Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

“And at this point,” said Fred going to the kitchen, “I was interrupted. I woke up just as in the dream I was about to talk myself to sleep.”

“The Pharos wasn’t that high,” I called, wondering again who might have scribbled in the final volume of the encyclopedia Caesar Bemis sold Al.

“Don’t question his facts,” said Al a bit too seriously. “He’s a walking—”

“Maybe so maybe not,” said Fred barely loudly enough to carry in to us. “But it was the ravishing astro-philosopher Hypatia all right.”

“It was your wife,” said Gail.

“What did you mean — my ‘Hawaiian friends’?” said Annette.

“What’s your authority for making the Pharos less than four-fifty?”

“Do you forget my Breasted Ancient Times you borrowed?”

And read during a month of Search and Rescue in Bermuda: the Barataria got painted, the crew were allowed to go ashore in civvies, and Al on the balcony of a Hamilton bar or on the sunset battlements of Fort St. Catherine above St. George or in the Corpsman’s presence or absence sought to rescue himself and then strangely was rescued during the last week of this tropical duty by a local teenager wise enough not to send by her brother messages of affection every afternoon as her even darker sister did to Al’s Detroit shipmate who was therefore scorned by Al’s full-blooded Seminole buddy who slept with a small, Wheatena-colored snake around his shin and never knew Al’s girl was black that final week during which the deck crew rolled a second coat of white onto the cutter’s comfortable hull and Al gave ancient history a rest.

Dom, the letters from Richard, Dorothy, and Lila would have lowered your resolve, for the less you let yourself sink into your destiny the less could love be displaced by your courage. And those letters were not like one of Richard’s actuarially unpreventable acts of God.

Doc said Brooklyn Heights hadn’t been much, he thought we’d at least take him to the Club Samoa near Times Square where his brother had gone on furlough last year.

Bob was too quiet; the day had picked up a wearying impurity in its interruption. Bob didn’t mention the encyclopedia again, he may have thought the gift reckless snobbery in me puzzling Doc into silly defense.

I woke at a gas station feeling very, very young. Nothing was said about my having been asleep. We were twenty-two miles from Heatsburg and Doc wanted three dollars from each of us, which Bob paid.

I asked them not to tell we’d stopped in New York.

My mother seemed not at all surprised that I arrived as I did. Doc was impressed by her. She just looked at me and said I needed a haircut. Was it possible she didn’t know I was supposed to come by train? She isn’t a vague person, in the kitchen or at the piano or any place, though she is not unyielding. I didn’t want to ask her for money and when Bob at the door of our john upstairs asked me if I could get the fifteen dollars and twenty-five cents from her I said I’d send it to him tomorrow. When he came out my mother was calling me. Bob started down and I went in the john. Aiming above the water line I heard my mother say perhaps your friend would like to use the bathroom. When the cistern filled I took off the top and disengaged from the hook at the end of the flush-lever the stiff wire attached to the plunger. Then I replaced the top. Entering the village I’d seen hilly pasture turn into flat fields and the flat lake on the Heatsburg road and then I’d seen the postmaster going back in off his porch following two kids who’d evidently come for an after-supper cone; I’d seen Caesar Bemis watch us pass without recognizing me in Doc’s Plymouth, and I’d seen Al and Tony having a catch, and I’d seen four people getting bags out of a yellow convertible at the inn. As I came downstairs my mother asked if Bob and Doc would stay for supper, she’d be meeting my father at Hillsdale pretty soon. Bob said they had to be going. My mother seemed weirdly unconcerned about our arrival, but did ask about the polio epidemic and where Doc lived, and he told her why he had to get home, and she asked if he wanted something to drink. And Doc took a look at me and said, “You wouldn’t have a Budweiser, would you?” My mother said, “We just do,” and when she got the bottle out and opened it Doc took another look at me and mumbled, “Use the bathroom” and nodded to my mother and walked out as casually as he could. Bob was calling Rhode Island. My mother said she’d seen Al and told him I’d be home tonight and he’d said he might come over. But I was out of the house before she finished and hoping that Doc, who loved every inch of that Plymouth, hadn’t taken the keys. I had the trunk open and twelve volumes of the encyclopedia out and stacked in two piles around the corner of our white fence and the keys back in the ignition before Bob was finished with his unpleasant conversation with his father who’d tipped over in a race that afternoon. Doc was a while coming down.

Before Bob and Doc left, my mother asked Bob if he was sure he wouldn’t like to stay the night. When she and I were driving to Hillsdale she asked me why on earth Doc had been willing to detour such a distance from his straightest route, was it that he felt responsible for me and Bob?

And so I was able to mail Bob a money order the next day in the same outgoing post that carried a note from my mother to Coolidge confirming the next weekend. You have to admit it’s funny, Dom. Cold, calculating me!

When Gail and Annette were out of the room Fred said, “Emissions recollected in senility”; then, to Al, “Look out how you fool with the constable’s daughter.”

But the Hawaiians were the fooling Al should not have done. The librarian said television was going to be a great threat to the reader but on the other hand could be very educational, it was probably too early to make a prediction, wait till ’54 or ’55, and we all nodded. Al said he was already hooked on baseball telecasts, but Fred said baseball was even duller than soccer on or off TV, he for one hated all “manifestations” of physical sport, and when Fred said baseball was an intellectual game and Fred asked Gail if she played chess, the librarian diverted them into the issue of contact and non-contact and he and Al got a bit ruffled when Al said the only reason the librarian could call basketball a pattern-sport not a body-contact sport was that he’d never played it, the librarian said he had played guard in school and he had seen what happens under the backboard, and Al said Not only there, and when the librarian though a bit huffy tried to pacify Al and said, “Well we can agree about baseball, baseball is not a body-contact sport,” Al looked at me and shook his head. Maybe not for a pitcher.

Annette asked him again what he’d meant before about the Hawaiians. He shrugged her off saying O.K. he probably knew them much better than she did. But she said no he didn’t know the first thing about them. “I know they got half the high school girls in Portland smoking tea.” “You lie,” said Annette in the same moment that I said, “What’s wrong with that? The kids are bored.” The librarian said, “There’s a lot wrong with it, it’ll make them bored is more like the truth.” “They don’t matter,” said Al; “if I’ve got to pick a drug I’ll pick the stuff in the glass with the icecubes tinkling and I’ll take Aristotle’s intellectual life along with it.” “What about sex?” I said, and as I glanced at the librarian he looked at his empty punch glass.

But Annette said Earl and Eddie were fun, maybe they didn’t know who Epaminondas was but they loved to dance. And smoke Mary Jane, said Al. Yes, said Annette, yes. Yes, that’s partly why they’re fun.