Women and Men (82 page)

—Right! (his shoulders felt stiff and good) so they figure a pellet of dry ice the size of a pea can make a hundred thousand tons of snow—

Who
figures? came a voice back (a voice of a daughter) (multiplied by us)—yeah, so who’s this "they" that "figures"?—a multinational oil-insurance corp.?—but it isn’t coming to anything, admit it—they
don’t
control the weather except in their Men’s Dreams of zooming into a zero-visibility cloud and blowing everything out of there!

Well the Russians have shot rockets into thunderclouds their radar said were packed with hailstones, said Jim.

She would eat her dinner and suddenly ask why the winds came from west to east. This led her father into air masses, their personalities and so forth. He drew one for her, on a paper tablecloth in a little dump in Boston where they had crayons in old jelly jars, drew a picture (with commentary) of the prow-shaped slope of the cold front, its hundreds-of-miles-wide keel bottom frictioning slowly across the land, a very wide load.

She’d drive toward some point, maybe of truth—across land that was water, do you understand?—Yes, Jim, we understand though you didn’t say it aloud to yourself—then shift into another type of love, because it was (we’re sure) always that—love and the incestuous anger-humor/humor-anger all mingled of wanting to send up a parent or two who a bit too easily granted their failings especially her father, though when he was tempted by affection, drink, and food to tell her where he was literally coming from he couldn’t because she would be puzzled as if she believed him (that is, that he was in the future) and in the current present only by leaning like a long-necked proto-pelvic closet-biped ankylo-soaratops into its brained past.

I know what you mean, she said to her father, but he didn’t mean the acceleration of time’s hardware that she meant, tossing her long straight light-brown hair back (and what would
she
know about how dreadful the future was?)—that is, that you might go and teach Peace Corps in middle Africa (there’ll always be an Africa), but listen Dad the overall grid was haywire, she felt, and run not by Decent Thought or even a collaboration of crooks but—she didn’t know—it had run away with itself—the answer was, she said, socialism maybe, but not the kind we had, with the corporations half-owned by the government that they more than half-owned in turn, and the only point in going to college—she had been accepted by a formerly men’s college that had just gone "public" (joke) and offered excellent skiing close by—Was to study and know your enemies: not men, no, not men, but—she would quit after a year mebbe and go to work for Nader, do
obsoletely anythong
he needed, but she ought to be a lawyer, but it took too much time, and did she want kids young?, but that wasn’t what
she
thought, it was her father.

The future her father had sloped out onto
was
like us the slope, static but for the shadow it threw, which was
him,
back upon Now, the Present, which was really the past from the vantage of that future he had gone into like a shock of memory which gave off a desire to return to what was a void and had to be reinvented, namely this present: God! he thought, it wasn’t him, this future position, it felt causeless, caused by an absence of cause, it came at him a sure home, not someone else’s.

Like when he woke up one night, and it was the night he walked out on the landing to find Sarah his mother wending her way upstairs with a book—and come to think of it her grandmother’s large comb—in her hand, reading. And a flashlight made like a candle.

But when he woke at first he had heard certainly his mother, her neutral though now unusually explaining voice, upon the ground of Brad’s crying coupled with his sort of whining word-sound, and she was telling him it wasn’t a bad dream, it was a good dream; his "terrible" dream (certainly) of the whole town going back in reverse into a volcano it had come out of, but— for reasons that were people in the dream that Jim missed out on because he couldn’t really hear—a "very moving" dream, a good dream, Braddie—she wouldn’t have minded having it herself—which made Braddie laugh and sob-snuffle at once, and something else that caught Jim but
he didn’t
catch, for what was it?, he only got out of bed. He could have run off the roof into space the way he felt but he had heard the train leaving Windrow getting up some speed headed for Little Silver or the Shore or Trenton; but he opened his door to the removed but spread light from the bathroom down the hall, which his instinct told him was empty. Turning to look down the stairs, he saw his mother on the way up with book and comb, reading—the big brown-and-black-and-golden-orange comb. But later on he thought it might have been her ghost, and he could allow the possibility of ghosts because he had
ruled out
dreams (though not for others).

All this more or less O.K. until—wait a minute—the next afternoon he heard the very same conversation through the slightly ajar music-room door, and Brad was even doing a bit of crying, same whimper-type really and the little shit couldn’t have just had the dream because he had been at school all day: Jim could guess it was lava boiling down out of the volcano in the movie the previous Saturday, even standing the other side of the music-room door, that gave his kid brother that dream of the town reversing itself to flow back into the volcano with everyone boiling back with it like stuck in the tongue of a titanic snake (sheep and people and even a farmer hoeing unconcernedly, etcetera), then his mother saying a "terrible" dream but a "good dream, Braddie," and Jim knew what came next before he heard it, which was, "It was a good dream Braddie because it was your soul rooting for you, telling you what’s inside you." Jim hadn’t ever heard his mother say "soul." But how had he known she was about to say, "It’s your soul rooting for you," except for her having said it last night when Braddie must have woken up out of a bad dream and she went in to him?

But she had been downstairs!

So was it that Jim could see the future? Or hear it! And so right then, surprised at himself outside this door, he thought that his mother coming up the stairs at two or three in the morning—with the book and the great comb he recalled combined so the comb was extending out of the book she was reading as she slowly came up the stairs—had been a ghost.

Though they had exchanged words.

And she had not really said to get back to bed, it was like they were meeting like friendly acquaintances downtown. Oh,
hello,
Jim—what a nice pair of pyjama bottoms you’ve got on today.

So later, after she had gone down the drain of the sea you might say cruelly, he looked forward to seeing her ghost again, because this other night when she was alive and Jim could have sworn had been just heard outside in the hall or in Braddie’s room sort of comforting Braddie out of his dream, she had evidently been a ghost out of the future. Of course as well as what she was. Which was reading late, while Jim on the landing had been hearing his father’s snoring and so you could feel that the breathing of one parent passed through you and met the nightwalking or breathing of the other parent. Were there thoughts there, too, along the breath-junction you made? He didn’t know. All he knew was that she said at least a couple of times that he only didn’t remember his dreams; it wasn’t that he didn’t have them. Until he once got mad and, yes, chilly at the same time, so didn’t say what he hoped to but did say she didn’t know what she was talking about, and some people definitely did not have dreams, like some did not see ghosts.

Was
it her ghost? He got quite sure of it. But there was no proving it so he put it behind him.

Did he see ghosts where others dreamed? And had history repeated itself downstairs, or what?

He had little to go on, putting his mother together out of his later life. Until one day he regretted not asking people who had known her about her. Why hadn’t he? Because he thought it was up to her?

He went for the definite. Yet he did once see her later on. She was resting on her oars for a long time. He was playing squash in his freshman year at college in a cold court defending the center with hip and elbow and killing perhaps his partner’s very mind targeting the angles to make him dart forward or long-alleying a wall-hugger so the black ball found a home in a dead rear corner, yet always as if his variant wrist knew the future independent of its lord—and this was when he once saw his mother resting on her oars for a long time before some change that came would end this rocking pause.

He "decided"—how?—that she had felt herself not fit for relations with people, all these relations—was that it?

He had seen her row once, and off the beach at Mantoloking, which was crazy and fairly dangerous, and he, a child, had felt it. Though she had gone with a grinning lifeguard, who had shoved the boat, a white and high-bowed small boat across the barriers of magnet-strong low breakers to dig further into the swell. And they both got up onto the gunwales facing each other and grinning out there in the immediate distance of the boy’s watch kept for her, and then they both clambered down and she insisted on rowing. Why did Jim think "insisted"? A secret of the line between where he was and where she was, and the line between them was a foreign shore, and he knew he heard her speaking inside him or maybe him inside her—yet not then, but much later, after she was gone, he recalled this inside business and knew it had been felt by him then. He caught a follow-through of his partner’s racket on his right knee and was never the same again, though was playing two months later and played even better the following year though moving sideways was a bit risky. Out-thinking his "partner" was all it was, and yet he was there doubled in a future of the next second before it had come, it was waiting for him awful as a lost traveler’s inertia, you wouldn’t tell this about yourself even to the multitudes of eyes watching you from the totally imaginary Ship Rock of the northwest New Mexico desert—this future he couldn’t do more than joke about—with his daughter, that is—though once with the South American lady who had wandered thoughtfully into the bar of the hotel the night before or after the first U-2 announcement: and he and Ted were talking (hell) history, light history (Clear, two-plus-two causes; or Just Plain Accident; or the secret rooting capabilities of New Jersey beach sand and mid-1940s bare feet; or history’s trick of happening elsewhere if you paid close attention: well then, didn’t Buddha say speak only of what you know) and Ted had known an ancient relative of Greeley’s, like an old, comparatively valuable pistol, a tea-totaler incidentally whose great-great uncle had lived for a week at the semi-utopiate community in
Greeley,
Colorado, that Meeker and Greeley founded, and the ancient relative in question when living remembered sloops racing each other out the East River and to the other end of the harbor to the Narrows to meet an incoming ship and whip back to Manhattan to peddle the hot foreign news in the newssheets they had in those days before the great man had founded his
Tribune
partly to purge journalism of such obnoxious attractions as medical advertising of that day—

And Mayn—and Ted too—and maybe partly in the presence of "their" despised end-of-the-bar auditor Spence with the cruddy sideburns both bushy and patchy and the hide jacket frontier-fringed—showed off to the newcomer, the lady perhaps six or seven years Jim’s elder, a round-faced beauty with an exacting kindness waiting in the eyes, and independent; and she did put three fingers to her lips listening to Jim pass from the wind of sailpower running the news business all the way back to the 1680s when the law said no one might ferry across from Manhattan to Brooklyn when the sails of all the windmills were rolled up or in a
rowboat
ferry at least, which led to the friend of Ted’s who had grown up in Brooklyn Heights with a view from Grace Court of the ferry lights moving away from the Battery in the early evening and wanted never to look at that vast harbor again and had moved as far inland and slightly southwest as you could get without coming out the other side, and while one thing led to another, the foremost thing was that after the official NASA statement the next day that nobody believed, they had all foregathered (as Jim’s father would say)—pasf-gathered was more like it—here before Ted had gone off to dinner with an economist from Puerto Rico, and Spence, when Mayn had looked away for a moment from his exquisitely trustworthy interlocutress to whom he hadn’t mentioned he was married but wanted to because he was going to be friends with her, had seemed to appear—and for a horning-in moment inquired so incredibly what was the bean with the limitless oil that Mayn had recently been heard speaking of that’s like sperm oil and the planty bush survives up to two hundred years (which Mayn didn’t recall saying because he didn’t actually know how long and now said so, somewhat angrily, to this sidling character who shied away doubtless into his hole as Mayn turned back to the South American lady hearing Spence say, c"d you think I dreamed that?")—so incredibly, yes, that the woman said, Who is
he?,
as if she’d detected Mayn holding out on her:

—that is, he told his daughter Flick years later (when she
could
be told things to was it before or after college?) the barest facts of what he had told the South American lady in i960 but did not think Flick would believe him and anyway cared much more for her than for conveying what became so hard to credit that it was a shadow whose very source had been cast with it—all this both a species of but distant possibility maybe of madness, and a vulgar violation of his most ordinary self.

This, Flick might have partly picked up, for she said to him (admittedly the evening he came to Washington to be met by her, and not in his gift to her the old white Cadillac she had that very weekend sold as a collectible), Well you aren’t exactly ordinary, Daddy, the places you’ve been, but this business of our living in the future, well,
I’ve
never seen that transparent bubble and the plate that people stand two by two on to get transferred into space.