Joseph McElroy: Ancient History: A Paraphrase

Ah Dom, if I’d died yesterday what would you have known about me? For that matter, what would Ted? Every suicide demands a survivor, and it’s the survivor who foots the loss and breaks or bricks up the code. But think if you were the last person on earth — the others all suicides. You could play golf. You could pray. Would you spend your time on suicide? Ted’s textbook says, “The quotient common to all societal breakdown-tabulations is Interdependence.” It is not my fault Ted got me for a step-father. We are open ends. Ev understood Emma when Emma said, “Ong Zeus.” Ev has so much time to do so much that I wonder if she doesn’t to begin with have more time. One of those old Friday evenings my father stepped off the train with two cases instead of one, and though nothing had been said about a typewriter for my birthday I’d wished for one, and carrying back across the station platform that density of independent weight I was reduced to dumb labor by knowing what was in that black, square-sided case whose gravity I now know I was exactly equaling. I would not receive the machine for two days yet, I wouldn’t be eight till Sunday — Sunday evening, to be precise. Well, Saturday Al’s mother heard me tell Al what I was getting, and she asked him why he and I didn’t play with Tony and another of Al’s schoolfriends, and when he said he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to she slapped his left cheek with her right hand. He ran into his room, and I went in there too, he had more things than I did including a Norden bombsight, but his mother told me I better go home. As soon as I got my typewriter Sunday my mother made me pick out a letter to my grandmother, who was so sick she couldn’t write legibly any more — you couldn’t even tell her p’s and k’s apart. It was a junior machine, it had about everything except a margin release, a back space, and a single-quote for an exclamation. With the top off, it was bigger, and I would slowly click the drum around secure in the endless energy of the cylinder’s clear soft black and I would rest my fingertips along the silver-ringed celluloid-topped letters and let its authority touch a mass of merciless future behind my eyes.

Al’s birthday was in January — a bad month for a birthday it seemed to me then. It was on a Sunday, the year he was twelve, and he was going to spend the weekend with me in the city, the first and last time we asked him. I was so excited I had a stomach ache and didn’t go Thursday the fifteenth to the Brooklyn Ice Palace with Bob and Petty, and I even forgot to phone the Norwegian girl from Bay Ridge who was meeting us at the rink and who two or three years later when I’d walk her home through her very different neighborhood (where the stoops went up grassy embankments) gave me a soft kiss at each streetlamp. But Al’s mother phoned person-to-person that Thursday to tell my mother Al had pinkeye and couldn’t come down, and it was his birthday Sunday the eighteenth also and she hoped we’d understand, and I confess I was relieved even if I did not understand. I wonder which fooled my step-son Ted more, the divorce or his father’s sudden death? He is only now coming out of an orbit of filial distraction he went into at fourteen; it kept him from knowing where he wanted to go to college. He stands today in my living room downstairs and Dom he says things like “Oh, books are so linear!” But he doesn’t read. He wants an 8-millimeter movie kit but hasn’t asked for it. When I was his age — and that’s only twenty years ago — I worked a couple of summers on the ranch of a business friend of Perpetua’s father’s, though granted it wasn’t all digging postholes and shifting aluminum irrigation pipes in fields of Sudan and forcing Herefords into chutes where they could be stuck with needles. I’m a doer, in any case. Ted tells me there’s nothing left to do, and not even time to. One morning he came in and looked at us in bed and said he wanted to be a writer not a doctor, but Ev and I hadn’t even known he was contemplating medicine. I was able one night to state and illustrate for him the parabola principle. What I think stops Ted is locus, all points equidistant from point F and line D. He is not exactly an only child now, but I suspect his receptors were always different from mine. When I couldn’t solve a problem at the end of a chapter in his Analytic book he said it didn’t matter and thanked me for clearing up the theory in, like, creative quik-trips (right?) like my old friend Bob’s cross-stick boomerang that he got for Christmas 1946 or the diver’s flight from springboard to strobe-water oh wow—

But Ted couldn’t see parabola as conic section—

and when I said what good were my analogies if I couldn’t do the problems in his book, he said the point was the concept of focus-directrix-vertices, upon which I said mildly that at least I could demonstrate why only a ninth of an iceberg is exposed — but Ted says, I don’t want you to demonstrate that — Or, say I (remembering Ev his mother happily waking once in the middle of the night when I’d fallen from sleep and was willing a thigh suspended on the wall to turn into something else), is it a seventh of Archimedes’ iceberg or an eleventh? you divide densities — Which doesn’t matter , interrupts Ted, its irrelevant (right?)— Which , I therefore shout, does too matter and by the way irrelevant to what?

Oh if our ends, Dom, were only open at the same point.

Mass is energy: granted, natural Lucretius couldn’t have divined that; but redefine mass both at rest and otherwise, as our old Einstein did, and lo! Lucretius is saved: or (and does my father nod approval?) to be more precise Lavoisier’s eighteenth-century axiom “in all the operations of art and nature nothing is created” can now by grace of Einstein’s artful Mass insure that grave Lucretian clue “Things cannot be born from, nor once born restored to, nought” (in my English a syntax over-neat). Terrible Ted bolts out the door, an incident which lends itself to multiple reproduction, and I hear the stair exit slam in the long hall, for in these moods he’ll never take the elevator.

Would I like to feel I’ve done some of all this to Ted? And am I initially disarmed by his willingness to shut his eyes, shake his head, successfully try to smile, then so expertly recount the waiting room sequence? Yes, Dom, I indeed am initially disarmed. For I want to believe he’s resisting. So I think, What? is he inventing it all? No, that sideways sag of the combed head denies he is. The waiting room serial strains my brain. Would he tighten truth into a puzzle to prove to my satisfaction my adult poverty, sitting here ruling parabolic axes with your typewriter repair shop claim card? No, he’s too natural. Yet this high-priced interlude composed over the secret weeks of certain half-hours in his psychiatrist’s waiting room shrinks out of reach. I can merely listen to the kid and pay his bills. His doctor, a plump but distant Hungarian highly recommended by poor old thirty-eight-year-old Hugh Blood, came often late for appointments or even forgot and gave two patients the same hour. So often that Ted thought he meant to. But he produced excuses, like incredible morning traffic coming down from the hospital, or an empty squad car double-parked blocking the nonetheless vacant space he always parks in, or then somebody broke into his buxom Mercedes and he had to go to his garage to order a new burglar alarm, which was the only thing tampered with. Or he’d blame the time-lag on his secretary, who operates from someplace else and serves several doctors. Three or four times, the person waiting with Ted was a girl who at first when the plump Hungarian finally showed was glad to dislodge her pending congruence with Ted and go out for coffee. Ted teased himself that she was the plump Hungarian’s plant testing Ted’s capacity for healthy selfishness; but on the other hand, Ted’s appointment Monday was for no less than nine a.m.