The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  I am unbelievingly, unbelievably jostled. I laugh—doubtingly, flutingly; then, when he doesn’t stop, I plummet into hysterical, real hilarity and then into hilarious silent gasping. The irregular and ecstatic gasping sound I make eccentrically commands interested attention—Daddy says, “He’s a fine orphan . . .” A portable item of theatre . . . a lucky happenstance of theatre.

  (“It’s lucky that child is easy to amuse,” Lila will say.)

  “Summer rain dee rain dee rain. And you and you and you,” Dad says—his voice emerges from below me, from between my legs. I gasp silently from the top of the flesh-and-bone tree where I am—I laugh helplessly—it is a major and unargumentative helplessness among the erratic scrawls, the racing vandalism of rain-shadows.

  S.L. walks rapidly, tilting from side to side. “We’re hogs of good times . . .” Harbingers? “Here come the gigglers; forgive our dust—you ever seen two gigglers like us! Pay no attention; we aim to please.” I tilt back and forth metronomically. The nearing noise of unwindowed rain on the screened side porch becomes assault by dainty, tickling transparencies that fly everywhere, a tickling haze of particles of rain. Bits of wet fly into my mouth. I move into further laughter when he makes me fall, and he catches and jiggles and juggles me. I’m outsprawled in the air in his arms in my laughter. God. I laughed and laughed and did not scream. The blessed thin-throated child. The surrender to coerced (and blunt) gaiety of this sort—to this mirth-at-home—is a matter of importance to the rescued and speechless child. The sustained stutter of sound-riddled and often silent merriment are part of the child’s this-way-amended sense of life. Daddy, my companion, roars piteously, a joke; and he laughs in manful and perhaps semi-helpless accompaniment. The child’s unpoliced splurts and silent convulsions make S.L. squint. I remember my amusement-astonishment. It was painful, the clutch of the hypnotic novelty and rapture. S.L. is impassionedly breathing the limitless broken rain. The tingling screens. I see through the screens our soaked yews. And the damp reek of rain odors and my prolonged spasms. I had a partly amused existence.

  A stuffed Scottie is on a chair; S.L. holds it up to me. I grab it—a laugh racks me. I clutch it, the smelly effigy that shepherds me in naps. S.L. puts me on a chair and puts on me a garish and damaged turkey-feather warbonnet . . . a too large crown-of-battle, beads and feathers, with a long tail of feathers . . .

  I imagine the open and plundered and bony look of the child . . . S.L. and a staring, feathered boy with a stuffed Scottie under his arm . . .

  Bonneted, mounted on the galloping man inside the droning semi-dark of the rainlight, I endure it, shocked, that S.L.’s fleshy shoulders whop me with each step he takes and that the tail of the warbonnet jerks and slaps me stingingly again and again and again. The often amended moment is felt as beauty. “Not everybody has a good time like you, Pisher . . .” S.L.’s head and hair are in the grip of my trembling thighs. S.L.’s skull knocks against my body. The film of glare from the electric lights near the ceiling is as glittery as flies’ wings. The trick of comprehension is beyond me. I have stopped laughing and am simply frozenly mirthful. Daddy is jumping, hopscotch fashion. I am akin to drunks and other shouters. I suppose this is a form of comedy. I am changed from the child my dead mother knew. I’m S.L.’s heir now. I am at home here near the unstill gloss of the mad natural flowers of light on the walls: American light, American childhood: American happiness . . . I say this but I suspect myself of being wrong in this matter . . . Yet the room is as convincingly for me the direct presence of good as a conviction of the direct sight of truth would be. Daddy’s hair is bunched and disordered by my grip. I like being his child. We pass a dirt-speckled ceiling light fixture. I bounce among my own skull lights. I am partly unconscious with jostled, overexcited, hurtful sweetness. Pleasure is not stupider or less remarkable than pain or grief is, is it? I felt the moment as one of glamour. I think it had glamour. The child cries out oddly in the stifling moment. On my father’s shoulders I was swallowed by the leopard light. It was ocher-and-black. I remember I was costumed in the hot blur of union. I don’t want to confer an unwise amount of awe on amusement but I was profoundly amused—gigantically pleased. My bare thighs scratch along (from the rear) his cheeks. I expect serious amusement to recur in my life. The climate of sensation is inflamed with an oddly slanted OPTIMISM. What soreness of soul is here I cannot say. But I say it is reasonable to be like this. I remember his stale breath alongside my knees. My anomalous descent and nauseated ecstasy mean I-don’t-know is pretty much who I am unless his mind, his breath are fitted onto me in the immediate vicinity of the world.

  I love you, you Pitiable Frenzy . . . your character of violence and of intrusion and sympathy. I love you.

  “Will you remember me? Will you remember my hair? I’m going bald, Sweetiekins. I have nice hair—will you remember that I was blond?” The blond Jew whispers to me some biographical information: “I’ll tell you about me: I won’t wear another man’s shoes or kiss another man’s woman, but I’ll tell another man’s jokes.” He said, “I’m the father to another man’s child.”

  Nonie

  An eerie gray-white light appears at the window and displaces the rainy shadows there briefly, and then a segmented noise, a thunder, splits my head open; and my eyes go rolling and banging everywhere.

  My parents’ daughter, Nonie, enters the room. She is not quite a child, not really small—I assumed for a long time that being victimized was a matter of size. Nonie is pudgy. A pink weight of haunch settles on the couch, pushes me: a haunch touches Daddy, his daughter’s. She stares; her eyes are set in the small bones of a pretty and oval face, clay-bright. She’s thirteen but seems younger. In this light a lynx mask of yellow glass rides askew on the upper part of her face.

  She greets people in the room with high-pressured, uncentered, and impersonal and loud friendliness, cheerleaderish but in an eccentric way and juvenile: “Oh, hi . . . Hi . . . Oh, hi.”

  Each time she says “Hi” she adopts and discards a strenuously open look, a display of bright health of mind (and body), and a demand that she be seen as highly normal, a very high—or even the highest—form of normal; and as pleasing: she’s bringing brightness into the room; she’s a happy girl, a friendly greeter. She smiles—and smiles—she resmiles to the full width of her face each time she looks at someone.

  Her skin is clammy. She wraps one arm over and then under my legs. She’s S.L. and Lila’s real daughter. She’s breastless, barely literate, unmenstrual. She flunks school; she’s been put back a year and a half: she takes after S.L.’s family—They’re not bright; they’ve done all right in the world, though; they’re Southerners, Carolina-nice types (Lila).

  Nonie, in answer to someone, says, “I’m eleven now.”

  It was Lila’s notion that it would be smart to lie about Nonie’s age: People think they know a child’s age, but they forget—believe me, you can get away with it. Nonie had been worried about being cheated of something she couldn’t guess at by this notion of Lila’s. Daddy said, That lie hurts no one, and if it makes you feel good—why not? That is, he’d as soon she lied and freed him from the embarrassment of her loathing for school and her being behind by a grade and a half.

  S.L. whispers to her, “Do up your shirt, Honey—you have too many buttons undone.”

  Anger at being corrected makes her go rigid. The veins in her temples show and tremble. Her mouth dies with hurt, then stiffens into toughness, a sinuous obstinacy. She is engaged in surviving the cruelty to her in any correction or disapproval shown her—any at all.

  Nonie’s griefs, her determined jollity, her victories over tragedy are part of a comedy. Perhaps not.

  A self-conscious woman asks Nonie with bitterness, “How is school? The teachers still like the boys best—as always? As ever?”

  Nonie’s eyes grow nobly unfixed. At moments, they glance fixedly, however, at the grown woman’s breasts. Nonie’s pink-yellow face, Nonie’s legs-tied-together, coquettish, scratchin
g-at-you, I-have-to-pee voice: “I can’t stay awake in school; it’s dull—I don’t know who can like that stuff. It’s all dumb and foolish. You know what it is. They don’t like Jews at my school, either. They show movies, but their movies put me to sleep. Daddy has to carry me home sometimes from real movies, even. I guess I just like to sleep—that’s all.”

  An interview with the host and hostess’s daughter—a celebrity, on this occasion.

  Nonie’s an athlete. She is someone of monosyllabic calculations, and of a quick shieldedness of those calculations, and then she has a knowingness in action, and there is the absurd, enormous elegance of her childish coloring—shades of peach and roan—all in all, she is a particular sort of creature; she would like a boy’s education: the femaleness of school is what evades her.

  Daddy says, “When she sleeps, she really sleeps. This is someone who likes to sleep. She’s my Sleeping Beauty.”

  “I’m the best sleeper Daddy knows.”

  “She’s sensitive, whether she looks it or not.” This is Lila preparing to explain Nonie’s style as coming from feminine sensitivity.

  Nonie immediately scowls, comprehending, athletically, at once, elements of oppression and chance in her life, even if obscure, in what Lila said. And then, she, Nonie, in a weirdly biting voice from inside her warm weight, says, “You be quiet.”

  At once, a number of women simultaneously break into speech:

  “I envy that girl her skin.”

  “She’s so pretty I can’t believe it.”

  Nonie’s forearms are damp. She observes the women concealing her outburst, her public display of temper. A terse boy, and quick and shielded—but she’s not a boy—she reaches for, she grabs, the child: me. From behind me then she stares at Lila, at the guests. It’s noticeable that this one’s undaunted: her mixture of the defiant and the conventional, the conventional being a general principle of defense, of justice rather than manners, a claim that she’s typical, she’s good—it is a matter of personal style.

  A nearer flare of lightning theatrically whitens, then blackens our front lawn. Nonie states in an immoderate voice, “I don’t mind the lightning!”

  The child on her lap is a pillow, a muffling device, a fleshy shield against electrical bolts and the storm if God rips off our roof soon. Nature does not have Nonie’s survival at its heart as its first principle but it has her bravery, her comedy in it. Her survival as her first principle is part of nature as I know it. She feels her own life as the moral given, and large—larger than any other moral given. She’s less subsidiary in her view of the drama than anyone else; everyone is servant to her vastness—the vastness of her mind, her consciousness of things, her sense of things; it’s Nonie’s world; she knows what it’s like to be in it; she’s been a child in it now for a long time, she’s lived this long, she’s experienced (in her own view, she’s expert) and not innocent, not stupid. I say this as a description of her moral style and of the sort of protection she craves.

  She’s maybe the spirit of darkness, and of nothing-special to boot. If I love my accidental sister enough, perhaps the world of darkness and of nothing-special will be given to me, too.

  Perhaps I will see my parents and myself straightforwardly.

  Her breath is unquiet and present. She is small compared to Daddy, tiny-boned—not so much lately, but it used to be he called her a little bird and told her to take shelter under his arm and he would hide her from the rain and thunder and so on. He used to say, “Can you tweet like a little bird, can you whistle like a little bird, can you do it for me, can you sing like a little bird for your dad?”

  Like a canary, or like a child, fastidious and frail, she is sensitive to the presence of Evil, the possibility of Evil, the approach of nightmare, the nightmare asphyxiation of her pride—the terrible onslaught of the horror of that—and she registers the approach, the presence of Evil, and is discolored by it when it approaches, as now in the lightning. If I try to be her, to know her, I sense the darkness and enraged exasperation of her mind—it is an unlimited exasperation. Her mind cries, It’s wrong. The lightning is. It’s an impropriety and Evil; she will be upended. She directs Evil away from her. She’s fierce. Maybe she’s sort of the way everyone is, maybe she is the spirit of not being a subsidiary character which is in everyone who is proud—maybe she is the spirit named I-am-the-chief-story, I-am-the-BEST-point-of-view.

  She is a spirit caroming like a swarm of molecules in a quickening hysteria of the application of heat. The passage of lightning toward her, the streaks become sheets of light at the windows; the great white skyey burning becomes weird light flung whirling through our windows and filling the room with interrogatory glare that pinions her in the stormy attention of the sky—perhaps Nonie is Evil Incarnate—perhaps Nonie is being visited by judgment. She squints. I feel she is Evil in the way she puts her life, her feelings above mine—mine and everyone’s. Maybe she is the Angry and Indomitable Secular. She says, “I love Wiley so much. Lightning doesn’t strike the same person twice. I used to be afraid of lightning. I’m not a conceited person, I’m a nice person—the lightning isn’t interested in me. I had science in school—it’s really silly. People think very silly things all the time—not me—” She laughs. She says, “I know what a lightning rod is—I can’t explain science but science is good.”

  The things Nonie said stood in relation to what she felt and knew, the way a calculated poem, an artificial thing in relation to secret matters, might. She had an air as of anything-could-be-said-but-it-had-to-be-sane—but she wasn’t honest about that; Nonie was the Primal Sanity, sort of—or Lunacy attempting to pass itself off as sane. Anything she accepted as a standard for herself she became priestess of, sort of; her interpretations were a little startling: she had no patience for other people’s motives, or perhaps even for their existence. She had an air of jollity and discipline and yet of undisciplined threat: Don’t doubt me, don’t question me. This wasn’t exactly boyish but was an inversion of a heated, womanly, and sensual thing of you-want-to-question-a-woman-and-know-all-my-secrets-I-know-all-about-it-and-I-will-be-evasive: well, she was not evasive so much as a real liar, and violent . . .

  So it wasn’t amusing to ask explanations of Nonie. She did have some gift for being an example of skepticism; she was as cynical, then, as a ten-year-old boy waiting for puberty—and knowing all about it but not from experience, and so feeling cheated while she waited perhaps forever. Her temper came from her being proud, which was an aspect of her prettiness, and there was a sweetness she sometimes had—a spring-and-tall-grasses kind of sweetness, maybe temporary, but piercing all the same, when she felt experienced in things and not cheated.

  “A lightning rod carries the lightning to the ground and dumps it there. See, I know,” Nonie said. “I’m not afraid.” A much-privileged, much-spared girl, an American girl—that was her tone. “Lightning is stupid, thunder is stupid. Thunder is the noise—thunder is a stupid noise.” She quotes—and adopts and adapts—then she owns the thought, the thought is hers, the priestess’s; she alters it, she announces it: it’s a law.

  Doubt is criminal, an impropriety: AN EVIL THING.

  From the doorway to the sunroom—from which come voices and radio noises—a cousin of Nonie’s (and mine) stares at the clayey girl. “Nonie, we’re listening to the radio—do you want to come be with us?” Then: “With me?”

  Nonie’s face, as it often is for me, is as if lit by the overhead light in her bedroom or bathroom. That is, I don’t see her freshly. I remember her face when it was clearest to me, when it had a star’s illumination. Hers is an important face to me.

  That is to say, to me Nonie is as if undressing and washing while sitting in the front room. But the hovering cone of whiteness for those acts is nowhere in the rainlit room—it is just that I know her that way; I have some knowledge of the variety of sounds of her clothes; her smell; her roughly bitten, torn fingernails. Is everyone like her? All the voices so far? Mine, too? Is it the rel
ationship—the motion of her life—alongside mine—for a while—in this odd way, the particularities of that? Am I wrong about everything?

  “I’m busy; I’m with Daddy and Wiley now,” Nonie says.

  The cousin’s face is hurt and doting, an upright fish, shiny in the air, long, smooth, scaly with rain-shadows. Nora Cynthia “Nonie” Silenowicz.

  Nonie is a specialist in fearlessness: this catches her up until much of her life is cast in the boastfulness and fatefulness of an epic: she is a girl Achilles. But now a televisiony light (a term from later on) appears at the window: the light extends into the room silently and then recedes without a sound, rapidly. Visible outside is a corridor of wet trees, and then they are rain-blurred and half-hidden, obscure—obscure again. Nonie’s head is yanked. Her face hardens and gets thin. Then it fattens and is yanked again. The thunder comes bowling jerkily into the room. The thunder gets loud and then louder and then passes credibility. It is so loud my sense of separation from it is erased; I am inside it, swallowed. After I return to myself from my sojourn in the noise, my mind and lots of the parts of my body go on being startled for a while.

  Daddy says, “What did you think of that?”

  Nonie angrily recites, “Sticks and stones—STICKS AND STONES.”

  That is, the lightning is defamation, and no such defamation can touch her—she is from a good family.

  The lightning tried to expel her from the Iliad into a different poem, not sunny, one mostly about the spirit and squalor, defeat and complaint, one with only one hero, not her, someone pure, not Nonie.