Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

A blue-jowled giant, a genius named Darius Dominion, would create and cable anywhere on the planet any sort of fear required, so long as the person who ordered it for his own use or to blow someone else’s fuse was bright and original. Darius Dominion didn’t need a home; he simply lived inside his own great head, which had rather shocking knots and ridges down its back, for Uncle Cooley had given me Dr. Bernard Holländer’s turn-of-the-century treatise on the higher phrenology. Uncle Cooley called it a real eye-opener; but there were things in it that meant much more to me than its level-headed distinction between Gall’s bumpographic cranioscopy and Gall’s real bequest to the study of cerebral localization. Many a night I sat handling my head as I read Holländer and imagined I had persecution mania due to injury of my temporal lobe’s posterior, or ye gods a sexual desire “exalted” (as they used to say) by some perversion of my gray matter. But I’d have been ashamed to tell Ted all this about how Darius Dominion’s bumps arose.

My father dismissed those Interfear Mysteries — but if that had nothing to do with our unhappy bout the Sunday morning I said God was just someone to tell your side of the story to, why do I bring together that Sunday encounter when he was feeling so badly, and those silly mysteries that I probably should have tried out on Ted tonight to ease him? But in those sheets that the Hungarian removed so long ago, didn’t I somewhere say Ted has trouble with Betsy now? He started to phone her back and I walked past the phone and for some reason grinned at him. Did he go out to the phone booth on the corner across from the framer’s to call her in private? But someone ripped the new gray receiver out of that booth, and it hasn’t been replaced. But Ted could have gone in the hotel down the block. I do not know. I do know I was harsh, Dom, to Ev one early morning when I’d just pivoted from my delusion about her potholder to the real thing and warm against my shoulder came her voice saying, “I’m worried about Ted,” and then, “Do we know any psychiatrists?” and I said to phone up Hugh Blood, he’d been shopping around for years. When Ev said, “I hardly know him,” I said, “That doesn’t usually stop you,” but she was nice enough to ignore that and say, “I don’t really know him. Would you?” I moved my shoulder blade back against her mouth.

Al said he thought he knew the boy in my rented back seat but not the girl, and if he could identify a photo in the Dean’s Office file he’d report him for molesting a faculty guest. Al was quite serious. He was taking his two oldest to a birthday party, and before he left, I and Annette urged him to forget it, if he went after the boy he’d get him suspended. “Oh I couldn’t get him suspended,” said Al.

Annette may have been embarrassed. We sat on the couch to look at her album. The third little girl was upstairs, Al’s special favorite who bawled him out for eating before it had cooled one of the sugar-dough stars she’d baked in her toy oven, and bawled him out for not giving her a Valentine, and for losing a patch of hair in back that Annette called his tonsure.

Annette and I stared at a snapshot of Al asleep on a bed beside a baby. Annette said, “He just feels the students are rude, that’s why he gets so upset; he says they want more than they’re prepared to give — they don’t know any facts.”

There was a picture of Al’s parents sitting formally relaxed on this very couch that Annette and I were sitting on. The house was quiet. Annette said, “Those two used to fight. But I guess she was devoted to him.”

“Well, there was trouble,” I said. “But… what the hell…”

“Bound to be,” said Annette, crossing one knee over the other.

“The old man got to dislike me,” I said, looking at the top of her top knee gleaming in its nylon.

There came a rattly knock at the kitchen door, the boy to mow the lawn.

It was one a.m. after the company steamer had scoured up into its two holds that dark field of silvery fish, all but those that flipped over the finally narrowing corral of expensive nets; and it was one, after Bob and I had left the outboard on its mooring and rowed the dory twenty-five yards in to the beach; and it was one before we’d divided most of the Jim Beam in slugs interrupted by minutes of silence and friendly but cautious and at one point rather tense talk, and it was after one before we’d said what the hell and killed that fifth and I took it outside and left it on a rock glimmering dully in the touch of a small moon.

During all this space of time sitting at a candle-lit spool table under a tattered American flag that a brother-in-law of Bob’s had brought back from the Bulge, we had a few laughs — all roughly equal. They were about:

on one hand, the difficulties of coitus interruptus with a Bucks County girl in her brother’s pup-tent in her farmer-pappy’s dew-damp back yard probably watched through a distant screen door by a quiescent old Golden Retriever,

and on the other, Bob’s feat with the cross-stick boomerang—“Well it sure as hell came back,” said Bob, “I thought it was going to scalp me”

on one hand, Hugh Blood’s strange whistle when Bob was about to leave his feet for the window, and Bob said he’d known way up in front of his mind that that whistle was Hugh’s—

and on the other, Petty’s dad’s old friend Mrs. Bolla, recuperating in Presbyterian after having her veins done — each fine leg wrapped from ankle to ass — slowly reading an Updike novel brought by Bob’s mother who once said to mine, “For an Italian she seems awfully restrained; but he, of course, was supposed to have been a bit on the cold side — all involved in natural gas geology”:

while Bob — for it seemed throughout that this other force of Robby his oldest son preoccupied him or hung near like a power to which these outer, equidistant recollections were raised — with the dure pique of a good man who can’t see why his warmth and abruptness are not accepted as a kind of leadership albeit temporary — Bob at several points recurred to Robby: “Said sucking a run of herring up out of the cove with a machine wasn’t real fishing, and I said to him God who said it was! Well this is a kid who sits around reading electronic catalogues. One day I started mowing the lawn but then I was out of gas and when I said, ‘Robby, get me the five-gallon can in the garage beside the skis,’ he waited a second and looked at me: just blank. And yesterday I was alone in the house, or thought so, and I phoned Ben Sedgwick — you’ve met Father Sedgwick — I suddenly had to ask him what he really thought about Bonhoeffer going back to Germany in ’40—wasn’t it really suicide? and after I dialed I think I said a phrase or two in advance and I waited with this dead phone in my hand and then the line was busy and I held on, I don’t know why I held on, and then I knew I was being watched and I looked off through the hall door across a corner of the living room through another door to the new living room and there was Robby just staring at me, it was like night and he made me feel like a fool, a lunatic, and do you think he looked away or said a word?”

“You mean you were scared?” I asked after a while as Bob pushed the bourbon across almost upsetting it on the table’s central bolts.

Mild eyes framed in gold circles peer at me as if I am some distinctly odd question — the face opens and writhes in violent laughter and the whole pen assembly on my private seismovec gashes right off the drum, in fact up right off my Rictus Scale — the noise as suddenly turns off, and Bob says quietly, “’Course not.”

“Come in here,” my father said from his bed in the room to my right as I stood in my pajamas in the hall facing the bathroom and with my bedroom behind me. My morning muse had been Camille a moment before when I was sitting on the edge of my Sunday bed thinking about the party she’d taken me to. Now in the hall my morning muse had risen to the height of Tracy: I don’t know what I expected my father to say but I delayed obeying him and said I’ll be out of the john in a second.