Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Dear Trace stammered trying to speak of my secret, whatever in her romantic head it was: “Ev — e — everybody’s got some… secret. And maybe the guys who talk best are the ones who do the best job of… you know.” But I said Why guys? And that got us onto who talked more, men or girls, and then I cozily conceded she was probably right, men talked a lot more. But from the Biltmore ’69 I was bound (wasn’t I?) ahead to Al’s conservative trap the late spring weekend of ’68 but instead have come to my bust-up with Tracy in March of ’53. Voices from the near elevator jog my sequence. Around four, Al would be arriving at the New London station with or without Annette, Tracy and I had to meet the train, we had to get up, we had to get dressed. March in Mystic was raw but fresh, the sea and land interrupting each other in rhythms more mysterious than frost and thaw. Before we finally rolled out, Tracy picked up her earlier remark about secrets, and when from the high bed I got my feet down on that cold floor of dark honey boards she said as for secrets it was no secret what she wanted, and then said she was sorry but she had dreams of losing me, and I turned around with the ball of my foot in a slight trough warp of one of those magnificent old floor planks and looked at her all snug and anxious under a quilt and said, “We didn’t even have lunch.” The Bloods weren’t coming up this weekend; it wasn’t clear who they thought Tracy was entertaining.

She didn’t drive in with me to New London after all, and I was late; Al was standing outside the station in his pea jacket with his small blue canvas bag beside his spit-shined black toes and reading what turned out to be The Iliad , Dom. I remember, because Al asked what the Thornton Wilder was that Tracy had left on the back seat.

I asked about the ship and Al said he was beginning to have trouble with a couple of the black-gang — enginemen thirds — who played Keep Away in the berthing compartment with his German book, and I asked how Fred Eagle was and how Annette was doing up at Orono and how the librarian in Portland was (whose name I’d forgotten), and the Seminole shipmate and of course the Corpsman who read a lot (whose encyclopedic knowledge of VD, Dom, and of a particular creamy gray meerschaum found in Asia Minor and Thebes and in a certain serpentine mined in Utah I may have mentioned in those pages lifted by your shrink son-in-law) and as I drove away from the center of town toward the bridge that would carry us eastward past Groton (where, as I know I’ve mentioned, Al once got a Captain’s Mast for receiving stolen peanut butter) and thence to Mystic, I was curiously excited returning to Tracy in her car. Al said Annette was wonderful, she should have tried for a scholarship to Smith, Fred Eagle’s wife was sick and he was off the sauce and had taken her to Cuba for a week — a nice nice man. Al said he was really looking forward to this weekend, and I said They call it a farm, it’s a restored farmhouse, they farmed turkeys during the war. I was about to tell in detail how they’d run it while living most of the year in Brooklyn Heights, but Al said, “Eighteenth century?” and said he was looking forward to a few drinks nodding in front of the fender with deep-browed Homer—“and how’s your joint?”

About all I could have said for it at that moment was it was clean, but the question’s casual insensibility, even succeeded by his asking if I knew any Greek, made me sad. For Trace and me. When she said some hours later, “You’ll have your way, as always” (which was how she signed her surprising letters), she didn’t mean sacking in that night (for we had no differences there), but rather my not answering her secret that afternoon when I’d stood up on the cold broad boards and gone to the john.

That night Al had four martinis and half a bottle of Burgundy. Then over some of the Bloods’ very special lemon liqueur Bergamot, he and I had a skirmish about how many ships Agamemnon brought against Troy, terminated drily by my remark that the only thing to be said for a college course was that everyone was reading the same thing at the same time. Al went happily up to bed.

Tracy and I were through. Her convexities lived on. We cooperated. I don’t know about the devouring and forgetful invention set forth in novels Bob’s mother was always urging mine to read, where love has died but the body lives on: but ye ordinary gods I confess it was almost the same as usual, time again recoded, lengths mingling, nothing unheard-of yet a strange gratuity, no moving of pillows though some strange waste, but no cigarettes. My tongue was not in my cheek. I wondered if she’d write. Her letters were dreamy and real and guiltless. For a long time I wasn’t aware of Al snoring two doors down, but then I was. He’d forgotten to turn onto his stomach.

: Because you will now, Dom, sleep fast through upwards of fifteen rather quiet years: quiet as if preoccupied or asleep: but in their disappearing act busy proving the locus between triumph and disappointment. Annette’s hair draws away from her husband’s sleeping hand as in one gesture she wakes startled, rises on an elbow, and in the windowed dawn sees at a kitchen table two or three hours’ drive away Al’s mother study his pearl-satin scar blazed straight across the slope of four knuckles, and hears her say she used to dream that in the car crash he lost his fingers and his tongue. “Well, he lost his tryout with the Pirates,” that deep-seated father would remind any who wished to be reminded: until in 1959 (when, Dom, in a volume containing a chance series of joint press conferences, you called Collaboration the secret of the expanding century) that limping father set out parallel to a green cornfield his last yellow truncated cones to mark where the state was completing a short, beautifully black four-lane by-pass, and after that terminal morning in ’59 he continued (but now by his absence) to Remind any who wished to be reminded of anything they wished him (from the grave) to remind them of: by “they” I mean his wife and two daughters, and the desomniac and fancy-cooking daughter-in-law Annette he’d come to like in a manner more satisfying than he loved his scholar-son Al, who passed from a 3.8 “cume” at a state college near home to a grad assistantship in northern California and by way of Beeson’s medieval Latin primer and two symbolic but misguided terms teaching at Contra Costa College conveniently located in nearby San Pablo looped back by way of the Longhorn Renaissance Collection halfway between Austin and Galveston (though he didn’t visit the Chief ET now retired) and then the sights and adjacent sands of beautiful Saint Augustine (though he didn’t visit his Seminole shipmate now in conservation near Naples) — at last (with a good old-fashioned Trivium under his belt) to a berth within range of (though not quite equidistant from) Atlantic beaches, Harvard’s Widener Library, and those narrow enclosing mountains you’ll have to let me loosely call part of the Taconic system.

You preceded me there, Dom, that spring weekend of ’68. You spoke Thursday morning, afternoon, and night, and just as I arrived Friday you left for the Marine Nutrients Lab where rumors of a break-through on phytoplankton efficiency vis-á-vis feces reabsorption had inspired anti-government demonstrations. I visited Al and wife that weekend to measure your fresh absence but also to double-check an inadvertent report from “Pappy” Pound which in my back-going Heights anthro-dig I saw might be strangely structurable if not statable, if I could just find out a thing or two from Al. In memory of my father, who had not been a member, Russell Pound wanted to put me up for Seneca; the least I could do was take the IRT over from Murray Hill to lunch there in an extreme southeast coign of the Heights once or twice a year. The same old polished black hands helped me to sweetbreads, crumb-broiled tomatoes, and popovers; and I calmly smiled to other tables, to old Eben Smith and his permanent committee, and to the drug magnate Werner Vande Land and two of his chess-players, and in the farthest possible vantage from us under the famed Iphetonga Blanket the Presbyterian minister whose son used to beat defensive-minded Hugh Blood time and again on sewer-to sewer pass patterns to Bob and who the January night my father died came right over to us and sat plump and black-suited in my father’s wing chair and looked at the dark lighted harbor and then (for heaven’s sake) asked our permission and said a very short prayer which because of his masculine kindness seemed to me agnostically final and hence honest as I’d never been sure the Christian business itself really was. And that lunchtime at Seneca years later I amused myself by amazing my small, trim host Petty’s Groton “Pappy” with my knowledge of Dallin, for Russell Pound always among the deep-folding rhythms of his self-love forgot that I knew his monograph on that movingly minor sculptor whose bronze of the Indian chief Massasoit at Plymouth Bay not only portrays that great Wampanoag sachem who sold the white settlers the land, but I privately believe looks deeper still to Dallin’s own Utah, which he abandoned for Paris and Boston though never the Navaho and (I’d guess) Shoshone tongues he learned in the ’60’s as a child. “—which is the only time to get your languages,” said Russell Pound, whose sons long ago went off in roughly opposite directions, one to an east Montana spread with a Harvard classmate, the other with equal accuracy to an ad concern in Zurich. But somewhere between reminding me of what it had been like after four years at Harvard to be the only American cox at Oxford and two years later to just miss Columbia Law Review, he’d gratuitously delivered an electrifying fact about what happened after or (depending on your viewpoint) during the party in ’53 whose guests Bob and Petty surprised; and as I split my way head-on through the meaning of that odd fact — namely, a phone call made by Tracy Blood — yet believed I saw it as but one force among forces, and for the moment I could not understand but only savor the neighborhood of (a) vanilla ice cream shrouded in hot thin fudge sauce now icing-brittle, and (b) the cracked skin down one side of the black hand that served it in its silver-plated dish, I put out of my mind why I’d mainly accepted this lunch invitation in Brooklyn ( Breukelen ) Heights (called by the Indians Iphetonga ): namely, to observe once more the Seneca’s cocktail snacks in the Library downstairs to add a note or two to my still unstructured file on Heights hors d’oeuvres — hot versus cold, monochrome versus versicolored (like eggplant compote), plentiful or scanty, protein or carbohydrate, female or male (deviled eggs, Greek olives, with polycollation of these and like indicators to (say) median annual income, proximity to the harbor, summer habitat (owned or rented)). If the relevance of the Seneca to all this was curiously compromised by its public status as a club, Seneca was a situation private and controlled enough for any lab anthropogromer; my old Poly classmate Ven (for Venable) Mead was the full-time manager and had made quite a good thing of it. But calmly receiving in the very heart of my vectoral muscle Russell Pound’s remark about “some sailor” whom Tracy had phoned late that night of the party, I’d known that I must take up as soon as I could the open invitation Al and Annette had extended us to visit them in that college town of theirs.