—and if it was a mystery why Brad went to pieces that day, Brad’s Day as it came to be called, never mind all its wrinkles, its whys and whys and various crap you can’t know, maybe he discovered jerking off the night or afternoon before but was too young surely; and who in the hell cares, comes a foghorn-strong voice both far and close, hard to tell, we almost miss the later James Mayn expressing good-(more-or-less)humored disdain for something or other, maybe family history:

and you come up to the present with a lot of interesting enough memories, no doubt about it, hearing your mother’s fugitive brief lover (who loved her but would never have called her "nice") tell of an argument they had about a piano being out of tune and he heard it, a foreign vibration, a separate if not isolated sound, and she didn’t: sharp-edged memories often become surrounded by a nothingness of what lay around them I mean the idea of all these never-to-be-known people who knew your folks and arrived with horse-drawn (in Windrow, horses could draw, you see) vanilla ice cream at twilight saying but once, You have a lot to live up to—she was the nicest woman . . . and you hear them in the woodwork, then never more, such as the vanished voice that called the cemetery four, five days after Sarah disappeared and got Eukie Yard mad in his voluminous one-piecer to ask if interment had taken place and when Eukie retorted that the drowned lady hadn’t been recovered, the voice from New York re-retorted Well she couldn’t be in two places at once obviously, which Eukie said he knew already, he thought; and somewhere before a trowel clanked under a porch but not before Lincoln’s wife was identified as an impossible woman, a voice with shoes on said to another heavily shod voice that Alexander had said the second voice ("you") had told him it ("you") had gotten opera tickets for a special road opera performance in Trenton, because it ("you") was afraid Sarah’s going crazy or something, and the other voice said, Yes it was Vurdee’s Ba[w]llo in Mascara (like a brilliant woman designer of revolutionary new men’s shoes with whom Mayn discussed South America all too briefly who insisted on pronouncing as Bore-guess a known Argentine storyteller and poet whom Mayn had never read and possibly never heard of) and what had been said to Alexander (who once observed that some Armenians are gypsies) who thought for Pete’s sake he’s going to start bawling on me, was that the lady in question might go crazy living with him, Mel—

—close down some of these systems, a voice says firmly at a semicircular meeting of Grace Kimball’s workshop, close ‘em down, don’t go back for more, ol’ Freud’ll have you sniffing around day and night till you got a snootful and it’s like booze, one snootful paralyzes you as good as another, close down some of those systems, you’ve seen ‘em, they work, he do act like that some of the time? you know it’s most of the time, which might as well be all the time, so don’t go back for more—so that we might have substituted the verbal sound "voice" for "workshop" and dispatched to the heart of what’s just been said—

—hear those voices with their boots on comin’ down through the woodwork and you’re under the porch but outside if you want to be—and the memory is worth not maintaining major space for, so store it dehydrated it’ll keep next to Brad’s brief vision he recalled and recalled and recalled of Sarah with skin peeled raw when the draped black towel came off which meant the waters tore her clothing, she left no garment in the boat, and she had gone away on her trip—

—oh please don’t, said Mel—without enough clothes, y’know—but after Dad Mel said she was in heaven, big brother Jim said, touching his half-brother’s shoulder (though Mel could touch Brad, too), No, Braddie, she’s O.K.

—no need for her to go on floating downward in your ill head, she had the water to float on, in, under, within, through, out through, so long as you got the basic info into your who where when lead—

—What? asks a now-long-unheard-from voice, a childlike interrogator who have overheard stuff not comprehensible or not especially desired— "What?" asks a kid watching TV—multiple kid dune homework with the sound off for a new wrinkle—

—No, she’s O.K., Braddie, she’s O.K.

Well’s far’s I’m concerned, said Dr. Herman, when Jim told him of Mel’s asseveration that most Armenians were Catholics, all Cartiolics are Armenians—have you ever had a real drink, Jimmy? and he bent to deftly lift from back of some other bottles ein quart applejack before Jim could start to describe Brad’s Day finishing off at the cemetery with a couple of snorts from Eukie’s small but somewhat inexhaustible bottle emerging from his voluminous coverall—"sirensuit" as it was called by Margaret (a great Chur-chillian sometimes though then she would see he was only history) and when Jim asked why "siren," Alexander said Churchill attracted all the ladies with that suit and looked like a baby in point of fact, and Margaret said Nonsense, the fact was that the siren was the air-raid warning and Churchill was always out among the people at those times and always wore that one-piece semi-military-fatigue coverall outfit—and Jim said, "Thanks, Gramma," and she said, "You’re welcome," he still visualized the Prince leaving in quest of the Princess, and the giant bird still adrift in that formidable western sky that at some margin, or set, of the light, became East, and the curious recovery of the Navajo Queen—curiouser and curiouser if you thought about it but he could stop thinking and he did stop asking:

And seldom asking his father, Mel, who didn’t relinquish the weekly newspaper for quite a time, questions he really wanted answers to and often thinking up questions about Windrow goings-on that Mel would have incorporated succinctly into the Democrat: a piner woman and her infant were found dead at the edge of the swamp west of Lake Rompanemus: in fact, the woman’s foot was in the water. Back in the woods the apparently sleeping body of a piner man, in fact dead, was found braced in the limbs of a tree near a burned cabin. (His clothes, Mel observed upon being asked by Jim what about him, were still damp, but there was no sign of foul play or water in the lung though no autopsies were held on three unknown piners.) Jim asked Sam, who for some reason had not told Jim that Sam’s uncle at the firehouse had heard about it at the Elks’ from Dr. Herman, who had been called by the police and had taken Cornelia with him and Cornelia who was in Miss Myles’s journalism class had turned in the brief article to Mel at the Democrat, which became briefer in the Democrat, though Miss Myles, who got this information out of Jim, could never persuade Cornelia to expand it into a feature piece. Jim saw waterflies playing on the murk near the dead woman and child, saw one waterfly carry some sultry irritation to the baby so it revived and opened its mouth but was capable only of silence. (The woman had shown signs of malnutrition and her hair was bedraggled. There were no plans to drag the swamp.) When confronted with such interesting news items strangely brief, Jim tended not to ask his father. If he got into talk with him it was maybe to tell him things like what would happen if the Earth slowed down rotating and stopped rotating when inertial momentum had been enough reduced so no one had been hurled off Earth’s surface—’cepting that this event occurred in a dream (though a daydream) Jim had which therefore he would never have told Mel and possibly would not have broached to his mother were she there still, or were she to appear on the roof in the middle of the night or in his framed picture of Sequoya, brave Cherokee linguist, gift from Alexander like the picture next to it of Andrew Jackson in a black coat looking pretty mad—the pictures done in the same year of 1821, according to Alexander; or Jim would tell his father there was "some crap" showing through the ceiling, a discoloration on the slanting, low, roof-squeezed ceiling above Brad’s bed—some rotten shingles out on the roof at that point and it would get worse—and Mel asked Jim (a rare asking, a rarely personal species of asking though father and son and densely aware, more than that, of each other) if Jim recalled how upset Sarah’d been when they came home from her group’s chamber recital at the Presbyterian church and the snow firm underfoot and the winter stars out and even with his tone deafness he’d told Sarah it was one of the memorable evenings of his life and she said Byron Kennett’s mother had come up after the quintet and told Sarah Sarah was making By fall in love with her, did Sarah know that? and she could see it in his eyes during the Mozart, she could see it in his eyes, and all Sarah could say was wasn’t Betty glad Byron was falling in love with someone safe— with a laugh!—but Betty got mad and said some fairly surprisingly final words and went away, and though Sarah, though bitchy, was enough in the right all right, she couldn’t get over it and got cold late in the evening and her fingers got blue, did Jimmy remember? not really except Mel had wanted to call the doctor—"my musical anemia," Sarah said, "my incurable blues" and she looked so young then, said Mel, like a little girl, younger than when I first knew her, but deathly pale though we knew what a toughie she was, climbing out on the roof to look at the shingles one spring and when Mel, whose slippers were always dark red leather, the best, and made of leather only (not the carpet-material-type slippers Alexander wore out onto the porch to go half-sideways like a sea captain or a sailor down the steps to retrieve the newspaper in the morning with the dew still icing the front lawn the deepest damp green), said if they didn’t reroof the house he’d have to waterproof his slippers, Sarah picked it up as lightly as one of her letters downtown to her father came up off the floor into his hand, and when Dr. Range in his yellow slicker came by when Brad had influenza and they were all there, Sarah said (and Mel said that’s the second time you got that wrong) that they were probably a leak-proof and dry house but Mel was the only man she could imagine waterproofing his carpet slippers, which got a laugh but not from Mel, who essentially clapped his hands and offered a sherry to the doctor who said he would love to but it was against his religion this early in the day whereupon Mel plucked the doctor’s yellow oil-slicker rainhat from the hall table where it hatched a massive paperweight with newsprint from the first, heavily Jacksonian issue of the Democrat sunk into it, and handed the slicker hat deftly to Dr. Range, whose services were not for very much longer sought by the Mayn family though Margaret and Alexander Mayne (with the e) went on with him nominally their physician for years, though Margaret, who was congenitally well and believed that there’s an awful lot of things in this world that’s your business and nobody else’s, couldn’t stand doctors doctoring—much less hospitals mined with bedpans, buzzing with thermometers that got shoved hither and yon, granted, by nurses that for all their hellish officiousness knew more than the doctors up to but not including slicing you open, which Margaret would never permit done on her, though she had had Sarah’s and Sarah’s sister’s tonsils out (well how many actual tonsils does that make?)—and it comes to us as if it were moving outward to our fingertips or had been on the tip of the tongue, a notorious nearness better located at the susceptibility threshold of the tastebuds—when ‘twas through Jim unbeknownst to him that we relations extracted clean clear and isolate Sarah’s "Well done," when Mel hadn’t flown the hat to Dr. Range’s head or done anything special, only wished it a bit fast perhaps from the mahogany table to the doctor’s living fingers, which is no sin.

No sin for Range to say Sarah might get out among people more than she did, for if anemia was anemia, blues didn’t help anemia, and though no longer called in after Sarah’s death, Range did offer to grandfather Alexander the morning after charges had not been preferred against Jim, against Bob, or against Anne-Marie Vandevere (the remarkably impassive one of the lot) the confidential opinion that Jim would land on his feet, the doctor had liked him ever since Jim had in his opinion quite possibly saved the young German girl who had been out of sight down in the meadow between the cemetery and the race track when she had been struck in the temple by the good doctor’s unseen golf ball that had sliced and sailed—took off and seemed to travel further than would a good shot, although there’s an illusion—through trees and into downhill sky, and all Jim saw was one girl in one meadow fall, drop, drop sideways, almost as if cleverly pouncing on something unknown there in the grasses: Jim had run to her, found her gagging, sensed her whole struggle, gone into her mouth with his fingers; had gotten her tongue forward, had started raising her hips, pressed some life into her (she seemed in a concussive shock) so that when the doctor, in search of his ball, came in view looking down to the right of the golf course and beyond this far end of the cemetery, the intent motion of the boy straddling the girl and the swift, sturdy approach through the field of that Ira Lee, the Indian kid (part-Indian? full-blooded halfbreed!) lacked any visible response from the girl lying in the field who was then, as if in death, the cause of Ira striking Jim across the side of the head for Jim went on trying, that is to revive the girl, and in fact never stopped although the doctor’s shout and Ira’s second thought saved Jim from a second blow; but judging from the examination at the hospital, she could have been in trouble if not found soon—she was a refugee, but not a German Jew—and Ira’s presence there never got explained any more than Jim’s, who came out the rescuer, but he never said how he came there, a fairly boring place to be, and this was long before his mother died—all in all, an impressive performance, the doctor emphasized to Alexander; that boy’s all right—

—an isolated incident of irresponsibility giving Anne-Marie the key to Bob’s pickup so she could get inside and wait, where presently Italo-American emotion found Dutch-settler property enclosed beautifully in the cab but not locked in, which inevitably if not fatally caused that scene to beget and to overflow into and to slide sideways curving into (out of nowhere) a next:

while Jim, from obstacle through obstacle rushing through his high school building at twin speeds too fast, too slow outward, unsure what’s wayside and what’s way, how much to love his mother gone, how deeply to give his father thought, how much weight the motion he had experienced above the smudged Windrow, New Jersey, lens guarding the earth-colored corrugations of a continent of South America donated by—he forgot—how much to blame his grandmother Margaret for being the East Far Eastern Princess who in her turn couldn’t tell him quite where she was Margaret or how she was her own mother or what was so and what wasn’t and so he had thought, hell, he didn’t want any more of that story stuff, he’d close that out and about time: and there in one place was coach telling him to get off the glass, then finding stuff coming out of his mouth about it being Jim’s girl (but only the one he knew about) that he hadn’t first thought about, re: Jim; and there in another was an absolutely pooped Mr. Quirk (Jim’s summer employer’s brother) who had only three in his Solid class and had been ordered to remove the otherwise much-laughed-at sign over his door "let no one ignorant of geometry enter here"; and there in another place whizzing by was the tall young legislative principal Thompson Fulkerand, columnar, firm as stone, exactly half-bald, and the equally tall, majestically material Pearl W. Myles, and they ain’t talking about the weather but it’s bad whatever it is, there’s the eye in the back of Fulkerand’s head for half an instant jolting Jim as he bounds by so fast only the word "criminal" in no doubt "Well I’m not a criminal, Miss Myles" or "It’s criminal what’s done to gain favor with the student body" gets into the strong, fast, angry boy’s head; there’s the occasional, laughable seventh sense in Jim that at least for the time being he, or the world-altering episode he’s in, is insane; there’s Mel’s all-too-brief obit for his wife, black-edged oblong on the second page a stone’s throw from the masthead, that Jim was not asked about but, after the fact, when asked by Alexander (in Mel’s presence, for Alexander did that) if Mel’s piece seemed O.K. with him, Jim called it "short and sweet" and never spoke of it again—locked it in; and there’s the order in which people came to Brad’s Day: there’s Alexander, his shined shoe-toes sticking out while he peruses a book about Indian music and smells very faintly of peanut butter he keeps in his shop; there’s Brad, so set apart by his own hand, his own act, of legs, neck, head, stomach, voice, playing hookey some might say; elsewhere, though same room, there’s Mel reporting a chance today of a hurricane originating astoundingly along the mid-Atlantic coast, and Margaret, shocked she said at Mel, then ovaling her mouth, though she didn’t ring true, while that weather reporter’s hand made a rare trip to the small of Brad’s or anyone’s back; and then, blink, there’s the sound heard at a distance but not a close-up, an illustration of which Pearl Myles from on gentle high asked for as part of her tall kindness to Jim and the family; and always there, central and invisible, is Brad sometimes swimming, the way any swimmer will use the floor for training and support, though not much on breathing, though ‘twas heavy:

For as we breathe, so shall we move, but upon moving, we go on of force breathing—

—on the move? the interrogator tries out idiomatically echoing in warped unison Mel’s "on the move?" at the bedroom doorway and Jim had abruptly quarter-turned to catch his father in the corner of his eye, then continued laying out every bit of his clothing on the bed beside a suitcase and a largest-size old khaki scout knapsack, he had three pairs of narrow khakis, he had five white T-shirts, he had four pairs of colored boxer shorts and two white jockey, he had three pairs of washed denim jeans, one of them Army-Navy store bell-bottoms, he had a maroon V-neck sweater raveled at one wrist, a yellow cashmere sweater (you said sweater) his aunt sent him from Boston that he never wore, and a tight-fitting scratchy, very warm blue-black turtleneck Navy sweater that Margaret had just last week brought him from the City; he had a washable seersucker jacket that he could wear certain evenings this coming summer if he had to, and for shirts he had a fine-red-white-and-blue-checked button-down, a blue Oxford button-down, a white tab-collar shirt with a light-brown stripe, and a regular white button-down; he looked at the closet and around at his open bureau drawers and answered his father: "Yeah, seeing what I got." His father had had a (his "warm weather") haircut, which enlarged his square head and broad-chinned face. Behind Mel, or around him, the sound of frying was audible, for Brad was a capable cook and, flicking the pan butter with a (with "his") spatula up over the yolk and unsettled white, would fry himself an egg in the afternoon and sandwich it between two slices of Tip Top bread, the egg of which Jim now smelt, and saying Brad made him hungry and was there any peanut butter left which he knew there was, he stepped around his father who sort of got out of the doorway. In the morning there’s Brad looking at Jim when Jim comes in for a fast glass of milk, Brad slowly chewing a mouthful of cereal in the quiet of the sunny kitchen so sounds like Braddie’s got nuts in his cereal or bones—whole animals, for God’s sake—while looking, looking, looking, munch, munch at his big brother (How ya doin’, Brad, you glutton!) and less fugitive and meaningless and exactly not to be turned away from, the dark red wool skirt (her mom did weaving as a hobby) of Anne-Marie Vandevere sitting on his right in the pickup truck (how did he drive it so many times right in town?), the cloth tight across her thighs and knees and lap you could tap like a drum but there must be a tunnel underneath right up because of the cloth not hanging down the way it sometimes did, he’s not sure how much he’s going to get this afternoon? why no practice that afternoon?—either it’s very late or it’s Sunday—and he’s eating an apple or something sweeter, he can’t quite recall, not what Anne-Marie thought or said about his mother’s drowning though he didn’t go out with her till just after, and not worth recalling, obstacle upon obstacle, but it’s his life, he feels years later, and there it was in all its minor trivia as vivid as fact in suspension ("Suspense," said Ted, "but did Anne-Marie ever say anything?"—and both men, aware of the Chilean journalista between them who smiled at her drink, knew the difference between saying that about an adult and, here, of Anne-Marie—"Oh she often spoke, and she’d have thought it out and she’d begin by saying, ‘You know . . .’ and you listened.").

It was later like he’d turned to these facts, all scattered and all the more exact and kind of meaningless, yet horrendous, funny—he’d imagine the entire life of the Stormer woman (going far away from her home and feeling occasionally guilty, and bearing a child and then another child conceived in marriage while perhaps her doctor-husband watched, watched her being a good doctor’s wife or falling out of love with him without knowing if it was him as a man or as a medicine man), the woman who married the hairy, intensely hard-working doctor ("workaholic" we always say now in the mid-eighth decade of a century that threatens to see life itself as a drug), in Chicago they lived, and Leona who on a visit to Windrow parents ran into Sarah and seemed not to be insulted by her one day in the old, still drugstore that was also a soda fountain and afterward Jim asked his mom if he could have a Clark bar and she paid for it with the tears in her eyes and then needed a bite of it, raising her lipsticked lip a shade above the upper teeth looking along her nose at it. Jim aimed the balled wrapper at the trash can and it missed and landed on the white tiles that weren’t as much like bathroom tiles as was the facing in the barbershop from linoleum floor up to the counter.

Yet Flick Mayn, the daughter of Jim, once wrote for herself to give to her dad ridding she hoped some need from not just her system, why was it insulting to say to Leona Stormer, "It isn’t that I feel much for you; you take me back, that’s all you do—" but it’s honest—and your mother cried—

—which she never did, said Mayn, and granted she did say "that’s a hell of a lot to make me do," I think she said that—

—damn right she said that, said the daughter never flinching from (well) someone else’s life, but she meant "taking her back": that was the "hell of a lot" she meant, and I think you knew that, Dad.

No . . . no—which was how Mel habitually responded to someone’s opinion, even on special occasions a cluster of facts reported to him, such as that Sarah when she played the piano, which wasn’t her first instrument, was able to see places she had never been to, markets full of red beets in a Polish village, the Chicago wind from the north raking the lake into white flesh, grouped skeletons down a mine, and when Brad looked at Mel saying gently, No ... no ... his brother Jim fighting mad, said back at Mel, Yes. Yes. Yes, to which Mel answered Jim, What do you mean? How do you know? Whereupon Jim seemed to surprise Mel by saying, I was there when she said it, she said it to me and Brad—upon which Mel was just able to smile, Well if she thought so . . .

You can just about take an insult from an adult who will at least not decorroborate what you have testified when he, or his relief, inquired who’s doing the script for the opera-ette we’d cited entitled Hamlet?

But Alexander, whom Flick came to know in his ninety-second and ninety-third years (concluding postscript years, not twilit so much as noisier, que brujo, what din, as he lost his sight and turned the radio up and up and discovered music all over again—Alexander no more meant to insult Brad by removing the Densmore book he had loaned to Sarah a decade before than to dishonor Brad’s Day (quite the reverse) by bearing upon his person a simple smell of peanut butter from his supply downtown, which was neither here nor there:

The Indians of course lacked peanut butter, or the demand for it, to begin with, though the jojoba bean, a very buffalo among vegetables, not in that they used all of it which wasn’t the feat that totaling a buffalo was, but in that the jojoba got them through many a weekly problem, from shampoo to the generally unknown desert fish fry, when these deep-underground travelers found their way or it found them up into the warmed waters of the high cacti, raised the level and brinked the pressure of these standing reserves and ceremonially leapt from cactus "eyes" we name them, openings sometime occupied by owlbirds, one at a time unless we include the biggest-ever elf owl that Mena the itinerant zoologist had seen, plugging that particular hole clearly, yet, in the dusk, darkly when contrasted to the visible but illusory wash of moon-stark dawn-lumen literally coating the cactus trunk as the real light otherwise diminished: for that elf owl would not have budged for a pressure of fish risen inside that cactus except to fly at the eye of some night camper Anglo or Indian glinting in the flash of jojoba oil awaiting that desert fish fry so unknown even Mena had not witnessed it (hence the importance of judging comparative descriptions), and the Hermit-Inventor of the East said he had not witnessed it but Marcus Jones was more to be believed, a plainer, less potent figure so that when little Flick ran off outside to see what her younger brother was doing around or under that house where Alexander still lived though now with supervision, the name of that west-renowned botanist who found, and found names for, even unknown growths of locoweed so that his feats of broken-ground bicycling south of Salt Lake City and, monumentally, still south, are overlooked, brought from old Alexander, who was just turning the radio volume dial up again a generous exclamation, Oh Marcus Jones! (as if to say with distant softness, My old friend!) he was real, you know, that was him, with his field work in Colorado, you only see that book in French, (slowly) last day of April, the air perfumed you know, the sunny white flowers and the silver stems of the poisonous loco, and the Spanish bayonets, reaching an eminence, lights across a mesa—

—he remembered that? the thirty-odd-year-old grandson inquired.

But only that, came the reply, all else is gone, like your daughter just now, and the volume dial turned delicately while the man in carpet slippers who had been bald through four decades "quoted" a mass of dark rocks . . . gigantic walls half ruined, some ancient cathedral . . . good stuff, lifting sadly in the wind its proud debris notched and made jagged or something by the puissant hand of time—Ute Pass by horse, and so forth, and I have no reason to suppose your grandmother didn’t really know him, he was out there in the late seventies and the eighties and he’s up at the Sperry Glacier in Montana twenty, thirty years later—but in the late seventies he changed to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe at Kansas City ... is it possible that Colorado is more beautiful than Iowa? he asks, and you don’t have to go there to say with him you bet your life.

Upon the sinking of Sarah’s teeth into the outer-skinned chocolate of the Clark bar on into the honey-colored brown-sugar-crumble inside you would not build a broken marriage, or a self-destroy scenario either. Yet you won’t go so far as to say you’d have ruled out Sarah’s leaving her husband one way or another. Taking the boys with her? Hard to imagine her taking Jim; in the end he would not go. Why is another question. Not loyalty to Mel. Nor to the town, for what is loyalty to a town? get out your hose and have a speed contest outside the fire station once a year against fire companies in English-town, Toms River, Holmdel. Grease a pole and set the duck or flag at the top. Loyalty to a place and time: Jim would have been able amidst the madness to say I’m not goin’. And in his heart would be, Not yet. But then she had gone, she had gone. He couldn’t have foreseen it, could he? Not in the drugstore the Leona Stormer day of the enforced sharing of the Clark bar. He just saw Willy and Wally pass by the bright drugstore doorway in the downtown direction running in step and he knew where they were running and he didn’t recall what it was all about: years later, fallen forth into other lives, he lighted Mayga’s cigarette, an American cigarette for a change, and he said to Mayga that he could see his mother’s mouth, teeth, infinitesimally nose-crossed eyes watery still, but no fingers. Mayga told him he’s so precise on what’s not there, while she waves away her smoke and not into but away from his face. Oh, you see, I was feeding her, that’s how I recall it. Nonsense, said Mayga.

Oh Christ, you’re right, he said. Let’s, she said, get back to the libration-space future you’ve already had. Let’s get, he asked, back?

But if these sole things were there to turn to instead of the something identified as real that Margaret a trifle throatily (especially for her) said existed there in the cemetery where they had stood on Brad’s Day before the others moved Brad’s Day to the cemetery, there surely were people to turn to if he wanted; but he couldn’t. He couldn’t want. And not just Byron Kennett, who put his sensitive arm like water around Jim’s broad, strong shoulders and said, If Jimmy ever needed to talk . . . well By was comfortable like a fly winging softly in a calm room.

Do you mean, demands the duty interrogator, that the effeminate Byron man was like a fly, was comfortable, was a room in himself?

We can’t answer—for we changing from angel into Jim sometimes find or hear only the moment and the words of its impulse, we’re not explaining.

But there were others. He made a one-quarter turn and it was Brad staring at him from a nest of garden hose a-coil beside the house: "You goin’ somewhere, Jimmy?"

(Why naturally.) "We’re havin’ pork chops tonight."

(Kid brother; no mean chef; acting like a mom, but nothing like theirs, who knew freedom and wouldn’t ask where you goin’ and Jim would never catch her sweeping his bedroom floor.)

And there’s Margaret: he made a half-turn in the leaf-windowed silence of chewing down a kitchen doughnut, and she broke her mood and whanged a n’innocent fly off the white icebox (real icebox on porch, pale-brown unfinished wood with inset panels and two big sections, upper and lower, what timeless comfort that icebox with butter and apples and he didn’t know what in the lower, and a great cake of ice mysteriously and ceremonially alive, a treasure that never needed to blink its eye)—well, this was a summer later and he had a job down ‘t the shore swizzling Tom Collinses at a hotel with a long, long sanctuary porch of rockers where the older ladies sat in their white unbuttoned sweaters, he liked the people on that porch and he came out with his tray and walked to them and they enjoyed especially receiving their drinks watching the wind ruffle the American flag on the pole, he knew that was partly it, while the sun settled lower off to the extreme right, around the bay.

And there was Bob Yard, with whom he did talk, and a lot, and some about Sarah. But then how can you? You just do. Except in Bob his mother came out quirky, and not even ... he did not have the word in those days, and sexy wasn’t the word . . . "sensual," he said to Mayga later, realizing as he did so that Mayga was "sensual" less mysteriously than his maddeningly gentle wife, Mayga was "there"—he let her be—and he would go to bed with her if he suddenly asked and she wanted to but he never stressed it, and then they did go once, and then it was valedictory, which is very very risky, like looking for special large last words on your deathbed and not settling for what you already know, but no, it turned out to be friendly and miraculous, no doubt the Grace Kimball that Mayn later heard about and came closer and closer to would have said Exciting one-night stand for crying out loud: but it wasn’t anything like that: it was love: and he loved his wife, too: and it was another form of . . . well Sarah came out exciting, behind Bob’s memories told frankly sometimes to Jim, the son of Bob’s illicit paramour, my God!, are they talking?—well, why not?—quirky and exciting and, yes, magical: and Bob did not know about when she went to France for a few months in 1925 in a carefully supervised program for music studies at Fontainebleau checked out by Margaret so that little but the music was left to chance, and that time evidently meant a lot to Sarah though Boulanger and other mysterious teachers were what Jim recalled her talking about when he didn’t know much about music or care, at least about the violin—he came, eventually, to care about cabaret piano, the super-involved departures and the root simplicities of it all such as the first, perfectly scale-like six-syllable progression of "She dances overhead" (followed by "on the ceiling near my bed"), "Dancing on the Ceiling," a very sexy song half-clothed in the airs and imminences of romantic touch: and one day in Paris Jim woke up knowing that Sarah’s feeling, hardly communicated to him, about Fontainebleau in 1925 or so, was unchecked in him at that moment in a large bed under a comforter in the vicinity of those very few articles of rather heavy dark hotel-room furniture and the sound of cars revving that could not touch him because he was looking at the curtain veiling the ironwork of the narrow balcony you could hardly step out on, and he was due at the airport in the late afternoon and thought today, yes, he would go further out and take a look at Fontainebleau—it was on the way to places that he picked up, according to Joy, his wife, what he really had to report—or left it (he retorted, because wasn’t she putting down his profession such as it was?), and the French journalist he was supposed to be meeting at the airport who wanted to ask him what would happen to top-priority French plans for ballistic-missile submarines if the Russians were to wangle out of Washington an agreement to reduce general western strategic strength changed his schedule and went with Jim to Fontainebleau and during that visit asked many things, had Mayn ever opened Henry Adams? ever been down to the Maginot Line to have a look? try Brittany in January, see Mont Saint Michel and eat very well—but never mentioned a submarine till they were on their way to Orly after a fish lunch that left Jim liking France and still wondering exactly where his mother had lived, he could have checked, it was a school: Jim had never, he realized, thought about his mother fondled by a man or sinking her teeth into a (Clark bar) neck or shoulder, Jim had only his own experience to go on at fifteen, but it was pretty good, he thought about it in a lot of pictures that didn’t easily go away but also didn’t think about it at all, was in casual shock, it was pretty good, better than he grinningly let on to Sammy, who chose himself a girl nobody thereafter would have dared call a pig (which she wasn’t), but she certainly was plain (as the older generation would say it) a very plain girl who also said kissing his way was unsanitary but Sam loved dancing with her slowly with his right hand firm at the downward limit of the small of her back just where the flesh flared beneath clothing, though, as Sammy reported, nothing much was happening—he liked Margaret, that was her name and she had thick, raspy red hair and got brown not burnt-pink at the beach like her brother, who played tennis and got razzed by the guys behind the fence of the town court for playing a fruity game, spring being bad enough but fall too. Jim had never seen his mother undressed and whatever he pictured out of Braddie’s dream he himself didn’t see his mother bloated, salted, or wafted deeply and coldly by the Atlantic Ocean out and back, out and back, though he half-saw her in her panties a few times, hips a little larger than he had expected, shoulders defenseless (—It is true of women, says the interrogator; Crap, we say to him, in your country all people are defenseless).

(On the contrary, the currency is at last defended, thanks to your remarkably durable republic—with panties on, but turned away): only in his mind if he was honest, her back to him and he didn’t see Bob Yard in the daydream and knew him to be somewhere where he would never see Bob’s face, Didn’t remember the first days at school after Sarah’s suicide; felt he could—but didn’t want to, possibly. He did miss his mother’s . . . privacy: what a thing to miss! he had his own, and plenty of it; and one day twenty years later he wondered what his daughter’s ever sharp view would be of her father’s mother doing that.

So he didn’t turn to others, the ones that seemed logical to. But Sammy was the only one he remembered like a daydream in retrospect coming up to him and saying, I’m sorry. And he shook Jim’s hand and there were tears right under his old eyes but none in ‘em. Jim and his mother never cried. Well, obviously Jim—that is, didn’t. And this was something the grandmother stated, one time, and it was true enough. Three girls wrote notes to Jim that went out of his head though he recalled the notepaper, one with rabbits on it in the margins, the others with little pink and (/or?) yellow flowers. Anne-Marie didn’t write him a condolence (he learned the word) message, but came to the house the second day when there was still some awful expectancy, and she walked into the living room where Alexander sat and Margaret was in the kitchen and Mel and Brad were there (long before Brad’s Day—a month to be approximate) and Jeanette Many was teary and Byron Kennett and his mother were alternating on the theme of who could have predicted it, and Anne-Marie coming forward reached and hugged Jim and then she kissed him three kisses on the mouth, each one longer, which could not create anything but silence, hence acceptance—jokes would have been out of place; then Anne-Marie took Jim’s hands with a happy smile that brought courage for the unknown, not sadness—dole—for tragedy, and she said softly, "I don’t want to stay here, but I did want to give you a big kiss. If you want to take a walk, come over. You know what I mean," which was all she meant. He was part of her life, she part of his, but no real sweat at all: maybe it meant she wasn’t going to get tied up with any fellow for a long time; Jim never did find out if there was an answer like that with Anne-Marie, they just weren’t together later on: but now they were, yet with a happy knowledge he took so for granted it forgot itself, like the inequality of his not giving a damn when he found Brad going through some papers and stuff he’d brought back from the shore —until later (in Anne-Marie’s case, twenty years later, and then he tried to understand how they had been so warm and cool at the same time; it was sex (going all the way), respect, a slight subtlety on each side; but in Brad’s, the unequal, case, maybe a couple of days later) he found some joint of his mind wham! remembering for him:

In the daydream of retrospect—to continue, to continue, to continue, to get anyway to this end at the risk of being less and less (than) succinct—his mother’s bare back was to him as we have known him to say to Mayga and to his much-loved wife, and he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find, he couldn’t find his mother’s—oh yeah he couldn’t find Bob Yard in this, the daydream, who was so vivid, so living, as opposed to the bare back and elsewhere directed shoulders and hips that were full of oh full of—

—you cannot easily say, said Mayga, for who could?

—something, said Mayn quickly, that’s it, thanks, kid, expectancy, full of some expectancy that—

—this is your mother? did I say "expectancy"?

—sure, sure, and I’ve got the words now, but—

—You had the experience then, said Mayga, never rushing him but giving him or taking from him a lessening of time, as if she would look at her watch, ah her watch, her watch—

Oh he wasn’t remembering stuff he hadn’t remembered, for he had always had his mind inside this time of his life; that "true" daydream had come, there wasn’t much to know about it.

They all laughed at a thing he said, bartender, Mayga, Spence at the end of the bar that always seemed underground or optically curious; a bearded man with a newspaper; and another bearded man just entering from the hotel lobby, who laughed for no more reason than to join in or lest the joke be on him if he didn’t, or out of good spirits, though when he sat up beside the other bearded man and they at once began conversing in tight order it wouldn’t have been good spirits, no, upon which Ted appeared from the lobby with, for a change, a real grown woman at his side, not one of his gals who always made such a rotten impression at first and eased into their natural grain later in the evening when it might be too late—but what did Jim say to make them laugh?

—full of expectancy, the room the day Anne-Marie Vandevere kissed him "in public," for Sarah might still be found, and full of expectancy, that strange bare back, in the daydream somehow, missing Bob Yard, a daydream as still as if the dreamer were she and in motion, opening the front door with the upper reaches of the house as empty-feeling as the front hall, familiar with its mahogany table, mirror, carpet with Persian prayer rug on top of it, his new raincoat hanging outside beside the mirror where he’d left it forty-eight hours ago after returning discreetly from the shore, and the paperweight as blunt and uninstrumental and as ugly and second-hand-looking and never really old as ever—a hall (nothing underlined) the same as it had been a month ago when Sarah had departed in her own direction, he looked at the pictures on the hall walls seeing them more than when her mother Margaret was there; and, electing to go (to bound but not to bound) upstairs, instead of to the kitchen, he took two stairs, then one, then paused like a back-diver adjusting his balance, and knew that the absence of Bob Yard from the daydream detail of the lady in panties only and with her back to him, his mother’s shoulders he was quite sure, and dark hair, was hard to get out of his head and he had been entertaining alternative explanations as the source of the daydream forty-eight or so hours ago—what the hell might as well play detective to the hilt: (entering house, starting to throw off coat off both shoulders at once is hit in face and midsection arms pinned)—sheer story!

He felt he had been preceded, and often thereafter. Someone had been there ahead of him. Well, he had been delayed getting there. Pearl Myles ("Pearl," as the class called her offstage) had asked for an imaginary news story (evidently nothing happening in town), what a contradictory assignment, said Mel (his father), to whom Jim could not say that with all his own practical physical confidence he left that classroom and stopped, bumped by a couple of guys, and stood nauseatingly alone for a moment losing everything to something, but what?, and then he knew it was embarrassment, mortifying, over his mother: and not that it was suicide (recalling Alexander crying in the kitchen very, very briefly, with the words "How can those boys stand it?— why, I can’t accept it, I can’t accept it ever, Margaret, not ever")—but no, it was embarrassment at her being not present any more—

Letting the family down, responds some former interrogator, and rubs his chin and glances "out" into a closed-circuit screen where those "presently" contained in the local stadium that can "seat" a hundred thousand (and stand more) are playing soccer, but he gets no confirmation nor does he himself need any that he is correct in his judgment of this woman whose name temporarily escapes him.

A woman also in a raincoat who when Jim thanked her for stopping asked if he was wet and when he said he wasn’t sure if it was raining, she stopped her wipers and together in the front seat as they accelerated they watched a mist grow on the windshield which was "rain all right," Jim said. She sat pressed back against the seat, keeping the wheel at arm’s length well almost. She asked where he lived, whether he’d had a good summer, wasn’t it good we’d had the atom bomb, that is, to use—and what was his favorite subject, or was it too soon to tell, or was it always the same subject. Something had to happen, which was why Jim had decided to revisit Sarah’s point of departure. Something. Anything. For nothing was happening at home, except Brad came into his room and asked about this, that, and the other like touching things.

Jim got a hard-on but his new raincoat covered it. She never asked what he was doing hitching down to the shore on a rainy September day, or what his name was, but they laughed at a billboard and five Burma Shave signs that made up a sentence, and his hard-on had gone down all by itself as warm, though, now as before, and a boy and girl happily huddled in the jouncy back of a pickup truck they passed; the woman drove Jim an extra eleven and four-tenths miles and though she wasn’t old her nose looked tired, like some stuff or material or other, while her cheek was soft and tan; and when she shook hands with him when he got out he liked her tits filling her yellow silk blouse and after she made her U-turn they waved. No one need ever know he’d come to Mantoloking, and then he got mad, being alone, and wondered if he could get in a few good jabs at least at Bob if they had it out. You could call it hate, and he cut off around and through to the small road, and up through to the beach that was bright without the light of brightness. Jim wanted to swing at somebody (maybe just play catch). Then he saw that it was the future, this decision to investigate the place where he suspected there was nothing, nothing to be found. A man was fishing. He knew the man. The woman would not have waved had she thought Jim was a detective. The cottages back on the bay side were many of them still not boarded up. The man turned about, with his eye on the end of his rod like it’s alive, and came suddenly through but slowly and methodically hurling his line far out, beyond the second swell back of the first breaker—"comber," Mel his father had called it, and somehow Jim always remembered remembering his father who did not swim calling it that (though he could, undoubtedly, swim).

You might have an accident if you lived alone and you’d rot in your room and you became luminous. The man was a brother-in-law of the man who owned the gray dory that needed a bottom coat in August and probably still did. Jim knew this so well. Jim didn’t know the man to speak to and figured the man didn’t know him and had no reason to change his judgment in this regard. The man was built like Jim, or like Jim was going to be—that is, broad, stocky though not less than more or less medium height. Jim had not wished to listen to the subject of their eventually finding Sarah much less go and ask Lester Coombes, the jowly, long-legged chief of police down at the Courthouse. His mother was here in the sand.

She was on a towel in the sun and he saw her fingers, her hand thrashing as she threatened him with his name as if she would actually do anything if he fell upon Brad, and, moving toward the man who now cast again as rain again fell, but the man passed the least additional second aware of the other person approaching, though from the direction a mile from here of the bend and the breakwater and the pier down came two, three walkers slowly as if they might never get here—Jim passed over the exact place where he had stuck like a pole at an angle in the sand though he would never have hurt or anyway murdered his little brother, who would have his day beyond all this feeling after Sarah’s going, a feeling that could well be the crap about eternity the minister "put into words" (as Barcalow Brandy wine in a black suit with this time a tie like one of his horse- or Indian-blanket sport jackets, done in a Windsor knot—"He surely put it into words")—so it must have been there and might be "Still out there?" he said to the man in boots and olive-green slicker reeling his line. "All winter if you got the circulation for it," the man said and at his voice some dumb gulls yelled against the breeze, and an image of his mother went away, but he’d been getting this foreign one with panties and bare back and Bob Yard went away with her—where? over to get clams or ice cream at Mantoloking pier? clear down the coast hugging it as far’s you could go?, but he thought they had never done that kind of thing together, at least she played badminton a few times with Mel who moved well and had a wicked wrist. Did some deaths go on hurting? were there winds below the sea that blew as fast as all other winds but blew through you as you turned end over end slowly enough so if the ledges and cracks down there wanted to move over to make room for you, look out, you’d get in there and go so deep you’d never stop falling, long’s your rate of descent was controlled. A swarthy man walked near them out of nowhere, dark, "darkened by some centuries-old desert," Jim one day recalled the scene for Mayga, who was made uncomfortable by this particular (circa-VJ-Day) slice of the small-town Mayns, and he knew it and later felt that he had guessed why fifteen (sixteen, seventeen) years before knowing Mayga whose conversation, occasional as these drinks together actually were, might get him feeling unfaithful, and her discomfort made him secretly mad this time quite a while after the U-2 but Spence was at the end of the bar, one of the few actual times Spence was there, when Mayn said what the boy (a smaller shape of him, or was he, the grownup, the smaller?, they were in each other for good and sure and goddamn sure) said to the man fishing, who each time Jim looked at his face seemed to look back at Jim though he didn’t, "Did you ever know anyone who drowned out at sea?"—"And never washed ashore?" said the man, and bobbed his rod and kept reeling. Yes, had the man ever known anyone that that happened to?, but he said, No, not known, though he thought it wasn’t as bad as many deaths, and, as if changing the subject, the man said, "Look at the horizon coming out clear in that space below the overcast, look at that." And Jim, abandoning private detection though glad of his raincoat because of the wind even rainless, asked if a body would sink and later rise, or what, and if the man had seen bodies come ashore, and the man half turned to speak, then turned to look at Jim (or like a silent version of when Mel was saying to Jeanette Many, "It was a mistake"—"A terrible one," added Jeanette so quiet you had only faith that you’d heard her—"She didn’t die, she didn’t die, Jeanette, she didn’t do that" (Jeanette’s long and amazingly narrow hand on his wrist) when Margaret entered and said gently, "You mean maybe she didn’t know what she was doing; but remember, she did it, not you," so that Mel looked up in surprise, the editor of the Democrat, crying again, and said, "Do what?"—that is, the brother-in-law of "the boat" Sarah had in some fashion used was saying, by not saying, You’ll live with whatever it is; and you can.

So that after passing back down the bay-bungalow road up to the pier and breakwater and asking nonchalantly if the police had ever questionedpeople about the woman who committed suicide and the man had laughed, a commercial fisherman, and said there was things that matter more and wasn’t the boat found a ways down Barnegat from here?, owner was lucky it wound up on that spit—police found a note in an airmail envelope (man laughed but)—people are people, the boy flared back and the man in sudden defense of what he probably did not know stepped forward, and Jim thought of stepping back, but the man said, "What’s the matter kid, eh?" and although Jim did not know a good answer he knew what to do, without knowing.

"You bastard," Jim shoved the man in the chest so he moved, and Jim ran, he didn’t recall even turning to run. I am alone, I am alone, but not lonely, not lonely for people it seems. The man had boots on. In motion, it was no contest, except much depended on the man’s unwillingness to go beyond a boundary that was in Jim’s mind, and it was a measure of the man’s rock-bottom interest in the event. But Jim felt the same even when the man gave up and Jim wasn’t hearing the great whishing silences between when one boot hit the ground stride for stride and when the next. But Jim ran like the halfback he was, because detectives didn’t run, they stepped behind something. (Ted: He ran like a Seminole through the woods with Andy Jackson whooping after him. Mayga: He ran because he wanted to get somewhere else! Spence, end of bar: Ran like your little brother trying to keep from getting beat up. What’s it to you, Spence? Oh, man tells me his story. Other people’s families, you know. Stick to your own. Wish I knew where they were. Breaking my heart, Spence. You ain’t got a heart, Mayn.)

Someone says (and it’s a multiple child that is growing up staggered): The boy meant not only that his mother mattered but so did the man in front of him. He shoved him, which is like pointing except the thing you mean is too close up but it’s better than having to wait till you know his name.

Well, what’d he do? asked Sam the next afternoon. Stopped running: he musta got a hernia in those boots, he was just standin’ around fartin’ enjoyin’ life, but he was a bastard.

Yeah, he musta been.

So you went down t’ the shore.

Yeah.

I’d agone with you.

That airmail envelope, Jesus, said Jim.

The guy laughing, you mean.

Yeah.

He’s a bastard, yeah, said Sam, who knew about Jim all Jim had to tell and that was a lot, though not Margaret’s Indian crap.

Jim came off the pier running easy, and passed up along the bay cottages. After a minute he walked and cut through to the beach again. He always recalled the horizon the hot day his mother stared at it irritated and alone upon her familiar black towel and he had to look away from her to see what she was looking at. But now the gray receding sight threw at his eyes a wake of sharp wind, and he knew that the man on the pier wouldn’t have talked like that if he’d known who he’s talking to. But is that the way it is? But here on the beach with the wind asking nothing but hitting the eye like a chemical not quite healthy given off at great speed by the horizon, Jim knew there’s two systems, and the man on the pier would have been O.K. if he’d been switched onto the other, which his grandmother surely knew ‘bout ‘cause she blinkety-blinked around between the East Far Eastern Princess and the Margaret who got more freedom running off from Chicago in ‘93, and then onward largely alone to the meat packers of Omaha and the loco weeds of the stony West, than Sarah ever got when she came of age because Margaret was a suffragette but not notably at home; but if his grandma knew the two systems she must have known she must have known, she must have known—have to get to the point, said Mel, when Brad to whom Jim had spoken of the odd brevity of the little "box" about the dead piners asked Mel what Jim could not ask— have to be concise, succinct, compact, terse, pared-down, compressed, succinct, short, concise—

—she must have known (as Jim found the other man, the fisherman brother-in-law, gone, and felt that this trip to the pier and back was coming around in cold, dumb circle ‘cept more a doubled half-circle round to the pier and back again that could have been a full and single circle only by sea, by having a sea half), she must have recognized the other possibility (and Jim looked quickly around him, we already remember, for he in us and we in him have needed help who are relations but relations that sometimes we have yet to have or that loom away in the offing, which must be a sea term we almost remember—help seeing in the absence of the other man a sign that this might not be just where the fisherman had stood) that, as the Navajo Prince learned upon acquiring that pistol shadowed by the double moon, a half-Ojibway Thunder Dreamer had been given it on the deathbed of a white man who gave it as an evil charm while lying that it was donation to the T.D.’s clown art of acting out awfully their worst nightmares and daydreams to the point of turning themselves inside out all except the fingertips whose whorl prints showed the path of the winds at the time of creation—and if she didn’t recognize that secret possibility, well Jim was all by himself anyway, in his raincoat that he liked the deep pockets and crisp fabric of, and was turning away from the scene not of the crime because there had been only the starting here, though a leaving of the note in the unstamped airmail envelope for someone she hardly knew who hadn’t kept an eye on her taking the boat out through the low surf, or how had she done it?, well she did it—

She had help, came a voice from bar’s end—

—She left the suicide note to the owner of the boat, for crying out loud?

—But you didn’t stay angry at your grandmother Margaret . . . (for Mayga didn’t ask why he’d been angry)

Oh no, said Jim, shaking his head humorously, we were pals, and I was going far to see the land, as Owl Woman, remember her?, said, while back in my house (what was it?—no takers even from bar’s end) the songs are intermingling (he laughed open-heartedly), and Margaret pointed out how I was doing some of the intermingling, I remember because later before she died we had a similar reckoning up—I can hear her on Brad’s Day walking all the way back with me from the cemetery saying I never told you anything about a second origin of that pistol, the first one was perfectly satisfactory, or you found it so when you were a little boy—for Jim had asked if it was true that the Princess’s prospective mother-in-law got better when the Prince and Princess cleared out, and the resurrection led back to the Prince’s pistol which really belonged to a lot of people for even Harflex of Choor had had it in his hand and after saying cruelly and angrily, Why did she have to go telling him all that stuff?, he added the Thunder Dreamer’s connection with the pistol and Margaret said with equal irritation, I never told you that—

And it would have gone further but, shaking his fifteen-year-old fists out to sea, and roaring and screaming, hurting his throat, he never remembered what into the wind or winds that blew some damp self into his dry eyes, his mother gone, leaving not a crumb of ice-cream cone, that nice woman, and taking nothing with her not even that half a humid pickle in its paper on the thwart of an everlastingly damned dory which should have arched its gunwales and told her No, don’t do this, don’t do this, lady—a man’s voice from behind Jim called and he turned to see the brother-in-law fisherman beckoning and he went sheepishly but when he got to the red-slatted sand-drift fence in front of that beach house, the man said, Aren’t you the Mayn boy? asking a fact that Jim wrote down in his notebook verbatim that night. Aren’t you the Mayn boy? (as we ghosted him prolixly, to be in the very difficulty of what it is to be) but giving what Jim ever after knew was almost love, from a stranger, a stranger with no hole in his head and no double moon in his brown eye and cheek stubble, inquiring if Jim would join him in a cup of canned Manhattan clam chowder, but who asked Jim what he knew he’d been asking to be asked—so that it wasn’t until he got into the front hall at home in Windrow two days later, and stared at his new raincoat that had been hanging there since he got home from the beach almost two days before, that his daydream of a near-naked mother (never turning around yet turning and turning and turning in the sea like just a body) returned together with, again, the absence of Bob Yard and the emptiness of this house especially where he went, seeing the panties, the spinal line, the shoulder not now bent to the ear as when she played the violin, the fiddle, but straight and lost, waiting, waiting, while Jim took the stairs and slowed waiting to hear something was waiting up there so it’s too little to think about coupled with too much, like twenty lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snowbound he had to memorize by next week (not only memorize but remember!) when he didn’t like poetry period: So that when he heard a rustling upstairs so that he might tell the fine drift of its air, a window open, an opening when all the layers of the atmosphere lined up each its slit, crevice, or chink which explained that cleft Margaret had told him of, when cosms of the sun (and apparently the Hermit-Inventor of New York and the Anasazi ancient agreed on this) ran instantly down but what they did had not been clear, or not as clear as in retrospect the next day the news of the Normandy landings had been clear in words and on the map in the Newark paper and then the New York Times with headlines and paper and ink all as authoritative and packed and soft as a Christmas present, the map Jim had (on the page it was printed on) snatched from under the nose of Brad who wasn’t touching it with any part of his body (You ain’t readin’ that): yet was the rare atmospheric cleft (now successfully explained as Jim went softly up the stairs of his home some two days after his detective round-trip to Man-toloking) an opening for the cosms to draw up the life of the Navajo matron with the hole-in-her-head? or to prepare for that night of the day when the sun itself would not and would not go down until at last in darkness the double moon came to reveal the Princess’s sometime bird rising and hovering, as only the Hermit-Inventor of the East witnessed and told later to Margaret, to attack the lion drawn by the future’s odor in the eggs of the bird’s strictly diamond-shaped nest but lost both its quarry the mountain lion and the lion’s prey the egg or the matter inside it sucked by that speechless cat at the long instant when it knew its own inner essence to be that of the egg—

—What’s "essence," Gramma?

—only, according to the Hermit-Inventor of New York, to vanish with a speed given it by the egg or more plausibly taken from a process of relation or transformation the Hermit-Inventor’s friend the Anasazi could explain if he would, that turned that mountain lion looking for deer but introduced to more curious food into the very wolf, the giant wolf with immense, slick, independently breathing internal organs that the bird then taloned, dismembered, and/or gorged as a one-for-the-road farewell since evidently the Princess and the Prince after her were bound elsewhere if not together—

—and the remaining egg, the remaining egg, atop that volcanic plug? asks the interrogator—

—I never said anything about a volcanic plug, said Margaret some years later upon what would have been her deathbed if she hadn’t "gotten up to die" on her own terms—

You’re trying to make us ask how she died, but we will not fall for it, the born-again interrogator recently christened Gatorix nags.

—Jim in one silent swoop was at his bedroom doorway witnessing what here he was not too late for: his brother Brad reading note pages of Jim’s held off the desk and now returning Jim’s look of blank hate with fear and the sudden inspiration "Your floor needs sweeping, what’s all this grit?"—until moving toward Brad with a hand like a paperweight downstairs, he hit him on the side of the head and Brad said, "She was crying, I remember, she said Gramma had told her a sad story about the Indians." Jim went away downstairs getting the point of that picture that was missing Bob Yard at last, that he and Bob Yard were occupying the same body in that scene and that’s where the missing Bob was. But Jim couldn’t think of anything probably then but what sad story about Indians?—nor did he hear Brad make a sound upstairs, who now knew where Jim had gone two days ago and had a nerve going into Jim’s stuff and had a jaw or cheek or whatever Jim had swatted that was hardly a living thing for Jim he didn’t give a shit and didn’t even feel like calling up Anne-Marie but here today had come home forgetting forgetting forgetting—

—Hey Jimmy, didn’t you have varsity practice today? came the voice of the chin, the cheek, and he wheeled at Brad, who said he was sorry, he was sorry, he didn’t really see anything, a few words underlined, nothing honestly, and he would of liked to go to Mantoloking with Jim Saturday—

—Well now you know, so it’s just as if you did go, you fucking little snoop, and if (or words to this effect) you don’t like beach sand in the house why don’t you sweep it out—

Tough little insect with a life of his own all right.

People just taking up space. Taking up matter.

Was it cold? asks a firm voice that wants to know.

How’d you get down there, Jim? asks the same voice.

Did you see Missy?

You didn’t go in the water.

Did you go barefoot?

Hey Jim . . . ? asks the same voice, dwindling. Nothing much more to ask.

The insect might turn into a person one of these days.

I don’t know why I wrote all that down, but I left it there because it’s my room.

It was an assignment, didn’t you say? Vm sorry, Jim.

Just don’t do it. Don’t be sorry.

Is that what you’re handing in?

No.

Good.

What do you mean, good? I couldn’t hand that crap in.

That was good about ramming that guy, Jim.

And, Brad, what story about Indians? Gramma never told those stories to anyone but me.

Mom said it was a swap. She told Gramma some things, and then Gramma told her some story about an Indian who died.

Jim was looking long in the refrigerator and when he turned Brad was not there. There’s things probably can’t be said about relations with your family. Margaret told him "the man with the pencil" was an Indian word for "white man."

Well, had he wished to be at the shore alone or had he wished to find people there? Can’t have it both ways. Isolated incident.

What’s a . . . volcanic plug? asks Ted (who supposedly knew everything) with some readiness in his voice so Jim heard the joke coming a mile away, or the elements of it, and laughed at once but didn’t stop his friend, nor go on to tell the places where the additions had been his own to his grandmother’s souvenirs, and earlier instructive additions by Jim very young, such as the crevi-chink and the Thunder Dreamer alternative provenance of the Colt pistol, and—source of somewhere both inside and outside him like us because it is us becoming human, a piece of him, or a piece if they came even in pieces (like those Brad "went to" on the following day) of these relations that go from him as he from them—the gigantic timber wolf’s swan song out of lion into the departing bird’s bright-eyed ferocity below the double moon and above the elf owls in their cacti and the People watching both the sky and a clear radiance off the body of the Prince’s apparently dead mother, a working glow—so that when, weeks later, recalling its curious positioning in the detective document that Pearl Myles never saw (but never needed to see), Brad the little insect asked, Hey Jim, what’s the lion’s egg mean?, and Jim considered clouting him again but pointed out that it was the lion that ate the egg and there were two eggs—which then reminded Jim—and Brad said, Gramma says she never said anything about a lion turning into a wolf and being torn up by the bird, Jim felt less betrayed by an unfaithful beloved than in possession of some other adder than his own dumb calculus of daydream that he discounted as being not him, begun then, long before he found himself living and half-returned from the future that in the early sixties the interesting Chilean journalist-woman Mayga accepted (as she perhaps in sympathy could not accept the painful thing Jim’s mother had done for reasons easily invented). So it was "See I didn’t make that stuff up, Braddie" (he heard the voice, his own, and recalled Pearl Myles preaching Synonyms, Synonyms, Synonyms for an increased vocabulary and Success): whereas he would "claim credit" (in the code of later political violence) for additions, hell, to tell his children if not himself—many arising some time after Margaret’s characteristic death: to wit, the vast visitor-bird’s sneaking kinship to our heavy, short-necked sea duck the king eider of northern coasts (now thought, by a curious "lifer" ornithologist doing time within thinking if not striking distance of the Hudson River, to possess a tracking-resolution grid in the predatory wing of its brain enabling it to process both incoming weather and the crabbed configuration of the coastline it patrolled); to wit, too, the fact of the pistol’s having been given the Thunder Dreamer as a dying white Anglo attempt (by, likely, one of that brother-band of dueling Germans in the mid-century American West) to put the whammy on our Plains Indian protest religion of the eighties the Ghost Dance. Yet additions occurred also prior to Margaret’s death: unpro-duced operas by a Chilean woman of the mid- to late-nineteenth century that were part folk, part Italianate—but virtually Verdi!—and part (in the strange case of the Valparaiso Hamletin, according to Mayga, the journalist) late Beethoven chamber music (i.e., in the "This was your husband," cum picture, aria echoed in Ophelia’s Valentine morrow song): addenda also including matter on German settlers in Chile who might design a railway system then retire to keep bees; plus matter such as the desert jackrabbit, his eyes a-watch low and for’ard in their moist head-holes, and other data the authenticity of which James and Margaret very occasionally bickered over and might have even on her deathbed if she had had one. But the Hermit-Sojourner, who to the Anasazi healer’s mind had about invented New York, with its plans for wind-saving mid-air canals above the projected skyscrapers of the city along which would run pneumatic shuttles like the communication capsules future department stores hoped would rattle and whistle their efficiency music up pillar and across ceiling, proved to be a person (Oh stop it, Jim, the ill old lady laughed suddenly, not so old was she yet plummeting into her real age unreally ‘z if she’d been radiated in some fascinating zone), a figure anyhow, whom the grandson was not specially pleased to reinvent: for the Hermit was among other things multiple, appearing first on Bedloe’s Island in 1885 as the nephew (though this wasn’t known to the twelve-or-thirteen-year-old Margaret) of yet another Hermit-Inventor who had known the Anasazi before Margaret knew the West, and who a generation before had detoured lengthily en route to Anasazi country via that Alabama farm later named (and truly) Whalesville where slaves had turned up the amazing skeleton architecture of that fallen angel (so they thought) which their betters at once christened the reptile Basilosaurus—while at least one new manifestation of this character-scientist seemed to come up in later allusions, all used, both to build to a fine phantom of a continent spanning Margaret’s girlhood and her grandson Jim’s latterly irritable imagination, for the Hermit-Inventor came to visit the Statue of Liberty in pieces the same day Margaret and her father, her daddy, came to cover the event for the Windrow Democrat (a dubious organ—oh stop it, Jim—founded once upon a decade to get behind a President who was haunted not only by the sinister lunacy of a central bank of the United States that might foster adventurers like the American Wheelwright whom Alexander’s grand-cousin shipped to Chile with to build a railway that had been accidentally designed on a restaurant tablecloth, but even more by the possibility that he Andy J. himself, dyspepsia, desire and all, might be inhabited by one or even two of those Red Sticks he had striven to extirpate and scalp from the woods and marshes or send west in one of Our early solutions to the mass transport problem and to that of economizing on Mass itself)—yet a similar figure rises to crags and other lookouts in the western appearances of our Princess of the East Far East who is sometimes Margaret eager, intractable, palpable learner and sometimes an earnest tale told by a place about the Navajo Prince’s mother’s dream songs: until as the references pile ahead powered by the latest cow-catcher-engine fueled by a locoweed even Marcus Jones could not name before we let it die out through inattention as a viable energy source when if used it would have gone on living even after being picked and while being burned (wait, though, wait, wait a ramute! remember the northern bison’s tongue, delicacy amid wasted carcasses, yet) as versatile as the jojoba pod, as thoughtful as the nature gas in Casco Bay Indian seaweed, versatile as winter steam in northern Maine or as that visible relation in certain of the territories between air and earth, and altogether as active as particles of melted, smelted, Indian and Anglo flesh which in rituals in northwestern New York (where the printer Morgan threatened Masonic secrets) and in central Oklahoma (where a curious sect of non-evangelical lay Christians, the "Protestant Franciscans," loved and knew the exile Cherokee without ever laying their religion on them) sometimes mingled in purely symbolic communion whorl upon whorl—and as by definition so much of this current knowledge (read knowhow) keeps clear of James Mayn’s eyes and the working heart he turns upon his work and hours and his humoring pessimism re: the senses history does not much make, and runs only in memories he rides pestered by a past that for cripe’s sake is over and done with until he charmingly lets slip to a friend or two at most that he’s in and is "coming from" the future, the libration-point space settlements, and can describe them and will oblige when that spirit comes upon him maybe get drunk, sozzled, mildly mackereled, pickelooned in (please add also) good company to a point of preferring to believe his future existence is an inebriation best succincted or, failing that paternal tradition of economy, shunted into a nutty past that kids him ‘s much ‘s he it, until occasionally he meets a man or woman he’ll tell things to, a wife, a colleague, maybe a person he knows is primarily overhearing him, but to be so believed as he was by the lady Mayga bugs him so he’ll drop right into someone else’s life which is neither the future relation of strip mining to the deep-steam taps, nor the truncated lunacies of his own (he thinks substantially banal) fambley where you go so far and then shrug your way forward into adult life and he never needed a somewhat wonderful and historically elusive mother (who, well, had the good taste not to get found, having gone too far, too deep) to say to him You will go away where you belong, because cripes he was goin’ anyway—door’s open: yet these private lives that greet him between, on one hand, the relation of chemical warfare (agreements) and the ease of keeping C.W. development secret, to the genuinely civil uses of controlled poisons to seed the atmosphere at many levels with efficiency that’s odorless but almost painterly if you can catch it just before or as dawn arrives, and, on the other hand, the relation between the Prince’s mother getting better when he left (which Margaret claimed she had never told Jim!) or Harflex of Choor waiting patiently but far from passively in the old familiar coastal plain while the Princess eluded the pursuant Prince by being spirited in the shape of a swaying mist into a Statue braced like a tree against the high winds of the harbor it’s a-guarding to the question why Sarah, a mother, for whom people mattered quite a little and who was a good and practicing musician should have turned away into one day’s horizon like some meaningless wind that’s as equal to the matter a descending body becomes as one obstacle yields to another and story to story—yes, the aforesaid private lives that greet him and themselves between all these above relations became nicely complete, modestly revealing—he told someone named Norma about teaching his son to ride a bicycle so he was the one taught, not Andrew, because Norma had told him about a separated woman she knew who was living with another woman and they took the first woman’s twelve-year-old son to an experimental video showing at a small loft theater downtown and in the middle of it a man got up out of his seat with a pistol naming a woman nobody knew who he’s going to kill and people began to get the point and were scared, and Norma’s friend’s son suddenly said out loud to the man with the pistol, "She’s not here and it’s lucky for you she isn’t," and the man collapsed weeping on his folding chair—"She’s not here, she’s not here, she’s not here!"—and the gun dropped to the floor and that was more or less that (someone kicked it away from him, he was as they say overpowered or something similar to that happened): and many of these shared lives are chambered where Jim wouldn’t even get at them, knowing that in their disconnected self-containment they make sense like a day’s work let it go at that, like a past that you could get pestered by to the point of having pursued Margaret right to her deathbed—not over a thing like 4 7 never mentioned any eight-thousand-volume Masonic library in Salt Lake City," but over some embarrassing little gap in her life as if it would tell why her daughter Sarah (think of her with white hair, garrulous) permanently absented herself from the town whose name we have been given to use and understand was made up by our grandmother and our grandson between them like founders.

He even told his Chilean journalist-lobbyist friend Mayga once what he never had told his wife, which is the uncrowned infidelity if you want to explore the continent-size tilt of the well-known guilt-ride where you ride it and it rides you, told Mayga, told Mayga, told Mayga (before she herself disappeared at a point when she might have told him something—disappearing like the apparent converse of an obstacle heaving up again and again) that the day he saw South America move beneath the glass he was leaning on (ah yes, no practice that afternoon because they were excavating the south half of the field laying a pipe, looking for a pipe, it’s no longer clear. Fascinating, Jaime, fascinating. Sure, sure. Don’t lose any sleep over it, as you say—if you could dream, you could economize).

—he had seen above the glass above that map that if he didn’t move, life would—but no, that wasn’t quite it (another bourbon, Leo . . . Mayga? no? Early flight to Boston tomorrow, New Hampshire)—

—no, it was that the brother-in-law man sharing with Jimmy a can of tomato clam chowder which Jim discovered at that moment was not his favorite kind, he liked the white New England milk kind, you tasted the clams, tomato roons everything oh it’s the oxalic acid no it’s the red shit, the brother-in-law man on a dull September day at the Jersey shore had said point-blank, "Your mother hasn’t been found"—those words alone—and leaning over his soup Jim said nothing, one of many times he said nothing—nothing until the silence and the soup-spooning changed the subject:

But that wasn’t it: Mel, who’d written with one of his many soft-lead pencils this stony-brief obituary for his wife, had said, apropos of the "hokey-pokey" ice-cream man who’d praised Sarah, and after (no matter "when") Alexander said some Armenians were gypsies but that most Armenians were Catholics, and Margaret said later that for Catholics suicide was the worst mortal sin, so Jim said (thinking suicide certainly makes you mortal), "Guess she didn’t commit suicide, then," without knowing how near a joke his remarkable inference was—but surely he meant, Because the hokey-pokey man had said she was a lot to live up to—

It’s certainly mortal, said Mayga.

No second chance, Margaret had said.

The day after Brad’s Day, Brad asked what happened to the other lion’s egg. Brad wanted Margaret to buy him a new raincoat too, and Mel said he would buy him one, and Jim said it had been for the funeral, but Brad knew just what he wanted and it didn’t have the epaulettes—

—but, said Mayga, who had to go—and the following week left for good—you were thinking all the while that—

—that (it’s wrong, it’s in absolute error) that when I was away at the Quirk farm working that summer or until shortly before V-J Day and all of this—my mother was home, she was there—and I came home for two days, I forget why, and that was when—

—You mean you had something to do with it? (You might have left your imaginary news notes out, but—)

—Of course not but you know you remember the Prince going away and his mother reviving—

—Almost entertaining, all that scattering of half-tales.

—It was thought up to be almost entertaining.

—But you came up with this detail.

—But the Prince ... did his mother die when he eventually . . . what did happen to him? (did the Navajo have princes?) did he come home? or become assimilated and become a guide or a mass weaver or a sporting-goods tycoon?—surely not the first American Indian tycoonic or a doctor, a doctor (but Mayga wasn’t flippant, wasn’t good at it, but wasn’t being it here)

—The Prince? Oh he was tragically wounded by Harflex of Choor, as I recall.

—A wound need not be tragic.

—Even a mortal one need not be tragic.

—I don’t agree, but his was mortal.

—Of course.

His heart was opening and closing to Mayga, as she got off the bar stool and looked at her watch because she didn’t want to go, though she already knew what time it was. She had something else to say to him. But instead, "And Pearl Myles?" They both laughed.

Funny you mention her. She wound up on a paper in Minneapolis.

She didn’t.

It’s the truth.

Trouble-shooter? said Mayga.

They don’t got no trouble in Minnesota—only in New Jersey.

So they have to shoot a long distance.

How far is Chee-lay from Peru?

Chile’s distance, said Mayga, is from the U.S.

Anyhow you’ve had your share of stability there.

Give us time, said Mayga.

Time is money.

I have it!—give us money!

What did McNamara say before the Lima coup last year?

Ted now came back from a pay phone somewhere, a bit holy in his walk. Jim could not believe some of the stuff Mayga had listened to from him, though she talked, too.

This was almost the last that Mayn saw of Mayga, though they met later that night, the first and last and only such meeting decided on by sudden phone call from Jim though it seemed mutual, like strange friends who have only corresponded or have not seen each other in twenty years—and after that (though it might have been after the 6 p.m. cocktail earlier) he really never saw the lady again. At close on seven, she had gotten off the bar stool, not a drinker, not a lady-drinker, a lady with a way of looking down her shoulder at you or at something vaguely poignant at the far end of the room maybe; wore dark, warm-styled clothes with a dash always of ancient brightness, a yellow sash Mayn remembered, or a bright blue hat the color of a French workingman’s jacket, or one time orange shoes that showed off her legs which in the manner of European and perhaps South American women she knew without knowing. She said, after kissing him on the cheek (then, after an instant’s thought, on the other cheek), "Dinner with three difficult and powerful people—my husband’s newspaper business—which becomes regrettably mine though I never as you know need to take notes which makes me much more attractive company yet there’ll hardly be room at the table for me if General Clay comes, but he will not wish to interrupt these large gentlemen talking about his commission although they knew that even when John Kennedy came back from Vienna high on foreign aid after sitting on a couch with Khrushchev, the investment money would come through Washington, not from it. And Jim, as for your Defense Secretary the Computer McNamara, urging a beeg welcome for Latin American military trainees here, his words to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on this ‘the greatest return on our military assistance investment’ were, T need not dwell upon the value of having in positions of leadership men who have first-hand knowledge of how Americans do things and how they think.’ "

Ted asked, a year and a day later, if Jim recalled those words verbatim, but he had to admit, he said that the lady on occasion would talk like that and it was a pity she had not lived to be President of Chile.

They were, of course, briefly joined by the little laugh like the shadow of a nod or like a loud breath or two from bar’s end of the free-lance photographer and information dealer Spence, always an isolated incident on the move, and with the mist that settled or rose in Mayn’s eyes came some blind gap of crap or fight that would blot that presence whatever it was at the end of the bar—the business they were in? minus some nice woman they used to have a drink with once in a while? or some business that was in Mayn, protected by him like a host for all the world the way those clothes kept Spence just the way he was for well over a decade, the often fringed buckskin jacket and string tie or some other decor up there around the neck, the beat-up shined always expensive (Mayn thought) boots and the whipcord jeans (or denim or slept-in colorless velvet jeans) and the lank hair just as light as that little set-shot artist back-court guard on the Toms River basketball team who you could never stop from eddying away from you, Polish, whereas Spence (whom Ted hardly noted except to ask why Jim disliked him—Jim shrugged as if to say he pretty much ignored the "Spence factor"—Oh, said Ted, Spence would have had to be invented if he didn’t exist already—"Concockted," laughed Jim—"What’s he got on you?—have another?"—"Probably enough to know I wouldn’t care if he found I’d over-expensed a business trip or was seen examining a Colt revolver in a Manhattan gunshop"—"You’re clean," said Ted)—Spence, yes, might have borrowed origins temporarily the way he could rent or loan news—now how the devil did you loan news? what happened to it when the information was paid back? was it a swap for other items? but you couldn’t loan news, it stopped being news: while Spence seemed unchanged for over a decade during which you would seldom catch him at a press conference yet typically he knew of the plane crash of a rich executive relation of Mayn’s two-time boss the Argentine who owned a string of papers in Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania seemingly before it happened while to Mayn’s friend Ted who saw and was curiously stopped by Spence at an Easter conference of Third World economists who were largely complaining (as Ted reported back to Jim) that America wasn’t drinking more tin or doing more bananas, Spence professed astonishment at the story (news to Ted) that was going around, that the presumed-incinerated rich Argentine cousin was not dead but playing clean-shaven golf under an assumed name beside a green-bean plantation in the Cameroons. The "loan," Jim tried to explain to Ted, was in a slight lack of indelibility to be found in the item, but Ted said no matter how good your memory was, the news often had this quality of, well, history—he sounded like he was joking and Mayn only said that Ted told with special verve those stories he felt little more than amusement about: whereas (Jim did not audibly add) years before—and a year and a day after Mayga’s last drink at the hotel bar—Ted felt much more about their first woman "President of Chile" (Jim knew) while saying almost nothing more than "What a waste," which meant nothing very specific about what Mayga, "that newspaper publisher’s wife" (Spence once with sidelong or was it smiling confidentiality inquired of Mayn about), might have wanted out of life but Ted seemed to express a sadness at the circumstances in which Mayga (as no newspaper would so wordily, if truly, put it) "met her death" plunging from a cliff during (or to be precise, at the conclusion of) a walk near Valparaiso harbor only a few days after Jim had seen her, though Ted had run into her the morning she had left for home and she had given him a book (She gave you a book?—Sure, she’d finished it. It’s Henry Adams, you know, the Adams family—you want it? I’m not sure Adams ever finished it either.—Who?—Henry Adams). And who was it that in some isolated incident had told Mayn to read that same author? The Mayga death would not leave him; or anyway it did not. No doubt because they had wanted to make love that last night in Washington suddenly after months of friendship curtailed just shy of comradeship (yes, that was it); and there was a friendly completeness about the night and that was that, but a month later it began to feel as if it had been some completion foreknown.

Well, if so, then in her mind; for not in his.

Perfectly understandable, then, that hearing Ted with his firm view of history as commerce cloaked in the small talk of sporting drama and moral health and divided mostly between the Ordinary, who gave the power, and the Worst, who took the power by being also dumb but so colossally so that their complements and client audience the Ordinary just watched them bestride the Earth like statuary bridges of fine, fixed networks of public utility when actually such busy, blood-like action coursed through these structures that the Earth risked explosion and worse still leakages that would permanently stain—oh hearing Ted go on about the Third World wishing we’d sprinkle more bauxite on our breakfast in the morning ‘stead of home-spawned plastic snowies, and more natural zinc, wood, and diamonds in our brain resectioning ‘stead of the new orluminums and solid-state love-informations, Jim was put in mind albeit contemplatively of that isolated incident "Spence" looking for and finding somewheres to happen, since it had been right here (not only in the Easter conference in question but) in this hotel bar snickering like a breath of impedance at the tribute to Mayga as Woman President of Chile, and then with an impudence so incredible Mayn could just about disbelieve its content, "She said you left your notebook out on purpose"—when it was such a distance from the warmth between Jim and Mayga one day he told her about Brad’s Day and environs down to the end of the bar that he never thought Spence was listening.

Today, this very late afternoon, perhaps in honor of the dead lady Mayga, they were in many places in that conversation and Jim Mayn said it was a mistake to go to people for what they couldn’t possibly provide, produce, or give you. Ted’s father, for example, had an excellent sense of humor but little kindness in him. Jim’s had little humor, from what one could divine after upwards of a hundred years, though how many Mels there were was no doubt someone’s guess—probably one Mel. Right you are, responded Ted, right you are; except any person has one thing to give and you’ve been given it if you don’t know it.

It was time to call a halt to these festivities, such as they were, and Jim observed that the one thing Ted came up with agayn and agayn was interesting news items re: Third World.

And who was it who in some isolated incident had told Jim to read Adams, Henry Adams? The rear of his brain just above and independent from the balance part has a sluice let into it out of which and in pour and are dumped things (definitely things) and maybe nothing is lost, as Alexander used to think with a book in his hand, oft recalling some fact from Margaret’s own early "travails"—so that she, rehashing that old time, would sweep it away with her hand and an exhaling, whispering sound of dismissal—who cares now?—about a homeless quite presentable Mohave woman who with her Ojibway "wife" (that’s right) had almost got them both killed by the Utes they stopped briefly with and had wound up among these Navajo, and this Mohave woman wore men’s pants and wasn’t allowed to sing ceremonials but had amazing veterinary skills with sore horses and anemic sheep and understood the wild pigs, she said, and was accepted as "the husband" though not permitted to do what hunting that community of Navajo went in for though did spend time among the men yet never, as in another Indian people, discussed her "wife" intimately with the men. (The weaving, said Margaret, was extremely well done, tight and flat, though for my money the Navajo patterns weren’t a patch on the drawings, horse and haunted landscape drawings, done by a part-Sioux part-Cheyenne holy fellow with these pale gray eyes almost white eyes over and over from one single sight seen in a dream when he was twelve, pretty sad chap in the early nineties of course.) (But, said Alexander, the weaving and the pictures were two quite different products—yet for Jim’s grandfather history was not only a catalogue but, maybe somewhere in his snoring sleep just before he woke up hearing Jimmy being taught by his grandmother off in her room in her bed to whistle or in relations never to be flushed from their coils and crannies coins and flex of feeling, a romance, and Alexander had in the winter of ‘93-’94 met at a campfire by a Pennsylvania river a band of itinerant unemployed who told him of Coxey’s Army of the poor that would set out on Easter Day to march on Washington though Alexander was back home by then—where was the romance?)

Jim thought you never knew how much got left out of Mel his father’s obituary for Sarah and how much in the very niggardly nucleus of that black-framed box on page 2 actually crept in. Like time of death, when no one after all could tell: so "knowledge" in the absence of evidence, what was that? You never knew what Jim himself felt because he told Anne-Marie he wasn’t all there when he had the copy of the New York Times in his hands, for three lines of information appeared there, three mornings after—after what? the drowning?—and he wasn’t all there when, the next afternoon, without touching it he leaned on his grandparents’ dining-room table, one hand on either side of the weekly issue Margaret had folded to page 2—("Well I could have told you that," said Anne-Marie, with married humor while stirring chocolate into two tall, cold glasses of milk)—

Jim told Marie that his mother had no middle name. Marie said that girls didn’t. Jim said without thinking that his mother hadn’t been exactly a girl. Anne-Marie did have a middle name but she said she didn’t want it, it was "Maureen"—from a famous sharp-tongued horticulturist great-aunt on her mother’s side—her father liked "Marie Maureen." Jim had a middle name which was Charles, but boys always did.

But his mother didn’t. She had been strolling past the monumental brown-stone Presbyterian church one afternoon, one of the few times Jim recalled taking a walk with her. (One of the few? said "Marie" (he tried out the name), Well, maybe one of the two or three, said Jim.) In fact, he had only happened to meet her and he was on his bike, so he swooped up a little steep driveway ramp, cut along the sidewalk, and slowed down to "a walk" beside her where she was whistling softly some music. She looked at him in a darkly friendly way without saying anything and asked him if he liked his middle name Charles (which she said as if he might have forgotten it) and before he could answer she said that his father’s middle name was Honesty (which the way she said it he almost believed) and she told him she had been scheduled, before birth, to have a middle name but "your grandmother" dropped it, and she had tried using it as her given name the spring and early summer she was studying in France and in French it sounded really like her—Marthe, Marthe, Marthe. But she ran into a violin student from the Middle West whom she really liked in the middle of the night in the pitch dark in this dormitory she lived in outside of Paris and when she heard his voice asking who it was (and she knew this was Robaire, Robaire, Robaire) she said her real name, "Sarah," without thinking. And she particularly recalled this because he had been at a recital of Saint-Saens and had met an American violinist named Spalding who was going to be famous, and when "Robaire" had said to him that he himself thought you made your own luck, Mr. Spalding had said to look him up in New York, though he wouldn’t be there for a few months.

Where did you and your mother go? asked Anne-Marie (Maureen).

Jim and his mother had gone on a little further, and she had asked how fast he could ride back to the church and return to where she was, but when he raced back to the church he got yelled at by three of the guys who were walking along the sidewalk with their baseball mitts, and he stopped for what he later thought was only a moment but when he recollected his projected round-trip and wheeled away back up Winderhoff Avenue seeing only—he didn’t know what, porches, tree trunks, a man far up the street fixing a flat —he pedaled on and on but no mother. He had lost track of time.

—Jim thought you never would know what got left out because I’m not about to ask Dad how responsible he felt, and what he thought about the fact that she left only the note to the boat owner saying she was "kind of sorry." He couldn’t ask Anne-Marie about Mel’s responsibility, and then, a month later when he knew more, he couldn’t ask her or Mel how many people knew about us, that is, the number of boys Mel was in fact the father of; or why Mel never got into a fight with Bob, although the shoes on the porch above Jim’s head (upon his head) got amplified in our view to a threatening weight, and he couldn’t at the long, days-long moment of his mother’s death, if there was one, believe in a time ahead when these things could be talked of apart from the Sunday wonder and stunned fluency of euphemism in a room where the absence of the dead parent gave Jeanette Many’s fringed tweed shawl and the clothes and hands of others the same independent molecular substance as the whole-wheat sandwiches on the silver plates that Mel told Margaret he hadn’t seen in fifteen years, but the thing was, as Jim confidentially pointed out to her, his hand on her shoulder, that she had sliced off the crusts which she never did because she used to say, Eat ‘em and they’ll give you gold teeth!—

—so at least he asked someone something during those days, and took that Windrow Democrat obituary standing up, that weather-report brevity edited into being by fifteen or so years of wedlock: so that if Jim (whom his grandmother called on her last day "good people"—"you’re good people, Jim") had ever been a scientist instead of a journeyman, he might have found a formula for that extremity of briefness that so much reduces it releases its very soul which had become already the void about it; and so for years, whatever Brad felt after scissoring out the black frame and the words of the kind man who had been and was becoming his father, and whatever Brad felt a month later after reading in his brother’s scrupulous quotation from the brother-in-law man "Aren’t you the Mayn boy?" adjacent to the words "How did he know me? I didn’t ask," Jim had to ask himself how much of that obit so easily memorable it wouldn’t stop repeating in his head was ignorance, and how much as unspeakable as the solitude on a breezy September beach when, having run one fisherman into the ground, he no more knew that the other was watching him than knew what he meant in his terrible words spoken against the wind but never ever written down for a brother-half-brother to spy among all those horizons of a lined notebook page, "I don’t want them to find her."

Margaret had let herself be appointed, because of her Democratic party connections, to the state prison commission during the War and had revived her New Deal interest in unemployment, what it costs to make jobs in peacetime or not to. But, though she set foot in church only on special occasions, whichever the church need be, she said the Devil found work for idle minds. She meant Mel, when he got rid of the paper at last; and she did not mean he played the market (with some success) and the local harness races (with some happiness and just barely in the black), though she regarded the first as living vicariously through numbers, not real making of usable products: what she did mean was that Mel suffered even more over Sarah’s "tragedy" because he stopped working and had less to do; and into one gap came another, if that is possible, and we, who are relations meteorolong, whorled, human ward, and possible as well as relations that people have actually had, believe it is, and were there, like an equal and opposite reaction, to receive through Mayn’s at the time only incipient voiding-sluice (incidentally creating us at need) his moving picture clandestinely witnessed through glimmering back-porch screens in order to be put soon out of mind, of Margaret turning on the porch light, opening the kitchen door to come out and open the wide old icebox while Alexander came and stood on the kitchen threshold continuing a conversation and asking her now not why she was crying (which she clearly was)—for of course their younger daughter was gone and there were problems of life itself—but, rather, what on earth she meant that Mel was dying vicariously (Alexander really didn’t understand that)—was it that we didn’t know exactly where Sarah "was"? But Alexander, who was subtler than anyone else told him, got out of the way when Margaret went back into the kitchen and the sticky yellow door slammed and the back-porch light went out upon the odd sobbing noises of the loved voice and upon the possibly inaudible stress in the devoted husband’s words didn’t and Sarah (as if, well, he and Margie did know the final whereabouts of someone else), and upon the curious boy who sometimes roamed the early evening and mastered into middle life a healthy shrug because he knew how to shut the door too.

So what if the double Moon expected as its due two explanations if not more?—ranging those twi-set nights those twi-set times between the story of the day and the story of the night to the shadow Marcus Jones the man-botanist cast on the woman-zoologue Mena as he got off his bike in that narrowing desert, for Mena claimed that before Marcus went away that night he had cast upon her the double shadow "hers to convey" until she met her next human—

—the ancient Anasazi?

—right you are, who because of her appearance at the top of the last ladder upward to his cell had caused that lifted pistol in his feather-light hand to throw two shadows according to the precise Mena, which was the only way he had seen the double Moon.

But so what, so what, shrugs the humor of the boy-man with such casual cogence his very shrug grows him up a year, two years, five years, who could now have spoken a bit of Spanish with Mena had she existed still, six years, seven, eight ("You will go away where you belong, my darling"—but we did not pick up "my darling," with all our audio resources did we?—sho did!—did not—)

Until the "so what" ‘s subtly prevail, even when to a child and, in fact, the children of Joy Mayn and Jim Mayn are voiced the weathers which the Hermit-Inventor of New York divided with his mortal colleague the Anasazi medicine man, the weather of presence and the weather of absence, which do not quite parallel the division between the weather from earth and the weather from beyond, the weather from the body, the weather from almost nowhere, weather of going and weather of arriving, and so on perhaps into a future where Mayn found himself returned to the city and to an apartment he had inhabited with a family, and the family had been his own, and the family had rented the apartment at that particular time, and now, taking possession of the apartment with misgivings not because he now owned it, but because of love he found he really had given, and naturally the love he had not given, he compiled for professional use a history of rent control and related matters in the city of New York which struck him as the classification of the constituents of a chaos, or so it was suggested to him in similar or congruent words by a new acquaintance, a fellow tenant of the building where, within the inertial system he partly tried to take a view of, he did much of the compiling, oft interrupted by "so what?" from voices known and unknown, sometimes his own, breathing in and out such weather as was ludicrously true and profanely painful, recalling the "so what?" shrugged silently from the boy’s own early telex looking on at a grandparental scene complete with lights on and lights out. Meanwhile—