She wasn’t strange at all but, Christ, I didn’t want to know her—but I was used to her. It was an entire metaphysics in its way, her attitudes and her victories in the moment, nearby or actually present, but as if present, and her prettiness and her being a trap for anyone who went near her . . . I mean there was no trade-off, there were only Nonie’s rules, Nonie’s victories, Nonie’s view of how one was likable or else a drip, an enemy to be punished.
Lila: “Nonie learned a lot of wrong things from me—maybe everything’s a mistake—what do you think of that philosophy?”
In her truthful and superior mode, she told Nonie, “For a number of reasons, don’t attract too much attention. You can’t afford it.”
Insult and curse. And Nonie lived by such advice but she denied that she did: “I don’t listen to you. You’re jealous. I will never listen to you, and you can save your breath. Oh, it’s terrible—I have to have you for a mother.”
“She can’t think. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“I do, too—you’re the fool—”
Nonie did not ever admit she was gambling . . . Part of why she was so dictatorial, so tyrannical, was that she believed there was one truth—one only—and she wanted to be the one who had it in her care: she was the chief enforcement officer, the prophetess—the columnist—the executor-executioner of the one truth . . .
She argued with Lila so often that I remember almost nothing else. Sometimes their arguments seemed to be a fixed matter—it was fixed that they would argue; and the methodologies on each side were fixed or habitual often and not reinvented, except at times, they did, both of them, or one of them, go off op a new tack—in arguing, I mean.
Nonie said to Lila, “You’re too psychological—I like some psychology—but too much is just sickening, and if anyone asks me that’s what I’ll tell them. I hate it when it gets sloppy and lets sloppy people off the hook . . .”
Lila said, “Nonie; you don’t make a good impression if anyone thinks about it . . .”
A remark of Nonie’s, one that she made several hundred times: “Nothing ever happened to me; I had a happy life. Nothing ever went wrong. My parents loved me. There’s nothing to me, I guess. I’m just a smile and a good game of tennis—that’s what my husband says. And maybe Hank”—her husband—“can tell you I’m good when the lights are out—that’s what he tells me. But he’s a liar; he likes to flatter me—he thinks I’m sweet.”
Hank never made a lot of money, and Nonie kept scrapping all her life—she stayed active in the world in her style; she persisted in her methods; she drank more; she became more combative; she was an adult form of the various younger Nonies but drunker, meaner, more righteous, more self-assured. No one knew why she had ended up on the social level she did . . . She chose it, in a way, or it chose her, and she gave in: “I have a wonderful life, I am a truly HAPPY woman,” she would say, drunkenly, angrily, spitting a little at me . . .
But she burned to death.
Hank never disagreed with her in public. He took her side wholeheartedly, whole-spiritedly—in every moment I saw them together, in all the fracases, litigations, feuds, innumerable quarrels and wars that she spoke of, that I knew about, he shared her views utterly, totally. He was fat and sly-looking and had a face with a particular expression on it: a sort of numbed self-congratulation and childish hurt on very small features; but the overall velocity or motion was set among the details of eyes and mouth and eyebrows and forehead that indicated slyness—slyness, self-congratulation, and hurt . . . A hurt sweetness.
He had no quarrels of his own that I knew of, no real energy, no real life, no actual history of slyness apart from her: only a history of maybe extreme complicity with Nonie . . . A certain simplicity was in that—I don’t know. The talk was that he was limitlessly scared of her, but when I say the talk I mean seven or eight people who enjoyed bringing the subject up with me because they were fighting with her, with him and her, or they had the temerity to do it because they were scared of her and wanted to talk to her brother.
I was scared—morally—to talk about her or to judge her, and I often would tell an anecdote of my early childhood when my best friend—this was in second grade—had disliked her and said she was a witch . . .
The other men who had liked her had not been like Hank or had not been so openly like that that I had seen it although I could imagine that that was much of what life offered her: I mean, what she wound up with: she had a foresense of it. Some of the men who had liked her a lot had been remarkable. After her death, Hank didn’t remarry. He worked as a clerk in a drugstore after she burned up. Before, he had been in real estate but had been considered lazy and detached. Inept. His mother said Nonie had sucked out all his blood and replaced it with her poison but Lila had said before she died that Nonie had a mother-in-law-and-a-half and could use a little help . . .
Before he and Nonie married, Hank had been “popular” and had been thought “clever” and “brave.” It’s funny to judge other people’s lives—it’s damned odd even to sum them up . . . Books and stories really have a lot of moral nerve. Nonie seemed to me, when I was younger, she seemed to me to have choices, a good many of them, and I was startled and uneasy at the life she, in part, chose.
I did not exactly judge it.
If I turn to what other people said of her choices, it is because they did judge. Lila said, She doesn’t know what she’s doing but she won’t listen . . .
She herself said only, over and over, I want to be happy . . . And: What I know of the Good Life is how to be happy and I’ve been happy and very very very lucky all of my life.
A cousin of Hank’s told me, “He let her down—he was no good at anything—she’s a terrible person—but she never had a chance married to him . . . He just dragged her into a pit—she never had a chance . . .”
Nonie’s cousin and mine, the one at the party who was in the sunroom, said, “Hank was a good soldier and a smart boy, and she cracked him like a nut and ate him for breakfast. Hank never had a chance in hell.”
Here is a terrible story, not necessarily to be believed: Twice, I left infant sons in the house when I went out, and both died; Nonie was with them. It’s the worst thing in my life. It’s the only thing I can’t bear. The second time was just terrible, just terrible. I did it to show I wasn’t frightened. The doctors never knew what caused either death. I know it could be anything; you think I don’t know how terrible it is that I think what I think? I’m only saying I know what I know. What was strange was that Nonie wasn’t upset—not at all. A mother knows. She did something. I know—she said when I came home, Momma, nothing happened. I screamed at her when I found out. We didn’t get along after that. Maybe she was just being foolish. Maybe she did nothing, but it was something that bothered her—I don’t hate her, Wiley. She never admits anything. I took you in right away—I dared myself. I wasn’t going to stop living, I wasn’t going to let everything I had be wrecked, and let people feel sorry for me, right and left. I know I imagine things, but I’m not a fool. Maybe I ruined her because of the way I THINK ABOUT THIS. I THINK AND I THINK. Maybe she hates me because I’m wrong about her—or maybe because I guess—how can I know? Why does she hate everyone so much? Because no one’s as bad as she is? She wants to think we’re all as bad as she is—worse than she is. Why does she talk like such a fool? She’s not a fool. She tried to be so clever. Why did nothing ever work out for her? Something’s wrong with her. You know, she’s like a baby in many ways. It’s so she won’t have to think about anything seriously. I’ll tell you something. I will never know. I will never believe anything she says as long as I live. She’s mean—she’s really mean. But I was a bad mother; my own mother told me so; I know I let myself off the hook when I think these things about the babies. I get so miserable. I know I may have been unfair to her and done something terrible to her. S.L. always said I sacrificed Nonie to my own convenience. I know I build everything up. I did her a wrong to suspect her. But no o
ne pays attention; so she gets away with it . . . I know whatever happened was my fault—but I want to know what happened and I never will . . .
Did you accuse her, Lila? Did Nonie yell back at you?
Did you and Nonie accuse each other, Lila?
Someone else’s life: the knotty dramas, the sense of meaning—with (or without) catharsis . . . And the pile-up of moments, the kinds of forgetfulness—of burial . . . Of forgiveness. Absolution. Forbearance . . . Lila saying with astonishment, Then Nonie forgot about it . . .
Then Nonie forgot about it because it was such a nightmare for her, Momma? Or because she persuaded herself none of it was true?
Did she get over it because it was over?
Did Nonie have moments when she began her belief that she had to fight to live, that she was fighting for her life? Did she pray for forgiveness? Turn into an athletic girl so that she would run and run and sleep and sleep?
Lila couldn’t keep the guilt and grief to herself: Lila had a restless soul—an explorer’s sense of things . . . (This is what I think.) If I am to playact Lila in a drama, I address myself: You like to talk, you like to say you know you’re not a good person, but you have to set yourself so that your guilt never is the question—you can’t exist without protection . . .
How old was Nonie when the first death occurred? Seven? Eight? Ten?
I mean if Lila saw the act as accident—as a twitch of a blind and malign universe, an empty chance materializing in a given moment as a fate to be overcome—would Nonie match her movements, twist them, be a version of Lila and of Lila’s predicament . . . Lila’s grief . . . Lila’s attempt to live? Nonie’s right to live, to command her own life, includes what acts?
Was Lila a great-souled dealer in truth who saw and saw and saw and who showed the truth on her face? Would Nonie have already begun to be unaware of it in herself—of the chemical feelings of the act, of whatever truth it was that Lila saw—if Lila saw the truth? Would Nonie have said, I did nothing . . . I did nothing bad . . . Would she be immersed in that pattern of definition . . .?
Is that what social class and lineage and faith and “normalcy” are, is that what each one of those things is, a set form of absolution—an almost automatic absolution up to quite a farfetched point?
And what if it was true that she had done nothing, that only her feelings were at fault, if one wants to speak of fault in this matter, in matters such as this? What did she and Lila see in each other’s faces—complicity? Horror? Disbelief? Relief? Shock? Love on one hand and not-love on the other?
Mutual hatred? Dismay at the world? Utter innocence? Immediate innocence? Innocence in the end, all-in-all, because-what-can-you-do-but-live-and-let-live?
Imagine it is factually true, that Nonie was in the house twice alone when an infant, or a near-infant, died . . . Imagine Momma refusing to believe the worst of Nonie the first time . . . And then . . . And then . . .
Or are you too modest to imagine or know or to have a sense of reality?
No, no. Imagine the first time: Would Nonie have confessed? Even if nothing particularly bad was true? Boasted? Boasted madly? Would she have said, It’s not my fault, or blamed Lila: You did it, you just want me to be blamed . . . Did she say, Momma, help me?
I mean the oddity of what people say and then of what we think they said . . . And this is in the real rooms, the actual hallways, the dailiness of the stairs of that house . . . This is in actual moments . . .
I was not there. Was Nonie so fierce and strange back then that she would have been set in secrecy—and the claim of normalcy—that soon, even as a little kid?
I wanted her to be as tough as a boy . . . I knew what the world was . . . I brought her up to take things for herself: I wanted her to have the freedom my mother never gave me . . . I was A TOY for MY mother . . .
Did Nonie say, I was only trying to help . . .
Or: I was playing with him?
What is it that they knew, that they understood, and misunderstood and imagined?
Did Nonie invent herself as normal so fast that it happened in the course of an hour? So early in her childhood?
Lila said, I never got over it . . . I’m not over it now . . . S.L. blamed me . . .
Of course. Of course.
Lila said, It could have been a mistake the doctor made. . . And children get poisoned from bad milk . . . Life is life, Wiley . . . I was never childish.
But since Nonie didn’t die, or crack up then, at least not openly—and Lila did—I had to go to a sanitarium, I had to get away from both of them—Nonie and S.L.—and from my mother, who kept blaming me for not being a better Jew . . . Whatever happened must have happened over time in a ghostly way as well, Lila dreaming about it, crying, or not crying, Lila turning into the Lila I knew and whom I am inclined to take as an absolute being, as someone who was chiefly one thing all her life when, of course, she changed all the time, not back and forth but onwardly, cumulatively—accumulatingly . . . And with all her own reality wadded up behind that sort of greeting-card smile, that imagined fixity of motherhood . . . Or whatever it was I was inclined to ascribe to her in easy moments . . .
Take the circumstance of innocence: I mean how that circumstance can seem a horror beyond all bearing . . . Imagine yourself suddenly stricken with a kind of burningness of guiltiness—you are cut off from everyone . . . But not from your own child—not if she is guilty, too. One might slip into a reality of being horrible . . . I think Lila believed that God disliked her, Lila, individually . . .
Nonie felt she, Nonie, was lucky, and that her mother was doomed . . .
But again, the real house, the afternoon light, a cloudy day: Nonie, let us suppose, imagine, hypothecate, is fully innocent—even in her thoughts. Her mother’s suspicion, then, over a period of actual days and weeks, and her father’s disbelief, and other people’s curiosity and their minds, their eerily self-protective notions, would have defined the world in such a way that Nonie might have begun a lifetime of resisting all of them . . .
So that then my lifetime became, has become, a systematic and emotional and spiritual attempt not to be Nonie’s brother . . .
It is not exactly anyone’s fault.
And the negation—of not being her true brother in a spiritual sense—might seem like a positive thing (but with drawbacks since it is human: it isn’t divine and in Heaven and without flaw).
Then she and I, Nonie and I, are parallel systems, or almost parallel ones, and we are linked and perhaps trivial and like a good many other people: and hardly tragic . . . Perhaps we are but it seems boastful to think so . . . But if you do things, then there is a result; consequences change people—it is just common sense . . . Then how much freedom can be allowed in a well-run state of things?
If I assume, instead, that Nonie was playing with her own feelings and with the complicities there are in solitude in a house—in one’s being alone and the queen of the silence there—and if I then assume that murder as a moral absolute, a bodily one, is present as a realistically absolutist correctness in the sense of making the world truthful and orderly, and that this is always, epically, naturally, endemically, epidemically so—then I can’t see that Lila’s story, her anecdotal recounting, could have much truth about what happened.
Only some truth.
I mean her claim of innocence, of any absence of collusion with Nonie, of any absence of confusion, is too great . . . And the moments of knowledge, and of tacit, almost overt acknowledgment between the two of them, have vanished from Lila’s memory—or from her speaking of the matter as a poet might in a way one would want to accept as bringing light to a thing of darkness . . .
Or, rather, they are sort of there in odd tangential ways . . .
If you’re my friend, you’ll know what I mean . . .
I knew Lila to be a cynic about government—about love—about men and maleness . . . Who is going to govern the ones who govern? she said of any ideal proposal or any ideal notion of human existence. I�
�m a liberal, but you know me, I go too far, but I don’t ever go too far when it’s serious . . . It’s all a sleight-of-hand, you know . . .
I mean her accusation of Nonie could have been ideological—a suspicion—a jealous suspicion—a deduction . . .
Also, I don’t know that I am separate enough from her and her ideas and from Nonie and her life to speak without complicity with one or the other of them—with Lila, a mother of sorts, or with an anti-Lila, a mode of escape—complicity not necessarily with her actions but with the idea under the ideas under the ideas that governed her actions in actual moments . . .
Our almost genetic attachment through negations and acceptances and mirrorings and reversals.
I know this about Lila: she didn’t want to know what happened in these two instances . . . She didn’t blame herself . . . And for her curiosity to work, well, it didn’t work, not ever, unless she was the worst person—the smartest, meanest, toughest person, and yet good overall, or after all, or when the chips are down, I did some good in this world—so that there was no greater omniscience, no greater potency or strength of judgment than her accepting the bottommost level and yet not being really bad: she was secular but she was like God, sort of: I mean like her idea of God: she knew the worst, she was the ultimate arbiter, the ultimate authority, she knew the truth—it was her pride . . . She wouldn’t vote ultimately for evil, no matter what—not if the issue came to her in a certain overt form . . .
Hell, I can’t make it clear. You have to guess at it—from your own experience.
And Nonie, by the time she died, by the time Nonie died in the fire, in the time I knew her, a lot of the above, a lot of what Lila said, was something Nonie could have said by the end of her life, such as When the chips are down, I did some good in this world.
And Nonie believed that she was the toughest person . . . the ultimate authority wherever she was even if she had to do harm to prove she was the ultimate authority . . .
One notion I have, not my favorite and not necessarily the most likely, is that Nonie did something and suffered afterwards, not morally, but from fear, in a luminously dark way . . . I try to make it all childish with her denying any real question of guilt but saying something later; perhaps she almost truthfully confessed but she wouldn’t remember clearly: He wasn’t a good breather—something like that, not really knowing what she was confessing to but looking for an explanation of the fear and so on . . . And Lila, since she would be blamed for having reared Nonie in such a way that this had happened—and, also, since she would be blamed for having left Nonie alone with the baby—whispered and then perhaps shouted at the child, Shut up, shut up, shut up . . .
The Runaway Soul Page 18