Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  That one was more like three little ones, diminishing in strength. When she was quieter, she was gasping, she said, “Oh, you love me.…”

  That, too, excited her. When that died down, she said—angrily—“I always knew they were doing it wrong, I always knew there was nothing wrong with me.…” And that triggered a little set of ripples. Sometime earlier, without knowing it, I’d begun to cry. My tears fell on her thighs, her belly, her breasts, as I moved up, along her body, above her, to lie atop her. I wanted to hold her, my face next to hers; I wanted to hold her. I slid my arms in and under her, and she said, “Oh, Wiley,” and she tried to lift her arms, but she started to shake again; then, trembling anyway, she lifted her arms and hugged me with a shuddering sternness that was unmistakable; then she began to cry, too.

  PLAY

  SOMETIMES WHEN I wake, I am eleven years old; and the underside of the bedsprings, the rows of coils that face me, sag, squeak, clatter against the wooden bed frame, flabbily press air—a slow sound—when I grip the curved enameled wires of the coils with my hands and bare feet, and move horizontally, hand over hand, foot over foot. No part of me touches the floor. I can climb sideways or toward the foot or head of the bed, my head in any direction. I am in my underpants and otherwise naked. And sweaty. That child’s bare feet are crudely large, intrusions from next year’s body. The weighty endowments to come shove and push unimaginably at a mind that refuses to name or predict them, shove and push at the childish bones and skin, too; his wrists have a grossness no other part of his arms yet has. Some time-ridden force hives and swarms in him, with no due proportion, swelling out here and there, enlarging his lips: his mouth is dull and harsh, the lips flattened planes, unchildish in his high-colored face; his eyes are cold, abstract, and hurt and vengeful eleven-year-old eyes; whatever hives in him secretes a honey and he has pale, summer skin, but also secretes a venom and he is sullen; his disposition is rough, unhoneyed, cynical, bloated with impatience. He is, with desperate weariness and unamusement, sly. He is not under the bed alone; he is with another child, one considerably smaller, seven years old, perhaps. The other child is in his underpants, and barefooted, and lies atop him as he climbs, suspended, on the underside of the bedsprings. The other child clings with his arms around my neck, his legs slide from side to side within the guardrails of my skimpy thighs; I shift my abdomen often to change the plane on which he slides, to block or interrupt a slide, to contradict the loose bony slippage of his uncoordinated frame on me: he bounces and bumps and slips on my abdomen and chest. I scuttle within the confines of a game of Tarzan. If his mother or grandmother comes in, they may or may not object; I don’t care. The bed-springs are a matted tangle of jungle growth; sweatily, intensely, I disturb the dust of habitation in the half-grave beneath the bed.

  Any memory of private play that year would be of play in barely lit garages or thin-windowed basements, in the most distant and the weediest parts of fields, in the corners or on the hidden side of roofs of half-built houses, or in the hidden tunnels in clumps of shrubbery, among the prickle-edge leaves and nagging spines of evergreens, or on tree branches leafed in, or in windowless shanty-clubhouses, by candlelight at noon, anywhere out of sight—perhaps I speak only of myself. I wanted to be unobserved. Boys and girls already adolescent mysteriously shamed me by their notice or even their mere presence, grownups wore me out and humiliated me—younger children spied and bore tales, were stings administered by another world: all faces held the threat or actuality of humiliation closing in; to be eleven was humiliating, the powerlessness, the lie of looking like a child still; we had been more lovable a few years before; now we got on everybody’s nerves. In our view, we were the only true humans, the only complete, rational beings, clearer-headed than angels—no adult understood this. They thought we stammered with unease; it was with contempt. We did not believe we were temporary; we were too rational for miracles, for puberty; there was no hair on me below that of my eyelashes except childish fuzz—we waited. I had almost the cold heart and the will and austere obsessiveness of a man. Not quite. The moment before puberty is perhaps the clearest-minded of any but it is full of errors: still, we were all brain, eyes, logic, will, and a working coldness. I did not believe in time and change, in anyone’s honesty or promises—my cynicism was absolute. What passionate, relentless scoffers we were. We were like actors in a movie who know they will be murdered shortly, and everything about them, arms, legs, soul, will be carted away, will vanish from the plot, and not our parents, not our friends, not even memory would find us again. We were as cold and sly and temporary, as full of basking and venom, and with a peculiar suitable treacherous cold irking beauty, as snakes.

  It was dark under the bed, a gray-lit—not a green-tinged—jungle, and the smell of dust took the place of the smell of leaves. Randolph was pretty and he was dull. We had no language of useful abuse; it was all done in inflection: Him? As I understood it, nothing could come before a game, not one’s mother’s fears, not one’s own. There could be no safety, no prearranged rules, no set order to appeal to: everything was re-created every day; yesterday’s everything died in one’s sleep, in the furnace of one’s dreams; what dreams allowed to stand, luck burned: your friends were busy or had allied themselves to someone else or had entered some other sphere of influence, or you had. To appeal to logic or any law outside immediate precedent, to any law outside childhood and a range of two days, was to be past our ability to describe in language the sort of person you were and why it was no good to play with you. The only acceptable mental set was that of a profoundly irreconcilable anarchist. I don’t know how much we lied, how attached we were to logic and safety after all—I don’t think much. To a sickening extent, the real world was curtained off from us: we tried to make our world real; we were grubby, we were little militarists, soldiers in a garrison town. Would we be six feet tall? Would we be creepy? What would luck do to us? While we waited, we thought it shameful to be organized in any way. To be a Little Leaguer was a terrible thing. We liked to explore sewer outlets and the sewers themselves; we liked to hunt rats; we put rat corpses on streetcar tracks and studied the parts of the exploded cadavers—“Lookit the thing like a bean.” We liked to sit around in grubby, abandoned places, derelict corners of the park, and say crude things about our teachers. We had moments of fastidiousness and delicacy, of concentration, and of limpness. We doted on violence; we were sexually inadequate; the rage spilled out: we liked banditry, thievishness, treachery. We liked to spit on the floor of the garages of Catholic families. We vandalized sporadically. You could be crazy and ugly, but as long as you realized other people were alive and as long as you had no rules, you were eligible for companionship. But no rules—none of that leverage. We were sick to death of innocence.

  Randolph was a lousy playmate; he didn’t realize the bedsprings didn’t squeak, it was the monkeys chattering. When I told him, he said, “Monkeys?” Then he said, “Tell me again.” What he liked was being told. His mother was close to my mother, and Randolph had a little-child’s crush on me, so I had to play with him. But I was ashamed of it and was playing this naked game in order to get something not too boring out of it and also maybe to shock his mother and get that over with. You could snort and refuse to play and say sharply to someone, “Aw, you don’t do it right,” and stalk off, but then the mother of who you stalked off from might strike back through the school psychologist, who was erratic as hell and might accuse you of being unstable: then it was war between the families and between teachers at school, some of whom thought you were crazy and some of whom liked you: to the towers, to the towers. The phrase was It is hopeless. Randolph is uplifted by the rapture of hearing an untrue statement made with passionate faith in its usefulness inside a frame of pleasure and for no other purpose except selfishness; the delight for him is not in the logic that opens out of any game and one’s adherence to the game; his delight was in the willfulness of speaking the blasphemies of private imagination as truths. He will be
a lawyer, an advertising man, a drunken grammatical loveless poet, a wit who does not amuse. The idea of willed pleasure will always exalt him because of the trick of it, which he will never have but will claim to have. He will at intimate moments make the wrong confession. The unhappiness he experiences bores me—not all unhappiness is worth respect. He will maybe never realize he is boring and plays games badly. He expected to be liked, to be a toy; his mother and grandmother had reared him as a toy for themselves; he was pruned and undone, a harem male. He was startled into a dependent, tense, always brief, and soon doubting pleasure, by whatever I said. He keeps his arms around my neck, his body lies on mine, and he waits to be amazed some more. Meanwhile I maneuver in the scrofulous hot jungle dust beneath the bed, acting out my notions of adventure and of physical splendor, and I largely ignore him.

  MY FATHER has been ill; he’s had a series of heart attacks; sometimes he asks me to sit near him; he holds my hand and tells me bitter things; sometimes almost with dim amusement, as if from a great distance, as if he floated out away from everyone on an inner sea, he refuses to be interested in something I ask him; he will say, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do—you know how to be a fool all by yourself.” He says it often with affection, a kind of affection; he makes jokes of that kind; I don’t understand why he doesn’t worry about me.

  My mother is a very pretty, overweight, tense woman, who has had a large-scale social life which is done for, for the moment. She says of my father, “He pities no one but himself.” She nagged him to try harder to live; he told her to be gentler, to smile, to be nice; she said, “I can’t be a fool just to make you happy—be reasonable.” My father had decided he hated her, and his hatred was slow and far and unrelenting; he called her Madame The Great Horned Toad and Your Highness Our Own Killer Bitch and Mrs. Hellmouth. She did not think much of the masculine sensibility; she thought my father and I ought to be inspired by our feelings for her and do great things for her; but my father did not want just to be a father, breadwinner, husband, man uplifted by love, and she didn’t want to deal with him as a person. She was willing to play her roles for him for a while—she did not expect him or want him, maybe, to see her as a person, but to love her instead. She was casual that way. My mother made me play with Randolph. She liked to make me do things. She would say, “Take off my shoes for me—I’m all worn out.” But I didn’t want to; if I refused, there might be no dinner. She minds it that I am young, that she is supposed to take care of me, that I am a boy and will never be stuck as she has been as a nurse for someone. In an idle, terrible way she hates being a nurse and lets herself be cruel. She tells my father it makes her sick to take care of him—there is more to her than a maid and a cook. She often tries to wheedle me or crazily orders me to run the house—“Fix your father’s dinner—if it isn’t cooked right, he won’t kill you—you’re the one he likes.” She said, “I suppose you expect me to give you a happy childhood?” They were all crazy.

  She was fond of me in a way, but now that my father was ill people were concerned about me and not about her: they expected her to sacrifice herself. She gets even for that, she endangers me, in a casual way; in a casual way, she indulges her moods, her impulses. She is good-looking and dangerous and aging. Other people say that of her, that she is dangerous and aging. I know she feels animosity toward me, and she lets herself feel it, and I am sickened and afraid, but what should I do? My father tells me to have nothing to do with her. When I avoid her, she cries and says, “You, too, you’re going to turn on me?” It is part of my wildness, those tears of hers, the animosity and then those tears.

  I tried to avoid going to play with Randolph. That is, I made myself invisible, I forgot invitations, but my mother outwaited me. She said, “Don’t be so full of yourself. Be more willing to do someone a favor. Maybe he’ll help you someday. You never know what will happen—you might have a good time. You should be flattered he likes you. Believe me, you haven’t an easy personality to like.”

  She began to yell, “Go play with him! Don’t make a fool of me in front of his mother! I owe her a favor! Be kind to someone for a change! It won’t hurt you!”

  IN THAT SUBURB, among boys my age, games of acquisition and of gambling, marbles, trading baseball cards, playing mumblety-peg for stakes, or tossing pennies, and games of real or of mock violence, peashooter wars, cops and robbers (with mock brawls, mock agony, often elaborate plots), Robin Hood, Tarzan, Space Search, and Torture, were more common than sports. We played scratch baseball, stoop ball, stick-ball, catch, touch football, wall ball, and various two-man games of imaginary baseball; it was hard when you were young to get up a real baseball game; we did not have easy access to a field, and if we got the field, older boys or grownups could easily dislodge us and take over; and where could we get eighteen kids anyway? Our parents sometimes lobbied for or paid for or set up sports to keep us from the happy nastiness of children, from our other games, but my parents did not have any interest in sports, and I had perhaps a larger acquaintance with the nastiness—and liked it more—than other children did. I don’t know that that was so. Our powerlessness, the reality of that physical fact, was dinned into us over and over: you might get asked to fill in on a baseball team of older boys, but your reach, your power at the plate were so limited that any older boy who showed up was welcomed and you were kicked off.

  Of the games we could control, Torture was, from the time we were six until we were about ten and began to have the coordination and freedom for large-scale activities and actual bullying, the most common game. It was most often played by three children, but the third was really more a referee, a magical companion, a safety factor. It was popular in spurts and not everyone played it all the time but everyone played it some, everyone who was a player—there were children we did not play with, who were what their parents wanted them to be, and who we thought were disgusting (and maybe the future belonged to them: we didn’t know). Not all children have free will; and among those who have it, some have it more than others. Inflexible children, those who could not explore a moment’s exotic possibilities and perversities, were excluded. Torture was straightforward: one of you was a captive and was helpless; the game hardly ever involved escape. Usually the central drama was that of interrogation; you could rise up and try to hit or actually did hit your interrogator, but then he or she would bring down an imaginary whip and you had to howl in agony. Girls played, too, but they were very strange, not easily controlled. In most cases, no real pain was essential; there were other games where the pain had to be real, but then it was shared or mutually inflicted. The basic plot of Torture was helplessness, and the reality of ruthlessness, and the survival of the will or its breaking. When you were very young, you played with everything imaginary—chains, whips, branding irons—but you might use an old shoelace or a piece of string as a lash: you know what children are like. Among the children I played with, the girls were the first to become realistic: cuticle scissors for stabbing (not deeply) or clipping off bits of the padded finger end. It was odd, and funny, that at that point Torture often turned into her giving you a manicure: the game’s voltage was too full of intimations, had too much resonance, was too nasty, and we would, as it were, forget what we were doing and slide into something else.