Joseph McElroy - Ancient History - A Paraphrase

I have to finish this ancient history now or it will last for the rest of my average life-span. One day a man came out of the psychiatrist’s inner office, shutting the door, and stood at the coat rack and talked to Ted: three insurance firms seemed to have got this man’s name all at once and one of them just chuckled and said, “You’ve got a sense of humor” when the poor, irascible guy demanded of the salesman why he was trying to sell somebody who had only six months to live and no company would insure him and he didn’t want insurance anyway. Despite the salesman’s chuckles, it was true, yes, six months the man’s doctor had given him. And Ted wondered why he was seeing a psychiatrist (and then for a second if that was what he meant by “doctor”) but Ted didn’t say anything except, sympathetically, “They’re stupid,” but the man stopped with his coat half on, arms pinioned, and said, “They are not stupid.” Ted tells me things. He says he wants someone to get something out of all that shrinking money. Ted is in group dynamics at college. Group dynamics, it sounds like a stock. As my father turned to leave the kitchen I unaccountably rose with my mouth full of yolk and bread and asked if he wanted to go to a movie, but he said thanks he would read Thucydides, and when he walked into the dining room we both remembered and in unison said, “Bohack!” having forgotten for a second that we couldn’t both go out. Of course the suspect Joey could leave the carton on the doormat but there was danger of theft — maybe even from Joey — and anyway my father wanted to stay in. He’d been away on business the weekend before and since he couldn’t possibly get back for Russell Pound’s party he’d stopped in Washington to see Cooley. My father was born in 1900, Cooley in 1896. Cooley is not a close relation, but I called him Uncle. As soon as my parents’ bedroom door closed, Bob and Petty rang our bell. I saw my father bundled dead into Joey’s deep silver carrier and the big lid banged down. That Junior Corona — if it was a Corona — softens in recollection: its carriage and keys and the black center lid over the type-bars become almost soft, malleably soft, as a new crisis hardens out into undue clarity: I mean the injustice to me three years before of Dr. Cadbury, who Akkie had just now told us was having an operation on his gut; but I really mean my mere urge to expatiate toward the end of Cadbury’s midterm three years before. It was at first the expatiation of a pupil so free in his knowledge and syntax that the exam question turned into an invitation to art or play; in essence, all I said was that in some later Assyrian reliefs the figures could have been freed by first cutting away a small tissue of stone but for some reason were not, and after all it wasn’t as if they’d been on the sea floor waiting for Captain Nemo. Cadbury rebuffed me sorely in the margin; my father phoned him and complained; I was embarrassed; Cadbury and my father both backed off, and I was left with an A minus. My pyramids don’t soften, I can tell you: they are greater than ever: greater far than that well-known entrepreneur’s plan for a poured-concrete facsimile in California one foot higher than the great pyramid.

When I opened the front door Bob and Petty were hand in hand — no Joey — and she said, “Bob didn’t play in the lacrosse game.” They looked married. “His father was terrible to him,” said Petty, “and so were the people at school; if he slipped off the window sill, it could happen to anybody. I think I was rude to his father, but it’s funny, he sort of gave up; he took it.”

I stood aside. Vectors everywhere, then and now. I now believe the elevator I’m guiding up here is the near one, the west. Its acceleration is wholly controlled by vectorcraft. I have switched on your late TV but my trip to the foyer and kitchen is invisible on this 8 1/2 by 11 Sphinx bond of yours. Your Hungarian son-in-law wondered where your typewriter was. Is there an answer in the words to which I have led myself? But so many of those have been removed by him. If you aren’t dead after all, I didn’t do that either. When my father died in ’52 he’d been reading Lawrence’s letters and hoping to go to New Mexico to recuperate. But if you’re alive in the two parts of my confession, I guess I did do that. In the kitchen your TV screen is a bright blank.

But Petty and Bob and I didn’t enjoy sitting around in my living room discussing what Poly would do about Bob’s cutting the game and what his father would do if Bob went through with his abortive vow to abjure Princeton. We took a long walk. They were sober and dull and they needed me there with them maybe to have someone to exclude. The Heights was bigger twenty-three years ago. We moved past the famous Gothic exterior of Petty and Tracy’s school, and we got all the way to the Greek Revival colonnades on Willow Place and a Gothic Revival house Petty pointed out with recessed spandrels over and under the windows later used in—

My block returned like an idea, after an hour, and Hugh appeared from the Bloods’ brownstone on the corner and there were some others, Freddy Smith and Wit Holmes and North the minister’s son and Angus Moore and the Negro superintendent’s ten-year-old Abra (for “Abracadabra”) — her real name I think was (with the a as in “saber”) Sabra. She had a ball and she was dying to play, and I got a broomstick from her father.

We had played three innings by the time Joey came slowly into the long block with, on the sidewalk but walking beside his bike-cart, two guys I’d seen with him before.

Ted’s no groupy and neither is his girl. But I think they’re out of phase now. I feel I should keep pot as well as booze. It’s only polite. You, Dom, smoked for your blood pressure. Its effect on the vectoral triangle is not known.

We didn’t usually play in this street. My father’s shade was down. For home we used the sewer cover up opposite the Historical Association’s brownstone. I was glad not to bother my father if he was asleep. On a spring evening five years before when I’d had my supper of liver and bacon and gone out again to have a catch on roller skates with Freddy Smith who was still Bart Smith then, my father came home after working late. And, for some reason I half divine now long after, and long after I began this private confession, I called across the street, “Hi, Dad; soused again?” and Arnie the Good Humor Man standing with that rear icebox-door of his white truck open reaching in to find a burnt almond or a sundae for one of the kids who were around him with their money in their fists, turned to look, though his arm was still inside; but he saw merely a man in a gray worsted suit, a gray fedora, and black (not wing-tip) shoes, with his New York Sun twice-folded under his arm. At my weird words my father started to smile with a puzzled frown then interrupted himself and turned in the door of our apartment house. My father came back out before he’d even gotten to the elevator and asked me to please come in, he wanted to speak to me: for my father was barely even a social drinker, the doctor eventually had to urge him to take a drink before dinner: and as for me, I had never even imagined him drunk, had never seen him drink too much and knew I never would because he never would: unlike Bob’s father and old Eben Smith, whose dragging guffawing chat and sweaty untrussing of sentiment and distrust seemed to me when I was nine or ten to close their bodies — there, yes, I’ve come upon the right word for the first time in my life, Dom, on your Sphinx bond paper, “close” —yet also loosen and coarsen and supplant those great laborious bodies. It must have been all of eight o’clock the evening after the boomerang incident that my father and the others were talking about Europe’s future and Russell Pound asked my father if he still thought history a succession of moral lessons — when Eben Smith interrupted, “a succession of moral lessons no less” and then said to Bob’s father and Russell Pound (though not within earshot of the glamorous guest of honor just back from the Arizona sun) that Mara Bolla’s estranged husband was basically a perfumed fart. Russell Pound’s mouth was at once governed into an immobility the resultant of two vectors which (even if this isn’t very good physics — and I confess I learned physics on my own) were directed one horizontally smilewards the other vertically talkwards, the tolerant male chum (which actually Russell Pound never was with those two if with any man) countered by a lover’s loyalty (though indirectly on behalf of the man Mara had walked out on). He did point out (with a bright hospitableness no doubt nourished by the sight of Bob’s mother in her gray Persian lamb approaching with Bob’s father’s dark blue overcoat over her arm and doubtless herself debating whether they’d get as far down Fulton as Gage and Tollner’s lamb chops and the dear hierarchy of epauletted Negro waiters, or stop at Joe’s for Long Island duck) that hardly four years ago Signor Bolla served on one of the famous Italian subs that, approaching the Gibraltar passage between Punta de Europa and Punta de la Almiña, would cut the engines and in the mysterious westward current deep deep below the great Atlantic eastward influx, would ride silently out past the British listening posts. I interrupted to say that the ancients had wondered why the Med doesn’t overflow, and Bob’s father, the glow of Bob’s boomerang fading, said, “Balls.”