Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  With the stick.

  When I’d screamed, I’d lifted my head—I mean I bent it upward. She may have meant to strike the eye again but she got the nostril—there was a shoving disarrangement of the center of my face and a squishing-squashing woodeny noise.

  Part of her experiment was a dabbling, so to speak, in delivering a blow in the masculine style—but she hadn’t taken on masculine attributes: she had hit me as a girl. It was a little like being underwater and watching someone stick a stick into the water and poke at you: there is a mask, a shield of refraction: the refraction in this case led to her being a floor, a masked girl dabbling.

  But her identity, for me, was packed full of history. Another girl—that is, if Nonie had been a different sort of girl, a witty one, a laugher, and had done this, the meaning of the blows would have been different: her innocence would have been proportional to her, oh, worth-to-me: it would have been almost a percentage, a twenty-five percent guilt, a lesser horror.

  But Nonie was not valuable to me as a person unless she made an effort to be nice to me—or if not an effort, so long as she was drawn to me, or needed me.

  Now she had dabbled—I would have felt another girl had not meant to hit me: but in this case, it was Nonie hit me. My sense of her guilt was total, was absolute.

  ABSOLUTE? Only in a sense. The initial emotion was partly like a blow by a pipe swathed in cloth—of it-was-impossible-she-should-hit-me, this-had-not-happened.

  The sudden accession of shock, the physical shock, the anesthesia, perhaps brought on the mental shock, the sense of impossibility, and its moral tone: the impossible is either magic or a dream.

  We need logic so desperately that the unlikely is always in effect seriously criminal. The more unlikely something is, the more it swells into a grandeur of wickedness, as the Calvinists thought.

  The thick petals of galling sensation and of numbness, of half-sickness, of darkness, were as innocent and ignorant as any flower, a blossoming of darkness. I did not live among people who thought pain was inevitable: pain has not been unmanageably ubiquitous for years.

  I was already middle-class and modern, in a sense; and I expected an immediate cure: I expected this not to have happened, to be untrue.

  But at the same time, there was—there is only the faintest hope the pain will stop now, stop at once; there is very little chance that this isn’t bad, isn’t really bad, isn’t real.

  An odd, spaceless, timeless almost floating, circling, a gradual descent, occurred, to lightlessness: a descent from, a dissent from time: this is unbearable, this endless greasy slide.

  It hurts—only a little—but it hurts enough so that there is nothing now but resignation or helplessness toward this slow discovery of just how much it hurts.

  Around this clouded waiting or ignorance is now a dull memory of the series of thumps: I hear them now, notice them only now: I felt them then: I feel their consequences now—the times are mixed up, of the noises, the wood-and-squashing noises, and those of the nerves jumping around; the sounds continue, sickeningly: the memory is stuck, wetly, fibrously, in my consciousness.

  I see, out of my eyes, in flickers, Nonie, Nonie’s face, flesh-colored: mostly I see a gray foggy wad, a dirty cotton wad that has been jammed (it seems) into my eyes or eye sockets, into the eyes themselves: a damp oppressive grayness: there is no color (colors are a special treat of well-being). My lips are supernaturally dry. In my gullet, the air drags.

  All at once, there is something like a gasping, of swollen, terrified, hysterical tissue—but this is buried, shoveled under by some hunter’s madness in me: I think, I would expect boys and girls to die differently.

  A child has an inexact fear of death, a wordless is-this-death in the way a child says is-this-the-circus?

  Animals in a ring.

  I am about to give birth—to death.

  Sensations push in and out and in all directions in me: I am full: I am a plenum of sensation: I am swollen with nausea, with self-abandonment, with I will let go, not as words, but like opening my fists: I will not resist anything: anything can emerge from me, be taken from me—I suppose, too, anything could be put into me.

  There was a simultaneous rush of unforgiveness, forever incurable.

  Thin, underlying currents and spasms of fear and violence passed beneath the resignation, the letting-go, the willed surrender (which had an unwilled part as well).

  Perhaps it would be accurate to say my pain made itself more and more known to me.

  It is not metaphorical or a figure of speech or a conceit to say that as that knowledge grew to occupy the center and the periphery of my attention, whatever else I knew seemed unimportant, and was, in a geographical sense, forgotten: that is, there was no room for it in my attention.

  My name, the value of daylight, the assurance of any logic besides that of a short statement such as I hurt, are gone, are worthless. There is a stew in me, meaty, acid, of unswallowable present consciousness of being deep inside the realities, the boundaries, of pain: this stretches forward and backward without interruption or memory or hope of another state: this is, as I said, the pain continuum.

  The nerves are lunatic more and more: with hardness, flights, stirrings, yowlings, heats, softness (a rottenness), ignorance.

  This is what she wanted.

  The actuality of internal disorder is of another life: nothing here is right except one’s own painlessness—or death: the cessation of consciousness. Pain does not have to be charted unless one is determined to escape: and then it is charted only so that one can find a way to its edge in order to see the world again. If a woman is watchfulness itself, perhaps then pain is worse for her. So far as I have experienced my life, a man does not have to notice or understand or observe or map his pain. He tries to function, and if he cannot function, he is as good as dead: pain kills him early in a way.

  Everything in me is wrong: everything in me gives off screechings, thumpings, everything is muffled and shuffling maloccurrences, forbidden stretchings, distensions, ill-advised compressions—bruisings, knot-tings—everything bears down and on the self, shrinks and leaves a sore hollow: one gags everywhere, inside oneself, from surfeit, from emptiness. The distance from here to painlessness is astronomical.

  I cannot cross such distances, they are so great.

  Maybe I will be here forever. I am as good as dead. I start to cry.

  I did function somewhat. I managed to get my vision past the gray wadding stuffed into my eyes: I sensed Nonie’s staring—her disgust, her satisfaction, which was hateful—her victory and her staring.

  I raise my hand to my face. This sense of Nonie’s looking at me, this purposeful, slow, frightened, uneasy movement of my hand, my not fainting, mean I am existing in the pain continuum—mean I am dead only in a way, I am only in part a ghost.

  It may perhaps be deeply insulting to the identity that one learns to live in pain, as in filth or poverty.

  I raised my hand to my face. I realized that in the clutter of general pain there was a fearsome tepid trickling, threads and patches of creepy semiheat on my face, on my lips: silly sidling sliding crawling fragilities and tiny pools: a furtive wormy end-of-life.

  I touched it with my hand.

  I must have known what it was but I doubted.

  I looked at my hand: my vision was wadded and gray, with speckles of clarity: I saw still-glistening gray threads, spottedly red; but I couldn’t really see color: I saw gouts, heavy, tear-shaped drops.

  Ah, now, the fantastic wrongness of everything in me is capped by a coldish fear—because of the blood. The sickness of spatial lostness, of where-am-I, where-am-I, that disorientation, now lay beneath a cold, specialized fear: flowing sheets and shiftings of cold—of cold resignation. I move my arms but only slightly: I move them to free myself from those cold sheets: but they are not to be displaced, those sheets.

  It is blood. It is blood.

  Something full-sized blunders through me: there is a stink—as of
an elephant’s passage in a narrow corridor: a smothering and a stink. Nothing in me is of quite the same importance as blood.

  Pain is lesser than blood.

  All at once, bravery becomes different: bravery becomes I-will-bear-this-filth-and-filth-to-come.

  It is as if there was no help now. I am walking: I am going for help—but it is an icy formality, this pursuit of help. There will be other pains, an entire medical sequence that will not end with the rasp of bandages on sewn soreness. Convulsions from antibiotics, sickly sleep, the stomach-turning waking to the smell of antiseptic—nausea will be inflated over and over. Blood is the boundary of a special seriousness. Or unseriousness: a silliness of constantly introduced new dislocations, wavering spacelessness (one is imprisoned), faintings, weaknesses, blackings-out, continual and spasmodic imbalances, wrongnesses: there is even an itching that is illness—that is sickening and that induces despair.

  One is crazed, dull-headed, resigned, human.

  Nonie utters a birdlike shriek, she throws one arm up into the air, she passes out.

  I make an odd, loud breathing noise—I don’t know.

  I go in search of what comfort there is for me now.

  LARGELY

  AN ORAL

  HISTORY

  OF MY

  MOTHER

  I

  THERE IS something odd about voices in memory—thinking of memory as a chamber, a state or condition of mind, and the mind’s running like a machine or a track star, that sort of state: the voice in there, the remembered voice is strange—in my memory anyway. There are unmodulated, gray sounds and unidentifiable words—I mean it is a very strange mumble, with the words indistinguishable from each other and from the gray, electrical hush of the mind, remembering, running.

  Sometimes, even with great effort, the words can’t be made clear, although I seem to know what the figure—gray-lit, somewhat obscure—is talking about; and if I wash out the figure, if I make the memory purely auditory, I often hear words, phrases, fragments of a sentence (rarely a whole sentence), and what I hear is not the voice of the person who once spoke those words; I mean the music is missing, the actual sound, the actual pitch and key, the inflections, the riding-on-the-breath thing (by which you recognize a voice on the telephone): none of that is there at all. But suddenly a sentence will appear in my head; and some identifier, some cataloguer will say, My mother said that.… Ha-ha, I think amiably; yes, she did; that’s her voice—but it isn’t her voice: it’s only her words—and part of what she meant.

  Sometimes, then, there is a room; and the room is a conglomerate of rooms I saw her in; memory fills it, but with stuff from different years, different eras, different times of day, so that the light is different where she stands from the light that surrounds me, the observer, the one who has returned to this room that never existed in this form, to this compendium of rooms. Sometimes one’s own inner voice speaks—I have an announcer who often speaks during my dreams, and who, when I am awake, makes various pronouncements from time to time: Boy, are you worn out—things like that. And he sometimes speaks for the gray-lit figure who is saying things inaudibly—he speaks for her as she once spoke for me when I was an infant; he will say something like “One thing I’ll say for myself—” which was one of her phrases at a certain stage in her life; and then maybe something like a flashbulb goes off, and all the grayness turns swiftly to color—maybe a little washed out by glare but close to actuality; and I may grasp, or almost grasp, the sound of my mother’s voice, its actual notes, and some single speech in her real tones rather than the usual laundry-hamper jumble of dozens of her speeches spoken over the years and mixed up together without the music and inflections they once had. Then if I work with this glimpse, if I go over and over that glimpse, I may find in my memory a chair she sat in when she had that voice and not a later one: then I seat her in it like a doll, and all at once I am very small and walking toward her: she is wearing a gray tweed skirt and a white blouse, maybe silk, maybe just shiny cotton, or a black dress with very large, modernist, smeared-yellow-and-green flowers on it; one hears something—not her voice but a weird mental echo, a recording, almost, of a younger woman’s voice, the words unclear but supplied, tentatively, contingently, by the announcer a moment later—by the announcer who is the master of ceremonies of my dreams, of the instruction one receives in dreams. Occasionally, the words are of this sort: she says, “Sometimes I like to lie.”

  “They say—” That’s a phrase she used very often: “they,” in “they say,” are the keepers of respectability; there were at least three different respectabilities she was interested in—that governed by certain Orthodox or nearly Orthodox old Jewish women, ancient aunts, or second cousins; that governed by our neighbors; and that governed by the two or three social levels of Jewish “society” she moved in in the nearby city when I was young and we lived in a small town not yet turned into a dormitory suburb, a small town maybe sixty miles away from The City. “They say a woman is who she marries: there’s something in that, but I never went that far. But I will say it makes a difference who your husband is, and I wasn’t lucky in the one I picked.”

  MY ORAL history of her—mine, of her—will begin, then, with my father speaking: with frequent interruptions.

  My father, S. L. Cohn—usually called S.L.: when people who spoke Yiddish wanted to make trouble they called him Esel, or donkey or ass—my father was in his thirties when I first met him. When I was adopted. I should say that when I write an “oral history of my mother” I mean an oral history of a time when Leah, or Leila, Cohn—she renamed herself—was my mother; and only part of that time, at that. Really, not the whole of her life except as it was implied—it was always implied that there was more than I knew or would come with my best efforts (which I might never make) to know.

  I think my father was generally considered a splendid-looking man, largely apricot-colored—skin and hair—and with chestnut eyes. He was big, muscular—“a war hero,” Leila often pointed out.

  Now, I want to use the voice of a woman, Leila, from a time a long ten years after the end of this story, when she existed only for a little while in an avatar or stage in a life cycle so brief, so well lit, that that stage—to switch meanings—seems to tilt, to explode with flames, to be illuminated by collapse. She spoke with melodrama—it was a matter of style, language, and conviction; she spoke like popular fiction when she told a story; she was not talented, or an innovator, verbally; so, in her account, lives are compressed, often for a reason having to do not with her vision of things so much as with her wish to be interesting or her fear that things might be actually what she melodramatically said they were. Faces, houses disappear: a pear tree in flower is never mentioned; rages, ground traversed, thoughts while lying in bed become synopsized in an intake of breath and a cliché—“S.L. wanted a son.” If I wanted, I could dilute the melodrama, push toward what I consider verisimilitude, but I want not to do that for a moment; I will try to do that in a little while.

  She is speaking—in a chatty, sort of pushily intelligent voice: she is playacting intelligence. She is perhaps mimicking Tacitus without knowing it, or rather, at her social level, some local style of aristocratic concision as she understands it, and combining that mimicry with what she knows of soap opera and movie plots: “We took you in when you was about a year and a half.” She often said “you was.” “You were in terrible shape. Your mother was dying in the Jewish hospital, in Xton”—the nearby city. “S.L. had left me. I don’t blame him; I wasn’t easy to get along with; I hadn’t married him for love—the man I loved was no good, selfish, but I always liked that type. I never was religious, but I didn’t believe in divorce. Are you old enough for me to tell you why S.L. left me? Well, partly the bloom was off the rose, but I’d had two sons who died—in infancy. I wasn’t home either time; I always had a life of my own. One time, maybe the infant was neglected. And your sister [her real daughter, Nonie]—she was too young; it was all my fault, to leave
her in charge: but that was once. The truth is, the deaths were unexplained: they hurt me. But S.L. didn’t pity me, he blamed me. One death, you see, was bad, but two—my God. I said then it was just dumb luck, but S.L. wouldn’t believe me. S.L. didn’t like Nonie, either. He left us both; he went to live with a trashy woman. To tell you the truth, I’d had my eye on you for a long time; I offered your mother money for you; I thought she’d do anything for money—she was crazy about money. She was a good mother to you: she liked you; she loved you; but she was terrible to your brother; she didn’t like him. You see, no adoption agency would put me and S.L. on the list except at the bottom, because we weren’t a religious household and those adoption people are all religious. Well, to tell you the truth, that’s partly a lie—that’s what I always said to people—but, of course, what it was, they interviewed me and S.L. and they took a look at Nonie, and they didn’t like us: we were having too good a time: those people were jealous: I was too pretty; S.L. was too selfish. And Nonie was like S.L.’s family, not smart: she was a year behind in school, and she had a bad temper. To tell you the truth, she was like S.L.’s mother: S.L. used to say that between the war and his mother it had done him in; all he wanted was a little peace. One thing I’ll say for myself, I’ll speak out, I’ll tell the truth: it hurt S.L. that people thought we were unfit to be parents—of course, he wouldn’t believe he was; he blamed it all on me; he always blamed me for everything: he was dependent on me. But I’ll tell you the truth—we were no good as parents, but he wanted to have children; and other people aren’t such hot parents, either. My father was O.K., but my mother was just what S.L. always called her—a pip. I never thought of myself as a mother, to be honest with you. But we had money then, and I knew which schools were good, and I knew a lot of nice people; I could hire a good maid—a kid wouldn’t have it so bad with us, and if he did—look, your father was illiterate, he was a junkman, a brawler; in those days, he drank. He was no good—he was a gambler and a bully; he never even kept himself clean; he was crazy—you know, he had very nice brothers and sisters, clean, good people, and his father was a very strict whaddayoucallit, an impressive man—I didn’t like him—the father: if you ask me, he was cold and mean. And who was your mother? She was a nobody. I happened to like her; I thought she had a lot to her, a lot to offer, but she was an immigrant, she spoke with an accent, all she cared about was running that godforsaken junkyard in a little town and making money: she knew nothing, and maybe she would learn, but who could tell? I’m a real learner. She was from the old country—a tinhorn, a greenhorn. She was superstitious; her father was some kind of rabbi—a crazy kind, not the regular kind; he put a curse on her if she ever stopped being Orthodox, and she was scared of the curse. And what was she doing, a bright woman like her, marrying someone like your father anyway? People warned her; she wouldn’t listen. I liked her; I asked her; she said she wasn’t afraid of nothing. She was sure he would appreciate her; she didn’t want to marry a man who would be doing a greenhorn like her a favor—she wanted to do all the favors. She said she wanted a toehold—a business. So she married a crazy man. Why wouldn’t you be at least as well off with us as with people like that? I’ll tell you one thing: she was a genius as a businesswoman; my brother Henry said so, and the one thing Henry knew was business and money; she won everybody’s respect, and it wasn’t just because she was so tough; she didn’t care what people thought of her; she didn’t flirt; she cared about two things—you and money. But you were the reason. Well, she used to come to see me, and S.L. was crazy about you; you and your mother were so close, and you were beautiful—beautiful. S.L. always went by looks, always. So when she got sick—I’ll tell you the whole story. Your father couldn’t stand it; he was like a child, a mean child; everyone respected your mother; she hid money from him; so one night he beat her up and took her by force and when she found she was pregnant she said she’d get an abortion, God or no God; but she believed in that curse; and she got sick. Then she started asking people to take you in—she didn’t care what happened to the other boy: your mother wasn’t sentimental; she crossed him right off, but she worried about you; only nobody would take you. See, some people, her people, had been jealous of her because she’d made money—and maybe she hadn’t shared it with them. And maybe they were jealous because she’d loved you—you never know how ugly people are going to be. But other people, nicer people, were scared of your father—he’d killed people—I forget who: some man, two men; it was self-defense, so he didn’t have to go to jail, but he was really violent—and they were scared of the blood you had in you; they were scared you were a jinx, and anyway everyone thought you would die anyway: you cried a lot when your mother disappeared and your father slapped you around; your nurse was drunk; you wouldn’t talk or walk anymore—you wouldn’t eat. Your mother didn’t want me to have you—she said I wasn’t serious—but what choice did she have? I went and got you anyway. My God, you were covered with sores, bruises—I threw up. I had my mother with me; she washed you; I couldn’t bear to touch you; the nurse was there, drunk, shouting, she tried to hit me—I outshouted her, I put the fear of the penitentiary into her for child murder: it was some scene, let me tell you; my heart was pounding. I knew if I took you in, if S.L. heard I had this sick child, he’d think I had a good heart, that he was wrong about me, and he’d want to help—he was very sentimental; he lived for sentiment, if you ask me. Well, he did come running. He came back to me. But everything misfires—there’s always a surprise. He came back to me, but he loved you. Oh, how he loved you.…”