Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

“You know,” I said to Annette the next noon without fair transition, “the morning of the party in ’53 that I didn’t take Al to, I phoned Bob.”

“Yes?”

“And said I’d heard the good news about his father pulling strings so Bob could apply late to business school or, if he’d rather, he had a standing invitation from a firm in Wall Street to enter a training program. Bob didn’t say much, and then I said I’d see him that night, and he said, ‘Yes?’ and after he’d answered my question about how Petty was holding up, he said he had to go out, and he said a rather abrupt goodbye. He must have gone to work on his mother to find out about the surprise party.”

“What party?” said Annette. “I never caught up — who’s Bob?”

We heard Al’s car and then its doors — well, we’re all time-warped centers of attractive force and last night old Al had indeed been bugged by Annette and Greatorex and Baba Babcock, and that was that — and now the three girls came in through the kitchen and when Al appeared he said — to Annette—“Babcock got it open himself.”

But old Fred Eagle said over the phone to me when he was in New York on business around the time Ev and I got married, “Annette’s a witch, she knows things she’s never heard. A beautiful witch, mind, and a rattling good cook.” When Fred phoned I’d been mulling over an argument with Ev’s Ted that hadn’t been quite as understanding as we both pretended — but I may have thought impromptu hospitality from us would merely interrupt Fred’s intramural quest for Hypatia. He phoned just before he left — how long he’d stayed I don’t know for I’d been living those weeks on another time — and as he was hanging up he remembered he wanted me to recommend a broker and without thinking I gave him Bob’s firm right in Portland. For which I have never received credit.

But life isn’t like school; yet now I know I welcomed that unlikeness ignorantly when I belonged (I thought) mind and soul to corpulent Dr. Cadbury and wiry, hypnotic Dr. Cohn. I wrote a better hand in those days, though never good enough for my copybook-educated step-grandfather (Zo-an > Zon > John) who revered Poly because it boasted several Ph.D.’s.

But Al never dropped Fred Eagle. Did business with him year in year out. And Fred may have done business with Bob’s firm in Portland. On some excursion with Fred — why not? — maybe up north at a shop full of old bottles when thanks to Fred Al snatched for two bucks a mint first of U.S. Grant’s 2-vol. Personal Memoirs for Professor Babcock — may not Fred have mentioned Bob? Why should this matter to me, when so much of my current energy turns about the vibrations of your American greatness, Dom, who now like a retreating muse demur at “The Cannibals” and insist I might have found a better name for them. I’ve really used your living room, but it would take ingenuity even I don’t possess to show that I caused your suicide. What will such guilt matter tomorrow morning when as the first forkfuls of soft pure scrambled eggs pass her wind-cracked lips the no-less-lovely Darla discovers your death in the inner spaces of the Times and phones in her prediction that because you were “flirting with a repertoire of other, minor winds such as the sexicide of skydiving, Japanese undersea husbandry of the algae porphyra umbilicalis , or what he himself called ‘the honest gut and gentle perspicuity’ of a suburban Gary neighborhood that swallowed Goldwater unanimously,” you Dom ignored “the one big wind” and would “ultimately” have in some sense killed yourself anyway — a syntax Newsweep’s Prophecy Desk will jump on with howls of rapine recognition.

I’d almost forgotten where I am and can only guess that had there been sounds outside your peephole I’d have fielded them. One of my fellow panel pundits — say, the famous Dr. Polly Ester Sitz in her short, Persianelle-scented sheath — may if she reads even what is left of this think I gave you a heartfelt push toward suicide so as at last to have a firm locus for my own conclusions about your identity. Your face Dom all know as well as you (though few know so well as I your major pronouncements, especially the one or two you seemed to have abandoned unexplained, like your remark at the airport the morning after your defenestration that America’s an only child).

The face I refer to one supposes to be the seven-by-five-foot black-and-white photo-face leaning against the wall here behind me. It is miraculously a painting. Up close you can see. Dot bought it for love of you.

Newsweep punned, of course, on “poring over” this painted face of yours… “from some Sea of Tranquillity southeast of one broad nostril, and then dead north (at the mercy of the famous though now absent grin) a liverish pit the artist has blown up into The Great Salt Dimple.”

Immigrant eyes, slanting east from Vilna but looking west with the shrewd trust that in the twinkling blank of the great American field your brand of acquisitiveness will work. The more I think, the more I trouble myself to be glad those famous eyes aimed to acquire the whole land, not just the baked or grilled. But the more I look around over my shoulder at this hugely candid photo in paint, the more I measure. Nose, eyes, short convex pugnacious chin silently collabor so I no longer can take for granted personality or, almost, even person. Your reference to this painter last night seemed to me to take back the admiration with which some months ago you found in this kind of painting from photographs an instance of “Field”: i.e., “Field” as in your “Neutraline Equatics”: a mode that lowers, eases, even coolly ousts ancient hectic hierarchies that have set the mass of us or our parts discretely off from each other or from the mass of our setting. Yet my eyes cry out, Can all that other life I know about subside into some rankless field and lose its poignant fussy orders? Maybe I never knew what you were talking about. Yes, what about my step-grandfather on his desperately discrete vacation up north (where he was born saying First Things First) as he goes back to the barn to get a stone for the hand-mower blades: Or my father upstairs in the stone heart house on a Sunday morning making neat ABC outline notes for his Market Letter, getting the priorities right. Dom, I’ve closed my eyes, turning away from this amazing picture; then I’ve turned back opening them, and for a moment I saw you there but also the massive terrain, at most now parafacial, and with it some of your trademark words last night (as reported in this morning’s paper). “The secret of concord now is that it doesn’t greatly matter if you disappear from the scene— if you can come to feel this…” And like your other words these are to be identified with your now renowned last name.

“What a pile that is,” said Hugh Blood one Sunday twenty-five years ago trying to get into the conversation decisively and thinking Bob and I and the minister’s son and Trace would agree, for Petty had said that her father’s “friend” Mrs. Bolla’s first name Mara meant “the sea.” Petty said to Hugh, “Why not?” and Bob said, “What a great name. It’s better than Perpetua any day” and I began to feel that the day was turning out not so bad after all — my father had been too blunt at lunch telling me I wasn’t going to the movies on a Sunday. Now I said to Hugh, “What about me: I’m named for a famous king in Herodotus, ask my father,” but while the minister’s son slowly said, “Who’s Herodotus?” Tracy said quickly and quietly, “You are not, you’re named for your uncle Cooley,” and her eyes out of that weird shyness of hers got teary. Then Bob said his mother had had their new cat Romeo fixed and his father got her mad by just calling him Cat. Bob said he wouldn’t mind having a famous name like mine; then he changed his opinion and said No it was better to get an ordinary Christian name like Bob; the one you had to live up to was your last name. Petty, with a kind of hesitant, proud seriousness, said, “Yes. I think that’s right.” Then my mother called her and Tracy to come into the kitchen.