Women and Men (171 page)

The horse helped.

The Mexican blue mare. No, that’s the Prince’s. Do the Navajos have princes?

It was a horse as far as Zuni, to the south; and then I got a stage, and then I got a horse (that’s what one of those kids yelled at us the other night at the intersection when they nearly hit us: "get a horse").

I didn’t feel I was in their car with them at all.

Why would you, Jimmy?

That was the day grandson and grandmother had things out, almost. Not why was she in the cemetery at that hour when she had just gotten home from New York: but

Why, why had he spoken to her as he did the day Marie’s brother got stuck in the tree?

Stuck!
(sticking up for
his
generation, even though he didn’t like his girl’s brother, against the older generation even its most beloved representative)

—and Sammy came to get him (she went on), and he really was most rude to her (she insisted).

"Well what did I say—cripes sake."

"You know what you said," retorted Margaret, "and in front of Sam."

"What was it?" (though he more or less knew).

" ‘What a great friendship!’ you said" (oh, she was emphasizing
that
remark), "as if those two surprising men didn’t care about each other."

"But
you
were the one—you said the Anasazi put up with a hundred years of talk about the weather from that zany Hermit (when the
Anasazi
was more the hermit) to humor him, that’s what you said" (knowing, as he spoke, that she had in her mind harder blows or queries that had glanced hither and yon).

"Not one hundred, for heaven sake" (she started to—oh God, she’s crying).

"Well, thirty, then!" (knowing that other words of his he didn’t care to recall were in their heads blocking and breathing). "I mean, you don’t have to talk to
me
about the weather, Gramma—"

"Oh" (she laughed and cried, like laughing tears but instead musical as a feeling may be word-free) "oh you’re the Hermit and I’m the Anasazi six hundred years old!"

"No," he said, thoughtfully, though to himself granting her truth,
"you re
my
mother"
—which threw them both down into silence.

"She is neither here nor there," Margaret stupidly quipped, and the boy-man drifted off toward the future where he’d been told he belonged.

"She wasn’t in the cemetery last time I looked," he always remembered saying, badly, while some opposite barred him, with its words, from taking the following step.

"Why would you look?" asked Margaret as clearly as if she forgot his words about his mother from the other day still delayed; he answered himself, not his grandmother: "How could Sarah do a thing like that?" he said his mother’s name.

"We don’t know," said Margaret.

"Holy hell," said the boy-man quietly quoting his father.

"It was in her to do."

"Holy hell what there is in people."

"We’re ordinary people," said his grandmother.

"Well, it isn’t in her now," said Jim and remembered at once, as if the thing he said covered so much it might cover it up if taken seriously.

It was all held somewhere, a load of what we’re capable of, some plural "we we we we" voicing now and then its slide into action. He couldn’t believe this vague thought but it was in him, the sense that somewhere he was in it, a dump, a general dump of what you’re all capable of, a messy cemetery messy because most of the folk weren’t always dead—oh shit.

"You thought I said some terrible thing, didn’t you?" he persisted, and in later years knew only that she had gently backed off.

"She had such life in her but she couldn’t give it up much," said Margaret. "Sometimes I thought it was my doing, but how could it be?"

"What did she say? I can’t remember."

"She said Chopin was great but as for Schumann, his inspiration seems to come between two sobs. I remember her saying that, because I laughed and she said it sounded better in the French where she’d read it."

He didn’t understand
couldn’t give it up much
and so couldn’t get it out of his head. One thing: he would get away and hear more than these few special emptinesses. His grandmother put her hand on his shoulder. Two facts: his grandmother had a husband; and she had lost a daughter. (If you ever
had
a person to lose.)

"Your mother had wonderfully bad manners when she chose."

He wanted to say, Stop.

"The day she met your father at his friend’s wedding she told him he came from one of the dull branches of the family remote enough, though, so that she could marry him without producing Mongols, and she told him, ‘If only you could keep up that dashing appearance you had on the running board leaving the church to come to the reception!’ I was standing at the punch table when she said it and he dropped his hat onto the floor, I don’t recall what it was doing in the room."

Wait a sec, there
was
a connection—

A connection?

—between spiral winds and present and absent weathers.

Oh!—some strained surprise between grandmotherly wonder, laughter, irritation. "Between" what and what? his father Mel in the newspaper office said to someone, anyone, himself, an orderly thinker who was fond (if "fond" could ever state the difficulty with which he paced himself through life) of saying, to someone who had spoken confusingly or with just too many words, "Say that again."

O.K. he answered her: one morning he had come out of the now motherless house and stopped at the end of the walk and found the wind, which he liked, pressing him but on the right side of his back, not his left, aiming right into the wing of his right shoulder yet practically non-existent on his left side; and he turned with the wind, not toward downtown and school beyond downtown, but turned leftward (in the direction of the intersection at the other end of town where the highway ran one way toward Trenton alongside the race track and the other way toward the shore), only suddenly to see
Margaret
up the street more vivid than distance should have allowed, on her porch just waving to him: the wind had turned him but it wasn’t spiral, you know—it was only strong and a bit curved, the way winds of the Earth will be, but
he
felt a bit spun, and he believed in mere coincidence so he didn’t think the wind
came
from his grandmother (anyway it was sort of blowing
toward
her, "leading" like a forward pass)—but the thing was, you could think what you wanted, and Braddie was known to get so angry when the winter wind was ramming him that he had a fit almost and once went back inside the house and was late for school, instead of running quick downtown like the three hundred jackrabbits Margaret saw all together several jumps ahead of a Kansas dust storm, but the thing was you could
think
it was hands on your back pushing you, or one hand there and the other not there or not much there— present, absent—but, true or not, you could learn from nature, and so you had to let it do what it did—

(Oh my yes, his grandmother murmured; life is right.)

—and the hands, right hand pushing, left hand not pushing, or for somebody in another town maybe the other way around, could be just your mistake, your imagination, some other hands of yours inside you pushing out: not that you had to believe that, but if you get turned by the wind and the wind doesn’t have real hands so the hands are inside you or something, you can keep on turning ‘cause you’re started and the wind you sort of give in to is inside you maybe as a spiral—even if, outside, it isn’t—

Oh he wanted to have it both ways! his grandmother laughed.

And probably when winds meet, they not only join each other and flow together, but they might spin each other or they might—

"Why, this is our Anasazi medicine man talking all over again, Jim, don’t you remember?"

"But, Gramma, it was the Hermit who talked about the frontier where the breath of the reptile met the breath of the food needles the cactus was tossing out."

"But the inside wind being part of the outside wind, twining spiral and all that, if you recall, that’s our old Anasazi, who by the way had one big lung instead of our two; an earlier lung."

"But
he
said the spirals got set off in the four corners or something inside us, the four corners facing outward from one another."

"Well, maybe you’ve started a new weather on your own."

But Jim didn’t know.

She said, "Not upcoming or downgoing, but ongoing."

He shrugged slightly and thought of getting away, remembering guiltily how he had needed her. O.K. Gramma, O.K. maybe I’m the Anasazi. He beat reincarnation, and I don’t believe in reincarnation.

Exactly my sentiments.

Right after his mother’s suicide he had to hate his grandmother. How else could he have worked toward this spring victory? He was sort of riding out of town swung toward the future as his mother had once quirkily decreed for him. He would rather be the Anasazi, he told his own daughter years of bedtimes later—because the Anasazi managed for himself a
post-mortem
cruise in the form of a cloud in order to check if there
were
foam volcanoes in the eastern states. (And Jim was able some nights to tell his beloved daughter after his equally beloved son had risen above them by formula to the ceiling of the room in sleep, things he knew there was no danger of her believing, and in any case she was more interested in the pistol, what happened to the pistol the Navajo Prince had on him when he pursued the Princess (than in how it had come into the Anasazi’s hands), and interested in what ground-up horse bones etcetera were used for internally—the father didn’t tell her.)

"You can be both Anasazi
and
Hermit," Margaret told him; for he had gotten up and was going, and all that had been said, like some power that would be
there
if it were not
here,
had left unsaid what had upset Margaret to call him rude, rude!, as if to have the power you had to take it from somebody else the way the mestizo spy who had wanted to unload the (later) Mayn family pistol nonetheless used it as a mid-journey deterrent somewhere in the Sonora desert between the Mexican War and the Gold Rush when an unknown but someday-to-be-legendary Alsatian mathematician threatened to withhold specie from his pocket together with a large folded sheet of foolscap evidently valuable, upon which when the mestizo took it from the footsore foreigner he found a numbered design with curved lines radiating outward of varying length dotted or broken, yet with identical maths and figures that all came down one way or another to the number 5—11.125 (she recalled) minus either 3.125 and 3 (successively) or 6.125 equaling, along all these lines of varying length, the number 5 she thought—but here in early 1946, Take the power, Jim, from
who?
But he knew, he knew—he did, he did—a clamor dividing in him and dividing (when some song his Gramma sang said, "I have nothing to divide"); and he delegated the knowledge, just as he kept a new irritating presence to himself in politely asking, "Did that really happen, with the mountain lion becoming a wolf and the great bird flying away?"

"I had left by then," said Margaret, her hands in her lap.

"Had the Princess?"

"I can’t quite tell," his grandmother said and laughed with a slight wit of unease—she was witty, snooty, democratic; tall, loving, crazy punster, very smart; self-depreciating re: her family having settled the town even before Washington hospitalized his wounded in a church out by the railroad tracks, and she also until after she got sick "went" to the bathroom with magical speed, he could never see how she could do it that fast, so the water was flushing almost
as
the door was being locked. "Yes," said Margaret; "she, too."

"Did you love the Navajo Prince?" he remembered asking, with Anne-Marie on his mind, in his body.

"Yes I did. A prince only to the princess. They wouldn’t use such words. They use ‘princess’ among the Seattle Indians, I seem to recall."

"Did my mother know?" came the question more indelible than any answer to it.

"Very little. She felt I talked too much and was a busybody at the Historical Association and raising money for those poor old Split Wood Del-awares in upper New York State, and the Indian women in Pennsylvania with their family problems and good sense."

"What did you and the Prince talk about?" (while "Why don’t I ask you things?" his own weirdly memorable words, unvoiced, probed outward like a worm whose blindness was the unlikely staying power in his recollection of what he did not understand, such as Why "Split Wood"?).

"Not the weather. Difference between us, their whole extra family of aunts and cousins, for example; everyone moderately in touch with everyone else; using each other. Only one stargazer, and I let him know the pictures I saw at night, the constellations, when we sometimes lay full-length on our horses—but he tolerated me only as a nice visitor, which I was."

"What language did you speak."

"My own, though I learned some of his in secret so I could say in their tongue to myself what they said to me in English—like ‘Walk in beauty,’ which was quite a thing for them to say of me."

"You
are
beautiful, Gramma."

"They meant all living—living with the land and its animals and plants, as the land lived with the air and the heavens. They dry-farmed in the plateau and they did irrigated farming in the canyon. Peaches and grapes in the canyon when they were lucky."

But the mestizo spy?

He gave the piece of stolen foolscap to the Anasazi with the pistol and was later turned inside out by two Thunder Dreamers and left to dry on a saguaro cactus.

But years later when Jim Mayn’s daughter’s words had evoked "Holy hell what there is in people" and she had fallen asleep where she was in her quilted bunk—not like her little brother afloat near a ceiling lamp fixture snoring more subtly than a grandfather’s nasal short-circuit potent as the memory of it—he made his wife quietly mad by calling Anne-Marie Vandevere in California who, after sixteen average years of silence, informed him at once that that time in the cemetery-golf-course "complex" (she’d been funny sixteen years ago, too) his grandmother had been in New York for two days because an old friend had died and his apartment had been taken over at once by-