Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  She claimed in an apparently tactful way—between outbreaks of her outrageous temper and cruelty of speech—to have a broader mind and broader perspective than other people; she claimed to be a woman who laughed at all pretensions, who was without self-pity, who condemned no one. She said of one of her relatives, “Well, she was always a lesbian, you know; she held on to her dignity; I felt sorry for her husband and children—you never saw such confused children in your life, sweet but confused: the boy is tender; and the girl is tied up in knots, she’s so boyish. Well, live and let live, I always say—I don’t blame anyone: it’s a hard life but it’s all we have; it’s a good life if you don’t weaken.”

  She said, “I know how to laugh at myself.”

  She said, “I know who I am: I’m Leila Cohn. You’d think after all this time, after all I’ve been through, that name would mean a lot to people, but it only means me—of course, I’m somebody still—ha-ha.”

  She said, “I don’t like to swear, but women have a goddamned hard row to hoe.”

  She grew narrower and more intense—just as prejudice said about middle-aged women.

  Less sensible, less well-informed, more selfish, more willful.

  Momma.

  I BECAME aware all at once, when I was five—I mean the thought became clear, although it was wordless (I was sitting in the back seat of a car she was driving: she was in the front seat with Anne Marie)—that Momma was now half mad with impatience and maybe exhaustion and a kind of fear and a nothingness.

  And another time: I was crossing a lawn, me and two other little boys; we were carrying, each of us, a toy gun, and I saw Momma running down the middle of the street, in dress-up clothes—furs, fancy shoes, hat, purse; she ran sort of with one shoulder moving mostly: still, it wasn’t really bad running, considering how unexercised she was and how she was dressed; it wasn’t fast, but it was graceful, and there was a kind of physical expertness to it at times between bursts of panting, stumbling clumsiness, as when her shoes caught on cracks or unevennesses in the pavement. I curved out away from my friends and ran to her, ran alongside her. I’m not sure I asked her what was wrong, or that I said anything: I may have just joined her and run alongside her, carrying my gun, and concentrating on staying at her side.

  I learned later, from eavesdropping and from asking questions and working over the answers (which rarely meant much when I first heard them, so I’d store up the words, some of the word sequences, and then go somewhere and be alone and think—or ponder—what the words could possibly mean, in the sense of referring to real life, real pain), that she’d been driving a car and had thought that the driver of a bus was harrying her, and, in a fit of rage, she’d rammed the bus; then she was amazed at the damage to her car and she remembered she didn’t have the power over policemen she’d once had (this was a different town, a suburb, and we didn’t live on a ridge anymore but in a sort of slightly damp valley, with very large, dampish trees), or maybe she couldn’t bear the way the men who gathered looked at her or the way one said she was a terrible driver, but she called them, or one of them, an obscenity, which made her afraid to go to court—“The judge will think I’m a God-knows-what”—and then she opened the car door. By then there was a traffic jam; and she took off: she ran off among the cars, and then between two houses, and then down streets.

  Maybe she felt like running, like being physical.

  But by the time I saw her, by the time she reached our block (the accident happened maybe two blocks away), she was anguished and tragic, her running was tragic, she was hunted and—I don’t know what.

  When we got to our house, she opened the door without ringing for the maid; she drew all the curtains—maybe the maid wasn’t there; I guess she wasn’t—and Momma took off her furs and dropped them on the floor behind a chair, and she and I hid, she squatting behind the couch, me there beside her; she had on some jewelry and a black dress: one knee was up, near her chin; one of her hands, long-nailed, with a pretty diamond-and-pearl ring on it, rested on the floor; she muttered something about the maid’s never cleaning behind the couch.

  Someone knocked on the door: there were noises as if there were four or five men outside: Momma said it was the police; she said to me, “Hush,” and she held my hand with her one free hand while we squatted there, more or less facing each other, coconspirators but not two children.

  When they went away, Momma stood up, went to the window, peeked out through the curtains. Then she threw herself down on the couch and lay there and stroked my head; when I said, “Momma, what was it?” she stopped stroking my head and she said, “I’m getting old—don’t ask me questions—go out and play.”

  I stood there and thought over if I wanted to be stubborn and ask again or if I wanted to go outside.… It was the darkness in the room, in her: I didn’t like the airless, curtained darkness in her. I went outside, blinking in the air, in the revolving, settling late-afternoon light.

  Maybe her successes were more and more temporary, less and less complete when they occurred: apparently, Daddy made less money; and while she didn’t take the blame—she said he wasn’t supposed just to listen to her, he was supposed to use his head, too; she said he was a lousy businessman and so on—she seemed to gather to her, like the dark folds of a mysterious garment, a regret, an admission of failure, of lack of authority. Her new friends were “colder,” she said, quicker to be bored, to drop someone “without actually dropping them—just all at once they’re busy, or they’re going to Florida: do you want to come, too? But you haven’t the clothes or the ticket, so what kind of invitation is that?” Maybe the madness was of failure, after all.

  But maybe she was bored by success and concentrated on the failures because they explained things or suited her mood: “I guess it’s my turn to lose—I’ve always been too lucky.”

  ALSO, she wasn’t very healthy anymore. She had gallbladder things, and back things; she had to get a board for her bed; she made a joke about it: “I’d probably feel wonderful if I slept on the floor” she had a thyroid thing or maybe not; a hormone thing.… She blamed “difficulties”—her mistakes about business matters, her outbursts of temper, her not handling well the people she set herself to please—on physical pain, physical disorders: “I stood up too late in life—I ruined my back and a lot of my organs.… But I had to slouch when I was young—I was— busty—you know—I was too much for a lot of people as it was—ha- ha…”

  She was so stubborn in her plots even when they didn’t work, she tried to do things to everyone, even her doctors, she kept changing her style, she kept taking off her masks and putting on new ones, she tried out so many forms of being effective, even as Lady Macbeth—I mean she played that role, too (“Why don’t you become a gangster, S.L.? There’s money in it” and she said to me, “Cheat more—learn now. It will come in handy” and she wasn’t joking: she’d get mad and yell at me if I didn’t cheat as she advised me to; but then she’d say, “Well, I don’t like to lie—honesty, when you’ve said and done, is the best policy”)—she changed so abruptly so many times of day, she summoned so many fears and feelings in people, that she was witchlike.

  Daddy said to me we had to see Momma through a difficult time.

  But he often lost patience with her.

  He’d say he loved her but he’d say it dryly or sarcastically, and she would reply with an almost idle air of being good at repartee, in a voice of resigned, dry Tightness compared to his naivete, his stupidity, “I know what your love is like, S.L.—and what I want is for you to be good to me. Don’t love me, just be good to me.”

  Daddy would yell at her, “You’re a rattlesnake—you have a poisonous mouth on you would kill an elephant—you’re a terrible person, a crazy woman—it’s death to be around you—you can’t control yourself at all—you like to hurt people—you want everyone to be as miserable as you are!”

  She’d look at him—she gave him a wife’s look.

  She would often look as if she was saying: Yo
u fool, and This is what my life is, and God, this is what I have.

  Sometimes she would glare at him in a way that held the wild glaring threat of true lunacy; but even then it always seemed to me it was only Momma.

  She was always, no matter what she said, a familiar, a normal presence to me.

  She would let herself say, in front of Nonie, “I have a feeling Nonie will marry well—men like dumb girls,” and Nonie was implacable toward Momma anyway: she said Momma was crazy; she refused to listen to her; Momma said, “Nonie’s like a rat leaving a sinking ship.” And she said accusingly, “I have to have a life, too, Nonie,” but Nonie was firm, and Momma, oddly, half respected Nonie—or was bored by her; anyway, Nonie was firm and only let Momma near her if Momma did her specific favors, if Momma came up with money or would wash Nonie’s hair; otherwise Nonie would be relentless and say, “You’ve never been a real mother to me.”

  Daddy was often flustered when Momma threatened him with her dissolution. He said he didn’t care about her, but he did in a way. But he loathed it when she was indomitable—he said to her often, “Don’t be such a goddam big shot all the time—try giving up.”

  She said to me once, “I’ll tell you a secret—I’ll tell you what’s wrong with getting older—nothing is fun anymore—you get bored.…”

  She said to people, “Things are only just beginning to get interesting now; when I was young I was a fool.”

  She said, “I don’t dwell on the past—but I’ll say this: I had fun; it wasn’t so wonderful but it was fun.”

  She never said “I love you” in such a way that it meant she was giving herself or you absolution or as if it erased time: it was a contract, a matter of sharing the same address, of being involved, in a somewhat dirty way, in each other’s pride and respectability; it held no guarantee of pleasure; it remained an open question what was really meant by it … except that she wouldn’t let you starve (but she might let you die or wish you were dead).

  She said, “This is a very difficult time for me and S.L.—I’m not sure we’re going to make it …”

  And: “Everyone makes it—I suppose we will, too.”

  She would yell at Daddy, “YOU’RE NO HELP TO ME!”

  She said, “He tries but he’s too … dumb to be a real help.”

  Sometimes, when things were really bad for her, she would stand in the hallway and shout in a voice that was hollow and unhappy and full of challenging or of summoning you to combat alongside her but in her war, and had to do with you only insofar as you were dependent on her: “I’m … trying … to keep things … going … but … no … one … is … helping … me!”

  ACROSS THIS part of her life, most of my childhood was inscribed.

  IV

  WHEN I WAS a child, I was a bouquet on two legs.

  Momma calls me to come see company: “There are people who want to see you—”

  The doorway to the living room rises with a gross grandeur, framing my slow, staring entrance. Around the room is an irregular palisade of knees and a floating, discontinuous frieze of heads, foreshortened, proper, with the flattish propriety and exoticism of identities dressed up and that I don’t recognize.

  Momma says, “Give everyone a hug—don’t play favorites.…”

  It made trouble—discomfort—quick nervous jokes sprang up—like stiff needlelike weeds, whipping and cutting—if I did not want to touch someone, if I didn’t want to hug someone.

  I held up to these people, I presented to their embrace, a substance entirely mysterious to me, the bouquet of my childishness, my childish reality.

  I held up to them a face, looks I was unaware of except when I stared at myself in a mirror. My looks were the reason I was in that house … the face, in the silence of the mirror.

  I hold up a face, a posture, a manner, a skimpy musculature, blond hair, a young namelessness, and all the plurals, sheaves, and sheets of childish sweetness, seducibility, whatever, to a soft, smelly life that leans over me. I am enclosed in a hug, in a noisy crumpled whisper of ironed linen. I don’t know it’s linen: I name it now. Then it was a roughish, nice matting, a sliding, a half-silence of ignorance in me.

  Only when I was seriously hurt was I entirely without power, was I powerlessness itself.

  In the living room with company, my polite whoring sometimes led to this: one would be bedded with shocking suddenness on a look of comprehension in someone’s eyes, a look pushing in at me with a hint that someone knew more about my life, about the circumstances of my being a child, than I did: this person could tell me—things.…

  Ah, God, the seductiveness of intelligence: it is one of the first things a pretty child learns.

  What struck me over and over in my childhood was the outsidedness of speech. To me. This was perhaps because I was adopted (but I was not aware then of having been adopted: I did not know what a word involving bellies and births, a word such as “adopted,” meant).

  I could not attach what was outside of me, in speech, to what was inside of me, even as desire. Momma can say to me, “Come closer, I want to comb your hair.” I do not understand how speech succeeds in making me obey. I don’t know how to do that, how to want speech to do that. If I want to touch Momma’s hair, I go to her, I lift my hand, and she guesses, she supplies the command and the obedience. My inner sense of everything remained tentative, shadowy, elusory of course, patient—everything in me was placed like a thing that I’d found and brought home and that had childishly perceived attributes, glimpsed or stared at, attached to it … incomplete; each tag said: Incomplete: in time you’ll know. Maybe.

  I never suspected or thought language and my feelings were one. Or, for that matter, that life was mine—or sleep. Each of those was a surprise, a penalty, or a gift; and I trespassed on them, as into a closet of Christmas gifts.

  I never had the sense that everyone else was an aspect of the life in me; the world always had other people in it—indeed, was other people —and I was attached to life through them: I was part of their lives. When I am good—or loving—or docile—I belong to people more than to me, and people know this and are proprietary.

  I am a bouquet and belong to this house; I am turned back over to myself, I am a separate identity, only when I am bad.

  Wickedness that I consciously do is my real name for myself.

  I can remember being awake and asleep at the same moment; and then going over to the sweetness of study, the study of one’s life that dreams are, among the clover of interlocking private meanings—the clover, the bloom of sleep.

  I remember waking too early, moving in the hallways of the house of the sleepers, I remember padding into my parents’ room.

  I am in my parents’ bed. Their bodies are big (they are both asleep) and their bodies give off heat, and the sheets and my parents’ chests and arms are warm and vast; they seem red to me with heat; and the sheets are blue with reflections of the blue walls and pink with the reflection of the heat in my parents’ huge bodies—it seems to me.

  The scale is dismaying—comforting—obscene. My mother’s knee pushes me frighteningly (she knows I am uneasy about her knees and will herd me with her knee when she is awake: she doesn’t grab me with her hand and pull me, the way other mothers do their children: if she tries, I may yell at her). When I am quite little, I stand holding the headboard and do not wake the sleepers.

  My breath is tiny compared to Momma’s, whose breath is small compared to Daddy’s, which is immense: his breath makes the room shiver, with a peculiar, troubling rhythm.

  I climb over Daddy to the edge of the bed, I climb down from the bed, I move out onto the bedroom carpet: my breathing is different now as I look back at the bed, at the sleeping figures on it: they are absent, entombed—whereas I—

  I am a standing child now.

  I AM LOOKING out an upstairs window, waiting for my mother to return from a “luncheon.”

  I stand quite still. Waiting, and the air—heated by the sunlight that comes through the wi
ndow—tickles me. It is as if I am a prisoner on an old, dusty plush couch or as if the heat and stillness and torment of abeyance for a child are like a hot, buggy lake in a Midwestern woods— it is that severe, that extreme. A stubble of purpose and of discontent rubs at me like Daddy’s face sometimes when he doesn’t shave. I am going to make a scene when Momma comes home.

  This beetling-browed effort, this determination to remember to make a scene—something is owed me for this: for the tragic and fierce wit and slapstick and pain of singleness of purpose when I am still a child.…

  I have changed. There was no exact point of transfer. The change took place over a period of time, waking and sleeping. It is almost as if a slowly turning wheel, very large, like a waterwheel—time being the water; or one’s observations being the water—propelled me, brought me to the window. The goodness that had been me belonging to the others, to the household, now comes partly under my purview; and I am its guardian, somewhat legalistic, sometimes complacent, sometimes fierce: a knight: a referee: a child.… I have escaped—at least some of the time, whenever I am not tired or ill or defeated—into something like independence as a child, as now.

  I saw a car driven too fast, in the wrong lane, on the suburban street on the ridge. Momma. Momma in her navy-blue Buick coupé. Life in America is hard: you have to know so much: and it keeps changing—what you have to know, that is: such as that Momma’s car is a dark Buick this year.

  When she drives, she breathes through her nose, often haughtily; I notice that: it is a detail, of courage, competition, and competence. She drives with angry, pushy hauteur; she whips around corners; her hair snaps if she opens the window, which she does if she is headed homeward; if she is going out, the windows are closed: she passes every other car, condemning, often aloud, the other drivers, the showoffy men, the cowardly men. She thinks men don’t understand about cars—that is, that cars are for power, self-expression, efficacy, and speed because time is short and often dull.