Women and Men (181 page)

"If she has a temper, enjoy it now while you can," said Margaret. "Don’t put it off," she said, and then shaking her head went into hoots of laughter like the "Hoo-hoo" with which she and her cousin but never Jim’s mother entered a friendly house without ringing the bell—"No; my gracious, don’t put it off," as if to say, I’m sure you never do—"but it wasn’t just that one class you cut today and don’t you have class Friday?"

And while they discussed such things that had all been discussed at Christmastime as President Truman, who would never fill Mr. Roosevelt’s shoes but wasn’t trying to, thank goodness, though Jim’s girl’s father thought Harry couldn’t help being an improvement—and Margaret said she had to like a man who bellyached in public about having to be two people, President and an ordinary human being, man, husband, and father, and she and Jim discussed whether the Washington music critic Hume would need a new nose ‘f he ever met Margaret Truman’s dad, who had promised he would, and whether the war in Korea would be done with by the time Jim graduated because at least we had a man with experience in General MacArthur running things, although his mother had run him, and Margaret questioned the dark glasses, but would Truman actually give MacArthur the atomic bomb to use as he had said he would?—no, he would loan it to him—while Jim’s Poly Sci professor got half the class mad for saying the aim of a political party is to get elected . . .

Jim’s grandmother was marginally pensive there in the sunny room, a scent of soap, her oval translucent soap, coming from the bathroom; thoughtful, he sensed—though she was so curiously remembered by him in ‘77 that he was startled to see he couldn’t fully feel any more the time or its span then in 1950 back to his mother’s sudden absence in ‘45, though
was
able to recall not knowing the terrible wonder that took place the afternoon after he had seen Margaret in ‘50 (while a section of his mind was disloyally stuck back in his college town, gymnasium at the head of the street, movie theater, bookstore, soda fountain, package store)—thoughtful, he could recall her in ‘77 through that sprightly conversation which turned then into what she seemed to be really thinking: anyway he remembered no special sequence—only, at some center of their talk, "Better get it now because you don’t get it after you’re gone": which was, yes, reincarnation, that mortally old friend they joked about that used to come up in the old Indian powwows they had had when they both agreed when you died you died: while when-you-died-you-died didn’t mean that your buried flesh or ashes or even the miles of compact intestines and liver and all the little sacs your personal undertaker (Margaret had a good gruesome side) flushed down the drain didn’t enrich the crops and the seas, too, and the hereditary upgoing and downcoming atmosphere, so what had been an invisible particle of a "you" wound up in the blood of an angry Indian with high blood pressure or in the womb of a terror-stricken adolescent in a suburb of perhaps Rome scared to tell her father or in the tip of an elephant’s tongue (they would laugh, the two of them, even hearing the grandson’s father calling from the porch) or the hind-mounted scent-gland of a nightmare-white-mouthed javelina during threatening weather trying to smell its way home to Mineral del Monte or a Mexico City alley or some impossibly southern pampa it retained only the faith of in its shins and eyelids that in turn reach the garnish of a fat, filmy king’s Egyptian table when the pastrami from New York didn’t fly in on time, but we were not meaning reincarnation by the
book,
from moral escalation (you white in you next life) or inclination upwards or downwards if there even
was
a ranking, and witness Owl Woman all in this life abstracting her angelic Body-Self into a hole in a saguaro cactus in time to sing to herself as if from far away and to other auditors from any angle and the illusion of many distances

I
am going far to see the land,

I am running far to see the land,

While back in my house the songs are intermingling

which for a second gives pause to the exploiters of saguaro potential interrogating the unthreatenable botanist Marcus Jones preoccupied more with how in desert plants the green stem may take over the job of photosynthesis than with danger to himself, who will regrow a lost finger no more than a crocodile tooth sows the desert with the pitless prune, and all stop to listen to the cactus song, and the tortured but cheerful botanist is sure the plant is bearing animal fruit to yield peace on earth if not carried too far: while Alexander brings three cups of tea he says he steeped too long, three slices of lemon on a silver butter plate, six store-bought lemon-flavored cookies on another plate, and
"No pills,"
observes Margaret ("only make you feel better," retorts the husband): until he leaves the old chums alone so they rejoin some dispersed twists of their old reincarnation agreement which seems to include a quite other agreement not to discuss Sarah: until (. . . something . . .) just before he left her to go (only downstairs, Gramma) to help Alexander peel the potatoes ("But you go downstreet and let your father know you’re alive"—"You mean, let him know I’m
here?"
for Alexander hadn’t answered the door before and Mel had gone away doubtless thinking his mother-in-law was sleeping), she told Jim her visit among the Indians had been dry and difficult, beautiful but hard-working, white man came by with a beard, and a child whom she sometimes cared for thought it was wool, and on being asked by him who her father was, the child said, "My father is unknown," and the man peeled off a couple of chili peppers for them to eat with bread, and the hot didn’t faze the child while when the man asked Margaret what she thought she was doing there among the Indians and she said, "Just living," the brave young man who was the chief’s son and who was her particular friend but was afraid of lightning and she wasn’t, came up and answered for her and never lost his temper; another time she was alone with the women weaving, and she got up and went wandering and heard singing from a hogan and was invited in, incredibly, and there was corn pollen everywhere and the people sang late and when she asked her gentleman friend’s aunt, Tall Salt, what it meant, Tall Salt didn’t joke with her as usual but said there was "a lot of story" in it she didn’t need to know but someday she would—and then was when Margaret reckoned they expected her to stay; and another time Margaret discovered she was thought to be a healer,
they
had seen this in her, and she had not known, but when Small Canyon Wind got terribly sick in his eightieth year and legs swole up so his bones got smaller and smaller like to burst, she was told by a voice she didn’t identify (for Navajos don’t go around telling each other what to do) to go to the old man and pray outside his hogan, a white Anglo girl darkly tanned in cotton skirt dyed red, and she went and prayed whatever of the People’s prayers she found she knew. They came to her and closed her eyes, these prayers, and she held out her hands and their trembling got uncontrollable, and she heard a man say, Yes, yes, and she held out her hands further and further, feeling a lightning or very white sun come down out of the heavens as if balancing things out that had been unbalanced, and her hands trembled with some force she then knew had always been there at rest and shown now only in the smallest quantity so she was afraid, and she found she was reaching out to one of the singers standing there outside the sick man’s house and he was being pointed out diagnostically by the hand trembling, and so
this
man went right inside having been picked by Margaret to sing and he did and the sick old man through faith or luck or magic or caring was genuinely healed that night, which prepared him for death the following week; and Margaret even helped the chief’s son’s mother who at her age still had a fontanel that suppurated like a saint’s wounds or from some possibly external sinister mysterious cause and didn’t heal when oiled with a secret vegetable and "actually bubbled with its own pulse which either drove her mad or was the sign of a distemper she had independently arrived at" (subtle differences quickly stated, for Margaret had a very good brain): and she had reached a "personality" there with those people where she was another person, she couldn’t describe it except as temporary, but got to believing what Tall Salt assured her, that like the lightning above them that she had an understanding with, a sacred life
inside
her guided her arm when she let it and made it longer at times and moved her arm-hand with a—"well, call it sympathy, Jim, I don’t believe I have it now, though if I did then, let it rest." Did she say that? Her voice came equally from all those distances, 1950, 1965, now from a nearby 1977 apartment Mayn hadn’t set foot in, lighting the way back to her love and personality, and equally back to 1893 and the epic easterly trek of ‘94, and the forties of his mother and his growing up; so that when he had become interested in Ernie Pyle’s war reporting long after the fact, he had run into an Indian bridge builder in Canada who laughed about the Navajo language, its fabled difficulty, and told Mayn what Mayn
(quin-repente-quoian)
instantly recognized, but from where? from the newspapers during the War (though he didn’t follow the War like Norma’s Gordon) or from a movie? till this night in 1977 he recalled circuitously the day in 1950 and, turned through the corner of his unchanging eye which was doubtless as empty as his repossessed apartment, heard Margaret: "They didn’t make up their minds if they wanted me to really know their language. It’s so hard they used pairs of Navajos as radiomen in the Pacific Theater, because who knows Navajo?"

No, they didn’t believe in reincarnation, neither Navajo nor grandson and grandmother. Those fellows running the unemployed march in 1894 believed in reincarnation, but Margaret preferred the Great Unknown . . . big handsome gent who proposed military-style farms for the unemployed and who kept his identity secret until one day he seemed to turn into another person just by being identified at last as, not after all Captain Livingstone of the British Army encountered by a traveling man in a hotel during the Chicago Fair, nor one of Uncle Sam’s shrewdest Secret Service men, but as A. P. B. Bozarro (or Pizarro), a manufacturer of blood medicine at South Peoria.

No doubt there occurred isolated cases of reincarnation, Margaret observed, staring so deeply into Jim’s eyes he thought it wasn’t all funny.
Special
reincarnation? he said. She sighed. Why did people want to complicate things by coming back twenty years later for a second or third chance? Oh, he disagreed there, he thought people deserved a second chance. Oh, they deserve it all right, his grandmother murmured, and seemed to laugh quietly but for some reason he hadn’t been sure she was laughing. He thought she said, It’s still in me. But his uncertainty now in 1977 slung him along a curve of silly will back to the last century, thence forward to this moment in 1950, for he hadn’t been sure if he had heard her, and it made him the same person as now in ‘77, same immortally dumb body shouldering his attachment to her so it made him dizzy or lumpy of mind, pulled him out of shape, doubtless more formed by her than by his regular uptown-downtown father or the gap of his mother, so he had to get away, out of the room, downstairs; but she was drowsy anyhow, the frown deepening as her eyelids got heavy, and he saw the thing that had been in the corner of his eye as he got up to go peel potatoes. It was a medium-size gray envelope with a stamp on it and Jeanette Many’s name and address, and under it another envelope with only the place visible, which was a town in Pennsylvania, with trees the shape of girls if he had had night dreams, the town he had come from that very day, and he wondered if it was a check, he hadn’t been sending his laundry home lately in the big cardboard suitcase Margaret had given him, a check and the laundry no connection none whatever, but personal mail is personal mail, and who else did she know in that town, certainly not his girlfriend except by reputation, intuition, generalization, and old wit.

His grandfather when they curled the potato skins carefully away from the cool, pear-like moistness of the white did not speak of Margaret: he asked what Jim was going to do; Jim said, Maybe law; definitely not business, maybe a field geologist for an oil company, maybe professional sports management —he didn’t remember what he said except his grandfather was irked, and Jim thought, Touchy, probably having to nurse Margaret.

Jim said, Maybe marry money and live abroad for a while, some similar gag he didn’t much recall later but then was answered by what he did recall, in so many words: "Society’s immoral and immortal," said his grandfather; "it can do anything it wants, any crazy thing, but you can’t kill it." And something also about fragments that survive, laughing at you after you’re gone—that sort of thing.

She was asleep at suppertime, woke up like a drugged child, drank half a glass of sherry, swallowed just one bite of "shark" (the ham steak Alexander had broiled with numerous bendings over to look into the oven), and half a banana, and dozed in her chair. Upstairs again in her bedroom she came very much awake, frowning. He asked who she had written to. People she owed, she said. He could hear her voice in her letters. In 1977 he thought how close his mother’s death had been to both of them then in 1950. (A Russian Five-Year Plan!) And on the wings of such trivia as Spence, who seemed, on the morning after Amy left her apartment and apparently did not return, part and parcel, pocket and contents, of a life lived between old questions unasked or boring to ask, and a mass of fact unneeded, Mayn phoned his neighbor Norma to tell her of the difference Margaret had made between him and his little brother Brad. But first thing in the morning Norma and the two girls and Gordon (who answered) were all maneuvering around the apartment, which was slightly smaller than Mayn’s, breakfasting, playing the radio, dressing, doubtless undressing and dressing again, someone asking what it was like out, everything up to the higher levels of spirit where he could smell each toasting particle of toast, honey gasketing the thread of the jar—and Mayn flashed on Norma trudging humorously into the lobby after a hard day, her legs, her charity—and after insisting on speaking to her over Gordon’s faint anger, he could then only ask if she knew if the woman Clara had been in touch with Grace Kimball and if Norma knew whether Clara and her husband were in town, he needed to know—but Norma, who said, No, she didn’t know, asked, Are you all right? What is it? So he remembered being married and an old raincoat of his that didn’t repel the rain but he went on wearing it, and, saying goodbye to the dear woman, who said, You and Kimball ought to meet, he felt a concrete thing in the corner of his sleepless eye like something that should be moving but wasn’t, or wasn’t there but had been: he could only tell himself how he had accepted his grandmother’s words that evening—he was probably thinking of his girl angry or his father wanting to see him, though to talk about what?—yet
Jim
had brought his mother up: Do you think about her, Gramma? Oh yes. It wasn’t really us she was leaving. No, but there’s no way of knowing, without asking her. It brought Brad and my father together. Well, they were alike. That’s true. You took it well, Jim, you let it rest. I don’t know, Gramma. No, you knew a lot in your heart, so did your girlfriend—what’s happened to Anne-Marie?—but your little brother was another story.