Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

A moment interferes in which A and B elect to be friendly.

Ev may not have gotten on to the cops; she may have just figured I went, and will come back.

Al checked Bob’s name and origin, then said, “I wasn’t invited to your Welcome Home party in ’52 or ’53, whenever it was.”

No surprise from Bob: “Neither was I. I mean, we didn’t go.”

“But you were invited.”

“Matter of fact, it was a surprise party, so I wasn’t. But why would you have been asked to my parents’? Did you know someone?”

I am mentioned and Bob privately wonders why I let Al think the honored couple had turned up for the Welcome Home, for Al neglects to tell Bob it was not I from whom he learned where I really went that night in ’53. And of course Al was awake enough to note that I came home with my mother, and my mother was heard to say the Vande Land’s Dutchman was a lot of fun even if he hadn’t been a Resistance hero. He had talked about Europe’s coming demands for energy and had been quite fascinating on the subject of natural gas in the Netherlands.

Dom, long ago I should have done you a floor plan of my parents’ apartment on Brooklyn Heights, but for that matter a plan of our Heatsburg house too, including the upstairs room where on Sunday mornings early my father would sometimes sit with his dark brown Brokers Special pencils and long yellow pad, first outlining ABCD. For thus these spaces could have been around us throughout this night of time that seemed urgent one way when I came in your unlocked door but now spreads like an inestimably charged field ever, yet, within the coördinates of this room, to a mode like time, but solute — a paraphase.

As on the educational channel last week my small Emma was watching the thin man Mr. Rogers from his own private outer space end his kids’ show “You make each day such a special day. You know how. By just your being you,” the gossip column Eagle Eye said that your wife Dorothy had got her final decree but that you were sitting around these days enjoying life in your “vast elegant” living room running your slide collection round and round your Carousel projector — mostly “candid news shots involving himself.”

I don’t think that from our brief meeting at Cora’s you recognized me in the Think-Tank shot or in Ed’s overhead zoom of the Defenestration Crowd waiting. But are those even in your slide box against that far bookcase-wall above and to the right of the styrofoam?

I’ll have enough paper, and even though as I write this, to my surprise I vector one of the elevators up its shaft and I divine footsteps preparing to come into existence, I will have time enough as well as paper, for I’m now into my proud paraphase. Let me subtract from that, rather than add, that instead of the dreaded Vectoral Dystrophy, I’ve got Writer’s Cramp. And looking into your newly insured past though no longer divining by means of liver because Ev says even our high-priced butcher admits that liver is apt to be polluted nowadays, I think I can tell who it is in that east or west elevator coming here. He will not get to your floor until we’re ready.

You learned Spanish after the War. Did I say you were an only child earlier tonight?

You were not an only child, though you said America was.

You said you didn’t fear overcopulation any more: you said every great human test is new and its right solution unimaginable at first: the day you resigned from the primary to throw your support elsewhere, you said the secret of future solutions resided in the idea of spacecraft. After tonight you’ll never know if spacecraft will as you predicted turn out to be earthcraft — if life-sup-portable microfields designed for interstitial vector-treks and vacuum-strolls can feed and house our ordinary unlaunched future too, and even space us far enough apart so we can like each other. Mmm… spacecraft is to politics, as—

One reporter asked if you’d said “statecraft” and you said No, and then incredibly another reporter, a girl, asked politely if you’d said “statecraft,” and you stared at her but spotted your shrink son-in-law standing five spaces down from me and hailed him but he slunk sideways among the crowd. I think he’d been observing me.

You have done a lot for me, though you never knew it. I’m trying to reciprocate.

The TV cameras were still on you when Eagle Eye — in real life Valerie O’Doul — asked what you were going to be doing with yourself now: you said, “Val, if I could only, like, drop down a few floors and live an ordinary life.”

I think I’ll incinerate my file on Heights hors d’oeuvres.

At twelve I returned. Bernie Scheindlinger’s mother drove me all the way from school to the 36th Street subway, so I skipped seven stations and because 36th is an express stop I could bypass four more local stations by catching a Sea Beach to Pacific Street, where just as its doors were closing I caught my 4th Avenue Local. When I sprang into the front car there was Hugh Blood with his feet up along one yellow straw seat reading the ads. He’d been at school that Saturday morning working on the newspaper.

My father hadn’t been able to make the match. He was in the kitchen with my mother when I came in, sitting with his hand on The Peloponnesian War . To his eager question I replied that we’d been “vectorious.” My mother had on a dark blue hat and a lighter blue — or was it gray — wool suit. She reminded my father that Joey would be delivering her order from Bohack, and my father wondered if Joey’d taken offense when she asked about the typewriter the other day. She was about to leave to go to Manhattan with Russell Pound to see some “abstracts” by a young westerner he was interested in who’d gotten very excited reading Pappy Pound’s remarks on paint-perishability in his Ryder book. My father wanted all the scores of the match, singles and doubles. He was wearing his new light brown slippers and a gray cashmere sweater. He always looked young. His teeth were good, they hadn’t worn blue at the end, and his hair was good too, he parted it in the middle; and he had a quick smile that was full of surprise and respect. Later, when he was really dying, he looked for a time even younger. My mother said, “I’m off,” and they touched lips. But I’d forgotten about the lacrosse game, I’d meant to phone Bob from school to see if he was coming out for it.

Damn! and I had a paper to write that I’d have to hand in in longhand. My mother now said, as she went into the hall, that Bob had called. My father had the refrigerator open and turned to say that my step-grandfather had phoned to ask me to go to the Museum of Natural History with him that afternoon; my father said he’d promised I’d call back. I have not told John’s (Zo-an’s, Zon’s) story here, Dom, but I now think it makes an absence. Displaced from New England at twenty, never quite making it back except for a month in the summer and never for longer even in his long, neatly ordered widowerhood, he was now six months away from retiring; he would leave New York and go back up north; he had until now always made me feel I was smart, but he was getting dogmatic. All these details won’t bring you back, Dom. Even to ask (say), “Who was that Sue you mentioned? where does she fit in?” I don’t think even Bob knows about her even though she was my great-aunt — which is something else Al has in common with Bob. My mother, from the hall and holding the front door open, had to tell my father twice to please shut the refrigerator, she’d defrosted it only two days ago. If Bob was going to play lacrosse after all maybe I could get a ride back out with him and his father. I should have phoned from Poly.

My father made two fried egg sandwiches, and if it would bring you back into this former space of yours, Dom, I’d describe the goldgray damp of the grease coming into the Pepperidge Farm white. He said, “You can’t wait till your birthday for a new typewriter.” It sounded Jewish, but I wasn’t perfectly sure what he meant. He said he was going into the bedroom for a nap. He took Thucydides from the kitchen table.