Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

When Hugh and Bob and I met next morning, converging in the lower hall past a shot of tobacco smoke out of the master’s room and then as the door of that floor’s john came open and shut a whiff of lysol and entrail-methane, Bob kidded Hugh it wasn’t Loyalty Day any more. But Hugh didn’t take it. A friend of mine named Scheindlinger whose parents had just changed their name to Shane came up breathlessly and said, “How you gonna do, C.C.?” And ignoring him Hugh said to Bob (but poking me on the operative pronoun), “Your boomerang didn’t have tape on it with his initials. You lost your boomerang off the Bridge.” Then Hugh preceded us into the history exam.

I’ve replaced your World Almanac on the low square parson’s table where it lay beside what I happen to know Dot sent you for your most recent birthday: a Time Man of the Year cover suitable for hanging done in vinyl with a mirror occupying the main panel. I’ve had a look in it. My prints are all over this room; the kitchen too. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Are Bob and Al here this weekend for a reason too simple for me to have thought of? Well, I never claimed it had anything to do with how badly Bob knew he’d done on that history test, or on Hugh’s asking how he’d done as we trooped into Akkie Backus’s study hall the next afternoon, or on my quick reply that it had struck me as a ridiculously fair test.

Wait: as Petty could have learned if she’d let me finish my story, Bob’s boomerang indeed came back, but right over us through the cables and through the other side and on down as if at first toward the Navy Yard before it dropped onto an empty barge in tow of an outward-bound tug. But there was no point in explaining all this to Bob’s father. After the Poly athletic director’s report Friday night, Bob’s irascible father would have concluded that Petty’s boomerang story was Bob’s lie, but I’ve gone too fast, we aren’t quite yet into Akkie’s Friday study hall. I find I’m reaching the end of these Sphinx 8 1/2 by 11’s of yours, Dom.

No question, you knew just where the rescue mat was, when you exited through the window onto the twilight. But you knew it wasn’t exactly a trampoline down there you’d be hitting. Did you simply not want to descend by the same route you’d come up?

Darla had fallen into her story. She no longer had an idea, but only what she thought she’d seen. You were half out the window and Ed looked at Darla’s breasts or so she saw the trajectory of his focus: “Yes, I knew the situation had been like a triangle — don’t get me wrong, you know what I mean; I don’t have to explain, do I? — a triangle just at the instant it became just a line — me, Ed, and him in a line. I said at the airport press conference it was no defenestration — he wasn’t pushed — that’s what I said. You look at me as if I don’t believe what I’m saying. Oh how do I know how you’re looking at me.”

I interrupt her pursed lips — courtesy of my now almost unrecognizable parabola softened by a field of distances equal only to some marvelous second-strength in my old, only-child’s vectoral muscle — to bend you toward Akkie’s study hall the early afternoon of May 3rd, 1946.

Still waiting for me in 1942 by the white picket fence outside her beloved stone heart house that she and my father stopped going to in 1950, my mother says, “You’re a worrier like your father; my goodness, so Gail threw Al’s sneaker into a field, so what?” And as I leave her in the kitchen May Day night of 1946, to make our malted with soft ice cream and to finish defrosting, she calls to me, “I saw Joey in Bohack today and asked him if he’d seen your typewriter downstairs by the other door, we knew he’d been there.”

And in 1942 Al’s first sight of the sea — so far as one sees the sea through Boston Harbor — could not have been from the Mystic River Bridge, for the MRB Authority didn’t begin construction till ’48 (the year of Al’s car accident): any more than nine-year-old Gail could have sensed from such a distance and through a shimmering kitchen screen, that day in 1938 her dad came and fixed our old Kelvinator, my sudden stupor looking at her profile out there in the pickup and my prickling inkling of her closeness to the man. Al’s big hand gets two cans of Colt 45 out of my memory’s growing refrigerator Saturday afternoon of 1968 and says flatly, “Dad never fixed a Kelvinator gas refrigerator because Kelvinator never made one. And the Mystic Bridge changed its name to Maurice J. Tobin Memorial.”

Robby wrote me the whole ordinary thing — its ordinariness fluent and wise: Bob and Robby dropped John B. and Petty at Cub Scouts. Then, though Robby wanted to get back home Bob decided they’d drive the five miles to the landing and check the outboard mooring. Robby said there was no need to, and when Bob said it wasn’t as if they were going out to the island and asked what Robby had to do home, Robby didn’t say he wanted to consult the Columbia Encyclopedia I gave him because he doubtless didn’t, but just said, “Things,” and shut up; and when Bob said, “Why in hell’d you come along then?” Robby continued with his murder mystery there in the front seat though Bob had said he was ruining his eyes reading that crap in the car; and Bob I believe was in the strangely weightless feeling of not knowing whether in the next five seconds he’d forbid Robby or drop it. He said he’d need him when they got to the landing but Robby knew Bob would do it all himself, row the punt out, bail with the blue Maxwell House can if there was anything to bail, and relash the outboard cover. But a mile shy of the landing Bob suddenly turned in at some second-hand bookseller’s sign — did he mash and displace a trough of gravel cornering so sharply? — and when he parked in front of the barn who should be practically run down coming around its corner but the sinewy little lobsterman who was apparently killed only a few months later when his boat was sighted out in the bay going round in circles empty. He jumped back but then got up on Bob’s hood and crawled to the windshield and Robby had to stop reading and laugh. And since the lobsterman was headed back to the landing and Robby said he didn’t care about going in to look at books, Bob gave the man a lift and he took them out to Bob’s mooring and the three of them sat for an hour and Bob never did get into his own boat but just had a look. But at the end of that considerable period of rocking in the dead chill of March, Robby’s moroseness dispersed and though he could never tell Bob because it was so vague he himself didn’t understand it, he became for a while quite happy.

Not because his dad gave him a bitter, luke-cold swig of beer from the quart the lobsterman produced from under a thwart. Not because the lobsterman told a funny story about a dragster cousin up the coast who had too big a tongue so his mouth sometimes looked full of it — indeed from crown to tip it measured a good four-and-a-half inches, but was wide as hell too, and he bragged about what he could do with that tongue, and some of the girls said he really could, but he didn’t have a steady girl but spent a lot of time driving around the new school’s parking lot, but now the tongue was too big, too damned big, the lobsterman said, and people said there was going to be an operation at Maine General but it might cost too much.

Nor did Robby’s mood change because the lobsterman said, “What’d you do’th all them herring nets,” and Bob smiled challeng-ingly as if he had some tricky secret about those nets, a masculine misdemeanor or a wild stinking joke, and then said quietly, “Oh I still got ’em,” and the men looked archly at each other and after a moment laughed.