Women and Men (194 page)

His father asked if Flick was really going to start calling herself Sarah. Seemed so last week, Jim said.

"Why did you name her Sarah?" Mel asked.

"Why did you call my mother ‘Sorry,’ sometimes?" asked the son.

"She was sorry she’d married me—or married at all, maybe. And I was sometimes sorry—not to have more to say to her."

"But it was
her
name, not yours."

"I felt very bound up with her, we lived in this house in our own separate ways."

"I’m beginning to miss her," said Jim.

His father’s eyes brightened as if he would laugh. "So am I," he said. "Thirty-two years, I mean start missing her again, because I really did miss her at first, though I thought I was relieved."

"I’ve seen that beach at Mantoloking and that boat she supposedly took, a thousand times, and it always slips into my mind out of nowhere, you know like a subway car into a station and suddenly you got this unit in front of you, this package, and then when you look close, you’re back where you were, thinking about a Medeco lock, or this new program contemplated for mapping lightning from above, to check the pattern against storm severity."

"Did Pearl Myles ever get in touch with you?" his father asked. "Do you remember Pearl Myles? She asked for your address."

He could feel the encroachment. He asked his father who the bookseller was who had inspected the cellar shelves. Name was Saint-Smythe, his father thought. Did he leave a card? No card. Carry a bag? Big leather shoulder bag, crazy-looking fellow indeterminate age, hair light or graying (couldn’t tell) and caught up in a rubber band at the back if you can believe that, wearing a fringe jacket; a fringe
case
but courteous. Came back upstairs with the Jack London
Alcoholic Memoirs
inscribed to your grandmother just before he went to Vera Cruz with the Marines, you know. He corresponded with Margaret briefly over Wilson’s policy, she loved Woodrow Wilson but disliked the intervention in Mexico and there was our socialist Jack London saying blood would tell and Mexico must be saved from mestizos, but despite their disagreement, he sent Margaret a copy of that
Barleycorn
confession of his. I told the man he couldn’t have it.

Mayn turned away from his father, who asked if he had ever visited the geothermal installation in northern California (wasn’t it?) called The Geysers. Oh sure: twice. Greeley, Garibaldi, didn’t they go for steam? Jim didn’t know, but did know and conveyed to his father that William Bell Elliott who discovered the area thought he had found the gates of hell. Steam coming out of a canyon for a quarter of a mile. Teddy Roosevelt was interested in steam, said his father.

How was Brother Brad?

All right now, but they took a trip, went to New Hampshire and walked up a mountain and now they’re O.K. Dunno, they’ll never learn to yell at each other. So many don’t, including yours truly. But they sure can take a trip.

"I think I know the guy who came here for those diaries," said Jim.

"Well, then you can find out whether he walked off with them," said his father, who had paused at the dining-room table to open a magazine for a glance. "Did you ever run into that man again who burned down his own house and heard voices?"

"At a ballgame in Detroit, that’s right."

"A Yankee game," Mel said, "and you got into a shoving match as I recall, and made friends afterward."

"You remember that," said the son, who had never wanted to hug his father and didn’t now. "We wound up on an island in Lake Superior out near the old copper mines, the guy was some Norwegian and we stopped to talk with a friend of his at the Ojibway fire tower who was high on foxes: half-cat, half-dog, little bastards know what they’re doing."

"You never mentioned that," said Mel.

The son would like to tell the father he too had failed to live in marriage to another person; but what if that peculiar marriage of his father’s had been not so bad, and why speak for his father? A crowd of unknown voices were sounding off as if they belonged to him, he to them, and why did that Grace Kimball get under his skin when he had never met her?

Mayn asked his father if he had ever looked at the diaries in question.

Never.

"Isn’t it amazing that some people who weren’t at all involved might think Sarah
didn’t
commit suicide?"

"You mean Pearl Myles," his father said.

"Looking for damn knows what in life."

"Well, how old would she be now?" said his father, and they faced each other.

He pulled away from his father’s house in Windrow, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father might be friends; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch out of the kitchen with the big wooden table where his father and the half-brother Brad had discovered wonderful love that transcended blood by using blood, and step by step through the parlor-dining room where Trenton and New York papers and old copies of
Newsweek
and
U.S. News & World Report
were arranged here and there like placemats in addition to the two that were permanently set and a pamphlet entitled
Personal Memoirs of James Shields;
and step by step (Mel now talking steadily) through the now unhistoric precincts of the sofas and fine ladderback straight chairs and the Windsor chair his grandfather Alexander had sat in uncomfortably when he came that had now a shiny white cushion advertising the race track, and step by step past three drop-leaf tables made by early nineteenth-century ancestors, not to mention the nondescript leather chair that needed to be resprung there in the corner with a lamp beside it and a gray metal magazine rack; step by step to the front hall with the music-room door closed and the mahogany table and the giant paperweight with newsprint embedded in glass myopically reflecting the mirror above it. Then, the door and the porch, where his father in black cardigan sweater from the days of the newspaper stood with a hand on a white porch post and waved and waved again to his son, who started the car and waved back, but then his father held up his hand and came down the porch steps and to the curb and Jim reached to roll down the passenger-side window and his father said, "Let me know if the weather on Venus is changing," and Jim replied, "Do you think I’m interested in that fellow’s wife?" and his father, surprised, replied, "Not really." Jim had turned off the ignition and Mel heard the phone far away in the house—"I’ll never make it"—and waved as he straightened up, so Jim saw only the hand at the window, and started the car as his father made tracks back to the porch—must be seventy-three, seventy-four? And Jim made a U-turn and headed out of town toward the clover-leaf, passing the blue New York car parked, now facing the opposite direction from him, halfway up the block near his grandparents’, a car that with some provincial lack of concern he had thought might be following him. And at the next corner he found a tall man with a medium-size red backpack hanging from his hand hitching, and a fur tail hanging out of the pack. And he stopped to pick the man up—he knew he was going to New York—and in the rear-view mirror, so he didn’t have to turn around, he saw the blue car behind him complete its U-turn and slow down, waiting.

He pulled away from the curb wanting to phone his father whose memory seemed better than ever, to thank him, to tell him, "Good; good." And he heard meanwhile the tough-skinned man in suede windbreaker and ironed bluejeans tell him, "Shouldn’t pick people up" (which Mayn agreed with)— for when the man had leaned into the rented car and swung his pack into the back seat, Mayn had reached back on instinct to slide it down flat on the seat and had seen the butt of a revolver with a loop of leather over it just showing from a side pocket.

"Well, this is my day," Mayn said. "So I’m figuring all you want is a ride to the city." The man reached in back and obtained from his pack a box of cough drops and a small spiral notebook which he opened to a page half full of notes in violet ink.

Leaving town, Mayn eyed the blue car following. He looked at the man next to him who was staring thoughtfully out at the road ahead; he had acne pits along the cheekbone and the uneven stubble was dark and silvery. "Do you always leave the butt of that pistol showing?" he asked the man.

"No, I usually make sure it’s out of sight," the man said. "It doesn’t belong to me but I’ve had it awhile and I’m beginning to think maybe it does belong to me."

"Ever been held up by a motorist?" said Mayn.

"No, not by a motorist," said the man; "you?"

"Haven’t hitched in years; generally fly."

"Suppose you just get out," said the man, "and I drive back down the road and come back here and you put out your thumb and we’ll see what it feels like," said the man.

"It wouldn’t feel real," said Mayn; "it would be like middle-class wild-game hunting." He had picked the man up on the chance that he was with the big guy driving the blue car.

At the rotary they passed the road to the shore and the Trenton road and found themselves on the connecting road to the turnpike, the same blue car two or three back that had accompanied Mayn to the cemetery, driven on, and followed him back to Throckmorton Street.

Mayn pulled off the road and nearly sideswiped the phone booth he parked by, in front of a small yellow house with a tarpaper roof. A person in a black-and-yellow-striped garment watched at the window. Mayn took the car keys with him. The blue car ran by, looking violet in the passing lane parallel with a red van. Then it fell back and to the right and a quarter of a mile or more downrange stopped at a low block-like edifice which was a suburban insurance branch. His father answered as if facing slightly away from him, and Jim said, "I just wanted to thank you, Dad; I was amazed you remembered all that nonsense. By the way, you used to dream of owning a white Hispano-Suiza. Remember?"

"Yes, and it was a real dream at night," his father said as if interrupting himself; "your mother told everyone."

"I remember," said Mayn.

"Flick phoned," said Mel. "She wanted to speak to you. She had guessed you were here. I asked if everything was all right. She sounded puzzled. She asked if you had spoken about a typescript she sent you and I said yes, and she said, Good, good, that’s all she wanted to know, and thanked me—then asked
me
of all people how well you knew someone called Grace Kimball because you were involved with a women’s bank that a friend of the Kimball woman does P.R. for—is that right? Then she said she had to go. I heard voices behind her, and someone said a word or name twice that sounded like ‘Afraid’ or Trying,’ I mean like frying eggs. That’s all I have to report, Jim."

Mayn thanked his father and with a chill like a blush of shock knew (and should say to someone now) that through Norma and not only Norma he could have described to his father the brother of this woman Grace whom he had never known, lying on the front walk in the middle of the continent, with blood on him, and with terrible sympathy and ardor flowing, yes flowing, from the body and eyes of his sister above him in the house, on a porch, somewhere that didn’t matter so much as that Mayn was back there like a colonist of the compacted future unobtrusively regrasping the century his civilization had left so that even if he had no
blood-sister,
he felt like Grace Kimball nonetheless and could have faked an entire double-column obit of information—"shared," as she said; consigned to print, as
he
would say, and eternally retrievable.

The hitch-hiker was doing something with the dashboard.

"Dad, did you ever think my mother was alive?"

His father might have been thinking for a moment. "Where would she have gone?" he said. "But more to the point, who’s this man you think borrowed those old diaries?"

"Oh, he’s one of these people that don’t really matter, Dad, but you turn around and find them there and you want to strangle them."

He pulled away into the right lane, having gotten no answer at the number Flick could be reached at, and knowing he had picked up this middle-aged hitch-hiker to use him or include him the way the engine seemed to build the radio right into it, both starting because his passenger had turned the knob while the ignition was off.

Twice during their conversation the news reported the kidnapping of the escaped man’s child and in their listening pause Mayn knew so well that Spence had drawn him into the picture by assuming he was
already
deep in it that if Spence had sent him a bulletin out of this car-radio speaker that generated the car’s horizontal gravity—"Wherever you are, Mayn"—he could not have felt more surely a violent imprint to come somewhere like change of weight or future species on the bones of his face, nor more exactly and wordlessly the anger of a dark Hispanic woman ahead in New York wildly, silently searching a noisy police stationhouse for her child: what was she doing there? why would they expose her to a microphone? how could Mayn make up so well and truly that scene with the City flowing in and out of it—so who would say for sure which was margin and which was the cash-up-front center?, while what was in the way proved more important than what we had been bound for yet we had
been
bound for what was in the way, but only for now but don’t ask the people in a precinct stationhouse—a large, green plant on a metal typewriter stand near a dispatcher’s desk, a mobile video unit somehow allowed in there and right by Mayn’s shoulder when he had nothing to do with those people except that if interrogated he wouldn’t even be protecting sources were he to deny knowledge of the man known to Efrain (released) and to Foley (inside), and to the Chilean economist, who had visited the man, who had himself escaped less than seventy-two hours ago and was now said to have abducted his young son.

The blue car had maintained its relative immobility in relation to Mayn’s rented vehicle, and he had sensed that the driver was confused and should be somewhere else.

The hitch-hiker, who shared two Russian cigarettes with Mayn, observed that in his experience there would always be people who didn’t approve of your domestic arrangements and maybe neither did you, but we couldn’t all live in the same way: he himself rejected bus and train travel, preferred driving but did not own a car: ergo, hitch-hike, where there’s waste in the direction of uncertainty and sometimes scheduling but how do you measure time, by clock or by what happens?, and getting there’s what matters; and when hitchhiking the man was always sure to join up with people he didn’t know, which was dispersive in one way but collective in another, and which was O.K. when in a less abstract era he was a redneck kid visiting his starving cousins out there beyond the cemetery road—and was all right now that he had been inspired by—