Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

By the time he got transferred from Norfolk to Maine and a ship full of Georgia farm boys who’d never had it so good, he was wondering what he’d been thinking of in ’49 enlisting for four years. On the ship a favorite remark about him which, he wrote me, he couldn’t be bothered after a while to contradict, was that he’d had two years of college: because of his encyclopedia and getting through a few USAFI German lessons with the Chief ET who came from near Galveston, Al was supposed (yes) to have had Two Years of College (the phrase went), always Two Years, something to do with requirements for state cop or some insurance training program or some state college aggie qualification.

Well, Dom, I did my farming in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and don’t you forget it. Six almost solid weeks, and so did Bob.

My letters helped Al. In port the ensign from Richmond went to Boone’s wharfside lobster house with the exec or a Bowdoin cousin, or he was playing tennis at Prout’s Neck. Gail’s jibes about money that October weekend late in Al’s hitch were just her way of letting him know she understood. He did the best he could on Saturday afternoons not to leave the Public Library. It was where he really wanted to be, but to stay there was like some key abstinence. He browsed. When he walked the streets it was a city; he was living in a city. Not like liberty in Norfolk, when he didn’t know yet what he was going to try to get, and where he’d never quite slipped beyond the dragging enclosure of the sailor circuit. Nor like those cramped, soiling sojourns in a bus to get to New York for a stupidly random set of beginnings interrupted by the loneliness that forces boredom — during which I was rarely in New York and Al had no idea what he’d say to my parents if he got them on the phone except (say) that he was going to see the Unicorn tomorrow morning. Perhaps dull Portland was the right site for the meditative end of a certain attenuated loneliness that I now see may have arisen those early summers when he and I were the simplest of friends.

Leaving the ship he gave the Blue Moon on Commercial a miss. Ditto the shipmates there, who poured down eight or ten gassy drafts as soon as they got off the ship, then went up town and ate cheeseburgers and french fries at the chrome-tuned skirt-and-sweater center just below Congress Square, but after all that beer they weren’t fresh enough to do more than clamp their fresh white hats over their brows and trudge up to the movies and drowse for three reckless hours before making it back to State Pier for a night’s sleep. Once he did get caught in the Moon and had to act. But as a rule, it was up India Street to Congress, then the curving length of Congress — I’m boring myself , Dom, but maybe not that little pre-Annette student nurse from the boondocks who liked Al too much and, he told me, had worked for E.B. White’s family one summer — yes, and I’m no nearer Bob’s white-knuckled fist and my stolen Corona junior — all the way, yes, along Congress (he bought his mother a wool stole in Porteous, Mitchell & Braun) up and then down the main municipal hill: past the High Asia, the bus terminal, the Columbia Hotel and its lounge patronized by local magnates and visiting salesmen (Al too, when he was feeling he’d like some authentic service), down past the stale hotel he stayed in during the liberties before he and the two yeomen from the Coos Bay splurged on the tree-screened room on Franklin Street.

It seems such a distance from the delicate raisin moles below Gail’s immortal collar bone, while Gail says to Annette (as in the October night they start up the librarian’s porch steps, then step aside hoping Al will go first, but I do), “I want to have at least three, maybe four”—

Such a seeming distance to those close coördinate diagrams joining me to Bob on one hand and Al on the other, or to my parents, or to Al and his father, or to Tracy and her prodigal legs, or to Bob and the former Perpetua Pound whose court-tennis-curating “pappy” (the tidy-minded author of monographs on Ryder, Marin, and Dallin) once urged my father to enter me at Groton and who herself was delivered of a third boy the Easter of 1960. Well, must the custodian always contemplate the secret things he protects? And I am no almanac.

But I know that the polio epidemic in the Newtown, Pennsylvania area came right around the Japanese surrender. In our dorm at the family “camp” Bob and I were ready to take on four yokels from Philly over whether or not the Japs would give up, and the tall basketball big shot had called me a damn New York son of a bitch and said I didn’t know a Jap from a Jew, the Japs wouldn’t give up while there was two of them alive, it was too fucking bad that B25 last week hadn’t completely destroyed the Empire State, and Bob and I had moved close to the tall one when his chocolate-milk-drinking friend with bad breath who’d come here straight from a Presbyterian conference at Lafayette and had his bureau drawers stuffed neatly full of Westminster Fellowship hand-outs, said to the tall one, “Don’t use language, Hank, there’s no need to use language.” But how else can I get up past the librarian’s amicable porch pillars and through his outer door, his vestibule, his inner door, and through the evening to perhaps Annette and one thing she may know? How can I without damning myself? I don’t ask for any help, though. Not for the phone number of her waitress schoolmate Maureen whose father is a telephone lineman; not, Dom, for your instant excuses posted above the phone box here; certainly not for some vile transition, though I might end your phone’s endless busy signal tonight and resourcefully take whatever voice first calls. After all, that false busy signal quarantines our space tonight, Dom. And our time, too. Recalling suddenly years later that nasty Barataria Bay incident in the Blue Moon, Al tips down the last of a martini. He’s on a crowded, smoky lawn and he says into his smiling wife’s ear that if you leave out the prefix the Greek root of “epidemic” means “people.” But now he wheels laughing toward someone—“ I heard that”—and his wife takes his arm and says loud enough, “We have to go, dear,” which was what he wanted her to say. A flashbulb blinks in the corner of his eye, a colleague’s engaged daughter gently screams; again the flash cube flares, the hostess says, “Gotcha, Allie,” and Al shields his profile with his large brown hand then turns to his chronicling hostess — and his wife sees he’s decided not to go quite yet.

When I shook your hand at the opening last week and couldn’t hear if the hostess said “Dom” or “Don,” I told you I’d had an odd sense about your suicide book, to which you too quickly replied (winking over my shoulder at someone) that some of the critics had had an odd sense too. The runner-up for Miss Utah materialized at my elbow and gave you a floppy, vinyl-lined canvas goblet, saying, “One Topaz Neon,” and you shrugged. Then later, as I was looking at a styrofoam much like this one of yours here, you were dragged away to a party in Harlem by your former girlfriend the beautiful archaeologist Kit Carbon. You keep late hours. But one evening a week, namely tonight, you’re apt to be home.

The atom bombs didn’t make much impression on the big basketball player. Maybe they din’t remind him of anything. He doubted the Japs would surrender but he was concerned with the nightly game in the gym, where he hipped anybody that came near the key and even though I hit seven times from outside he spent a very satisfying two hours being fed the ball by his friends from Philly. Early in the morning the local farmers let the camp office know how many, and often which, boys were needed; and when I was in the same group as tall-ass I heard nothing all day long but his bellyaching judgments. I was there that summer because Bob’s father had told mine, and my father thought it would be an education. Bob was sent because his parents knew of the famous Quaker boarding school where the camp was located; to Bob’s mother the tennis courts and ivied dorms made a reassuring base from which to make each morning’s foray against the acres of rutabagas and carrot weeds, though Bob was there because he wanted the hardest possible work to toughen him up for the Poly wrestling team. Evenings over that heavy rich earth were dull. No one cared when you got back so long as you got up for work in the morning. We hitched to a fair one Wednesday night. I met a fine girl in a gypsy skirt and one of those loose blouses with the embroidered yolk. Eventually Bob left, and I walked her two miles home to her farmer-father’s dark dewy back yard. I was unnecessarily afraid of knocking her up.