Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

Russell Pound’s model ships were rigged to the last stay and their lacquer personally dusted by Petty. They were all over the library as if independent of each other and of everything else there: they were in glass boxes, there was one out on a table under the rare little portrait of a Colonial militiaman (paint cracking on his musket); there was another ship on top of a display case full of Indian things. The Pueblo mugs reminded Bob’s father of German steins, and Bob’s mother thought the prairie dog vase was darling. On a wall was a faded Navaho rug, patterned from those fluid, calm, vulnerable dry-paintings poured in powdered sandstone color by color upon smooth ground, made and destroyed while the sun was up but exactly remembered by medicine men who no doubt saw to it that to let evil spirits escape, the rug-weaver left a break in the design — in the yellow blossoms of the sagebrush, or in the stubborn buffalo, or in the god. My father made a point of remembering what Russell Pound told him, from the Navaho swastika to Albert Ryder in New York not knowing what his bathtub was for.

Mrs. Smith’s first name was Lydia.

I’ve gone to the near john: left at the foyer, and left again: on the tub’s yellowed porcelain bottom that in the ’30’s for decoration more than safety they ribbed longitudinally with wavy parallels, a slivery oval of translucent amber lay among a dozen dark hairs at the far end from the drain. The water in the toilet keeps swaying in and then out like the water in our west toilet downstairs, as if on the other side of a ragged valve an open ocean moves, or some passing craft. In the cabinet are a bottle of Measurin with the cotton still in the neck, a punctured plastic sheet holding now only three Contac capsules, and a four-inch unsqueezed aluminum tube on whose red-framed label “Apply Externally” has been penned by (I believe) our own cut-rate man two blocks down. Recrossing the foyer’s white and black diamonds — and for the second time in the choice acre of my life coming upon the thought (though now accepting it) that it must have been my father who created those latter puzzles in the Hour , the frigate and the ziggurat and those others that in turn made mild trouble in that Heatsburg family that once preoccupied me so — I have to confess to myself that there’s a limit to what any of my outgoing vectors can do to that elevator rising in its own, other time; yet faced with ’46 and the Joey Neurohr Three advancing at one end and my father’s third-floor shade down at the other end, I’m nonetheless here to say that quite as if adolescence brought with it some breakdown like my grandmother’s pre-fatal aphasia that at seven I’d knowingly discussed with my mother when it got her down, Hugh Blood would think Bob had it in for him if Bob failed to greet him enthusiastically. Hugh made the same mistake with yours truly though I corrected it; he didn’t make this mistake with silent Wit Holmes, who was a loner, but he did with Binocular Bill Smith who called Hugh “You” and once in a while when they sighted each other would neglect to share with Hugh their regular hog-holler borrowed from some movie, “Suey! pig pig piggy!” Dom, in this same earlier time maybe a year past Pearl Harbor, imperturbable Petty stopped playing with us. She might — or might not — spare half an hour Saturday before she went off hand in glove with her “Pappy” to the Manhattan galleries. And she suddenly developed an indiscriminate sweetness with Bob and Hugh and the Smith twins and once Joey too and of course me which I happen to know Bob in private told her to knock off for it was phony and which to me bespoke some inescapable bounty of which she had made up part. Joey had dark down on his upper lip when he was only thirteen, and he rooted for the Giants. Where was Tracy? She didn’t like sports. The handsome creature in our basement laundry room here in this benighted building asked the Super if he gave up booze for Ramadan. He looked at her and moved toward the door then halted— suddenly , so you were reminded that as usual he’d been limping. Then with his back to us head down he said, “I guess you might say we’ve put the salaam back into the salami,” and she said as if on cue, “Is that black humor?”

But it’s the Irish-Italian axis my Austrian neighbor fears, some decentralized outer Mafia. On the other hand, she smells very real; she smells of (as the big button next to the green “KISS ME I’M IRISH” in the stationery shop window says:) “SEX NOW”: she isn’t quite Utah clean under her quilted sleeves or in her demanding non-committal drawl “How you doing today?” That’s not exactly the password kids by custom exchange on the Hello Walk of Utah U. perhaps locatable most vividly as the east third of a promenade that bisects the campus’s oval park. If I can’t decelerate the elevector I can retard the footsparks when they come into the echoing hall. Yet maybe, too, I should welcome the chance to ask if, in law, suicide invalidates a Whole Life policy. For it’s Richard your son coming. It has to be.

Let me insert into the record lines Tracy wrote in the book she sent me out west for my sixteenth birthday, A Bell for Adano:

Therefore I gladly trust

My bodie to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and finde his birth

Written in dustie heraldrie and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern ,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth .

I cannot feel the paraphase field come around me without it constellating into sentences which are as framing as the blindly momentous syntaxes I leveled at Al’s father a generation ago. “Love is style,” I must have said in the sheets the psychiatrist took away. Thank God I don’t have to read them over to see if I’ve been consistent. Did he think they were your suicide note overlooked? If love is style, then is style love? Hugh Blood (no relation to Governor Henry H. Blood who in the ’30’s fostered the Utah U. art collection) winces: but not like Bob in front of Petty’s medicine cabinet — but Hugh can’t call my contagious equation dirty. My syntax in that parlor Al’s mother hung with three big picture calendars was the truth if I could only get to it instead of laboriously hosting Al and Bob in the living room of a moderately famous American I hardly knew.

Parabolabuster. Absentee vote-pairings in Congress.

That Saturday in March of ’53 I imagined Trace wasn’t using anything, so I went ahead, I unearthed her and then in time (though stylishly) withdrew. Bob and Al would laugh and say Retracted the old landing gear. Well, after that, her whole body beside me was puzzling back beyond the strangeness to the spasms which she had once upon a time haltingly told me were like her vertebrae turned into little attacking hearts of electric blood sliding down one by one through her living womb and back. But now she began to shake and when I drew the covers up I found she was moving her fingertips through what I had left of myself on her. So style isn’t necessarily love, O.K.? I had made her lose her grace, and I forgot then whether Al could have heard us from his snoring room and I thought only that guilt teaches nothing. But if Earth = Spacecraft, may not Space = Earthcraft?

The freaked-in cloud-hanger, his plane long gone, looks up for silver and feels the earth out there, and but half-willing to think of himself as just one more paratrooper, himself vectoring the drag and lift and their aerodynamic resultant vector which brother had better be equal to your downward weight, puts off deciding whether to yank his ripcord: but suicide? like, spend the rest of your life dead? Space is something to get through, to come from. It’s how you use your earth.