Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

Well he was mad in that sunny room. As I must have said in those pages removed by the Hungarian — I don’t know which page but the phrase was in the lower right third — my father was sitting up in bed. You could see great gray-and-white platforms of ice in the water off the near docks; a tug crossed my path as I ran that ice-strewn Brooklyn slip straight across the East River to the ferry landings. On the floor of his open closet I saw the black-and-white saddle shoes he bought the summer we went to the shore instead of the stone heart house in Heatsburg. My father had my prominent nose, though not my height; eyes gray, face delicate and square, mouth precise but responsive. My mother had replaced the empty tumbler from last night and instead of that acidophilus milk I dreaded being near, there was water beside the three short brown bottles.

It was my saying God was just someone to tell your side of the story to.

The scene has less meaning now then earlier in this confession when it was a mere glimpse equidistant from Camille’s father’s Bahama duck marshes.

My father’s being in bed sitting up against the ramp-like wedge of my mother’s lemon satin invalid pillow that he’d bought her made his daunting finality immeasurable. He was not harsh but he was certain, though less terrible after he’d worked himself up a bit, for he thought my seeming taciturnity was gall.

What do you mean by saying such a thing? What were you thinking of? Now you’re in college you’re free, is that it? I know you don’t tell me a lot of things. And I tell myself I don’t want you to. Listen: how dare you speak of God as “just” anything? just some pal to tell some petty tale to? What do you know? Now that you’re a freshman in college you can spout the difference between Augustine and Bonaventure. You’ve been taught how to drive a car because I knew you’d break the college rule and drive this year and I wanted to make sure you knew how. You know Cyrus E. Dallin sculpted Indians. You knew more about the Bible than any other boy in your ancient history class four years ago, maybe more than Cadbury. Well you don’t know nothin’. And someday when you have to earn a living—

(I’ve smoothed it here, Dom, he was hesitating as he got mad, and I’ve eased his slight breathlessness.)

— and when you make some big mistakes instead of all these little ones, come back then and tell me about God.

Dom, I’d been a bit flip but I didn’t deserve what I got. Yet maybe it’s the uncalled-for things that say the most, am I running out of space and is someone going to walk in on me here? by uncalled-for I mean the unfair blurts you should have done without. In the middle of his ejaculations I felt affectionately insane and nearly asked him what God’s last name was, I’d often wanted to know. I wanted to be weaker before my father that Sunday morning than I was; but even in my gaping pajamas I didn’t know how. Then my father said, “He is so close, I don’t see how you can’t feel Him.” My mother said, “It’s a phase.”

Betsy and Ted were to have gone to a film tonight, and you know that just as I could describe to you the gap Dot left vacant on this east wall behind the white leather couch, so if I chose I could tell you the theater Betsy and Ted went to and what was on and even the price per head, which was why they were going there, and even delineate the furniture emporium diagonally across the street. But now I don’t know if they went together or apart, or not at all. If not, they found something else to do.

Dom, among some Indian tribes of Brazil the chief holds his numerous women partly because his important trances can be homicidally volatile, and somebody has to be around to keep him from killing perhaps even himself. Now at least in Dot’s caustic wit if not wholly in your mind, you were a chief; so maybe you’re a suicide because you let that pregnant secretary and other secretaries go, you let Dot go, Kit go, and whom else I don’t know enough about you to know. Richard let you go.

There it is, hero. Yours is the ultimate insurance. Stunted by publicity, you’ve emerged at fifty-two into mystery.

Unlike me. I’m on the line registering under my own name in public space.

Bob was incredibly standing when we looked down. Seeing him we then swung our gazes away and back like a pendulum; he had a smudge of new-mown green on top of his crewcut, and we all heard him tell our athletic director he knew what he could do with the lacrosse game tomorrow.

Almost three floors he’d dropped. Now he walked away and he was placing his feet carefully. “You could be a parachute-jumper right now without a single day of training, Bobby,” the athletic director called after him. But Bob just warped out of sight into the locker room, and the hapless athletic director who could not punish him glared up at us but didn’t say a word to us and followed Bob inside.

Bob wouldn’t let him drive him to the subway.

I was puzzled. Bob might well have made that window-leap in any event, but I did not tell my parents about it and about the miracle of his safe landing. At the time, it seemed a corollary miracle that my parents never heard about the feat from anyone else. I’m sure they never did. Sometimes you don’t hear about things — especially without our old friend ye vectoral muscle. But you can bet Bob’s father heard all about it from our athletic director, who as if to keep it all from being true by staying on the phone in the face of Bob’s father’s stoic courtesy kept saying the same things in varying sequences: A fine clean guy. Could have killed himself. He was a good boy, no one’s fault. Backus wasn’t at fault. Bob was enough shaken up so he forgot the game tomorrow. He landed just enough off balance, and with enough basic thrust, to tumble. The game tomorrow. A good clean boy. It was unprecedented.

I had told Hugh his whistle hadn’t done Bob any good. Hugh ignored this and asked if it had been a thirty-foot drop, and I said Less.

Bob wouldn’t see any “medicine man,” but his dad called Doctor Field anyhow and according to Petty, who wasn’t really there, when that excellent laconic man came up to Bob’s top-floor room Bob was very seriously taping his knees and looked up blankly like a king.

“But how could Al’s dad like you?” Annette said lightly returning from the back door. Then, as if finding reasons for something she hadn’t really meant, “All that hocus-pocus about newspaper puzzles? And the old man and Gail were driving past that antique shop of course when you were unloading your encyclopedia and later Al didn’t believe his father but Gail said it was true. But so what? Al didn’t care. He said he wanted the books. There’s no puzzle in that.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“You might say he needed you, Cy. Don’t think badly of him for

that.”

We share life, even our attempts not to.

Is it possible that I won’t or can’t explain to you, Dom, how Al and Bob happen to be here this weekend? If you were here perhaps I’d not risk it. Fred Eagle coughs and coughs, grinning helplessly; then he stops and hoarsely says, looking into his handkerchief but not at either of his visitors: Someone I want you to meet:

Al and Bob shake: and Fred’s shelves and shelves of stock are comfortably around them, and on an old table a gallon of Gallo and a partly carved turkey: Fred tells the joke about the Renaissance Jew who in his lonely wanderings came at last to Rome and seeing the utter corruption of the clergy but concluding that this church, having survived it, must be indeed the true church, became a Catholic.

Al said, “He should have been content just to know his true enemy.”

Bob said, “If you feel so strongly you ought to read Simone Weil.”