Women and Men (121 page)

Now
that,
wakes the interrogator, is so empty a statement it is downright bracing; what is the humidity outside our chambers?

Jim fell forward, sent away. But by whom? For it was his (only somewhat sickly) mother who had "passed away" (as Pearl Myles put it of her own mother’s death, discussing what, where, and when matter-of-factly for the class; her mother having passed away less than four years previous or, as Jim with a sour smile hidden in his heart swiftly calculated, not long after Pearl Harbor!); fell forward, as not even he could quite know, borrowing Bob Yard’s pickup truck (this time legitimately) one afternoon of his senior year, but
we,
who were always potentially part of him, knew and would claim credit for saving his life that afternoon if it were not some section of our own, not to mention that of a farm kid in a baseball cap driving a bare bodiless chassis the wrong way out of the street behind the Courthouse as Jim, with the right of way and Ann-Marie Vandevere braced beside him in the same seat that Anna Maria Pietrangeli had occupied with proud arms crossed over her breast the week before, floored the pedal only afterward to be in a position (thanks to Bob Yard’s brakes in the days before inspection) to know that at that instant his errand had been less to kill that vehicle in front of him and its exposed operator than to pass through it with an angry
(not
"irate") vision that if he’d been given what his force for a moment demanded would have propelled him and the severe and passionate blonde girl with him through that thing—that "thing" he’s driving, that dink, that fuckhead—by way of a mere rearrangement of the matter making up said unwary obstacle without altering it in any way but the experience of these molecules that made secret space for him and the girl and Bob’s vehicle to pass through yet paralleled by a memory felt in Jim’s shoulders and knuckles and calves that this was no way to get out of town. The kid’s life was spared. The so-called Hokey-Pokey Man, who peddled his homemade vanilla ice cream by a little horsedrawn wagon at dusk, told him his mother had been one of the nicest persons he had ever known; a lot to live up to, he said—an Armenian, but not quite the only one in town, said grandfather Alexander—some Armenians are gypsies (some gypsies are Hungarians), but the Hokey-Pokey Man has that fine head of white hair and a square head like Mel’s, only smaller—he’s no gypsy—

—We knew that anyway, said Margaret.

Jim reported to his father what the Hokey-Pokey Man had said, who incidentally must have recalled how much Sarah loved vanilla ice cream as deep a vanilla taste as heart of nutmeg; and Jim’s father said how most Armenians were Catholics. Jim didn’t get it, but wasn’t in the habit of asking his father things; but when he reported his father’s odd remark, Margaret, whom he never talked with any more about her old hole-in-the-sky stories, told him Catholics considered suicide a sin. Jim just said, "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," and Margaret retorted, "No second chance there." And Jim added, "Maybe there’s no heaven." "Maybe there isn’t," said Margaret. Margaret laughed and went to give him a hug, which he more or less went along with. But it made him hopeless—how could that be?—and he said what seemed to come between them: "Well, they never found her." Not that anyone was really looking now, or raking the briny floor for a person he felt like he knew somewhat less now, though Brad for God’s sake recalled stuff about her from before he was born—maybe the little bastard really
was
more her son—such as that she didn’t want any more kids but after Brad came along she was glad; and that she had been a great surf swimmer in the old days, fearless and stubborn, until later she hardly ever went in. And she laid out her writing pens and ye olde music-copying implements on the drop-leaf desk in the musick womb—the next room, a room full of possible and future music, and Jim fell forward (it felt like forward) through furniture, people, walls, power lines, hilly roads—and, and—

Is she clear to
you?
asks the interrogator, faked into a second career as listener—and
who,
he adds, are
you?
—it’s suddenly not qua-t clear; in the modern city they have just adopted one of our own venerable methods of causing pain in order to elicit information; yes, a youth approached a park bench containing a couple who were either of different sex or same, and shot them through the leg with one shot, and (which was his
original
"touch") only
then
inquired what money they had.

—and Sarah wrote little letters to Alexander her father though he was just downtown and if he replied it may have been by word of mouth. "This is a great-grandfather desk," Jim heard her say to little Brad and she smiled at Jim who appeared at her doorway and she went on speaking to the baby of the family: "that’s a grandfather clock because it’s tall and old and it’s been telling time for a long time" (she reached to release the arm of her metronome and let it swing back and forth, then stopped it—Jim in recollection couldn’t quite see her principal audience, which was Brad—where was he? he was standing by her desk); "but this is a great-grandfather desk because that’s who made it, and over at Margaret and Alexander’s house there’s a grandfather pistol" while she smiled at Jimmy now and then and would say, "Oh Mel, you are so goddamn polite," like she was against him; or she would kid with her "baby," Brad: "Now what was your name? I forget, was it Benjamin?" (‘Wo," cried the child)—"Was it Jackie? was it Sammy?"
("No,"
cried the child and developed hiccups from giggling and couldn’t say his name)—"Oh /know: it was Emily, that’s your name"—("No," but he’s too young to say, That’s a
girl’s
name)—"Oh I remember,
you’re Brad"
was said at last, like sheer invention at the last burnt-out moment when we’d run out of potentially erroneous facts.

There were ladies in silk blouses with dark chiffon scarves inside their instrument cases and such; but, never forgetting her sister in Mass. who didn’t get along with Margaret and Alexander and rarely (though with some considerable annualized ceremony) visited, Sarah came more to life with the male musical contingent whether or not they actually made the music or sustained it. Here were Barcalow Brandy wine, a would-be singer with a natural performer’s name whose family owned extensive orchards and other properties in the county and who wore sport coats you’d never see in any store and a scarf around his neck like an actor, Jim thought; and Byron Kennett, who wore silkier sport clothes and, one secret shocking week, went to state prison for a while, where his mother’s dancing shoes could not penetrate, and who could play the cello and did so out of it seemed love for Jim’s mother, not for the cello which in a way didn’t even belong to him though against his will it had been left to him by a maiden great-uncle who had desired to exert some strong influence upon this only child whose father had left his wife and son otherwise fairly well fixed. The truth was that Jim didn’t much want to go near that room with its sudden empty or shouting or laughing halts in the music when someone had missed a note ("Probably turned to the wrong page," said Mel one evening when Brad reported that the music group had had a bad argument over a few missing notes, etcetera, "pages stuck"); yet Jim would not have wished those late afternoons or Saturday mornings to end; because —he didn’t just
know
why—because his mother didn’t turn toward
or
away from him but was in that room sealed by an agreement arrived at—aha!—between Jim and the intermittent music itself: but not an agreement not to enter; for he could, though didn’t because the music
(chamber
music cat’s-cradling and/or sawing up and down and around) gave the house a comfortable good sense, whatever that might mean. And when a fellow named James Mayn came, years later, to tell his wife Joy (to
try
to tell her, though then with oddly little strain) what he hadn’t known he knew, that his tone-deaf father Mel had to keep replacing a thermostat with a mind of its own (though Joy didn’t want to hear the make of thermostat it was and a detail or two Jim couldn’t have helped recalling), all part of a conflict between Mel and Sarah, who claimed that her catgut tightened up unpredictably so that during the cooler months she couldn’t keep her violin or her big viola tuned (at which the Interrogator’s knee jerks picking up a poignant sexual slant as when a condemned, in, after all, industrial process of being electric-chaired, sends back upstream through the cables his own unequal but distinct charge that changes the warden’s hand if not his being for some rest of his life e’en though he knows it not): meanwhile the brink-like brevity of Mel’s news item that Sarah had "passed away," together with such elements of her life as time and names might sum up, capped the event so Jim later felt he had not known where the event
was
and while respecting his father’s not unloving conciseness, he looked for news to fill the gap and found it in the future inside him, even to some nothing fantasy that he was
in
the future with everything Go and under control, looking back—throw in a space settlement and balanced atmosphere brick by factual brick, etcetera—but . . .

But in the weeks and months ("mouths," in possible misprint) succeeding Brad’s Day, Jim held to his friendship with Margaret. Was she "all he had"? Maybe not. He had his new angle on his father Mel, and this now heavy-laden, really fat-jawed Mel a special father to Brad, and a person who forgot to touch others on the hands and arms and shoulders and back and body (but stood around with his fingers locked behind his back and his shoulders forward), a person who once suffered enough to slug Jim in the cemetery when he brought Bob’s pickup truck back after an untraced joy ride, these were real things that years later he was thankful for, as if they were themselves the thanks.

Yet Margaret was Margaret and Jim was Jim. Newly confused about her tales, their exact date of inspiration, their pretty weird anatomy, their topography that changed like the weather, their hinted nature of foretelling, yes, foretelling for the Navajo mother with the hole in her head had come back to life when local Prince departed in pursuit of visiting East Far Eastern Princess, otherwise unknown as the Alien Beloved,
AND,
as if part of the same crap, the mother of Jim and Brad had said that they must go away, or anyway Jim should, while for his part he was pretty sure that
she
had been the one to go away—well, she warn’t here, so where
was
that lady?—among the Navajo? on Second Mesa among the Hopi? the long-gone Anasazi? was she sweating in an underground chamber? working "with" the poor?—give me a
poor
person any day!—swimming toward water, toward China, toward Choor? (to the strains of a liner’s band playing "Let’s Take the Long Way Home" what Jim had swayed in the dark to the music of, with Anna Maria, her proud, very powerful arms around him instead of crossed over her tits).

A joke: "He was pretty sure
she
had been the one to go away"—well with a fact you don’t always know: and facts in combination, next thing you know you’re explaining the last World War or some President’s raid on the icebox.

But still pals with his grandmother Margaret. When she went to New York to (annually) buy material at Schumacher’s and stay at the Hotel Seymour near Times Square which excited or intrigued Jim in absentia, for he had never stayed in a hotel and refrained from asking Margaret if they had dance music under the chandeliers and gambling kings and movie stars and rich, kind criminals all visiting each other in their white satin suites—Margaret would see a few people, a cousin who did something important in a museum. Jim did not like her being away (well, of course—what with no Sarah any more, etcetera). ‘Specially when the secretly joint owner of the Brad’s Day pickup truck, namely Bob Yard, added, Boy she really had to get away—(what did he mean?)—as if he knew more and less than that—more and less yes, come to think, as when some years later Bob recalled Jim’s mom Sarah talking funny to him, making a decimal point (she said) in the dust with (she said) her parasol, when she didn’t have a parasol: yet Jim felt Bob knowing something more than his stated ignorance—"said we met in passing, that’s what she said more than once but we were somewhat better friends than that," said Bob, who a bit overwarmly recalled the day he first saw Mel upon a running board sweeping to his destiny downtown from church to hotel-reception the day he best-manned a local friend’s
nuptials,
leg out like a skater (who on earth had the camera to catch him? maybe his inner immobility conquered his outer)—grim gay smile exactly as fixed as that of a man (to wit, him) who squeezed as much a record amount of concisely edited news into the paper of the family he later realized he had known he was about to start marrying into five minutes later, while smiling not so fixedly that he could not be a shade long-winded and w/tsmiling upon meeting an unexpected feminine obstacle en route to the hotel punch bowl who was so taken aback by his fixed best man’s grin that Mel momentarily introduced himself—they had the same last name. Maybe remote cousins? she asked; from Jackson’s time? she tilted a head. He thought it through and doubted it: a branch of the Mayns’ from right around Harrisburg-Carlisle way (Pennsylvania’s beautiful, she said)—until his post-introductory at-a-loss-for-words near-solemnity in her presence now made her laugh and tell him he should
always
wear those trousers and a cutaway and the gray top hat, while he abruptly explained that he was second in command of a small-town weekly over there to the west, that was getting more into wire service and statewide news which was what he had been working for, these many long months; and meanwhile he said he liked Caruso, and she could only reply, You don’t say, not knowing what she felt, nor recognizing by speaking voice a tone-deaf man—though she laughed (never knowing he would be tone-deaf nor that if he could not conquer tone-deafness he could still rise to one side of it); and so they walked away into the room together and he dropped his topper, which landed right side up, and he picked it up and left it on the punch table, falling in love but not with love, as the music had it at that very moment, she had told Bob Yard, never guessing (she told her father one day indirectly in a letter downtown) that Mel Mayn (without the
e)
would never
again
drop a flustered gray top hat and snatch it up and drop it and pick it up as if it were soaking and leave it on a punch-bowl table; never again, because he managed it just that once—having power, but not for Sarah, who married him on a whim because he wasn’t afraid to tell her as he stood up with his hat that he’s tone-deaf, yet because Margaret had kept her on the strictest rein yet had bent her ear for years about women in the home and at the polls. Which Jim and we—changing track less and less angelically to its summary moment the night of the day that Margaret died, a few years later, so swiftly that we hear Alexander (implicitly paralleling deaths of daughter and wife), in the midst of more grief (which he’d call "trouble") than he will ever have time to grasp, apply the word "Ow" but to his daughter’s marriage, that old trothful plight Sarah would write him little "humor-me" "gists" about—’ ‘What more could you say but Ow later Ouch to sum up fifteen years or so of marriage to Mel with a point like that one, Jim: Ou . . . ch."