The Runaway Soul

by Harold Brodkey

  And forgave her.

  But did not forget.

  People have feelings. I’m not a bad person. Nonie was better for a while after we took you in; everyone nursed you, even me—me the least. I wasn’t so good with babies—do you understand what I’m saying?—and Nonie was better for a while—a lot better. You were in such bad shape it didn’t matter; no one would laugh at me—if things went wrong; at first, back then, no one could say I wasn’t charitable. Bad-Lila-not-so-bad, isn’t that it? Isn’t that a good style for me? Maybe the first baby irritated her and she teased it too roughly, and it had a defect and would have died anyway, but it happened then. And the other was—I don’t know what—an accident. Nonie’s so proud, it’s as good as murdering her to disapprove of her. Do you know what being realistic is? It means taking risks . . .

  Moral risks.

  You, she said, you’re no angel . . .

  Do I blame myself for my real mother’s death—oh, not in my head, not anywhere in me that my will can reach—but down among the shadow truths? I have been told by three or four women that my real mother died of a bungled abortion: She had you: she didn’t want another child . . . Lila, even when she was dying, said, Nothing was simple . . . My whole life long . . . If you wanted something simple, you had to make it that way: simple costs money . . . I expect you to blame me: but I want to ask you a favor—I want to ask you to tell me now that you forgive me . . .

  Am I complaining that such people as Nonie exist? I do not see how existence can exist without Nonies. Without my being somewhat like her. Then, am I complaining about existence? Making a confession about my childhood? About myself? Am I describing the texture of the air of an actual moment?

  You went after her—she suffered from you more than you did from her—although I suppose one can’t keep track, one can’t keep count . . . The way things happen.

  Am I complaining about the obscure omnipresence of evil? Perhaps. I am not aware mostly that I am complaining that she behaved too much in a fashion so openly true to the life in her—so true to herself—that much of the time I knew myself in certain ways too soon because it was in relation to her.

  Childishly stripped of innocence—but given life. Perhaps I am not complaining. Perhaps I am trying to say that human diversity is not a minor matter and that it has to do not just with efficacy and Babel and such matters but with moral reality . . .

  I think that we are all like Nonie—but not exactly—and part of me is in reaction to her—culture and belief and will . . . And that good and evil—and fear—and reality have this other element, these elements of existence, this elemental existence, this eternal and sneaky presence all the time, in and for all of us . . . Lila said once—she was in some weird, upward-mounting, joyous-mouthed mood—I’ll tell you how I feel: anyone who doesn’t live in this household is a LIAR . . .

  I.e., if you are not here with us, you are lying . . .

  Am I saying, then, that Nonie was complex enough to be known differently as a fact or facet of nature and not simply an accident of my adoption—a family accident—an aberration?

  Yes.

  But then, in the flickering eyeliddedness of thought—of private judgment—the answer is no . . .

  I start in innocence, and shallowly . . . I have been drawn in to saying these things . . . The shadows deepen around me in this garden . . . No: not quite, not quite that. In the shadowy afternoon, one says only that Nonie was not complex enough in regard to me: she was bad to me too often . . .

  But then I am swept along in the current of associations, the slant-footed abruptness of simultaneities, or seeming simultaneities in the strange motions of the moments where I am drenched with the conviction that there is no point in lying about what people are . . . Why make yet more mysteries and lay up a store of future bad actions when there are real mysteries enough whatever we do? Without the false ones of sentimental maundering about what people are and what innocence is (a device, a technique, not an actuality except as a comparative matter)? Why not be sensible about these matters?

  Guilt is not simple . . . Blame, therefore, ought never to be simple . . . Stories are not simple at all if they contain any truth in them . . . any truth in them whatsoever . . .

  Was Nonie innocent—in the beginning? One learns innocence as a charm against one’s own helplessness as an infant. One is helpless as an infant without innocence . . . And there is a comparative innocence to be considered . . . an ignorant, myth-ridden, comparative powerlessness—toyed with, experimented with . . .

  There is how you feel.

  Then there is what others judge you to be.

  And innocence clung to becomes a social matter, a form of rent one pays; it is like a sticker on one’s forehead allowing one to enter the house in a certain privileged way . . .

  But then character, and the shape of character, the shape of one’s social class, of one’s social rank, take on a peculiar and singular shape: one’s mark . . . Lila said, drugged and ill, Nonie has the mark of Cain on her . . .

  Who doesn’t?

  It’s true that I am a pacifist—in part. I became one. It’s true that Lila used her hands for nothing—she didn’t cook or sew or touch people . . . or slap anyone . . .

  Nonie: I’m not a booky Jew. I’m a tennis player.

  Momma’s and Nonie’s wit—and bitterness—toward moral chivalry and the world of intellect made them partisans of common sense.

  I don’t read; I’m practical.

  And: Nonie had a pet. She let it die, too.

  To punish herself, Momma?

  Me, I don’t care for Nonie; I think everything’s better since she’s dead. But if I posit her as deciding-to-live, if I posit EVERYONE as causing moments of horror and defeat in numbers of other people as Nonie did, and if I believe that the grounds of faith, and forgiveness, are only human and need not be fine or pure, then I’m left with a resigned and filthy kinship to her.

  The two of you, peas in a pod, after all. Well, who’s an angel?

  Momma said that.

  She said, I’m not as bad as Nonie is . . . Goddamn it, I am not . . .

  But I am, sometimes, goddamn it, sometimes I am.

  I remember when Nonie was fifteen going on sixteen, how she practiced in front of the mirror and taught herself to look, and in a way be, virginal, and to have a frightening unrough aspect of never-doing-any-harm.

  It was a very specific look and in the style of a given era . . .

  The underneath is poking out—it’s peeking out—it’s part of how she’s pretty: she’s a two-souled, complicated, duplicitous, and punishing and mindless lover, a fearless lover, a peerless infatuate, fully and finally and quickly enraged: a young, normal girl . . . But how can you love anything if you’re unwilling to be frightened?

  And: She was bound and determined to be fearless as long as she could . . . I don’t understand Nonie, Momma says. What no one tells a parent would fill a book . . .

  What children do when they’re alone is as strange as what absolute rulers do on their thrones. Imagine a single overriding heartbeat that commands the universe of a house.

  The maid we had was sick that day. When I came home, the infant was in the crib, fat and still—it had no marks on its little self: I can talk about it but I can’t think about it—it’s the one thing I can’t think about. Maybe I took some of it out on you, Wiley: you never looked like you could die. I came home, and Nonie was in the hall, and she said, “Momma, nothing happened. I’m sleepy.”

  The death of an infant.

  If only one had died and not two.

  Maybe Nonie could bear some guilt. But then the second time, innocent or not, the unpracticed mind went haywire in her.

  Or she had been insensately brave—a monster of bravery, a girl Achilles, a strong-hearted girl loose in the world. Unkind. Murderous—secretive early, and dishonest, and brave early.

  I know what Daddy said: Well, we’ll manage, we’ll fix things up; it’s not the end of the world.<
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  And Lila: I advise you, no one will pay attention if we just drop the subject.

  The reality-turned-into-a-subject, into a-subject, into a moment-regarded-in-various-ways, is partly a device. Nonie is a wronged girl, a wronged soul. I mean, in truth, and then, in sarcasm, it is not true. Nonie is sensitive, mistreated—this is said or claimed as the ground for moral charity: is it moral charity? She is a spoiled and affluent girl. She is lordly, cheerful, obtuse—enraged. Enraged, she insists on her own happiness. She is forgetful—she’s without a future . . . People have to live . . . We live day by day . . . We do the best we can . . .

  Nonie has no drama, no story at all: she has only triumphs—and Normality . . . Is that possible in all the moments of childhood as a real part of life? If it is not possible, then what does she do to her mind in order to believe that it is not only possible but that it happened to her?

  If you ask me, it hurts too much to think; I’d rather be natural.

  We are playing one time and she says, I don’t like your face—here, wear this pillow . . . It’s just a game . . . don’t cry . . .

  Active, bright-cheeked, wooden-faced Nonie. Unredeemed, nervous, shrill-voiced little Jew, a lying lynx mask of yellow glass blurs her eyes. A piece of futurity, a child, she carries in her a large part of Lila and of S.L.: We love her. We love her plenty—till the cows come home . . . Up to a point, and then I have to draw the line.

  It was taken seriously when she got upset about my disdain for her and she shouted: LISTEN TO ME—HE NEVER TAKES MY SIDE, HE DOESN’T ACT LIKE MY BROTHER, HE DOESN’T CARE WHAT HAPPENS TO ME.

  When she was younger, Nonie was right in there, among one’s emotions, one’s reasons. She looks a little sneaky, a little scared, a little triumphant, but she’s there, she matters. She looks sad, too, and enraged: she wants to matter more than she does. Lila says, She’s my daughter—I’m stuck. Well, I’m not going to throw her out the window . . . Or my life, neither. She sees Nonie as becoming finer if she, Nonie, can learn to be less autonomous, if she would only learn to listen—she would be more obedient then: swindleable sometimes: listening is giving in.

  “Wiley, would you do something for me? Would you do anything for me?” Nonie asked me that . . .

  The more Nonie “loves,” the more secret and “passionate” in request she becomes, the more she has an aura of request . . . She asks and extorts: Take-my-filth; I have your virtues because I love you. A kind of competition: its one-sidedness makes it a romance—dreamlike in wakeful hours. “Love” as competition. As ambition. “Love” is here. Nonie doesn’t know how to love. What is anyone’s life, what is my life worth if it is at Nonie’s disposal, her willful disposal, if at any point, her argument, her emergencies are as she defines them?

  When Nonie looks shiny and well tended, she gets more admiration; it is perceptible that her value increases—she is what-she-is plus the efforts of those who tend her. Nonie, pink haunches, bitten fingernails, when she’s Nonie-who-doesn’t-have-to-lift-a-finger, when she’s an angel and perfect, grades us loudly on how well we nurture her because we are responsible then for how virtuous she can risk being. I need this-or-that: make Wiley help me.

  Daddy said, Lincoln freed the slaves, Hon.

  If her eyes are canny when she leans back in a chair and stares over at us, past her slightly bulbous torso, and uses her clearly compromised innocence to make us kiss her ass, her claims of innocence, her privileges as a child, then what have we become?

  Daddy says, in fake ruralese, Don’t get too big for your britches, sweetie, or the goblins’ll git you good if you don’t watch out.

  Nonie says, “Daddy’s jealous of me, too!”

  She’s perceptive in her way.

  If you generalize too intently from yourself and your experiences, if you make your tics into universals, you claim the more than somewhat royal privileges of madness . . .

  Momma says to Nonie, “You’re too pudgy to have such a swelled head—dearest . . .”

  “IT’S PURE JEALOUSY!” Nonie says. “I’m not wrong—you are!”

  Does Nonie become . . . pure . . . when she plays tennis? She says she’s not bored then—she feels good: that’s a state of piety for her.

  Human politics, if controlled, seem to her, to me, a kind of beauty. They become a kind of beauty—the future opened and mutual like that—but it’s a little rough.

  Lila says, I like the last laugh as well as anyone.

  Daddy: He who gets the last laugh better laugh quietly, or the goblins’ll git him, I betcha.

  Nonie’s your enemy if you laugh at her.

  Never-Tease-Nonie is your nickname, Daddy said to her. Be a good sport.

  “I’m not going to be a good sport. I have my self-respect to think about.”

  Nonie has her self-respect often. Maybe.

  We expect policemen to die for Nonie but they may not want to if they know her. It’s better for her if people think of her as A Daughter, A Girl, A Woman, rather than if they look very hard at her.

  I don’t get to dislike Nonie—she is a sister—but isn’t it unfair to treat human love as if you had less choice toward it than you have toward dislike directed at you? I mean, if it has to be assigned to this one and that one, whereas dislike is freed, is part of your free will, isn’t love insulted? Can’t I love where I choose? In life, it’s disgusting to treat Nonie as if she were pious or reliable, as Anne Marie is. If I’m supposed to love her because she’s in trouble, that’s no good—if you give Nonie special rights because of an emergency, she’ll create fake emergencies. Emergency is a social form for her, a device of hers.

  When it’s clear to Nonie that she’s not innocent enough for Daddy, that he will not die to preserve or enhance her life, she becomes frantic. She suffers then. He is not a mystery to her, or foreign, and so she finds him to be just at times. She knows him and she wants him to love her, and she gets angry and unpersuaded about everything, maybe strange-in-the-head if he makes it too clear that her habits and systems have worn him out.

  Here she is, reading the comics aloud as if to show how well she reads and how naïve she is, while Daddy reads his paper in a chair near her. She lies on the floor and chants the words—she’s playing with images of innocence: she is nine and cold, eleven and cool and malign, thirteen and moody—Daddy recognizes her courtship: he embraces her thoughtlessly, heatedly; and she laughs at him and is appalled and observant in her coquetry of guilt and shameless virginity—a virginity she will improve on when she sets to work on it, when she’s sixteen. She tests her power over him in his heat—she does it by rebuking his heat. Momma laments, Why isn’t she smarter? Why can’t she learn how to handle him? It would make my life so much easier if she was only a little smarter. Lila means Daddy’s bored and wants to have interests-in-life. Why can’t Nonie be his interest in life? But he doesn’t like Nonie’s using her body’s power (and his blood in her) and the past in order to command him. He ignores her even when listening to her . . . He tries to enjoy her, he does the best he can, but he gets bored, he gives up . . . He lies about this . . . Daddy says to her, It’s worth every cent I have just to see you happy. When he’s angry, he says to her, You’re so greedy I don’t think you’d spare ten cents to save my life.

  Once when he was angry he accused me: Would you give ten cents to spare your sister’s life?

  Would I? No.

  We are not guilty all the time of everything and neither was she. People are good or half good or a quarter good and it changes all the time. The addition can come to a different total all the time. Consider the blind political reality of people who want to be good but who are, also, realistic? How much is explained by that? Listen (as my mother used to say): What does guilt consist of? What is a fair trial like? We begin our lives, formatively, among the necessary lies told to children. And we have children’s wishes then and, to some extent, always—this is part of human goodness or is associated with it . . . families and truths . . . those lies, that care (
such as it is), and the rest of the like matters. One half knows one is being lied to but the lies are the truth, too, they are the truth of one’s childhood.

  And the lies are told us by people who are fully alive in their lives, and their lives are going on, and they are not subordinate to us in the drama then or in any story in an actual moment but, instead, they are in the physical and moral and emotional scale, giants compared to us. Twelve people on a jury had twelve versions of that and have grown up differently and have changed differently—and to various degrees, their sense of goodness and of right and wrong and the ways they are, also, realistic . . . In the shadow biography I have, I was born and two years later my real mother died and I was adopted by the Silenowiczes of Alton, Illinois. We can all agree with that. Go on. Respectable people, upper-middle-class—not much like me. Yes and no . . . Some people disliked them; some people loved them . . . No one is perfect . . . If no one is perfect, the flaw, the flawed elements in each of us, are they criminal? Do they smack of crime? Should we, do you think, think of the human as containing Original Sin? If so, then in a world of Original Sin, what is a family, actually?

  Perhaps I should have asked this first . . .

  This sense of how one begins to know things . . . Of how one begins to live.

  THE

  RUNAWAY

  SOUL

  Ora: New York: 1956