Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  FROM NOW ON, I will run this history, this oral history; I will order it, arrange it.

  AT FIRST, only my nurse, a woman they hired, an Alsatian Frenchwoman named Anne Marie, could get me to eat, could feed me without my being ill. Then Nonie could do it—she was small for her age and seemed like a child to me. Then S.L., and finally Leila. They had rented a larger house, too—quite a nice house—and everyone was nice to everyone else and kept the atmosphere pleasant as part of the attempt to nurse and restore the silent and stricken child.

  They were very pleased when I first walked again, when I first tentatively smiled. I would say they experienced—oh, self-respect, and happiness.

  There is little doubt that they saved my life.

  In dreams, there is no loss without a happiness first.

  II

  NONIE BEGAN to like me less when I grew stronger, and she and I became enemies, actually; and, either by accident or on purpose, or in some combination, when I was with her she managed to hurt me—physically, I mean. And I could endure the physical pain but not the pain in my mind that Nonie was such a person and that she was not struck dead. The physical wound on this one occasion was such that I had to have stitches. I was sick with gloom, perhaps even with childish despair, at the stink of medicines and the itching and stinging, the crust of perpetual discomfort, of the roughness, of the blood scabbed and stuck to gauze bandages and to me; and the eccentric no-footing, the no-safety-against-injury feeling that one has after the violation of physical assault and harm. I could not endure the world. I had no proof, no images of human goodness that comforted me enough to make up for what I felt. Anyway, there is anesthesia in despair.

  S.L. tried often enough in those days to console me, but I would not listen to him. One afternoon, he woke me from a nap, an uneasy nap, lifted me out of bed—me, I consisted of stitches, scabs, and bandages, a head aching with bad dreams.

  He dressed me himself.

  At first, he kept his hat on. After a while, he took it off. He took me down the stairs. He held my wrist in his enormous, rough-skinned, slightly sweaty palm—a palm blankly suggestive of a meaning I could do nothing about, certainly not speak of, except stare at inwardly, blankly, from time to time—and dragged me along in a sort of chivying, let’s-play-this-game-and-you-be-excited way; but it physically hurt, the movements pulled the skin around the stitches; and furthermore I didn’t trust him anymore.

  So I made not hesitant, I-love-you-but-I-don’t-want-to-do-this noises; rather, I made I-don’t-like-this-you-are-torturing-me noises, which always—always—embarrassed him.

  And he was embarrassed—but he insisted.

  We went out the front door from the stillness of the house into the blathering, humming afternoon heat and glare of a Midwestern summer day; we went the short distance to the driveway and climbed into his car.

  I know now that Momma’s car was wrecked: she had wrecked it. The light came from everywhere into Daddy’s car and bounced on the metal, and struck me on my bandaged face, here like a bat, there like a splinter, there like a board of yellow wood. I said nothing. My father started up the car, and we drove along one of the three streets atop the ridge where our house was, past large, silent houses set, each one, that day, in hard, glaring light. You could not look directly at anything, the glare was so painful.

  I suppose the I can move around in memory as it does in dreams, changing its connection to things, its degree of relationship, its elevation. I can remember my father’s face as if I were a man, too, that day; or I can remember what the child saw: his father’s face blurs out: it grows large, moves upward, swings, is heavy with chin; I see the bottom arcs of his spectacles, I see his nostrils; the expression of his face is mysterious, somewhat frightening—the child sees that but is too sullen to understand: he merely sees, and nothing else.

  The tires make slapping noises on the stickily partly melted macadam of the street. At the edge of the ridge where the road curves down, a few houses, irregularly spaced, stand between us and the view of the town below. The sun is more merciless here. We sweep down and down into yet hotter reaches, into the lower town, and we park in front of a Buick dealer’s, and Daddy says, “How would you like to buy a car for your mother?”

  One wall of the dealer’s showroom was a mirror that went from floor to ceiling; it was the biggest mirror I’d ever seen. And two walls of the showroom were glass between you and the world; and there was a distress of reflections on them. The floor was so highly polished that my legs and bandaged, peering head (with broad horizontal ripples and considerable distortion) were repeated in it. The enormous cars around me held reflections in their paint and chrome. The number and scattering and multiples of reflections suggested not so much an infinite vanity as an infinite readying for study.

  The salesmen—there were two—were very thin, smaller than my father, very well dressed but not so well dressed as S.L. They were insinuating: good-looking with no promise of warmth, only with a promise of urgency, of thrills; I was too sore, too wounded to want their attentions, their loud voices directed at me with false affection and false admiration. Or their physical attentions: lifting me up to see a radiator ornament, for instance. My father said, “Now, watch this. I want you fellas to see—” And he took a packet of money from his pocket and said, “The young fella wants to spend six thousand dollars on a car for his mother.” He said to me, “Take a look: those are thousand-dollar bills, Alan.” He handed the money to me, and I looked, and then he took the money away from me, folded it, and put it in my shirt pocket, saying something like “You’re a rich man—you can afford to show these gentlemen how much you love your mother.”

  The money rustled in—and crowded—my shirt pocket and pressed against my chest. The mirrors around me seemed to rustle silently. As I breathed—blinked—turned—reflections fluttered. The salesmen patted me; one or both knelt to say, “He’s a good kid, isn’t he?” Daddy said later, “They smelled carrion. They smelled raw meat. They knew we were there to spend money.…”

  I walked away from the salesmen: one of them remained squatting, one knee forward, one knee up; I walked in the flicker, in the subtle storm of altering and toyed-with-perspective images and reflections of all the mirrors and mirrorlike surfaces around me; and everywhere I saw a damaged child—for some reason, my image was credible to me in my bandages, disguised, as my reflection was not when I was not marked up, not bandaged.

  My father’s voice, loud, unmusically rural—it is easier to dig up what I remember the sound of his voice to be, although the sound, the actual sound, of his voice, too, eludes me—was also hugely assertive, insistently good-natured; it insisted that you ought to be good-natured—the sound filled the showroom, not with theatricality, but with pedagogy. Daddy said to me, “Pick out any car you want, young fella—any one. You got enough money to pay for it—there’s enough there to choke a horse.”

  I looked up—uncomprehendingly. His face always had in those days a ripe-apricot, summerish, slightly swollen glamour—a thickish self-satisfaction-anger that was like a secret along my spine (sometimes I disliked it; but I breathed it in, or was stabbed with it, and then held it in me); now there was a—a tone—a metal edge, more or less hidden, hurried and exotic, like a sled runner; he was sledding, on a hot day, among the mirrors: a downhill excitement (you lay on a sled; someone lay on you; you were half suffocated; the adventure was white and swift; you were at once highly, whizzingly inadequate, and supremely, rushingly adequate—on the sled on the snow); the sled runner was a—a display—of the thing that money was easy for him, that he could—morally? out of sheer respectability, because of money?—control these men: the adventures of his comprehension, always, when I knew him, took place in abrupt installments, each of which he insisted was final.

  I remember the faint stink of the cars, the smell of men’s talcum and cologne. Above and through the other smells came Daddy’s burnt blond smell—a smell always attached to heat, the heat of the sun, of radiator
s, of his body, his blood. I saw reflections in his glasses: and there were the odors of his summer suit, wrinkled, beige, ironed carefully.

  The showroom was a place for a child’s standing still, largely waiting for the grownups while, with limited comprehension, he spied on what was going on. If he did anything, someone would say, “Here, don’t do that—you’ll hurt yourself.”

  But the money, folded up (and smelling of paper), that was in my pocket, not far from my bandaged chin, not far from my eyes and nose and my father’s craziness, tilted the world and made me the ruler of this grownup place.

  I wasn’t sure at first that he could manage it, that the money could manage it. I disbelieved him partly because I had begun to learn that he was, in certain ways, to be disbelieved always. His love was tricky; I guess one of the first things you learn when you’re a child is to say “I don’t believe you,” or if not to say it to think it while you turn your face away politely.

  I did not want to be a fool. I was partly seasick from the mirrored flutterings. The final, hard sense of the actuality he was offering me, of what I could do now, was like when I was one of the dozen children on a lawn who stood still, who had not yet begun to play.

  Why should it be cheering to own the attention of salesmen anyway?

  Also, I did not want life to happen, I did not want to be cheered up. To want something, to enjoy something, to enjoy what my father was doing would have meant to feel again along my nerves, excitedly, the terrible surprises and then no-surprises of my usual living rather than the glum, half-mad endurance of enjoying nothing, of being hardly aware of pain, of being without hope in the manner of a wounded child.

  But it was a temptation. To have the say-so of a grownup. The child became taut-bodied, like a dog watching a stick being waved in the air. I was almost willing to want this, to half want it anyway: to condescend to want it—gracelessly, with half a spirit only, not like a dog, like a child, a suspicious, spoiled, handsome child.

  My father was, in his affections, full of pretendings; he was an older kid, rebellious, covered with weeds, with dirt—he looked to one side of me, over my head. He was uplifted—and—soft—willful—rounded—apricot-colored—breathing rapidly in the conditioned air; he had a bold toughness of manner, an excitement in his rights as a customer, a rough implicitness. He was at the center of what was happening; he was both hard and soft, he was I-will, I-can, and I-choose, and that odd addendum I’m-not-a-bad-man-I-will-make-this-child-happy.

  Was it merely power he gave me? Power for the moment as in a game of cops-and-robbers when you hold a toy pistol? Fantasy? Sometimes it seems to me, looking back, what we had was a love affair similar to a grownup one; and this was a moment as in a movie in which a man takes his mistress to Monte Carlo and confers on her staggering glamour, almost a royalty.

  He gave me the salesmen, their pride, this place as a playground. He bound it all up, he controlled part of the grownup world, he stamped it flat and held it still—for me—to climb on, to play with as I wished.

  He wore a look of rising above the greed that animated the salesmen—he didn’t like to be careful about money; he was laughing at cars, at the salesmen, at their world, at grownups. The salesmen grew more and more oblique, oily, and resentful: each jeered at my father beneath a deference. It was as if I could see under a table, or under a stretched sheet, what they were doing: they were hating us.

  They would not full-heartedly enter my father’s project of pleasing the hurt child.

  I was pleased; I was proud, ashamed of us, tentatively arrogant. I sort of sadly enjoyed myself. I touched a car’s metal—left finger marks—I thought my father was wrong to arouse so much enmity, but it was stirring to be this proud. A worm, a canker of half-amusement, of personal superiority—to people like these, to caring about money, finger marks, these people’s lives—began to buoy me up, bear me along.

  I kept seeing reflections: a bandaged child kneeled near a hubcap, looked into a bumper, and was seen in each; each car was printed with images of me if I went near it. Once, I took the money out of my pocket and unfolded it and held it up to the mirror and looked at its reflection.

  Toward the end, I looked at the cars in the mirror: I walked along the mirror and poked with my finger or laid my entire palm and fingers on part of the reflection of a car.

  I asked Daddy to help me get inside one of the cars. He told me to tell one of the salesmen to do it. They both came over. One opened the car door, and they lifted me—one of them did—onto the seat behind the steering wheel. I grasped the steering wheel, looked out the windshield. I climbed out again, went over to Daddy, took his hand, and just stood there.

  “Are you through?” he said. “Is that the one you want?”

  I nodded. I’d chosen THE BLUE ONE.

  DADDY INSISTED they let us drive the blue car home then and there—he said he’d bring it in the next day for servicing: he overrode the salesmen and the manager; a wall, a part of a wall, lifted, and we drove down a ramp and into the sunlight, which was like an itchy yellow serge rolled and stuffed everywhere. Patches of palely centered, stilled light were hung on lampposts, aluminum screens, on all visible metal and glass. (The inferiority of other people showed itself in the inferiority of their consolations.) I felt sick from the crossplay of excitement and the cramped grayness of the spirit of being wounded. The car was odorous, full of plumpish slidings, and specialness. I heard the tires thumping on the street.

  The street turned left and began to rise so steeply that when you saw this rise in the road, if you were in a good temper you grew excited because the car might somersault backward. Your eyes grew big: you rose up onto your knees and stared—and waited.

  Very quickly it happened that out the window on my father’s side of the car roofs appeared, an expanse of sky with chimney stacks in it, the distant towers of a bridge: the sweet and silent simplification was like a hand sweeping away a city and making a clear, spiritual space for the rich, for the specially consoled.

  Daddy’s joke or game—of having me buy the car—seemed to happen with more reality, more good humor, in memory. Pain-with-hope is like climbing on something when you’re quite young: you may scratch your knees, lose your breath, and be frightened to boot; but you’re somewhere, there is more than pain: perhaps there is a ring around the pain of a sense of accomplishment.