Stories in an Almost Classical Mode

by Harold Brodkey

  I hold his hand and walk squintingly alongside him, past wet azaleas and a somewhat ratty privet hedge, and I walk into and out of puddles: I am alternately completely nonplussed by puddles and blasé about them, above worrying about them since he didn’t care if I walked in them or not. He has some picture of childhood heroism, happiness, freedom: his pictures of that sort are also Ideals.

  The puddles splash on my high shoes and up the calf of my bare leg, and meanwhile the sheer number of elements outdoors (including Daddy) hurts me even though I’m squinting. I have no principles yet for ignoring things, for paying no attention, so that I am harassed and tugged at fiendishly, I am fiendishly teased (as if by desire), and so I sort of faint into mindlessness and just get tugged along by the tall blond steeple of a lecher beside me.

  When he says, “Walk,” I rouse myself, but if I look—I am giving an example: I don’t mean to: I should have said, I take my eyes from Da’s pants leg and I look up and I see a many-leaved wet trembling thing, a great mass of gleam and shadow inexplicably without light and suspended over my head, porch roofs and sunroom roofs and indoor and outdoor stairs steps broken and in an avalanche. I clutch Daddy—S.L., I mean—which reminds S.L. that I am frail; and then Dad changes his mind about the stilled water of puddles: “Your fat girlfriend will have my head if you don’t stop splashing around, you funny duck, your precious nurse will fry my balls in butter, you’re walking in the great lakes, Biddy-Buddy. Hell, look at you, you’re sopping: don’t you know about water? Well, we’re not on parade, we don’t have to pretend—you and me, we’re just a pair of schmucks.” He mops me with a handkerchief. I peer at green and gray porticoes of lawn and trees, dripping and green-and-gray, wet colonnaded rooms, piazzas—a wet paradise.

  He said so: “It’s quiet, it’s paradise, it’s real quiet, it’s paradise for real, Honeykins.” Then: “It costs enough.”

  He has a grunting peaceableness, which indicates how it’s Eden here. He is onstage but he is not as guarded, as he is downtown, say. The foreignness and incomprehensibility of his maleness, the brutality of heat and rot and the loneliness in him, man’s stuff, pride, showiness, and restlessness of appetite and of temper, and phallic languor, are harnessed by the way he’s nursing me, up to a point within his changes of mood.

  His presence is bridled: it is a kind of flattery of me that this is so. He is not himself but is another self for me.

  His presence was charity to children and to women. People made this clear to him. It was good to be near an affluent and good-looking man, to have this chance at one’s reality being enlarged by the transfer of consciousness with him, by being twinned to him in a way.

  He sells this, so to speak; he uses this, maybe with some discretion and some honor, and maybe not—maybe without discretion and without honor—how would I know about that?

  Up and down the curving street I see the crazed variety of Towering Sentinels, treetops and roofs, gables and chimneys zigzagging and jagged in segments and wedges of nearer, glowering sky, darkened sky, suffused with dimmish light above the haphazard geometries of this fortress neighborhood.

  The wind is stumbling and knocking around, and growing stronger. It is hurrying and silently banging everything. For a moment, branches and mist, clouds and house awnings—elements of the real world—seem to fly in the wind, but it is in the stupendously untrained vision of the child. He says—he’s thinking partly of money, partly of friendship—“It’s always fair weather when good friends get together.”

  I stare upward at the nauseating wiggles of the spaghetti-and-applesauce clouds, and drips of water, wet twigs, and shiny leaves and dark brown shadows on lawns, and bits of clear sky and the madness of drizzle and dripping leaves and the motions of the trees. “It’s kine d-uh ni-isce seein’ youuu le(ih)oook at thee/unngs,” Daddy said.

  What weird negotiations life is made of can be seen in imagining a general English, a general voice that nearly everyone speaks in.

  I hear his and the mad wind-soughing of His shoes and trousers. He’s big. He looms. He is a man who has a deep obstinacy of self-deference—maybe he feels to himself like a house of explanations—an explanation in every room of himself. One time, sometime after this, I put a toy, a toy this and that, in each room of the house until every room was, in a sense, a playroom—I knew it to be so, it was a secret knowledge.

  Bored with my pace, he stoops, he hides the world from me, he lifts me into the light. He lifts me and then I am up in the air. It was that a great, fanlike darkness opened, descended, enfolded me, and now it becomes a perch or window to which I hold while I look out at the moist light and wind-ridden perspectives of the rich man’s American street (in a smallish town). I grow faint with dizziness: he likes that, too. It is like a genital dizziness, a rush in which all my power resides and is moved around disconnectedly and yet makes apparent a special self, but it is his arms, his will, that lifts me. My culling of the roaringly liquid architectural natural particulars of the day at the height to which I’m held brings to a point of sense, a here, a there, a sense of distance, little distances disconnected, then partly connected to the spatial particulars, somewhat explained, of how far from our lawn and the first it is to this moment and this alliance, this point of advance in the scene. My head, my heart, my soul expand with this. I am a little house full of sight and noise; my newly and miniaturely masculine mind sees a flagpole down the street, a grease of reflections on it, in the day’s clouded transparency. My breath splendidly, heatedly rattles, drowning out this man’s; I am as big as he is in a mysterious fashion, part of a conic projection with me as the small end and the large end is him but is equivalent to me despite that. “This damned wind,” he says. I feel the wettish and burdened air is wind. The large, pale glass boulders falling from the mountainously dark clouds above my head are different when it is wind. Now I know what this transparent and bullying and never-really-to-be-explained thing is in its masculine sense. I mean, I will never really know why it should exist, but I know it as some boys and men know it, as this outdoor thing, kind of thrilling, and somehow allied to my purposes. It was given to me. I stole this secret from an ogre. From S.L. S.L. calls me suddenly, “Little Pigeon—” He summons my attention, he is in a mood: as on a porch: he reminds me, “A man likes the sight of a little goodness now and then—likes a little taste of goodness in the middle of the day.” This is a sadder attempt to say what he said earlier—he rewrites himself all the time. He’s been learning and amending in a kind of stop-and-start, trial-and-error, not entirely overt way. Anyway, this became in part a song for himself, he is reminding himself at the end why he likes me, why he feels good. He looks at his mood after he speaks, as a general rule, to see if he means what his words maybe surprisingly say—they sound so different to him once they are in the air than they had in his head that he has little regard for head thoughts, but on the other hand he despises speech, and at odd times he likes only head thoughts and he broods and daydreams and ruminates then with an obvious contentment even if what passes through his mind is making him angry: a man’s home is his kingdom, unless he has a wife; a man’s head is his kingdom unless he’s a shikker …

  A drunk.

  In his head, he beheads people, he settles destinies, rescues nations, peoples, and so on, and is acclaimed.

  What he’d said out loud this time, what was in his voice, was a song of Reasoned Liking.

  I look up and he blinds me in the first of several ways he has—he wears glasses and they shine—up there—shine, puddlelike, with dull glare—his wind-stirred blondness is a manner of glare—his hair, too, is sheeted fuzzily in glare—and this stuff is set in the velocities of the day—the world is racing and pouring itself on me, air presses into the sockets in which my eyes keep their secret devices, their mechanisms of light, and it shuts them, my eyes are pressed shut blinkingly by the movements of the air, the stirring of the earth.

  “Hey, you’re adorable, you really are.” He bends his head closer to min
e, he puts his head inside the corolla of the perfume of innocence—is that it? He says, “Like a bee in a flower—” Maybe it is only my surprising prettiness-without-strength, me embedded in my doomed-to-fail study of the day, my weak accession to childhood, my need of fathering—is it my astonishment that rises to his nostrils, toy astonishment from a toy face? From a toy mind? Toy soul?

  A flicker, a fleck of color on his glasses, a decal of childish eyes, childish nose, childish mouth and chin: it is me. He says, “It’s all a horse race: a horse race for bastards—men-and-beasties going hell-for-leather.”

  I am tired of his talking with such difficulties of speech for me as that. The words I hear are loose and scattered in the fields of what I think he means. I am tired of him—this is a moment of my disloyalty to him: is it dangerous?—I can’t bear him anymore. His lips, large, ridged, salted, which still rest deep in the cold reaches of my sense of power of myself, in slate and brimstone flutters of shadow: it is obscene a little—a thrill, a matter of disgust, big—the way I feel him, the currently soft intentions of his lips. He is a noisier variety of mother. The breath and spittle of rain pucker and press themselves on me. “You look like a rose,” he says: his eyes stare at something—me? not me—from behind his reflection-tinted lenses.

  His head comes close, he leans it against me, and he blinds me the third way: the fathering stone, the great near boulder, shuts out everything. “I can’t live without you,” he says—testing the thought, the contract: it’s just an idea he has, it’s not true yet—he’s just sniffing at what would be ideal (Lila’s phrases). He lifts his head; he lifts me; he grunts slightly. He carries me and I am high up, jolting along and being held, and I like it.

  A lot.

  The wind is on his head and only a little on mine.

  “You look like a pigeon and a rose,” he says. His eyes are partly shut and he can’t see me, so what it is is he’s thinking about it and deciding now. He’s experimenting with thinking about how I look, he’s experimenting with feeling a certain emotion: love, love in this way now. He’s remembering the way I look and he’s pleased. Now he turns me around in his arms and he kisses my right eye. After a second, I close the left too. He blinds me this third way. His large, ridged lips, his enormous breath—my face disappears. Now he kisses my neck, my head is bent way the hell over; he lingers: I start to see from this kissed, weird angle, but his hand is stroking my face: I am blind, blind—he is so close—and since his emotion is so new to him, it has an airy, fresh, untried quality, like morning air or light. He knows he has a thrilling presence.

  I don’t think I liked him, I didn’t like being overwhelmed—he has a sense of just how much febrile or tensile resistance is in the small body he holds. I didn’t really like being played on that way, I did and I didn’t.

  His kiss lingers on the rose-pigeon’s inner eyes. I am stark blind—with blind attention: this is so even after he pulls away. Sight returns only when he speaks now; he says, “You’re a sight for sore eyes—you are—ves you are—you are a pretty thing and then some, you little sweetheart you ARE a sweetheart—”

  During that embrace he experienced a gush of feeling, a complex gush of rich feeling, a sense maybe of purity—ablution, absolution—a sweet explanation—I don’t know.

  I don’t know what he means, I don’t know if he means it. I mean, I don’t know how contractual he intends to be. I don’t know how close to the sacramental tie of blood he intends for us to go.

  He heaves as he breathes—he heaves with the discovery of emotion in himself. I have been possessed, interred in the living grave of his embrace, his astonishment: “You are a joy, rainy day or no rainy day—you know that?” He says that outward to the day, the now windless mist, a motionless drizzle or spotted damp in the air—not to me—beyond me. If he doesn’t look at me, I can’t tell he’s speaking to me, unless he uses a nursery—or nonsense—tone and even then I am not sure. So I feel I have been abandoned.

  It was a peculiarity of that moment and of my life that he was not my father by blood and that I was not an infant when I met him except that I was like an infant. I was an infant a second time, an older, smarter, tougher infant, and weaker and more scarred. And he was like a father. I’m trying to say that I was a peculiar example of a son, not an ideal example, but some of that thing of being ideal hovered around me, probably unwisely, as a kind of explanation of the pain of emotion and the poignancy of hope, and a reason for grief and for pleasure—the hurt urgency in the real thing, plus the charitable part, gave a glow of the ideal. But I was not the son or his son but only a son he had. And he was not whatever an Ideal Father actually is or would be—a kind of light inside a common thing—he was not it, or maybe he was, or maybe he was at moments, how would I know? I would think that no one has had an ideal father, that that’s a kind of lunatic, sad wish. S.L. and I sometimes had the thing of a light inside a common thing: we negotiated it. I think that may be a common thing. I suppose it’s ideal in a way.

  When I see a photograph of S.L., I think, startled, Oh, was he like that, too?

  Was he stilled as well? By love, by sleep?

  No. I saw him asleep often enough, heaving with dreams and breath, with snores often, with self-assertion even then.

  He was never stilled prior to death, never separate from heartbeat and change, never uninflected by restlessness, by heat and tics, the motions of his moods—I have never much seen the resemblance of photographs to people in life.

  Suddenly he says, “Blah, blah, blah.”

  That’s startling: the child laughs—not that he understands: what he understands is relief, he’s been released—for a moment.

  He is rumbling along: I have trouble knowing what is going on; I can hold nothing still in my thoughts yet.

  Dad says, “The Carlyles’ peonies are knocked all to hell. I’ll tell you something, Peony-Puss, it’s a fucking shame what it costs to have a decent place—it’s worth your life to try to be a classic; a man can throw his life away trying: you know what a garden costs up here? But who’s got the bucks—who’s got the mazoola?”

  He’s talking for a grownup of some kind, maybe a slum kid—I come from people less socially sophisticated than he is. He’s being not-a-snob. He can’t know how strange a sequence of sounds and half-meanings and no-meaning what he said is to me—or the ways in which I recorded it, recorded contingent meaning in the nonsense as special nonsense, not as nonsense understood in some one way out of dozens possible, as in hearing music or seeing a gesture or in being kissed (Oh, he likes me), but as having a group of mobilities in it which were meanings drawn from his life and power and from his suffering and which change all the time and which I know as this music and this nonsense which is not nonsense, which is sensible enough, since it is his: and he is what I had as a father.

  I will understand it in various ways someday anyway.

  He is separate from me and from my judgments of him—he is truly autonomous.

  My feelings were as contingent as his—I learned this from him.

  Women are different, maybe.

  He was distantly pleased that I was mute, mute and unlanguaged; he invented a speech for us, one that made actual comprehension unnecessary, a game, merely a matter of understanding his sentiment of closeness to me (which was mostly not true from the standpoint of all the hours in the day but sometimes was true) and understanding how beautiful he was and how beautiful his treatment was of me.

  But his language, to the extent that I respected it, withheld from me knowledge of the world and of human tongues, except his, except his emotion about me, or rather the emotions I could summon in him: “Your face is a song, you know that?” (He also later said, Don’t try hard to amuse me—just he nice—just do what a nice kid would do—understand me and be there. Mutely. He said, You were more beautiful when you were silent.)

  He talked simply and crazily to me, I had a sweet dimension of nonsense for him: “The wind whips hell out of every pretty little thing
—why is that, would you say? Ça va. Sa-vage. Salvage. Say veggies.” Or: “C’est veggies.”

  He had been in the war in France. He had a great many speaking tones: one was his Princeton tone—he called it that: his tone for selling stocks and bonds, he called it; he didn’t sell stocks and bonds; he was a local businessman, a small-scale entrepreneur. He owned things, stores and farms. He bought and sold other things—asparagus by the basket, by the carload one year. I thought it was funny, him dealing so grandly in a vegetable. He liked vegetables, he said. He spoke ruralese and maybe a dozen variants of stupid-smart good-guy American: I won’t catalogue Dad’s stuff, him and his shitty Americana; I don’t want him all alive for me again. “I’m ignorant,” he said, humbly boastful, and very handsome in expression, “I’m just an ignorant American citizen—me, I’m a poor dumb cuss—dumb as you are. I’ll tell you something: it’s a trade secret: maybe flowers aren’t worth it—you willing to settle for weeds?—you want weeds, burrs, cockleburs? Cockadoodledoo?”

  Then: “You old enough for a cock horse, Hero, you want a weed or a flower for your itty-bitty crotchety-crotch—you wants a nice flower, a fleur, you wants a tough weed—a little milk weed? Damned if I know me—” What he wants for himself, what he wanted sexually for himself. “Some days I want a weed, I want a good tough weed up to no good; some days I want me a rose, a rosebud, a nice fat happy rosebud—you got a rosebud down there, I swear you do: you’re all flower: are you all flower? I think you’re all flower—”

  I am entirely a flower.

  “Little flower Jesus, what a risk—how are you on a bed of nails?”

  I am part of what is unsayable about his life.

  Christ and S.L. in America

  HE SPOKE to me in a tone of immense, immense honesty like an actor speaking with self-conscious openness to a child performer in a famous movie. He was a selfish Christ.