Women and Men (117 page)

He looked at her across the specific blank, wet grass where his mother’s small ledge of headstone was. Margaret’s eyes grayer and grayer, and the light behind her like the sound of the announcer bringing the trotters up to the starting mark took her away from him but he couldn’t follow, and, to boot, she turned to look somewhere as if she heard the approach of what would finish here and everywhere a privacy she and he had always had. Though this was nonsense, for they could always laugh—for years afterward they could laugh—the Prince and Princess junk was behind ‘em; or they could laugh for
a few
years anyhow. And she said, Funny how Brad and your father accept it.

And then, so Jim dented the earth with the side of his hand, the sides of his hammer fists, he didn’t know what to call out or how; he hammered on the Earth hammering himself or someone else who might as well have been inside
him
back in or into shape and never said a word, while stupidly feeling that some drumming came up out of the earth at his summons and traced its smoke through him, employing him, ignoring him, maybe proving through this material experiment to have been so insubstantial that there’s nothing holding his mind back, falling forward then over the grave only to find that like a sprinter or a lineman he was leaning too far forward but the ball wasn’t snapped, the gun didn’t go off—but he didn’t fall forward except in mind.

"Yes
there’s something here," said Margaret in that intelligent mellow voice after a moment; "it’s not your mother—"

"—/ know," said Jim rather quickly without feeling.

"—and it’s real, my dear, it’s real—"

"Yeah, yeah—" tired after Brad’s Day.

"My heart lies buried there," he thought she said, and it was hard to credit, so he did—tired after Brad’s Day—which in some bumping or winding in his ears he knew wasn’t yet over, like the spaces of silent, silent fact between him and what his mother had wryly specified, which he knew then and later he would have gone on to anyway "Go away where you belong" —yet instead of just doing it, departing Windrow like others leaving home and state, he’d been
told
to and by a mother who had then given him and his halfway brother the impression that
she
was the one who’d—and for that moment as his (yes!) apologetic (!) grandma spoke again, Jim the slicing halfback who had run through muscle-bound (actually nice-guy) Feingold like mere matter was in his mother’s shoes, no, well, his mother’s body or her soul at any rate, and he would just believe that she had done this even if he did not accept her—her death (because if he had, he would have felt her last breath clouding his way with or without words which were too easy to say and write down, which was what he wished to say to Miss Myles, fine wide mouth and geometric tits, for he would stick to facts, not make
up
news). And he got up off his knees and didn’t know what came out of his mouth until there it was: "Gramma, I’m glad Braddie cried and all. He had to. I didn’t feel like the door was closed on that room. He was a kid, I mean any kid; you know what I mean, Gramma? And I thought, he’s my brother and I don’t have to be crazy about him, he’s Brad."

And then, ‘75 he my brother, Gramma?" and Jim grinned at what had come out because of some story-like relief that got onto her whole face.

"Brad?" she said. "Brad is your
half
-brother. You guessed it, I’m sure. But your mother never actually told me till that day at the beach—the morning
after
that day. You probably didn’t
need
as much as Brad did, you know." Her face got the way it had been before, so what she’d said seemed to leave her with something else or the same old thing, though the fact itself of this blockbuster that had just come out (coupled with Jim not asking, Who was the father?) was easy to take; it was just there—surprising, ^surprising (y’know).

Said she was her
own
mother. Funny thing ever after for better, for worse, for still better: Jim hit Feingold too hard next day but did not pass through him, the attitude was wrong. He didn’t ask his grandmother (who had said, "Look who’s here"—though they were only approaching this part of the cemetery in their vehicles), Was Sarah then
her
own mother? His mom would laugh at that but you often didn’t know why, and in the cemetery with the rinsed grass all around and by the same token stuck to his hands so he would rub it together in his palms, he missed his mother, he loved her, she was off by herself but
he
was the one who didn’t go hunt her up—well, he did sometimes, but anyway, she was there and he came and went and knew her humor ‘thout paying much attention to it (life go on quat slowly—he had treated his grandparents’ house like home at eight, ten, twelve . . . Why? Oh, because it took you back to your childhood, was his mother’s joke, it reminded you of your little aproned mother hanging up underwear in the backyard breeze. At
eight,
to be reminded of your childhood?). She joked as no one else.

He certainly had been a kid—had played, disappeared all day; ran away once overnight ‘n applied for a job in Englishtown at a dairy; and his grandma wasn’t exactly a little aproned person. His mother, though, was not quite so tall, which was surprising because of Alexander too, and she was a little fuller, squarer, though not
strong-feeling,
that is, to look at, and, if you could catch her, see her, she conveyed this in the curve of her slow sweep through the rooms of the house, where, like Margaret, to do a day’s work in two days she paid the shiny-black little indestructible girl from "collard-ville" literally on the far side of the Jersey Central tracks whose name was also Margaret; but Sarah never worked along with her and never checked up on her, though Margaret did—and in Sarah’s house. Why I thought you’d gone home, Margaret, said Sarah, which made little Margaret laugh and laugh, sucking without many teeth on a cherry pit from the backyard.

Leona Stormer who had married an older man who had made her pregnant, a doctor who had known how to—and she’d gone away to Illinois where he practiced—came back and Sarah came face to face with her after years and years, in the cool-tile-floored drugstore on a day as hot as uptown downtown. Sarah had burst into tears, Leona had smiled. Just then Jim appeared, whom Leona had never set eyes on even when he was a baby. Sarah started laughing
and
crying. Jim found two things out. One was that his mother as he’d suspected really did say odd things: she said to Leona, It isn’t that I feel much for you, you take me back that’s all you do but—
Thanks!
said Leona, pretending to be a bit irritated, which she was— But, said Sarah, that’s a lot to make me do.
Thanks,
said Leona, and didn’t cry, though Jim’s impression was that she wouldn’t have, or as he thought back on it years later. But the other thing Jim found—was it accident that he had run into his mother downtown? and he imagined that at eleven or twelve he had been married and working to support his family and had happened to run into his mother (Oh hi, Mom, how are you doing?)—but yes, the other thing Jim found was that he wasn’t embarrassed by her, by what she said to Leona that time in the drugstore. He had observed this woman Sarah who happened to be his mother, a surprising woman, interesting, warm to the touch and would even hug him though he never saw her really touch his father, or was it the other way around?

But Jim and Sarah left each other kind of alone, that is in the good sense, but then the day came and he thought of all the times he had missed, that is, you know, the chances: to do what, to ask her things, like Dick, who used to ask his father, Why get married? or, Did fish suffer? and whose father died in the middle of the night when Dick was out camping with the Boy Scouts (smoking his first cigarette). But not to just ask her things—no, to be in the same understanding room together.

(What crap!) And what
was
he doing there that day in the drugstore when she ran into her old school acquaintance Leona? Well, while we’re all here, might’s well ask what was he doing under the porch that other day? "What doing, Jim?" tiny tot Brad would ask arriving softly in Jim’s room and Jim didn’t speak to him but didn’t tell him to go away: oilin’ my mitt; readin’ a comic; seein’ which cards I’m gonna swap (baseball cards—the stars in the flesh, square-jawed, at ease). Oh, said tiny tot Brad clearly, softly.

He would be allowed to stay if he didn’t mess around with the cards. Jim gave him one to look at, a duplicate, and Brad put it down on the floor carefully, but he watched Jim instead. Well, don’t look at
me,
Jim didn’t say.

Till one day, Brad’s Day, Jim looked at Brad, and looked and looked at him on the floor in his short pants, his legs lengthening, till he’s glad not to look any more; where do you go from there? your bike, your bike with balloon tires mashing the gravel so Margaret across the cemetery saw him before he saw her and Eukie looking (Jim had been told) like Winston Churchill. And where’d you go from your grandma’s fact called forth by your crazy question
Is
he my brother, Gramma?

"Well, look who’s here," she said matter-of-factly.

The vehicles parted wildly as they entered the gravel patterns of the cemetery drives. The Mayn Pontiac contained Mel, who embraced the wheel, his head close to the windshield as if to see better, and Brad, who sat back with his tough insect’s elbow out the open passenger window. The noisy-bodied Ford pickup truck had followed until they all got past the stone posts of the gateway, then it veered along another gravel way so Jim, who was at once on the move himself across the grass, could just about hear Bob Yard talking and Pearl Myles laughing and exclaiming, but the two vehicles got to the golf course side of the cemetery almost simultaneously, and Jim, who was walking away toward the caretaker, Eukie Yard, and later remembered a dog barking out on the road, heard Miss Myles, on removing herself from Bob’s truck, tell Mel she was shocked to hear (which Jim knew meant the projected termination of the newspaper but he didn’t hear the end of her suddenly respectful sentence). Eukie stood off against the lintel post of the Vandevere mausoleum wearing one of his—maybe his only—large and voluminous garment like what Churchill always wore. Jim went over there and right up to Eukie with his dirty old crew cut, red cheeks, gray chin, and asked quiet like if Eukie would give him a slug of that applejack (CT never had ‘ny apple, is it strong?").

Eukie bobbed his bald, crusty head in assent or turning his eyes somehow down into the places of his great olive-green garment and the bottle was in Jim’s hand before Jim could ask what Margaret and Eukie had been in conversation about. He could just punch Bob Yard for upsetting Brad, back home, but why did he think this?—for Bob hadn’t upset Brad. In a moment Jim was both more
with
his "host" and way beyond him, the effect of the fluid was a burn at first, then a worm coiling gently over his bodily structure outlining his skull-mask which there in the cemetery he saw he had looked forward to.

"We’ll piddle along with the job printing, but we’ll get a good price for the
Democrat,"
he heard his father saying far away. So the paper was being sold
to
someone, Jim thought idly; yet it was not going to come out every week any more. "Your wife," a respectful voice was heard muffled by the length of the day, by the grass, by the cushioned distance of this stinking pleasant place, where an impromptu thing was going on, secret each from each of the persons there "your wife was sick ..."

No connection: it’s been in the works for a year and more; her death had nothing to do . . .

"Damn," said Bob Yard; "damn it to hell." But Bob himself,
he
had been affected by Jim’s mother’s death. You might not know it, because he just went on with business, and him and his wife went to the Harness for dinner out on the Matawan road twice a week and drank a snootful and laughed all through the movies, no matter what, or went to sleep in the back row. Margaret didn’t move, as if she’s waiting for a word to set her going, or a funeral that might come from the four persons clustered near the headstone. Jim, off by the Vandevere mausoleum, took another drink. Eukie breathing heavily said nothing, while Brad, whose Day it had turned out to be, stood at the undug grave and his mother’s stone. He said, "What do you mean ‘Damn’?," and Bob, who was not nice but was good company, said threateningly, "Listen, Brad—" who retorted, "Well, my mother was probably right for all you’d know. I bet the wind does curve—"

"Listen, kiddo—"

"Bob"
said the unknown foster father.

"Listen, little Brad, you’ve been the center of attention," said Bob, "but you ain’t the only one."

"Bob, you simmer down, the boy’s got a point—"

"How’s it sitting?" came the murmur in Jim’s ear as if nobody was next to him where he stood at a distance from the cluster by his mother’s memorial. "You better step in ‘n defend your dad." It was, of course, Eukie the caretaker speaking, but he didn’t ask for his pint back, and Jim just knew there was another in that giant suit.

"Of course the wind curves," said Pearl Myles like a speech or song, and if the latter then ‘twas no bird ever seen in that landscaped acreage; "you’re
all
of you right: the wind bends round the curve of the Earth, the Earth’s gravity draws the wind—isn’t that it?"

But
who
is remembering all this? stabs the interrogator, himself again; or, better said, what use are the family facts to the abiding subject of the grown journalist James Mayn’s activities? both in the seventies and in relation to folk drawn into the interior or the meaningful margins of Grace Kimball’s workshop carried on naked, with visual aids, "glass, rubber, plastic" (a modern variant of an old game played with hands), and in a living unit rented as residential within the articulate structure we have gradually seen built up by partial pictures, accommodating (on faith, perhaps) a multiplicity of small-scale units, when in reality Kimball takes money from her workshoppers and is even now planning not only Eros, a nationwide system of women’s health "houses" which will serve fresh foods subject to selective boycott and which will aim at further rearranging man and woman in terms of checks and balances by supposedly establishing healthier and more permanent separation between the sexes, but Kimball is also contemplating workshops for
men
—which will require a compulsory minimum nudity about the genitals hopefully spreading to other areas of the body including the feet, which contain wonderful tangled and stalled powers, and the teeth, the cleansing of which she proposes to instruct by means of an imported servo-oscillator, if the assembled members will ever stop betraying themselves with talk called
input
taped raw into Kimball’s abundance bank where it is always retrievable though you might have to skim off the crust to get to the cream which in turn includes the lengthy conviction lubricated by repetition as by any good commercial shortening (yet far far from her home, her adolescence, some solace she is coming from that no one will find in her famous fuck-your-audience auditorium a purgatory to tell how she saw through guilt, manipulation, universal addiction) that the asshole, sensitive zone that it is, should be upgraded as not only the easy out that it has traditionally been but as a joyful entry as well, which can be neat to a degree that the person is a really neat person without respect to age or shape or size or color (of genitals, that is, at this early stage when they are all that are exposed of the person who is brave enough to commit himself to the achievement of "personoia").