Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Quite late, I was singing “The Banks of the Wabash” with four elders, including Bob’s dad, who kept his hand resting on his mahogany Tantalus just where it barred into place a very special decanter; and thanks to me (though I’d forgotten I knew that song so well) we did not quite forget the least memorable of the Dreiser brothers’ immortal lyrics. On my way out I at last was introduced to Uncle Victor, and he said, “This is a wonderful party my niece dragged me to.” Hugh and Tracy were hunting for her earrings and when Freddy Smith on his hands and knees jocularly said, “How could you lose both of them?” Tracy said she might have lost one down in the kitchen.

Wait: my only self should have told me the vectors that night in ’53 weren’t merely many (as I simply forgot, thinking by turns of Tracy and Al and by sub-turns of whether she loathed me or loved me and whether he (wherever he was) was put out or not); no, the vectors were also zipping in to many centers besides me — even in some sense to all centers save me, which understand is not to grant other people there necessarily a vectoral muscle.

So whether or not Petty or Bob told any of the three parents about my odd phone conversation with Bob that morning, no one can say I didn’t do my part that night. The party might have turned into one of those Scythian obsequies Herodotus tells of in ghastly detail, an entourage of real men and even horses fresh from the taxidermist and lined up (propped up) outside the dead king’s newly occupied tomb.

As I set foot in the venerable vestibule above fourteen brownstone steps and felt the fresh dark air, I was grabbed by Russell Pound: why in hell was I leaving, it was only eleven, and would I lunch at Seneca next week. (Sure I would.) And that Tammuz whom the Goddess Ishtar’s love was fatal to, what was he?

I said, “He was the son of Ningishzida, Lord of the Wood of Life, and grandson of Ninazu, Lord of Aquadivination” (a term I’d created on one of Cadbury’s exams) “and Tammuz himself was Lord of the Harvest.” But this didn’t exactly satisfy Pappy Pound, who in his tailored blazer was quite a specimen for his age: “But didn’t Ishtar become Venus?”

“Of course,” I said, “and as for Tammuz, his harvest in Ishtar was more than corn and less than sacred.”

Pappy Pound smiled at me with reflective sentiment. He’d been startled by my father’s death, my father had admired him and talked to him about everything under the sun, and of course we had an inscribed copy of his Dallin. I said, “Don’t worry, they’re going to be very happy.” He said irrelevantly, “Your father was a very fair man.”

At eight p.m. last night you began your address to the Undersea Press Club by being interrupted by a heckler. To his challenge that you didn’t know what the hell you were, ideologue or father-of-your-country or artist or man or what, you replied that in twenty-four hours each person present was to switch on any size TV screen, concentrate on its center simply as a point in a grid, and for any set number of seconds “please fit to the measured length between you and that half-tone or colored picture-element the concept that my unnatural son Richard, a mutual actuary specializing in industrial probability, is not looking at the same point you are.” There was glad, clapping laughter at your deceptively spontaneous retort but all this got into the Times today rather because at the end you revealed that because a plan of yours for ending the war had been contracted by a major weekly you wouldn’t present it tonight except in the hint that it would use (or perhaps even be ) the Energy released by (a) the dissemination of a certain idea, and (b) all mass-chance juxtapositions with that idea.

Your old Admiral portable was off when I came here tonight. Or is it by now last night? But, like water dripping, the phone system was blinking my attention to your TV and thence no doubt to the challenge I have I believe now just faced, for between “challenge” and “I” I disappeared into your kitchen, took your receiver off the TV, and hung it up. (So we don’t get that constant plank-plank now.)

Well. So your son’s a square, measuring so many annual dollars up each side: that’s no cause to kill yourself, albeit without mess, though I haven’t checked other rooms. Divorced wife Dorothy and daughter Lila, they’re part of this, too. But I am not.

Except as receiver of some compounding energy which is now gathering through me through this place.

If you have come to life somewhere maybe now that you can you’ll phone here.

But just after the first half of this confession was stolen, the detective tenor said as if in reply, “Oh it’s got to be ruled a suicide,” and then our super’s deep voice said, “I can’t believe it. He wouldn’t.”

The quality paperback on Egypt in his ripped hip pocket gives him more mileage than The Autobiography of Malcolm X , which the beautiful giraffe in jeans asked him about in the basement laundry room yesterday. “God,” she said, “I was in the middle of Malcolm in April when my husband and I you know left for Greece and I couldn’t put it down even to skim some book about the islands I bought for the plane.” The super said he didn’t want to discuss the Malcolm book on account of that low-life stuff in the first half, he couldn’t see why they stuck all that in—“Why that’s the best part,” our lovely companion interrupted — and “this here,” the super slapped the book in his hip pocket, “is more relevant to our real problems.” Why, there was a Shadow Clock the Egyptians invented—“talk about your Greeks!”—it was over one thousand years before the Greeks got wind of this clock and stole the idea.

The beautiful homemaker had changed the subject to begin with and now she changed it back, to the pilot flame in the dryer: did the super know how to relight it? “Oldest clock in the world,” he said to me, “two sticks all it was, set the crosspiece toward the east first thing in the morning, read the hours on the lengthways piece, then turn her round at noon so the cross-stick’s facing west.”

“The original clock-watcher,” said the cameleopardess lounging against the dryer and bending me a smile as the super bemusedly pried up the panel right by her tight haunch and moved his lighter back in under.

“And Thutmose the Third to you,” I said to her. The super brought the panel down again and said, “That’s who it was all right, and that shadow clock ain’t all he’s famous for either.”

Mileage on a Rootloose Outboard let’s call Bob’s memoirs. If I’m to leave them to him, better I not retaste Annette’s dense, medium-rare beef liver of ’68 in order to prophesy in rich retrospect that the upwards of three thousand dollars Bob got hold of to buy special, fine herring nets would return him a surprise. Maybe I’ll leave him to tell that one, though his kind of patience is not for memoirs but for the rough interruptions life courts and absorbs. I’ll let him explain, if he will, at length (though let me, on the keyboard of my exclamation-less Junior Corona, copy for him): how riding adrift slowly on the fragile night lid of his cove, and all alone, he saw down past the gunwale and then out everywhere the space below bursting with luminous bodies, and how also their slippery phosphorescence held him off with the odd funny-bone feel you got from John B.’s Christmas magnets when you forced repellent ends together, but beautiful, in particular and in plenty: how instead of losing his money, his gross on one haul trebled it, even if he did have to wait a while, relying on islander reports; how with some experienced help — but this first try acting instinctively on what he’d heard said — he walled his weighted nets across the inner cove and at the crisis, moving two boats quickly together completed the trap’s landward side and commenced narrowing; how the company steamer showed just after sunset and ten thousand dollars of big silver herring were sucked by a steady old engine up out of the cove into the two lighted holds.