Annette — to say to Gail (whose high-teased hair seemed too grown-up) that Annette really had it upstairs and would do well at college, the guys on the ship had her all wrong and called her crazy you know just because she had so many smarts and didn’t know what she was going to say next to those rebs fresh out of high school.

But Al heard a wheedling “Anne- e tte” and it was a second Hawaiian Coast Guardsman who’d sat down with the first. She said, “Hi, Earl,” and Al said quietly to Gail, “Ward-room stewards, I got no use for them.” The two stewards giggled at something and ordered without looking at the menu the waitress held out to them.

As clearly as I see you, Dom, I hear my step-son Ted patiently say, “But you had an idea in keeping these friends apart, didn’t you? It wasn’t just that you thought they wouldn’t get along. And if they took patronizing views of each other, so what?” So it’s lucky I never told him about Al and Bob.

But you, Dom, would not interrupt with two such questions, Ted’s second derived of course from a set of coördinates other than mine. You cannot; but you would not. Any more than your cased screen above its tripod would interrupt me — or your library — or your phone off the hook, or your list of excuses above it, including the haphazard addition EARTH = SPACECRAFT. You see what I’m trying to do. Because you see the gap between Al and Bob and the kinship system between you and me.

But your forbearance deserves an answer. No, I wasn’t in that provincial city with the main street of a town merely to cheer up one of Our Boys, however remote his stake in Korea. And if I say, with due mildness, that I study Friendship, don’t think my weekend lacked a prudential point. I was just as glad Al was still seeing Annette, because in her rambling reading and her real and wrong sense of her absurdity she was independent.

Or was until faced by me my first visit six weeks before. That Saturday noon for an hour or so Al excused himself. The librarian was lending him a Latin grammar. Annette and I ended down by the Station and my hotel having spaghetti. “You’re the one who told him about the encyclopedia, what an encyclopedia! what a friend! you should be ashamed of yourself, if I had an encyclopedia like his I’d turn it into a pill and swallow it but I wouldn’t swallow you. The way he talks, you’re his best friend. Is that right?”

But what she’d settled down to say afterward was what had made me mosey back now for this October weekend, and Gail had come unexpectedly. When the four of us left the High Asia at seven-thirty it was too early to go to the librarian’s, where Al had gotten us invited, so we went to a bar and sat in a corner in a semi-circular seat, and I wondered how to talk to Annette.

For during that lunch in August just before Al’s little white ship pulled out for Argentia, she’d shown me something. Her voice rose playfully, “Well now what about that crazy encyclopedia?” She said Al kept it in sick bay because he didn’t have room in his footlocker. He read it in sick bay and he and the Corpsman would smoke their pipes. But “you used to be his best friend,” she said, “you must know why he’s so crazy on the subject.”

I knew his father tried to make him take the encyclopedia back where he bought it and I knew a lot more about those twelve abridged volumes. But from Annette I learned that his father had been so mad at Al for spending twenty-two dollars that, bad leg and all, he’d got out of his chair and in two trips carried all but the last two volumes out to his pickup, he was going to take the encyclopedia back to Caesar Bemis at the Old Blacksmith Shop. Listening to Annette I forgot and with my fork in my soup spoon I wound too much spaghetti to get into my mouth. “But when his father was coming back for the last two — which Al always says were One and Two — Al couldn’t stand any more drama and ran out and un loaded six volumes and started back into the house, and they bumped shoulder-to-shoulder and his father claimed to have wrenched his leg. Al told me this three, four times, and it’s a scream till the end but then he’s different.”