Women and Men (127 page)

No sin for Range to say Sarah might get out among people more than she did, for if anemia was anemia, blues didn’t help anemia, and though no longer called in after Sarah’s death, Range did offer to grandfather Alexander the morning after charges had not been preferred against Jim, against Bob, or against Anne-Marie Vandevere (the remarkably impassive one of the lot) the confidential opinion that Jim would land on his feet, the doctor had liked him ever since Jim had in his opinion quite possibly saved the young German girl who had been out of sight down in the meadow between the cemetery and the race track when she had been struck in the temple by the good doctor’s unseen golf ball that had sliced and sailed—took off and seemed to travel further than would a
good
shot, although there’s an illusion—through trees and into downhill sky, and all Jim saw was one girl in one meadow fall, drop, drop sideways, almost as if cleverly pouncing on something unknown there in the grasses: Jim had run to her, found her gagging, sensed her whole struggle, gone into her mouth with his fingers; had gotten her tongue forward, had started raising her hips, pressed some life into her (she seemed in a concussive shock) so that when the doctor, in search of his ball, came in view looking down to the right of the golf course and beyond this far end of the cemetery, the intent motion of the boy straddling the girl and the swift, sturdy approach through the field of that Ira Lee, the Indian kid (part-Indian? full-blooded halfbreed!) lacked any visible response from the girl lying in the field who was then, as if in death, the cause of Ira striking Jim across the side of the head for Jim went on trying, that is to revive the girl, and in fact never stopped although the doctor’s shout and Ira’s second thought saved Jim from a second blow; but judging from the examination at the hospital, she could have been in trouble if not found soon—she was a refugee, but not a German Jew—and Ira’s presence there never got explained any more than Jim’s, who came out the rescuer, but he never said how he came there, a fairly boring place to be, and this was long before his mother died—all in all, an impressive performance, the doctor emphasized to Alexander; that boy’s all right—

—an isolated incident of irresponsibility giving Anne-Marie the key to Bob’s pickup so she could get inside and wait, where presently Italo-American emotion found Dutch-settler property enclosed beautifully in the cab but not
locked
in, which inevitably if not fatally caused that scene to beget and to overflow into and to slide sideways curving into (out of nowhere) a next:

while Jim, from obstacle through obstacle rushing through his high school building at twin speeds too fast, too slow outward, unsure what’s wayside and what’s way, how much to love his mother gone, how deeply to give his father thought, how much weight the motion he had experienced above the smudged Windrow, New Jersey, lens guarding the earth-colored corrugations of a continent of South America donated by—he forgot—how much to blame his grandmother Margaret for being the East Far Eastern Princess who in her turn couldn’t tell him quite where she was Margaret or how she was her
own
mother or what was so and what wasn’t and so he had thought, hell, he didn’t want any more of that story stuff, he’d close that out and about time: and there in one place was coach telling him to get off the glass, then finding stuff coming out of his mouth about it being Jim’s girl (but only the one he knew about) that he hadn’t first thought about, re: Jim; and there in another was an absolutely pooped Mr. Quirk (Jim’s summer employer’s brother) who had only three in his Solid class and had been ordered to remove the otherwise much-laughed-at sign over his door "let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"; and there in another place whizzing by was the tall young legislative principal Thompson Fulkerand, columnar, firm as stone, exactly half-bald, and the equally tall, majestically material Pearl W. Myles, and they ain’t talking about the weather but it’s bad whatever it is, there’s the eye in the back of Fulkerand’s head for half an instant jolting Jim as he bounds by so fast only the word "criminal" in no doubt "Well I’m not a criminal, Miss Myles" or "It’s criminal what’s done to gain favor with the student body" gets into the strong, fast, angry boy’s head; there’s the occasional, laughable seventh sense in Jim that at least for the time being he, or the world-altering episode he’s in, is insane; there’s Mel’s all-too-brief obit for his wife, black-edged oblong on the second page a stone’s throw from the masthead, that Jim was not asked about but, after the fact, when asked by Alexander (in Mel’s presence, for Alexander did that) if Mel’s piece seemed O.K. with him, Jim called it "short and sweet" and never spoke of it again—locked it in; and there’s the order in which people came to Brad’s Day: there’s Alexander, his shined shoe-toes sticking out while he peruses a book about Indian music and smells very faintly of peanut butter he keeps in his shop; there’s Brad, so set apart by his own hand, his own act, of legs, neck, head, stomach, voice, playing hookey some might say; elsewhere, though same room, there’s Mel reporting a chance today of a hurricane originating astoundingly along the mid-Atlantic coast, and Margaret, shocked she said at Mel, then ovaling her mouth, though she didn’t ring true, while that weather reporter’s hand made a rare trip to the small of Brad’s or anyone’s back; and then, blink, there’s the sound heard at a distance but not a close-up, an illustration of which Pearl Myles from on gentle high asked for as part of her tall kindness to Jim and the family; and always there, central and invisible, is Brad sometimes swimming, the way any swimmer will use the floor for training and support, though not much on breathing, though ‘twas heavy:

For as we breathe, so shall we move, but upon moving, we go on of force breathing—

—
on
the move? the interrogator tries out idiomatically echoing in warped unison Mel’s "on the move?" at the bedroom doorway and Jim had abruptly quarter-turned to catch his father in the corner of his eye, then continued laying out every bit of his clothing on the bed beside a suitcase and a largest-size old khaki scout knapsack, he had three pairs of narrow khakis, he had five white T-shirts, he had four pairs of colored boxer shorts and two white jockey, he had three pairs of washed denim jeans, one of them Army-Navy store bell-bottoms, he had a maroon V-neck sweater raveled at one wrist, a yellow cashmere sweater (you
said
sweater) his aunt sent him from Boston that he never wore, and a tight-fitting scratchy, very warm blue-black turtleneck Navy sweater that Margaret had just last week brought him from the City; he had a washable seersucker jacket that he could wear certain evenings this coming summer if he had to, and for shirts he had a fine-red-white-and-blue-checked button-down, a blue Oxford button-down, a white tab-collar shirt with a light-brown stripe, and a regular white button-down; he looked at the closet and around at his open bureau drawers and answered his father: "Yeah, seeing what I got." His father had had a (his "warm weather") haircut, which enlarged his square head and broad-chinned face. Behind Mel, or around him, the sound of frying was audible, for Brad was a capable cook and, flicking the pan butter with a (with "his") spatula up over the yolk and unsettled white, would fry himself an egg in the afternoon and sandwich it between two slices of Tip Top bread, the egg of which Jim now smelt, and saying Brad made him hungry and was there any peanut butter left which he knew there was, he stepped around his father who sort of got out of the doorway. In the morning there’s Brad looking at Jim when Jim comes in for a fast glass of milk, Brad slowly chewing a mouthful of cereal in the quiet of the sunny kitchen so sounds like Braddie’s got nuts in his cereal or bones—whole animals, for God’s sake—while looking, looking, looking, munch, munch at his big brother (How ya doin’, Brad, you glutton!) and less fugitive and meaningless and exactly not to be turned away from, the dark red wool skirt (her mom did weaving as a hobby) of Anne-Marie Vandevere sitting on his right in the pickup truck (how did he drive it so many times right in town?), the cloth tight across her thighs and knees and lap you could tap like a drum but there must be a tunnel underneath right up because of the cloth not hanging down the way it sometimes did, he’s not sure how much he’s going to get this afternoon? why no practice that afternoon?—either it’s very late or it’s Sunday—and he’s eating an apple or something sweeter, he can’t quite recall, not what Anne-Marie thought or said about his mother’s drowning though he didn’t go out with her till just after, and not worth recalling, obstacle upon obstacle, but it’s his life, he feels years later, and there it was in all its minor trivia as vivid as fact in suspension ("Suspense," said Ted, "but did Anne-Marie ever say anything?"—and both men, aware of the Chilean journalista between them who smiled at her drink, knew the difference between saying that about an adult and, here, of Anne-Marie—"Oh she often spoke, and she’d have thought it out and she’d begin by saying, ‘You know . . .’ and you listened.").

It was later like he’d turned to these facts, all scattered and all the more exact and kind of meaningless, yet horrendous, funny—he’d imagine the entire life of the Stormer woman (going far away from her home and feeling occasionally guilty, and bearing a child and then another child conceived
in
marriage while perhaps her doctor-husband watched, watched her being a good doctor’s wife or falling out of love with him without knowing if it was him as a man or as a medicine man), the woman who married the hairy, intensely hard-working doctor ("workaholic" we always say now in the mid-eighth decade of a century that threatens to see life itself as a drug), in Chicago they lived, and Leona who on a visit to Windrow parents ran into Sarah and seemed not to be insulted by her one day in the old, still drugstore that was also a soda fountain and afterward Jim asked his mom if he could have a Clark bar and she paid for it with the tears in her eyes and then needed a bite of it, raising her lipsticked lip a shade above the upper teeth looking along her nose at it. Jim aimed the balled wrapper at the trash can and it missed and landed on the white tiles that weren’t as much like bathroom tiles as was the facing in the barbershop from linoleum floor up to the counter.

Yet Flick Mayn, the daughter of Jim, once wrote for herself to give to her dad ridding she hoped some need from not just
her
system, why was it insulting to say to Leona Stormer, "It isn’t that I feel much for you; you take me back, that’s all you do—" but it’s honest—
and
your mother cried—

—which she never did, said Mayn, and granted she did say "that’s a hell of a lot to make me do," I think she said that—

—damn right she said that, said the daughter never flinching from (well) someone else’s life, but she meant "taking her back": that was the "hell of a lot" she meant, and I think you knew that, Dad.

No . . . no—which was how Mel habitually responded to someone’s opinion, even on special occasions a cluster of
facts
reported to him, such as that Sarah when she played the piano, which wasn’t her first instrument, was able to see places she had never been to, markets full of red beets in a Polish village, the Chicago wind from the north raking the lake into white flesh, grouped skeletons down a mine, and when Brad looked at Mel saying gently, No ... no ... his brother Jim fighting mad, said back at Mel,
Yes. Yes. Yes,
to which Mel answered Jim, What do you mean? How do
you
know? Whereupon Jim seemed to surprise Mel by saying, I was there when she said it, she said it to me
and
Brad—upon which Mel was just able to smile, Well if she thought so . . .

You can just about take an insult from an adult who will at least not decorroborate what you have testified when he, or his relief, inquired who’s doing the script for the opera-ette we’d cited entitled
Hamlet?

But Alexander, whom Flick came to know in his ninety-second and ninety-third years (concluding postscript years, not twilit so much as noisier,
que brujo,
what din, as he lost his sight and turned the radio up and up and discovered music all over again—Alexander no more meant to insult Brad by removing the Densmore book he had loaned to Sarah a decade before than to dishonor Brad’s Day (quite the reverse) by bearing upon his person a simple smell of peanut butter from his supply downtown, which was neither here nor there:

The Indians of course lacked peanut butter, or the demand for it, to begin with, though the jojoba bean, a very buffalo among vegetables, not in that they used all of it which wasn’t the feat that totaling a buffalo was, but in that the jojoba got them through many a weekly problem, from shampoo to the generally unknown desert fish fry, when these deep-underground travelers found their way or it found them up into the warmed waters of the high cacti, raised the level and brinked the pressure of these standing reserves and ceremonially leapt from cactus "eyes" we name them, openings sometime occupied by owlbirds, one at a time unless we include the biggest-ever elf owl that Mena the itinerant zoologist had seen, plugging that particular hole clearly, yet, in the dusk, darkly when contrasted to the visible but illusory wash of moon-stark dawn-lumen literally coating the cactus trunk as the real light otherwise diminished: for that elf owl would not have budged for a pressure of fish risen inside that cactus except to fly at the eye of some night camper Anglo or Indian glinting in the flash of jojoba oil awaiting that desert fish fry so unknown even Mena had not witnessed it (hence the importance of judging comparative
descriptions),
and the Hermit-Inventor of the East
said
he had not witnessed it but Marcus Jones was more to be believed, a plainer, less potent figure so that when little Flick ran off outside to see what her younger brother was doing around or under that house where Alexander still lived though now with supervision, the name of that west-renowned botanist who found, and found names for, even unknown growths of locoweed so that his feats of broken-ground bicycling south of Salt Lake City and, monumentally, still south, are overlooked, brought from old Alexander, who was just turning the radio volume dial up again a generous exclamation, Oh Marcus Jones! (as if to say with distant softness, My old friend!) he was real, you know, that was him, with his field work in Colorado, you only see that book in French, (slowly) last day of April, the air perfumed you know, the sunny white flowers and the silver stems of the poisonous loco, and the Spanish bayonets, reaching an eminence, lights across a mesa—