Women and Men (193 page)

His father had never heard of the cooperative wind conversion system on a Lower East Side apartment-house roof because his son had never told him, or Mel had never asked. Like a toy airplane on a steel-strut stand thirty-odd feet high, took twenty people four days to raise it—couldn’t afford a helicopter. So the utility-company lines get a cut of the surplus household electricity the people’s windmill generates? Synchronous inverter (looks like and is a solid-state box) turns d.c. from the wind generator into standard-line a.c. voltages. Never thought how a windmill worked but you’re right we don’t
have
to think. We don’t want to know. Unreportable information? his father asked, and was treated, as they moved from the dining room into the kitchen to an account of how the air crossing the curved upper blade of a windmill has to go farther and faster than the air hitting the flat lower blade, and the higher velocity on the upper blade creates "lift," and this turns the blades about the generator shaft—nothing to it—though the Wyoming operation . . . that’s something else.

His father gathered he had seen Flick in Washington, was mildly surprised that she was in New York, and struck by the "irony" that she’d phoned her father at his hotel in Washington the night before; Mel wanted to know what was so interesting about a women’s bank, and speaking of interstate how could Jim’s Argentine boss legally own a string of papers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania and so on? even Mel remembered the scandalous rumors of that tycoon’s tycoon-brother’s apparently faked plane crash, and Jim said, Private life. His father said nothing about Flick maybe wanting to be called by her given name.

He didn’t pull away from his father’s hand on the bare skin of
his
hand asking him to unscrew the kitchen globe and screw in a new light bulb. His father except when he was at work, which was after all much of the time in the old days, had spent years with his hands clenched behind his back or, when he was seated (for after all he was not handcuffed), clenched in front of him. His father below him looking upward as Jim unscrewed the globe, inquired what the prevailing winds in New York City
were,
and Jim in a low, preoccupied voice as he loosened the holding screws just enough to release the globe, which was a regular fly-trap, thought that the summer winds came mostly from the southwest, the winter definitely northwest, but the arrangement of winds through the city had got so weird because of building configurations that it would take someone who knew relativity to figure out where they went and how fast, and even in a relatively simple operation like that Lower East Side apartment house you need a pointed tower because the surface area at the top—Mel handed a sixty-watt bulb up and his son handed the ceiling globe down—can actually back up winds that are approaching so they don’t get right to the blades but are held up—winds in a holding pattern, chomping at the bit! His father thought there were probably some
southeast
winds around New York as well, and Jim said he really didn’t know—like a good Buddhist, he really didn’t know. Getting religion in middle age? said his father.

His father wanted to know if he still played water polo at the Athletic Club and was told, in somewhat indirect answer, that his son’s trick knee was acting up under stress and he had limped across against a red light the other day, throwing himself on the mercy of a truck driver who, granted, did not have much in the way of pickup acceleration but was so high-slung you almost thought it would drive over you if steered safely without touching you the way a couple of kids he had seen in a market area of lower Manhattan would not go around an unloading trailer van stuck way out into the street but walk under it. This fellow Gordon had been a City kid, you know. They didn’t ride bikes so much, but of course that was thirty years and more ago, and the bicycle had now become a middle-class adult inner-city vehicle.

Mayn’s father (who notably had not yet expressed the hope that Jim would spend the night, for maybe the old man didn’t especially want him to—you had to allow for that chance) asked if he was going out to the cemetery while he was here—and Jim said actually he had already been—he had in fact come into Throckmorton Street and on the spur of the moment instead of stopping at his father’s house (though, as he did not tell his father, there was that car that started up and moved out as soon as he passed) he decided he would take a look at his grandparents first before calling on Mel.

He told his father the kitchen ceiling fixture might need rewiring and asked if his father had circuit breakers now. His father said he would get a licensed electrician in; and there was a moment of silence for Bob Yard, who had wired his last house or almost, for he had had a stroke and fallen from a ladder and in death had displayed a wonderful dark grin as if ... as if .. . and Jim said really he could do it for Mel, the hourly rates were a total rip-off.

His father asked again how he had traveled on this quick trip and it was too bad Flick was in New York. Mayn said he couldn’t keep up with her, she was becoming an authority on pollution without actually residing in New York and had written something that was supposed to be in the mail to him but he hadn’t gotten it but hoped it would be waiting for him tonight.

His father wanted to know what it was.

Well, she says it’s like fiction. Probably selling herself short. I guess it’s environmentalist.

He felt he and his father were pulling away from each other, and when he had tightened the three screws around the globe’s circumference, he came down off the stepladder in one stretching step.

No, he had flown from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, hopped to Washington and had rented car on spur of moment thinking to make stop in Philly to make purely speculative inquiry, but drove straight here; car’s not his, could have taken the Metroliner (not here direct, of course), but he’d felt like a car. "You don’t look like a car," his father said, and he could hear twenty-five years ago his father singing when he was a bit nervous or unhappy, though the off-key melody made him always sound like he cared about everyone in the house, which curiously Jim Mayn had never thought before.

He turned to his father as his father turned away and sat down with a grunt. Nowadays, his father observed, a small-town paper gets all the news it can handle from your electronic terminals. That was true, said his son, they carried the machines around in suitcases like astronauts; he wanted to get into something else but it was his trade. Andrew’s college expenses were about it, now.

His father asked him if he wanted to talk about it. He said, Nothing
to
talk about—well, Andrew didn’t keep in touch; didn’t feel like it—and some curious stuff going on right now but mostly it’s a guy getting into my hair for some reason, probably my fault, involving people I know; turn away from it, it doesn’t exist, almost. His father said he knew, and Mayn told his father he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t being pulled into some hard-to-explain activities involving a cluster of other people’s supposings that became something maybe threatening even to a man with as slow a fuse and as low adrenalin as he; but that wasn’t why he had stopped on the way back.

Mel said, "Funny but your life tells you every few years or so—"

"—I don’t believe my
life
tells me
anything."

His father said O.K., O.K., turn it around and put it your way, but—

He asked his father who this bookseller was and his father said to wait a minute—"stock taking was all I meant, I mean your marriage didn’t—I don’t know what went wrong but I didn’t have to ask you about it, you’re a good man and you felt that on balance you had to shift gears—"

The son laughed and ran water in the sink experimentally and then yanked open the icebox door and found a beer.

"—and now a few years later you’re taking stock of how you’re doing: I tried to do that when your mother died, and I didn’t get anyplace except Brad and I got closer, and I started eating better, in fact I developed quite an appetite, and I recognized I liked this town—what was it you and your grandmother named it?"

Mayn said he had left for Hartford and points south the morning they reported the prison escape and hadn’t looked at a New York paper since.

"Well, Adlai Stevenson said, Stick to your profession, whatever else you do."

Maybe that hadn’t been too clear to him, the son observed, and sat down in the other kitchen chair, beginning to sense why he had come to see his father.

"I had a strong feeling in my heart about you that you would survive and you were always there even if you didn’t get in touch, and had wound up by some circuitous route several rungs up but in the family job, and I held myself responsible for your mother, no one else."

This was a longer set of words than the economical obituary he had set up in type for Sarah as if it had never been written by a living soul, and his son told him so.

Mel laughed: was Flick serious about returning to her given name; and what was she doing in New York? Jim said that she was serious about everything; however, the difference between toxic pollution and her boyfriend was that her boyfriend made her laugh. Mel listened deeply, and asked if she was enjoying the old white Cadillac Jim had bought for her.

If you pulled away the parts of Mel that were above his forehead and below the bone of his chin, you would have remaining a man of indeterminate age, eyes you might never have looked at closely to understand that they wanted help in engaging yours—forget their color which was mostly brown with some pale brown threads of orbit targeting a place potentially of pain-free interest far beyond you or behind them.

Mayn kept saying things that weren’t why he had come, yet often these were answers to his father’s genuine questions, which in turn did seem to be why the visitor had come.

Slow going into a tourist’s brief "Story of Geothermal," through some question whether the St. Louis World’s Fair (really just "Fair") was 1903 or 1904 because if ‘04 then Italy could have advertised there its small, virgin dynamo driven by the first steam well. This was at Larderello near where third-century Rome exploited that mysterious steam field: yet had not your Sky lab astronauts—?

—that was Skylab 3, replied the aging son.

Hadn’t he attended the last Moon launch? his father asked.

Yes indeed, and Skylab a few months later.

He hadn’t spoken about Skylab, said his father.

Skylab 3’s same Skylab different crew.

Yes, his father knew that.

They photographed some hot spots in Central America.

Heat-sensing cameras, his father believed (who for the years when Jim would make duty visits with the wife and children would ask Jim’s children before they would go over to their great-grandfather’s to play in the backyard if they could eat two hamburgers apiece and Flick would always say Yes— but had never to Jim’s ear asked Jim like now with an urgency which after all was only a warmth of being curious yet flowed jointly this private afternoon from Jim’s need: which was quietly, inarticulately, to go inside some imaginary polis complete with kitchen and cellar housed amid a warped map of demands waiting far and near, connected by others even if
he
had declined to do so, and now nearer than New York, for he saw the blue car pass once and imagined correctly that it would be parked by a high, grassy curb down near his grandparents’ house or back near the Baptist Church whose horrendous purple stained-glass window against white Victorian-shingled gingerbread seemed to glow outward at you with some light of determination from inside)— It was the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, he said, whether that’s 1803 or 1804, because I’ve run on the track at the university there that they built for the Games, I think, because it’s three laps to the mile— Well, the Purchase was ‘03, said his father, who knew a lot about the Civil War. Well, grinned the son, his memory jogged, the Fair was ‘04 because a man Margaret met on her way East hoped to organize a balloon experiment there, or maybe it was the St. Louis Fair itself he hoped to organize. Your grandmother got a lot of mileage out of that trip West, said his father.

His father persisted: where
were
the main hot spots? . . . any chance for New Jersey to—?

Well, the New Zealand area was a regular thermal wonderland, we overtook them in ‘72 and Italy the next year for number one.

What about the Russians?

Well, they’ve got a small unit in Kamchatka.

His father wanted to know how it worked, and he told him, adding how nuclear explosives in the "ploughshare" method could fracture rock, admitting us to the heat that from piped-in water will make steam to be piped out while trapping the radioactivity down around the hot rock level, if you want to believe that.

He and his father rose from the kitchen table and Jim went downcellar looking for the M. H. Mayne diaries he did not find, turning from time to time to address his invisible father who was standing almost directly over him in the kitchen above. ‘To the best of my knowledge," he heard him say for the millionth time.

He kept seeing his father’s mouth open and shut, open as if itself thinking it might be possible to form the word
Yes
and, upon doubting this possibility, closing it but closing it upon genuine words that were not necessarily
No.
Mayn looked at the bottles populating the narrow closet. "You sure look in the pink, Jim," he heard dimly from above.

He turned his father’s queries about the future of geothermal and about Jim’s collateral journalistic future in regard to that subject toward the ancient joke relating speech to hot air, but his father persisted; and when they arrived again at Mayn’s interests in weather and missile development which had taken him to four arms-control conferences in a dozen years (and what
was
the weather on Venus, sort of an outer-space Houston in July? midsummer St. Louee?) Jim told his father he remembered him singing Rodgers and Hammerstein in the bathroom. Offkey, his father added—and Jim couldn’t believe they were having quite this conversation, this mere recollection where details were not in question but the spirit had so changed that his mother wasn’t sleepwalking in Jim’s dreams but just coming slowly up to bed and asking him why he was awake, for he was standing at the head of the stairs. I liked that singing, Jim said quietly. So did I, said his father.