The World Is the Home of Love and Death

by Brodkey, Harold

  Ah, the scene, the scene. Aunt C. whispered in my ear, “Cry and you won’t have to be punished.”

  “Go to hell,” the boy said to his uncle.

  “No dinner for you!” Simon shouted.

  But the ill, old people and the black cook sneaked me food. And even Charlotte showed up in my room with bread and jam and milk.

  Simon confronted me in my room the next morning. In a serious tone he demanded to know if I intended to live without discipline.

  “Why don’t you shut up—or talk to me sensibly,” I replied in the shimmery morning air.

  “You want to end up in a home?” Uncle Simon had not lost his temper. He was handling me.

  I blew up. I was the one who lost his temper. But it was not real temper; it simply pushed the dialogue toward reality. “I’ll write the school system in St. Louis, the superintendent, in U. City. He’ll come and get me. He’s offered me a home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Mr. Baker will come get me.… He said he would.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not suppot ased to boast,” I said glumly.

  “Whare you talking about?”

  “Mom told me not to tell you. I’m a genius, Uncle Simon, and people will help—if I ask them to. I don’t have to take your shit if I don’t want to.”

  I represent a foreign “civilization” located in no particular place but only in certain people. I represent layers of other education, of a whole order of other permissions. I know about politeness extended to a child. In a different realism from his—or Momma’s or S.L.’s—I have a position in the world. It’s still the same world; mine is still a childish piece of the ordinary world, but the rules, the position are different. Playgrounds, yards, sports, even mere footraces, sunporches, all are different for me. It is not really a matter of “language potential” or “leadership” although it was said to be that. It might very well be delusory, valueless. One verifiable fact about it, though, was that it was not local.

  “You’re gonna get a good swift kick and a paddling if you don’t watch out,” Uncle Simon said with almost good-natured violence.

  But he was steaming with rage, because of the hierarchy thing. Because he wouldn’t know to dress or address me if I came into his store as a nineteen-year-old. Because his world was local, delusory, a piece of oblivion. Because the very terms were lunatic with their swift implication of another level of privilege and rationality, of realism, as I said, than any he knew of or was used to.

  But he was omniscient, intelligent, a shrewd, well-informed Jew, a man of affairs.

  I said, the ugly child, not as ugly as when he arrived, said a little wearily, “Might I use the telephone? May I use the telephone?”

  He came at me then. He had instructed me to stand up when he came into the room on this occasion. He looked quite happy and furious—no, it was a rictus. He was stricken—by sudden truth … unwanted, somewhat European truth. I ran out of the room and grabbed the phone in the hall. “Long distance!” I said breathlessly to the operator. Operators oversaw all such calls then. “Get me the superintendent of schools in University City, Missouri—that’s outside St. Louis.…” Uncle Simon had grabbed my arm but now he just watched and listened. But he started pulling at me. I told the operator, “I’m a child. Tell him Wiley Silenowicz, Wiley, is in trouble in Little Rock, tell him I’m here at this number.… Ow, ow … Simon Cohen’s house.”

  Simon shook me and started to slap me but stopped when I said, “Don’t.”

  The phone operator did it. Sam Baker telephoned within the hour, while Simon was shouting at Auntie C. I got to speak to him. Then he called the local school board in Little Rock to find out what kinds of force he could command. Uncle Simon was a figure well-enough known in town that Baker—with what pull or by what accident—reached the senator, who called the house, and, guess what, peace broke out at once.

  The senator is a noisy and indirect-eyed but impressively present sort of man. He seems intelligently dishonest and at the same time to have a keel or underlying sense of both sentimental and actual honestyat times. But then he is not total in anything. Talking to a partial-selfed person is more like talking for him than like engaging in a dialogue. But he was a very astute listener. On the other hand, I was smart enough to know that a child’s talk bores an adult, a busy or well-employed adult. They can’t wait to get out of the house and be among adults. The senator always stayed with me longer, sitting or talking, or taking a longer walk, than I liked or than I thought was workable.

  For a while Auntie C. pretty much spoke for Unc Simon, who was far from humbled. He was not even silenced. But he said he didn’t understand this sort of nonsense, and he would stand there, in the door to the sunporch, while Auntie C. relayed to me “the marching orders” for the day and she asked me what I wanted to do, but Simon, Uncle Simon, spoke to me and did not respond to any nickname I proposed or to any new form of affection, only to the old form, and the old routine—running at twilight—but with a certain oddly worked-out freedom allowed and no more six summer days a week in the store.

  I had said I would make no scandal if he stopped coercing me in everything, but he ignored any idea of scandal—he completely redefined it in his mind. He seemed to have been only slightly affected, but I was at the limit of my strength, and I became silly, or a bit crazy, childishly crazed: “He has to leave me alone if I say it three times,” I said. This was taken seriously as a rule although things I had thought more carefully were ignored.

  For a while, I stopped work in the store entirely and spent my days with the limping and fragile and dying old people. Then with the cook in the kitchen who liked me well enough but whose affection was limited. I never knew or came across a devoted Uncle Tom or Aunt Thomasina. Of course, Unc Simmy with his methods of authority in the house and store did. The cook represented a civilization obscure to me but present in her presence—she told me to stop trying to be cute and to remember that Simon was Simon and wasn’t going to change: “Charlotte has a little give, not much, but a little, but he ain’t got none.” She spoke Southern and noticeably so. If we talkedabout books, she spoke a different English but one that wasn’t entirely pure either: “I got too little time to read to bother with trash.” When she talked religion, her English grew stiffer and so did her enunciation, but she was not a passionately religious woman, not a gospeler. I was interested in her, but I preferred to be outside. And she was a grownup.

  In the ravine, I met a gang of white boys. I went there alone two days running, and some white boys who used it as their wilderness took to hunting me, a preamble to friendship or to harm. I cared and pretty much didn’t care what happened. I was intent on holding on to my mind but I was tired of it too. I was not a hero. I got beaten up some, hit a lot, kicked. I came to know one of the boys, a sissified boy, the only talkative one. But I didn’t love him or put him solidly in my life either. The gang of boys scared me and harmed me some but, at times, they made me their ex officio leader because of my precocity: I could read maps and explain things and talk to cops and find my way in the woods and get us water or soda in strange houses and adjudicate quarrels and tell stories. They asked me to lead them on an illegal trek along the stream in the ravine to wherever it joined the Arkansas River. The police knew me by then. They let us go on out on a mud shoal in the big river, dirty-legged boys.

  Ah, it is too hard a story to tell, the evanescence of attachments, the greater importance always of something else, the specific form this takes in one’s life. Simon had begun to respect me as someone who had power. He was not vengeful toward me but he expected to win out in the end, no matter what. He expected me to work in the store, to brush lint off the suits men tried on, to brush men’s behinds and backs: I went blind with distaste. I worked with two black kids in the storeroom, but you can imagine what they needed and how little I could give. Twice, for a few minutes, I suffered hysterical blindness, nerves.

  Si
mon breathes noisily in the small cove of air around him. I suffer nausea when I am near him. What failure means and the pains of increasing age and what male destiny is when it winds down are reflected distortedly in a privileged child and his powers and hislacks—and his tendency to collapse. I have no regrets about what happened. I think it’s funny. I had decided to return to St. Louis and to live with the Bakers for a half year and then transfer to a private school—the scholarship had been arranged for—but Lila had called and said she knew Simon would bore the hell out of me, and she needed me, life was hell, S.L. wouldn’t live with her anymore unless I was there, and so on: “You won’t let me down, will you? And you know how S.L. feels about you. The sun rises and sets on your hind end. You may be ugly, but he likes you. Wiley, he doesn’t like me at all anymore.”

  I didn’t know if I was strong enough to tell her to fuck off. I didn’t know if I would go home. It weighed on me. I hadn’t inwardly signed off toward my dad as I had toward Lila. I didn’t know anything.

  Simon. The albatross spirit of that aging man mounts on a thermal of last-minute heat, a heat of the feeling of possibility of last-minute victory, a triumph with, over, through the luminously reputable child, “the bluebird of happiness to a dying man,” thus, S. L. Silenowicz. I mean the albatross knew that, knew the terms on which I was summoned—well, asked or sought, even besought—by his sister, the quickest-witted one in the family, the one who’d had the most fun, if I can put it like that. Let us imagine the broad-beamed, big-faced senator on a visit, and the child tells the senator’s fortune, and takes a walk with him around the yard, the senator’s arm on his shoulder, the two discussing armament, the Spitfire versus the Messerschmidt. It is not a day when interest flags. The generation gap is bridged well enough. The senator leaves. Now I am sitting on Simon’s lap, a rigid boy trying not to be rigid, ugly, you know, wearing glasses, with badly cut, ugly hair; the boy is wearing a slack suit and Buster Browns. It hardly matters though, since I was the child who was not a child, but who was, off and on, a bright bird of a soul (S.L.), now a blue jay, I might add, cawing and mischievous, now a cuckoo in some other child’s nest, now a silent red cardinal, bright-bright-faced, now a dimly visible, recessive bluebird haunting the shadows, a paled sunburst on its breast and—if one thinks of everyone as bird-souled—then in an invisible aviary, undergoing one adventure after another, the birds shrieking and cawing and darting from room to room among the shadows and in the pallor of emotional light that is all that these domestic adventures permit—if one sees the smaller bird in the talons of the larger one—or escaped while the larger one is shot and is dying, one might suggest the complicity and the complexity of the chase-and-response.

  But what it was felt as was, oh, imprisonment and brief horror. Uncle Simmy wanted me to run for him, to show what I had learned, to demonstrate how much stronger I was after visiting him. And so I did, but I was in the slack suit and not in shorts. And I was unhappy because of what lay ahead of me—I felt the melancholia of wanting things to be O.K. with him even while loathing him for not knowing what to do, for being so Christly stupid. I didn’t really dislike him. The plunge and whir of the child’s mind and Uncle Simon’s deadish fixity, the procession of imageries a greedy and unhappy child’s opinions are, the history of abductions, the smiles of the late light among the leaves, the half-wish in the child for death.… Oh I remember. Oh how I remember. And then the dog showed up, a dog I knew from when I was with the gang of boys, a neurotic terrier that we, the boys, knew bit erratically.

  Be careful, I said to Uncle Simon. Watch out. That dog bites.

  No dog bites if it is carefully treated, Uncle Simon said, and he stretched out his hand.

  The dog bit him, and that, of course, is the end of the story.

  THE WORLD IS THE HOME OF LOVE AND DEATH

  S.L. and Wiley, Saturday, 8:10 A.M.,

  April 1944

  The time-ridden tickling of the air and the rustle of real moments: wakefulness. I open my eyes and light overprints me, the boy in that room, seen-from-years-further-on, visible from the corner of my eyes in the present tense of the memory and from far away now as I write. Then my consciousness in the room is like a ship placing its shadow on water as it goes along, the waters of the moments. On one bare shoulder, where the pajama top has fallen away, is a single gleaming epaulet of light. The lightly muscled boniness of the boy, the shy-looking skin, newish since puberty, are freakish. The mind moves secretively. If I begin when the story has gone on for a long time, then the characters should be known to be dependent on mostly unexamined memory. Such dependence is a flickering blindness alternating with sight.

  The skull has boyish hair atop it. The skin registers light. Left-over, faded hallucinations from sleep and memories and distortions of the senses in the changes since puberty, the self is shadowy, undefined—I am rigged with the question Is this me? The sense of who I am was wrecked in my sleep, and this anguishing vulnerability is me, but I am foreign to myself. This is in a bedroom in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, in Missouri. It is 1944, the last year before people like us knew about the bomb and the camps. My father by adoption, S. L. Silenowicz, has risen from the other bed in the room, the twin to the one I am in, and he is sitting on my bed.

  One story is that this is the sixth year of his invalidism. This is a month before his death but we don’t know that. The story of his life and then the story of his invalidism and then the story of his tie to me during his illness are coming to an end; perhaps we did feel that but musically, as a sense of coherence in a form yet to be worked out. I am his adopted son: William Wiley Silenowicz. I was born Aaron Stein. He and I don’t look alike, but I will look like him when I am old. I will look like both my fathers and like myself as well.

  S.L. is ill with a bad heart and uncontrollably high blood pressure; killingly high blood pressure wasn’t treatable yet in those years. And only some diseases were easily diagnosed, and his was one. I mean the one assigned to him. He has had four strokes so far. And been in a coma three times. We were told each time that if he did recover he would be a vegetable, but he never became a vegetable. He is forty-four years old.

  Wrecked by sleep and dreams, my mind moves with a drowning hiss and thump (of the heart) of my being shipwrecked in the wreck of my father’s life … the wreck of the ship. The Unbearable. Life is unbearable. He has a flattedly musical voice, gentlemanly North Texas with a friendly overlay of jokingly lower class—you have to talk that way in America. He had Southern and Midwestern rural tones and he was folksy-incantatory, my invalid father. It was very male. He is telling me to wake up; it is not an emergency; he is using affectionate, coaxing tones, distant tones, those of a sick man.

  He doesn’t like people anymore. He is rude or silent with people. He plays with dialects and kinds of discourse in tones that are sometimes educated and openly socially complicated just as he did when he was well, but he does it mockingly—with people he doesn’t like. His voice has grown smaller and paler with illness, but my father’s voice is still the voice of a man who is large-chested. When he was well, he sometimes coaxed and wheedled and talked to bartenders or business partners and women and children and old people and animals—it was interesting to me, my father’s voice and the ways he spoke that were formed in our flyaway democracy—but in a way he does only spiels and confessions, only those.

  He is shaking my foot and saying—my head is turned away from him and he can’t see my eyes—“Dead to the world? Can you hear me in there? Listen to me: we want you out here—” He has promised not to wake me. I’m a growing boy and under extreme strain, and my mother and father get scared at night and make scenes. S.L. says, “The world is waiting for you—wake up, Mr. Shakespeare—” I’m not a young poet or anything like that, but people think I have a big vocabulary. “Mr. Too Piss-elegant for Words. You’re the Black Prince of the Morning—I admit it—time to get up so you can honor us with a sight of your bright and shiny eyes. You’re a sight for sor
e eyes, this bright and shiny morning.” He is kneading my thigh, patting the side of my thigh. “Talk to me, Sleeping Beauty.… Cat got your tongue?”

  Loneliness in a voice is like small movements of water in a pool. I am not detached from him: what he does affects me physically. The sound is caught in my ear like the noise of a fly.

  “You’re the Cock of the Walk.… What a sleeping beauty.… I’m the Queen of the May.… I want to see your eyes.… Don’t look at me like you’re seeing a ghost … I’m not a ghost—You’re asleep with your eyes open.… Why don’t you join us for a while.…”

  The ghost stuff of waking hardens.

  Every surface in the room has a sheen in this light—the pillow near my eyes glows with whiteness. After the sly, scary changeability of identity I had in my dreams, I don’t want to talk to him. There is a sense of papery masks and of staginess, lies and truths hidden by a mask of silence. Now he is touching my shoulder.

  I am in the voice-house of him speaking. His voice, poolingly, lappingly, moves in the dark flow of bedroom minutes. I am immersed in connections to his voice. He says from his partly recumbent position on the bed—rehearsingly, remindingly—“Get up: It’s like tearing down a stone wall with my bare hands to wake you. Wiley hates to leave his sleep; Wiley loves his sleep … he’s a dreamer.… Listen: sleep is common as dirt: there are more sleepers than nice people: Get up, sleepyhead.… Did you have nice dreams, are your handsies cold, are your feetsies cold, are you cold? Oh how I hate to get up in the morning—is that what it is with you? Did you have bad dreams? Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”

  I blink with my eyes unfocused, say, “I’m awake …”

  The fullness of blood and erection—the potency there is in my sleep (and not in his), this arousal at-the-edge of hallucination converts it, his voice, into an ironic diabolism.