Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

I happen to know that this boomerang adventure eased things between Bob and his father.

(Elsewhere in tonight’s often short-circuit field, that tough gruff gentleman heard from Russell Pound at Seneca’s Sunday night Family Pot Luck Buffet (who had it from Mrs. Bolla who got it from Petty who had it from me) that Bob needed various thousands of dollars for the herring nets; so Bob’s father phoned Bob station-to-station to offer a non-interest loan).

For after I’d told Bob’s father that Bob could have been class president if he’d campaigned the spring before, Bob’s father challenged Bob on the matter: but this uneasy affection was received by Bob with such triumphant silence that his old man phoned me one night saying what was up with Bob, he was still planning on applying to Princeton, wasn’t he? But though Bob had seemed to deliberately throw away that boomerang, he kept mine on his wall several weeks, I guess for his father to see. At school other guys were impressed by Bob’s laconic confidence — his views on first dates with Catholic girls versus Jewish girls, and on what Torger Tokle’s record at Iron Mountain had been; and because of Bob some of us thought seriously for several weeks of becoming seismologists on the west coast. To Bob class office was at best beside the point, he was a leader anyway. Akkie Backus told Bob that during lacrosse season he’d prefer Bob not to waste his time even on occasional contributions to the school paper. Bob’s father was afraid that because of wrestling he’d end up at Lehigh.

“They certainly waited long enough,” said Bob as the Land Rover’s lights went on and we heard the motor. Bob stared at the steamer’s running lights so neatly independent out there off the promontory.

“He a neighbor?” I asked, referring to the Land Rover.

“Him?” Bob murmured, moving down off the ledge. “He’ll talk your head off. Married into an old Portland family. Ever hear of the Deerings?”

We were on the beach now and Bob was shoving a thin log under the bow to roll the rowboat down. He laughed. “Damned if I’d ask him over tonight.” On the beach the Land Rover backed around and swung toward the island road. “’f he knew he’s missing a herring haul,” Bob chuckled, “Jesus he’ll talk your head off.”

But I’ve said Land Rover elsewhere tonight, Dom. Who was it I said meant to buy one? That famous vehicle appeared in those pages your psychiatrist son-in-law took from this antic table together with a typewriter repair ticket and no doubt a sly slip or two of your pen.

The white phone’s been sounding in the kitchen.

It was Fred Eagle the Land Rover Fred Eagle. Is this the same vehicle? Footsteps to the elevator, no doubt fingers to the button — finger tips —eyes to the articulator, and then distinctly vague shuffling: nothing for three seconds but my phone still going off like an occulting alarm clock: another shuffle: are they kissing out there listening to this apartment ring? and perhaps each independently determined not to end their kiss at least till that phone stops. But if the elevator comes? The fine for tampering with your mailbox — if mere use is tampering — equals what Bob borrowed for his nets not of course allowing for inflation.

Bob dragged the roller out and down again to the stern. “He’d have had himself a couple three belts and told us what a lot of trouble his Land Rover turned out to be, and then told us how to get these herring.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“You know, we should have had him over. He’s a very funny man, and that’s something.”

“It was him or us,” said Darla in ’69 the morning of the Friday Bob flew down to New York and less than two days after your defenestration, “it was a live dichotomy. He wanted to upstage us for his own sake but he let himself down, he got confused. He poured himself some of our wine — well I didn’t really mind, the ed and anthro departments sent us four jugs of Paisano and we should probably have boycotted it.” As she spoke to me in New York, Bob was packing for the plane in Maine and he and Robby were arguing whether the noise cone came from the plane’s bow or tail, a dispute confused at first because Bob thought Robby was talking — now they’re talking out there as the elevator arrives — about a nose cone, and terminally interrupted when Robby said as he left his parents’ bedroom, Well anyway Bob wasn’t going by supersonic to New York, so who cared.

“A boy I just broke up with,” said Darla, “was there with his zoom to photograph us holding the ninth floor and the crowd down below. He poured himself more wine and I said, Cool it, Ed, and took away his cup, I don’t know why he let me, we weren’t some fraternity party, I said. And Ed and I were just having it out, and he’s saying Darley you’re absurd and me saying our personal relationship was irrelevant to the overriding issue, when the great man was suddenly standing there, in a suit with a vest. One of my girls, Haya Watt, got stagestruck and told my guards outside to let him in.

“Nothing was negotiable, I said, so he laid a hundred-dollar bill on top of the dean’s secretary’s dicta-pol and said it was a contribution to the party. I told him to keep it, he’d need it for his own political career and he said would I meet him in Trinity Churchyard, Broadway and Wall, day after tomorrow — that’s today, isn’t it? — he was filming a TV spot he said between Al and Bob. Al and Bob? That’s what he said. And Ed said, What’s this Al and Bob? Well, some of the kids were settling down to enjoy him, and I had to go check the security of the rest of the floor and find out who let him past eight, but he was half fighting us half charming us — like, he said stop trying to purify and start studying just what it was that was supposed to be being contaminated, like what did we know about plankton and he went and hugged one of the guys who goes around in an old Arab skirt and a headband and told him not to think he was a freak but study, study, study — review the Cheyenne transvestites and their relation to the regular bravery, then he wheeled around and grinned and punched a fat kid in the shoulder and said to Ed, ‘Al Hamilton, Bob Fulton.’

“So I told our great man he was right on schedule — he tried to interrupt me,‘ Emotion is time!’ he cried out — and I said how could he be making a date with me in Manhattan day after tomorrow if he was planning as he said on the news to be involved with this protest situation as long as he was needed—‘I’m not needed,’ he said, ‘that’s the beauty of my being here’—but when he smiled taking off his jacket, Ed got hold of him and got butted in the stomach. So he got his jacket back on and then they were scuffling at the window and raising it, but that window wasn’t the window he went out of, and when the great man knocked Ed onto a typewriter he looked over at me grinning and said he was only trying to make us less pompous; I have to admit I liked him, like a father (yes?) who’s been away for a long time and you want to forgive him, but all of a sudden he was fielding questions right and left: yes he thought the technology generated by Viet Nam and the Space Program would develop ideas incidentally for transportation, nutrition, conserving space, etcetra etcetra; then, No indeed he wasn’t interested in space exactly, space had no shape; and someone objected that—

“The fat kid told him what wasn’t negotiable, who we want reinstated, who we want for black studies and that the dean responsible for the police emergency equipment outside had to go. But the great man went away to a window and raised it all the way up and leaned out. Then he came in again and his eyes were sort of watery and he looked his age, and he said, ‘No, they’re out there because of me.’ You know, he’s a shit but he’s a nice man. He winced and he said, ‘Ow, that wine,’ and the fat kid said O.K. maybe he knew so much but in his last book what was his frame of reference, but Ed moved in, took his camera off and put it on a desk and took a couple of steps and the great man backed toward the window and five or six of the kids moved to break it up or something, and Ed swung and missed and then our guest in the vest was sort of sitting on the sill, and all but Ed dropped back away from the window, Ed was to one side and he turned and looked at me — at my breasts.”