Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Until Russell Pound had sprung Tracy’s phone call on me, the following rough rule had seemed to obtain: “When there is a key absence at a homogeneously Heights evening, this gap will be centrifugally ignored with such unbroken élan it will cease to exist.” This field theorem was now under stresses I confess it was never designed for. I had to try to resense it. I wrote Annette that I was coming and Ev would try to arrange to come with me.

Dom, I now wanted from Al (a) exactly where he’d spent the evening of that party I didn’t take him to, and (b) exactly what Tracy had told him. For he must be that “sailor” (whose identity Russell Pound wouldn’t have known even if he had known that the phone call that late evening in ’53 had been made to my and my mother’s apartment). But exact or not, I felt after my six-hour trip north to Al and Annette’s that among these evening fragrances of tree-flesh and damp bushes and bare shingles and the air that made even the oil drips in Al’s garage smell wild and fresh, my arrival wasn’t simply mine. For, like the blandly unmistakable tremors of Sister Deirdre Reardon’s then incipient move to revolve the Presidency of Rotary Intercontinental not to a Dickens man but to one of her own Corrolarian Order, vectors were loose in this college town’s spring weekend of ’68 beyond the rein of the dialectic spread in spite of myself by my own hermit cavalry.

I drove to Al and Annette’s seeking no less than a fresh equation, not armed with the mere fact served up to me from his memorial larder by Petty’s dad, to wit: “There they were, Bob and Petty, months abroad, just back from Salzburg, Munich, Geneva, Paris, Oxford; and so after a day and a half home why they calmly wreck their own party and don’t come back to Brooklyn for a fortnight. Petty’s note to me two days later absolutely refused to blame Bob. And oh she rambled, Cy — how Bob missed Europe and she didn’t except the skiing in Austria — more coffee? — then some damn thing about Tracy Blood getting some sailor on the phone by accident late the night of that party, and being ter ribly upset by what he said — Cal, Hal, Mal, Val, I forget — Petty was rambling in a way that any alert parent would sense was defensive, Cy — oh Dred, can I sign my… thanks — it was Bob’s stunt missing that fiasco, not Petty’s. There are things you don’t do, the rules don’t have to be written down, and no words in a pleasant Wellesley hand mailed to Pappy with the right postage can hide the fact. By God, Cy, that awful party. I remember you . Your father understood those simple laws and he wasn’t brought up with a silver spoon in spite of that rich cousin of his. The nicest man I ever knew, your father. He’d have been proud you’re a social scientist. He would have been a professor of chemistry somewhere, who knows maybe Harvard, but — you know the story, he chose safe self-sacrifice and all that. Could have been anything. Charming man.”

I resent transition, Dom, though I’m glad your Hungarian son-in-law told the Irish lieutenant to leave lights on.

Professor Al was too keenly aware some of his countryish colleagues thought of him as handy. The department chairman had called for help just before I drove punctually in Friday night and I scarcely got onto the back porch and through the kitchen door to shake hands and kiss Annette and their eldest girl who was still up, before I was right back in the driver’s seat backing out Al’s driveway wishing he had let me catch up on him at least by one little lemon-peeled vodka martini on the rocks and passing a motorcycle I hadn’t seen up on Al’s grass standing near a big bush while Al explained that “Baba” Babcock couldn’t open the trunk of his car that was full of andirons and Turkish prayer rugs from an auction that afternoon and phoned to see if Al could jimmy it.

Al said old Babcock had missed all three of your major appearances, Dom. Al asked had I seen the Yamaha back in the driveway by the lilac? that was your fault, Dom; and Al said the bright traffic jam we hit just under the hill leading into Main was also thanks to you — but then he said no he was stretching a point, and I wondered if the point was that I was something of an authority on you, Dom — but I hadn’t thought Al knew that.

At his direction I tried to back so I could make a U-turn and cut around to Babcock’s by way of Loop Lane bypassing Main, but the cars that had come along in the last half minute were so tight behind me I couldn’t wave them back.

“What about the Yamaha?” I asked feeling chilly smelling that sweet liquor.

“Student. Useless mother. Fast pacifist named Vance Greatorex. Pop him one he’ll turn the other handlebar. And sue you. He’s litigating his way through college. He was chewing on a one-inch harmonica in class so I threw him out. Said he wasn’t playing, just breathing. He came over today to be nice to me; he said he could understand how I’d missed the point about him and our distinguished lecturer too and a couple of other things, but anyone could see I was a real person, not some snot from Harvard. He didn’t know how to leave, so he’s still there in our living room. Annette’s probably feeding him your dinner by now, which shouldn’t goad his abstemious gones any more than the long seat of his zenocycle. These people think we’re boring; what are they planning to think about in 1980? This one’s kind enough to say he finds me interesting. But as a person.”

The fancy pickup in front of us moved at last and I stalled.

“Well what were we thinking about fifteen years ago?” I said. Three fellows running down the hill veered in front of my car as I got it started again.

“Not being interrupted. And learning something. Being decent. And I guess beating each other over the head, too.”

Dom, listen, no one in this building of ours seemed to know what the NS button on the elevator panel meant till I asked the blowsy Austrian in her pink and blue garment dangling her postbox key irritably as we went down one morning. She pressed NS, shrugged, and said it meant Non-Stop but it didn’t work now, else the damn thing if there was someone in it would never stop at a floor so low as hers. At the first floor we saw only the bright lobby in the car’s diamond window, for the door did not open and instead we started up again. The Austrian woman said, “Have mercy.”

This recollection may make you think we’ve reached the phase of our confession at which the elevator’s guillotine-like counterweight gets untracked, or the hoist cable breaks at last and the centrifugal governor fails to close the safety jaws upon the guide rail — at which, in short, life, mass, the uncooked reality, student bulges, effluent spontaneities engulf me. No, not exactly. But in fact a boy and a girl arriving from our rear do suddenly get into the back seat of my car as cars behind honk. Al protests irrelevantly, “Hey look, we’re in a hurry to go help out a friend who’s stuck.” I swiftly take the space behind the pickup ahead, then rockingly U-turn into the opposite lane and head for the Loop shortcut that will take us to Babcock’s. The girl leans forward at my shoulder and my vectoral muscle picks up her insoluble age and detects some inner soap she cannot control that keeps rising in her pores; and ye gods in the field of her unperfumed hair I can smell she’s nice, and nicely spoiled, and find this even in her incredulous complaint, “Hey where you going? the action’s up on Main.”

Therefore when I came rocking free of the turn I braked so hard a car gunning down the hill away from it all had to bear half into a ditch beside the dark orange of a brick dorm to miss my back bumper. I said, “Walk it,” but as I turned a speaking profile to the back seat and the boy leaned to say something to the girl whom in the glow from up the hill I now almost saw in the lower right angle of my eye, the driver of the other car got out, and as Al said, “Why didn’t you knuckleheads walk it in the first place?” the girl said, “That’s all right,” and the boy, “Go baby,” and I did.