The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  Lila asked, “Do you think that child’s unhappy?”

  Summer rain tumbles weightily outside. S.L.’s face, S.L.’s nose and eyes, as edited and proposed by the glare, have the spectacular wobble of real life inside that other, further, spectacular wobble of being young. He is young and in a particular mood. S.L. and I live here. His face is not smudged in a summary of a bunch of moments. My memory gives him to me in this way now and then, real, and not a moody average of a thousand times in a number of years. This is not blurry S.L. in the mask of my opinions of him. I mean now and when I was older; he is not that caged person, he is free and a little scary but humanly familiar although in a partly shocking, booming sense . . . SPECTACULARLY lonely and shiny, physically confident, and with a confiding manner, publicly young—a known lecher, S.L., full-grown but not final, brilliantly male, phallic, supple-waisted, beaming-faced, then deadpan (in a post-1920s small-town, practiced, provincial way)—a sort of hero, Dapper Dan, Valentino, Mr. Romance—guys in high school called someone like him a cocksman—and high popular art began to call someone like him a stud—well, that was in him along with a leery good fellowship—an ironic straining and calculated vivacity among people. An I-am-a-good-guy . . .

  That’s Daddy—not just at a party but a lot of the time—and at a party he might be rebellious. See, some of the later S.L. is mixed into him, shadowy and porous—and cavernous with shadow creatures moving in the hugeness of the cavern—of S.L.-later-in-life. In his life now, S.L. is young and monied, blond and moody.

  He had been a soldier in the First World War; he has a lot of opinions—where are we in the web of jealousy? He talks, this one does, in a variety of tones mysteriously and excitingly and soon-to-disappear, disappear first from his repertoire and not just in moments of anger and boredom, of dark-mooded thoughtfulness, but even from the face of the earth . . . He will speak in the tones of an older man . . . DADDY!

  He never had an always–talks, not in a given week, not in a year; but in the years that I knew him when I name the year, he is differently blond, different-voiced. He is a different mix of moral styles. He smokes a pipe this year. He has on a sleeveless sweater like one he saw in a photograph of the Prince of Wales that was in Esquire. He carries his large stutteringly movie-star-like head at an angle. He has abducted me from the party; we are in the back hall, at the back stairs, refugees from the party noise, and the smoke. It is possible Daddy is avoiding someone in particular.

  I say now that he felt then delighted and lucid fear—and mournful fear—party fear; dry-toned, tumbling-breathed feelings . . . And he was also sort of locally soigné—the last was his and Mom’s word. His heart-beat, against which I, a little itchingly, was held, was loudly rhythmic; and over it, his breathing is like the whispery-almost-rumbling sound when I drive in the car with him on the spans of a high bridge over the river.

  Emotion and nerves. The nearby rain-glare of a little window. My small-ribbed chest, my erect neck, my wide-eyed watchfulness observes his festive nervousness off and on, the amiable party strut of his giant’s voice and his masculine manner. The glow of special behavior—male—social—private—the mockery, the private affection—my spine trickles with hot, hotly jumping, popping sensations. S.L. whispers, emptily and hotly mocking: “It’s always fair weather when friends get together, i’n’t that right, Pisher? You got honest hands? I like honest hands.” He smells of brandy and aspirin, cinnamon Sen-sen (breath freshener), and of cookies, and of coffee. And of fear.

  S.L. said, I’m a kisser and a sniffer . . . You like the smell of apples? Do they remind you of trouble? Brains and sin.

  The violent thing of personal beauty in America shapes his temper, his life, his sense of the world. The tones of his speech. His neck thickens—and pulses—with some of the mechanical and nervous stuff of speech:

  Is this something? Isn’t this something? I hope you know enough you’re flattered, Pooperdooperkins: all these people coming out in the rain to see you, to get a look at YOU—we’re showing you to the sons-of-bitch doubters: smile and show your dimples . . . Are you a little piece of golden sunshine in the rain? “Sunshine—you are my sunshine,” he sang the last part. You know about Old King Cole and the four and twenty blackbirds? Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie? Pecked out your eyes? Someone’s eyes . . . You’re blinding me, Angelpuss . . . Are you a nebbish who don’t know the tango? People are conceited, Pisherkins. It’s all funny business—you want me to tell you everyone’s secrets? It’s all funny business . . . Little pitchers got big ears? Look who’s here, Cupid himself, hello, hello, and more hello, you, hello, you be nice to me, I do favors. You don’t know who your friends are when the chips are down . . . I’m the man to have in your corner when the shooting starts. They hung a Jew in Alabama: they won’t hang you. You want tuh have a good time? Is that right up your alley, Pardner, a good time? It’s up MY alley . . . I aim to feel good on general principles . . . A good time was had by all: why not? I’m not religious but I have one or two qualities a reg’lar fella can like . . . Lincoln spoke Yiddish, did you know that? Lincoln freed the slaves but he didn’t free me—I get time off for good behavior: once I learn to behave—how do you like them potatoes? My mother didn’t raise me for all this horseshit—I’ll tell you about me: I’m all for mother love and the tariff. I’m a good-time Charlie named Sam. Yum-yum . . . Booop-booooop-be-booooop . . . I’m sick and tired of all the shits . . . It’s raining cats and dogs, Pisher: arf, arf, bow-wow, meow, meow. I’m a fan of yours; how about that? What do you to say to them little green apples? Hon . . . honey . . . honey lamb . . . Isn’t this just the cwaziest weather? Your momma’s got the best breasts in Illinois but a woman might as well be bald as have a smart mouth—who knows what’s right and wrong in that case? I ask you. Well, it makes me no never mind as girls used to say down South; don’t make a lace. I got my weak moments, so what? Get me when my guard is down, you draw blood: that’s no reason to tell a man like me to go jump in the lake. We got nervous nellies—tightwads—the small-fry—today. I’m not the world’s best talker. A man don’t like to talk, Pisher. Lila is the family talker; she’s hell’s own talker. Christ, the g.d. rain. A man spends a lot of time talking to himself, you know that, Pisher. It’s a sad world. But you, you got a man talkin’ to you. Are you just a lot of fuss and feathers or are you an honest soldier? Are you true blue and a yard wide? I’m a jolly good fella; I’m no dentist. Tell me honestly, you like people? You like me? You’re really something, those big, big googly eyes . . . I’m a philosopher, you know; I don’t ask for trouble. Pisherkin: kiss me, I’m the last of the Red Hot Poppas. Women, slow and fast, they hound you to death . . . They kill you. I fuck too much—I admit it. It’s not all roses, believe me.

  I don’t know how to punctuate his speech, the way his tones played among his intentions. He nuzzled me: You little heartbreaker . . . I like women . . . I don’t know; I’m in over my head a lot of the time—You want me to be careful, I’ll be careful for your sake—as careful as I know how to be. He gazed at some woman outlined in the flare of his mind. I’m a big muck-a-muck. I like Abe Lincoln but would Abe Lincoln like me—and that is the question: was he a big-hearted Joe like me? Would he go for a sexy Jew from North Carolina? Tra-la tra-la. Smile and show your dimples: You have to be nice: that’s the rule—that and you have to throw in a good five-cent cigar every other Tuesday—is that a good deal or is it not? You want to know what goes on in the back room? Well, I’ll tell you: it’s simple, it’s ABC, it’s sweat-of-the-brow and a little dirty talk . . . Tell me the truth: you have honest feelings? You pulling the wool over my eyes? What would you like to know about me? I’ll tell you what you want to know. Are you a good boy? Are you always good? Are you bad, badder, WORST . . . Well, join the Rotarians just like yours truly. Your little face kills me . . . Daddy has an odd quality of waiting and of thinking as if he can not often for long detach himself from the predicament of waiting.

  I can tell you everything everyone at
this goddamned party will say: How are you? I’m okay . . . You look well, dear . . . Then: We’re the center of the universe: look around you: it’s all there, even on every side: go ahead and look. The Cardinals don’t look too good but they got the Deans. Dizzy and DAFFY. I look like Valentino the sheik except I ain’t dark. Valentino’s dead. He was a dark Eyetie. Calling Mr. Moto . . . Calling Sherlock Holmes . . . knows all, sees all, tells all . . . No more moonshine. No more ether—and reefers. There’s money in those things, real money. Someone’s been running trucks a stuff all night on route 917. This is a free country but not if you want to eat. I like bank robbers: they got the right idea. Some men have the life. Their own armies. Of hooligans and goons. Well, all’s well that ends well. Be an officer and a gentleman if it kills ya . . . Learn to keep your mouth shut . . . Me, I’m Mahatma K. Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson and I got things on my mind . . . I’m Samuel Leonard Silenowicz and I come to give you Louisiana . . . You ever notice women like tenors . . . Isn’t that a can a shit . . . If the shoe fits . . . Kiddo, let’s strike it rich: I’m going to be rich like Rockefeller. Hot-cha big-shot. I’m the man on horseback. Did you know The Great Depression ain’t so great? Believe in me, Kiddo: I’m a great, great man . . . What do you think of them coconuts? I’m a real hellraising go-getter; you’re living now with better people than you are used to . . . I want you to be a Champion Little Boy. I ain’t no wolf in sheep’s clothing. Abruptly he howled like a wolf. Not funny? I guess you had to of been there. You want a graham cracker? You know what they say in Merrie Olde England? They don’t say “shut up” . . . They know better; they say, “Hold your tongue.” He stuck out his tongue and then he took it between the fingers of one hand. He laughed and stopped and said, It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. You think Old Fatty’s the fairest one of all? Anne Marie. My nurse. Y’all, ninety-nine and forty-four one hundreds-th(uh)s percent pure? Should I ask the man who owns one? I’m a corny son-of-a-bitch, right? I yam Popeye the Sailor Man. Well, let’s go back to the mob scene in there. Have pity. Walk softly but carry a big stick . . . I hate to think how many newspapers I read, how many movies I’ve seen. I’ll give you the shirt off my back, you go easy on me . . . Why is it a man’s supposed to have no nerves? Look at me: I’m wringing wet; it’s the humidity. You got to have the stamina of a champion. We got to go face a houseful of know-it-alls? I can’t help my feelings. I ain’t cardboard. Kiss me: I pay my taxes . . . Happiness is in your own backyard: I’m an angel just like you, you know that, don’t you? Want a white man’s kiss? Hear my heart going pitty-pat? Lover, I’m not as dumb as I look—You think I’m too pretty to be a husband? That’s what all the girls say, Punkin. He whispers: A man like me can’t live without love . . . Slow and steady wins the race—you want a slow and steady Poppa? Kiss me . . . I’m the Wise Man of Borneo . . . When your heart gets broken, it’s too late. I don’t know—you and me; the chair I like is the yellow chair in the front room . . . You like the yellow chair? Pooperkins, you know what yellow is? Let’s us go and sit in that yellow chair . . . Or let’s not and say we did.

  His voice, his motions, the party noises down the hall and at the other end of the house flutteringly move on me like beetles: they crawl, mutter, buzz, bite, and fly around in the moving shadows in the unlit back hall, in the shadowy motions of the shadows cast in here by the rain-dotted air outside the little window and the back door. We move on the strong momentum of his and my breath—I’m a child, almost a toy. How hot the grown-ups’ bodies are in their clothes, how hot their clothes were, his were, how steamy the flesh was inside his clothes. The curious crinklings of response in the flesh to the changeable intentions of the man, think of the childish self as an eye and eyelid that opens and closes, perhaps on revealed emotion toward him.

  The Laugh the Child Laughed at the Party in an Imperfect World

  S.L. carries me through the skinny channel of the back hall and out into the spread-out space of the front hall where, at first, the rain-darkness is like a deep hole with a screened door. Through the screen of the door, one sees the streaked, busied air.

  “Let’s go out, let’s have us a little airea purea; let’s just take this blue jobby; we’ll just play a little truant here . . .” He’s been playing truant. The yellow chair is forgotten. The wooden house shivers with voices; and S.L. closes the screen door and we are in the rain: the coarse blond hairs of his arms that hold me grow wet and flat while above our heads a blue umbrella opens and rides and thumps, oscillant and scary; and on S.L.’s eyes, on his forehead, on his hair glides the color blue.

  He breathes a few times in the watery coherence of the moment under the lightly thundering-tinking blue spoon-bowl. My now melodramatically gentle father and the paternal-erotic heat of his throat, stubbled and shaking with breath: “Enough? Ready for the den of thieves?” A lively melancholy fills him, or seems to. Daddy kissed my slightly twisted, exposed, rain-dampened face. “Women are hard . . . But would you rather share a house with an elephant?” he asked in an optimistic tone. “Let’s see if we can round up a few laughs.” The me of my-face-when-I-was-a-child hears the screen door slam—rattle, ting. “Life’s a struggle and I’m a quitter, Poopchick, how about that? How about a kiss?” I shake my head. He’s a grown man; it isn’t necessary to spare him anything. “Are you ignorant?” Daddy whispers to the child.

  H. L. Whitters observes us. Leon Cohen observes us. Also watching are Carol Forz, Rosemary Williams, low-kneed, wide-bottomed Margaret Karlson, and many others. Daddy carries me into and partway through the room; raindrops burn coldly on the shaking trumpet lily of my thigh; the oddities of vision become me smiling oddly; a wet pain of astonishment on the childish face in the loosened tide of shadows in the room, among the shoals of heads, chairbacks, shoulders, and the minnow-shadows of the raindrops darting. He carries me at an angle across the room—he makes noises—people laugh or smile—we go around and in front of people. He is locally famous for his jokes, his carrying-on at parties. He is an agent of counterchagrin, a blond, thin man with a pretentiously romantic face. I-don’t-know-what is slithering in the sad obliquity of his eyes. He rises on tiptoe; he walks. Daddy is parading. “Aren’t we divine, us two?” he says out loud in some kind of odd voice, and people laugh. His inexpert pantomime and the planets of people’s faces, thumbed, squeezed, colored protrusions, form a parlor astronomy. S.L.’s eyes bulge a little. I see us in the mirror. His high bitterness, his friendliness are obstinately impertinent. Also he is dapper, and has a quality of intensity—and of folly. He’s good at this; he doesn’t look down on people. He has said to me, “A pretty man has a deeper self.” Some men are looking at him disgustedly—or naïvely, jealousy halted by a sense of his foolishness. Daddy has the impractical imposture of his assumption of a unanimity of pleasure, a funny, laughable edginess of that. He is aiming toward getting a general beauty of mood to declare itself. This disarms some of his critics. His face doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot of innocence in it; he is a man who arouses emotion as if he were a woman, a child, a famous athlete. Beauty is not serious . . . MONEY IS SERIOUS . . . He does not have a large fortune. Or an army. Someone who causes feeling is not usually allowed to cause it as he wants. S.L. lifts me over his head; he moves his entire body beneath me; I’m on his shoulders. His head is between my legs. The air near the ceiling is like starched cotton in its irregular shininess. It’s warm here. Echoingly musical wasps of near suffocation are in my nose and throat. And in my ears. It is hot up here. I see slantingly down. People’s hair. Their heads and noses. I see out one of the windows of the room the false dusk of the rain. He says, “You-all up there, you all-happy-go-lucky-upsy-daisy? Okay? Here we go.”

  S.L. mimics a clown carrying a child: bowing and deadpan, he is doing a clog dance. Then he does a funny half-baked Charleston. He clowns in this ornate way in and out close to the legs of people—some laugh and exclaim—Daddy and I, our oddity, our ordinariness, we are flushed with heat in the humid room. We have hot and transparent s
tares; we are a spectacle. I imagine seeing us.

  “We seem to be nice people!” S.L. says self-consciously . . . It is something performers do in vaudeville and on the radio and in some movies, announce the virtue of themselves and their audience. I’m above faces doused in watching us. S.L. walks wide-legged. I wobble. S.L. trots in a quaint manner and announces to all and sundry, “A laugh a minute keeps the doctor away.” In S.L. is a recurrent awareness of the compression between young girls’ legs and of the weight of buttocks and of sexual curiosity in people, that extreme if odd poetry, or whatever. He is proud that he has a grown man’s arms. Such knowledge, such awareness, is carelessly unlyrical, all-in-all. His charity purifies this. His heated, clumsy gait is pretty odd. I think performers’ envies are soothed and dead in them when they’re performing, since no one present is more alive than they are for a while. The watchers wait to be alive if they’re drawn to the performance. They wait for our performance to end or they interrupt us. S.L. has a clumsy version of the sorrowful sexual presumption of a famous and heroic performer, the stagy ideality. The parading child is mostly solemn. Or so I say. What Daddy does for me encloses me in a contradictorily wide-awake, present-tense oblivion, a semi-place. The comparative ease with which children die and are hurt makes them less valuable than grown-ups, except sentimentally. I am sentimentally valuable. “Carry me next!” Cousin Trish cries out to S.L. No selfishness is necessary in you toward a performer.

  “Don’t be fooled. This is no fun. Don’t jump to conclusions,” he says. He’s being ironic. He jumps from side to side—but not to a conclusion and says so: “I jump from side to side but I have no conclusions,” he says. I hang on. The floor shakes. One woman in the room laughs on a high, repeated note. S.L. says, “I’m Esel the ass; I’ve come from Tennessee with water on my ass; don’t wriggle too much, I’ll fall on my ass . . . Look who’s laughing NOW . . .” He’s not professional at this, he’s human. Daddy reaches up and holds me, one hand over my stomach, one on my rump as he jumps.