Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  Ann took an afternoon off from work and went to Baltimore by train to have her abortion. Very weak, she took a train back to Washington. Fennie was frightened, when he came home, to see her so pale; she was on her feet, her mouth set in an unreal smile; Fennie had the impression that Ann hated him.

  She refused for a long time to speak of what had happened; sometimes her hand would creep to her stomach and rest there as if to warm it.

  She and Fennie quarreled. Fennie suddenly complained that Ann had a piercing, Wisconsin accent.

  “You never complained before!” Ann said in just that piercing voice.

  “I never noticed it before.”

  Ann said, “I’ll tell you what, Fennie. I’ll kill myself. Will that make you happy?”

  Fennie said, “Oh, shut up.” Then he looked amazed. He said emotionally, “You can’t let things fester.… I think you’re still upset about the—er—abortion incident. But what’s happened to our ideals, Annieannie? You know we’re not after the ordinary things in life. We’re after big game.”

  There was something sexual and slatternly about Ann as she stood there in her despair; Fennie felt himself fascinated by her anew.

  Two months later, she miscarried. The doctor said her system had been weakened by the abortion. Ann said, “I didn’t tell you I was pregnant, Fennie, because I knew it would be all right.” She talked as if she were proud of herself, but she would drop suddenly into soliloquies of self-accusation: “I’m a terrible fool—stupid, stupid.…” She was often apologetic: “I don’t know if I’m coming or going. I’d lose my head if it wasn’t fastened to my shoulders.” When she drank, she would turn on Fennie: she twisted up her face and said, “You’re a rat, Fennie. You’re a genuine rat.”

  Fennie, quite pale and patient, said, “I know you’re not yourself.”

  Ann replied, “No, I’m not myself. I’m your mother, Fennie, you rat.”

  Fennie said, “You haven’t been your real self since the babies.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way, you crypto-Fascist!” Ann cried. “Well, the honeymoon is over,” she would say by way of apology. “I’m sorry. I said a lot of true things I shouldn’t have said.”

  She would be silent and devoted for days. “Marriage is not easy,” she would say to friends. “Fennie and I have made a good adjustment.” She thought of Fennie as Men. “You know what men are like,” she would say. She had been married four years. To have given a specific description of Fennie would have made her weep: He is a smallish man who had a bad mother. He drinks too much because he’s self-centered. He gets overexcited. He isn’t always easy with me. He’s tempted to bite his nails but he wants to believe analysis cured him and so when he starts to bite a nail he stops. But every couple of months he gives in and bites a nail or two. He is not very good with people. The skin over his chest is almost blue and there is a reddish-blue mark on his paunch where his belt rubs. His collarbones stick out. If she had been asked to list his defects, she would have cried, “We have values! We don’t look at people that way!”

  If asked to describe herself, she would have said, “I’m something of an intellectual. My mind is very erratic, but I’m not ashamed of being a woman.” If pressed, she might have added, “I’m a good wife to my husband. I don’t bother him with my moods. I know when to say goodbye.” She would have said that she and Fennie labored to “bring to birth” better “conditions” for the country. Her life and Fennie’s were not at all meaningless.

  Fennie’s mother fell ill. Fennie went out to Milwaukee. When he returned to Washington, he said to Ann that his mother would like to see a grandchild. “Why don’t we have a child?” Fennie said as if it had been Ann who had not wanted one.

  “Fennie, a child?” Ann ran her finger across an invisible veil in front of her eyes. She smiled haltingly, one hand covering the corner of her mouth. “Is it fair to bring a child into the world just now, Fennie?” Her hands dropped into her lap. “I wouldn’t mind having a child,” she said.

  She carried to term and gave birth to a daughter, named Louise, after Fennie’s mother.

  ANN CALLED the child Baby. She felt inside herself the baby’s moods, her rages, appetite, sleepiness, and comfort; these feelings in Ann were like a model of an unusual solar system: blank and primitive, very unreasonable and private, an enormous space and a sun and a moon. Light leaped from the sun to the moon. She played—she did not fully know what she meant by the phrase—the sun-moon game with the baby, each taking turns being the sun, being the moon.

  She was with the baby all the time; she never said goodbye to the baby. During the day, a colored maid came in; the maid was affectionate in a false and distant way, was proud, thought people were plotting against her. Ann hardly knew the maid was there.

  Fennie was rarely home; he worked late at the office; he did not get in Ann’s way. He said war was coming; he had lately begun to admire Harold Ickes and he modeled his speech on that of the secretary of the Department of the Interior. He said, “War is coming just as sure as God made little green apples.”

  The baby was colicky, and cried at night; Fennie would wake—he was not as tired as Ann and did not sleep with her desperate unconsciousness—and he would nudge Ann awake; at the thin edge where her mind met the night world was the baby’s cry. Ann would leap out of bed—sometimes Fennie would laugh—and bound across the room, rebounding from chairs, even from-the wall, to the baby’s crib, her senses dulled, her pride dissolved in a preoccupation with digestion and infantile excrement.

  It frightened and pleased her that motherhood was difficult. She looked into the mirror at her harassed face, her undone hair: she was doing all she could.

  Fennie and Ann could not talk together as they had. They did not make love for three and a half months. Fennie was pale, his stomach was acting up. His best tenderness had an undertone of sarcasm. In a burst of concern, Ann, half asleep one evening, struggling to stay awake, gave herself to him. Since the baby came, she often thought Fennie was difficult—if not childish; he did not bother his head to understand how important it was for her to concentrate on being a good mother.

  She wondered if Fennie would ever give up talking about the “male” and the “female” and D. H. Lawrence. He said, “It isn’t good to fight the life of the instincts.… I don’t think you read enough anymore, Ann.” He thought she was not being a good sport. Ann no longer listened to Fennie when he spoke. He would say, “I heard about a book called A New Look at Female Happiness. Should I get hold of a copy? Will you read it?”

  She replied, “I think I’ll get some ivy for the window box.”

  She seemed mysterious and elusive to Fennie. She became pregnant again and announced the news to Fennie, and added, with her eyes large and in a calm voice, “We have to get a house.”

  Fennie said, “Ann, it’s too soon for you. You know the doctor said it was too soon.”

  “I’m not going to do anything to this baby!”

  Fennie said, “The baby, the baby. Women don’t care about their husbands. Only their toys, their dolls … that’s what Lawrence says a baby is to a woman.”

  “There’s always suffering in a marriage,” Ann said in a strangely light tone. “Everyone has it, Fennie,” she said. “We have to buy a house.”

  She chose one across the river in Alexandria. It cost thirteen thousand dollars and was made of peach-colored brick; it had white stone windowsills. An old woman had lived her last years in it and it was shabby. Ann cleaned it room by room. The house possessed, Ann thought, an undeniable goodness.

  Ann tried to be a better companion to Fennie. She read the newspapers: “Hitler is insane,” she said; “you can tell by his face” and she sat down when Fennie came home and had a drink with him and tried to get him to talk about the office. He could not get over how much having children had changed Ann. He did not trust her. “Don’t bother your little head about the office,” he said.

  “The Germans bomb civilians, you know,” Ann said vague
ly, glancing around at her backyard. “People’s houses …”

  She bought almost no furniture; many of the rooms in her house remained empty, filled with sunlight during the day but empty. “This is not a time to become attached to material possessions,” Ann said. Her house and her babies, the one born, the one not yet born, had to be taken care of and appreciated, but they could lead her astray. “People lose their moral judgment and turn into appeasers because of possessions,” she said with a kind of grief.

  The doctor said she was doing too much housework, going up and down stairs too often.

  She said, “I look like a dope fiend. I’m letting everything slide.”

  France was falling. Ann was in her seventh month. Fennie came home early one afternoon and told her the Germans had entered Paris. “The French didn’t stop them at the Marne this time?” Ann asked. She said, “We’ll have to fight now, won’t we, Fennie? Are they bombing refugees?”

  She did not like to complain or be self-indulgent during a time of crisis. It was a difficult and premature birth. The baby, a girl, was healthy but very small. Ann did not recover properly, and the doctor said she would have to have an operation. “You won’t be able to have any more children.”

  Ann refused to permit the operation. “I’m strong as a horse,” she said to Fennie. “I’ll be all right. Don’t be a worrywart.”

  Fennie told her their elder daughter kept asking for Ann. He had tears in his eyes, and he was angry, too. “Why are you so stubborn? You’re the stubbornest person I ever knew.” He said, “Children aren’t everything.”

  The doctor said to her, “You are a very high-strung, unreasonable woman.”

  “Doctor, look at your peasant woman,” Ann said. “She—”

  The doctor said, “Do you know anything about the death rate among peasant women?”

  “Is it high,” asked Ann, the statistician, “if the women aren’t overworked?”

  “All women are overworked,” the doctor said dryly. “If they’re not, they become hypochondriac. I can’t let you go home,” the doctor said. “You can hemorrhage at any time.”

  Ann said to the doctor, “My husband always wanted a son.”

  The doctor shrugged.

  Ann thought of her house and the two waiting children. She said, “I guess he will just have to do without.”

  The doctor said, “You just keep your sense of humor, Ann, and everything will be all right.”

  Five days after the operation, Ann went home.

  IT SEEMED to Ann that Fennie was as stirred and uplifted by the excitement of the war as he had once been by her. He was distended with excitement: “People don’t realize that this is Götterdämmerung,” he said. He drank at the office to keep himself going. It tired her that Fennie felt important because he was involved behind the scenes. She wanted to tell Fennie to watch the way he spoke; she needed to draw from him—she put no name to it—a sense of being worthwhile, because she could no longer draw it from herself.

  She often did not make sense when she talked. She said tactfully, “You know, the children see you when you talk as if you like the war.…” She halted. He’s a good husband, she thought. It seemed to her silly suddenly to blame him, just as it was silly to blame children—everyone knew what children were like. Goodness was not something people talked about, and anyway, she had lost her sense of moral direction. Nothing in marriage was ever settled. Marriage was not a completed state.

  Fennie broke the silence. He said, “Dearest, what are you trying to tell me?” She turned away; he was being patient with her. He was a more successful human being than she was; he was a good bureaucrat. She was not certain if she liked him anymore. She stuck out her lips. Fennie said again, “Dearest, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “I’ve forgotten,” Ann said, and gave a small, placating laugh.

  She rarely mentioned her feelings, but when she did—“I’m sad,” or “Fennie, I don’t know why I go on living”—she spoke almost lightly so that it would not cause a quarrel. Fennie would say, “You should get out more. You think about yourself too much.”

  It was as if there had been a long, long struggle between them and Fennie had won it and she didn’t care much.

  She followed her Negro maid from room to room. She said, “Last night I had the oddest dream. I was in China. I was a little, tiny, doll-like, perfect Chinese woman—” She meant one who had never undergone an operation, who was pretty and hopeful and high-spirited. “I think you missed a dust kitty under that chair, Mary Lou,” Ann said.

  Mary Lou turned a sad, furtive, half-psychotic gaze toward Ann, toward a spot to the right and above Ann’s ear, so that Ann remained an unseen, bleached presence. “Nobody ever said I wasn’ a good clean-in’ woman. I don’ lie, I don’ steal, I don’ owe a dollar to no man alive—”

  “I’ll do it. Hand me the broom. Let me tell you about my dream,” Ann said as she swept. “I had a terrible husband. I was a slave. I was black and blue from head to toe, all my children died of impetigo or beriberi except one, so I ran away. I took my baby with me. I left it in a railroad station, just for a moment. Then a bomb fell—I saw it like a tear falling. It exploded; the air rang and rang like a crystal glass when you tap it. A man was on top of me, but it wasn’t a man, it was a piece of wood—you know how dreams are. And my baby was crying in the ruins of the railroad station—have you seen that famous photograph—” Mary Lou denied having stolen any photograph. “No, no,” Ann said, “I’m talking about a photograph that was in all the newspapers years ago.”

  “I wouldn’ want one of your photographs noway,” Mary Lou said, smiling richly. “I got photographs of my own.”

  “Mary Lou,” Ann said. “Don’t you understand? I would never accuse you.” Ann trembled with sympathy for Mary Lou, whose sorrows had cramped her mind. “But listen to my dream: The railroad station was burning, but the Panay was coming to rescue us, and Wallace Beery was the captain, only it wasn’t Wallace Beery, it was Mussolini.… Mary Lou,” Ann said, “you never tell me your dreams.”

  “I has only religious dreams,” Mary Lou replied.

  Mary Lou’s skin was rough, black, exotic; she had a foreign, sweet odor, like soap. Ann followed Mary Lou with her eyes. One day Ann stubbed her toe; she cried out, lifted the hurt foot, stood, her eyes closed, her leg lifted, balanced like a heron on one foot. Mary Lou said, “Did you hurt you’self?” She uttered a low, crooning noise, “Ooo-lee-doo, oo-lee-doo, did you hurt you’self,” and put her arms around Ann. Ann leaned against her, but then she said, “I’m not going to be one of those women who turn into parasites on their maid. You have a life of your own, Mary Lou.” She pulled away from Mary Lou. “Oh, we in America owe the Negro so much!” she said.

  Mary Lou grew more careless after that; in one day, she broke a dish, a glass, a rung off the back of a dining-room chair. She was rude and shouted at the children; she pilfered Ann’s sheets. Ann told Fennie, and Fennie fired the maid. He said, “We’re doing this for your self-respect, Mary Lou.”

  SOMETIMES, on the street in Washington, Ann saw the new Selective Service inductees, freckled farm boys among them, a few with reddish-yellow hair; she could imagine what the smell of such a boy’s body would be like, the naivete of his conversation.

  Ann and Fennie went to parties, informal parties, usually held outdoors, in someone’s backyard. Often, at these affairs, the men in the earlier, soberer portion of the evening would congregate at one end of the yard to discuss the war and the government. The women chattered about servants and prices.

  Ann drank a lot because she wanted to be drunk. Then, when it grew late and the moon had risen and the men rejoined the women and boozy versions of friendliness, nostalgia, innocence, and seduction appeared, she hinted at her despair to whoever approached her. She often sat alone, bleak-eyed and erect.

  A man, his face a lopsided plate swimming in the broken dark, put his hand on Ann’s knee. Ann saw it was Fennie, and he was drunk, too. He said in his H
arold Ickes voice, “How’s life treating you, sweetie pie?”

  To Ann’s right, a voice said, “For my money, far and away your best right-handed pitcher in the major leagues today is Bucky Walters.…” Ann said, “Life is black. The Fascists are coming. I wish I was dead.”

  “Oh, you’re in a bad mood,” Fennie mumbled, and made his way off into the seesawing flurry, the feathery, flapping geese wings of voices at the party.

  AFTER Pearl Harbor, Fennie worked so late at his office that he had a bed moved in and sometimes slept there. Ann never contemplated infidelity; it would make Fennie unhappy. On a cold Thursday night, he telephoned her and said he was in love with his secretary.

  IV

  ANN THOUGHT it was bureaucratic of Fennie to break the news to her over the telephone, and she meant to be rude. She said—Fennie shared his secretary stenographically with a man named Aswell—“Doesn’t Aswell mind?”

  Fennie said, “You don’t care. You never cared.”

  “Me?” Ann said, but he had already hung up.

  He telephoned back to shout that he was nearly forty years old and had high blood pressure and deserved a little happiness before he died.

  He telephoned a third time: He wanted to bring the girl to the house; there was no reason why he, Ann, and the girl should not discuss the situation like civilized human beings, he said. Ann said, “All right, Fennie. Anything to give you a little happiness before you die.”

  Ann had not realized to what extent despair had wrapped itself around her spirit until the girl came to the house that evening with Fennie. She was Southern, young, and timid, and Ann minded terribly that the girl was brainless and had soft, plump legs—“But her legs are neither here nor there,” Ann said to herself—and she minded the girl’s compliments on the house and furniture. “What a truly lovely old house this is,” the girl said tensely. “This is the girl I love,” Fennie said. Ann said she was perfectly willing to divorce Fennie. He said—in front of the girl—that Ann was in no fit condition to make a decision. Ann said, “Then why are we talking? Why did you bring the girl here?” Fennie said Ann was making a scene, and the recriminations began.