Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

The girl put her hand on my shoulder and said, “That’s tremendous. I mean, it’s very sad. You don’t know how profound that is.”

“If you do, I don’t,” I said without thinking. “But ‘Freddy’ said—”

Al interrupted, “I’d give my left cullion to have gone to private school.”

“—‘Freddy’ pointed at Pat Breen, the skinniest palest kid in our class who hated all sports except ping pong and never took a shower there never even took off his underwear, and ‘Freddy’—only his name wasn’t quite ‘Freddy’ yet — pointed at Pat and said, ‘Yeah, well I’m no little Lord Fauntleroy,’ and that feisty little Breen snapped back at him like a prepared answer in Mr. Cohn’s Solid class, ‘My name isn’t Bartholemew, so don’t talk to me’ and even afterward, long after we stopped laughing, years after, Bart Smith was known as ‘Freddy’ Smith—”

“I don’t get it,” said the boy in my back seat, and I heard more clicking.

“Freddy Bartholemew played the part of little Lord Fauntleroy, and ‘Freddy’ Smith’s real name was Bartholemew. His twin brother, the stingy one, loved that day, but ‘Freddy’ didn’t do anything to Breen, he was always a pretty nice guy, not as well-coördinated as his brother. Tracy said he was too nice.” I hoped this would do the trick.

“Wait,” Al half-rolled toward me and pointed a cigarette ember in my face. Something special, the boy in the back seat was right. “Too fast, too fast, wait…” Al sounded as if he’d been drinking again.

“Yes,” said the girl, “much too fast. It’s a different generation.”

“I belong to the Korean generation,” said Al.

The Cannibals were in the middle — or it seemed as if it ought to be — of a number which was essentially a jaw-breaking jangle-twang like drawing a giant raw comb down wet fir trees that were made out of live generator windings. My blood sugar was low and I thought about Annette and a scent on her as close to Persianelle as country Topaz Neons are to city, and I wondered if some of those times Al bombed stone-chips at me up at the quarry his missing me so close had been error not accuracy.

“Don’t interrupt,” I said to the girl.

Al said, “Wait. The name was Tracy. You always thought I tried to slap one on her — yes, Tracy: isn’t she the one you didn’t marry?”

The boy said, “What a way to identify someone.”

“Indemnify you mean,” said Al and pointed his ember at me again. “You stayed in bed that Sunday and she got up when I was trying to pour myself an Alka-Seltzer, which made me drunk all over again. We met in the hall between the two johns, she didn’t seem so tall in her bathrobe, I thought I’d said something stupid the night before and drunk too much of her father’s Cherry Heering—”

“—it was lemon Bergamot—”

“—and she fixed me a second Alka-Seltzer, which made me horny I remember, and V-8 with Worcestershire, and dropped eggs, and bacon she’d broiled — I remember that — and then she couldn’t stop, she made me a stack of buckwheat cakes which I ate after all, and I still had an idea I’d been stupid last night — about Agamemnon’s ships but I couldn’t recall if I’d stated the number or said we didn’t know the number—” Al interrupted himself with a little intimate camaraderie: “Oh listen I don’t know if it’s fourteen ships or fifty-six but she just kept bringing me nums out of the kitchen and sitting down with me and putting those long elbows on the table and watching, and I kept cleaning up the plates that had a couple of hunters on them, and a white fence going out of sight over a hill, and pheasant and woodcock, horses and a fox, and as I was dying to get away upstairs down you came looking bleached and dumb”

(—“That’s very good,” the girl said as if surprised to be amused; the boy murmured, “Outa sight—”)

“and you ”—Al’s ember brightened as he took a drag—“you acted jealous as hell.”

“You never wrote to thank Tracy.”

“You know I’m no correspondent. Anyway I didn’t have her address at Smith.”

I now knew that the whirring, even friction in back — not the new crackle I was sure was a brown paper bag (out of which to my anthropolvectory defenders came the dry warm meat of a peanut butter unmistakably unhydrogenated, whole, organic, and without dextrose — a Natural peanut butter falsely labeled “Home-made”) — was at least one small tape recorder, maybe two. But because Al didn’t catch on I didn’t mind and decided we’d give the kids a real generational scoop, though their grasping my own anthroponoiarc interest was out of the question but in any case beside the point. And Dom you don’t want to hear my verbatim log with every motion on the seat covers, each sigh, click, or stomach static. You recently professed little interest in Space. You said it was what people did to each other in their own rec rooms, kitchens, and johns that interested you.

My opening had worked, but as Al and I entered it — I aware of the busy spindles behind us, he (I think) not — I was again unsure I’d discovered just what, in our joint past, was bugging him. All this matters, Dom. All confessions are fantastically banal — even how I may have mildly affected your end; even how I got together that equation whose form Pappy Pound’s gratuitous news had shown me I ought now to seek.

Al sat up straight and said Annette was phoning the Babcocks by now, but I saw he was thinking about what he’d, to his own surprise, said.

Now look: the night of Bob and Petty’s party, Fall ’53, my mother was going to dinner at the Vande Lands’. She was taking her violin, naturally, and there was going to be an extra man, a Dutch engineer who she’d heard was an accomplished pianist and chess player. When Al turned up at our place in his Coast Guard uniform with his blue canvas bag saying he hadn’t phoned for fear there’d be no one home, I told him he didn’t want to spend his 72-hour pass watching Mrs. Vande Land’s candles drip or hearing Mr. Vande Land brag how the one time Russ Pound had been so rash as to invite him to play court tennis he’d run the pants off Russ without even knowing the rules. And I told Al he didn’t want, either, to sit around listening to a bunch of older people tell him what a nice man my father had been. Al was in the shower when my mother blew in late. She’d bought a new dress she said was all wrong, she never should have taken the minister’s wife’s advice and gone to the shop in Greenwich Village when, if she couldn’t get over to Bonwit’s, Martin’s right here in Brooklyn on Fulton Street had never failed her, she could have taken the bus from Boro Hall or even walked. Her face had broken out again on the way home on the subway — something new in the last year or so — and she was late leaving for the party because she was swabbing her forehead with milk. She had just time to shake hands with Al and say she’d see him in the morning, and then I walked her to the Vande Lands’. My priorities thus ranged, I had something to eat at Nino’s dark bar on Montague that no one I knew on the Heights would ever have gone into. Then I sloped off to the disastrous Welcome Home party at Bob’s parents’. Al had said he guessed he’d go to Broadway and try for standing room.

Why tell him I was afraid if he came to the party for Bob and Petty he’d get his back up: up against Perpetua’s father’s neat gazeteer queries about Heatsburg and environs; up against Bob’s father’s blue morocco copy of Gray’s letters (as indeed my back was for five long minutes that very night jabbering to Bill Smith about how glad I was my otherwise meaningless heart murmur exempted me from the Korean thing, while Bill, who was headed for Newport OCS and explained the sextant to me, said three times despite my interruption that he assumed he’d make j.g. before his three years were up); or later in the evening up against “The Banks of the Wabash” harmonized by Mr. Blood, Hugh, and others before the hearth which Al’s husky bass would successfully have joined but from which Al would know himself excluded as exactly as the moment’s mellowness was vague. If Tracy’s phone call had told Al too much, then he would figure I’d spared him that party because I didn’t quite trust my four-year Coast Guard enlistee from Heatsburg to have a good time. He wouldn’t have known anyone except me. And Tracy.