The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Taking a deep breath, I said, “Good luck. And leave me alone from now on. Don’t come after me this time. No more changing your mind. Let me go. ”

  In photographs that year, I was an ugly child twisted with tension and self-disdain. I was as shy as if I were covered with mud. I was pitiable, and that hurt me. I was squat, ill-proportioned, with long thighs and a neck so long that I had been called for a while Giraffe. Dismounting from the train in Little Rock is a troll of a child, squinting, twisted, with no freckles and nothing impish about him.

  The actual moment slides in and out of focus. I remember how strange and unpromising my aunt and uncle looked, large aunt, buck-toothed, pompous-looking; small, grinning, monkeylike uncle: they looked like self-important, emotionally ignorant people with money and no sense. In childhood one sees this but can’t say it. One can only say I don’t like them. In childhood one is several steps away from the literacy of self-defense. Many boys rarely or never look in grown-up eyes.

  I was relieved that these people could stand the sight of me. The sufferance I was on in general, I mean in life, not in a story as someone active in response and in play, a presence, the pity and concern, the doubts and jealousies I aroused weren’t really part of Happiness-and-Normalcy Land or Adjustmentville. Aunt Charlotte was marginally less unattractive than Uncle Simon, and when she held out her arms, I returned her embrace in a version of my most honorable, sincere-child way. I don’t know if regular children do that, lie and suck up to grownups for the sake of shelter or not, shelter and the rest of it.

  You can tell a lot in a hug, the dry boringness, the degree of emotional ignorance. Aunt Charlotte was a childless woman, plain and with a difficult husband, a proud, bossy woman in ugly clothes. Itregisters. I sincerely sucked up to Aunt Charlotte who was self-righteous and hairy and had a large bust. Aunt Charlotte responds to the hug of the wild boy, the fierce but dry seductiveness, the request.

  I was, when I was with other boys, the most foul-mouthed, a specialist in vile vocabulary. I did not actually know about sex but I suspected that it existed. There is an odd musty smell to Aunt Charlotte and a look of command in her eyes. Uncle Simon, ah, Uncle Simon was quick-talking, he had a high tenor voice; his talk was a quick jibber-jabber. He had a lot of wavy, grayed hair, and canceled, or collapsed cheeks, small jowls, an enlarged nose, and a thin but protruding mouth that wandered half the width of his face when he talked.

  His aura was male-womanly, and he was entirely averted inwardly, turned away emotionally from me and the moment. His “Hello,” his “Let’s shake hands” were so devoid of emotional presence that one sensed that for him being liked was everything—not in a fool’s version, but in his own neurotic version. His manner was one of cold charity. He had a funny sharp smell that lonely conceited men, subduedly homosexual, retired military men and priests and aging gangsters had, that bitter worship of the male and the disdain for it. And the lifelong experience of not being able to interest the men one did admire, the settling for a bureaucratized version of admiration for the nearest bearable male.

  In Uncle Simon’s case, it was one of the U.S. senators from Arkansas. Simon had taken into his house a series of boys related to the family. I was the third such boy. Ten-year-olds are not actually childish; they are semi-adult but sexless and savvy about childhood. One of those, as a caption in my mind, meant his hands were too forward and too stiff. He smells bad, I thought despairingly, governs the sense of the emotional emptiness of the man.

  He said in his quick, treble jibber-jabber, “Train trip interesting? Did you meet interesting people? You’re not a snob: you’re someone who talks to people on the train, aren’t you? Or are you a Northerner, a Northerner through and through—ha-ha.” He was a quick-witted, political joker who had no humor.

  I had a dying father and a mother going mad, and I was very hungry and tired, very frightened in a cold, fearless fashion: I was prepared to run away. I don’t think I have ever in my life been greeted with such a marvelous sangfroid. Even grownups who don’t like children give you a glance that takes in whether you’re ill or scared or not.

  Wooden marionettes in a sense but flesh-and-blood all right was how they struck me. Still and all, I was wearily grateful that Uncle Simon and Aunt Charlotte could bear me even if that acceptance was so wooden and contradictorily had an iodine-and-bandage quality—that quality of weary grief, that quality of hurt and of hurt memory when you’ve been bandaged, do you know?

  Their car was a Nash, which was a make I didn’t admire. They had only one car; Uncle Simon didn’t, or wouldn’t, drive. Little Rock in 1940 looked very small, not unpleasant at all, but not a place where people read anything. I know about this from neighborhoods and households in St. Louis and its suburbs. This was a hell of a scary step down in sophistication.

  Uncle Simon’s house was marvelous looking, real stone, the orange and gray kind, and stucco, with a green roof, and set among very tall sycamores. It was far and away the largest house in its near neighborhood with the largest lawn. The others were small, one- or two-family wooden houses. Uncle Simon said his house had sixteen rooms and an attic and was set on the highest hill in Little Rock. He said it had been a bargain when he bought it.

  He said he didn’t know his neighbors.

  Let’s see, what else did he inform me of in his treble jibber-jabber in those first days: that Jesse Owens was a great man, a great American, that I should try to imitate Jesse Owens. Owens was black, and Uncle Simon meant something on the order of I ought to be a great athlete, beautifully shaped, beautifully mannered, and that I—forgive me the term—should play the nigger as an orphan. (Aunt Charlotte said, “Your uncle is a very, very smart man: listen to him and grow wise.” Aunt Charlotte had asked me, and I, as virginal and strange toward touch as any ten-year-old, obeyed, and as part of my fearfulsucking up, I had curled up beside her on a small couch. Uncle Simon told me to come and sit on his lap.)

  He told me my parents, my adoptive parents actually, were not smart or realistic, were not even real citizens of the U.S.; he meant they were not as American as he was—not as up-to-date about the real nature of “these United States at all.” He spoke in his crackled treble; I would say his was a gravelly voice but that usually implies a baritone; and his treble did have baritone aspects, not tones but aspects. I mean it was a complete voice, not squeezed, a long-term voice, not a deformity of age. Cracker barrel—but Jewish and nervous.

  He told me I would work in his big clothing store, and he would send my salary to Lila. I was used to being kept prisoner by being given no money, and I was not only a thief, I had my ways for getting rides from policemen and streetcar conductors.

  Then he told me about the big thing in his life, his friendship with the senior United States senator from Arkansas, a big shot in Washington because of his Democratic longevity in Congress, and his intelligence and statesmanship, and his committee chairmanships. I’ve forgotten which ones. Simon did not mention any other friends. And the phone did not ring. He was not surrounded by good fellowship although he acted as if he was. I nodded in a cold, wry, sickened, defeatedly eager way, a way favorable to him, not deadpan, not disgusted and sarcastic in the usual ten-year-old, end-of-childhood, bitterly pre-pubic way I might have.

  But he made me sick. I felt sick. I had thoughts of savaging the large room we sat in, the ugly furniture, breaking the windows. Simon wanted a substitute for a son, someone male and small, to deal with from time to time in order to see himself as he aged in the speeches he made to a helpless auditor. He had no family feeling in regard to himself—I don’t know why. I suspect eldest child vanity. He had five younger siblings, and they all had virtues he didn’t have. I also suspected that at one time he had been fastidious and truly quickwitted and had not wanted a Jewish family in which some of themembers, including his mother, permitted themselves impermissible behavior in that outraged way of some people of that sort.

  I think Uncle Simon had a dim relation to his younger self i
n something he saw in me. And I don’t think he had another human tie he cared about, not to Aunt Charlotte, not to anyone. And I don’t think he cared.

  S.L. said of Simon to me before I left St. Louis, “That’s a stupid man for you. His trolley is off the tracks.…”

  He wasn’t stupid. But he wasn’t aware of you except for things like money and shelter and manners; those were the generalities he actually used for fitting in, those were the general areas in which he faced the world.

  The grownups and I felt I was like a wartime refugee. Years later in Rome, a quite old Russian countess who had a limp and a stammer and a fine face, said the Russian Revolution had overturned her life: “We were spilled out on the map of Europe like pills spilled from a medicine bottle, and we did not much care where we ended up; it was all the same; where we rolled, there we stayed.…”

  It was like that for me. Uncle Simon was anti-war, not wanting to be fooled again as he had been during the First World War by Allied propaganda. He did not believe Hitler was a monster. I said I did. And that I was pro-war. “Hush,” Aunt Charlotte said.

  But my sanity—literally—depends on there being a degree of truth in how I live. I’m a much traumatized person. I was a super-heavily traumatized kid. I had been abused. I had lost my real mother. I had been denied food. I had nearly died twice so far. But I can manage if I don’t fantasize or lie to myself, and there is something good and edible, so to speak, in each day. Ideas are not negotiable for me. You can shut up about them but you can’t lie about them. You have to respect them. To know the Germans were human was a good thing. Not to understand the war at all meant, in my view, that Uncle Simon was a near schizophrenic, dead from the neck up—and from the waist down. He had managed to ignore the commonsense evidence of hiseyes and ears; he was shut off from the world. This too was a matter of age. He was about fifty-six.

  He told me he had spent the First World War as an ordnance officer in the army in New Jersey boxing for his regiment as a light middleweight. So he was not naive about the world. It was then he had met the senator who was an officer in the Quartermaster Corps but was determined to see battle and become a politician. I may have the story mixed up by now. He had tied his life to the senator’s but not in the sense of being at his side. They’d been separated in the war, and the senator was mostly in Washington, where Uncle Simon had, I think, never been. Simon had helped run the senator’s Arkansas campaigns and his office, had served as a de facto public relations officer—at any rate he had dealt with newspapers in the state. “Those were great days, great days, great, mmm, great,” Uncle Simon said in his quick, sopranoish jibber-jabber. He was not a lucid storyteller or he was infinitely discreet but I never heard from him or Aunt Charlotte what those days had been like, the election campaigns, the negotiations, not even a crude story. No one in the family, even Lila, was really a storyteller.

  Simon had left home after the war, in the early 1920s, when all the world was topsy-turvy, when everything was changing, and moved to the town where the ex-lieutenant who became the senator lived. Maybe—I offer this tentatively—maybe Uncle Simon was both smart and brain-damaged, first by his mother, then by his boxing, and he was in love with the American electoral process. Why not? The crowds, the inner meanings, the shifts of allegiance—seriously, why not? The connections to the police, the whores, the demi-whores or sluts or broads of the campaigns, the nice ladies. The swift panorama of men—why not?

  Or it was just cold ambition, a Jew wanting to get close to the core of power in the new place, a brave kid, smart but almost illiterate about the implied and the implicit in the new kingdom. A refugee like me but much older, in his late twenties. He wouldn’t have hadthe childish, odd, numbed shyness and the blunt studying of everything and the uneasy taste of nervous spittle in the mouth at foreign sights and sounds like a child. He would be a conquering tourist, a colonizer.

  Aunt Charlotte’s aged parents, in their nineties, lived in a suite at the back of the second floor. Charlotte’s father was angrily dignified in a German mode and her mother was chirpily sweet. I played dominoes with the old man and piquet with the old woman. They were very old and failing but courteous and oddly determined. Simon had a heart condition, they told me. The old people disliked Simon; they made little jokes about him, or not jokes, but their faces became tragically persecuted. The black cook disliked him too. A large, soft-voiced woman. It seems a male thing to be disliked somewhat. In St. Louis our servants had often disliked S.L.; some had disliked him quite a lot; some had liked him. What Grandpa Hartman said of Uncle Simon was, “Little Napoleon—huff, huff.” And Grandma Hartman had laughed tinklingly.

  And Simon was quite short and relentless in a slightly muffled I-am-not-a-peasant-or-a-gangster way. I forgot to mention how I was dressed, in a slack suit, in long pants and a shirt of the same fabric. I wore glasses and had grossly curly, asymmetrical, unpleasing hair. I did not like my clothes or my shoes, which were Buster Brown brogans.

  One room on the first floor of the house, a sunporch, had a sunken floor, slate, and a wall of almost continuous windows, and books and a radio in it. The chairs weren’t comfortable but who cared. Outside the row of windows was the mixed light and shadow of the lawn under the trees where it was hidden from the street by a rise in the land, in a scoop decorated by a changeably black-leaved and partially sunlit web on it and roofed by a wild ceiling of large and small leafed-out branches mostly up high, as high as the eaves of the roof of the house.

  A few thousand dusty books in low shelves, best-sellers, clumsy books, no longer famous, out-of-date, queerly no good. “There’s nopoint in reading those,” the black cook said. I know it’s a cliché but she was an educated woman.

  Uncle Simon insisted that I become athletic. I was, a bit, already, but he meant athletic in the way he had been in his twenties. Every evening on the large, tree-shaded front lawn, in the marvelous light, he measured me, my thighs, ankles, and calves, with a yellow tape from the store. In the late southern sun, or twilight but a brighter one than in the north, Simon produced in his jibber-jabber, slowed a bit, rules, adages, aphorisms about men and what a man should be.

  Totally absorbed in issues and thoughts and memories of masculinity, he sat in a metal folding bridge chair under the tall trees of his bargain lawn and with a stopwatch set me off to run, across the lawn to the street and down the street either on the flat summit past the small wooden houses which was embarrassing or down the hill which was mostly just road with a wooded ravine on one side. I was to run only a short distance out of his sight. If he wanted me to run farther, he would stand at the corner of the house. I would return hot and panting in the twilight, but I must admit I never once ran with my full heart, although I experimented with it. But this sort of running, you see, was like an abstraction—or was classical—and not like running in the woods or playing football. It lacked the characteristics of actuality as some Talmudic injunctions did or some mantras, to use a term from later.

  Gasping from the exercise of the physical ideal, and with the smell of macadam and sycamore leaves and daylong heat and sweat in my nostrils, I stood in front of him while he felt my buttocks to see if the muscles there were tightening, and he poked and ran his hands over the calves of my legs to see if I had runner’s muscles and runner’s tendons yet, and then he palped my thighs, front and back, and poked at the sides, and my abdomen. I had been, I think, a phenomenally pretty child once, when I was little—that was how I came to be adopted—and I hated being touched.

  I hated any sort of touch, but some kinds of physical closeness, just behind the shell, were pearl-like, were laughable and as if sweet—nothing is really sweet when you’re ten. It is a rather acid know-it-all age for most middle-class children. Simon’s turtle-skinned hands produced a touch, a series of touches, that had a dry, semi-brutal, professional quality that wasn’t bad at all; it happened and was forgettable, that touch; but sometimes he did a long stroking thing, and I would cough spittle into his face, or
fall on the grass with a sudden cramp, mostly imaginary, or across his lap and then off it, saying, “I’m tired!” and I would shield my eyes with my hands and lie on the grass or roll back and forth or scoot backwards, sometimes stainingly, until I was several feet from him.

  He said I was crazy—crazy and spoiled, a Northerner, ruined by Lila and S.L., their true son, a real example of a wasted life of a city kid. He spoke reasonably, he didn’t yell, but with a promissory note in his voice: he was going to fix me.

  Sometimes, before he examined me or after, he would insist I run more, that I run shorter distances, on the lawn mostly, while he barked orders in his treble jibber-jabber, “Knees higher! Keep your head up!” That sort of thing.

  He slapped me in an athletic way on my shoulders and butt and on the top of my head. Once I turned and said in a way that is sometimes called a snarl, “Don’t ever do that!” He put his hand on the top of my head and gave me a lecture on not talking back and hit me again on the head. I grabbed a stick, but I merely waved it at him—I had struck my father or anyone else who ever hit me on the head, including a first-grade woman teacher and later a priest; this was the most sycophantic in this matter I had ever been—and I ran into the house.

  Oh what an uproar! Oh what politics—old people and cook, Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Simon. And me.

  I was Shirley Temple sweet and conciliatory and Jackie Coogan pathetic and I was immovable: “If you’re going to hit me on the head, I would rather go to an orphanage.” Like many orphans my mind was my real family, was brother to me, and fostering sister, and nursing mother, and fierce father: I never told anyone this because it would give them too much power.

  Simon said I was being silly, emotional, unmanly.

  “Call the orphanage,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  Then when Grandma Hartman and Aunt C. were sympathetic, I became pathetic. At any sign of relenting on anyone’s part, I became sweet and humble and loving—I’m afraid, though, it had that ten-year-old’s acid to it.