Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  He wore a white polo shirt. Once he had been the sixth-ranking tennis player in the United States, and had married a rich girl; his days on the tennis circuit were five years past, and the marriage had ended in divorce twelve months before. Now he taught American history in an American school in Rome and played tennis with various members of the diplomatic set. He still kept to the course of reading he had drawn up and that he hoped would give him intelligence, or, failing that, education. Gifted with a strong body and good nerves, he had never felt so harassed by ignorance that a sense of his own worth could not come to his rescue; then in the fourth year of his marriage, his tennis game and marriage deteriorating, he had begun wanting desperately to know more about everything. He had settled down to read the philosophers, the psychologists, the historians, the poets, the critics. He had had no clear idea what he would do as an educated man, a self-made intellectual, and so he decided to teach. He had left his wife, unwilling to quarrel with her, unable to bear her restlessness at the change in him. He had gone to Europe. The divorce had depressed him. He had missed his daughter unconscionably. He wrote his former wife and asked if the child Melinda could visit him. He would pay her plane passage to Europe. His former wife agreed to permit the journey. Melinda had sent him a note in block capitals: “CAN WE SEE VENICE DADDY?”

  She sat beside him in the gondola, white-skinned, thin-boned, with straight eyebrows like his and green eyes like her mother’s. Her reddish-blond hair was her own. So was the dull stubbornness with which she maintained a polite and lifeless manner toward Henry. This was the fourth day of her visit, their second day in Venice.

  He had a headache. He sat slouching, hands between his knees. He wondered irritably how the Venetians managed to live day after day with the illusive and watery haze, the heat, the mind-scattering profusion of reflections, of smells, of playful architectural details, with the unsettling mixture of squalor and ostentation, with the silent, silvery air, the decay, the history, and the atmosphere of vice. But he felt constrained to be honest. The truth was, he thought ashamedly, he was bored. It was dull as hell to spend so many hours in the company of a child.

  They had been to the Ca’ d’Oro that morning. Henry had said, “Isn’t it pretty? It’s supposed to be one of the prettiest houses in Europe.”

  “It’s pretty,” the child said.

  She had grown restless when he’d dawdled in front of the Mantegna. “Tell me the story of that picture, Daddy,” she’d said.

  “The man being shot with arrows is a saint,” he’d said.

  So much in Venice was unsuitable for a child.

  It had been perhaps a mistake, this trip: movement was half a child’s charm. Children stilled—on a train, at a dinner table, in a gondola—were reduced: one was chafed by the limitations of their intellects and the hardness of their voices.

  When they’d left the Ca’ d’Oro, they’d hired a gondola and embarked on the Grand Canal. Noticing the child’s lackluster eyes, the loose setting of her lips, Henry had asked her, “You’re not seasick or anything?” He suggested, “Some people don’t like gondolas. If the gondola bothers you, we can go ashore.”

  “Could we have lunch?”

  “I forgot,” Henry had said. “It’s your lunchtime. Can you hold out until we get to San Marco? I know the restaurants there.”

  AS THE gondolier resumed his steady stroke, Melinda turned to Henry—the angle of her head upon her shoulders indicated melancholy —and asked in a weak voice, “Why did they build Venice on the water?”

  Henry replied without thought, “To be safe.”

  “It’s safe on the water?”

  Henry, whose eleventh-grade history students adored him and trusted his opinions, said, “Well, children might fall in. But the people here wanted to be safe from armies.”

  The child waited questioningly.

  Henry was thinking that a gondola was an inefficient watercraft, keelless (a bent demiquaver, a notation of the music of the water). He woke from his reverie with a start. “Armies can’t fight and swim at the same time.”

  “They could come in little boats,” the child said.

  Henry dusted off the knees of his trousers. “The Venetians could swim out and overturn little boats, they could do all sorts of things to little boats. The Venetians had no trouble with armies for a thousand years.” He smiled to cover any deficiencies in his explanation—he had always been extraordinarily confident of his physical charm.

  “A thousand years?” the child asked.

  “Yes,” he said reassuringly, “a thousand years.”

  The child closed one eye, looked at him through the other. “Is that a long time, Daddy?”

  Henry swallowed a sigh. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Let’s take Grandmother Beecher. You think she’s old, don’t you?” Henry’s eyes held the child’s attention. “Now imagine her grandmother. And keep going back for twenty grandmothers. Isn’t that a lot of grandmothers?”

  His and the child’s eyes seemed hopelessly locked. Then, as he watched, the child’s eyes slowly went out of focus.

  Slowly, she extended her arm over the water; she observed the shadow of her hand change shape on the sun-gilt waves. She was as lifeless as a mosaic, yet she spoke: “Are the palaces so wibbly-wobbly because they’re so old?”

  Henry said, “Well, yes and no.” He paused, then went on heartily, “The buildings are old, yes, but that’s not the entire story. The islands they are built on were mudbanks—they just barely stuck out of the water, and the Venetians made them bigger by throwing stones and logs and garbage—”

  “Garbage—eeugh!” The child held her nose.

  “Well,” her father said, “they made the islands bigger. But as the years pass, the water licks away at them. Waves are like little tongues,” he said with sudden poetry. “They eat out little pieces of the islands, the islands sink, and the buildings wobble.” It was sad she was too young, Henry thought, for him to tell her that suns, stars, people, intelligence, and every other bit of created matter began by law in chaos and aged into chaos.

  Melinda, squinting, peered up into Henry’s face. “Is Venice falling apart, Daddy?” she asked.

  “Well—yes and no,” Henry said. “It’s sinking, but very slowly.”

  “Gee, Daddy, you know an awful lot,” she said with despairing enthusiasm.

  Henry felt his face heating into a blush. He said, “Any guidebook would tell you …” He did not finish. He gazed at the Baroque palaces along this newer stretch of the Grand Canal, palaces spotted with noon shadows, draped in cornices, pilasters, and balustrades, sad.

  “It won’t fall down while we’re here?” the child asked. She laughed faintly.

  Did she want Venice to fall? Henry said, “No. It won’t fall.” It was disappointment he saw in her face. He said, “You know that big tower in the Piazza—the red tower? It fell down once.… In Henry James’s time. About sixty years ago.” Melinda was watching him, he thought, expectantly. She wanted to hear more about the collapse of Venice. Good God, why did the child wish harm to this fanciful city built on mud and garbage? Was it that, betrayed, she resented the world of adults, hoped for its destruction? Henry’s heart trembled: the child was a betrayed idealist. Achingly, he looked at her.

  She wore the dim frown that suggested she might be grappling with a half-formulated female thought.

  “What is it?” Henry asked. “Are you thinking something? What are you thinking?”

  The child, startled, shook her head and drew her shoulders up.

  “You can tell me,” Henry said encouragingly.

  “You’ll get angry,” she said.

  “Me?” He stopped. He said slowly, “It doesn’t matter if I get angry. Fathers and daughters can get mad at each other if they want. It doesn’t mean a thing. We can’t go through life being afraid of each other.” Melinda studied her thumb. “Why, if I got angry, I might shout and wave my arms and fall into the Grand Canal—wouldn’t that be funny?”

&n
bsp; Melinda was silent.

  “Go ahead,” Henry said. He leaned closer. “Try to make me angry. See what happens.”

  “I’m too scared.”

  “Of me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said tactfully. She stuck her forefinger into the water. Henry could see only the back of her head.

  He felt the rush of innocence that accompanies a sense of being misunderstood. “The water’s dirty!” he exclaimed.

  Melinda raised her finger and held it in her other hand on her lap; drops of water darkened her pale-blue skirt.

  Henry said, “I don’t see that anything you can tell me would make me any angrier than I am at your not telling me.”

  Melinda whispered, “All right.…” The gondola rocked. A lifeboat-shaped motor vessel was chugging by, stacked with Coca-Cola cartons. “I don’t really like Venice.”

  He had expected her to say—his hopes had grown so from the moment when he realized she wanted Venice to fall—something more illuminating, something like an admission that it saddened her, the distance that had come between her and Henry since the divorce, something like “I hate it that you and Mommy don’t live together anymore,” something honest like that.

  He said, “You wanted to come to Venice! It was your idea!”

  “It’s not the way I thought it would be,” she said. “Nothing here is sincere except the water.”

  Henry’s mouth opened, then emitted laughter. He laughed rather a long time. He sobered: Would Melinda care that a city was insincere if Henry’s leaving home had not taught her that insincerity was everywhere? He blinked at her pityingly, tenderly.

  “Why did you laugh?” Her face was pink with hurt.

  “Because I thought what you said was witty.” He watched her. “Do you know what ‘witty’ means?”

  “No.”

  “Something true—more or less—that comes as a surprise makes people laugh. That’s witty.”

  “I did?” she said.

  “Yes. You did.… But, Melinda, Venice is supposed to be nice, even though it’s insincere,” Henry said.

  The child’s face caved in, as if she took what he’d said for an expression of disapproval.

  Henry, with that sensation of clumsiness that came to him whenever she asked him to help with one of her small buttons, tried to put things right. “But you like the water?”

  “And the pigeons,” the child said, anxious to please.

  “Why? Are they sincere?”

  “Yes,” the child said, and nodded vigorously.

  Why did she look so expectant? I give up, Henry thought, and laughed with exasperation and weariness. Melinda’s face pinkened again, slowly. She smoothed her skirt. She seemed to have come into possession of a gentle incandescence. He said, “We certainly won’t stay here if you don’t like it. We can go to Paris.”

  “Paris?” The incandescence grew, then dimmed. “If you want to,” she said, staring into her lap.

  Henry had come to hate her pale good manners. The first days of her visit, he had thought she was still shocked that Mother-and-Daddy were no longer a single, hyphenated warm beast; he had told himself, “She will have to get used to me as an individual.” He had not expected her to go on so long being mannerly and frightened with that individual. He began to rattle off words like a salesman trying to confuse a customer. “We’ll go swimming—at the Lido—this afternoon. We’ll take the launch over. We’ll swim in the ‘sincere’ water, and tonight we’ll eat and pack and have some ice cream, and tomorrow we’ll fly to Paris. We’ll fly over the Alps. You’ll see the Alps—you’ve never seen the Alps before. We’ll get to Paris in time for lunch. We’ll have lunch outside on the street—”

  “I know. I saw it on television.”

  “But you’ll like it?”

  The child said worriedly, “Do you have enough money?”

  Oh, my God, Henry thought, she did overhear those quarrels. “No,” he said, “I can’t afford it. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

  Melinda’s eyes grew large. Her face seemed distended with pleasure. She put her hand to her mouth and laughed in the shelter of her hand.

  Henry said, “What’s so funny?”

  “You’re funny, Daddy. You’re so bad.” She inserted her hand inside his and gripped his fingers with an industrious and rubbery pressure—an active possession. Light dipped and danced along the swan’s neck of the gondola’s fantastic prow. She sighed. “Daddy,” she said after a while. “You know that boy who lives across the hall?” From the apartment in the States where she lived with her mother, she meant. “Well, he likes to play dirty games.”

  Henry’s tongue moved over his lower lip. He thought, How strangely moving it is that the child trusts me. “He does?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What do you mean by dirty games?” His eyes probed a corner of the Venetian sky; his voice was as calm as a psychiatrist’s.

  “You know.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Oh, he wants me to go into the closet with him and take my clothes off.”

  The gondola slid under the Ponte dell’Accademia. Henry said, “Is that so?”

  Melinda said, “Yes,” nodding.

  Henry switched his eyes to a different corner of the sky. “Is that all?” he asked.

  “He’s really silly,” she said, noncommittal. “ … He likes to push stomachs.”

  Henry heard the muted rumble of footsteps on the wooden bridge. “Do you like to push stomachs?”

  Melinda said, “Sometimes.” She drew the end of a strand of hair back from her cheek. “But I don’t really like playing those games with him.” She looked up at her father, her brows knit. “He gets angry if I won’t play those games.”

  “Why does that bother you? What do you care if he gets angry?”

  “Well, I don’t like him to get too angry. I like having him to play with when I get bored.”

  “Is boredom so awful?” Henry said in a louder tone.

  “It depends.”

  Henry thought, She wants to punish me for abandoning her. My God. He made a mental note to do some reading about disturbed children. He said, shielding his eyes with his hand, “You stay out of that closet!”

  A startled, single peal of involuntary laughter popped out of Melinda. She stared at him with pink astonishment.

  “What’s funny?” Henry asked.

  “You are!” the child shouted. “What you’re thinking! You want to kiss me!” Strands of hair bounced on her forehead in the silvery light. She spread her fingers over her mouth and cheeks, hiding them from him.

  The sunlit panorama was squeezed into a rich oval in the center of which his daughter’s face floated, partly veiled by her fingers. “You’re right,” Henry said, with amazement.

  A flutter passed across the child’s shoulders; a sound halfway between a choked shout and a laugh came from behind her fingers.

  Along the canals, at the edge of his vision, Venice trembled on its uncertain islands, assailed by the devouring and protective and odorous wash of the sea. He kissed Melinda’s hands, and as she moved them he kissed her cheek, her nose, her chin.

  THE GONDOLA floated toward the seaward rim of the Piazzetta. Melinda’s head lay on Henry’s chest in the exhaustion following laughter. Her arm was thrown across his stomach. “We’re at the Piazza,” Henry said.

  Melinda sat up, touched a hand to her hair. Groggily, she surveyed the approaching landfall, the stone folds of the perspective opening past the winged lion, the lozenge-patterned palace, the benign litter of Byzantine oddments, bronze horses, golden domes, pinnacles, flagpoles, and pigeons. Amiably, the child said, “Ciao, piazza. Ciao, lunch. Ciao, pigeons.”

  BOOKKEEPING

  I THINK I am going mad, what you call loco.… I don’t want to bother you … but you live so near.…” Annetje’s voice over the telephone, fascinating, foreign, threaded on hard-breathing pauses, moved Avram Olensky unbearably. He was curly-haired, a handsome bu
t unhappy- and nervous-looking Jew. He kept his back to his guests, Louise Kimball, now Louise von Kunnel, and her husband of eight months, the Graf Ulrich von Kunnel.

  Avram, as usual wishing his feelings could be simple, felt embarrassed to be thinking it dreadful luck that Louise was the person he would have to abandon to help Annetje: Louise was so highly susceptible to slights. She had earlier, in her bland, quite admirable, Yankee forthrightness (she was from Ridgefield, Connecticut), warned Avram that she worried he would be anti-German with Ulrich.

  Louise was a very old friend and had been briefly a mistress and had once lent Avram the money he had needed to found a small literary magazine.

  Calculating the ethics of the situation rapidly, Avram said to himself, “Compassion outweighs Gratitude,” and said into the telephone, “Annetje, I am glad you called me.”

  “You are a kind man!” Annetje exclaimed in her accented, exciting, telephone-flavored voice.

  “No, no,” Avram said truthfully. “I only wish I were. I—”

  Annetje said, “I took LSD. I am having a reaction. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. I am paranoid as hell.”

  Avram’s spirits lifted; they rose a certain percentage. LSD. Ah, he thought, a little help is all that is required. “Talmudist,” hissed a part of his mind.

  But he had avoided Annetje for years. He had grown nervous in his middle thirties; Annetje frightened him, her prettiness was so extreme—white-blond hair, enormous seaside-gray eyes—her irrational, storm-tossed, passionate conversation so unnerving. She would say, “The story of my life is too much. I was born in a castle, a Dutch castle. My father was a banker. He was not afraid of the Nazis. Then he was. We got to Vichy, and one day my father went out to buy cigars and never came back. Never. The nuns told my mother they would save me. I was dressed as a nun and I went to Italy. I never saw my mother again. I was told after the war she died of pneumonia. But they were being kind to me, I think. I spent the war in Italy. We were often bombed. I could not go to the chapel or the cellar. I did not want to be buried alive. I used to run outside and scream at the airplanes.”