Women and Men (81 page)

But what prisms of sight carried the mother and with her a divided son, left out yet asked along, from the active Mantoloking beachhead out to a horizon more northern than could be explained?—for our sailors tell of those high-latitude mirages whereby the land below the horizon levitates if it does not invert into sight, and we see where we are going before it sees us.

An explanation—little more than that—as that light entering a different medium promises to bend—or that a mother we already recalled before we had gone far enough in our research to reconstitute her was the one who left her sons with the promise that they were the ones going away, a mirage factor that keeps its distance no matter how we go on or go back, to tell us something past mere satisfaction as the shine of a distant desert lake meets the shade of some earthly substance over the hill of our New Jersey still-wartime sea.

Facts worth their weight in gravity if they can only carry a tune to get them to the noise the tune hides in case—ti-dum-whung-lu—it needs to be moved fast and be in not Sarah’s open case but Thomas Jefferson’s violin terminally cased while in a next room he wrote with his left hand to Le Roy in France about the weather (Seasonable in Monticello; how makes it at Mont-pellier?) if ‘twas the same Le Roy (in the history of rain, the "humid" Le Roy) the Le Roy who in the 1750s (so it
couldn’t
almost be the same one) discovered dew point by sealing damp air not in a painted can as we did 1950s New York City air for tourists and Paris air for the Clignancourt flea market, unless you could
hold
your breath for the lag of your homeward leg there to transfer it to the tunnel of a loved one’s mouth and system, but in a bottle where the temperature was falling, until drops formed like tunes to Le Roy’s eyes, and in measuring this degree of the air’s saturation he brought all of us closer to the causes of rain. And found, with his improvised hygrometer of goblets indoors and out, that where he was the dew point varied with the wind direction—further, that the northwest
mistrao
and the northeast
grec
are not so dry as the north wind, nor so moist as the south wind from the sea, and dry and moist are relative in air so that dry air on a summer’s day may contain more water than moist air in winter.

But (and we turn to the child speaking and rotate so’f we was in a Choosing Configuration we’d just go on spinning)—But he wasn’t the
inventor
of rain, right?

Right (we are so happy to give a Yes or No answer to a child, the slight smile upon its face or certain parts thereof)—No, my dears (for it’s a multiple child!) he wasn’t. Nor, fifty years later, was he likely to have been the Le Roy to whom Jefferson, having broken his right or violin wrist on a walk with a mere acquaintance wrote a rambling letter with his left hand and never had the strength to play again, though four days later he attended a concert and the following night went alone to the opera, our all-purpose Jefferson, and never once stopped taking notes, as witness less than two years later his observations in Europe both of windows that admit air but not rain, and sawmills that run on wind, not to mention his having instinctively grasped the modern dream of urban sprawl proposing a coastal Thru-Way from Nice to La Spezia, an Alps by-pass for travelers entering Italy whereby, as T.J. said, "all the little insulated villages of the Genoese would communicate together, and in time form one continued village" ahead of its time along that route.

Which had been, to cite from Larry what Jefferson six generations or so earlier could not have termed it, his personal Modulus to give back to world civilization all the energy-to-burn that had fractured his wrist. And could have led to his discovering in Inner Choor with its long seacoast-like range proto-nomads landbridging to the Alkan-Yukon fields, had he the renowned polymath T.J. trusted his naturally swiveling instinct finding not just slender black-and-white solutions at any hour of his epic day/night but oceans to bestride with a compass whose points were out of sight of each other wading in the watery sphere; hence had T.J. surveyed on Euclid’s drowning angular shoulders such sunlight shed in Earth’s seas as to discern long before the synthesizing of uranium that flesh itself, beneath the skin but even
in
the varicolored skin with all its history of light, if barraged at its nucleus (take for example the seven hundred individuals that were the nucleus of the Georgia Colony), could blow sky-high, clouding the horizons of events themselves—and the whole
shmeer
turns upon how we (a natural senate maybe only in birth and potential) apply our knowledge of the light (for is the tune the secret force celled in the noise or is the
noise
what waits in the
tune’s
fine track to blow us away together on Independence Day?).

You mean, asks an internalized interrogator drawing through us like an un-snappable lanyard looking for a grommet to lash and presuming to be our Modulus when unbeknownst even to
us
sometimes
we
are it—you mean that young Jim, shunted back to his Bases game upon the white-hot beach, might have found upon the horizon what his mother, anguished at the man Bob Yard, had looked around Jim in order to see—if he had only been smart enough to see that it was her
life
she had somehow lost and not a son whom she divided into two that they not meet? For in lieu of deciding that it was that uncomfortable day at the beach that decided Sarah (no middle name) Mayn to disappear, in which case he might have stopped her from doing it, he ever after discounted the conjunction of all this with what proved to be the old New York City geezer’s farewell to Margaret, and fixed his memory on what he knew for sure, which was the miraculous fact of his violently rooting his feet in the sand leaning then suspended against all gravity or other explanation, which saved his little brother Brad from receiving violence.

Which would never "do," while Jefferson’s violin healthy in its case so appreciates in value by the warm sheen of its workmanship, as by the shaping into a constant future of all its remembered music, that we, who are only relation, let such parallels as deterrence and disarmament meet, like being in one place yet being at once in two, and put Euclid over Einstein for sanity’s sake and not to overanalyze the unspeakable of a mother’s absenting herself from her sons. Whereby Mayn could mention matter-of-factly to his daughter Flick, or, soon after she was born, to his friend Ted, the night before NASA’s director of public information Walt Bonney indicated that a faulty oxygen line probably caused the U-2 pilot to black out (prior to slipping into Russian airspace), that Jim’s mother Sarah had been less sick than depressed during the year preceding both the tragedy and, roughly, War’s end, and that even on the summer’s day when the man with whom (though Jim didn’t know it any more than his brother Brad could think it) Sarah was or had been on intimate terms turned up unexpectedly at the shore forty minutes from Windrow ostensibly to deliver Margaret’s old friend the geezer who as it happened was supposed to be dying, Sarah in Jim’s later-articulated view had begun to think seriously about removing herself from the quiet, ordinary life she lived with her two sons and the husband she did not know how to speak of—

—and thirteen years earlier, or fourteen, Ted gently responded, "Excuse me but were the two sons both by your father?" to which Jim, contemplating still the horizon toward which (as he once upon a time years later began to try to make Flick his daughter see) he’d more than fallen, quipped,
"By? By?
He wasn’t no author, he ran the fambley paper, married into it, was an editor, Honesty was his middle name, not a bad guy, not necessarily a winner, maybe, but I never put my finger on just what was slowed-down about him, he could make you feel he was raising his voice, though he never did and maybe I felt he ought to but he didn’t much lay a hand on me, he would now and then take my mother by the shoulder and it didn’t matter if they were facing or not, and give her a peck on the jaw; he’s still very much alive—and that’s something."

—mention such stuff matter-a-fackly and all, und jet und jet . . .

What was the Hermit-Inventor of New York—that is,
doing
there that day upon the strand? and why was Bob Yard not serving his country in the armed forces?—in fact as an electrician if that career information had reached the right ears.

We’ll get to those questions, replies the spokesman, using the "Agency
We"
for he’s on tricky ground and had better just release the prepared statement on the Lockheed pilot Powers and his "sniffer"—that so-called "flying test bed" totally unarmed and slower than the speed of sound for God’s sake but heavy on the instruments designed to measure, well, gust turbulence at 55,000 feet, also "sniffs" radioactivity—you hang out a sheet of filter paper to check the atmosphere, that’s all there is to it but NASA categorically denies that
this
U-2 was packing any radioactivity-detecting gear, for there’s always tomorrow up to a point until Walter Bonney is saying on May 9th or 10th—

—Well,
which?

—he’s saying, "I thought I was telling the truth"—for his official statement re: this particular U-2’s work during a round trip of three hours and forty-five minutes of fourteen hundred or sixteen hundred miles (for both figures have been mentioned) identified "gust meteorological conditions" as the purpose of the flight, and Walt Bonney got his original statement from Air Weather and they got it from information supplied by the Second Weather Wing at Wiesbaden, which in turn was supplied the information from Turkish channels since the takeoff point was Adana airfield near the Syrian border, the officer in charge none other than Colonel Bill Shelton, low-profile but all business, commander of the Second Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Do you see the trouble you get into when you already had the Tiros satellite launched a month previous with fully automated eyes and touch which the Russians had no interest in pointing a rocket at (because for one thing they can share the data with us later), but beyond subsequent admission that this U-2, unlike the ones in Japan, California, New York State, and other, or all of the above, was engaged in necessary surveillance of missile sites, etcetera, we do not hesitate (so to speak) to (we proudly declassify, hand over heart, two hands for beginners, even three for those who have evolved that far into the race’s unconscious future Body-Self, the information in order to) acknowledge that from our U-2 we have learned that our bombers have nothing to fear from turbulence when refueling at high altitudes.

Like a contemplative and detached student of the stock market, Mayn followed the missile do-si-do in ‘69 to the point of getting quite fond of the Sprint missile that waited till the enemy warhead poked down out of the upper atmosphere at which stage it made a dash for it. But Mayn had been turned toward the more lasting field of meteorology, namely the comparatively "small talk" of weather that NASA had chosen to cover and to
be
its high-altitude lie. And Mayn was known to have studied the stodgy U-2 and its gadgets: for wind shear, ozone, and water vapor; for spotting would-be typhoons; and for looking into the dynamics of convective clouds. All this before he let go and went on (if someone had to speak for him) to less ambiguously administered manifestations of meteorological inquiry and application, straight stuff, journeyman work—

Yeah, said a daughter, yeah, said she who also did not see because he hadn’t completely told her what he had come back from like a shadow to reinvent: yeah, yeah, she said; straight stuff, Dad, hard information, right, Dad?

The energy-efficient home, he said . . . putting waste heat to work, he half-grumbled, hearing
her
add, Where homeowners can sit around and think
what?

and later the U-2 ten miles high could see through the smoke a mountain on fire to map the perimeter of that little hole, that brief, wild sea-bomb, of light. He couldn’t say those words but felt them because we relations could release them to him, which we could do because he was capable of feeling them, which, thus, we might learn.

Flick would get a little mad but discount it with that voice of hers, that little demolition of the area immediately around her, all of it an irony of hers, and he would tell himself he couldn’t follow her meaning unless it was that she thought he should use some power in journalism that he was reluctant even to look for; she would make fun of his pedestrian reports, his "straightforward" assignments when he was back with AP but then he left again to work for the group of papers in the East owned by the South American supposed genius Senor Long, and Flick made fun of these stodgy reports that she half seemed not to know zilch about, so she got Jim telling about the hail-suppression work in Russia and in Argentina and where it all started at the end of the War (Right, she said,
"The War")
after the supercooling of high clouds was found to be why ice formed on aircraft wings which themselves proved to be the trigger that froze the cloud water—so you introduce a cold rod or —aha!—dry ice and god-like or in the guise of a sympathetic medicine poetess of the early American desert called Cloud-Water make snow at fourteen thousand feet over Schenectady (ever been to Schenectady, Flick?) and one thing led to another and the pioneer in this, Schaefer, got some input from a fellow researcher named Vonnegut—Vonnegut? said Flick—to try silver iodide crystals which don’t make the cloud water any colder but each crystal grows ice around it like a nucleus, grows and grows and then it bursts and you get a chain reaction (Oh that explains everything, she said)—and with the chain reaction the next thing you know—

"Oh Daddy!
Snow! Thank
you, Daddy!"—they were in a restaurant, she was seventeen, there were a moment’s tears in her eyes quickly ironed
out
—
"Snow,
Daddy," so he had to laugh but didn’t know all she meant
but
loved her almost for her confused desires to (what?) make fun of him?, to make him more political?, but not to get him back with her mother—