Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

This thumbnail contour is perhaps the locus of all equidistances from Ev’s breast and the man’s half-recaptured ambitions, or simply capillary imbalance within and urban noise without.

And Dom, you can tell by now that whether or not you asked me What’s my line (and were answered) I could do that scene near the Westchester-Putnam line if I had to, and with flair.

But be fair: did I have the power to funnel your interests into suicide? Although you make a point of avoiding losers you survive on a diet of response, and your children disembodied you. Even if I’d let their letters through, you’d have felt disinherited, wouldn’t you? By another delivery system, my confession to you comes back to me. Instead of that DA-LITE screen you could have bought another lenticular one just as good from Ward for less than half the price. Bob’s conscience is not mine, nor Bob’s son Robby, though for some reason Robby now writes me long letters. My hand has turned sort of scrawly in the last few lines. Bob would, but indeed did, think your life had lost its center judging from what he’d recently read by and about you; there was a day in New York in which we happened to see you. I was still full of the Chicago room where you talked to the Inner Group with your mouth full of powdery doughnut and I suffered (in the graph of our gathering coördination) a drop in faith: yes, for one instinctive moment — did I say this earlier? — I thought what the hell had your life to do with mine, except that I’d moved into your building recently.

Bob didn’t know I’d interviewed Darla at the very time he was packing for the plane trip but he read on the plane about your ambiguous defenestration, and he said whatever happened he didn’t think you were playing it safe. For him of course you were merely a face on a news magazine. From your angle, Dom, you can imagine how tempted I was to confide in Bob my full dossier if not my (as Darla would say) Involvement. But there wasn’t time.

From that eighth floor above Wall Street Bob knew you as soon as I pointed; he said (what of course I knew) that the now mildly famous retired cop had been discouraged by his lawyer from suing you for saying he had a prostate condition. A group had come around you in a parallelogram of late sun down there on the floor of the street’s tall chamber, girls in bulging headscarves starting the weekend half an hour early, hatless commuters with attaché cases, ancient gray Mercuries with their stock transfers or certified hundred thousand dollar checks making sure this was the last day’s errand. We couldn’t hear you; the man Bob had come to see in this office was saying that Donnelly printing, and the publishing stocks generally, hadn’t done as well as Connie had predicted in ’66; but down there in the street someone reached to push you, and you shoved the wrong shoulder. And eight floors above you Bob — whose old nick over the cheekbone showed white against his tan — was diverted by a nearby secretary holding a phone who called to a man that they were ready with Cairo. Bob said he was ready to go. But it was hardly half an hour we’d been in this his parent office — seats on the Exchange, weekly Market Letter, wire service, informational amenities, all unimportant to my purposes (even to the future of my 100 Marathon that had once been 50 Ohio Oil). Hadn’t Bob come all the way down from Maine to talk business? Here we were, headed back over the ticker-to-ticker carpet past desks and file cabinets, past the research library where a lady with rings on her fingers was cutting up a newspaper with black scissors, past a bulletin board featuring a long, crooked graph, and suddenly a doorway through which I saw an ochre conference room with a long oval table clear except for a pad and an ashtray in front of each chair.

When I said you were about to film a political ad in Trinity churchyard at the Broadway end of Wall, Bob said let’s have a look. I was wondering if Bob was seeing anyone elsewhere on business that weekend, for I had a ledger full of field results to structure on Saturday. It crossed my mind as we head up toward Trinity that through some fatal trick Bob had learned by way of Dot — and Ev! — that I was under surveillance.

In The Whaler later, when Bob asked if Camille was still around — and for a second I didn’t know who he was talking about — I dwelt again on his response to your energy in that city churchyard. It’s all one to me tonight, Dom. Why so it is! All one. “What’s it?” asks my later father— “what’s all one? Gee, for a Cultured Anthropogromer you’re mighty impressionistic.”

Don’t you want to know what Bob was really doing in New York that weekend? He wanted some illumination postcards for Petty, but we were too late arriving at the Morgan Library, though we’d left Trinity churchyard before you finished shooting. Hard between Fulton’s erect slab and Hamilton’s topless pyramid, you chatted and hollered and mused to different distances, and the videotapers triangulated your active profile and the unspeakable records of your full face, and there were hecklers and the representative of Bankers Anonymous To End the War; and while they were trying to film this ad for your forthcoming campaign and the young director was calling Cut, and trying to kid you into being more simply serious, and two cameramen contentedly firing away from Gleaneagled shoulders with (from one vantage) the church and (from an opposite) a clutch of women grinning through the Rector Street fence, I said to Bob that when I’d come here with my old friend Al he’d gotten the sexton’s Puerto Rican assistant to trot out the cemetery book showing who and where everyone was; and Bob hardly heard me and murmured something about that sort of fussing over facts, he was grinning at the scene and at you Dom with a kind of readiness that made me think he could easily let go and pop someone. You glanced our way, and I thought you looked twice at my saddle-shoes as if they were odd or even you’d seen them before. Which you had, the day you lost your wallet while sharing the alarm box with the premature witch. And suddenly, as if recollecting more than he could possibly know, Bob turned and said, “Oh yes; Al.”

In The Whaler, where Bob wanted to go for old time’s sake, I answered that I hadn’t seen the fair Camille in years, and Bob said that after that Christmas time in the late forties he phoned her once himself but she said any friend of mine wasn’t necessarily a friend of hers. Bob would not have accepted Al as an equal.

A couple of hours ago Bob had breezed through that office floor like an up-country millionaire; and on the way to the man he dealt with directly — the lacrosse All-America from Hopkins — Bob had lacked only his old Poly stick to complete in my image the wily broken-field romp that had been his trademark, shoulders going low and then swinging unpredictably, sharp turn at one desk into a lateral aisle, sharp turn then near the window into a longitudinal aisle. Now in The Whaler I told him this, ignoring the query about Camille. I picked up my recollection of Al’s intrusive New York data and said Al would do well in Bob’s racket, make a hell of an analyst — he’d know how much it would cost in differing circumstances to ship natural gas from Alaska to Japan, and the exact equidistance from a point on the north shore of Alaska’s Banks Island to New York, London, and Tokyo — but he’d hesitate to prophesy.

“What is this?” asked Bob and tipped his gold-rimmed eyes back and finished his double martini. A middle-aged tar in faded denims came down a toy gangway and passed bearing a tray with a pair of drinks. In the low light they looked like Topaz Neons, but I couldn’t turn away from Bob’s vague, rough question to peer around that dusky lounge, and of course I couldn’t imagine you here in The Whaler Bar among the Fairleigh Dickinson girls and the tourists from East Pennsy. “I mean,” he said, “all this about Al. Is it the same Al used to live in Massachusetts? your summer place? where you made a fool of what’s-his-name who died in Basic?”