Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

No: the fact is that Robby, a shivering skin-and-bones twelve-year-old dead set against joining the Scouts, didn’t like all this man-to-man crap. But what he couldn’t then or perhaps ever see — nor see that the lobsterman himself didn’t see — was a virgin dogma inside Bob his father that said: “Fuck ’em all: I know there’s a beautiful bullshit mystery in these waters, Cassius Clay came to Lewiston scared shitless, so scared he won; and that crazy fisherman I meet out there sitting hunched in his slicker he takes a long look at me, hand steady on the tiller, and maybe he raises his hand, maybe not, but he’s on his way by Christ someplace, checking traps or going somewheres maybe you’ll never guess in a year of watching him, maybe going home to jump his wife on the kitchen table, and these down-east, sardine-packing, mainiac independents are better than poets because by Jesus they own that beautiful bullshit mystery but don’t know what it is and don’t need to know; 87 percent of the state’s in forest, and 98 percent of that’s privately owned, 98 percent! but you take all you ever thought you scratched up out of a book or heard some scared, ball-less, tuneless, shitless people say in your New Yorks and all the rest and puke it up into a cloudy southeast wind for the seagulls and then you get your ass out into the bay’t those rocks and get hold of some lumber, and you tarpaper you a roof and sit under it on a great gray afternoon and mister you don’t need any breaks, you got something and nobody’s going to touch you. I don’t think I want to get hold of that mystery, but it’s here.”

No, what made Robby almost happy — though he didn’t say so in this letter (for he didn’t quite understand) — was what Bob finally said to the big-nosed little lobsterman who had stood up with his back to the deserted landing to pee mostly over the side moving his back a little with the stirring of the boat. Thought he was ending that stage of the discussion by stating that religions were all the same — only to be curtly gainsaid by Bob. Went on to ask Robby if he was going to be a millionaire college broker like his daddy; and after Robby said Bob didn’t like being a broker and they really didn’t have a lot of money — to which the lobsterman quietly retorted “I bet”—Bob poked Robby and said, “This one’s going to be a vagabond like me.”

In the letter Robby said he almost fell in between the boat and the dock later but Bob swung him up and over by an arm. They had a between-meals triangle of pizza on the way home and almost as soon as they got home and Robby had left the murder mystery on John B.’s bed because he’d decided to give it to John B. because John B. said he was stingy (though their mother disagreed), and Robby had raided the freezer with Petty’s new ice cream scoop, it was almost time to go back to Portland. Robby looked up “vagabond” in his encyclopedia but didn’t find anything. When he looked it up in the downstairs dictionary he didn’t mind that the word didn’t really seem to cover his dad. On the way to town, Robby started thinking again how Bob was always saying John B. would be President someday.

Whether that barn and house belonged to Fred Eagle and what the lobsterman could conceivably have come in from the island to do there are questions that recede like your suicide, Dom, blocked for a second by an equally unimportant equivalence I now see between Bob’s view of summer people and Al’s of people who don’t know their facts, or between Bob’s view of Ben Sedgwick and Al’s of — if there isn’t a parallel there (interior angles, binomial taxonomy, but I’m running out of paper and must write smaller), at least there should be: for Bob and Al are perhaps as strangely alike as, Dom, you are to me identifiably mysterious.

For, interrupting Darla’s pursed lips I find again her tongue — a tongue still whole and bemused into the poetry of accident, for she has not yet realigned upon its agile unconscious the dialectic which gives rigor to her ideology today much as yesterday it did to her I.U. grad linguistics program to which she has promised her parents she’ll return. But now, toward the end of my interview with her the day you, Dom, did that TV filming in Trinity churchyard, she isn’t thinking of the tiny taste domes along that moist muscle or its root at the neck’s hyoid bone or, midway to its pink waving tip, its corona (or blade); nor is she thinking of all those trigeminal nerves she learned about one night at I.U. that make their bitter-sweet exit through our old friend Pons Varolii. No, her beautiful memory embraces whatever of that restless line she can embrace… her: and Ed: and (at the window sill nine floors above the police rescue mat and a growing crowd now including me) you.

Akkie’s radiator-rattling study-hall wasn’t as big as I recall it, but I promise you it was on the third floor. I feel aisles longitudinal and rows transverse, and east door and west door. Of the eight aisles Bob’s and mine are third and fourth from the north or clock wall, and our desks are next to each other in the rear transverse row. I feel the five rattley windows along the south wall tantalizingly sectioning the green of the athletic field’s further reaches and beyond them and below the sky the then slowly rising V.A. hospital which when complete would block like a premature door one rectangle of those New York waters between on the far left Gravesend Bay (washing the parabolic shore of that Jewish enclave which you lived in as an adolescent, Dom, Seagate, which is a contiguous westward extension of, though anciently and gravely and by fence and private police discrete from, Coney Island), and on the right the Narrows (long before Verrazano Bridge — I mean long before it was built — I am writing smaller and smaller — I’m running out of paper — your paper, and I feel at floor-level of that old room but above floor-level too a hundred-odd invisible vectorways diagonal in two or three dimensions). Akkie’s long face absorbed twitching from top left to bottom right of a sports page seemed upon his low podium to be high above us. Little Mr. Cohn came in, looked ironically round the room and stepped on the podium to have a word with Akkie: who smiles and keeps looking down as if at his Times , then at the punch line looks up sideways at Cohn and they both laugh. Hugh Blood says rather loudly, “Horny Cohn” and looks back at Bob and me, but Bob shrugs and says, “I got nothing against him,” and suddenly Cohn is looking sharply at us over that great distance: Akkie and Bob had an understanding. It was that Bob could do or say anything so long—

Wait, wait — they all say Wait, and I too say Wait, Tracy’s face at the Welcome party in ’53 says Wait and Gail’s says Wait through the screen door with her still wet light hair tight back from her forehead line and slick-massed down behind her ear and below her neck: and even dear strong bland undemanding recently deflowered Perpetua says it to fortify an absent Bob against Admiral Worth and his Navy Yard—“Hey wait, Bobbie aimed at the Statue of Liberty”—

And if Darla (formerly Darlene, from the Philadelphia area) did not actively say it just before or as you left the fenestral rectangle and gravely and without a peep much less an epic whoop came down to us hard like an authentic fast ball suddenly swollen past the space of time in which one’s wrists might have snapped the bat through to meet it, she did surely feel that word Wait in all its intimate fear (I don’t care what Darla now at the end of our talk adds about well of course all she really cared about was like interrupting the whole ideological momentum and like profile of the Occupation-Protest): Ed moved between her and you: he was in profile and very close to you and for an instant she could not see you straddling the sill: Ed glanced at her, then wheeled around to his right toward you: while simultaneously one of your arms stuck out from behind Ed: whose right shoulder then moved so that his hidden right arm appeared to be in action: you shouted “Hey”; but it isn’t clear if Ed gave you an unprovoked shove (if you can even conceive of provocation being absent) or Ed shoved (or lightly pushed) in answer to a shove (or feint) from you: or there was nothing and you just shouted Hey! — and, so to speak, shoved off and went below: but Darlene, Darlink, Darla, Darley, Darla just before she briskly recovers her official self, has declined to a slow dream of uncertainty and as she betrays the doubleness of your defenestration, nay a far more than double field of human chance in which that gross event must be gauged, she forgets herself enough to lay her hand on mine. Having said already, I believe, in the sheets that your scientific son-in-law appropriated, perhaps I don’t need to prove all over again that (a) the vectoral muscle is rare even among its principal possessors, Only Children; (b) if you have it, you can perceive Field-State; but (c) only if you have a V.M. can you come down with the dreaded Vectoral Dystrophy which shrinks Field to Dichotomy. The relation of this result to problems of parabolic locus should by now be clear.