The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  You can see how well or poorly he thinks he’s doing when he talks. I got into the trick of playacting comprehension even when he wasn’t comprehensible (to me) because I hated it when he looked sad. Also, I learned he didn’t like my opinions of what he said. I was supposed to appreciate everything. It was like a game: I had to guess what he wanted me to feel and then I feel that but I don’t ask for too many instructions or footnotes or anything like that. And if he didn’t really want me to know what he was saying when he was talking dirty or about lousiness, how much should I show patient incomprehension or hint I might understand some of it—some of what he is hiding from me? We are all dressed up as father and son but what we are is two blond guys out on a binge . . . How much does he want me to understand?

  He has an aimed-at meaning and half-aimed-at meaning and the unwitting (giveaway) meaning: You can’t get it right: I can’t. Being a good listener and a good son is impossible if you’re not a blood son, and maybe not then: someone has to like you anyway before they like anything at all that you do in the way of listening . . .

  He had a tone of voice that went: Do you wander in the desert of the details of a face . . . the musical (and unmusical) detailing of a voice . . . the arc of manner and of mannerism . . . Is it beyond you . . . Well, here is a smile and here is a glance of the eyes and here is a hug and here is a kiss to go with it. . . He said the last thing.

  My soul’s vocabulary is a mess of his musics—natural or not . . . And much of me is an immediate meaninglessness of shocked attention. A kid with its father.

  Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you. Well, I am four years old and pretty (You was famous for your coloring. A number of people said that to me later. [Oh,] Where did your pretty coloring GO?).

  Then, when I’m ugly, Dad is odd—and ugly in another sense—when he goes on saying, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you . . . God, you’re a mutt-in-the-manger: let’s hope it’s a phase—you believe in prayer? Maybe you ought to pray, Kiddo. Have a little pity . . . after all, we adopted you because you was good-looking—and you changed!

  Daddy was making a song and dance of his feelings . . .

  Daddy comes from a Jewish tradition—one that has existed since the seventeenth century—of being Jewish by being not Jewish. By believing in evil and in such notions as that God is embodied in this or that man, Jewish, and sometimes the devil, similarly . . . And in Christ. He hated piety—except in really sweet priests and ministers. He said it was vaudeville. He said of himself that he was modern, sensible, a man of breeding, sometimes deranged, shell-shocked. He believed in lying—Daddy was that sort of Wild Man of Borneo. I’m not a smarty-pants but I’m no fool, Kiddo . . .

  He liked to lie . . . He liked impostures . . .

  When I was six—just before I turned ugly—Daddy when he dressed me would brush my hair with his hands and shape my curls while I leaned against him. It was at such a moment that he would say, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you.

  It was also a sort of real information about something unclear to me.

  Lila said, I don’t know who lies more, S.L. or my sister . . . It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other . . . My sister Beth is aREAL liar.

  When I was nine and Daddy called me Ugly Little Dog and The Hunchback, I used to walk tensely with my head down between my shoulders, partly ready for a fight; and he would put his balding blond head at an angle measuringly and he would say, You’re an ugly mongrel . . . Well, arf-arf . . . Ain’t we arf-witted? What do you think . . .

  If I was standing straight and was neatly dressed and peaceable and was holding his hand, and if he said the same thing and wasn’t looking at me, it had a different meaning, it had to do with me being dressed up and an impostor in love’s chambers: he sometimes said, You look like Wiley Silenowicz but you’re not him: I think you’re an impostor . . . Little Stone Elf: how’s your sense of humor . . . I believe I did resemble certain squat, scowling, mass-produced garden sculptures of that period, sculptures of gnomes.

  Lila said to him, Be careful, S.L., little pitchers carry grudges, S.L.

  Do you have a grudge against me, are you a mean little elf—or are you a friend to me—what sort of good child are you?

  I don’t know yet . . .

  Ape-Child, the one and only Tarzan of St. Louis, Missouri . . . the Jewish Wild Man of Borneo.

  (Momma said of S.L.: One thing I’ll say for S.L., he may have misled me by saying he was sweet and a lover, and he led me on to think he was rich, but he always was ready for aGOOD joke together—it may not sound like much, but I HATE a man who has no humor, I can’t stand a gloomy man—I have enough troubles of my own . . .)

  His humor sometimes had a desperate insistence, a lunatic tic quality.

  My mother and father imitated each other in talk. They did variations on almost anything the other ever said, vocabulary or grammar. They imitated their friends and movie stars and comics. They imitated enviable neighbors. They add and mix and blend—they use stuff from parts of their lives I never saw or knew. What they knew was so far from me as a total thing that it moved in them at moments like some strange beast of farsightedness caged in me that was also a human blindness toward a child . . .

  And it becomes a wiggle of their eyebrows and a movement of their nostrils; and then that stuff that I had no personal idea of comes near me in their glance . . . like the hippos that stink in the zoo . . . or the slither of snakes in a dream, in the zooish heat of attention like an encompassing embrace—which is how I felt it for a while . . .

  They say personal things to me, but it may not be their own remark: they may be jealous of some person they know who loves a child more than they love theirs. They may conceal this with a slow mocking blink—Daddy winks a lot . . . Momma does, too, more excitingly.

  A hidden sense of other romantic lives may cause their voices to mean stuff oddly if either of them says, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you already . . . Put your pants on . . . Or: Don’t stand there near the window half-undressed, you’ll drive the girls in the neighborhood over the edge.

  Sometimes it’s a love speech, but I don’t get it that that is what it is right away. It can feel indirect even with them looking at me . . . Sometimes maybe it’s a recitation, a joke, an incarnation—an evocation of the past when they made that remark and it was nice maybe . . . You know?

  The air, the light, the clothes I wore, the ways I was deaf, a Wild Man of Borneo immune to civilized speech; sometimes Daddy’s emotion is a jealousy of me and sometimes he is jealous about me. He speaks in longing, or in a glum, sweet, teasing tone, or like someone in a movie, and it is about him getting older more than it is about me. Listen, Pisherkin, you know about the nature of girls? Does it concern the nature of girls? Of old women? My dad’s genital chronicles? I remember looking outside to see the mob of crazed neighborhood admirers, but no one was there, just a woman from across the street who did sometimes tell me she liked me but who wasn’t looking in our window that day. She was weeding a bed of tulips and not looking toward our house.

  Was he grieving, saying that thing, grieving a little, a lot? Do we have a family language—him and me? Them and me . . . yes and no. It depends on what my mind and heart and soul have some linguistic grip on . . . Immediate, intimate love—and personal and emotional—usefulness, family meaning, that sort of family meaning does have something to do with stuff being said a thousand times—the skill in saying something anyway, that comes with practice, the knowledge, so that each time adds to and constrains what-is-meant until you get so expert that when you leave home, you float off in haze of local linguistic expertise, never quite to be repeated outside the house.

  S.L. says, I don’t want to do anything for the first time ever again: I’m no beginner; no thank you. It’s not good news for me to start over at anything . . . I’ll tell you what it is: I don’t want to be a DUMB beginner. I’d like to think my life meant so
mething . . . I’d learned a thing or two—is that all right with you? I like having had a little practice. I like having a little experience under my belt . . . I’ll tell you about me: I’m an old cowhand . . .

  He said, when he was ill, I’m the sort of man likes two-toned shoes; if I got to wear one-toned shoes, I wear me some spats . . . I’m a dandy, a jim dandy . . . You know what that is? I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, stuck a feather in my cap and called it macaroni. Well, what can you do? I was a pretty man—you know how it is? If you don’t I’m not a-goin’ to tell ya. I’m no William Shakespeare—or his daughter . . . ha-ha-ha. This thing about the daughter had to do with all the best-selling women novelists of that time and with Lila’s having such a large, if unstable, vocabulary.

  The mind longs for clarity, but clarity in relation to reality is peculiarly forced, often. I like it that it’s hard to guess at what he intends when he speaks. I like it in a sad way that so much of what he did is over my head. We’re almost rich . . . You know how it is . . . You will never have the luck of being one thing or the other. His friendly and complicitous sarcasm . . . You want to play keep-away with your kiss, you and that come-hither coloring—shame on you—dost thou knowest about gathering rosebuds, you little Cupid. Come on now, give me a kiss . . . How could I know what he really meant?

  Or when he spoke like that in a totally other pitch of voice—sarcastically—either when I was ugly or when I hadn’t been paying attention to him for a while—at certain points in listening to him—face-to-face (or in memory)—I go into a kingfisher’s, or a dive-bomber’s dive, staringly but skimmingly and erratically over a glare of his face and of the sounds and music of the voice and then of the light in the room and of a hundred times when he talked: I dive and race along in order to have a context for what he says, a wheel of translation, whatever . . .

  I hear so variably, so untamedly, that it is scary—the abrupt floppy carrying off of a meaning—or the drill bit boring into what he is saying—or the deafness and my giving up, my escape from him and from love in the world. The varieties, all of them changeable, of being unloved, and of the thing of being Jewish and of the thing of having money, and of being American, and then the thing of the politics of listening . . . I am afraid of how rambunctious reality really is and how limited the reach is of my wit . . . my interpretations and translations of my father are.

  Sometimes—always?—he is talking in rivalry, to see who loves better, him or someone else, him and everyone else, which one is the better man, which one do I like best . . .

  He is rivalrous toward silence—toward books—toward movies. Some people he’s enjoined (or constrained) to look up to, and the fates of the kids of those people he is careful of; but he wants to be better than them and to make up for the “respect” he unwillingly feels. Or he goads me with how wonderful some other kid is . . . Boy, it’s dangerous to be somebody’s kid. Isn’t it dangerous to be his child? Anybody’s child?

  And not just because of him but because of what people do to you because of him . . . Or Mom . . . Mom and Dad do things to me because of other people—it is an odd light in their actions. Also, Lila’s mother liked Lila a lot and was jealous of me, or was friendly to me because of Lila and S.L., and I disliked her for it so much, for not caring about me directly, that I wouldn’t go to her funeral when, at last, in her eighties, she died.

  Both my parents liked to say that where there was smoke, there was fire.

  My dad had images for feelings. You’re as nice as a dog and twice as clean. And: I defended you yesterday. Beth said you wasn’t fit to sleep with hogs, and I said you was. And: You’re the one I want to kiss: come on over here and be my merry sunshine for a change . . . And don’t ask me for any change; keep your greed to yourself, tonight, Darlingkins . . .

  I am in a wild woods of memory. Voices speak and hands and expressions and movements of the lips fly around. I-am-lost-here. Memories in a bunch never happened that way. In relation to driving the girls in the neighborhood mad: I have to catch on in order to be their son, but I don’t have to catch on all the way. It might be creepy if I did that. Anyway, am I their son? Sometimes, in the years when it was agreed I was startlingly ugly, My God, look at you, either of my parents might say, but so might even kind strangers say it: I would pray at night, Keep me ugly, Dear God: make me a little uglier, if it’s all right with You—it was for the freedom, the semi-invisibility of it—but they, my parents, my parents by adoption, long for me to be a knockout, a killer-diller—as in the old days (when I was little). You was such a beauty . . . they say to me . . .

  It was a more interesting story for me, Momma said.

  It makes me no never mind, Daddy said—but he didn’t mean it . . .

  Each idea of things in him is a specialized focus of his eyes, I think . . . I peer at him, this year, some other year. In me is a Grand Army’s worth of specially focussed eyes, each with a different kind of gaze—my inner mind has odd legs and strange wings for travel—its slow shovelling, its scratching . . . its weird hands . . . the weird efficacy. Its rebelliousness. I use it. I remember Dad saying stuff when I was ten but by then it is not just him: it is the whole world and my fate—sort of—that is speaking; he and Mom brim and leak over with stuff different from what I know of public and schoolish prose and from the kinds of English in newspaper stories and in the books I read. But I hear them accordingly, in line with that stuff and in line with the past. They thought I was a scandal . . . weirdly shameful: a smart aleck, a traitor, treacherous kid, a snot, a moral engine gone wrong, a rogue machine of pissy moods, wrong actions, vandal acts, stupid dialogues . . . a humor of independence . . . The neighbors liked me sometimes when they didn’t like my parents. Or if I was in trouble, I was someone that some of the neighbors HATED—do you know how it is when you’re ten? People say I was good for the Jews, bad for the Jews . . . good for my sister, bad for my sister . . . good for the neighborhood, bad . . . People spoke of this stuff that concerned me in tones with dr without lyricism, and mean as shit or nice-nice—the bloodbath of the measurements—You’re not practical, Daddy said; you’re a standout as a’ impractical man.

  Then I am fourteen and Daddy says, Half the old women in the neighborhood have a crush on you. The immediate history may be of him glancing at my eyes and knowing I’m thinking dirty or romantically and me noticing what he is doing and him noticing my noticing. Maybe his attention is drawn to my being taller than he is; and he is vastly irritated by that . . . Or amused and sad. Then it might be like he is reproducing the tone of a children’s book, one where a little kid is in the jungle and meets Mr. Elephant and now he is the kid and I am Mr. Whatever. If I slouch so that our faces are on the same plane, I can see how Daddy’s eyes and lips and throat and tongue go wading out and then dive in and swim into syllables of what he says . . . stuff which I can’t see at all, after I’ve gotten to be six feet, if I don’t slouch. He is used to talking to me. I am used to hearing him when I was a different size, so that I hear him with a weird temporal echo as if I were in a well and his voice reverberates but not meaningfully except in terms of the distance between us. I am so used to his voice and his speech that it is almost as if he were breathing in a legible way and then that shrinks me or pushes me back to Fourth Grade, say, when he breathes dramatically or restrainedly or with a systematic intelligence in front of me in a way that is, or that merely seems to be, familiar . . . to be similar to stuff in the past that I knew in one way and now have to know in another.

  When I am older, his talk might, indeed, be anything, even a tone, a zone of silence. This morning, grief-stricken—or at any rate struck down in some ways by grief at being solitary in my room—Daddy slept in my room the last four years of his life—I think about things and I decide I can’t remember voices and what is said in a real way. I deny the confusion: I won’t admit it comes from reality: for a few seconds, I remember only in a school way, usefully: bookishly: accusingly . . .

  To remember in a real way is to
o emotional—too rending. I don’t want to live as someone who loved his father a lot. Maybe I don’t want to live at all. I am something of a prima donna of being reckless (Daddy’s view). Momma’s theory is that I died when my real mother died and that I was brought back to life but then I still had a yearning to be with my real, mom and to give up, and so I am not to be trusted in life-and-death matters since, she feels, I prefer recklessness to caution, and death to politic kinds of living. A Drang to recklessness . . . A Nazi policy is the Drang nach Osten, the pull-to-the-east. Dawn is real now outside. Any grief I feel is linked to the primal grief at the disappearance, actually the death of my real mother and my near-death then; my dying and my reunion with her or my punishment of her or my weakness—reunion wanted and unwanted but reunion anyway. I’m saying a wild limitlessness of infant grief underlies my sadness when it occurs . . . I’m up shit creek without a paddle. I tend to try to suffer limitedly, without remembering. I remember oddly; I go around voices and real moments and remember my dreams and opinions and conclusions about people, not letting myself be partly eaten by the beloved darkness or whatever the fuck it is that makes life into pure shit. I try to live . . .

  Everyone likes you, Daddy said, although he is just as likely to say, No one likes you, no matter what YOU think. I’m not supposed to say anything back because you don’t know how to talk, Wiley, and you hurt people, you don’t know what a man’s real feelings are, you aren’t good with people, Pooperkins.

  When Poppa talks, I’m expected to listen, to be purely a listener and not to answer back. I’m not to be fresh or conceited or simple—or simpleminded. I’m supposed to pay attention to his wittily ironic and deep complexities of meaning and intention. He says, I like the strong, silent type in men, myself I’m supposed to admire him. One of the reasons he lies so often is so I will admire him . . .