Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  After a while, driving, she gets sweaty, realistic, semiexhausted—then she sort of lets the car have its own way: she turns corners lazily, as now: the Buick drives three or four feet onto the lawn—I can see Momma dimly from where I am, above and looking down, Momma wrenching impatiently, belatedly at the steering wheel until the car returns to the gravel driveway.

  I prefer Momma to Daddy—the way she is is more interesting: she is fairer to me; I’d rather obey her than him because she leaves you alone more—she doesn’t really, but she sort of does—and she is very sparing about physical hugs, about immersing you in darkness and the past and those parts of you: she talks, and much of her talk has to do with what is fair and unfair, fair and unfair to her, to women, but still it’s closer to being interesting to me than Daddy’s stuff about love and be a good boy.

  Momma was frightened a lot of the time, but she was impatient about it: she just sailed on; she yelled or nagged or complained or smiled; she sailed into it, into whatever was frightening—she was, in a sense, sloppy with courage, with will. To Daddy, losing love, having my attention wander, his being passed over by me (by anyone), was really terrible: he was furious, itchy, restless: he would nag you good-temperedly or bad-temperedly, judge and punish you, and keep at it until you were confused—that was one of the things he knew. How to frighten you. Momma tried to frighten me but she didn’t do it well: some pressure radiated out from her, but I was not frightened: I was there, blinking, undeniably male—inside, being male was a melting sensation, runny, private when she tried to frighten me: “Do so-and-so or I’ll tell your father on you.”

  Momma thinks Daddy knows more about being a boy—or man—than she does: she expects me to be deferential toward Daddy; she has an idea of how men treat each other: she thinks that deference is the key to the world of men, or is its gateway, or is the way a man or boy gains protection.

  Momma climbs out of her car.

  MOMMA IS HERE.…

  Here-I-go—my project is for getting justice for Anne Marie: Nonie has been rude to her. I start to run. The safety pin by which my shirt is fastened to my pants tugs—“I’m tired of seeing his navel,” Momma has said. I am resigned to being comic in my herohood.

  No, I’m not. Not yet.

  I run fairly well. Nonie will sometimes say of me now, “He’s not a baby anymore—he knows what he’s doing.” If I have the wrong look on my face, I will suddenly get less sympathy and no support from the grownups—knowingness is sympathy-extinguishing around here. But Momma has a sort of welcome for sinners, criminals, Faustians, defilers, and blasphemers, and she occasionally now makes room for me as one of them. As a young male, I guess, as a child of a certain sort, a handsome child—of hers, according to various laws.

  * * *

  WE MUST shift around in time. When we move from the ridge, into the new neighborhood, I am a great success; when I go outside, there are always two or three and sometimes eight or nine kids on my lawn, waiting for me; sometimes when I appear, older kids say, “Here he is”—they give me rides on their bicycles and talk to me.… I almost whisper inside myself, I almost tiptoe, it is so amazing, I am so—established. I feel pride, my arrival at this estate as happiness. As triumph. This is serious to me. I turn on my parents when they interfere. Daddy doesn’t want me to play outside at all: “You’re getting mixed up with trash.” He’s crazy. Momma finds it hard to support his position. (She murmurs, “He’s jealous—that’s all it is.…”)

  Some days, when Momma, behind in her scheduling, absently and hurriedly and then poignantly calls me to come inside to get cleaned up—it is for Daddy, so we’ll be clean and pretty to welcome him home—I don’t want to go. Finally, I don’t go.

  She does not come after me; she sends Anne Marie if we are in the first house, the other maid if we are in the second house; but I hide from the other maid; Momma sends Nonie, but I won’t obey her, so that finally Momma must send Daddy: she cannot hide from him any longer that the child they adopted to be a son to him and keep him amused and happy has no interest in the old games with him, or very little.

  Daddy shouts to me from the front door. But I am arrogant—steely—the child is spoiled and full of temper. Daddy comes after me; he is enraged: “What is this, what do you think you’re doing, what is the meaning of this disobedience to your mother?”

  Part of the contempt I feel for him is the way he forces me to obey Momma, who then turns me over to him: he is not direct or honest. I am determinedly brave, resistant to him, my old love.

  I shout, “THE GAME I’M IN’S NOT OVER! YOU NEVER ASK ME IF I WANT TO COME IN!” The neighbors usually don’t meddle with each other—yes, they do, but they do it more with S.L.: “Hey there, S.L., that’s a good kid you have there—let him play—” (Part of it is if I leave, the kids will stop playing, or the game will slow down: their kids will get gloomy: I really am the junior king of the block.) But part of it is they don’t like my father. He says to them, “We have our own way of doing things.…” He smiles at them as if to say they have to like and admire him—which is lousy tactics in that neighborhood.…

  Momma said dryly of the child I was, “I have to be nice or I do without friends, but he’s stubborn and rude and crazy as a March hare and carries on like God-knows-what and the other children just think he’s special, they seem to like it, God-knows-why—I don’t know how he gets away with it. Of course, he’s beautiful to look at—but I wasn’t bad to look at, either, when I was young, and I never got away with anything.”

  The children I play with—the older children, too—envelop me with acceptance. Sometimes they are so raw and infected and forward with acceptance that I cannot think or suffer or repine at all but am—mentally—blind and onward-rushing, and suddenly seem to wake—to the brilliance of the world—and I stare, dazzled by everything, by my own happiness or satisfaction—what can this state be called? Each day, each moment whirled and shone; and I must have shone, too, like a lantern, with light, with luck. One grownup said to me once when I was adolescent, “You were the most beautiful child I ever saw—it’s strange that none of it lasted.” In the games, I shout, “Oh, you shot me—I’m dying!” I fling up my arms, I jerk spasmodically, I throw myself on the ground and I kick up and down or I roll over and over: the grass brushes my cheeks, my lips and nose, delicately rough-edged, many-tongued grass, a rug of ghost-tongues. The smell of grass roots comes: the sweet dirt odor. Houses whirl in the dusk.

  I was hated, too—by one or two kids—and by Nonie, who was sometimes agonized. Her face would twist with real anger. One day a boy she liked came by and spoke to me and merely nodded to her: she slammed me in the face with a brick (the chimney was being repaired). When I came back from the doctor’s, four or five kids were waiting on the lawn; and they went and got others; and I spoke to them from my window.

  I had the fineness of an abstention from cruelty, of contempt for cruelty, when I was still very young (although it excited me in a frightening way). And then I reeked of having been saved over and over again, of having that much value. And the physical luminosity of looks that had gained me a home. And I was so unafraid of pain—brave with an intake of breath. When I consider the brightness of life’s regard for that child, I can hardly credit that it went on day after day, that with intermissions (when things went wrong) it was habitual, my regular life.

  S.L. did not like it, really—he missed me. Momma says, “Whatever happens, I get the worst of it. I bear the brunt. I don’t understand it: I’m smart: I use my head all the time: I don’t see where I make my mistakes.…”

  She said to people, “I’m jealous of that child—sometimes.” And: “He’s not like us—his mother was a remarkable woman—I don’t know that I should get any credit: I’m not much on motherhood.”

  Or: “I don’t see why you say he’s not like me—we’re both outstanding, him and me—I’ll take the credit.”

  I could not understand her moods, or Daddy’s—any of that. I stared sometimes at her
; I rarely anymore looked at him; I did not understand.

  One time, Momma was bawling me out and suddenly I laughed at her—a little crazily; quite crazily, maybe—but I had no words, no taunts or arguments I could utter. My lunacy scalded her: she raised her hand to slap me; I laughed still more, victoriously—crazily, maybe—and then I ran away.

  In plays that are comedies, no one is truly lucky—it would be too frightening, I suppose, to wait to see what is going to happen to them.

  “Here comes the big shot,” Daddy would say absently, half agreeably, or with sarcasm, all affection in abeyance.

  He disapproved of my happiness, my personal glory: he wanted me to love him as I had before. To let myself be loved and tended as before. I’d scowl and be blank and polite—a fine but sullen child: such patient, obstinate hauteur!

  He took no pride in the moment’s luck—my farfetched luck: “The boy is spoiled rotten.” He gained no comfort for whatever were his terrors and difficulties. I was happily insolent toward his loneliness. Stubborn. He meant to bind me to his protection, his idea of home-as-comedy, with no one too lucky.

  In what way was I his son?

  I felt my generosity was greater than his—I wanted him to have everything. The inequality blasted me aloft, askew, away from him. I rose into the air as if in an explosion.

  At times, he still managed to display a crowded, small loyalty—intent but brief—to me; his affection would hover in the air, like a haze of pollen; even his sarcasm would balloon with affection sometimes; but chiefly he was betrayed because I was a “smart aleck”—he was a being in a sad play, a king with a sad message in his hand.

  He said in reproach, in sarcasm, in sadness, in self-exculpation, in warning, “You don’t need a father—all you need is an audience.”

  He had a child—Nonie.

  Leila said again and again to S.L., “Let him have a good time!”

  She would add, “After all, it won’t last—it never lasts.…”

  SHE SAID to me, “Remember, women aren’t spoilsports: tell your wife someday I was a help to you.” I can’t remember a time when she didn’t speak constantly of my getting married: “What a trial you’ll be for your wife.”

  It was never settled in our house what the top ten laws were, or even what the first law was—getting money, or loving each other, or getting ahead, or being just. What came first kept changing. Daddy wanted his tiredness to be the first law. (I wanted justice, legal symmetry.) He said his life and substance went into labor to enable us to live. He asked for charity, but he was too good-looking, too rich for charity—he wanted charity too soon.

  “It’s all too much for me,” he would say, an amateur mendicant.

  Occasionally, I get physically hurt so badly that I go and stand near my parents and wait for them to do something for me. They say then, “Oh, it’s all too much for you sometimes, isn’t it—yes, it’s too much for you still—you’re still just a little boy.”

  I don’t love other children more than I love my parents but I find other children more attractive than I find my parents now.

  I LEAVE, for a moment, the child in the hallway—the memory in which I run down the hallway, both light and heavy with skills, with intentness: inside a glare of semimastery.

  I am older—older—older.… What is intelligence? Momma—Leila, my other mother, my second one—said to me over and over, “Someone who is really smart never lets anyone know they’re smart.” There came a time when I could say, Yes, Momma, I see. But at first it seemed to me—the child looked at her obliquely—that she was saying the first act of intelligence had to be slyness, sly self-concealment.

  When I was in kindergarten, someone noticed me. The tests were simple at first and given by a woman on the school staff; then someone came from the local high school; then a team appeared from the local university.

  The last group of tests went on for five days. The testers, with great excitement, told Momma and S.L. that I was wonderful, prodigious, especially considering how unintellectual Momma and S.L. were; and the testers said I needed, must have a special sort of upbringing. They explained that I was the equivalent of a twelve-year-old, and in some ways of a fifteen-year-old; but Momma and S.L. did not know that that was meant partly as a metaphor, not an actuality, and that it dealt with mental games, really. Momma and S.L. could not believe I was “smart in that way—” They had never noticed. They knew me very well. Someone was mistaken. I laughed and simply, conceitedly, but patiently waited for the special treatment of me to begin.

  Momma was quick at picking up things, she said (it was true), but her mind was not analytic or consecutive; S.L., even in his own opinion, was without mental discipline. In some ways, whether the child actually was intelligent to the degree the testers claimed or not—that is, whether or not he had the capacity to be a prodigy—he was in some respects the possessor of a quality of mind unshared by his parents, but that is a statement of little point: what is to the point is that his mind, the neighborhood belief in the nature of that mind, the actuality of that mind caused pain.

  Smart. Sting. Burn.

  The community (part of it) became very excited about “our little genius.” Nonie was frantic—in fact, hysterical. She lay on the floor and screamed off and on for weeks. She attacked me with a knife—three times. She threatened to kill herself; she wanted me out of the house and into an orphan asylum or given away. She was crazy and unbelievably sad, anguished, hateful and vindictive. She kept insisting, wildly, as if it were the first premise of reality, that none of it about her brother’s intelligence was true: she demanded that it be untrue.

  Daddy was heartbroken. At first, he acted mildly amused and disbelieving: the popularity had been bad enough. Now he thought I laughed at him. (Sometimes I did.) His emotions were violent: heartbreak, stubborn loneliness perhaps: anger certainly, strange, sneering anger, even rage, then silence flaring and thickening, and he would refuse to look at or touch me. “You don’t need a father like me—I’m the old-fashioned kind,” he said.

  Daddy was perhaps fraudulent, self-concerned, conceited, and dumb: he was very uncomfortable in the suburb where we lived.

  Nonie minded so much and went on for so long out of control that doctors had to be called in. I must admit I did not care about her discomfort or Daddy’s. I watched Nonie with a sort of distaste—almost satisfaction. I watched Daddy with distaste and thought, All right for him.

  S.L. kept saying of me, “Doesn’t he care? Why doesn’t he care about his sister? He has no heart.” He never blamed me in relation to himself except to say, “I can’t like a child like you,” when he was particularly angry; but I snubbed his opinion.

  Momma, when she was told she and Daddy ought to reorganize themselves, devote themselves, their lives, to me—become supporting actors, give their money and time to incubating what lay (or did not exist) in my skull—said, “I don’t want the child to be a freak.”

  She was trying to reestablish equilibrium. She said in private, “I haven’t the faintest idea what to do.” When the testers said Momma had to take me here, take me there: that she was to set herself to study psychology, especially child psychology: that Daddy was to read certain books and enter therapy and attend lectures at college: that Nonie was to be considered (this was not said clearly but it was implied) merely a problem on the periphery of the great adventure of the possible prodigy, Momma said they must be crazy: S.L. would leave her; Nonie would not survive.

  I don’t know if anyone laughed at the Cohns, at their “luck” in adopting a child such as me: I don’t know if it was ironic that nearly everyone said the Cohns were lucky.

  Daddy did not object in theory to doing a lot of things for a child, but in actuality he liked only to enjoy himself with a happy child in a dream landscape of joy. In these new matters, clearly, he could take no joy. He literally could not. Momma said he loved me too much—that he was too childish himself to be anything but hurt. As for herself, her objections were “a matter
of common sense.” She said that study and prodigyhood would ruin my looks; she thought the way I looked was now and would always be of more use than “brains of that sort” (the newly discovered and theoretical intelligence or freakishness) could be. Besides, she needed me to keep Daddy from leaving her.

  The situation grew sourer: Momma went to a P.T.A. meeting; and she who considered herself smarter than most other people was overturned … insulted … beset: she was dressed in furs; she looked fine; but everything she was, everything she had accomplished in her life, was laughed at by the people there at the P.T.A. because of her attitude, her self-defense in the face of the putative intelligence newly discovered in a child she had adopted for his looks.

  Nonie’s tantrums, Daddy’s moods, Momma’s calculations. A joke. To me. I went on whirling. I refused to listen to them; I corrected them all the time; I was a smart aleck, as Daddy said. I trusted them to go on caring about me. I thought they had to be “nice” to me: I remember stamping my foot and saying, “This is my home!” and the way the three of them—Momma, Daddy, Nonie—looked at me when I said that.

  THE TESTERS and various people fought; they said, “We must prepare him—we must not lose time.… He doesn’t get at home from you … what he needs to—” Momma’s voice intervenes:” —become something in twenty years. Well, I don’t want to think about twenty years from now; it’s hard enough for me to plan for the next twenty minutes.”

  Momma said to the outsiders, “Well, we’re his guardians and we don’t want that kind of life for him at all. Years of work and no fun—no, thank you. My husband and I have talked it over and we’ll talk it over some more, but we’re really interested in leaving the child alone. Also, there are other people in this house I have to worry about—you people have no practical sense.…”

  She said, “We don’t want him pushed.”

  She said, “Leave him alone—let him have a childhood.”

  MOMMA SAID to a friend of hers about Nonie, “I don’t blame her for being upset—she was a very dull child, not popular, and she grew up late: she’s just getting her figure now, she’s pretty, boys are getting interested, the good years are just starting for her, people are starting to listen to what she has to say, and now this happens and everything that happens to her hardly seems worthwhile; she’s overshadowed, she’s not going to get to have any life. It’s not right. And it hurts her the way people talk about him and her and then they ask him things like he’s an oracle and they laugh at her and she was just getting her confidence. I don’t think it’s fair. Girls have a right to live, too. She was just getting to the point where she was far enough ahead of him she could be nice to him—now she hates him. Frankly, I don’t blame her. I hate him, too, sometimes—he’s impossible. She has only a few years like these years—why can’t the child wait? I promised his mother I’d give him an education and I will, but I don’t know what all those crazy people are talking about. I think it’s better for him to learn how to fit in—with women especially—he’ll marry someday. I don’t want him to be a lonely man: Nonie and I have to have our lives, too. I know him—he’s not as smart as they say he is—he’s clever for a child, that’s all—he knows how to make himself liked. Let him stay in the background for a few years, let him grow up as a human being and get some good experience under his belt, I don’t intend to push him, let him be a child and enjoy himself, he can learn later.…”