Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Doc said, “Yeah,” but he was looking at the view.

Bob was somewhere else. Our apartment was so big.

I said, “I’m fed up with your petty threats, I’m going to give you—” I went back to my room, the locus of every grandiose plan I’d ever made—“I’m going to give you this,” and Doc came after me. Yes, I said, if he kept quiet about me when we got to Heatsburg — about my expulsion and the money — he could have this encyclopedia.

Bob came to my door, Doc between us. Bob said, “You wouldn’t take it.”

“Sure he would,” I said, and started tilting books out. I heard Doc’s bottle rhythmically draining, and when I eyed him, there was savage reflection around his thick mouth, and he said sure he would. I added, “Consider it a going-away present.” Doc hesitated, and I said, “A present to go away.” He said where would we be if he did go away right now, and I said in that case I’d call my father and take the train with him.

The phone was ringing. I didn’t go out to pick it up.

It was after two-thirty when I dried our plates and turned out the kitchen light and we carried the dark red books down to Doc’s trunk. The Plymouth was like an oven. Bob looked up the street and we both saw Joey approaching on his bike-cart.

But I seem tonight despite this long memorial arc no nearer Bohack Joey and the fight, much less my stolen Corona.

But as we push north and are eventually pursued by the train that bears my tired father — who (I am to learn tonight) phoned the farm camp in vain this morning to say since I was coming through New York come to his office between trains and we’d go up together — I’m carried at another rate seven years north to that small city where the librarian’s yellow Oxford cuff is raised to toast Al’s future, and Fred Eagle downing that red confection turns promptly back to his unnursed bourbon.

Fred said that Al was so lit the night before the last weather patrol he hit both sides of his shop door leaving, but Fred said Al didn’t have the strength of character to be a full-blown failure. And I said neither did Fred if he was enough in the book business to drive a hundred miles today to buy some unsuspecting old lady’s library. Touch, said Fred; yet it was as a beachcomber that he’d found Epaminondas, and next time he needed something as real as a cat he was going back to that beach with a gallon of eight-year-old bourbon and two pounds of wieners and his surf rod and stay till he got whatever it was. What he was going to get one of these days was an English Land-Rover, go anywhere in a Land-Rover, Panama, any beach, up to the Arctic Circle where men live who sleep four months a year. Al said except for our host I was the only one he knew who would ever amount to more than two pounds of hot dogs on a wet beach, and he and Fred laughed about that; but the librarian insisted that Al would go to college, do his graduate work, and (as the librarian put it) teach at the college level someday. Gail said she knew he could do anything he wanted to, which sort of stopped the conversation, but her face from its breathtaking cheekbones down the mysterious secret V-taper to her chin was more than the words of any of us in that parlor. Annette went out to fill a pitcher so we could recharge our cups more easily.

“Now, I can’t sleep,” said Fred. “Mind’s too potent. ‘N’ I’ve such a time getting to sleep I dream about it. I dream that I make up stories to drug myself to sleep.” Fred took his glass to the kitchen and though he talked louder while we waited it was as if for him we were there in the kitchen with him. “And at the crack of dawn I’m up no matter how I feel or look and no matter where I am, heading east from San Diego toward the Chocolate Mountains, or talking to someone in the county courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi, or smack in the center of Manhattan.” Fred was back with a glass the color of strong Indian tea.

“A cup of sack, wench,” said Al, “a cup—”

“Don’t you call me wench,” said Annette.

“I’ll call you what I want to call you, with your Hawaiian friends. A cup of sack to make my eyes look red like old pint-pot tickle-brain. Fred, God give thee the spirit of persuasion.”

“Yes, I’ll be persuasive rather than exhaustive,” said Fred, “better the fleeting melody of the swan than the long-drawn clangor of cranes.”

Al nodded slowly to me and winked in honor of the great man, whose Lucretius I chose not to match but to share in the privacy of my smile. I envied Fred’s mere good will toward my friend, and I knew that like some Lucretian development my alliance with Al could never turn to nothing despite my strife to preserve it unthreatened.

“One tale I dreamt I made up to put myself to sleep took me up the coast here past Boothbay to look at a houseful of stuffed people, and a big yellow cat showed me around telling me by telepathy all I had to know about each of these stuffed sons and cousins and grannies and servants. I had to walk carefully between them, some were standing, I didn’t want to knock ’em over, pretty crowded in there I can tell you.”

“I bet,” said Annette.

“All dressed up, little boys in wide collars, dames in lace fronts, a ruby-faced uncle leaning on the mantle warming his knees, mid-Victorian matching chairs and sofas, hand-carved medallions — well I’d have to get a loan from the bank to buy, what with the two room of books upstairs. So I said to the yellow cat, I’ll take the lot, and named a price. But soon as I did, every last one of that stuffed family came to life stuffing and all and eased on out of that house, furniture too, leaving me with the books upstairs which I soon found I’d after all got a jolly good bargain on.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Why get it? You don’t have to get it. It’s just a story I dreamed I made up to—”

“I think you trapped yourself and don’t know how to get out of it,” I said.

“Ought to try it sometime,” said Fred. “Very salutary. Maybe there’s your trouble. You’re young, find yourself a trap.”

“He’s got you there,” said the owner of my old encyclopedia, and Gail looked at me in such a charming way I recalled that her plaid bag was in Al’s room, and she said to me, “You don’t have any troubles.”

“But who says I’m finished?” said Fred. “What else did I find upstairs?”

“Your wife,” said the librarian, whose name I had somehow missed.

“My wife, is it? O.K. say it was my wife, I don’t mind.” Al laughed, and said to me quietly, “He married a Deering.”

“What then?” said Fred. Let me convey him, Dom, more wholly than mere recollection of his hustling voice. His wife: she was reading Kingsley’s Hypatia when he arrived among the books upstairs. (“Ever been to Egypt?” he interrupted himself to ask me.) She looked up at Fred and instead of silently telling him to shave or silently asking him why he was a day late coming home, for he’d only been up to Friendship, which after all was this side of Rockland, she turned out to be none other than that alluring Alexandrian sage Hypatia herself, though still Mrs. Fred Eagle. On her wedding finger was a new familiar ring, its enamel top a picture of the Egyptian desert that grew as you looked till (“You never dreamed this,” said Annette whom Al tried to shush with raised hand) you found the great Alexandrian centuries approaching and with them Archimedes staying overnight at the Museum with Euclid, and you saw approaching you the green plots of the Ptolemies and the gymnasiums and basilicas, but there all the time stood the Pharos, the lighthouse four hundred fifty feet high with, centuries behind it or inside its substance, the memory of Babylonian tower-temples. And a mob of Christians mainly clerical including a clutch of those reckless fellows who cared for the sick during epidemics—“What did they call them?”—they were bearing down on the great neo-Platonist mathematician herself but Fred raced in off the desert, stepped across the river from back to back of fat crocodiles lethargic with a glut of recent human suicides, held Hypatia in his pulsing arms, and in short loved her right there in the Alexandrian library, “they won’t dig up the ruins today because they’re under a building they’re using.” And this mob bearing down on Hypatia for daring to defend pagan thought are stopped cold by Hypatia and young Fred burning her afternoon oil right there among the tomes.