Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  That afternoon, I was in pursuit of justice in the court of her authority.

  She was partly flirting, or playing, with me, indulging herself with the—handsome—child, with his mind, his knighthood, after her afternoon of intrigue, finagling, shenanigans with other women.

  She slips out of her shoes, picks them up—she is burdened now with her hat and purse and shoes, her suit jacket: she pads toward the living room. When she talks to me as she does now, her walk changes: she walks snappily, hipshot, in a walk at once incautious and a mockery—but I do not know what she is mocking: my pretensions, perhaps; her own physical powers, maybe.… Momma.

  She was being a real crook.

  In one of our houses, the one on the ridge, the living room is kept dark during the day, the blinds drawn, and the curtains as well: light enters only from the dining-room archway, an indirect, floating, atop-the-ridge gray light that will not fade the furniture, the lampshades, or the paintings. None of the furniture is much good, but it is arranged to suggest and does suggest a grandeur: that involved genuine skill of a kind. Momma’s rooms were amazing; they were homey stage sets, lush, yet eminently respectable: the shadowy grandeur represented social rank, cleverness, a personal worth that she was modest about; but it was only “manners” for everyone else to ignore her modesty. If they accepted it, they were enemies.

  She is checking the living room to see if it is ready for the evening tableau (for Daddy when he comes home): she doesn’t want toys in the living room, or any evidence that children played there during the day; she wants fresh flowers in a vase near the end of the couch where she always sits.

  I yell, “MOMMA, YOU’RE BEING BAD!” To make this jumble. This incoherence. I can’t stand it that our life is like this. That my life is.

  She half turns her head; she doesn’t quite look at me, at the half person, the blond semicreature, the diminutive sensibility: she sticks out her tongue.

  “MOMMA!”

  “I don’t think you’re being too smart.”

  She meant I wasn’t handling her well, so that while I might not be happy at the way things were going, if I kept on I’d be unhappier: she’d see to it.

  I stamped my foot.

  “My fine feathered friend, you listen to me. I’m giving you fair warning: don’t you ever stamp your foot at me: you may be a little tin god with your playmates, but I’m warning you, this is my house. I run this house, and I don’t want to be told what to do by anyone—I’m sick and tired of the subject—”

  “MOMMA, YOU HAVE TO LISTEN!” (I cannot live otherwise: I will die otherwise.)

  “You’re getting on my nerves—”

  “I DON’T CARE!”

  “Take fair warning, my fine feathered friend—”

  “i DON’T CARE!”

  Nonie is in the dining room, eavesdropping (I have caught sight of her): she has been waiting to see if Momma will decide against her; if Momma seems to be angry, Nonie will run to Aunt Beth. Aunt Beth is “not too bright” (Momma says) and is poorer than we are and is jealous of Momma and is dependent on her for her “social life”: she is invited out as Leila’s sister. She “makes trouble”—Daddy says she is Momma’s “Achilles’ heel” (Momma says we all are: “He travels fastest who travels alone”). Aunt Beth makes trouble in general and gets into trouble herself, but mostly she makes trouble for Momma—repeats her confidences to “outsiders,” encourages Nonie to be bad.…

  Momma gets peevish about that but not really angry: she considers Aunt Beth not a sensible woman but very dumb, a blind mole, a chuck-ler; and though she says, “Beth has done me more harm than anyone in my life, including S.L., and that’s going some,” she doesn’t seem to be angry about it. When Momma gets tired and frightened, she turns to Aunt Beth, not for comfort but for jealousy—Aunt Beth’s jealousy and hapless troublemaking: those things seem to warm Momma and persuade her how lucky she is, how much she’s envied. When Momma becomes mad and bitter, then she might as well be misled by Aunt Beth for her own purposes as by someone else: at least, Aunt Beth reminds her of how Momma’s father loved her best. Momma preferred trouble and jealousy to rootlessness. Also, there is something gaudy and cheap and careless in Momma, and Momma can let that out freely with Aunt Beth; and it hurts Aunt Beth, who has romantic notions about Momma: it hurts her, but she doesn’t reproach Momma or yell at her to get hold of herself, as Daddy does; Aunt Beth is hurt, but she likes it when Momma is awful and in despair: Aunt Beth is a chuckler, blandly optimistic; she tsk-tsks over Momma, tries to get ahead of her, chuckles.

  Sometimes Momma gets hold of herself just to spite Aunt Beth; and sometimes it is as if she is reminded how to get hold of herself, or edged toward it by great flocks of memories, by years of winning out over Aunt Beth.

  When Nonie appears in the doorway to the dining room, when she shows herself and says, “Momma—” I know I’m losing, and I start to feel desperation gathering me in its arms, muffling me in hopelessness, in fear of losing at this time.

  Nonie tells Momma Anne Marie and I destroyed her life again. She lies, as she said she would. She speaks in a phony hurt, accusing voice: she is rushed and self-righteous. I think, Surely Momma won’t believe her now. But Momma absentmindedly makes encouraging noises at Nonie. Momma “likes” Nonie today: she is Nonie’s mother, a friend.

  She is not my friend just now. Sometimes what I am to Momma is a fact of pleasure, usefulness, and duty, to which things of the world adhere. I am not even that just now.

  I am something, someone uninteresting, left over from another chapter, a happier hour—Momma is interested in pain in men usually only when she has caused it. Otherwise it’s unreal to her. She mostly accuses me by reporting on how she feels: she says, “You’re aggravating me. You’re making me nervous.”

  I cry, “Nonie always lies!”

  Momma says, “I don’t want you talking about her like that—not about any woman—do you hear me?”

  Momma says, “Your sister’s not well and needs a little sympathy—” Momma really means that menstruating interferes with how you should regard Nonie’s character, but it doesn’t occur to her to say that; or perhaps she sees it is a dangerous argument; and so, out of mischief—but righteousness—and in a good cause—of mercy and friendliness to Nonie—she says the other thing, which she knows is not true but which means she is going to be nice to Nonie and believe her although Nonie has lied stupidly.

  Momma is proud of how “feminine” she is. She is as egoistic as Tolstoy but “feminine.” She often gave in to other women’s opinions. “I learn,” she said. She never really repented anything. She despised people too much to regret what she had done; if then she became frightened that she had made a mistake, she would insist on being uncaring. Under no circumstances did she want her life commented on by repentance. She barely concealed this terrifying derring-do in her self, a carelessness in herself about whether she lived or died morally or physically in the course of this or that adventure of hers. She couldn’t be bothered with fear. So she made thrilling mindless moments—as when she drove too fast on a high, long metal bridge and the tires of the car slipped. She did such things often and without much calculation.

  It wasn’t that death failed to frighten her: she came home from funerals sometimes silly and trivial with shock and like someone slapped and bruised and bloated, as if the funeral had slapped her around the mouth. Sometimes she came home from a funeral and she was bored and didn’t care at all.

  Either way, her fright never governed her—she was defiant, ungovernable. Her pride came from that.

  Daddy said she was crazy—irresponsible—and incapable of feeling: I think he meant she was incapable of sentiment, his sort of sentiment about peace in the house and about being calm and happy. He had problems of feeling; he could not feel much at a funeral (he could walk out whistling or humming under his breath some song such as “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries”). I think he was uneducated in feelings. I think his repertoire of emotions was li
mited: sexual satisfaction, a slow, rich bullying generosity that you had to appreciate or he became angry, and fear and defensive rage, and not too many more. He accused everyone around him of being unable to feel—because they did not make him happy.

  Momma, in reply, used to say of herself, “I know I’m not perfect.” That was a formula.

  She used not perfect as absolution.

  She would say, “Many women are better at bringing up children than I am, but I’m good at helping my children be realistic.”

  Momma would veer between tears-and-rage and self-forgiveness when she spoke of her own violence: she would use the self-exculpating of course: Of course I hit him.… Of course I lost my temper.

  Sometimes Momma will intervene in a scene she is making with me and say, “Let’s be reasonable,” and she will start to be reasonable, start to listen to me; but if she listens too much she will have to change her life: past mistakes suddenly will rise and gibber at her; she thinks it’s better to go on—and not lose her nerve. Not be reasonable. She thinks “in the long run” it’s more reasonable to be unreasonable. Often when she says “Let’s be reasonable” she means that I, the child, the boy, must be reasonable, she intends for me to be reasonable: she assumes she is as reasonable in her complicated life as it is possible to be and that I must do things in order to fit in with her: I must do it at once.

  I constantly lost Leila; I’d look away, look back, and she wasn’t there: she was somewhere in an adult mess of unhappiness and plottings.

  One dreams first of a mother, then of any woman who is always there.

  Momma doesn’t want any of the consequences of what she says or does to be final.

  I shout, “You’re being terrible!” and I start to run out of the room; I want to get outside—the interior of the house is too charged with the feminine bestowal and withholding of justice, shelter, and safety.

  But the women will not let me out of the room: they grab my shirt: they interpose their legs and hips; they keep me away from the door. This is when I am quite little.…

  I then become hysterical, hysterically angry with her, obstinately accusing, and she tries to slap me. It is to comfort us both—it implies a commonsense world we can’t get to otherwise, a world of physical reality common to us both. She slaps me out of respect for my childhood and her duties and with respect for my masculinity: I mean she does not hit me because I am powerless—I am not powerless—or because she is mean: she does it for efficiency: I have to understand all that. Perhaps there is, afterward, or during it, a small sting of pleasure she does not want to understand except as relief for my being a pest. She says, “Men are crazy, if you ask me—I understand only one thing about them, and I don’t want to talk about that.…”

  She really doesn’t know what she is doing.

  SHE SAID ONCE, “I deserve respect—I don’t have to earn it: I’m not a slave.…”

  She keeps testing everyone to see what his quality is, especially the people near her, so she can judge the quality of her own life.

  She says to me, “All right, young man, you’ve gone too far—now you’re going to get a spanking.”

  My chin starts to do strange, autonomous things; my eyes pursue their own childish life; and my mouth is filled with a sharp burning taste.

  “YOU SHOULDN’T DO THIS!”

  She said, “You’re so conceited I can’t stand it.” She made a funny, truncated slapping gesture: she did not really mean to hit me—at least, she did not have a hunter’s I-will-get-you focus. Rather, she sweeps into a somewhat vague, grand action—“I think a spanking is exactly what you need.…” She starts to put on her shoes.

  She tends to go into action decisively but absently: focus makes her lost to herself, would use her up; thought and reason would make her dilatory, careful. There is charm—and horror—in her absentness, in her decisiveness.

  I back away from her; my mouth is quivering—with anger, reproach, contempt (moral). Momma is too slow and exalted in her high heels for this sort of fighting. I get away from her quite easily: Momma half laughs—she stamps her foot—she is loosely, demandingly, vaguely festal; she is in a carnival temper. Momma is both weary and amused at dealing-with-the-child.

  “My God, whoever saw such a boy? What makes you think you’re allowed to show so much temper, my fine feathered friend? You’ll kill someone someday—”

  That is her way of arguing that she-is-training-me-for-civilization by what she is doing now.

  The festal thing in her seems intimate, absurd, and obscene: it is very clear that everything that is happening has this particular style because I’m a boy.…

  I back away from her. I mean I really do—in my mind, in my heart: back and back—walls, wings of shadow sweep to either side of me: I gape at her.

  “Stop making those faces,” she says to me. Her face is large; the at-home sagging, the I-don’t-have-to-put-on-a-show-here is lightened and plumped out with a minor celebratory willfulness, an I-will-do-this. She exhorts me: “Be a good sport—take your punishment like a man—”

  The child, a good ten or twelve feet away from her, at the rim of the largest area of silvery light in the room, bends at the waist, leans forward, yells spasmodically as if he were vomiting: “NO! NO! NO! NO!”

  What is my life worth?

  Nonie turns toward me—she is in motion—her face assumes, like a billboard announcing something or other, an expression of permitted malice.

  Nonie says in an ecstasy of something-or-other, “You’re going to get it now.”

  I can’t believe this is happening. My senses start to function erratically. Shadows gather. Lights dim. Or so it seems.

  My consciousness is as faceless as a wind—a typhoon: there is an emergency here: Nonie grabs me by the arm to hold me for Momma.… I am kicking her or at her. My legs are stronger than my arms, my shoes harder than my fists.

  Nonie lets me go (no subsequent battle or physical adventure has the heroism of these childhood struggles with women: none of the same brilliance of being Captain Marvel).

  Momma cries, “Nonie, keep hold of him!”

  Momma nagged everyone.

  I could dodge pretty well. I run—or scoot, scuttle—toward the dining room sideways along a wall, facing Nonie, who grabs at, swipes at me: I make a noise and draw myself up on tiptoe so that my middle is small and Nonie’s hand hits an end table. I turn and sprint, my back blazing with anxiety and expectation of being grabbed from behind.

  I rolled under the couch.

  “Come out from under there at once,” Momma said. “That’s cowardly—I don’t like that.”

  There is an unspeakable pressure on me, on my ears, mind, and heart, to listen to her, to everything she says.

  The child yelled: “YOU SHOULDN’T BE DOING THIS, MOMMA!”

  My mother replies, “Oh, you like to dish it out—but you can’t take it—”

  (She does not think I ought ever to get even with her.)

  “I’m ashamed of the way you’re acting,” Momma said.

  We are antagonists.

  But she is my mother, and what she says also means that she is considering my welfare and that for me to be enraged … to suffer … as I was doing … was stupid.

  One hates and trembles at the stupidity of the world: but more so at one’s own stupidity—the two things flicker into each other.

  Momma kicks idly under the couch. Her foot appears in the shadows where I’m hiding—I pull off her shoe.

  “Oh, he’s impossible!” she exclaims.

  One senses purposes in people—how can it be otherwise?

  When I was handsome, these scenes were very different from those after I became ugly.

  When I was ugly, the women quickly grew tired of fighting with me; I could extend the struggle, mulishly, and nearly destroy them that way: give them headaches. But when I was young and a pretty child, there was something unwearying in them, in these scenes, something flattering and terrible to me.

  My
mother said, “Come out from under that couch: I’m your mother and I’m telling you to stop this. Do what I say! Give me my shoe!”

  I don’t have to do what she says—she is not good. To frustrate her is not to harm Goodness itself.

  This mood can change at any minute.

  I shout, “YOU SHOULDN’T TRY TO HURT ME—YOU’RE NOT BEING GOOD TO ME!”

  I was referring to the way I was a child in their care.

  What they were doing had an appalling richness of emotional sophistication I did not share. I felt an aha-aha-aha—bitter: not ever to be undone: a sense of them-as-women.…

  Some people speak of the infant’s love for its mother: how clever they are to name that sleeping-and-waking, the dependencies and dreams, as love. I don’t think there is any possible single name for the life-and-death mind-and-language thing of a woman with an infant.

  The nature of almost any real moment makes almost all theory a sweet, maybe boyish farce far gone in willfulness.

  The comfort and shock of using tremendous abstract terms as truth—when how can they be true? in what way can they be true?—permits us to explain a fleshly event without having to toy with the enormous emotions of actuality.

  “YOU’RE ACTING CRAZY TO ME! YOU’RE BEING TERRIBLE TO ME!”

  When I am older, I will defend myself differently.…

  My mother says, “Stop—stop at once—stop that—I don’t think this is funny!” Then: “What’s wrong with you! Where is your sense of humor! Give me my shoe!”

  Her remark makes me afraid I am a fool, and that this event is not serious and that I ought to laugh and give in. I give her her shoe because her being ridiculous pains me.

  But I am too deeply buried in the quarrel. There is something like the whipping of curtains back and forth, against my eyes, my temples—it is confusion. Perhaps this is some kind of domestic festival, one for impatient-but-joking women.