Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  AT ALL TIMES, and in all places, there is always the possibility that I will start to speak or will be looking at something and I will feel his face covering mine, as in a kiss and as a mask, turned both ways like that: and I am inside him, his presence, his thoughts, his language: I am languageless then for a moment, an automaton of repetition, a bagged piece of an imaginary river of descent.

  I can’t invent everything for myself: some always has to be what I already know: some of me always has to be him.

  When he picked me up, my consciousness fitted itself to that position: I remember it—clearly. He could punish me—and did—by refusing to lift me, by denying me that union with him. Of course, the union was not one-sided: I was his innocence—as long as I was not an accusation, that is. I censored him—in that when he felt himself being, consciously, a father, he held back part of his other life, of his whole self, his shadows, his impressions, his adventures would not readily fit into me—what a gross and absurd rape that would have been.

  So he was careful—he walked on eggs—there was an odd courtesy of his withdrawal behind his secrets, his secret sorrows and horrors, behind the curtain of what-is-suitable-for-a-child.

  Sometimes he becomes simply a set of limits, of walls, inside which there is the caroming and echoing of my astounding sensibility amplified by being his son and in his arms and aloft; and he lays his sensibility aside or models his on mine, on my joy, takes his emotional coloring from me, like a mirror or a twin: his incomprehensible life, with its strengths, ordeals, triumphs, crimes, horrors, his sadness and disgust, is enveloped and momentarily assuaged by my direct and indirect childish consolation. My gaze, my enjoying him, my willingness to be him, my joy at it, supported the baroque tower of his necessary but limited and maybe dishonest optimism.

  ONE TIME, he and Momma fought over money and he left: he packed a bag and went. Oh, it was sad and heavy at home. I started to be upset, but then I retreated into an impenetrable stupidity: not knowing was better than being despairing. I was put to bed and I did fall asleep; I woke in the middle of the night: he had returned and was sitting on my bed—in the dark—a huge shadow in the shadows. He was stroking my forehead. When he saw my eyes open, he said in a sentimental, heavy voice, “I could never leave you—”

  He didn’t really mean it: I was an excuse; but he did mean it—the meaning and not-meaning were like the rise and fall of a wave in me, in the dark outside of me, between the two of us, between him and me (at other moments he would think of other truths, other than the one of he-couldn’t-leave-me). He bent over sentimentally, painedly, not nicely, and he began to hug me; he put his head down, on my chest; my small heartbeat vanished into the near, sizable, anguished, angular, emotion-swollen one that was his. I kept advancing swiftly into wakefulness, my consciousness came rushing and widening blurredly, embracing the dark, his presence, his embrace. It’s Daddy, it’s Daddy—it’s dark still—wakefulness rushed into the dark grave or grove of his hugely extended presence. His affection. My arms stumbled: there was no adequate embrace in me—I couldn’t lift him. I had no adequacy yet except that of my charm or what-have-you, except things the grownups gave me—not things: traits, qualities. I mean, my hugging his head was nothing until he said, “Oh, you love me.… You’re all right.…”

  MOMMA SAID: “They are as close as two peas in a pod—they are just alike—that child and Charley. That child is God to Charley.…”

  HE DIDN’T always love me.

  In the middle of the night that time, he picked me up after a while, he wrapped me in a blanket, held me close, took me downstairs in the dark; we went outside, into the night; it was dark and chilly but there was a moon—I thought he would take me to the wall but he just stood on our back deck. He grew tired of loving me; he grew abstracted and forgot me: the love that had just a moment before been so intently and tightly clasping and nestling went away, and I found myself released, into the cool night air, the floating damp, the silence, with the darkened houses around us.

  I saw the silver moon, heard my father’s breath, felt the itchiness of the woolen blanket on my hands, noticed its wool smell. I did this alone and I waited. Then, when he didn’t come back, I grew sleepy and put my head down against his neck: he was nowhere near me. Alone in his arms, I slept.

  OVER AND OVER a moment seems to recur, something seems to return in its entirety, a name seems to be accurate: and we say it always happens like this. But we are wrong, of course.

  I was a weird choice as someone for him to love.

  So different from him in the way I was surprised by things.

  I am a child with this mind. I am a child he has often rescued.

  Our attachment to each other manifests itself in sudden swoops and grabs and rubs of attention, of being entertained, by each other, at the present moment.

  I ask you, how is it possible it’s going to last?

  SOMETIMES WHEN we are entertained by each other, we are bold about it, but just as frequently it seems embarrassing, and we turn our faces aside.

  HIS RECOLLECTIONS of horror are more certain than mine. His suspicions are more terrible. There are darknesses in me I’m afraid of, but the ones in him don’t frighten me but are like the dark in the yard, a dark a child like me might sneak into (and has)—a dark full of unseen shadowy almost glowing presences: the fear, the danger, are desirable—difficult—with the call-to-be-brave: the childish bravura of I must endure this (knowing I can run away if I choose).

  The child touches with his pursed, jutting, ignorant lips the large, handsome, odd, humid face of his father, who can run away too. More dangerously.

  He gave away a car of his that he was about to trade in on a new one: he gave it to a man in financial trouble; he did it after seeing a movie about crazy people being loving and gentle with each other and everyone else: Momma said to Daddy, “You can’t do anything you want—you can’t listen to your feelings—you have a family.…”

  After seeing a movie in which a child cheered up an old man, he took me to visit an old man who probably was a distant relative, and who hated me at sight, my high coloring, the noise I might make, my father’s affection for me: “Will he sit still? I can’t stand noise. Charley, listen, I’m in bad shape—I think I have cancer and they won’t tell me—”

  “Nothing can kill a tough old bird like you, Ike.…”

  The old man wanted all of Charley’s attention—and strength—while he talked about how the small threads and thicker ropes that tied him to life were being cruelly tampered with.

  Daddy patted me afterward, but oddly he was bored and disappointed in me, as if I’d failed at something.

  He could not seem to keep it straight about my value to him or to the world in general; he lived at the center of his own intellectual shortcomings and his moral pride: he needed it to be true, as an essential fact, that goodness—or innocence—was in him or was protected by him, and that, therefore, he was a good man and superior to other men, and did not deserve certain common masculine fates—horrors—tests of his courage—certain pains. It was necessary to him to have it be true that he knew what real goodness was and had it in his life.

  Perhaps that was because he didn’t believe in God, and because he felt (with a certain self-love) that people, out in the world, didn’t appreciate him and were needlessly difficult—“unloving”: he said it often—and because it was true he was shocked and guilty and even enraged when he was “forced” into being unloving himself, or when he caught sight in himself of such a thing as cruelty, or cruel nosiness, or physical cowardice—God, how he hated being a coward—or hatred, physical hatred, even for me, if I was coy or evasive or disinterested or tired of him: it tore him apart literally—bits of madness, in varying degrees, would grip him as in a Greek play: I see his mouth, his salmon-colored mouth, showing various degrees of sarcasm—sarcasm mounting into bitterness and even a ferocity without tears that always suggested to me, as a child, that he was near tears but had forgotten in his ferocity
that he was about to cry.

  Or he would catch sight of some evidence, momentarily inescapable—in contradictory or foolish statements of his or in unkept promises that it was clear he had never meant to keep, had never made any effort to keep—that he was a fraud; and sometimes he would laugh because he was a fraud—a good-hearted fraud, he believed—or he would be sullen or angry, a fraud caught either by the tricks of language, so that in expressing affection absentmindedly he had expressed too much; or caught by greed and self-concern: he hated the evidence that he was mutable as hell: that he loved sporadically and egoistically, and often with rage and vengeance, and that madness I mentioned earlier: he couldn’t stand those things; he usually forgot them, but sometimes when he was being tender, or noble, or self-sacrificing, he would sigh and be very sad—maybe because the good stuff was temporary. I don’t know. Or sad that he did it only when he had the time and was in the mood. Sometimes he forgot such things and was superbly confident—or was that a bluff?

  I don’t know. I really can’t speak for him.

  * * *

  I LOOK at my hand and then at his; it is not really conceivable to me that both are hands: mine is a sort of hand. He tells me over and over that I must not upset him—he tells me of my power over him—I don’t know how to take such a fact—is it a fact? I stare at him. I gasp with the ache of life stirring in me—again: again: again—I ache with tentative and complete and then again tentative belief.

  For a long time piety was anything at all sitting still or moving slowly and not rushing at me or away from me but letting me look at it or be near it without there being any issue of safety-about-to-be-lost.

  This world is evasive.

  But someone who lets you observe him is not evasive, is not hurtful, at that moment: it is like in sleep where the other waits—the Master of Dreams—and there are doors, doorways opening into farther rooms where there is an altered light, and which I enter to find—what? That someone is gone? That the room is empty? Or perhaps I find a vista, of rooms, of archways, and a window, and a peach tree in flower—a tree with peach-colored flowers in the solitude of night.

  I AM DYING of grief, Daddy. I am waiting here, limp with abandonment, with exhaustion: perhaps I’d better believe in God.…

  MY FATHER’S virtues, those I dreamed about, those I saw when I was awake, those I understood and misunderstood, were, as I felt them, in dreams or wakefulness, when I was a child, like a broad highway opening into a small dusty town that was myself; and down that road came bishops and slogans, Chinese processions, Hasidim in a dance, the nation’s honor and glory in its young people, baseball players, singers who sang “with their whole hearts,” automobiles and automobile grilles, and grave or comic bits of instruction. This man is attached to me and makes me light up with festal affluence and oddity; he says, “I think you love me.”

  He was right.

  HE WOULD move his head—his giant face—and you could observe in his eyes the small town that was me in its temporary sophistication, a small town giving proof on every side of its arrogance and its prosperity and its puzzled contentment.

  He also instructed me in hatred: he didn’t mean to, not openly: but I saw and picked up the curious buzzing of his puckered distastes, a nastiness of dismissal that he had: a fetor of let-them-all-kill-each-other. He hated lots of people, whole races: he hated ugly women.

  He conferred an odd inverted splendor on awfulness—because he knew about it: he went into it every day. He told me not to want that, not to want to know about that: he told me to go on being just the way I was—“a nice boy.”

  When he said something was unbearable, he meant it; he meant he could not bear it.

  In my memories of this time of my life, it seems to be summer all the time, even when the ground is white: I suppose it seems like summer because I was never cold.

  AH: I wanted to see.…

  My father, when he was low (in spirit), would make rounds, inside his head, checking on his consciousness, to see if it was safe from inroads by the unbearable: he found an all-is-well in a quiet emptiness.…

  In an uninvadedness, he found the weary complacency and self-importance of All is Well.

  (The women liked invasions—up to a point.)

  ONE DAY he came home, mysterious, exalted, hatted and suited, roseate, handsome, a little sweaty—it really was summer that day. He was exalted—as I said—but nervous toward me, anxious with promises.

  And he was, oh, somewhat angry, justified, toward the world, toward me, not exactly as a threat (in case I didn’t respond) but as a jumble.

  He woke me from a nap, an uneasy nap, lifted me out of bed, me, a child who had not expected to see him that afternoon—I was not particularly happy that day, not particularly pleased with him, not pleased with him at all, really.

  He dressed me himself. At first he kept his hat on. After a while, he took it off. When I was dressed, he said, “You’re pretty sour today,” and he put his hat back on.

  He hustled me down the stairs; he held my wrist in his enormous palm—immediate and gigantic to me and blankly suggestive of a meaning I could do nothing about except stare at blankly from time to time in my childish life.

  We went outside into the devastating heat and glare, the blathering, humming afternoon light of a Midwestern summer day: a familiar furnace.

  We walked along the street, past the large, silent houses, set, each one, in hard, pure light. You could not look directly at anything; the glare, the reflections were too strong.

  Then he lifted me in his arms—aloft.

  He was carrying me to help me because the heat was bad—and worse near the sidewalk, which reflected it upward into my face—and because my legs were short and I was struggling, because he was in a hurry and because he liked carrying me, and because I was sour and blackmailed him with my unhappiness, and he was being kind with a certain—limited—mixture of exasperation-turning-into-a-degree-of-mortal-love.

  OR IT WAS another time, really early in the morning, when the air was partly asleep, partly adance, but in veils, trembling with heavy moisture. Here and there, the air broke into a string of beads of pastel colors, pink, pale green, small rainbows, really small, and very narrow. Daddy walked rapidly. I bounced in his arms. My eyesight was unforced—it bounced, too. Things were more than merely present: they pressed against me: they had the aliveness of myth, of the beginning of an adventure when nothing is explained as yet.

  All at once we were at the edge of a bankless river of yellow light. To be truthful, it was like a big, wooden beam of fresh, unweathered wood: but we entered it: and then it turned into light, cooler light than in the hot humming afternoon but full of bits of heat that stuck to me and then were blown away, a semiheat, not really friendly, yet reassuring: and very dimly sweaty; and it grew, it spread: this light turned into a knitted cap of light, fuzzy, warm, woven, itchy: it was pulled over my head, my hair, my forehead, my eyes, my nose, my mouth.

  So I turned my face away from the sun—I turned it so it was pressed against my father’s neck mostly—and then I knew, in a childish way, knew from the heat (of his neck, of his shirt collar), knew by childish deduction, that his face was unprotected from the luminousness all around us: and I looked; and it was so: his face, for the moment unembarrassedly, was caught in that light. In an accidental glory.

  PUBERTY

  SOMETIMES in New York, I can create a zone of amusement and doubt around me by saying I was a Boy Scout.

  I am forty-four years old now, bearded—I suppose I have a certain personal ambience that makes Boy Scouthood unlikely.

  I don’t think it’s my fault.

  I wAs a Boy Scout in 1942. I was about five seven, newly grown from five two or three; I was temporarily deformed, with short squat legs and feet that were nearly square—the arches had grown but I still had a child’s toes. I had other physical anomalies of that sort: big knees and stick-like thighs.

  My balls had dropped; my prick had started to grow—it
was about five inches, not particularly thin, large for a child’s—it was still growing.

  I was by some standards of measurement the smartest child in the state of Missouri. I was, am, Jewish and had been very ugly and was still, as well as deformed, but I was slowly turning, slowly showing a pale, transparent physical quality, which in the suburb where I lived at that time was called “cute”—it didn’t mean cuddly: it meant interesting—I think. My ears stuck out: I had them pinned back when I was in college, grown tired of the problem posed when one’s appearance lies about what one is like. My father had heart trouble and was something of an invalid; he dabbled in the black market—there was a war and rationing. My mother was mentally unwell. I mention these things because they made up my social position.

  The Boy Scout troops I knew about were, each one, attached to a church—or a temple; I don’t believe synagogues bothered. Each troop had a social rank according to the social rank of the church or temple that founded it.

  It cost money to belong to a Reform temple: you had to have that extra money and be willing to enter on the confused clashing of social climbing and Anglo-Saxon mimicry and personal loneliness and religion as a set of tenets and questions about the secular, the fate of Jews, and the nature of guilt—such things as that—in the Middle West, among the cornfields. We had Sunday school and confirmation—nothing Jewish except the rabbi’s nose: it was the boniest, largest, most hooked nose I ever saw, ever in my life; he also used his hands a lot when he talked. He was reputed to be “a good speaker,” but I believe it was his nose and hands, his physical status as a Jew—I don’t remember him ever making a religious remark or showing any interest in anything to do with the spirit—that enabled him to force a salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, in 1942, from the Russo-Jewish magnates—well-tailored, quick-eyed, bad-tempered, secretive, restless, and clever—who ran the temple.