Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

At the edge of the ditch he stops short pretending to lose his balance. He whips Old Glory back and forth: “We had a parade before you come up from the city.”

He thinks my parents are rich.

“We had a Decoration Day parade,” I say.

“We had the Legion.” But in Heatsburg, not here in the village.

“My dad took me to Fifth Avenue and you could hardly see the soldiers.”

Al drops the flag into the ditch. “We don’t want that fucker.”

Back on the road cruising and coasting, he calls over his shoulder to me did I know what the Marine Committee in 1777 said the thirteen stars on the blue background meant and he quickly adds he does not mean the thirteen states— that’s not what he means. Bending sharp left across the road to come around at me broadside, “A new constellation” he calls without giving me a chance not to answer; and rising I press ahead like a slow-motion runner as Al cuts skidding in just behind, and then coasting I call out, “Sure, all you got to do is look at the flag to see that. Hey, how fast you going?” The next year my parents sent me to camp thirty miles from our summer house for three weeks of July, which deprived All of a pretty fast pitcher to practice catching, and when I got home Al let himself seem impressed one night I dragged him away from a sink full of dishes in an empty house and showed him Arcturus and Spica to the west and green Vega overhead.

Careful even at nine or ten not to be lured into discussing with Al’s father my advantages, like private school, the Planetarium, the Yanks, the subway, the docks, or summers in the country, I did want to be the man’s friend. And not because I was, as my mother more than once put it, “devoted” to his son. When she and I drove in to Heatsburg we might pass Al’s mysteriously free-lance father parked by the lake chatting up to a telephone lineman, or in the middle of nowhere directing traffic around a big yellow earthmover or along a line of marker-cones, or going the other way with a couple of dingy refrigerators in the back or some bags of feed I knew he had no personal use for. In his house his tone with me — while I smoothly appropriated my father’s views on Landon or Vandenberg — was like a host’s equality, adult to adult, even proprietor to patron. Then Al’s father with one foot up on a leather ottoman would make some remark that seemed instead to surround me with the scale of all our differences—“Dad takin’ the train up Fridays?” But at once he’d resume that incurious equality unsettling in that it seemed to relegate Al to the corner of the divan where without a word to us he worked neats foot into his DiMaggio glove or as if to remind me snapped a hardball into the steep hole of his catcher’s mitt, but unsettling too, though I hadn’t the words for this then, in that the father seemed to keep the son incommunicado in a kind of class childhood. Al’s dad was always arriving or leaving in his pickup, the tailgate hooked on one side, the bed strewn with tow chain, wrenches, match-books, sand, a sneaker, grease-tracked pages of The Heatsburg Hour , one of whose weekly issues in June would carry, thanks to a local lady who played sonatas with my mother, a social note to tell subscribers my mother, my father, and I were once again summering in the area.

Dom, here are some probable facts: you died tonight, I think shortly before I got to you, even if I didn’t get to you but only to the place you left; and now I’m filling you in.

Ev is so alive for me she’s virtually here in your late apartment carrying against her substantial hip my own small Emma, who can’t be here because she’s down in her own dark crib asleep but who holds her arms out to me and designates in her low-pitched voice, “Dad-dy” as Ev’s deep-turquoise eyes stare and she asks, “Why would you want to write to somebody dead?” Yet Ev’s tone is not a woman’s blank challenge, but simple query. It’s not a question she’d ever have had to ask her first husband. He, I may add here, cost her the mitigating status of widowhood by accidentally not dying till after the divorce was final. But I, it could be argued, gave her what she always wanted, a little girl. But I offered dark-haired, blue-eyed Ev exactly what else? You may say, Luck, a new list of friends… dot dot dot. And I should add, not subtract, that she believes me to be funny, and this after all is something, the mortar for a bridge of sighs, in private I embrace you Ev, your doom.

In the affectionate household of my only childhood I was used to seeing hands held, embraces, my father interfering with my mother at the sink, even if (granted) this isn’t the whole story. Al was called “Alvin” by his father, “Brother” by his mother; he was held upside down by the one, clouted and sometimes kissed by the other — pulled, pushed, elbowed, sometimes kissed by his older sisters, whom he clouted back and hurt. However, though I wouldn’t have said it — certainly not in one of my overpopulated, unnecessarily clear sentences that made Al’s father shake his head and smile — morning, afternoon, or evening I never saw Al’s parents touch. The summer I was nine — which ended with my father ending his vacation slowly nodding to the radio’s bad news across which cycles of static broke inside my imagination like swells upon a half-submerged sub from whose open conning tower Chamberlain grayly spoke — Fridays often I’d stand with Al around five by the low, sagging armchair and watch his dad do two puzzles at the bottom of The Heatsburg Hour’s comic strips. Even before this singular man had given up on the word-puzzle and gone on to the other, Al would be after me to have a catch or come put mustard water down to bring up the worms we were going to fish with tomorrow. Instead, I stood by that armchair staring at the other puzzle and forming a dozen pictures in my head — Charles Atlas in a still shot hauling a train, Bob and I roller-skating on the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian boardwalk, a city tug’s taut hauser squeaking under strain — and I smelled what I felt must come straight from this country father’s muscles: sawdust and motor oil and something else that carried sweat in it but so overmassed the dry sweat that what was left was the intimate schedule of the man, not at all that unmanly B.O. threatened by our athletic director at Poly in his talk “Personal Hygiene Comes First” or embodied in radio ads for Lifebuoy Soap by the eerie promise of that two-note harbor foghorn I and my city schoolfriends echoed in our changing voices. Then Al’s mother said from the kitchen that he wasn’t warming any worms with her mustard because he was going to wash up for supper; and Al’s father, whose stomach suddenly moaned, did not look at him straddling the window sill whispering Come on ; and as I watched Al’s father draw the last line of that second puzzle, Al wasn’t there at the sill in the corner of my eye, his sneakers were pounding away around the house. I smelled hamburgers crusting, and now the humid honey of corn. No one said anything to me and I knew I should go.

My mother and I would meet the seven-thirty and have dinner when we three got back from the Hillsdale station. And at (as my father put it) the crack of dawn, Al would be outside our glistening screen door very quietly asking, “Aincha had yer breakfer’ yet?” The fresh space waiting for us outside was huge because it was passionately known. But I seldom in those days stopped to think that the village was Al’s year-round home.

How did the authorities get here tonight, Dom? You said you smoked because Berkeley’s Sheriff Madigan gave you high blood pressure, but the New York Narcotics Squad hasn’t time to go hunting for pot. Here in your long living room no mess marks the spot, no contour of your fallen form. (I did not count on your suicide tonight.) But why assume you did it in the living room? Will it become necessary for me to look elsewhere? Will it be an open-ended contour? Will tonight be?