First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories

by Brodkey, Harold

  “But Mother’s waiting for us!” Henry said.

  Laurie stared coldly into the telephone. “This speaks ill for the future,” she said; she felt herself becoming more and more of a great lady. She said soothingly, “Now, Henry… Well, if you must know, the showers were crowded.”

  She wandered back to her room, her eyes blank. Martin, who was tall and serious and in the third year of law school, would never have put up with that. He would have slammed the phone in her ear. Laurie had never known anyone who studied with the ferocity Martin did. He could even cross his legs ferociously when he was reading. Martin counted so much on the future that when Laurie was with him, she could feel it, those hours of getting ahead, those days, and years, glittering like gold.

  “What kind of boy is he?” her mother had asked. Sweetly. “Is he of good family?” That meant that Martin had little value. He was no catch, no treasure. And truthfully, Laurie had to admit, his manners were poor; he was sulky at the drop of a hat; he was easily hurt. He could be very, very foolish. And what was worse, any girl could get him: she had only to be nice, to be a little tender, and a little curious about the law.

  Laurie surrendered. She decided to wear her pale-blue dress for Henry; it was innocent, to go with her lips. She took the dress out of her closet and began to slip it over her head. The strange thing was how few men had cut in on her at the law-school dance. Perhaps Martin had been fierce-looking and scared the other men off. Or perhaps, with Martin, she hadn’t been so eager to attract all the men; maybe it was something you turned off and on, being a bitch….

  Laurie threw her head back, her blue dress still unfastened. What in hell were you supposed to do with your looks? Collect just one man, very rich, with a number of houses, and have everyone look up to you? Be a good girl, date nice boys, not say mean things to the Careys and Phyllises, not make the Roy Delberts cry?

  She zipped up her dress savagely. No: she’d rather be mean and bad and have a foul character. She’d sleep with Martin. Her mother could go to hell.

  She savagely unzipped her dress and pulled it over her head. She threw it on the floor, where it would irritate Carey, who didn’t have a date. She reached into the closet and pulled out her new black dress. Her mother had said she was too young for black. Laurie laughed, showing her teeth. She wasn’t going to wear a girdle, either. Her behind was going to shake its heart out. The dress fit very well. Laurie sighed and patted her hair, pushing one strand over her forehead. Then with a Kleenex she wiped the curve off the corner of her lips. Sullen juvenilia, that was her. Bad world. Bad Laurie.

  LAURA

  LAURA WAS BENDING OVER, trying without much hope to touch her toes, when the baby began to cry again. Laura’s eyes, always warm and luminous, turned warmer and more luminous; at that moment, with her back bent, arms hanging straight down, and her head cocked to one side, she slid back into her childhood and its pleasantly queer perspectives. Somehow, her mother had always managed to be irritated when Laura assumed such postures (of course, her mother had been practically the only person who was impervious to her beauty); Laura could almost feel the vaguely desperate maternal hands pulling at the back of her dress. “Stand up, Laura. Stand up this instant. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.” But that was precisely what Laura had wanted to do; she would look at all the faces turned toward her, and she would know that she, Laura, was bending over imitating a monkey. She could almost feel her tail. “It’s me, Mother!” she’d say, delighted and surprised, and afterward her mother could go on scolding her for hours without ever penetrating the wonderful foliage of reveries and thoughts that had sprung up from her successful maneuver.

  The baby’s voice in a series of faint cries announced that hunger, like the tide, was coming in.

  “If that damn child doesn’t shut up, I’ll strangle it!” Laura said. Hardly a second passed before she jerked upright in a spasm of guilt. Oh, you are a terrible person, she thought, and fled to the mirror, but no, her face was the same—kind, gentle, and infinitely calm. Laura leaned forward and touched the spot on the mirror behind which her lovely lips so provokingly lurked untouchable. Soon the cries would be demanding, but now they were gentle—little invitations to her mother to fondle her, to wade in the baby’s need. Laura, refusing to give up the mirror, sighed because she would never know the pleasure that others had touching her lips. The trouble with beauty was that one could never enjoy it all by oneself in private, and one couldn’t go on forever imitating a monkey in public, and so what was one to do?

  “Be an actress,” Laura crooned, standing beside her daughter’s crib. “Be an actress, wee thing, and be lovely on the stage, where it earns you money,” she sang, in soft lullaby tones. The baby bent its tiny six-week-old body in an arch, and the eyes flashed open for an instant, but the figure at the edge of the crib wasn’t bending down. “Poor poverty-stricken child!” Laura said. The baby began to bawl. Her pink hands grew purplish and knotted with tension; her wrinkled eyelids pressed into her cheek; her almost nonexistent nose distended in hungry rage.

  “Grow up tough,” Laura whispered. “Grow up tough and mean. Learn to get your own way. Cry harder. Make me pick you up.” She bent over the crib, staring at her tiny daughter, hardly breathing, waiting for the coercive power of the other’s life to force her to touch her, to calm her. But the baby was simply crying in some lonely universe where tire irons float in space. Poor Laura watched, being a Theban—no, Spartan—woman staring at her offspring exposed on a deserted hill while the moon watched and said nothing.

  Laura was waiting for a sign from God or one of the gods (any omen would do) or a flash of inspiration—something mystical, like Saint Theresa—that would tell her what to do. The baby’s very destiny was at stake. Surely a child of hers would have a destiny—a bird that came and watched over it, a guardian fairy with no other duties, who lurked in the shadows until midnight and then carried the child to Oberon’s palace, where the walls were woven of vines and inlaid with grapes and ripe fruit…. No, Laura thought, her large, square hands joined in the peasant’s gesture of hopelessness, she didn’t want a guardian spirit; she wanted to devote her entire existence to the child.

  The baby cried on, still in its lonely void just before Genesis, before the earth is formed, where nothing has been named yet, and there is only the mother’s face and the mother’s breast, like the sun and the moon. But the crying was softer now, temporarily eased by the orbital warmth of another presence, and Laura looked down, aware that she was afraid. Her hands moved upward and pressed against her eyes, but the fear oozed through, in brighter and brighter streams. Laura impulsively reached for the baby. But I mustn’t pick it up when I’m disturbed, she thought. I’ll frighten it. Her hands lay twitching near the crying baby’s head. Just holding it will comfort me. Why can’t I think?

  Tears streamed down Laura’s face. She withdrew her hands from the baby’s crib and pressed them one into the other, for warmth. She knew she was overtired. Every three hours, all through the day and night, Laura nursed the baby. In bright light, her face was gray with fatigue, and sometimes parts of her body would begin to twitch, as her hands were doing now; sometimes it was her leg, and sometimes her shoulder, and she couldn’t control them.

  “But I wanted to be a mother!” Laura cried. “At least, I think I did.” She let herself sink wearily to the floor until her face peered at the baby’s through the bars of the crib. “Baby, don’t cry. Mother’s here. And you just ate. I can’t feed you again. I haven’t enough milk yet, anyway. Look, baby, Mummy’s making faces at you.” The baby cooed faintly between sobs. “Please tell me you’re crying just for exercise. Please? Tell me I haven’t ruined you.”

  There were bottles for supplementary feeding in the icebox downstairs. You take the bottle and loosen the cap so the bottle won’t explode, and put it in a pan of water and heat it. Then you test it on your wrist…. No, Laura thought grimly, I won’t. The baby and I’ll work it out together. A voice in the back of her m
ind said, “You’re being romantic, Laura. You’re being silly. Your baby’s crying, and you think silly thoughts about motherhood and how you’re going to be a natural mother.” The voice was her husband’s.

  “That’s not true,” Laura said desperately. “I don’t think anything. I don’t know how to think. That’s my whole problem.”

  Once, her husband had told her (they’d been lying side by side in bed, looking out their window at a particularly large and beautiful moon), “Darling, you’re so absurdly romantic. No one else says ‘I belong to you’ and means it, the way you do. Do you know what I think?”

  “What?” Laura had said, with an expression of hurt but secretly feeling pleasure at being the subject of the discussion.

  “When you were little, you never developed defenses, the way normal people do. You were too spoiled. You never had to save yourself. You could always run to someone and smile at them, and they’d love you—as I do.”

  “That’s not so,” Laura said. But she remembered how her father’s face had softened when she clambered on his knee and raised her pudgy hands for him to kiss. (“Mummy says I’m a bad girl.” “Maybe you are,” her father had said, but he had laughed.)

  “I was a very lonely child,” Laura said to her husband, lying there in the bright moonlight. How pure it is, she thought; if only I could wear it.

  “Laura,” her husband cried, “you only say that because you read it somewhere!” Tears gathered in her eyes, in the moonlight—because he was right, and it was depressing.

  Since her husband hated her to cry, she stuffed her hand into her mouth so he couldn’t hear her. And then, because she feared that he might not understand that she didn’t blame him for anything, she bit her ring finger—pressed her teeth as hard as she could until the skin broke and the blood welled out warm and soothing. Laura lay for a moment savoring the pleasure of sacrifice, and then she turned and held out her hand to her husband. “See how much I love you.”

  “Laura!” he cried in exasperation, but the exasperation disappeared in laughter, and he rolled over so she could put her arms around him—she was almost as big as he was—and stroke him as one strokes a dog, until he stopped worrying and lay warm and placid on her shoulder. “I deserve you because I put up with you,” he murmured.

  But he is right, Laura thought now. I have a bad character; I have flaws. The baby was entranced with her faces. It reached out its tiny hand and gripped her nose. The fingernails were sharp and scratched at the tender membrane in her nostrils. Laura smiled and made noises at the baby. Surreptitiously, with one hand, she tested her breast, but there wasn’t enough milk.

  “Please don’t cry any more,” Laura said. “The milk is almost here. Just a few more minutes.”

  She stood up and lifted the baby and held it on her shoulder and began to walk around the room with it, singing nonsense songs. Outside, the sky was turning purple and the locust trees down the block were swaying delicately. Soon her husband would come home and tell her what to do, persuade her to use the bottled supplement. Laura was perspiring gently. But the baby was already ruined, of course; she didn’t love it. It was too much trouble. She didn’t love anything. The baby was riding on her shoulder, a strange little lump that made noises. Laura began to stride around the room, and the song she was singing suddenly marched into a menacing minor key:

  “Lumpen, lumpen, little lumpen

  On my shoulder you are bumpen…”

  The telephone rang. The baby gave a startled little leap. In sudden distaste, Laura half slung, half dropped the baby in its crib and ran to the telephone; she was going to talk to the outside world. How wonderful telephones were! She flew down the steps. Behind her, the baby began to make small noises. “She’s just exercising,” Laura said aloud, to the hall mirror. She picked up the telephone. “Oh, it’s you, Mother.” Cars moved up and down the street, the shadows were sliding eastward, and out of the dining-room window the sun lay in the west, ripe and glowing. “No, I’m not tired, Mother. I don’t want you to come over and help…. Mother, please…. Yes, that’s the baby crying…. Mother, I don’t want that awful nurse back…. I don’t care if my waist hasn’t gone back to normal. I mean I do care, but not now…. Mother, I have to go….”

  The baby was bawling again, and her mother was in the middle of an expostulation, but nothing mattered, thank God, because her breasts were full. Dreamily, not thinking, or even knowing what she was doing, she slipped the receiver on its hook. It was important to tiptoe, to move very quietly, in order not to spill the happiness. You have to be happy when you feed your baby; otherwise, the milk is poisoned or something.

  The crying had such a needy sound, but how could it be desperate or frightened when she had her milk full in her breasts? Laura’s hands unfolded into the crib, like flowers opening, and nestled the baby. Laura’s sloppy dress slithered on her shoulders as she wiggled, and finally it fell free. One was supposed to wash the nipple with boiled water and antiseptic cotton, but “After all,” Laura whispered, “Mother’s germs are nice germs.” The tiny head cradled itself in her hand; the tiny mouth clutched the nipple. Laura giggled amiably, aimlessly, and settled herself in the rocker she’d bought in a junk shop for two dollars, over her husband’s objections. The chair began to move gently. The baby sucked. Laura smiled down at her nether heart and said, “You’ll give me back to me, won’t you? When you don’t need me.” And then she laughed, because her daughter looked so fierce clutching at the nipple and eating.

  TRIO FOR THREE GENTLE VOICES

  FAITH SKITTERED OUT OF the narrow hallway into the living room, her red telephone hanging around her neck, a toothbrush clutched in one hand. She swaggered to the desk, her telephone bumping against her chest. “Don’t go in the desk drawers,” Laura called warningly from the back room where she was folding diapers. “And don’t you dare touch the ink.” Faith opened the desk drawer and took out the ink bottle, which she placed in the crook of her arm. She closed the desk drawer, her tongue creeping out between her lips in concentration. She considered the drawer for a moment; then she pulled it out about an inch. That pleased her and she tottered, into the kitchen. “What are you doing, Faith?” Laura called.

  Faith, fifteen months old, didn’t talk yet; or rather, she didn’t say anything except words like hot dog, bye-bye, Mommee and Daddee. Now she pulled open the cabinets under the sink and took out a large aluminum pan, into which she dropped the bottle of ink. She took a paper napkin out and put it on the top of her head. It blew off. She put it on again. It blew off. Her lip quivered contemptuously and she wedged it under the ink bottle in the aluminum pan. Her mother’s purse was lying on the kitchen table, its strap hanging over the edge. Faith walked over on tiptoe, gripped the edge of the table and peeked; she saw that the purse was still on the other end of the strap. She yanked the strap and the purse tumbled to the floor. Faith bent and fumbled in the purse until she found her mother’s wallet. “Munn,” she whispered, “munn-munn.”

  “Faith, come see what Mother’s doing,” Laura called from the back room. “Come help Mummy fold diapers.” Faith tucked a dollar bill into the top of her overalls and put a ten in the aluminum pan, which she picked up, grunting slightly. She had two ones and a five clutched in her hand. Fully loaded, she staggered down the hallway toward her mother, “Momm-ee, Momm-ee, I come.”

  Laura looked at her daughter and sighed. As far as she was concerned her daughter was a nearly flawless thing; Laura would look at her and think to herself, Isn’t she rare? And she would shiver with a kind of delight. She could see her daughter at twenty, tall, slender, with curly hair and brilliant eyes—brave, honorable, dashing, appealing, intelligent…. The great problem with such a child was to keep the fine mechanism from being damaged; not that Faith couldn’t take care of herself under most circumstances. “She copes,” Laura was fond of saying, “she copes all the time.” But Laura didn’t want her child subjected to the more frequent childhood horrors—the maid that beat her, the cruel pla
ymate. Laura investigated and watched Faith’s playmates; the mean ones Faith was allowed to see only once or twice a month; the nice ones, the kind and jolly ones, Faith played with almost every day.

  However, maids and baby sitters were a different problem. Martin, Laura’s husband, insisted often on short notice that Laura get a baby sitter; and Laura would be desperate, her news-gathering and -reporting system being useless without a good deal of time. “Do you know a goodhearted, playful sort of sitter?” she’d ask her friends one by one. “The kind that doesn’t curdle a child? A responsible one?” Sometimes they did; sometimes they laughed at her. Whenever a new sitter came Laura had her come either a day before to play with Faith or else early on the same day. If the sitter was difficult Laura, in tears, would refuse to go out and nothing Martin could do would move her. However, on this particular day Martin was going to a cocktail party at his biggest client’s new apartment. Martin was a lawyer and he had laid down the law. Laura’s usual baby sitter, Mad Margaret, a somewhat retarded but very gentle woman who lived in the neighborhood, was busy; and all of Laura’s emergency girls were unavailable. Laura was going to try a girl named Cora, whom she had never met but who had been recommended by Mary Ellen Cabany, her dearest friend, from Wellesley.

  Cora arrived at ten minutes after three. She was a tall, handsome colored woman, with fine eyes and a firm mouth. Cora got paid by the hour and she didn’t mind being trained at all. She straightened her back, pushed her full breasts toward the door, and she looked down across this passionate topography at the earnest and ladylike Laura.

  “Oh, come in, come in. You must be Cora.”

  “You hit it, ma’am,” Cora said. “Right on your very first try.”