But it’s the Irish-Italian axis my Austrian neighbor fears, some decentralized outer Mafia. On the other hand, she smells very real; she smells of (as the big button next to the green “KISS ME I’M IRISH” in the stationery shop window says:) “SEX NOW”: she isn’t quite Utah clean under her quilted sleeves or in her demanding non-committal drawl “How you doing today?” That’s not exactly the password kids by custom exchange on the Hello Walk of Utah U. perhaps locatable most vividly as the east third of a promenade that bisects the campus’s oval park. If I can’t decelerate the elevector I can retard the footsparks when they come into the echoing hall. Yet maybe, too, I should welcome the chance to ask if, in law, suicide invalidates a Whole Life policy. For it’s Richard your son coming. It has to be.
Let me insert into the record lines Tracy wrote in the book she sent me out west for my sixteenth birthday, A Bell for Adano:
Therefore I gladly trust
My bodie to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and finde his birth
Written in dustie heraldrie and lines;
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.
I cannot feel the paraphase field come around me without it constellating into sentences which are as framing as the blindly momentous syntaxes I leveled at Al’s father a generation ago. “Love is style,” I must have said in the sheets the psychiatrist took away. Thank God I don’t have to read them over to see if I’ve been consistent. Did he think they were your suicide note overlooked? If love is style, then is style love? Hugh Blood (no relation to Governor Henry H. Blood who in the ’30’s fostered the Utah U. art collection) winces: but not like Bob in front of Petty’s medicine cabinet — but Hugh can’t call my contagious equation dirty. My syntax in that parlor Al’s mother hung with three big picture calendars was the truth if I could only get to it instead of laboriously hosting Al and Bob in the living room of a moderately famous American I hardly knew.
Parabolabuster. Absentee vote-pairings in Congress.
That Saturday in March of ’53 I imagined Trace wasn’t using anything, so I went ahead, I unearthed her and then in time (though stylishly) withdrew. Bob and Al would laugh and say Retracted the old landing gear. Well, after that, her whole body beside me was puzzling back beyond the strangeness to the spasms which she had once upon a time haltingly told me were like her vertebrae turned into little attacking hearts of electric blood sliding down one by one through her living womb and back. But now she began to shake and when I drew the covers up I found she was moving her fingertips through what I had left of myself on her. So style isn’t necessarily love, O.K.? I had made her lose her grace, and I forgot then whether Al could have heard us from his snoring room and I thought only that guilt teaches nothing. But if Earth = Spacecraft, may not Space = Earthcraft?
The freaked-in cloud-hanger, his plane long gone, looks up for silver and feels the earth out there, and but half-willing to think of himself as just one more paratrooper, himself vectoring the drag and lift and their aerodynamic resultant vector which brother had better be equal to your downward weight, puts off deciding whether to yank his ripcord: but suicide? like, spend the rest of your life dead? Space is something to get through, to come from. It’s how you use your earth.
Leave your lock off and someone’s going to come in and suicide you.
The elevator came and the steps began and then stopped; and doubting the power of my paraphase I went to the peephole to look. And it is your son as I thought, but he is not magically moving in another time; he is standing halfway down the hall looking at the key.
What time is it?
Once upon a night a lonely former witch
sat alone in her huge house. By the light
of one naked bulb she was poring over
a tome of old dead spells, when suddenly
down the hall the kitchen Minute-Minder
started clicking. Had Darius Dominion
returned?
Is he operating independently of his curator? Einstein may in a way have rescued Lavoisier and Lucretius. My father said so. He said Einstein was twenty-six at the time of his break-through. Russell Pound up on the tarred roof of our apartment house (guarded above the brick barrier by odd cement parapets we tried to hammer off, the night of Poly graduation) looked at the spring sky and the field of harbor lights, the slow glow of Jersey City, a moving ferry bearing its tiers of lights behind a barracks on Governor’s Island — and you know Dom, if I wanted to I’d tell you which constellations my father and his friend pointed out and followed, but at this juncture of my now shaky paraphase the names would seem to mean too much, and I (if not my trivia-scorning step-grandfather) prefer the fact that the roof right across the street from their star-watching is where stingy Bill Smith sold two-minute binocular views of the harbor and, as Tracy told me, had his glasses trained on the Bridge at the moment the famous boomerang was hurled through that diamond cable-weave, and saw the whole thing. And the day of the fight, ditto — though even with his binoculars he couldn’t have seen what happened to Petty, to Bob, to Joey, and to me in the vestibule above those twelve august stone steps though he may have made out something on the face of Hugh Blood who half-reached in but never really did get where he later said he’d wanted to get, namely right into the vestibule.
“But you can’t have everything,” my mother said one evening four or five years after my father died. I’d explained how I would interpret rather freely the Foundation’s understanding of my activities in those alien areas of Brooklyn — Brownsville and Williamsburg — and my mother said, “We’re just ordinary people.” But I bet that meant (say) the “1834” plaque on the Vande Land’s brownstone. In answer to her I nearly said like a blind soothsayer, “But I see tuxedoed adolescents ambling under eucalyptus trees, I see black nannies seated on benches and rocking prams and watching toddlers in Miss White’s exclusive Garden” (an ancient immeasurable area now the mere base of an aging contemporary cube) “and I see a dangerously unorthodox anthropologist himself a Heights native lecturing your women’s club Civitas:” but what I really said to her was that, instead of a people, I was unearthing the customs of a person, whose slowly prospering parents had moved from Brownsville to a small apartment house in Williamsburg, then to Bay Ridge, then to Sea Gate, and who himself had found violent means to maintain yet vary inherited identity myths. My mother said it didn’t sound like anthropology to her, and who was this person. But I said her remark was shrewd, Dom.