Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

What the hell. So he brooded over his defense; we all do. It was his money, and if, granted, I was the one who told him I’d seen the encyclopedia at Bemis’s and that it was a fair encyclopedia and a fair price — though I didn’t know then what the price would be — nobody made Al pay twenty-two bucks for it. No one made his father buy a bottle of whiskey at the Heatsburg Pharmacy that night and get drunk in his chair and say things Al swore he’d never forget. No, what stuck in my mind was something else he’d told Annette, and it didn’t come out till I was paying the cashier (while Annette palmed a pack of spearmint lifesavers), and then Annette said, “Written inside the cover of Volume One was something like—‘Happy Birthday from Uncle Cooley, August 1942.’ Al says he always wondered about — who it was, who was it? someone else’s life, whose life? what kind of people? — and then there’s something in a different hand in the last volume he’s been trying to make out; he made an educated guess, but…”

I told the Italian woman to take out a nickel, and then Annette and I walked back up Congress, through Longfellow Square to the Public Library right by the State, and you know, Dom, that if I chose I could tell you what was playing that night at the State, just as I could tell you the color of Annette’s beret and the exact length of the exciting run up her stocking—“my hose!”—that she discovered entering the main reading room.

From the High Asia you approach the library not from Union Station but the other way; but when Annette, Gail, Al, and I came down to the street we turned not left toward the library but right, in the general direction of the docks if we’d gone far enough. We took the fork at the lower square and as fast as it takes to think it, found ourselves in a bar around the corner from Sears, Roebuck.

A fat boatswain’s mate off the buoy tender called from the bar and Al asked why they’d been out the middle of last night—“not losin’ ya buoys, ah ya?”—and the boatswain’s mate said a dragger had radioed in for a tow. Al said lucky it wasn’t the herring steamer, and Boats said Oh we pulled more than her. He wanted to come over and see Gail and Annette but when the introduction to that “Oh My Papa” trumpet solo blared out and three of Al’s very young shipmates came away from the juke box, their uniform cuffs folded back to show the green and orange dragons sewn inside, Al terminated his exchange with the older man at the bar and put his arm around Gail.

“I never saw the sea till I enlisted.”

“Yes you did,” I said, “once going to Fenway.”

“Oh yes.” He raised a hand off the table and dropped it in acquiescence. Suddenly he seemed not really glad to see anyone tonight — polite but sad.

“Only coming in . Because on the way out you and I had a fierce argument. Tex Hughson won his thirteenth that day, shut out the A’s on three hits.”

Dancing would have helped, but there wasn’t any. Al wanted to go to the librarian’s house but it was only eight and he didn’t want to be even a minute early. Gail was telling Annette about her job working for the Boston representative of a Washington hotel, and how she went to B.U. two nights and was waiting to go to stewardess school. Her fingernails were painted the cleanest pink. Annette put her hand on Al’s.

I was back not quite so far as the encyclopedia. I’m quite a fair geographer. After the accident in ’48 there was no more talk about the Pittsburgh tryout, only a note from the Pirate front office that Al should get in touch when he was ready again, and they’d see. The scout may have heard the truth from someone at the Heatsburg Legion. Gail wrote me that their father got on Al pretty badly over that accident even with insurance, and Al merely said it was kind of late for his father to be interesting himself in baseball. Al blew his two-hundred-dollar bonus that winter; then he’d suddenly graduated, and that summer he waited on at the inn.

He spend the winter bartending in Florida. One day I got a Metropolitan Museum card postmarked Cape May, New Jersey, where Al was a Coast Guard boot beginning a four-year hitch.

I couldn’t speak privately to Annette on the way over to the librarian’s either, nor during our not entirely happy evening there. So I’ll simply have to tell you, Dom. Or what’s relevant, anyway. Over my left shoulder is that giant painting of your face which I need not describe; but I would like to know what time it is. I had indeed told Al there was an encyclopedia at the Old Blacksmith Shop; and partly because I hadn’t been around most of that summer of ’45, I had a hunch he’d quietly act on my information. He was making six dollars a day suckering corn. I did indeed say that if I hadn’t another in Brooklyn I’d buy it myself. As you’ve probably guessed, my Uncle Coolidge had given it to me for my twelfth birthday, if you’ve been paying attention to the dates I’ve mentioned so far tonight in this more and more comfortable living room. But now, three summers later I’d sold the frigging books to Caesar Bemis before I knew Cooley was coming up the next weekend (which as it happened he’d forgotten was my birthday), and I knew that even in a mellow state at two-thirty in the afternoon he wouldn’t leave the Old Blacksmith Shop till he’d seen every last thing there from the eighteenth-century well-sweep Caesar had across the rafters the length of the main room, to the last blue bottle in the last of the four dark corners. So it would be wrong to judge me in any clear sense responsible for the blow-up between Al and his dad. Not that you would.

Al was easy with people and after he got out of high school he liked a drink. Bartending in Daytona and Miami seemed to come easy. But his charm with customers was sometimes jolly pedantry which in turn made him interrupt his own view of them and despise them not always secretly for “graduating college” without having read a book. On the Barataria , where he was transferred about the time I got my B.A. he was called by two Georgia boys in his berthing compartment “Professor.” He spent a month’s Search and Rescue in St. George, Bermuda, reading my copy of Breasted, yet if his letters suggest that at sea when not on radar watch he studied German down on the messdeck with the Chief Electronics Technician from whom he began by learning the Greek alphabet, and discussed the Founding Fathers and early American landscape painting with the funny, spoiled little Reserve ensign from Richmond who had a box of oils in his stateroom on the boatdeck, Al if I know him at all spent as much time as I would have at the rail following the sea’s gray molten life. Unlike Bob, he never tried to hide the difference between what he thought he wanted and what he thought he was, except to insist on this “story of my life” a bit hard. He never knew it wasn’t honesty of that kind I wanted from a friend. I rarely trust a man’s account of his own weaknesses, but my doubt may itself be a weakness and on this Ted grimly agreed one night having just come from his three-credit Group Dynamics where they’d all finally gotten “to” the one married woman who they’d all sensed had been holding out on them — and it had been horrible and wonderful, Ted said. Al got looped one night in New London when he was at radar school across the river in Groton, and he failed to make it to Mystic, where I was staying with Tracy Blood. He was lucky the bartender was a moonlighting cop who was impressed by Al’s Pirate tryout and didn’t want the two OCS boys to get into trouble because of their fight in which over some matter of collegiate fact Al intervened. But at two in the morning back in Groton Al broke into the mess hall and took a half-gallon can of peanut butter, and for this, though he didn’t short out of radar school, he got a captain’s mast. So three weeks later he really couldn’t make the weekend party Tracy and I had at her parents’ so-called farm.