Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

So, in my (I hope polymerged) oscillation between active and contemplative membership in your career’s strange arc, tonight had to occur. I had to broach my kinships. But it occurs to me that perhaps to be true kin I must breach my parabolic plan. Certainly your suicide tonight — which earlier I might have dismissed as an underachievement — may be the ultimate disseminal interruption.

Yet to wholly grasp it would be to wrongly fix it.

And it was, as the President says to some poor big-shot he’s pressured, “your decision,” as my father to me when I elected chemistry but not physics at Poly and he thought I was just protecting my Cum Laude standing.

And did you look through the latest issue of Newsweep —which your postman can’t get into your box but leaves with other large mail on the ledge beneath? Did you examine the other face or two in the picture in which you appear? I wonder if Lila and her husband connected it with their exit from that Santa Barbara crowd.

I did hear the elevator again, but again the doorknob is being worked.

Imagine anything more alien to Bob’s parents’ living room on the Heights than that of Al’s parents, where in late ’53 they had a small party for him and for Goldilocks (as her mother occasionally and inaccurately calls Gail). There was a regular meal and pies and cakes vivid as the three calendars on the walls. There was doubt till that afternoon that Al would come; he had gone hunting in New Hampshire with his Seminole shipmate, also just out of the Coast Guard, and with Annette’s father, who had a friend with a camp. At the party I saw Al and his dad speak just once, and it was a brief, hard disagreement over Al’s taking legal residence in Maine to get in-state tuition at Orono, a plan Al abandoned. Gail had just become a stewardess and wore her Eastern Airlines raincoat when for a few minutes that evening she and her fiancé and I drove up to see the stone heart house.

The doorknob is moving again, I hear it; they should know that without a registered Eagle key it’s pointless. Footsteps are coming from the east end of the hall, probably from the east elevator I stepped out of into another phase.

Bob’s sister enraged their father by capitalizing on her fluent French and Italian to land a stewardess job with Pan Am.

Everyone in this benighted building is glad of the elevators. It’s good to have the elevator in common, and to talk of its vagaries when we cautiously meet in it.

Only you and I would understand how much you and I had in common, Dom. At the opening where we met, you had no time to acknowledge this.

“On the other hand,” my late father breaks back in, still weighing what I ascribed to him thirty lines ago, “if I don’t know these new terms InterPoly-force Vectors and Coördinate Availability and the rest, still think of how for the Babylonians the generative force took many forms — polyform if you want — all roughly equal, a falcon, a snake, the sun, a god, a—”

My own parabola thickens. If it’s putting on weight, let’s hope the process is like yours in that styrofoam across this long room. The template contour fronting your sculpture has been taken back ninety degrees, and though you will say the template contour is the arc of a kind of nineteen-thirties display of neat, banal cypress trees, I would call it clearly parabolic — as indeed that picture article did that called your aging versatility exciting if dubiously derivative.

My father wasn’t easy to interrupt. But (as he would say, “on the other hand”) why interrupt him? Because—

Petty and Bob and I were in Manhattan all day that Saturday after Christmas ’48, all three of us home from college. We stood her “pappy” up at a gallery and saw half a bad movie at a 42nd Street house where posters promised nudity at a health farm but Bob said it was fake so we left. We had whiskey sours in the Biltmore Bar at two in the afternoon. We rented skates at Rockefeller Center, and in long brown wool stockings Petty walking like a dancer across the wood to get to the ice seemed at least as good as the broads taking the cure in that interrupted movie. Bob raced heavily lap after lap, at last missing a middle-aged man on figure skates by so little the man sat right down but not till Bob was past him, as if in retrospect the man had reasoned his way into a collision with Bob. By the time Bob came up with Petty and me he’d come round again toward the sedately uncertain man on figure skates who turned halfway as if he had bursitis and told Bob to slow down or he’d tell an attendant, and as Bob swept smiling by him the man reached for Bob too precipitately and sat down on the ice again as Petty and I made a bridge over him passing. It was memorably cold. We were all late for dinner because we went to see my friend—

Steps. I will not rise. But in my own time. They’ll never find you.

I am not responsible for your suicide, Dom, but if I am it’s because in the extended privacy of my mind I could see the whole life you were trying to live. But if I pushed you to do it, must I now become you? There are no more like you. Your code, interruptive and silent, obliged you not to answer Darla that you weren’t trying really to be a hero, or Dave Dickens that you didn’t have any ideals in mind with which to reinvest American youth (two for one), or Sister Deirdre that you thought she ought to try some of her own stuff though you had no program at present though you might next week.

On our way to see my Negro friend Camille who lived south of the Village and whose father came from Andros in the Bahamas and was quite high up in the Motor Vehicle Bureau, Petty kept putting our words into hit songs. Bob told her to cut it out, and she said nothing till we were waiting in the cabbagey apartment hall for Camille to come to the door and then Petty said she wished Bob hadn’t persuaded us to go to that dirty movie, pappy’d be fit to be tied. Camille’s mother served us jasmine tea and Camille sang Barbara Allen to her guitar but when Bob asked for St. Louie Blues she said she didn’t sing that sort of thing. I said she was hoping to go to Bennington in September and Bob said he’d heard fabulous things about what went on in the Bennington graveyard and Camille’s mother said she would win a scholarship because she’d been outstanding at Music and Art, and Petty said she must be versatile but I didn’t point out that Music and Art was a famous high school. Camille came and sat on the couch-bed beside me and put her arm around my shoulder and asked me to come to a party that night, and I nodded to her, accepting and archly appraising, and no one said anything for a moment. Petty said didn’t they have a long time off at Bennington in the middle of the winter, and Camille said yes she was hoping to work for the City. Soon Petty said we had to be going. As we walked down, Bob said, with a grin, “How do you know her?”

We didn’t find a cab, and after one change and two waits on deserted chilly platforms, we got back to the Heights by subway. My father was up for dinner but wore his bathrobe. He almost at once found out the signal omission of our afternoon and he had something to say about how you simply didn’t do that, any more than you walked away while your elders were speaking to you, and Russell Pound was a gentleman and a terribly nice man and a scholar who knew absolutely everyone in the art world. I knew my father was dying. Why did I take his mild lecture so lightly? Not merely because I foresaw that he would not die for three or four years. I loved him in such isolation that everything else by contrast merged — Petty, Al, ancient history, Bob, things like watching the logrolling in the tank at the Sportsman’s Show with my frantically nostalgic and displaced step-grandfather John (Zon < Zo-an), or defeating Tracy Blood’s brother Hugh — merged, too, with things like the thick smell of corned beef hash from the cafeteria steam table at Poly (and the now unspeakable things we likened it to) on (say) a day rainy and indoor that hence made even more beautifully crucial the prospect of creaming the Solid test at two o’clock and concentrated even more the shiny cool concussions of the basketball court into which I would rush at three — yes, the state all these had of being other than my father gave them a wholesale kinship. But on the other hand ye gods my mother didn’t fit into that gross category either. My mother and father didn’t know I knew he was so sick. My mother has a class to herself too, in a white cardigan, watering trays of plants on a Sunday morning and drily commenting on the progress of someone’s dogged Mozart somewhere above us to which my father would murmur something in reply, absorbed in the current events quiz in “The News of the Week in Review.” But if she has a class to herself, hasn’t Tracy? Hasn’t Bob? Haven’t those expensive Christmas vacations? We came down from our country colleges to oratories and Death of a Salesman and feverishly to our parents’ phones and to bright windy errands round Manhattan — and then after making it home to Brooklyn Heights by cab over a bridge or by IRT under the East River, yes to the reality of southwest winds off the harbor, those serious winds flooding the streets of our Brooklyn Heights slowed us down but forced on us a future that was parental but whole and because of that harbor in some pathetically metaphorical sense maritime. You were Jewish Dom, and a well-to-do Jewish family we knew on the Heights went to Friends Meeting House on Sunday which thus allied them in my early mind with the Red Cross and hence with the Presbyterian Church, for from my room I’d heard my father tell his Cameroons Mission Committee what the Quakers had done in Spain, and my father was an elder in the Presbyterian — the First Presbyterian — Church. The Bloods were Episcopalian.