Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Driving her home one evening, Walter said worriedly, “What are your parents thinking of, letting a girl like you spend a summer living alone?” Ann meant to laugh, but smoke from her cigarette caught in her throat and she choked and coughed. Walter patted her back. He halted the car to do it. He was turned toward her and he was solicitous. Ann noticed his body smell—dry, physically healthy, warm. Ann caught her breath and said, “You shouldn’t worry about me. I—I’m not a virgin.” Walter said nothing. When they reached the curb in front of the building in which Ann’s five-dollar-a-week apartment occupied the third floor rear, she thanked him for the ride and went inside.

  She did not go to the plant the next day but stayed at home working with figures and walking up and down what her landlady called the sitting room of Ann’s “suite of rooms,” smoking and lecturing herself on childishness. But she was embarrassed at what she had said.

  That evening Walter called to ask if she was well. She said yes. She said she’d be at the plant the next day.

  When she entered the plant, she saw Walter bending over one of the workmen who was polishing a rifle barrel. He did not see her come in but he turned around as if he had felt her entrance. Ann was certain that he had begun to have feelings about her. It was as much to prove she felt no class distinctions as it was in the hope of winning Walter to her Marxist ideals that she permitted herself to decide she would encourage him. She was enlightened, she thought; she could want his bodily intimacy and companionship without wanting him. But she would accept him. When she left that evening, she said, staring over his head, that she would be at home, working up the material she had already gathered. “Please stop by and see me,” she said.

  HE WAS shy, and Ann’s boldness was a matter of principle and easier to maintain in speech than in her room. His first visit they spent talking. He said his wife and children were in Indiana for the summer, in a rented cottage on a lake. He went over on weekends. He said it was very pleasant to enjoy “a little harmless feminine companionship” in the evenings. He often grew lonely, he said. On his second visit, there were long silences. On his third, as soon as he entered her sitting room, Ann saw he had made up his mind about her. But he seemed unable to make the first move. Ann said, “I feel a little strange. I think I’ve been smoking too many cigarettes,” and she lay down on the couch. After a while, Walter tiptoed over and began massaging her forehead. Then Ann kissed him.

  She was not prepared for Walter’s quickness and noisiness as a lover, or for his semitearful whisper afterward of “I love you.” She thought he was joking, or that he was grateful for the sexual release. She said nothing in reply.

  He had an even-featured, dull face—the eyes seemed to be in retreat, to be fleeing, then pausing to look back, then fleeing again. But his body, good-sized, strong, somewhat bony and white on the chest because he still wore a shirt when he went swimming with his family in Indiana, was handsome to her and curiously alive, jerky, overeager, highly sensitive. Her body was a feminine version of his in appearance but slow and cautious in feeling and almost always slightly cold to the touch. It drew comfort from the repeated touch of Walter’s body, but Ann had never known what an older girl in the Party had described as “a woman’s right” (or sometimes “the woman’s right”), and she did not expect to find it with Walter, who had perhaps never heard of it. She did not feel like explaining it to him or requesting it.

  They met usually in Casperia, the next town to the south on the railway line. There was a wooded state park and a lake behind a WPA dam. Lovemaking with Walter seemed strangely clean and innocent.

  They rarely undressed completely but, with citronella smeared on their necks and foreheads and arms to discourage mosquitoes, lay on a blanket in the woods. Walter said he had never touched any woman before except his wife. He had always been shy with women, he said, “uneasy with this thing”—Ann presumed he meant sex. He said he probably wasn’t as good a lover as a college man was. Ann resented it that he hadn’t the courage and pride of those workingmen who felt themselves equal and even superior to everyone. She resented it that he felt her superior to him, that he felt she was experienced and worldly. She told him she had had only one lover and one experience besides the lover, that he, Walter, was as good as the college men she had known, that she felt more with him than with them. Even as she said it, she realized it was true. She felt passionately that he was as good a lover as anyone could be; she set herself and Walter on fire, and she knew, for the first time, the pleasure she hadn’t known before. Now it was her turn to cry; she cried and said, “I love you,” and, in a burst of melodrama, kissed both his hands.

  A SUMMER on the Illinois plains has its own special quality: the nights are heavy and still with heat, the sky splits frequently with bursts of heat lightning; often after midnight, mist rises from the ground. Ann and Walter sometimes waited for the mist; they liked to sit in the mist, holding hands or embracing more closely. But usually they parted before midnight, Walter to drive back to Millburg, Ann to take the train. Walter hated Ann’s taking the train but she insisted, and he understood that talk (gossip) was bad for an unmarried girl but he hoped Ann wasn’t doing it for the sake of his wife. “I wouldn’t hurt you for her sake,” he said. But he still drove to the cottage in Indiana for Sunday visits. Ann said she understood. She never complained. She said she would leave Millburg before his family came back. “I don’t ever want to be a problem or a burden to you,” she said.

  She daydreamed about being married to Walter and living in a small house and packing his lunch for him to take to the plant: but it was only a daydream.

  When they sat on the blanket in the woody park in Casperia, Walter talked about God, about the Republican and Democratic parties, about rifles. He did not talk well. He repeated himself and he left things out. He sometimes said Ann was “beautiful, really beautiful,” and that she was “the best thing that ever happened” to him. Ann realized his shyness with her and the fact that she impressed him made his tongue clumsy, because in the plant she sometimes heard him speak and he spoke sensibly and even with muted poetry: “We want the barrel to shine like a blue mirror,” he instructed a youthful workman. Ann was warm and comfortable and excited too, happy, a little breathless, and both sad and anxious that the summer was going to end. But the affair would be perfect of its kind, and it would end before she bored Walter.

  Meanwhile, each week, the intimacy deepened in its own way. They found out more about each other. Walter insisted she quit the Communist Party, and Ann did. She received in reply a vaguely threatening letter, but she had not been important to the Party; they had not thought highly of her; she did not hear from them again.

  She described her professors at college to Walter and he would say, “He sounds like a very conceited man,” and Ann would reply, “Yes, he is. That’s it exactly.” Walter discussed the plant with her. “It’s basically a craft operation,” Ann said sagely. “It would be a mistake to try for too much efficiency.” Walter would nod. “Yes. I think so.”

  They came to know each other’s clothes, even their underwear, and their physical states; Ann’s headaches and Walter’s nervous stomach became common property.

  Finally, as the involutions of time and feeling bore them deeper and deeper into the shadows of their own inner selves, Walter said he would like to divorce his wife; he said, “I wish I could get a divorce and live with you forever, Ann.”

  “Oh no,” Ann said. “You don’t really.” She laughed in an odd, twisted way. “You’re not that kind of man. People would talk. You might even lose your job.” He would never leave his job, she knew. He hadn’t enough confidence. Nor could he support his children and then support another family. He had spoken in a helpless tone anyway. “Let’s take what we are given,” Ann said, flushed and earnest.

  Walter continued to talk about divorce and remarriage, but not with hope or firmness. He hinted in a frightened way at her superiority, his own lack of worth, his half-guessed deficiencies and the
deficiencies of the life he could offer her. Ann lost her sense of direction; she no longer remembered why divorce and remarriage were out of the question. She thought despairingly only that she would have to go away soon (if he followed her, if he was that strong, she would live with him inside or outside marriage).

  II

  IN THE last week of August, one morning, Walter drove his two-door Chevrolet sedan up the tree-lined street where Ann lived and parked in front of the house-turned-into-apartments Ann shared with her landlady and two other women, all widows except herself. Walter turned the wheels of his car carefully in toward the curb, put the gearshift into neutral, and pulled on the hand brake. Swallowing with difficulty, he climbed out of the car, glanced quickly and furtively up and down the street as he trotted the few feet into the hall of the building. He climbed two flights of stairs and knocked on Ann’s door.

  “It’s me—Walter,” he said.

  Ann opened the door.

  “I couldn’t go to work,” Walter said pathetically. “I started to but I couldn’t. I feel sick because you’re going away soon. I think about shooting myself.”

  “Oh, Walter,” Ann said, and embraced him.

  Walter stroked her back. “Seeing you means a lot to me,” he said, almost without inflection. He seemed to be nakedly himself—ordinary, uneducated, successful in his small fashion, a mother’s boy, egocentric, lonely, hurt, shy, tender, bemused, in love, lost.

  There was nothing else to do: they made love.

  Ann was tense, was not satisfied, was emotional. Walter said nothing, not a word; he seemed to be too caught up in his feelings to speak. Ann lit a cigarette while Walter dressed. She thought at first his neck was flushed; when she realized those red marks were the marks of her fingers, she grew frightened. Second by second, she grew more irritable and more moved: she saw an unexpected beauty in Walter’s dressing himself, and at the same time she was maddened by his silence, his self-preoccupation, his getting dressed to go off to work after all with the dull, dry conscientiousness of a man of no imagination. She loved him for having no imagination. When he was dressed, he turned toward her, and she saw he had tears in his eyes.

  She cried, “I don’t want to make you unhappy!”

  “Ann.” He swallowed. He looked stiff, wretched, stupid.

  “You’d better hurry. You’re already late,” she said, impatient, maternal. When he was gone, she stood by her window; she saw him enter the car; she saw the car drive away. He didn’t look back.

  Ann sat in a chair by the window and held her bathrobe shuttered over her chest. She was drawn more and more to the idea of sacrifice, of leaving at once without saying goodbye. Walter would hate her; he would despise her for a coward. He would return to his wife. It was a great gift she would make him. If she left secretly, without seeing him again, he would not have the humiliation of having to choose between her and his wife when in truth he had no choice. It was not her own possible humiliation that she was fleeing.

  She packed hurriedly, inefficiently, disturbed by a sense of disconnection as if there were two Anns, and one was throwing a tantrum; and then she went to the railroad station. She bought a ticket to Milwaukee and stumblingly lugged her suitcase to the train platform, which had a wooden roof, like a canopy, with fringes of gingerbread and spooled icicles hanging down; from the railroad tracks rose an acid metal smell, the sun beat so strongly on them. Then there was a wrought-iron fence and a view of cornfields; no one moved anywhere in her field of vision. Not even a fly buzzed anywhere near her. It seemed to her that at the heart of the universe lay a dry small-town silence. I’m not looking forward to graduate school, she thought.

  AT COLLEGE, she found the boys she met to be hypocritical and tiresome, young and not acquainted with what was real, as Walter was. She wanted to say, “Why don’t you all learn how to be simple and real?”

  Her grief disordered her face and her temper. She said to herself, “You’re turning into a gargoyle—no, into Olive Oyl,” and laughed aloud. She was in the college library and saw her milky reflection in the polished top of the reading table. The other people at the table looked at her strangely.

  When she thought of Walter, she thought now of his shyness as foreknowledge of passion: he had known. She saw his fine-featured (tanned) face and on it she saw his understanding of her: no one else had ever understood her at all.

  She reminded herself that she was emancipated. She meant to sleep with someone. She fell into bed twice, but it was very boring.

  Then she met a tall, loud, cheerful, heavyset graduate student at a party; he had some of Walter’s great gaiety of spirit, Ann thought. They went to his apartment and it seemed to Ann that it could have been worse.

  Her lover patted his paunch and said, “Casanova was fat, too.” He said, “I’ve got vast appetites, like Walt Whitman.”

  This one is just a boy, Ann thought.

  Then he said Ann should come by his room the following day after classes: “It needs a good cleaning.”

  He’s joking, Ann thought. I must be losing my mind. “No, no, no, no, no,” she said.

  He stared at Ann. “You wouldn’t help clean my room?” he asked in a trembling voice.

  “I don’t do things like that,” she said nervously.

  He said, “I’ll tell you what you are—you’re a love cheat. I thought you wanted to make me happy!”

  It rained often that autumn. In her boardinghouse was a student who addressed women as “Ma’am.” He was from a farm. He was younger than Ann; he was about eighteen. He always left the table immediately after dinner to get to his books, and he rose at five in the morning and walked downtown to a department store and loaded and unloaded trucks until eight and then returned to the boardinghouse for breakfast and had his first class at nine-fifteen. He was as disciplined and broad-shouldered as Walter.

  She invited him to her room; she served him ragged fragments of Swiss cheese on saltines and gave him rye without ice to drink. They became lovers. Ann went and lay down on her bed, put her arm over her eyes, and said, “I’m too drunk to know what I’m doing.”

  It seemed to Ann that the Ann who had met Walter and the Ann who occupied the present moment were not the same: she had changed; she was not, in some essential way (it had to do with innocence), young anymore; the change was like a deformity. But she felt herself to be more intelligent, more awake, more a person—a person in agony but more a person. Half disbelieving and with a gasp of bitterness—the image in her head was of the outer skins of an onion being peeled away—she said to herself, “We’re getting a lot closer to the onion now.”

  It made her sad that he could sleep with her and not care for her, that this was the little that should be allowed her—she had thought life was more sensibly arranged than this.

  “It’s all so laughable, life is, don’t you think?” she asked the boy.

  “I don’t philosophize much,” he said.

  “You’re young for your age,” she said.

  He looked at his hands—they were large and very red—and at his shoelaces, as if checking his appearance to see if he was safe from being laughed at. He said, “I guess I wouldn’t know about that.” He spoke with implausible politeness.

  She sometimes thought she would stop sleeping with him, but then the thought of the fineness of his politeness and of his person would summon up images of rest and refreshment as if he were a movie or a vacation.

  It even occurred to Ann that she liked being hurt because she felt so terrible about Walter. She never named Walter to herself anymore; she referred to him to herself as the other one.

  She had trouble with her teeth. She went to the dentist—he said she was grinding her teeth, perhaps in her sleep. She took long walks alone through fields of crusty snow. She yearned to be moderate in her desires.

  She did not care if she lived or died. She thought she might as well go home and see her parents during Easter vacation.

  IT WAS funny when her mother said, “All my chi
ldren are musical except Ann—she’s advanced.” It amused Ann in her dark, heavy, German mood to put on one of her dresses, a loose-fitting modernistic print, and to hang a long chain around her neck and go to a dance to watch the middle-class mating ritual. It amused her that many men flirted with her, an “advanced” girl (because—she thought—the way she was dressed raised their hopes, and because they or their fathers did business with her father). And then there were the dullards who were pressed into service as her dates; they spent most of their time trying to persuade her of Roosevelt’s villainy. It seemed to her for a while, that lilac-penetrated spring, that it was a terrible thing to be a woman.

  She had in her face and carriage at all times something of the look of a torch singer—she looked emotional, melancholy, and proud in her lack of innocence.

  At a country-club dance, a man she did not know stared at her from across the dance floor; he was a smallish, young-old man; he wore the only brown double-breasted suit—and a wrinkled one, at that—among the white dinner jackets. He approached her and tumbled out the words “Fe fi fo fum! I smell the blood of an iconoclast!” He introduced himself: “Joseph Lord Fennimore—my mother’s maiden name was Lord”—nicknamed, he remarked with hopeful sullenness, Fennie, “an attorney at law and generally considered crazy as a loon because I go to a psychoanalyst that my so-called friends say I look on as God.”

  “Well,” said Ann, with a sigh, “I guess that’s not much worse than thinking Alf Landon is.”

  “Oh! Touché,” Fennie cried, and looked at her with gratitude.

  They went out on the terrace, each holding a cup of what Fennie called “Depression punch—mostly rum and indigestion. The orange peels are made out of Kleenex.”

  He said, “I’m not crazy; I’m what they call tied up inside.” He was eight years older than Ann; that’s why they had never met, he said; he had gone with “the older crowd.” He said, “I will tell you an absolutely typical story about me.”