Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

My father brought work with him in his pigskin bag those luminous Friday evenings when he came sideways like a sailor down the high steps of the New York Central coach to set foot in New England. He always had something for me, and I received his energy with a need I cannot merely express here, compounded of an only child’s intact though contracted privacy plus certain excited filial misgivings that may well be the true ground of religion or even the writing of history. I kissed him until I was twelve.

Tomorrow for the afternoon papers, Dom, select peers will “take a look at” you — your disappearance from the scene pivotal history for the real estate of all of us, a space impossible to fill. Tomorrow night a televizier in his molded swivel measures the broken summer of your achievement—“Virtually a natural force… created a new dimension in personal action”—swings thirty thoughtful degrees to ask his panel quintet, “Was this then an extension of that dimension? Why did he do it?” Mmm minimal response from the public sector, says one. Overwork, says two. Tangent syndrome, says a direct female voice flavored with twenty-dollar-an-ounce Persianelle. An English voice says, Oh I would argue loss of familioidentity. But (say I) what about the generous paranoia of those who pursue themselves? Ah Dom, such stuff as this is ripe to help tell your tale, the pre-neatened, pre-recoded, pre-shrunk annals of a radically active man who wrote key books in the selfsame field-situation he foretold and filled.

Well, let my step-son Ted quote you; but I know where you live, and know too as if my life hung on it the ancient trick of figuring a future by inspecting sacrificial victims, Dom. But a priest of any class or order needs privacy to do his line of work. He needs it even in this very home of one who once addressing The Population Institute flatly proclaimed Collaboration as, henceforth in our century, “the corner-module for any appropriate creative dynamic.” Your recent mode, Dom, moves in piecemeal vector-sights up and down your chance page, though still across the same terrain. To forcibly thus modulate, you risked indeed entering your postulate field of neutraline equatics through a commitment such that I must confess I saw this suicide of yours weeks ago as one newly viable valence in that field or field-situation. These last are largely your words. Does Ted think that if he quotes you — though I haven’t heard him mention you lately — the more he’ll be like you? You live with miraculous privacy in this building — Ted doesn’t know and I think neither does Ev.

I of course am kept wholly private from, though I’d love to know, the crowd with whom my Ted, my step-son, sits, smokes, shares awareness, and sometimes lives. (“C.C.,” he stops me, “for God’s sake!” Well what did I say wrong? “Not what ,” he goes on gnomically; “how.” He says I sound like I ran my words through some old-fashioned computer—“I mean C.C. let them come spontaneously (right?).”)

Do Ted’s lotus-limbed crowd even know what a fight is? Al and I those summers never quite had a fight, but I think we both felt it was always possible. On the other hand, in the august quiet of our Brooklyn Heights neighborhood where Bob and I and Hugh Blood and the Smith twins and one interloping girl Perpetua Belle Pound and others of our circle played rough touch and practically professional stickball weekends and now and then a weekday afternoon, it seemed that a fight was not ever possible. From Bob’s cut cheekbones and gray-and-yellow hip bruises and the strawberries on his knees and elbows you’d say that as he climaxed his shifty charge past defense-specialist Hugh Blood with an arms-out leap as if imploring the gods of the air to give him the clean spiral the minister’s son fired halfway down the block, Bob forgot the position of the parked car he was about to hit. But the way that in one turning unit of force Bob caromed off that gray fender or pale blue door possessing himself of the football, and then staggering against gravity plunged to the goal-line sewer — this might have suggested to you that Bob trusted his body and knew where that paltry beach wagon was even more exactly than the minister’s son who’d said he’d aim for it, though not than Hugh Blood, who was right there waiting but despite his skinny height was always out-jumped. Or if, with your lethally weightless broomstick, you pulled or sliced a cute pitch (from me say) round to the left sidewalk or away to the right, you might just miss a dowager black Persian lamb trudging over those great slate slabs of walk tilted and individual and someday to be replaced by flat grooved cement — or you might bop the Bohack delivery boy lifting a carton out of the deep steel carrier built onto the front of the bike; or the deep or short centerfielder down this street whose single axis made the only field center field might go onto a car hood for a mad-banging one-hander, or spring up off the running board onto the sparrow-limed top for a gracefully aspiring, rib-killing one-hand miss. But why do fist-fights now seem always to have been unlikely among these veerings and velocities? Elsewhere, twenty years on, Al perhaps answers, simpering, “You were Brooklyn Heights kids.” The colored superintendent in my parents’ building, Mr. Washington, had three sons out of high school but also a little girl seven whom we called A.B. or Abra which wasn’t her real name who hung around the railings hoping for a fly no one else could catch. Once, Petty Pound to spear a fly slipped between two bumpers, then instinctively took the high brownstone stoop two-four-six-eight-ten-twelve steps to get the ball just before it hit the next step at the level of the vestibule one of whose outer doors was open, and then she did tumble but in my opinion never lost the ball as she disappeared inside. One — I forget which — of the Smith twins calmly refused to believe she’d held it. He was umpiring that day, self-appointed; yes, he had water on the knee, swollen ripe and sprinkled with raw pimples, and while he’d pulled up his pant to show us I’d taken his shiny blond crutch and we’d all tried it, yes it was Bill Smith, the stingy twin, stingy Bill. Well, though big Bob himself had hit (off me) that long ball, he ignored Bill’s decision, gave up halfway to first (which was a car fender), and said “Jesus” two or three times partly to congratulate himself on his respect for Petty’s spectacular catch, if catch it was. We consented to play with her because she was good, she was “terribly well coördinated” as my mother was more than once told by Perpetua’s father, a museum curator who played court tennis. But it was something else too about Petty, and she knew it, and Bob and I did too in our little preoccupations even well before whatever age we were that Saturday of Petty’s famous feat. “Get on with the game,” Bob called, taking the chalk from little Abra and squatting in the gutter to add a zero to the boxscore, though actually no one was stalling. Petty underhanded him the ball as she bustled in to bat, she had on blue sneakers and an official Poly T-shirt Hugh Blood had gotten for her, and her dark braids came down to her waist. Bob stood ready to pitch, and without interrupting his concentration to look at the Bohack delivery boy he said, “Hi, Joey.” Then Hugh Blood, who it occurs to me was the only one I ever heard call Perpetua Pound a tomboy, said to Joey, “Bohack isn’t paying you to stand around and watch us play stickball.” But Joey, who had been about to push off, didn’t hear the levity in Hugh’s words, for the levity was an afterthought. The moment was a nasty nub for Joey, who now of course had to wait for something new to happen. Bob, pitching to Petty and, as he let the ball go, straining the last syllable, said to Hugh, “That was a stupid remark,” and Petty lined the pitch over Joey’s head into the Vande Land’s areaway. There it ricocheted around and became a ground-rule double by rolling under the grating door. The other Smith twin lifted himself backwards onto a fender and sat waiting. Then while the minister’s son was ringing the Vande Land’s delivery bell, Joey put his foot through onto the far pedal, rose to the saddle of his bike cart, and lounged off. Picking up the broomstick and heading for the sewer cover we used as home, I found myself thinking why didn’t he have a swastika on the steel bin rather than a skull and crossbones.